Where Shadows Dance (16 page)

Sir Henry took a bite of his pasty, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “You have a reason for this belief, my lord?”

“I do. Only, I’m afraid I can’t explain it to you just yet. Have you made any progress in identifying the body?”

“As a matter of fact, we have. It’s difficult to confirm, given the state of the corpse in question, but we have reason to believe he may be a Mr. Ezekiel Kincaid, who disappeared from an inn called the Bow and Ox on the Blue Anchor Road, near the Surrey Docks.”

“Ezekiel Kincaid?” Sebastian frowned. The name meant nothing to him. “Who was he?”

“As far as we can tell, he was an agent in the employ of the Rosehaven Trading Company.”

“Rosehaven? Now, why does that sound familiar?”

“Perhaps because it is owned by Mr. Jasper Cox, brother of Miss Sabrina Cox, the young lady who was betrothed to the late Mr. Alexander Ross.”

Sebastian stared at him. “The trading company reported Kincaid missing?”

“No, actually. They were under the impression he had sailed for the United States.”

The United States again. Sebastian said, “So what makes you think Mr. Kincaid didn’t sail?”

Sir Henry reached inside his coat. “It seems the young thatchgallows who reported the body to the constables first helped himself to this—” He laid a plain gold pocket watch on the table between them.

Sebastian flipped open the watch and read the inscription.
To Ezekiel with love, Mahala.
“It’s an uncommon name, I’ll grant you that. But if Mr. Kincaid wasn’t reported missing—”

“Ah, but you see, he was. He never retrieved his possessions from the Bow and Ox. I understand the ship he was set to sail on—the
Baltimore Mary
—waited as long as they dared. But they were finally forced to sail without him or miss the tide.” Sir Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’ve had a look at the man’s baggage; they were keeping it for him at the Bow and Ox. In it was a letter from his wife, Mahala.”

Sebastian was aware of a suspicion forming on the edges of his thoughts. “A letter from where?”

“Baltimore.”

“Kincaid was an American?”

“Oh, yes. Didn’t I say?”

T
he Surrey Docks lay on the south bank of the Thames, some two miles below London Bridge, in Rotherhithe. Once, this had been the center of the great Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London every April to return at the end of the season bearing blanket pieces of blubber that were then cut up and melted in vast iron pots. The stink of hot oil still permeated the district, mingling with the foul stench drifting downriver from the tanyards of nearby Bermondsey.

It was a squalid area of canals and basins lined with storehouses, of factories and artisans’ shops and reeking tidal ditches. The air rang with the pounding of hammers, the
thwunk
of axes biting into wood. Wagons loaded with iron and hemp, canvas and squawking chickens, clogged the mean, narrow lanes. “Place always gives me the willies, it does,” muttered Tom as they rattled over the uneven cobbles. “Too many foreigners, I s’pose.”

Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “That must be it.” He swung the chestnuts in through the arch of the Bow and Ox. “The inn at least appears respectable—and very English.”

An ancient, half-timbered inn with a lichen-covered tile roof and cantilevered galleries, the Bow and Ox catered to the company agents and factors whose business required them to frequent the nearby docks and their less than savory environs. “Water them,” said Sebastian, handing the horses’ reins to his tiger. Despite the lengthening shadows that told of the coming of evening, the afternoon sun was still brutal. “Just don’t let them get carried away. I shouldn’t be long.”

He found the landlady in the taproom. She was a short, rotund, grandmotherly-looking woman with a disarmingly beatific smile, who
tsked
sadly when asked about Ezekiel Kincaid.

“Aye, I remember Mr. Kincaid all right, poor lad,” she said, drawing Sebastian a pint of ale. “Said he had a wife and two sons, back in America. I keep thinking of them so far away, waiting for him to come home and never knowing what happened to him.”

“What do you think did happen to him?”

She set the tankard on the boards before him. “Footpads, if you ask me. Should’ve known better than to go off alone at night like that. And him so nervous, too.”

“Nervous? In what way?”

“Oh, just ever so anxious, if you know what I mean?” She reached for a towel. “I kept his things for him, in case he came back for them. But that magistrate from Bow Street carried it all away with him.”

