Anatomy of Murder

PART I
1

FRIDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 1781, LONDON, NEAR BLACK LYON STAIRS

“Come on! Pull, damn your eyes!”

“No use breaking your lungs at me! He’s tied or stuck or something.”

The two red-coated men hunched in the wherry looked down into the dirty waters of the Thames and considered.

It was already full light, or as near to full light as it could be on a London day in November, and up and down the river the city was awake and hustling. Carts and cattle fought for space across Westminster Bridge and the people walked fast with their heads down through the clatter and stink. Among the jostling crowds the hawkers shouted and swore and rattled their pails. Mud spattered up from the horses’ hooves and the fat wooden wheels of wagons. The air was heavy with city scents-woodsmoke, horse manure, fried meat-and tanged with frost. In any place within a half-mile of the riverbank you’d hear hammering and the crash of stone on stone. Someone was always building, someone else knocking something down. Smoke poured from the chimneys along the south bank into the damp air and blackened it. London’s skyline was smudged in blood and soot.

There was no peace on the water either. The Thames, the fat brown god of London, its flowing heart, was belching and grumbling with boats from dawn. It offered to the city its food and trade; all its riches and influence were borne on its broad twisted back one way or the other. Sometimes the mudlarks who swarmed over the shingle at low tide found little fetishes, some ancient sword or offering to the river from times past, to show them they were nothing but the latest of its acolytes. Sometimes the river spat up what it was offered more speedily.

The current pulled at the wherry. The two men it held made an odd sort of couple. One of them was skinny and young; the other had a chest like a rum barrel and a thick beard that stood out angrily from his chin. Proctor and Jackson. Uncle and nephew, now partners of a sort and servants of the river in their way. The passage across the waters put bread on their table. The nephew’s ready smile got them trade, and the uncle’s strong shoulders got them a reputation for a swift and easy crossing through the currents and their rivals.

Proctor was working hard enough now at the oars to make his face red just keeping his place in the water. With a fierce pull on his right arm he inched the boat far enough upriver so he could see better what they had noticed from the bank. It was certainly a man, or at least it had been. The back of his green jacket was hissing bubbles under the swell, and his wig was still attached to his head; the wisps of horsehair swam about him in searching tendrils. The body’s arms were outstretched and the head hung forward like the Christ on the Cross in St. Martin’s Church, as if the man was looking for something lost in the muddy waters below.

Proctor spat into the river on the opposite side on the boat. Of course the body was tethered somehow. If he hadn’t been, the river would have given itself a laugh flying him halfway to Woolwich by now. Nothing stayed in this part of the river that wasn’t stuck.

“Well, get a rope round him, cut him loose from what binds him and get him in then.”

Jackson shot him an angry look, before tying a lasso from a length of rope in the bow then slinging it around the body’s chest, working it under the arms with an unhappy frown. Drawing the noose tight, he checked the knot on the samson post before stripping off his coat and shirt. His pale skin turned goosish at once. He slipped off his shoes and pulled a knife from his waistband.

“Why’d you never learn to swim then, Proctor?” he grumbled. “Twenty years on ships and boats and not a stroke. I’d be ashamed.”

The older man scowled back. “Fate might see it as an invitation to throw me in, boy. Now get to it, will you!”

The younger man drew a deep breath, put the blade between his teeth and hauled himself over the side, gasping as the chill of the waters held him; then, he duck-dived. Proctor held the boat steady, watching as his nephew used the body as ladder and anchor in the muck of the river. Strong tides. He saw the activity in the water, then felt a sudden yank as the weight of the body shifted from its anchor to the samson post in his own boat and the river tried to carry the corpse off over its shoulder.

The boy rolled himself back in-then, settling solidly on the floor of the boat, he pulled on the rope. The wet lengths slapped onto the wood as he hauled on it, then as the dead man’s spine knocked against the gunwales, the boy reached back into the water, got his arms around the corpse’s chest and with a shout of effort dragged it in over the side. He toppled backward and the body followed. With a shove and shiver he got out from under it.

“Christ!” He backed his way into the bow to catch his breath and began to rub himself dry with his shirt.

“Least he’s fresh,” Proctor said. The boy did not reply but took his place and clambered back into his red coat. They began to pull out for the Black Lyon Stairs. “Though we could have towed it.”

His nephew looked black. There’d be a crowd there already, ready to tut at the corpse and bless themselves for having survived another day. Damn, his hands were cold! The noise of London was full-throated now. Whistles and shouts rang from the boats making their way up and down the river. Smoke poured out of every chimney and the banks were alive with hammerings and thumps as the warehouses were filled with and emptied of sugar and timber, cloth and spices, fancy goods and dried fruits. Off downstream on the far side of London Bridge where the Tower stared down into the waters, the merchant ships would be pulling at their anchors like dogs eager to be off and running again, yapping over the oceans for fresh trade.

The body’s head lolled to one side and the mouth drained the dirty water of the Thames onto the floor of the scull.

In other parts of London one could breathe sweeter air. On Bruton Street in Mayfair, a lady paused as her maid plied the door knocker of one of the graceful buildings at the Berkeley Square end of the street, and touching her high and powdered hair, which so bore down on her neck she was rarely free of a mild headache, she noticed a man on the opposite side of the street. He was consulting a pocket watch and frowning a little. She marked the cut of his plum-colored coat and thought it gentleman-like, if rather plain; and saw the man who wore it was not unpleasing, though the dustings of youth had been mostly knocked off him. He had a slightly Roman look to his face, long-nosed and rather serious, but nothing in his dress or bearing marked him out as anything remarkable.

