What Remains of Heaven

Chapter 38

Stopping by Brook Street, Sebastian slipped a small, loaded double-barreled pistol into his pocket. Then he headed for Bow Street.

He arrived at the Public Office to startle Sir Henry Lovejoy by demanding, “You said you were going to look into the circumstances of Jack Slade’s transportation. Did you?”

“Yes,” said the magistrate, carefully fitting his spectacles on his face and reaching for a file. “I’ve my notes right here. But I was under the impression you’d discounted the involvement of Mr. Slade.”

“I’ve changed my mind. Tell me everything you know.”

Jack Slade was trimming fat from a leg of lamb when Sebastian entered the butcher shop on Monkwell Street. The butcher had a bloody apron tied around his waist. The hand clutching the thin boning knife was bloody, too, as was the ugly-looking cleaver resting at his elbow. The pungent odor of raw meat filled the air.

Sebastian said, “You didn’t tell me it was Francis Prescott’s plea for mercy that saved you from the hangman’s noose.”

Slade glanced up, a smear of blood darkening one cheek, his lantern jaw set hard. “What if it was?”

Sebastian let his gaze rove the small shop, taking in the sides of beef and mutton hung from massive hooks in the walls. A tray of sausages rested on the counter; the battered green shutter that would be used to close the butcher’s shop when the day’s trading ended stood propped against the wall.

He said, “The thing is, you see, I find myself wondering something. Why would Father Prescott—I assume he was only a priest then, and not a bishop? Anyway, why would Father Prescott intervene to help a man convicted of bludgeoning his wife to death in a drunken brawl? That’s right,” Sebastian added when Slade’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve discovered you weren’t being exactly truthful when you said your wife died while you were in Sydney.”

The butcher sliced a ridge of fat and let it drop into the bucket at his feet. “Reckon he felt guilty. ’Cause o’ what his brother done to me family.”

“That’s one explanation,” said Sebastian.

“What other explanation is there?”

Sebastian shifted so that he had a clear view of the street, where a costermonger was pushing a barrel up the hill toward the churchyard. “Nice shop you have here. Been in business long?”

“Near on five years. Why ye ask?”

“It’s not often a man transported to Botany Bay returns home with the wherewithal to set himself up in business.”

Slade’s head came up, the handle of his knife clattering against the surface of the butcher block. “What ye suggesting?”

“That you were blackmailing Francis Prescott. That you blackmailed him decades ago to get him to use his influence to keep you from being hanged. And then, when you came back from Botany Bay, you pressed him again to give you the money you needed to set up this shop.”

Slade stared at him, forehead furrowed, nostrils flaring with each breath.

Sebastian said, “I suspect he was also periodically slipping you a little sum, was he? Is that why you were arguing with him on the footpath in front of London House on Monday? Because you thought the promise of an archbishopric in his future should increase the price of your continued silence, and he was unwilling to meet your demands?”

Slade swiped the back of his hard forearm across his sun-darkened forehead, leaving another bloody streak. “The Bishop was me friend, see? People know secrets about their friends. People help their friends when they can. Ain’t nothin’ wrong wit’ that.”

“And what secret did you know about the Bishop of Lon—”

Sebastian broke off, his preternatural hearing catching the whisper of shifting cloth, the subtle exhalation of a man’s breath. Sebastian threw himself sideways just as the giant thighbone of an ox still glistening with fat and gristle whooshed through the space where his head had been.

“Mornin’, Captain Viscount,” said Obadiah, his lips pulling back in a grin, his big body filling the air with the scent of hot, stale sweat as he swung the ox bone again.

Snatching up the tray of sausages, Sebastian slammed the wooden board into the man’s face hard enough to send him staggering back against the wall, his face dripping torn sausage casings and ground fat down the front of his leather waistcoat and breeches. With a roar, he pushed away from the wall, head bent like a charging bull.

Sebastian yanked the small flintlock pistol from his pocket and discharged both barrels into the man’s face, obliterating it in a spray of blood and bone. The small shop filled with thick blue smoke and the acrid stench of burned powder.

Jack Slade screamed, “Obadiah!” Snatching up the cleaver from the butcher block, he clambered over the counter and threw himself at Sebastian.