Sebastian took a sip of the ale. “How many days was Mr. Kincaid here?”

“Never spent a night, poor man. Why, he’d only just docked that very morning. Took a room and ate a meat pie in the public room, he did, then went off for a good long while. If I recall, he said something about needing to see someone in the West End, but I could be wrong.”

“He never came back?”

“Oh, no; he did.” She ran the towel over the ancient dark wood of the bar. “Came back and had his dinner. But then he went off again, and that was the last anyone saw of him.”

“No idea where he went?”

“Well, he did come and ask how to get to the St. Helena tea gardens. It’s a lovely place, you know, with a brass band and dancing most every evening in summer.”

“Where is it?”

She nodded downriver. “You follow the Halfpenny Hatch there, through the market gardens, to Deptford Road. ’Tisn’t the best area to go walking through after dark, mind, seeing as how the top of Turndley’s Lane is known as something of a resort for footpads. That’s what we thought, when we realized he didn’t ever come back—that he’d run afoul of footpads.”

“You notified the constables?”

“The next day, yes. They checked along the pathway and all around St. Helena but never found a trace of him. No one at the tea gardens remembered seeing him, so we reckoned something must’ve happened to him before he got there.”

“Tell me, what did Mr. Kincaid look like?”

“Hmm ...” She paused, her face screwed up with thought. “He was in his thirties, I’d say. Hair the color of a haystack. Didn’t notice his eyes, I’m afraid. He was a nice lad, to be sure, but it was hard when you were talking to him to notice anything but his teeth.”

“His teeth?”

“Aye, poor lad. Could’ve eaten an apple through a picket fence, as the saying goes.”

Sebastian drained his ale. “What ship did you say he came in on?”

“The
Baltimore Mary
. She was at the Greenland Dock.” She gave him a considering look. “Going down there now, are you?”

“Yes. Why?”

She nodded toward the window, where the westering sun was casting long shadows across the road. “Best hurry, then. You don’t want to be anywhere around there when it starts getting dark.”

S
ebastian drove through long stretches of biscuit factories and anchor forges close built with sail lofts and tumbledown cottages. At the outskirts of the Greenland Dock, he left the curricle with Tom in the shade of a big brick storehouse on a quiet, cobbled lane and pushed on afoot through throngs of workmen in leather aprons and merchant seamen stinking of gin and old sweat.

The Surrey Docks were a jumble of harbors, canals, and timber ponds lined with warehouses and granaries and immense piles of timber or “deal wood.” The vast whaling fleets of the previous century were almost gone now, their place taken by ships bearing timber from Scandinavia and the Baltic or wheat and cotton from North America. The air was thick with the stench of tar and dead fish and the raw sewage that scummed the water.

Sebastian had a double-barreled pistol in the pocket of his driving coat, primed and ready, and a knife in his boot. But he had every intention of heeding the landlady’s warning to be gone from the waterfront before nightfall.

An army of quayside workers swarmed the docks, lightermen and deal porters and the unskilled laborers who assembled every morning at area pubs like the King’s Arms or the Green Man, where foremen selected their day’s crews. A few carefully worded questions and the discreet distribution of largesse eventually brought him to a decrepit old wharf near the canal, where a big-boned, black-bearded Irishman named Patrick O’Brian was supervising the unloading of a cargo of Russian hemp from a sloop.

“Aye, we worked the
Baltimore Mary
, all right,” he said, hands on his hips, eyes narrowed against the glare of the water as he watched his lads toiling on the ship’s deck.

“She was from the United States?” asked Sebastian.

“That’s right. Carryin’ a load o’ wheat.”

“Landed last Saturday?”

OʹBrian sucked on the plug of tobacco distending his cheek and grunted.

Sebastian stared out over the grease-skimmed waters of the basin, with its hundreds of crowded hulls, their bare masts stark against the blue sky. “Yet she sailed again on Tuesday? How is that possible?”

“Never seen anythin’ like it, meself. Paid a premium, they did, to get that cargo off in a rush.” He winked. “And ye can be sure the captain greased the palms o’ the attendin’ revenue officers, to get it through customs that fast.”

“Why the hurry?”

