Where Shadows Dance (5 page)

Pushing his way through the early afternoon crowd of clerks and MPs, Sebastian found Sir Hyde Foley eating a plate of sliced boiled beef at an age-darkened oak table near the pub’s vast stone hearth. A slim man with pale skin and dark hair, he watched Sebastian’s progress across the hazy room with narrowed eyes.

“Let me tell you right off,” he said as Sebastian drew up beside his table, “that if you are here as your father’s emissary—”

“I am not.” Without waiting for an invitation, Sebastian drew out the opposite chair and sat. “I’m told Mr. Alexander Ross worked for you.”

Foley cut a slice of beef. “He did. Why do you ask?”

Sebastian studied the other man’s thin, sharp-boned face. “You don’t find the sudden death of a healthy young man at the Foreign Office cause for concern?”

Foley chewed slowly and swallowed. “Mr. Ross died of a defective heart.”

Sebastian caught the eye of the plump, middle-aged barmaid and held up two fingers. “Mr. Alexander Ross died from a stiletto thrust to the base of his skull.”

Foley hesitated with his fork raised halfway to his mouth. “How do you know this?”

“That, I am not at liberty to say.”

“Indeed. So I am simply to take your word for it?”

Sebastian waited while the barmaid set two foaming tankards on the battered tabletop between them. Then he said, “When exactly did you last see Mr. Ross?”

Foley frowned as if with thought. “He died ... when? Last Sunday?”

“Either early Sunday morning or sometime Saturday night.”

Foley shrugged. “Then I suppose I must have seem him that Saturday, at the Foreign Office. Why?”

Sebastian took a long, slow swallow of his ale. “What precisely were Mr. Ross’s duties with the Foreign Office?”

“He dealt with foreign nationals.”

Sebastian raised one eyebrow. “Meaning?”

“Meaning that anything beyond that is none of your damned business.”

Sebastian smiled and took another sip of ale. “What was your opinion of him?”

“Ross?” Foley shrugged. “He was a good man. A very good man. We were sorry to lose him. Too many young men in his situation would have treated his position in the Foreign Office with negligent indifference. Not Ross.”

“‘In his situation?’ What does that mean, precisely?”

“Only that his brother, Sir Gareth Ross, is both childless and half-paralyzed from a carriage accident. As the heir presumptive, Alexander Ross would doubtless have inherited—had he lived.”

“Sir Gareth’s fortune is considerable?”

“Considerable? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. But comfortable, definitely comfortable. The family is an old one, while the estate—Charlbury Priory—is both ancient and widely admired.”

“Ross was how old? Twenty-five? Thirty?”

“Six-and-twenty, I believe. He’d been with the Foreign Office since coming down from Cambridge.”

“Always in London?”

Foley carved another slice of beef. “With the exception of a two-year stint at our embassy in St. Petersburg, yes.”

“He was in Russia?”

“That’s right.”

“By which I can assume that some of the ‘foreign nationals’ he dealt with here in London were Russian?”

Foley raised his own tankard to his lips, his gaze meeting Sebastian’s over the rim. “You may assume anything you like.”

Sebastian leaned back in his seat, his arms crossed at his chest, and smiled. “I’m told Ross was expecting a visitor Saturday night. You wouldn’t by any chance know who that was?”

Foley shook his head. “Sorry. No.”

“Do you know if he had any financial difficulties? A mistress? Gambling debts, perhaps?”

“Hardly. We’re pretty careful about that sort of thing.”

“Know of anyone who might have wanted him dead?”

Foley set down his fork with a clatter. “You can’t be serious about all this?”

Sebastian ignored the question. “No enemies?”

Foley held his gaze. “None that I am aware of, no.”

“Any recent quarrels?”

Foley was silent for a moment.

“What?” prompted Sebastian.

The Undersecretary drained the last of his pint and gave a soft laugh.

Sebastian said, “So he did have an argument. With whom?”

Sir Hyde Foley reached for his hat, his chair grating across the old stone-flagged floor as he pushed to his feet. “Good day, my lord.”

Quickly paying off his tab, Sebastian reached the flagway in time to see Foley turn to stride up Pall Mall, away from his offices in Downing Street.

Tom was waiting nearby.

“Get down and follow him,” said Sebastian, leaping into the curricle to take the reins. “I want to know where he goes.”

