Why Mermaids Sing

Chapter 58

Sebastian was paying off his hackney outside Newgate Prison when he heard a man’s high-pitched voice calling his name.

“Lord Devlin.”

Sebastian turned to find Sir Henry Lovejoy coming out of the prison’s formidable gates.

“I stopped by your house this morning, my lord, but was told you were not in. I assume you’ve heard the news about young Anthony Atkinson? Dreadful business this. Just dreadful.”

Sebastian stepped out of the path of a passing ironmonger’s wagon. “Who was it pushed for the arrest of Brandon Forbes?”

“Sir James Read and Sir William both. Lord Jarvis has brought considerable pressure to bear on Bow Street to solve this case, and the magistrates are always anxious to curry favor with the Palace.”

Sebastian squinted up at the prison’s dark, oppressive facade. “And now that Anthony Atkinson is missing? Will Mr. Forbes be released?”

Sir Henry sighed. “I fear not. Sir James in particular contends that the disappearance of the young Atkinson boy in no way absolves Mr. Forbes of the earlier murders.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“That’s the law. Thanks to your admirable detective work, it appears that Mr. Forbes possesses a powerful motive to have committed the murders, and I fear the gentleman has no verifiable alibi for the nights in question.”

Sebastian swore long and hard. “So what exactly is being done to find Anthony Atkinson?”

“As I understand it, Bow Street has some twenty men combing the countryside around Forbes’s estate.”

“Bloody hell. The boy’s not there.”

“So it would seem.”

Sebastian found Brandon Forbes seated at a writing desk in one corner of a surprisingly large room overlooking the street. The rattle of the jailer’s keys brought the gentleman’s head around. At the sight of Sebastian, he grunted.

“It’s you I’ve to thank for my being here, I take it.”

Sebastian ducked his head through the doorway and waited while the jailer locked the door behind him. Newgate could be relatively comfortable for those with a few extra pounds to buy themselves a private cell, some furniture and bedding, and food. But the dank air still reeked of excrement and despair, and the threat of the hangman’s noose was like an unseen presence in the room.

“Indirectly,” Sebastian admitted.

Forbes laid aside his pen. The bluff, good-humored country squire who’d walked the fields of his Hertfordshire estate was gone. The man before Sebastian now was pale and anxious. “You think I did it?” he asked. “You think I butchered all those young men?”

“No.”

Forbes grunted. “Why not? Everyone else does. My arrest ties it all up in a neat package.”

“Except for this morning’s disappearance of young Anthony Atkinson.”

“Yes, well, I could have an accomplice, couldn’t I? That’s what they’re saying. Someone who nabbed young Atkinson to confound the authorities and make it appear that I’m innocent.”

“I don’t think so.”

Forbes pushed up from his desk and went to stand at the window overlooking the front of the prison. “That’s where they hang them, you know. Those who have been condemned to death. Right there in front of the prison. You ever see a hanging?”

“Yes.”

“I saw one once. In St. Albans when I was a boy. My father took me to see it over my mother’s objections. Some lad who’d pinched a bolt of cloth from a shop. I was ten at the time, and I don’t think the boy was much older. They botched his hanging something terrible. Took him fifteen or twenty minutes to die. In the end, the hangman wrapped his own arms around the poor lad’s legs and pulled in an attempt to break the boy’s neck, but even that didn’t work. He suffocated slowly. Very slowly.”

“I won’t let you hang for this,” said Sebastian.

A wry smile touched the man’s lips. “Pardon me if I’m not comforted.”

Sebastian searched the other man’s plain, weather-darkened face. “Is there anything else you can tell me about your son—anything at all—that might help?”

“No.”

“No one you know who might have felt compelled to avenge the boy’s death?”

The man’s face paled, and Sebastian knew he was worrying about the suspicion that would now also fall on his surviving sons, the boy studying at Cambridge and his older brother. “No!”

“I didn’t mean your older sons,” said Sebastian.

Forbes went to sit on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, his head bowed. After a moment, he said, “It is possible that someone…” He hesitated, then swallowed hard. “You see, Gideon wasn’t actually my own child. Oh, I raised him as my son, and God knows I loved him like a son. But he was not the issue of my loins.”

“What?”

Forbes kept his gaze on the stone paving beneath his feet, a tide of color staining his cheeks. “It’s not the sort of thing a man speaks of ordinarily. But…My second wife—Gideon’s mother—she was already some three months gone with child when I married her.”

Sebastian leaned forward. “The father—who was he?”

“I don’t know. She never told me and I never asked. Her parents never knew she was with child. I gather they had objected to the match because of the man’s religion.”

“Where was your wife raised? In Hertfordshire?”

“No. She was from a village called Hollingbourne, in Kent.”

Sebastian thrust up from his seat. “Is that near Avery?”

Forbes’s head came up, his mouth slack with surprise. “How did you know?”