Bluegate Fields (33 page)

The Deptford police station was not easy to find. Quite naturally, neither Emily’s footman nor her coachman was acquainted with the area, and it took several wrong turnings on seemingly identical corners before they drew up in front of the entrance.

Inside was the potbellied stove, and the same constable sat at the desk writing up a report, an enamel mug of tea steaming at his elbow. He looked startled when he saw Emily in her green morning dress and feathered hat, and although he knew Pitt, he did not know Charlotte. For a moment he was at a loss for words.

“Good morning, Constable,” Emily said cheerfully.

He snapped to attention, slid off his seat, and stood up. That at least had to be correct; one did not sit on one’s behind to speak with ladies of quality.

“Good morning, ma’am.” His eye took in Charlotte. “Ma’am. Are you lost, ladies? Can I ’elp you?”

“No, thank you, we are not lost,” Emily replied briskly, with a smile so dazzling the constable was completely disconcerted again. “I am Lady Ashworth, and this is my sister Mrs. Pitt. I believe you know Inspector Pitt? Good, of course you do. Perhaps you did not know there is a great desire for reform at the moment, especially with regard to the abuse of children in the trade of prostitution.”

The constable blanched at a lady using so vulgar a term, and was embarrassed by it, although he frequently heard far coarser expressions used by others.

But she did not give him time to protest, or even to cogitate upon it.

“A great desire,” she continued. “And for this, of course, a certain amount of correct information is required. I know that a young boy prostitute was pulled out of the river here yesterday. I should like to see him.”

Every vestige of color drained out of his face.

“You can’t, ma’am! ’E’s dead!”

“I know he’s dead, Constable,” Emily said patiently. “He would be, having been strangled and dropped into the river. It is the corpse that I wish to see.”

“The corpse?” he repeated, stupefied.

“Exactly,” she said. “If you will be so kind?”

“I can’t! It’s ’orrible, ma’am—quite ’orrible. You can’t ’ave any idea, or you wouldn’t ask. It’s not for any lady at all to see, let alone the likes o’ you!”

Emily opened her mouth to argue, but Charlotte could see that the whole initiative was going to slip away if she did not intervene.

“Of course it is,” she agreed, adding her own smile to Emily’s. “And we appreciate your sensitivity to our feelings. But we have both seen death before, Constable. And if we are to fight for reform, we must make people aware that it is not pleasant—indeed as long as they are permitted to deceive themselves that it is unimportant, so long will they fail to do anything about it. Do you not agree?”

“Well—well put like that, ma’am—but I can’t let you go and look at something like that! ’E’s dead, ma’am—very dead indeed!”

“Nonsense!” Emily said sharply. “It’s freezing cold! We have seen bodies before that were far worse than this one can possibly be. Mrs. Pitt once found one over a month old, half burned and full of maggots.”

That left the constable speechless. He stared at Charlotte as if she had produced the article right there in front of him by some abominable sleight of hand.

“So will you be good enough to take us to see poor Albie?” Emily said briskly. “You did not send him back to Bluegate Fields, did you?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. We got a message as they didn’t want ’im after all. Said as ’e’d bin took out o’ the river ’ere, we ’ad as much right to ’im as anyone else.”

“Then let us go.” Emily began to walk toward the only other door, and Charlotte followed her, hoping the constable would not block them.

“I ought to ask my sergeant!” the constable said helplessly. “ ’E’s upstairs. Let the go an’ ask ’im if’n you can!” This was his chance to put the whole ridiculous thing into someone else’s hands. He had been used to all manner of weird affairs coming in through the door, from drunks to terrified girls or practical jokers, but this was the worst of all. He knew they really were ladies; he may work in Deptford, but he knew quality when he saw it!

“I wouldn’t dream of putting you to the trouble,” Emily said. “Or your sergeant either. We shall only be a moment. Will you be kind enough to show us the way? We should dislike to find the wrong corpse.”

“Lord! We only got the one!” He dived through the doorway after her and trotted behind them exactly where Pitt had gone the day before, into the small, cold room with its sheet-covered table.

Emily strode in and whipped off the cover. She looked down at the stiff, bleached, puffed corpse, and for a moment she went as white as it was; then, with a supreme effort, she controlled herself long enough to allow Charlotte to look also, but she was unable to speak.