Instinctively flinging up his right arm, Sebastian only partially deflected the blow, the sharp edge of the blade slicing deep. Then the butcher’s massive body slammed into him and the two men went down together.

They careened into the tin pail, tipping it over in a clatter that sent a wash of blood and bits of gore spilling across the floor. Scrambling and sliding in the bloody sawdust, Sebastian managed to roll on top of the butcher. He closed his left fist around Slade’s wrist and yanked the hand clutching the cleaver high over the butcher’s head. But Sebastian’s right arm hung at his side, wet with blood that dripped off his fingertips to mingle with the spilled muck on the floor. He was aware of his vision darkening around the edges. The strength in his grip ebbed.

Slade reared up, the crown of his head butting into Sebastian’s forehead. Sebastian reeled back, his blood-slicked fingers losing their grip on the butcher’s wrist.

Lurching sideways, Slade swung the cleaver at Sebastian’s head. Sebastian jerked out of the way. The heavy blade sank into the wooden frame of the old green shutter beside him, and stuck there.

Face streaked with sweat and blood and sawdust, Slade rocked the cleaver’s handle, trying to free it. Sebastian slammed the heel of his boot into the side of the butcher’s head, knocking him back. Sebastian closed his own left hand on the cleaver’s handle. Levering the blade free of the wood, he swung around just as Jack Slade charged.

The blade made an ugly thwunking sound as it sank into the butcher’s chest. Slade flopped back, jerked, lay still.

His breath soughing in his throat, Sebastian sank back against the blood-spattered wall. He sat for a moment, his heart beating hard against his rib cage, the blood from his sliced arm pooling on the floorboards beside him. Then he yanked the cravat from around his neck and bound it tightly around his arm.

“You’re lucky,” said Gibson, setting a neat row of stitches along the nasty slash in Sebastian’s forearm. “A fraction deeper and he’d have severed an artery. A trifle to the right and you might have lost the use of your hand.”

Sebastian had stripped down to his torn, blood-soaked shirt and breeches and was sitting perched on one end of the long, narrow table in the front room of Gibson’s surgery. He took a deep pull from the open bottle of brandy he gripped in one white-knuckled fist, and kept his jaw set.

“Hurts, does it?” said Gibson with what sounded suspiciously like malicious satisfaction. He tied off his thread and reached for a roll of bandages. “You think it’s true, then? Slade was blackmailing the Bishop?”

“I don’t think there’s much doubt about it. The question is, what secret was the Bishop paying Slade to keep?”

“That Francis Prescott killed his brother in the crypt of St. Margaret’s thirty years ago?” Gibson suggested, wrapping the bandage around his handiwork.

“I don’t think so. I keep going back to the way Slade laughed when he heard Sir Nigel had been found down in that crypt.”

“If you hadn’t killed him, you could have asked him.”

“If I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me.”

“There is that.”

Sebastian took another deep swallow of brandy. “Miss Jarvis knew Prescott was being blackmailed. She just didn’t know by whom. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know why.”

Gibson tied off the bandage and handed Sebastian the torn, bloody remnant of his coat. “If you’re planning on going to see her, you might consider stopping by Brook Street first for a new rig.”

Sebastian grunted and eased his arm into what was left of his sleeve.

“And whatever you do, don’t drive those chestnuts of yours,” said the surgeon, fashioning him a sling. “Or the grays. Either stick to hackneys, or let Tom or Giles drive you. You need to give that arm a rest. Overdo things and you could end up losing the use of that hand after all.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, Tom is nursing an injury of his own.”

“I had a look at Tom’s shoulder this afternoon. The young heal quickly. If you ask me, this forced inactivity is doing him more harm than good. Besides, it’s not like he’ll be in any danger. Obadiah’s dead.”

“And if it wasn’t Obadiah who shot at us the other night?”

Gibson picked up the bowl of bloody water and pile of soiled linen. “Somehow I can’t imagine William Franklin lurking in some Brook Street area steps waiting to take a shot at you. It was Obadiah.”

Sebastian held his own counsel. But he wasn’t convinced.