P
aul Gibson spent most of the morning dissecting Alexander Ross’s chest cavity. He found no evidence of any heart disease or other natural disability. He was so engrossed in his task that he barely managed to grab time before his scheduled lecture at St. Thomas’s to study the Bills of Mortality for London and Westminster.

Published weekly for more than two hundred years now by the parish clerks, the Bills of Mortality recorded the dead in each parish, along with their ages and causes of death. Originally designed to provide a warning against the onset of plagues, the Bills of Mortality were not infallible. But they were fairly reliable. The returns were compiled by old women known as “viewers” or “searchers of the dead,” employed by each parish. Their job was to enter houses where a death had been reported. Since they were paid two pence per body, they tended to be thorough to the point of being aggressive.

Of course, the searchers’ expertise in determining causes of death was limited. Gibson had no doubt that whatever searcher recorded Alexander Ross’s death had simply accepted the diagnosis provided by the renowned Dr. Cooper. But if Jumpin’ Jack had made a mistake—if the body lying on Gibson’s slab belonged not to Mr. Alexander Ross but to some other young gentleman who was known to have encountered a violent death—then his identity would be found in the Bills of Mortality.

Choosing a chair near a dusty window, Gibson quickly ran through the compiled list of deaths by natural causes for the previous week ...
aged, 24; ague, 2; bloody flux, 1; childbed, 3; fever, 235; French pox, 1; measles, 5
. . . . Sighing, he skipped down to the “unnatural deaths”:
bites, mad dog, 1; burnt, 2; choked, none; drowned, 3; shot, none; smothered, 1; stabbed, none
.

He checked the previous week, just to be certain.
Shot, one. Stabbed, none
.

Leaning back in his chair, he scrubbed both hands down over his face. Then he pushed to his feet, returned the Bills of Mortality to the bored-looking clerk, and went in search of Dr. Astley Cooper.

 

 

He met the surgeon turning in through the gates of St. Thomas’s Hospital.

An imposing man with dark eyebrows and thick gray hair flowing from a rapidly receding hairline, Dr. Astley Cooper was long accustomed to hearing himself described as London’s preeminent surgeon. In addition to lecturing on anatomy at St. Thomas’s, he was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a professor of surgery at Guy’s Hospital. But it was his flourishing private practice that earned him more than twenty-one thousand pounds a year—a level of success he made no attempt to keep secret.

“May I walk with you a moment, Dr. Cooper?” Gibson asked, falling into step beside the famous man.

“As you wish,” said Cooper, cutting across the quadrangle toward the chapel. He cast Gibson a quick, assessing glance. “I hear you are to lecture this afternoon on cerebral circulation. I trust you’ve consulted my own writings on the subject?”

Gibson schooled his features into an expression of solemn respect. “To be sure, Dr. Cooper. You are the expert, are you not?”

Cooper nodded, said, “Good,” and kept walking.

Gibson said, “I wanted to ask you a few questions about Alexander Ross.”

Cooper frowned. “Who?”

“The young gentleman who was found dead in his rooms in St. James’s Street last Sunday. The one you said died of a defective heart.”

“Ah, yes; I remember now. What about him?”

“I was wondering if you were told he had a history of pleurisy? Or perhaps carditis?”

Cooper shrugged. “How would I know? The man was no patient of mine.”

“No one gave you a medical history?”

“I was told simply that he appeared healthy to all who knew him.”

“And you saw no signs of disorder in the room? Nothing out of place?”

“What a preposterous question. The man died peacefully in his sleep. He wasn’t thrashing about in his death throes, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“There were no signs of blood on the sheets?

“Why on earth would there be? The man died of
morbus cordis
.” The surgeon’s eyes narrowed. “Are you questioning my diagnosis?”

“Not at all. Simply curious.” Gibson drew up. “Thank you; you’ve been most helpful.”

He started to turn away, then swung back around when a thought occurred to him. “Just one more question, Dr. Cooper—”

The surgeon tightened his prominent, bulbous jaw. “Yes? What now?”

“I was wondering who called you to Mr. Ross’s bedside that morning.”

“Who called me? Sir Hyde Foley. Why do you ask?”

