When Gods Die

Chapter 47

London was different from the country. In the country, traveling judges sat only at the quarterly assizes—if then. In the farthest counties a man could languish in jail for three months to a year, waiting for a trial. In London, a man—or a boy—could be caught, tried, and hanged in less than a week.

Sebastian tried not to think about that as he and Lovejoy followed a porter through grimy prison passages lit by smoking rushes. The air in here was foul, reeking of excrement and urine and rot. Rotting straw, rotting teeth, rotting lives.

They were shown to a cold but relatively clean room, its stone floor bare, the small, high, barred window casting only a dim light on a grouping of plain wooden chairs and an old scarred table.

“What were you doing here?” Sebastian asked Lovejoy when he and the magistrate were left alone to wait.

“The watch picked up a couple of housebreakers near St. James’s Park the night Sir Humphrey Carmichael’s son was killed. I was hoping they might have seen something.”

“And?”

Lovejoy’s lips twisted. “Nothing.”

Footsteps echoed down the passage, a man’s heavy stride and the smaller footfalls of a boy. Sebastian swung toward the door.

Tom entered the room with dragging steps, his head bowed. His coat was muddy and torn, his cap gone, his face pale and drawn. It was as if all the boy’s plucky determination and jaunty irreverence had been wiped out in one long, hellish night.

“’Ere ’e is, gov’nor,” said the gaoler grudgingly.

“Thank you.” Sebastian’s voice came out thick. “That will be all.”

Tom’s head snapped up, his mouth opening in a gasp. “My lord!”

Lovejoy put out a hand to stop the boy’s impetuous forward rush. “There, there now, lad. Remember your place.”

“Let him go,” said Sebastian as the boy dodged the magistrate and threw himself against Sebastian’s chest.

“I didn’t do it! I swear I didn’t prig that bloke’s watch.” The boy’s shoulders heaved, his entire body shuddering. “They made it up ’cause I seen the gunpowder and ’eard what they was talking about.”

“It’s all right,” said Sebastian, one hand tightening on the boy’s shoulder even as his gaze met Lovejoy’s over Tom’s head. Gunpowder? “I’ve come to take you home.”

“They was going to hang me.” Tom’s voice broke. “Hang me just like they done Huey.”

Sebastian looked down at the boy’s tortured, tear-streaked face. “Who was Huey?”

“My brother. Huey was my brother.”

LEAVING THE PRISON, Sebastian bundled Tom into the carriage and gave the coachman orders to take the boy to Paul Gibson.

“Gibson?” said the tiger, bounding up. “I don’t need no surgeon. You’re going back there, ain’t you? To Smithfield? Well, I’m coming, too.”

“You will do as you are told,” said Sebastian in a voice that had quelled rebellious soldiers still bloody from battle.

The boy sank back and hung his head. “Aye, gov’nor.”

Sebastian nodded to his coachman, then turned away to call a hackney.

“Whether you like it or not, I am coming with you,” said Lovejoy, scrambling into the hackney behind Sebastian as he leaned forward to give the jarvey directions to Smithfield. “The law does not look kindly on those who make false accusations of theft.”

Sebastian threw the magistrate a quizzical glance, but said nothing.

Lovejoy settled in one corner of the carriage, his teeth worrying his lower lip as he sat in a thoughtful silence. After a moment, he said, “All this talk of powder kegs and a repeat of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. You think that’s what’s afoot here? Revolution?”

Sebastian shook his head. Tom had told them in detail what he’d seen and heard beside the Norfolk Arms’s cellars. It had been suggestive, but hardly damning. “More like a palace coup, I’d say, rather than a revolution. But God knows where it might lead. Change can be difficult to control once it’s under way. The French Revolution was started by a few noblemen wanting to revive the old National Assembly, remember? They certainly got more than they bargained for.”

The steadily thickening clouds had robbed the day of its light, making it seem later than it actually was. Sebastian stared out the window at brick houses streaked with soot, at gin shops spilling drunken laughter into the street. The sultry air smelled of boiling cabbage and horse manure and burning garbage. A boy of ten or twelve, a street sweeper from the looks of him, scrambled to get out of their way, his broom held tight in one fist, his eyes wide as he watched them rattle past. Behind him, a little girl of no more than eight, her clothes a jumble of torn rags, her face pale and bleak, stretched out one grimy hand in the beggar’s universal plea for help.

The hackney swept on, the boy and girl lost in a ragged crowd.

Sebastian found himself thinking about two other children, one named Huey, the other Tom. And about their mother, a simple but devout widow, out of work and thrown onto the streets with two children to feed. For her as for untold thousands of women in such a situation, the choices were simple but stark: starvation, theft, or prostitution. Tom’s mother had chosen theft and earned herself a one-way voyage to Botany Bay. Prostitution might have brought her disease and an early death, but it wasn’t a capital crime. Stealing to feed your starving children was.

From what Tom had told him, Sebastian figured the boy had been nine years old when he and his brother stood on the docks and watched their mother being rowed out to a transport lying at anchor in the Thames. The older by three years, Huey had taken it upon himself to care for his younger brother the best he knew how—until they caught Huey for stealing, too. Huey wasn’t as lucky as their mother. They’d hanged him.

Lovejoy’s voice broke into Sebastian’s thoughts. “We discovered the identity of the man you killed by the river.”

Sebastian moved his head against the hackney’s cracked leather upholstery. “I didn’t kill him. He fell.”

Lovejoy’s lips twitched, which was about as close as the dour little magistrate ever came to a smile. “His name was Ahearn. Charles Ahearn. Ever hear of him?”

Sebastian shook his head. “What is known of him?”

“Nothing to his discredit. He served as tutor to Lord Cochran’s sons until the youngest went off to Eton last fall.”

“What’s he been doing since then?”

Lovejoy withdrew a large handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his nose. “That we’re not sure.”

Sebastian had become aware of a heavy stench of raw smoke overlying the other smells of the district, the reeking tannery pits, and the fetid stink of the shambles. Now, as they turned onto Giltspur Street, they could hear shouts and running feet and the roaring crackle of flames, the hackney struggling to wind its way through a thick crowd. From the distance came the steady clang, clang, clang of the fire bell.

“Something’s on fire,” said Lovejoy, craning his neck to look out the window.

Sebastian could see it now. Flames danced across an ancient pitched roof and shot from windows that yawned like gaping holes in a crumbling brick facade. Thick black smoke billowed up to mingle with the low gray clouds ahead.

“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian, throwing open the door to leap down even before the hackney had rolled to a halt. “It’s the Norfolk Arms.”