Who Buries the Dead

Chapter 6

Sebastian ordered his curricle brought round and came out of the house half an hour later to find Tom walking the grays up and down Brook Street. It had rained again sometime in the early morning hours, leaving the pavement wet, with dull, heavy clouds that pressed down on the city’s crowded rooftops and soaring chimneys. The horses’ breath showed white in the cold.

“If you fall asleep and tumble off your perch,” said Sebastian, taking the reins, “I won’t stop and pick you up.”

But Tom simply laughed and scrambled back to his place.

They headed south, curling around the edge of Hyde Park, where faint wisps of mist still drifted through the trees and the distant clumps of shrubs were no more than blurred shadows.

There’d been a time not so long ago when Knightsbridge and Hans Town were sleepy, pleasant villages lying several miles beyond the sprawl of London. Now, neat terrace houses of three and five stories-plus basements and attics-lined spacious squares and a broad thoroughfare called Sloane Street that stretched from Knightsbridge down toward Chelsea and the Thames. This was a district favored by prosperous barristers, physicians, and bankers, with a scattering of respectable lodging houses and workshops and a few more modest but comfortable homes for tradesmen.

Reluctant to disturb Preston’s grieving daughter so early in the day, Sebastian went instead to the Rose and Crown. A well-tended inn built of brick in the last years of the eighteenth century, it had a freshly whitewashed arch leading to a bustling yard and a public room that smelled of bacon and wood smoke and hearty ale. A buxom, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl of perhaps sixteen was wiping the tables when Sebastian walked in.

“You’re Molly?” he asked.

She turned, a smile lighting up her pretty face as she let her gaze rove over him in frank assessment. “I am. Who’re you?”

“Devlin. I wonder if I might ask you a few questions about last night?”

The smile disappeared and she retreated behind the gleaming oak counter that stretched along one wall. “What you want t’ know fer? You don’t look like no beak t’ me.”

“I’m not.” He laid a coin on the counter between them, the metal clicking softly against the polished wood. “I’m told you recognized Mr. Preston last night. Did he come here often?”

Her hand flashed out, and the coin disappeared. “Sometimes. Though he mostly favored the Monster.”

“The Monster?”

She jerked her head toward the west. “It’s just off Sloane Street.” She wrinkled her little button of a nose. “The place is so old you have t’ walk down a couple of steps to get in the front door.”

Sebastian let his gaze wander around the taproom, with its neat round tables and straight-backed chairs and gleaming wainscoting. “Did Mr. Preston come in here last night?”

“Nah. Ain’t seen him for a fortnight or more.”

“When he would come in, what did he drink?”

“Ale, mostly. But he weren’t no lush, if that’s what you’re askin’. Usually, he’d just pop in for a quick pint of an evenin’, then leave.”

Sebastian brought his gaze back to her pretty, expressive face. “I understand you’re the one who told the magistrate what you’d found at the bridge. But someone else was with you, wasn’t he? Someone from the stables?”

“Cian O’Neal.” Her voice dripped scorn. “Took one look at that head sittin’ up there and started screamin’ like he weren’t never gonna stop. When I said, ‘We gotta go tell Sir Thomas,’ he took t’ shakin’ all over, and his eyes got so big I thought they was gonna pop right out of his head. I grabbed hold of his arm, but he jerked away and run off. Never even looked back.”

“Did you see anyone else near the bridge?”

She stared at him. “What’re you thinkin’? That there was two heads there?”

“I was wondering if you might have seen someone running away as you walked up the lane.”

“No. I remember laughin’ at Cian because it was so dark and quiet, he was scared even before we seen the head.”

“Can you think of any reason for Mr. Preston to have been at the bridge at that time of night?”

Her eyes widened slightly. “Never thought about that, but. . Well, no. Truth is, most folks around here tend t’ avoid Bloody Bridge after dark.”

“Bloody Bridge?”