“That I couldn’t tell ye.” He shot a mouthful of brown tobacco juice into the water. “I have meself a theory, though.”

He paused to stare at Sebastian expectantly.

Sebastian obligingly passed him a coin. “And?”

“Normally, ye see, a ship’s captain will unload. Then he’ll go to the Virginia and Maryland Coffee House on Threadneedle Street, or maybe to the Antwerp Tavern. That’s where all the traders go, lookin’ to consign a cargo to some captain fittin’ out fer the return voyage.”

“But the captain of the
Baltimore Mary
didn’t do that?”

“Nah. He unloaded his ship, took on a few supplies, then sailed out o’ here with naught but ballast. Heard tell he was headin’ for Copenhagen, plannin’ to pick up a cargo and do his refittin’ there. But I couldn’t say for certain.”

“Now, why would he do that?”

O’Brian laid a finger alongside his nose and grinned. “Only reason I can figure is that he had a powerful reason to get out o’ London. Fast.”

Sebastian studied the dock man’s craggy, sun-darkened face. “What was this captain’s name?”

“Pugh, I believe. Ian Pugh.”

“Had you ever worked with him before?”

“A few times.”

Sebastian handed over another coin. “So your theory is—?”

OʹBrian glanced in both directions and dropped his voice. “There was this passenger aboard the
Baltimore Mary
, one Ezekiel Kincaid. He had quite a row with the captain, he did, just after they docked. And then, the next day, what do we hear but that Kincaid has turned up missin’ and ain’t never been found.”

“So you’re suggesting—what? That Captain Pugh murdered Ezekiel Kincaid?”

“Not sayin’ he did; not sayin’ he didn’t. I’m just sayin’, it makes you wonder.” He looked at Sebastian expectantly. “Well, don’t it? Don’t it?”

 

 

Sebastian walked through darkening, empty streets echoing with the clashes of shutters as apprentices closed up their masters’ shops. The evening breeze blowing off the water brought with it a welcome coolness but did little to alleviate the area’s foul stench. He wondered if it was possible that the murderer he sought was indeed some American sea captain, at that moment organizing the refitting and loading of his ship in Copenhagen.

Possible? Yes. Except, what possible connection could exist between the unknown Captain Pugh and Alexander Ross? And how then to explain the intruder Sebastian had encountered at St. James’s Street?

He was still pondering the possibilities when he turned into the quiet cobbled lane and saw his curricle standing empty before the looming warehouse, the chestnuts tossing their heads and sidling nervously. Two men loitered near the open doorway of the warehouse; rough men in black neck cloths, scruffy brown coats, and greasy breeches. One was chewing on a length of straw; the other, a younger man, held himself stiffly to one side.

Tom was nowhere in sight.

Sebastian became aware of the echo of his footfalls in the silent street, the steady beat of his own heart, the icy chill that coursed through him. There was no doubt in his mind that Tom would never abandon the chestnuts. Not willingly.

Slipping his hand into the pocket of his driving coat, Sebastian walked up to the man with the straw dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Of medium height and build, he had dark hair and a beard-grizzled face split by a provocative smirk.

“The groom who was with the curricle,” Sebastian demanded, his voice tight. “A lad in a black and yellow striped waistcoat; where is he?”

The man cast a glance at his companion, then used his tongue to shift the straw from one side of his mouth to the other. “Nipped off to the gin shop up the lane there,” he said, nodding toward the top of the hill.

“A gin shop?”

“Ye heard me.”

Reaching out, Sebastian closed his fist around the front of the man’s coat with his left hand as he whipped the pistol from his pocket. Drawing back the first hammer with an audible click, he shoved the barrel into the man’s face. “I’ll ask one more time. And you’d best give me an honest answer because I won’t ask a third time.
Where is my tiger?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Sebastian saw the other man shift his weight. A length of iron bar dropped out of his sleeve and into his hand. He took a step forward, the bar raised to strike.

Without losing his grip on the first man’s coat, Sebastian pivoted, leveled the pistol over his outstretched arm, and fired.

The shot hit the ruffian at the base of his throat, the force of the blast slamming him back against the wall behind him. He slid down the wall slowly, his body crumpling sideways as he hit the earth.