S
ir Henry Lovejoy, once the chief magistrate at Queen Square, now the newest of Bow Street’s three stipendiary magistrates, drew a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed its snowy folds against his damp upper lip. The day had grown uncomfortably warm, the insects in the surrounding dank grass setting up a loud, maddening hum that seemed somehow to accentuate the foul stench of death and decay rising from the body before him.

Wrapped in a dirty canvas, the unidentified corpse lay halfhidden in a weed-choked ditch on the edge of Bethnal Green. A wretched, insalubrious area on the northeastern fringes of London, the district was a favorite dumping ground for dead cats and dogs, unwanted babies, and victims of murder.

“He ain’t a pretty sight, I’m afraid,” said Constable OʹNeal, a stout, middle-aged man with florid jowls and a prominent nose. Slopping noisily through several inches of slimy water, he leaned over with a grunt to draw back a corner of the canvas and reveal a bloated, discolored nightmare of a face.

“Good God.” Lovejoy bunched the handkerchief against his nostrils. “Cover it up again. Quickly, before the children see it.”

The constable threw a skeptical glance at the knot of ragged, half-grown urchins who’d gathered nearby to gawk at them, and dropped the canvas. “Yes, sir.”

Normally, the discovery of another body in one of the poorest districts of London was of no concern to Bow Street. But there were circumstances surrounding this man’s death that Lovejoy found troubling. He said, “So what exactly have you discovered, Constable?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. You did notice his clothes, sir? They’re uncommon fine. The local magistrate reckons the body musta been brought from someplace else and dumped here. Ain’t no gentlemen missing from around these parts, sir.”

Lovejoy sighed. “No identification on him?”

“None, sir.”

Lovejoy turned to stare thoughtfully across the green, toward the dark, grim walls of the madhouse and, beyond that, Jews Walk. This was an area of marshy fields and tumbledown cottages, of Catholics and Jews and impoverished French weavers.

The constable cleared his throat. “And then there’s the lad I was telling you about—Jamie Durban, sir.”

Lovejoy brought his gaze back to the constable’s jowly face. “Where is he?”

“Here, sir.” The constable motioned to one of the ragged boys. “Well, come on, then, lad. Say your piece.”

Jamie Durban—a scrawny, carrot-topped lad of ten or twelve—wiped the back of one hand across his nose and reluctantly stepped forward.

Lovejoy looked the boy up and down. He was barefoot, the flesh of his arms and legs liberally streaked with dirt, his ragged shirt and breeches two sizes too big for his slight frame. “So what have you to say for yourself, Jamie Durban?”

The lad threw a frightened glance at the constable.

“Go on. Tell him,” urged the constable.

Jamie swallowed hard enough to bob his Adam’s apple up and down in his skinny throat. “It were Saturday night o’ last week, sir—or rather, I suppose you could say early Sunday mornin’.”

Lovejoy fixed the boy with a hard stare. “Go on.”

“I were ’eadin’ ’ome along the east side o’ the green, when I seen a swell carriage drawn up just ’ere—beside the ditch.”

“What makes you think it was a gentleman’s carriage and not a hackney?” asked Lovejoy. “It was rather dark last Saturday, was it not?”

“Not so much, sir. The moon was still pretty new, but it was clear and the stars was shinin’ somethin’ fierce. It was a gentry cove’s carriage, all right. A curricle, drawn by a pair o’ highsteppin’ dark ’orses and driven by a cove wearin’ one o’ them fancy coats with all them shoulder capes.”

Lovejoy studied the boy’s pale, delicate features. “And?”

“I could see the gentry cove was wrestlin’ with somethin’ big and bulky ʹe ʹad on the floor o’ ’is curricle. So I nipped behind the wall o’ the corner house there to watch, and I seen ’im dump it’ere, in the ditch. It’d rained some that day, and I ’eard the splash when it ’it the water.”

Lovejoy’s gaze drifted back to the silent, canvas-covered body at their feet. “What did the gentleman do next?”

“Why, ’e got back in ’is curricle and drove off. Toward the west, sir.”

“And what did you do, Jamie?”

Jamie dug the bare toes of one foot into the dirt, his gaze averted.

“Speak up, there, lad,” barked the constable. “Answer the magistrate’s question.”

Jamie’s jaw went slack with remembered horror. “I ... um, I waited ’til I was sure the cove was long gone. Then I come and took a peek at what ’e’d ’eaved into the ditch.”