Honor's Kingdom (32 page)

“So ’ne shayna Stimme!”
he told her, and I could not tell if he were merely old or if tears afflicted his speech.
“Meen kleenes bet je so yesungen, meen kleenes Maedle. So viele Jobren ist Die weg. So ’ne shayna Stimme, best Di, Kindeloin . . . Ach, die tumme Jobren sind scho’ so viel . . .”

The little girl curtsied to the old fellow, and off he went shaking his head at his burden of yesterdays. Now, I had taken joy from her performance, although I wished that she had chosen hymns, and I could not offer less than some Hebrew fellow. Although I am no companion to extravagance.

I dropped a shilling entire into her plate. Just as the Jew had done. It clanged on the brass and come to rest atop the old man’s coin.

She curtsied for me, too.

“Thankee, sir. I do na deserve sich kindness, I’m sure.”

She wore a woman’s flowered hat, a bit the worse for wear and twice too big, over flowing, tumbling hair the color of rust. Her face was of that age when the prettiness of childhood has begun to fade but the bones of the visage have not yet decided on beauty or plainness for the woman she would become. A confusion she was, of childish sweetness and clumsy limbs, with a hint of a promise she might prove fair, indeed. Her face was clean, but the rest of her wanted a scrub.

I was about to ask her if she knew any of my favored hymns from Wesley or Watts, when the blind sergeant lowered his fiddle and growled, impatiently, “Have they na given ye this morn, Fanny? Lass, come o’er, and show us what they’ve na given ye.” But that was all the language he could manage, for he bent into a coughing fit and nearly broke his fiddle on the pavings.

Sick the fellow was, twas clear enough. The girl rushed to him and tried to soothe his coughing with her coins. I left them so. For I had duties enough awaiting me, and the poor are legion in Britannia’s streets.

“I COULD HAE WEPT when I saw it,” Inspector McLeod told me, although he did not look a weeping man. “In a’ my years, I hae seen na sight so fit to break a man’s heart, and a sinful waste it was. To throw him into the water that way, and with those fine boots still on him. I call that criminality of the worst degree, and sinful. To ruin so fine a pair of boots by throwing them in the water with the body. If ever a murdering bunch deserved to hang, it’s that clan of them, whoever they mought hae been.” He looked at me, as big and red as Wilkie had been small and dark, although both men shared an affection for powerful whiskers. “There’s crimes are such a man will na forget them, though he live to be a hundred and a day. All my years, I’ll see those twa fine boots all ruined from the soaking.”

We stood along the Broomielaw, where the River Clyde enjoyed the tribute of nations. Below us, steamers and lesser boats adorned the northern bank, while the far side of the river harbored a density of shipping so great I did not see how the vessels could turn about to return to the sea. A forest of masts and funnels it was, all busy with human limbs and hoisted cargoes, and the black maws of the warehouses lining the quay seemed fit to devour the commerce of all the world. Whistles there were, and mechanical horns, and shouts in accents as foreign to Scotland as decency is to a Frenchman.

But let that bide.

“I thought perhaps you might tell me something of the condition of the body,” I said to the inspector, whose blazing whiskers escaped from his hat like flames from an overfed boiler.

“Oh, there was na a thing to see of any interest. Except for those braw boots upon his feet.”

“But you said he had been strangled.”

The inspector nodded. “That he had. With the eyes bulging out of his head. He was na mindful of the law of the docks, which is ever to go careful and na to go anywhere useless in the darkness.”

“Could you tell what sort of instrument had been used? To strangle him?”

The inspector’s great pink face took on a wistful look. Thinking doubtless of those ruined boots. “Wire, I would say. His head was ha’ choked off him.”

“A thin cord, perhaps?”

Twas clear the inspector had no great interest in my questions and did not see their point. I had presented myself properly, as come from our legation to inquire into the circumstances of the death two months before of one Walter Quigley, late of Massachusetts. I did not mention any other matters that concerned me.

“Thin cord, thin wire,” Inspector McLeod said. “I can na see the difference.” At last, he forgot those boots and his eyes alerted with a first suspicion. “And why should it hae mattered?”

“Well,” I said, “we are concerned about Confederate activities, see.” It was no proper answer, I realize. But I was learning from Mr. Adams’s art, wherein high diplomats respond to uncomfortable questions by saying nothing at all with the greatest confidence.

To my surprise, my answer perked him up. “Ah, your slavers,” he said. “May the whole clan of them be damned twa times over. There’s ever a brood with a grand fondness for the sufferings of others.”

A dray wagon pulled up behind us, drawn by a blinkered team with unkempt manes. Three small men rolled barrels down from the bed. It looked as though the fellows must be crushed, but clever they were in their doings, jumping clear when the weight would not be resisted. From a deck nearby, a sailor cursed their lateness, and ship bells clanged.

“And is there nothing else you can tell me about the business, then?” I asked. The inspector had been good enough to accompany me from the police offices where I had gone to make my inquiries, but he would never have made a Welshman, for he had no love of words or joy in speaking.