Charlotte saw an almost unrecognizable head and shoulders. Death and the water had robbed Albie of all the anger that had made him individual. Staring at him now, the emptiness lying on the table, she realized how much the will to fight had been part of him. What was left was like a house without furniture, after the inhabitants have taken away the things that marked their presence.

“Put it back,” she said to Emily quietly. They walked out past the constable, close to each other, arm in arm, avoiding his eyes so he would not see how much it had shocked them and taken all their confidence.

He was a tactful man, and whatever he saw or guessed he made no mention of.

“Thank you,” Emily said at the street door. “You have been most courteous.”

“Yes, thank you,” Charlotte added, doing her best to smile at him; she did not succeed, but he took the intention for the deed.

“You’re welcome, ma’am,” he replied. “You’re welcome, I’m sure,” he added, because he did not know what else to say.

Outside in the carriage, Emily accepted the rug from the footman and allowed him to wrap it around her feet and Charlotte’s.

“Where to, milady?” he asked without expression. After the Deptford police station, nothing else she could say would surprise him.

“What time is it?” she inquired.

“A little after noon, milady.”

“Then it is too early to go calling upon Callantha Swynford. We must find something to do in the meanwhile.”

“Would you care for luncheon, milady?” The footman tried not to make it too obvious that he cared for it himself. Of course, he had not just viewed a drowned corpse.

Emily lifted her chin and swallowed.

“What an excellent idea. You had better find us somewhere pleasant, John, if you please. I do not know where such a place may be, but no doubt there is a holstelry of some sort that serves ladies.”

“Yes, milady, I’m sure there is.” He closed the door and went back to tell the coachman that he had succeeded in obtaining luncheon, and implied by his expression what he thought of it all.

“Oh, my God!” Emily sat back into the upholstery as soon as the door was closed. “How does Thomas bear it? Why do birth and death have to be so awfully—physical? They seem to reduce us to such a level of extremity there is no room to think of the spiritual!” She gulped again, hard. “Poor little creature. I have to believe in God, of some sort. It would be intolerable to think that was all there was—just to be born and live and die like that, and nothing before or after. It’s too trivial and disgusting. It’s like a joke in the worst possible taste.”

“It’s not very funny,” Charlotte said somberly.

“Jokes in bad taste aren’t!” Emily snapped. “I couldn’t face eating, but I certainly don’t intend to allow John to know that! We’ll have to order something, and of course we shall eat separately. Please do not be clumsy enough to allow him to learn of it! He is my footman and I shall have to live with him in the house—not to mention whatever he might say to the rest of the servants.”

“I have no intention of doing so,” Charlotte replied. “And not eating will not help Albie.” She had seen and heard of more violence and more pain than Emily, cushioned by Paragon Walk and the Ashworth world. “And of course there’s a God, and probably heaven, too. And I most sincerely hope there is hell also. I have a great desire to see several people in it!”

“Hell for the wicked?” Emily said tartly, stung by Charlotte’s apparent composure. “How very puritan of you.”

“No—hell for the indifferent,” Charlotte corrected. “God can do as He pleases with the wicked. It is the ones who don’t damn well care that I want to see burn!”

Emily pulled the rug a little tighter.

“I’ll help,” she offered.

Callantha Swynford was not in the least surprised to see them; in fact, the usual etiquette of afternoon calling was not observed at all. There was no exchange of polite observations and trivia. Instead, they were conducted immediately into the withdrawing room set for tea and conversation.

Without preamble Emily launched into a frank description of conditions in workhouses and sweatshops, the details of which she and Charlotte had learned from Somerset Carlisle. They were gratified to see Callantha’s distress as there opened up before her a whole world of misery that she had never conceived of before.

Presently they were joined by other ladies, and the wretched facts were repeated, this time by Callantha herself while Emily and Charlotte merely added assurance that what Callantha said was indeed true. By the time they left, late in the afternoon, they were both satisfied that there were now a number of women of wealth and influence who were sincerely concerned in the matter, and that Callantha herself would not forget, or dismiss easily from her thoughts, the abuse of children such as Albie, however much it distressed her.

While Charlotte was occupied with her crusade against child prostitution in general, trying to inform and horrify those who could change the climate of social opinion, Pitt was still concerned with the murder of Albie.