Turning away, she began to think of the gossip she was about to trade with the lady of the house outside which she waited, what she would be willing to reveal, and what keep secret. It might have surprised her to learn that the gentleman whom she had been observing was thinking also of the trading and flow of information, the commerce and management of knowledge. The gentleman was a spy, and a controller of spies. He had ears and eyes in every court in Europe and he collected their whisperings and spun it into the gold of intelligence-at least, that was his intent. Her friend’s footman opened the door to her, and the lady never thought of the idle gentleman again.

Mr. Palmer, the gentleman who had been under observation, glanced over his shoulder as he heard one of the street doors open and close again behind him, then returned to contemplation of his pocket watch. It still wanted a few minutes to eleven o’clock. That was the hour he had suggested in his note that he would call on Mrs. Westerman and Mr. Crowther, that strange pair of companions recently celebrated for their role in bringing justice to some unfortunates in Sussex, and now, due to the indisposition of Mrs. Westerman’s husband, resident in London. He did not wish to be early and so looked about him.

Berkeley Square. Some of the richest families in the country made their homes here in the Season, it being near enough the business and pleasure of the town but removed enough to offer some respite from the stink and the squalor. The air was certainly cleaner here than in the city, and the streets quieter than around his offices at the Admiralty in Whitehall. The houses were the work of various architects of the century, but though a number of hands had been employed there was among the buildings a slightly smug sense of agreement as to the fundamentals of tasteful design. Tall narrow windows peered with a certain disdain over the central gardens; the stone steps to their cellars were sheltered with black iron railings that flowered into iron brackets. The lamps they held aloft were all extinguished now, but when the gloom of a November evening stole up again from the river tonight, slippered footmen in powder and livery would emerge to light them till they decorated the square like marsh lights, each catching the glitter of gold braid in their little defensive pools against the dark. Mr. Palmer thought of those things he had lately learned, and saw himself suddenly as a lost traveler on hostile ground, chasing glimmers, and unable to say if they would lead him to greater security-or into danger.

From his position on the pavement, Palmer could see a group of children at play in the central gardens. Two boys, of about seven he would guess, were neatly tacking up one of the lawns under the leafless trees toward a young girl and a nursemaid with a small child in her arms. They were a well-made-looking group. The boys both appeared sturdy and healthy, their coats streaks of blue and brown against the grass. The girl, still not at her full height, though older than the boys, wore a black silk mantle over a gown of blue. She picked at its edges as she walked briskly by her nurse.

“Thornleigh, engage the enemy!” shouted the boy in the lead, the darker of the two.

“Yes, sir, Captain Westerman, sir,” his blond companion replied.

Mr. Palmer watched their maneuvers for a moment with a smile. So this was Captain Westerman’s son and the young Earl of Sussex, with whom the Westerman family were staying in London. He wondered what adventures they were undertaking. Perhaps they were replaying Captain Westerman’s capture of the French warship, the Marquis de La Fayette in the spring. It had been a valuable prize, since the ship was laden with goods bound for the rebels of the American Colonies from their continental allies, and worth not less than three hundred thousand pounds. It was also the last such victory the captain would enjoy in his remarkable career. An accident at sea during the repairs to his ship had left James Westerman badly injured. It had been the most appalling piece of luck, and now Westerman had returned home with his brains so shaken up, it was found after some weeks that he was not fit to live with his family but instead must reside under the care of a mad-doctor in Highgate. He was a great loss. The threat to England’s supremacy on the seas had never been so great, and the Navy felt the lack of such a competent commander most keenly.

“Stephen!” the young lady called. “If you launch a broadside at baby Anne and myself just when she is sleeping, I shall have you flogged at the capstan and-oh, what is the phrase. .”

The fairer boy paused, then shouted, “Keelhauled!”

Lady Susan grinned happily. “Indeed. Keelhauled!”

The darker boy appeared to subtly alter his course, as if the shrubberies to the north of the gardens had always been his intent, remarking only, “It’s just the Dutch do that, actually,” and kicking up the damp late-autumn leaves with his heels.

Palmer smiled at the young lady’s management of the boys before letting his thoughts drift back to the mother of the prudent warrior. He had met the captain’s redheaded wife in the past, and on the first occasion, some years ago, he had found her a good-humored and intelligent woman, and loyal consort. He had seen her again after her husband’s return to England, and on official business. Palmer had received information that a man taken captive on Westerman’s ship, who had later died from his wounds, might have been possessed of certain knowledge Mr. Palmer wished very much to have. He had found Mrs. Westerman as helpful as the grief and confusion caused by her husband’s injury would allow. James Westerman himself seemed drunk, childlike, petulant, but Palmer had left their orderly and apparently thriving estate in Sussex thinking well of the captain’s wife and family, and grieving for them.

Mr. Palmer’s most recent meeting with Mrs. Harriet Westerman had been in London, and extremely unpleasant. She had appeared at the Admiralty without an appointment and had taken him to task, in vehement tones and in public. She had accused him of harassing her sick husband. It had been an uncomfortable situation and Mr. Palmer had his profession’s hatred of scenes. Yet now he sought her out.

Examining his pocket watch again, he watched the minute hand finally creep to the head of the hour. Of her companion, Mr. Crowther, he had no personal knowledge, so knew only what the world knew: that the man was known for his expertise on the marks left on a body by violence; known for his wealth and eccentricity; known for having a father murdered and brother hanged for the killing, for having refused his rightful title and seat in the Lords to instead sell his estate and study the science of anatomy in obscurity, till Mrs. Westerman plucked him free and made him help her save the lives and fortunes of young Lord Sussex and his sister. Mr. Palmer had read the pamphlets and listened to the gossip and drawn his own conclusions.

He stepped forward.