A Broken Vessel (27 page)

“What!”

“That’s knocked you, ain’t it? Me and him had a confab this past Friday night, at the area window.”

“But that can’t be. He would have—It’s impossible.”

“He would’ve what? Told you? P’raps he forgot. His garrets ain’t too well furnished, after all.”

“I tell you, this can’t be! You didn’t see Caleb. He’s not in London. I don’t know where he is. He certainly wouldn’t come here. You’re trying to trick me.”

“One of us is trying it on, Bristles, and it ain’t me. I seen him in the area on Friday night, and called out to him, soft-like. He was struck all of a heap, but he didn’t dare hook it, ’coz I said I’d kick up a rumpus to wake the dead if he did. So he stayed, and we talked for a bit. ’Cept I couldn’t get much sense out of him, him being such a Tom o’ Bedlam. Mostly he just talked Scripture and said prayers. But he let on he’s been here before, and I think he might’ve knowed Mary. Maybe she even give him that letter, and he give it to you.”

“He didn’t. I didn’t have the letter. You didn’t get it from me.”

“All right, Bristles. No sense going down that road again. But you ain’t going to string me on no more about Caleb, are you? You admit he’s in London, and I seen him?”

“You say—you say you saw him in the area?”

“Yeh.”

“And he’s been here before?”

She nodded.

He took a long breath. “If you say you saw him, I suppose you must have. But I haven’t seen him for two years.”

“Bender! If you hadn’t seed him in all that time, you’d be jumping down me throat to know how he was: You was nutty upon him, so your missis says.”

“You talked to Ellen about this?” he said in astonishment.

“You don’t find out things by talking—you find out by listening.” She tapped her ear. “I knows all about you and Caleb—how he was wanted for murder in your old village, but he cut and run, and you was suspected of helping him.”

“I told everyone what happened,” he said tonelessly, “I sent Caleb to fetch some medicine from the local market town. He was my apprentice—I often sent him on errands of that kind. I didn’t know the constables were coming to arrest him. I told them where he’d gone, but they didn’t find him. He must have heard there was a hue and cry for him, and run away.”

“He worked for you?”

Fiske nodded. “I was training him as an apothecary.”

“He must’ve been more right in the head in them days,” she mused.

“He was very clever. He was a good boy, when people were patient with him. His mother—” He hesitated.

“I knows all about that. She blowed him up reg’lar— warmed his hide to save his soul.”

“She was too harsh with him. She broke his spirit. That’s why the village turned against him. He did act—strange— sometimes, but it wasn’t his fault. He was good. He was always good with me.”

“Now don’t take on. I ain’t argufying with you. I liked him meself, spite of his being a bit touched. This gal he’s s’posed to have croaked—who was she?”

“She was a poor half-wit creature who worked for a wood-cutter and his wife, outside our village. She wasn’t a very good servant, but they were too close-fisted to pay for a better.”

“And she was drowned? How’d they know it was murder?” When he did not answer, she added, “Come on, Bristles, you might as well blow the gab. I’ll only keep at you till you does.”

“One day she went missing,” he said reluctantly. “She was found face up in a stream. At first it was thought she fell in and hit her head, or something of that sort, but a surgeon came and had a look at her, and found bruises on her neck and shoulders. He said somebody’d held her down in the water. And he also said—he said whoever drowned her had—made free with her—before she died.”

“Well, I’ll be blowed.” So that was the “unspeakable crime” Mrs. Fiske had alluded to. Sally tried to imagine Caleb forcing himself on a girl. It seemed ludicrous—even more unlike him than murder. Yet he had told her he was very wicked, and babbled about lust and temptation. With his fear of God—and perhaps of his mother as well—would he feel the need to kill a girl he’d sinned with, to keep her from telling tales?

“Someone remembered hearing a woman’s cries near the stream where she was found,” Fiske continued. “And someone else had seen Caleb with her earlier that day. Soon everyone was saying Caleb must have done it. I couldn’t convince them they were wrong. They’d been suspicious of him for a long time, on account of his being—different. And it didn’t help that his mother believed whole-heartedly in his guilt.”

“Must’ve been hard on you.”

“Yes, it was. I was the only one who believed in him. He was all in all to me. When he went, he left—oh, such a great hole in my life! I had nothing, except my work.”

But you found him again, Sally thought. She was sure Fiske knew all about Caleb’s being in London. That might even be why he had moved here, after he and Mrs. Fiske had had to leave their village. He could well be seeing Caleb frequently, unbeknownst to his wife. Mrs. Fiske said he was always at his shop—perhaps that was where he and Caleb met. Caleb certainly knew where it was; Mrs. Fiske had seen him there the day she went to collect the post, after Fiske came out of his delirium.

That reminded her of something. “When you was in a fever, you said some rum things.”

“What things? How do you know?”

“I told you, I keeps me ears open. You said, ‘Poor little thing, her hands was as cold as stones.’ You was talking about Mary, wasn’t you?”

“I don’t remember. I might have been. I examined her soon after she died. It was—very sad.”

“Another thing you said was that you was sorry. What for?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a tarradiddle.”

“I don’t know,” he repeated dully.

She let it go for now. “The queerest thing you said was, ‘Oh my God, my boots!’ Now, what was you in such a pother about your boots for?”

He stood up slowly. What little colour there was in his face drained away. He stared straight ahead with glazed, horrified eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she exclaimed “You look like you seen a ghost!”