“That’s what it’s called, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

She sniffed, nearly as contemptuous of his ignorance as she was of poor Cian O’Neal’s terror. “Folks say it’s haunted by those who’ve died there over the years.”

“Yet you weren’t afraid to go there,” said Sebastian.

She shrugged. “It’s the quickest way t’ get t’ Five Fields, ain’t it?”

“And why would you want to go to Five Fields at night?”

She gave him an impish smile and raised her eyebrows in a knowing look. “I won’t be goin’ there with Cian again, that’s fer sure.”

“Tell me, what did you think of Mr. Preston?”

She shrugged. “He never give me no trouble, the way some of ’em do, if that’s what yer askin’.”

“Have you heard anyone speculating about what they think might have happened to him?”

“Most folks’re sayin’ footpads must’ve done it, which just goes t’ show what they know.”

“What makes you so certain it wasn’t footpads?”

She lifted her chin. “Why, I could see his pocket watch, couldn’t I? Danglin’ from its chain like he was just checkin’ the time. Ain’t no footpad gonna go t’ all the trouble of cuttin’ off a feller’s head and then leave his watch like that.”

“Mr. Preston’s greatcoat was unbuttoned when you saw him?”

She frowned. “Well, I guess it musta been. Didn’t really think about it, but, yeah, I reckon it was.”

Sebastian made inquiries at the stables, but Cian O’Neal hadn’t come to work that morning. He eventually tracked the lad to a tumbledown cottage off Wilderness Row, where he lived with his widowed mother and five younger siblings.

Sebastian’s knock was answered by the lad’s mother, a rail-thin, worn-down woman with gray-threaded hair who looked sixty but was probably younger than forty, judging by the squalling infant in her arms.

“Beggin’ your pardon, me lord,” she said, dropping a curtsy when Sebastian explained who he was and the purpose of his visit, “but I’m afraid you won’t be gettin’ much sense out of Cian. He didn’t sleep a wink all night-just sat in the corner by the fire and shivered. Some constable come by here from Bow Street and tried to talk to him a bit ago, and the poor lad started babblin’ all sorts of nonsense about havin’ seen the Dullahan.”

Sebastian had heard of the Dullahan. A figure in Irish folklore said to be a horseman dressed all in black and astride a black, fire-breathing stallion, he rode the darkened lanes and byways, carrying his own head in his hand. According to legend, whenever the Dullahan stops, a man, woman, or child dies.

Sebastian said, “I’d like to try talking to him.”

He knew by the worry pinching the woman’s face that she’d rather have denied him. But she belonged to a class whose members had been trained since birth to obey their “betters.”

She dropped a curtsy and stood back to let him enter.

The cottage was clean but wretchedly poor, with low, heavy beams, a swept dirt floor, and a worm-eaten old table with benches that looked as if they’d been knocked together from scrap wood picked up off the street. Of one room only, the place had a mattress in an alcove half-hidden behind a tattered curtain and a pegged, roughly hewn ladder that led up to a loft.

Cian O’Neal sat on a low, three-legged stool before the fire, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands thrust together between his tightly clasped knees. He was a fine-looking lad of seventeen or eighteen, big and strapping and startlingly handsome, with clear blue eyes and golden hair that curled softly against his lean cheeks. He kept his attention fixed on the fire, as if oblivious to Devlin’s approach. But when his mother touched him on the shoulder, he jerked violently and looked up at her with wide, terrified eyes.

“Here’s a lord come to talk to you, Cian,” she said gently. “About last night.”

The boy’s gaze slid from her face to Sebastian. A spasm passed over his features, the chest beneath his thin smock jerking visibly with his quick, agitated breathing.

Sebastian said, “I just want to know if you saw anything-heard anything-that might help us figure out what happened last night.”

The boy opened his mouth, the air rasping in his constricted throat as he drew a deep breath that came out in a high-pitched, terrified scream.

Sebastian pressed a coin into the poor woman’s hand and left.