Where Serpents Sleep

Chapter 10

Treading cautiously over charred fallen timbers, blackened furniture, and shattered bricks, Sebastian worked his way through scorched rooms standing open to the joyless light of the cloudy afternoon. From the street came the rattle of a wagon and the cry of a scissors sharpener shouting, “Knives or scissors to grind today?” But here, all was unnaturally silent, brooding.

It had occurred to him that a visit to the Orchard Street Academy would be most productive in the hours after dark. And so he had returned here, to what had once been the Magdalene House, looking for answers to questions that hadn’t yet occurred to him.

Pushing his way through a ruined doorway, he surveyed what had once been the kitchen. If Rose Jones had been shot in the alley as Miss Jarvis had said, then her killers must have dragged her body in here before setting the house aflame. They might even have kindled the blaze from the kitchen hearth.

A vague shuffling noise drew his gaze to the distant corner, where what he at first took for a dog rummaged for food. Only, this was no dog. At the sound of Sebastian’s footfalls, a child’s head reared up, his face darkened with dirt and soot, his hair matted. With a gasp, the ragged youngster bolted for the open doorway, bare feet kicking up little tufts of ash as he ran.

“Wait,” called Sebastian, but the boy had already bolted off the back stoop and up the alley.

Sebastian followed him into a narrow, shadowed alleyway reeking of garbage and urine. To his left, the cobbled lane ended in a soaring brick wall. He turned right, retracing the steps Miss Jarvis must have taken the night before. The jumble of footprints in the muck could have belonged to anyone. But there, near the mouth of the alley, he found what he was looking for: a pool of dried blood smeared over the cobbles as if by a body being dragged.

He crouched down, alert for anything out of place amidst the rotting cabbage leaves and offal. He found nothing.

His head falling back, he stared up at the buildings around him. Surely someone had seen something—or heard something.

Pushing to his feet, he started with the tea dealer who occupied the premises on the corner. The proprietor turned out to be a stout middle-aged widow with heavy jowls and an uncompromising gray stare who flapped her apron and blustered at the first mention of the Magdalene House.

“Good riddance, I say,” she grumbled. “This is a respectable street, it is. We didn’t need those tarts here. It’s the judgment of God, if you ask me, what happened.”

“You didn’t see anything suspicious? Before the fire, I mean. Some men watching the house, perhaps?”

The tea dealer swung away to lift a massive crate and shift it to one side with as much effort as if it had been a small sewing basket. “There were always men hanging around that place. It stands to reason, don’t it? I mean, considering what those women were.”

“Did you hear any gunshots last night?”

She swung to regard him with hard, unfriendly gray eyes. She had a large mole on the side of her nose from which protruded three hairs. The hairs quivered as she looked him up and down suspiciously, taking in the glory of Calhoun’s painstakingly polished boots, the flawless fit of Sebastian’s coat and the crisp white linen of his shirt and cravat. “What’s it to you, anyway? A fine gentleman like yourself?”

“I’m making inquiries for a friend. There are suggestions the fire wasn’t accidental. That it was murder.”

“Suggestions?” The woman’s meaty fists landed on her ample hips. “And who’s making these suggestions, hmm? Them Quakers, I suppose. A lot of heathens, if you ask me, with their strange ways and outlandish ideas. Impugning the integrity of God-fearing Christians.” She leaned forward. “It was a fire. Houses burn in London all the time. Especially the houses of the wicked.”

“God’s judgment?”

“Exactly.”

Leaving the musty, redolent atmosphere of the tea dealer, Sebastian ranged up and down the street, talking to a chandler’s apprentice and a haberdasher, a coal merchant and a woolen draper. It wasn’t until he stepped into the cheesemonger’s shop directly opposite the burned-out house that he found someone willing to admit to having seen or heard anything out of the ordinary the evening before.

The slim, brown-haired girl behind the simple wooden counter was young, no more than fourteen or fifteen, with the rosy cheeks and clear eyes of a country lass. “What you mean when you say did I notice anything out o’ the ordinary before the fire last night?” she asked as she wrapped up the slice of blue cheese he had selected.

The dim light of the dreary day filtered in through aged windows that distorted the vision of a passing carriage. Standing here, Sebastian realized he had an unobstructed view of the blackened brick walls and broken chimneys across the street. “Someone who might have seemed out of place in the neighborhood, perhaps?” he suggested.

She glanced up, an impish smile curving her lips. “You mean, like you?”

Sebastian laughed. “Am I so out of place?”

