Jack, Knave and Fool (31 page)

“All the rest …” I looked at Annie. “Is that what she …”

Annie nodded.

I sighed. “Much as I should like to take credit, mum, I made only five copies yesterday before Sir John called upon me for an errand — and one did follow another all day long. I never got back to the task you gave me. It could only be Clarissa finished the rest.”

Lady Fielding smiled slyly. “I thought your hand had greatly improved after the first few,” said she. “It became more cursive and flowing, less angular—in short, more feminine and less masculine. Altogether an improvement. You may pass the congratulations I gave you on to her. Has anyone looked in on her yet? Please do.” Then, pulling her hat down upon her head: “Well, goodbye all. I must be off.”

And indeed off she went. We heard her steps descending the stairs at a perilous rate. She seemed always to hurry down them in just such a way, but had yet to make a misstep.

I carried a pan of live coals and wood chips up to the top of the stairs to feed the brazier, which had quite gone dead during the night. Clarissa slept as I opened the window wide and emptied the ashes onto the yard below. Whether I had wakened her loading the coals in the brazier, or if she had, as she claimed, been wakened by the smell of bacon cooking, I know not. In any case, she was wide-eyed and smiling by the time I reached the door. I passed on to her Lady Fielding’s thanks and praise, which she took as her due. Yet I would not let her off quite so lightly.

“You promised me you would return to bed when you finished that cup of tea I gave you. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” said she, then turned away in a sulk.

“Are your promises worth so little?”

“Oh, pooh,” said she, as was her wont. “It was in a good cause, was it not?”

“That I cannot contest. But a promise is a promise.”

“You’re being tiresome. Now, please go, so that I may make use of the chamber pot.”

I turned and stalked from the room.

“Shut the door, please —and tell Annie that I shall be along instanter to help her with breakfast.”

“You’re supposed to stay in bed. Will you not understand that?”

“Mr. Donnelly said that that is a matter of my choice, so long as I keep warm — so there!”

I leaned back and slammed the door shut and then descended the stairs.

Sir John sat, fully dressed, at the table. He was sipping at a cup of tea as Annie put before him a breakfast plate of hen’s eggs and two thick rashers of bacon.

“What have we here?” said Sir John, inhaling deeply. “Bacon and eggs? What is it we celebrate with such a morning feast?”

“Well, sir,” said Annie, “you and Jeremy were both up late on court matters, and ‘twas you who always said if a man don’t get his sleep, he must eat well, for he must get his energy from somewhere.”

“So I did, so I did.”

“Jeremy’s will soon be coming.”

As Annie turned back to her work, I sat down at the table and pulled my chair close to Sir John’s.

“Sir, I have something to tell you,” said I in a low voice.

“About last night at Bradbury’s? Well, fret not,” said he. “These plans of mine sometimes do not go perfectly.” He chewed a bit and swallowed, then took another bite, dripping a bit of yolk upon his waistcoat.

“No, Sir John, it’s about — “

But he continued: “Mr. Perkins told me how the younger fellow had run through the crowd, and how the crowd had then closed up against him — against Mr. Perkins, that is —and made pursuit impossible. To have leveled a pistol at any of them would have been a mistake. To have fired a pistol would likely have meant a riot. He handled the situation properly.”

I paused to think through what Sir John had just told. It took a moment until I understood that Constable Perkins had taken the blame for my loss of Jackie Carver. Should I tell the straight of it? Perhaps later. The important thing at the moment was telling my tale of the white mare.

“No sir,” said I, “what I have to tell you has naught to do with what happened last night at the pawnshop. It was what I saw when Bunkins and I returned the wagon and team to the stable.”

“Ah … so … what was it you saw there?”

“A white horse —a mare, big as some stallions, I was told.” Then did I tell the tale complete, as Sir John listened, eating, nodding at each detail. In particular he was taken with the matter of time.

“And when did the ostler say the mare had been bought —a week ago?”

“No, sir,” said I, “he said a week ago or more. I would wager it was something like two weeks past.”

“The owner of the stable would know, of course. He would keep a record of the transaction.”