Athelstan kept him occupied with a case of embezzlement that involved thousands of pounds abstracted from a large company over a period of years. The incessant checking of double entries, receipts, and payments, and the questioning of innumerable frightened and devious clerks, was a kind of punishment to him for having caused so much embarrassment over the Jerome affair.

The body of Albie had not been moved from Deptford, so Pitt had nothing to act on. Deptford still had charge of the case—if there was to be a case. In order to learn even that much, he would have to go to Deptford on his own time, after his duties on the embezzlement were over for the day, and his inquiries would have to be sufficiently discreet that Athelstan would not learn of them.

It was a black evening after one of those flat, lightless days when fires do not draw because the air is too heavy, and every moment one expects the sky to fling a barrage from clouds so leaden they hang low across the city roofs and drown the horizon. Gas lamps flickered uneasily without dispelling the intensity of the darkness, and the drift of air from the river smelled of the incoming tide. There was a rime of ice on the stones of the street; the cab Pitt rode in moved briskly along while the cabbie kept up a steady hacking cough.

He stopped the cab at the Deptford police station, and Pitt had not the heart to ask him to wait, even though he knew he might not be long. No man or beast should be required to stand idle in that bitter street. After the heat of movement it could kill the horse; the cabbie, whose livelihood depended on the animal, would have to walk it around and around at no profit merely to keep the sweat from freezing and chilling the animal to death.

“Night, sir.” The cabbie touched his hat and moved off into the gloom, disappearing before he had passed the third gas lamp.

“Good night.” Pitt turned and walked into the shelter of the station and the frail warmth of the potbellied stove. It was a different constable on duty this time, but the usual steaming mug of tea was by his elbow. Perhaps it was the only way to keep warm in the enforced stillness of desk duty. Pitt introduced himself and mentioned his earlier visit to identify Albie’s body.

“Well, Mr. Pitt, sir,” the constable said cheerfully. “Wot can we do for yer tonight? No more corpses as’d interest you, I reckon.”

“I don’t want any, thank you,” Pitt replied. “I didn’t even get that one. Just wondered how you were doing with it. I might be able to help a little, since I knew him.”

“Then you’d better talk to Sergeant Wittle, sir. ’E’s ’andlin’ the case, such as it is. Although, to be honest, I don’t reckon we’ve much chance of ever knowing who done it. You know yerself, Mr. Pitt, poor little beggars like that get done in every day, fer one reason or another.”

“Get a lot of them, do you?” Pitt asked conversationally. He leaned a little on the desk, as though he were in no hurry to pursue a more senior officer.

The constable warmed to the attention. Most people preferred to ask the opinion of a sergeant at least, and it was very pleasant to be consulted by an inspector.

“Oh, yes, sir, from time to time. River police brings ’em in ’ere quite a lot—’ere an’ Greenwich. And o’course Wapping Stairs—sort o’ natural place, that is.”

“Murdered?” Pitt asked.

“Some o’ them. Although it’s ’ard to tell. A lot o’ them is drowned, and who knows whether they were pushed, or fell, or jumped?”

“Marks?” Pitt raised his eyebrows.

“Gawd ’elp us, most of ’em is pretty marked anyway, long before they gets as far as the water. There’s some people as seems to get their pleasure out o’ beating other people, instead o’ what any natural man would. You should see some o’ the women we get, and no more’n bits o’ kids, lot o’ them—younger than my wife was when I married ’er, and she was seventeen. Then, o’ course, some o’ them girls gets beat by their own pimps, if they’ve bin ’olding back on the money. All that, and wot with the tides and knockin’ around the bridges, some o’ them yer’d ’ardly recernize as they was ’uman bein’s. I tell yer, it’d fair make yer weep sometimes. Turns me stomach, it does, and it takes a deal ter do that.”

“A lot of brothels in the docks,” Pitt said quietly after a moment’s silence while they pursued their private memories of horror. It was more an observation than a question.

“Course,” the constable agreed. “Biggest port in the world, London.” He said it with some pride. “What else d’y’expect? Sailors away from ’ome, after a long spell at sea, and the like. An I s’pose when yer gets the supply o’ women, and boys, fer them that’s that way inclined”—he grimaced— “then it’s natural yer gets others come in from outside the harea, knowin’ as they’ll find whatever they wants ’ere. There’s a few times yer’ll see some smart gents get down from a cab outside some very funny ’ouses. But then I reckon yer knows that fer yerself, bein’ near that kind o’ harea, too!”