“Well, we don’t get the likes o’ you in here often—that’s for sure.” She paused to lean forward, her elbows propped on the wooden counter, her smile fading as she dipped her voice. “But, yeah, I did see something struck me as kinda queer. I mentioned it to me da, but he told me to mind me own business. Said we don’t need no more trouble.”

The earthy odor of aged Cheddars and fresh farmers’ cheeses rose up to scent the air around them. Sebastian found himself wondering what kind of trouble the cheesemonger and his family had already encountered. But all he said was, “What did you see?”

She threw a quick glance at the curtained alcove behind her, as if to make certain her da wasn’t lurking there. “Men. Gentlemen. They was hanging around here for hours—wanderin’ up and down the street, goin’ in and outta shops but not buyin’ nothin’.”

“How many men?”

“I dunno exactly. Three. Maybe four. A couple of ’em come in here. They pretended like they was looking around, but mainly they was just keeping an eye on the house across the street.”

“Were they dark haired? Or fair?”

She thought about it for a moment. “The two that come in here was dark. They was maybe a bit older than you, but not by much.”

“Do you remember anything else about them?”

“We-ell . . .” She dragged out the syllable, screwing up her face with the effort of recollection. “They reminded me a bit of Mr. Nash.”

“Mr. Nash?”

“The Nabob what used to buy all his cheese from me da. He died last year.”

“In what way did the gentlemen remind you of Mr. Nash?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. They just did.”

Sebastian stared out the wavy-paned glass at what had been the Magdalene House’s entrance. “Did you see those men go in the house?”

She shook her head. “It got so foggy I couldn’t have seen the King himself if’n he’d been driving down the middle of the street.”

“What about after the fire started? Did you see the men then, in the crowd?”

Again, she shook her head. Dropping her voice even lower, she said, “But I did hear gunshots. Two of them. Right before the fire started.”

So many people in the area had denied hearing any shots that Sebastian would have begun to doubt Miss Jarvis’s tale if it hadn’t been backed up by Gibson’s medical observations. He said, “No one else will admit to having heard a thing. Why would that be?”

Again, that quick look over the shoulder. “Nobody liked havin’ that house here,” she whispered. “They wanted it gone.”

Sebastian studied the gentle lines of her young face, the baby-fine light brown hair that fell in artless disarray from beneath her mobcap. “So you’re saying—what?”

She drew in a quick gasp, her eyes widening as she realized how he might have interpreted what she’d just said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not sayin’ I think anyone around here had anything to do with what happened. I’m just sayin’ people complained about the house so much, maybe they’re afraid somebody might blame them if the constables start lookin’ into how that fire come about.”

Sebastian reached for his wrapped cheese and laid a generous payment on the counter. “Then why did you tell me?”

“Pippa?” A querulous voice came from the back of the shop. “You still servin’ that customer?”

Pippa began to back away.

“Why?” said Sebastian again. But the girl simply wheeled and disappeared through the curtained alcove.

He stepped out of the cheesemonger’s into a street filled with lengthening shadows and buffeted by a cold wind. As he turned toward his carriage, the familiar figure of a man separated itself from the gloom cast by a nearby coal wagon and moved to block Sebastian’s path.

“I’m surprised to see you here, Devlin,” said Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith. “I was under the impression you’d given up this rather curious hobby of yours in favor of drinking yourself to death.”

With deliberate slowness, Sebastian let his gaze travel over the former cavalry officer’s tall, elegant person, from the smartly curled brim of his beaver hat to his shiny black Hessians. When Jarvis had threatened Kat Boleyn with a traitor’s death, Epson-Smith had been his instrument. The man was smart, vicious, and lethal. “Which curious hobby were you referring to?”

“Your self-appointed role as avenger of fair maidens brought too early to the grave.” Epson-Smith nodded toward the blackened walls of the burned-out house across the street. “Only, these weren’t exactly maidens, now were they?”

“I take it you’re here on Lord Jarvis’s business.”

Epson-Smith hooked a thumb casually in the pocket of his silk waistcoat. “I’d have said that in this instance, at least, we’re about the same business.”

“Are we? I’m interested in seeing justice done. Your involvement suggests Lord Jarvis is intent on something else entirely.”

“Justice? For a half dozen worthless whores? What are they to you?”

“Eight,” corrected Sebastian. “There are eight women dead. And if they’re so worthless, why are you here?”

If the Colonel knew the real source of Jarvis’s interest, he was too adroit to betray it. All he said was, “We could cooperate, you know.”

“I don’t think so.”

His smile never slipping, Epson-Smith turned away. But he paused long enough to look back and say, “If you should change your mind, you know where to find me.”