Where Shadows Dance

Chapter 25

The Surrey Docks lay on the south bank of the Thames, some two miles below London Bridge, in Rotherhithe. Once, this had been the center of the great Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London every April to return at the end of the season bearing blanket pieces of blubber that were then cut up and melted in vast iron pots. The stink of hot oil still permeated the district, mingling with the foul stench drifting downriver from the tanyards of nearby Bermondsey.

It was a squalid area of canals and basins lined with storehouses, of factories and artisans’ shops and reeking tidal ditches. The air rang with the pounding of hammers, the thwunk of axes biting into wood. Wagons loaded with iron and hemp, canvas and squawking chickens, clogged the mean, narrow lanes. “Place always gives me the willies, it does,” muttered Tom as they rattled over the uneven cobbles. “Too many foreigners, I s’pose.”

Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “That must be it.” He swung the chestnuts in through the arch of the Bow and Ox. “The inn at least appears respectable—and very English.”

An ancient, half-timbered inn with a lichen-covered tile roof and cantilevered galleries, the Bow and Ox catered to the company agents and factors whose business required them to frequent the nearby docks and their less than savory environs. “Water them,” said Sebastian, handing the horses’ reins to his tiger. Despite the lengthening shadows that told of the coming of evening, the afternoon sun was still brutal. “Just don’t let them get carried away. I shouldn’t be long.”

He found the landlady in the taproom. She was a short, rotund, grandmotherly-looking woman with a disarmingly beatific smile, who tsked sadly when asked about Ezekiel Kincaid.

“Aye, I remember Mr. Kincaid all right, poor lad,” she said, drawing Sebastian a pint of ale. “Said he had a wife and two sons, back in America. I keep thinking of them so far away, waiting for him to come home and never knowing what happened to him.”

“What do you think did happen to him?”

She set the tankard on the boards before him. “Footpads, if you ask me. Should’ve known better than to go off alone at night like that. And him so nervous, too.”

“Nervous? In what way?”

“Oh, just ever so anxious, if you know what I mean?” She reached for a towel. “I kept his things for him, in case he came back for them. But that magistrate from Bow Street carried it all away with him.”

Sebastian took a sip of the ale. “How many days was Mr. Kincaid here?”

“Never spent a night, poor man. Why, he’d only just docked that very morning. Took a room and ate a meat pie in the public room, he did, then went off for a good long while. If I recall, he said something about needing to see someone in the West End, but I could be wrong.”

“He never came back?”

“Oh, no; he did.” She ran the towel over the ancient dark wood of the bar. “Came back and had his dinner. But then he went off again, and that was the last anyone saw of him.”

“No idea where he went?”

“Well, he did come and ask how to get to the St. Helena tea gardens. It’s a lovely place, you know, with a brass band and dancing most every evening in summer.”

“Where is it?”

She nodded downriver. “You follow the Halfpenny Hatch there, through the market gardens, to Deptford Road. ’Tisn’t the best area to go walking through after dark, mind, seeing as how the top of Turndley’s Lane is known as something of a resort for footpads. That’s what we thought, when we realized he didn’t ever come back—that he’d run afoul of footpads.”

“You notified the constables?”

“The next day, yes. They checked along the pathway and all around St. Helena but never found a trace of him. No one at the tea gardens remembered seeing him, so we reckoned something must’ve happened to him before he got there.”

“Tell me, what did Mr. Kincaid look like?”

“Hmm ...” She paused, her face screwed up with thought. “He was in his thirties, I’d say. Hair the color of a haystack. Didn’t notice his eyes, I’m afraid. He was a nice lad, to be sure, but it was hard when you were talking to him to notice anything but his teeth.”

“His teeth?”

“Aye, poor lad. Could’ve eaten an apple through a picket fence, as the saying goes.”

Sebastian drained his ale. “What ship did you say he came in on?”

“The Baltimore Mary. She was at the Greenland Dock.” She gave him a considering look. “Going down there now, are you?”

“Yes. Why?”

She nodded toward the window, where the westering sun was casting long shadows across the road. “Best hurry, then. You don’t want to be anywhere around there when it starts getting dark.”