“And who knows, Mrs. Bradbury could’ve kept the animal a day or two, wondering what to do with it.”

“This stable—you say it’s very near the pawnshop on Bedford?”

“Oh, very near, sir. It’s on Half-Moon just before it narrows into the passage to the Strand.”

“Of course, I know the place. I’ve smelled it a score of times as I passed by.” He said nothing for a moment, then, with pursed lips, gave a wise nod. “It could be the very horse George Bradbury rode from Warwick. If we can prove that it was sold to the stablemaster by one of our three conspirators, then we know that he arrived safe in London.”

“And was murdered here,” I offered.

“That is a bit of a leap, yet one we might take. We shall see.”

“Jeremy!” Annie called crossly. “It’s not every day you get eggs for breakfast. Don’t let them get cold.”

I looked down and found a plate of eggs and rashers before me. How or when it had appeared there I had no idea, so taken was I in communicating my information to Sir John. I nodded to her and fell to the feast.

“When you have finished eating, Jeremy, I should like you to return to that stable on Half-Moon, find the owner, and get from him all the particulars you can. If his description of the seller of the white horse should match one of the two we have in custody, then bring him along to Bow Street —tell him I insist that he come —and we shall have him identify him or her face-to-face.

“It will be done, sir, just as you say.”

Then did I hear a clopping on the stairs which I knew well from yesterday. It was Miss Pooh, descending to breakfast in my old shoes.

“But damn,” said Sir John, “I fear I must detain you further, lad. I must be shaved again this morning for that Laningham dinner we attend tonight. But then again, it was just yesterday you shaved me, was it not?”

“No sir, the day before that.”

He rubbed his jowls critically. “Ah well,” said he, “I suppose I’m due.”

My return visit to the stable proved only partly successful. When I first looked in at the location, one of the two ostlers present (the night man, who had of course by then gone home, was not one of them) advised me that the owner of the stable was not expected in for an hour or more. I told him that I had come at the behest of Sir John Fielding of the Bow Street Court, and that I would return in an hour to speak with his master then.

I had another matter to attend to. Sir John had also asked me to look in at the pawnshop and give the place a cursory examination — to pay particular attention to the upstairs rooms and look for traces of blood about.

“They could not have separated head from body without spilling blood,” he had said to me. “Yet keep your eye open for anything you believe might be of interest. And oh yes, one thing specifically I should like you to bring back to us, should you find it. Our man Roundtree is a carpenter, is he not? If you run across his box of tools, that would be something I should like to have.”

And so, as I walked from the stable to the pawnshop, I reflected upon Sir John’s instructions, realizing full well the significance of his request for Roundtree’s toolbox.

Bedford Street, at that hour of a cold January morning, was quite a dismal sight. Though the taverns and grogshops never closed, or so it seemed, they were probably near empty. One or two of them were being cleaned, after a fashion; I saw a door open and a man in the shadows sweeping the filth of the night out onto the walkway. I heard water splashed in another, followed by the rhythmic swishing of a mop passing over the boards of the floor. Far down the street, beyond Henrietta, I caught sight of a single figure, a woman, staggering insensibly on her way to whatever bed or pallet she might claim as her own.

Then to the pawnshop. I took from my pocket the key to the place, given by Mr. Bailey to Mr. Baker and by Mr. Fuller to me. Pleased at how easily it turned in the lock, I stepped inside and locked it again. I found a candle on the counter and lit it, for though it was morning without, it was dusk within. Then did I begin my inspection of the premises. There was far more to the ground floor than I had supposed. Two rooms were filled with oddments of every sort — clothes, musical instruments of every sort and sound, clocks, paintings, even a piece of statuary set in one corner —all of this in no apparent order, simply hung, stacked, and leaned all higgledy-piggledy about, filling the space completely. Looking hopelessly from one room to the next, I realized that I could spend days going through each, and so, for the time being at least, I decided to leave them unexamined, and searched for the stairs to the upper floor.

I found them at the very rear of the edifice and ascended. There were but three rooms above. There was something tight, cramped, and mean about them. They were kept neat enough, which surprised me somewhat considering the disorder below; nevertheless the walls were bare of pictures of any sort (with so many below!), and the furniture, though large and cumbersome, was rather sparse.