He dragged his gaze back to her. His mouth opened, but only a croaking sound came out.

“What is it?” She jumped up, shook his arm. “You has to tell me!”

“I—” He swallowed hard. “I can’t tell you here.”

“Why not? Nobody’s listening.”

“I can’t take the risk,” he said urgently, under his breath. “You’ll have to meet me somewhere else.”

“I can’t. You know the rules. If I pikes off, they won’t let me back in.”

“I won’t talk to you in this place. Anyone could be eavesdropping. It’s not safe.”

She could see he really meant it. Surely it was worth leaving the refuge, to find out what he knew? “All right. I’ll meet you some place outside. Today, mind!”

“Yes. Let’s say four o’clock—” He thought a moment. “At Temple Bar.”

“Why so far off?” she complained. “If you made it close by, I’d have a chance of getting back before I was missed.”

“I want to be well away from here. I told you.”

She considered. At least Temple Bar was a public place. If he meant to do her any harm, he had chosen a poor spot for it. “All right. Temple Bar at four.”

He nodded, picked up his leather bag, and turned to depart. “Oh—how are you feeling? I never did examine you.”

“Not lately,” she said mischievously.

He looked down. “Well, I’d better go.”

“Goodbye, Bristles. You won’t show the white feather?”

“No. I’m quite resolved. Goodbye—er—I think Miss Nettleton said your name is Sarah?”

“Me friends calls me Sally.”

“Then, goodbye, Sally.” And for the first time, he smiled.

Sally stood at the junction of the Strand and Fleet Street, beside the broad archway of Temple Bar. The City churches were ringing five o’clock in a gay, discordant clangour. Where was Fiske?

Just as well she had taken her belongings with her in a bundle when she sneaked out of the refuge. They would never take her back. She had been gone above an hour and a half—she must have been missed by now. It would have been worth the sacrifice, if Fiske had kept his word. But he was so late, she could only conclude he must have lost his nerve. Well, he would soon see that he could not shake off Sally Stokes so easily!

Someone was plucking at her skirt. It was a small boy—one of those urchins who ran after carriages in the hope of earning a few pence by holding the horses. “Is your name Sally?”

“Why?” she asked eagerly. “You been sent to find me?”

“I’ve got some’ut for you.” He thrust a dirty hand into his pocket. “Here.”

He gave her a folded slip of paper. She tossed him a penny— then realized too late that she ought to have questioned him first. He darted through one of the narrow foot posterns of Temple Bar and disappeared.

She did not bother to chase him—she was too impatient to read her note. She squinted at it in the ebbing light, moving her lips to sound out the words:

Forgive me. You wouldn’t leave the refuge, so I had to lure you out. For your own sake, I beg you to keep away and not ask any more questions. You can’t help a dead woman. Let her rest in peace, or you may soon join her.

She crumpled the note, burning with chagrin. I s’pose you think you been mighty clever, Bristles! she thought. But the game ain’t over yet!

She smoothed out the note and read it again. Those last words gave her pause.
Let her rest in peace, or you may soon join her.
Was that a warning—or a threat?

CHAPTER
20

D
r. MacGregor was returning to his village in Cambridgeshire on Tuesday morning. Julian took him out to dinner on his last evening in town. In public, they forebore to discuss the investigation. MacGregor inveighed about the rudeness of London waiters, the staleness and unwholesomeness of London food, and the depraved clothing, speech, and habits of the people dining around them. Julian listened, smiled, and injected a dulcet word from time to time.

After dinner, they settled down before a crackling fire in Dr. Greeley’s library. The housekeeper had left them a pot of hot coffee. MacGregor added good English cream to his, while Julian took French cream—in other words, brandy.

Julian described his confrontation with Avondale a few nights before. “You seem to have been pretty lenient with him,” said MacGregor. “If you thought he was lying or hiding something, why didn’t you tax him with it?”

“I’d rather wait till I’ve heard from Sally. Whatever she’s learned at the refuge may make or mar my case against Avondale.
Besides, if I’d called him a liar point-blank, I should have had to stand up with him, which would have been deuced inconvenient, and not at all part of my plans.”

“Do you mean to say you’d have exchanged pistol shots with him over a mere matter of words?”

“Not if there were any honourable way to avoid it. But accusing a gentleman of lying is the deadliest of insults. If he’d insisted on receiving satisfaction, I should have had no choice but to give it to him.”

“But that’s preposterous! It’s criminal! I don’t understand you at all. One minute you’re investigating a possible murder with all the seriousness it deserves—and the next minute you say you’d stand up and shoot at a man because he took offence at something you said!”

“Duelling isn’t murder, whatever the press and the pulpit say about it. If one gentleman insults another, he knows what the consequences will be: they’ll fight according to the laws of honour, as nations fight according to the laws of war. Killing an unarmed man, or—God forbid!—a woman, is completely different.”

“Well, I suppose you can’t help these wrong-headed notions. You probably learned them at your father’s knee before you were old enough to know better.”

“Oddly enough, my father had much the same view of duelling as you do. But, then, my father was too good to live.” He added quietly, “And he didn’t.”

MacGregor regarded him thoughtfully. Not for the first time, he wondered about Kestrel’s early life. He knew his father had been a gentleman, whose family had cut him off with a shilling for marrying an actress. That was more than most of Kestrel’s acquaintances knew, but it was not much. It did not explain how he had learned so much about clothes, how he had become such a fine musician, why he had lived for years in France and Italy, or where his money came from.