Going to the bedroom, I gave considerable attention to the mattress. Sir John seemed to have reasoned that George Bradbury had been murdered in his bed; whether he had been decapitated there was another matter entirely. In any case, when I stripped down the sheet and comforter from it, I gave the mattress a thorough going-over. It was feather-filled and dusty; look as I might, I found no trace of blood on it. Yet I did make an interesting discovery when I took the trouble to search through a high chest of many drawers and the wardrobe beside it — or rather, it was a matter of what I failed to discover. The drawers were filled with shifts, lace undergarments, and nightdresses of the sort worn by ladies of quality, and stockings and garters. The wardrobe was crammed to bursting with frocks and gowns of every sort, color, and weight. There was not a single piece of male attire to be found in the bedroom.

The kitchen was quite ordinary. The only thing worthy of note was that it did not look to me as if it had been used much of late. There was little food in it —a jar of flour and another of sugar, both near full, but no barrel of potatoes, no carrots or turnips, and certainly no meat about. There was a good-sized teapot upon the table; I looked inside it and found it half full of black tea. On a shelf next the unused fireplace, I found a half loaf of bread and a bit of cake covered over with a cloth, still fairly fresh. It seemed that Mrs. Bradbury had done most of her dining in eating places about the town. Perhaps she always had.

As for the parlor, which looked out over the street, it also served as a dining room and had in it a table much too large for such a limited space, and eight chairs. There was a couch, also a bit too large, and two conversation chairs. All together, it made for a rather crowded room. I was about to leave it, when something caught my eye. I turned back to look at the table and saw that it had upon it the only piece of decoration to be seen in any of the three rooms —a small vase, blue and white. I reached over, picked it up, and examined it. It was delicate and thin-walled, of porcelain. I noted the dragon design upon it and determined that it could only be of Chinese origin. Here, though I took no joy in my discovery, was one mystery solved.

I had seen nothing of Roundtree’s tools. Perhaps they were not here at Bradbury’s. He could as easily have returned them to his room in Half-Moon Passage. Yet I had to look. I descended the stairs to make my search. In that second room of storage, the one farthest to the rear of the house, I found an area hollowed out of the clutter before a fireplace, which must have been located directly below that in the kitchen. Before it was a pallet bed with a wad of clothes at one end which had served as a pillow. This, I felt certain, was where Roundtree had hidden himself from us, close enough to make visits to Clarissa and watch over her after his fashion. This fireplace had had heavy use. There was some evidence he had cooked here, too, though it had no proper accommodation for cooking. Here was a dirty plate, a fork, a spoon. I could picture that poor scarecrow of a man huddling before his blaze, eating what little his protectors (or perhaps, in a sense, his captors) had allowed him to have. This was what it meant to be a fugitive. This was what it meant to mix in murder.

I looked around and located his toolbox with no difficulty. It was tucked in at one side of the fireplace, half hidden from sight —but only half. It was near full, yet there was just room in it, I thought, for the purpose I had in mind.

Looking about, I found copies of the Public Advertiser which he may have used to start his fire, and tearing up the paper, I wrapped the Chinese vase as carefully as I could. I placed it in an empty spot between the hammer and the saw.

Then was I ready at last to return to the stable.

At my second visit, the owner of the place was indeed present, a man of advanced years but still sturdy and able. He was brought to me by the ostler to whom I had inquired earlier.

“So you’re the lad sent over by the magistrate. What is it he wants of me?”

I caught him glancing curiously at the carpenter’s box in my hand, though he said nothing about it. Taking that opportunity, I laid it down upon the floor.

“Your name, first of all, sir.”

He seemed to think that rather rude and blunt from one of my years. Still, he answered: “Matthew Gurney.” Then, with a frown: “Was it that team you hired last night? Maybe they wasn’t the best. I’ll refund the cost if that’ll make it right. I wish to stay on good terms with the law.”

“No, it’s nothing to do with that,” said I. “but your’re right—the horses were not the best. No, I was sent to inquire about the white horse, the mare in the third stall there.”