“What would you hae me tell?” he asked. “There’s precious little, as in a’ these dockside affairs.” He pointed behind us, to the Hotel Lord Byron, where the late Mr. Quigley had been quartered. “A laddie called late in the evening, and your Mr. Quigley stepped out with him. He did na return, and there he was found in the morning, snout-down in the river, floating by the wheel of the
Pride of the Clyde.”

“Was his purse taken?”

The inspector shook his head. “Another shameful matter there. For the murderers must hae feared themselves. They left his purse as cauld as they left his boots. With a’ the banknotes ruined by the water. As ruined as those twa fine boots of his.”
The inspector’s visage tightened in disgust. “Aye, murder’s a wicked deed, that it is. But to murder and waste together, what could be more vicious and criminal than that?”

“So, you would say that it’s . . . it’s unusual, even unnatural, for a man to be murdered but not robbed?”

“I can na say it for America or London, but unnatural it is here on the docks of Glasgow City. For there’s hardly a reason to murder a man, if he’s na to be robbed for the trouble.”

“And you say you have closed the book on the matter?”

“Aye. For there’s na a thing more to be done.”

Now, I have always found the Scots a people set in their ways, and you might as well debate a block of wood, so I let that portion of the matter bide.

We began to walk back toward the police offices, although public hacks abounded. We were both of us sensible men in that regard, see, and would not pay for the luxury of a conveyance unless it was sorely needed.

A great commercial city Glasgow was, though I wondered if the sun ever shone down upon it. A muck the color of a miner’s tubwater slopped the sky, although it was not winter and no hearths burned. The clouds come from the wealth of manufactories that blackened the eastward portion of the city into a permanent twilight. The air smelled of burned coal, of rot and sulfur. But the streets were busy with money being made, from high commercial ventures to simple green-grocer shops. Of the poor, there was a plenty, but the bustle of the major streets seemed to force them back into their alleys by the sheer energy and thrust of well-done business. Success is a policeman above all constables, and money is another kind of law. Sober-dressed the place was, in comparison to London, and proud of money made in a busy lifetime and not passed down through wilted generations.

“Tell me, Inspector McLeod . . . do you know a great deal about the shipyard business?”

“I know there’s wages to be had, if a man is na afraid to work.”

“But are you familiar with the individual yards?”

He shook his head. “They’re a’ there along the Clyde or in the firth, and beyond the jurisdiction. Though there is a plenty of money to be made from them.”

I was disappointed, see. For Glasgow was all new to me, and I was friendless, and the truth is I hardly knew where to start my looking. A true detective fellow would have known a dozen things to do, but I could only think of making a canvass of the docks and warehouses, of the chandlers and sailors and worse, from one weary end of the harbor to the other. Given the size and number of the establishments, I feared I would still be asking my questions when our war was over and done.

Before we had stepped too far from the river, I made my excuses to the inspector, pleading legation business and the like. He did not mind our parting, for doubtless he had many tasks before him.

“I will na forget those boots,” he mused, as we shook hands on a corner. “I hae na seen twa riding boots more bonnie.”

AND SO HE WENT UP the street, all the great tallness of him, with his flaming whiskers still to be seen over his shoulders. I turned back toward the docks. First, I went to the Lord Byron, where our dead agent had taken his room. The clerk in charge of the keys and the book had no interest in any murders and no memory available even for purchase. Nor was I better impressed with the Hotel Lord Byron than I have been with the tales they tell of the dead fellow from whom it had its name. He was not nice, and his poetry was intemperate. The hotel struck me as the sort of establishment where no attention is paid to misbehaviors that would lead to the immediate ejection of a guest in a better house. Soused with mildew it was, and it wanted a dusting.

Even the gray pall of the street was fresher than the interior of the hotel, and I steeled myself to set out on my labors. If duty so required, I would try every shipping office, warehouse, and provisioner for information—about a warship I dared not mention
outright, and on a great secret wooden enclosure that might not even exist. Was I only chasing after phantoms? I found myself at a loss for words, which ill becomes a Welshman.

A porter from the hotel overtook me. Plump he was, and past his prime, and his garments were far from immaculate. His beard showed a trail of snuff or such like, and his nose betrayed the decline of a drinking man. Had I been a guest at the Lord Byron, I do not think I would have trusted my bag to him.

“Will ye wait, sir?” he asked, all out of breath from the labors of rushing half down the block. “Will ye wait and listen?”

“Listen to what?” I asked him, pausing.

He finished buttoning his tunic as he stood before me, torturing the cloth until it closed. His mouth gaped with his appetite for air.

“For the answer to that ye were asking.” He coughed. I fear I coughed along with him, as sometimes we do. The truth is that the Glasgow air was wretched. “Although,” he went on, “I could speak a’ the better, if I had a wee little dram to water my wheezer.”

Shamelessly, he extended his palm. In daylight, on the street. Panting like a dog he was, for want of nourishing air.

I gave him a shilling and, when his hand failed to retract, topped the first coin with another. He made a fist and shook it in delight, then buried the coins beneath the worn flaps of a pocket.

“It’s the murdered man ye’re after? Mr. Quigley?”

“What can you tell me about him?”

The fellow shrugged. “Oh, quiet he was. ‘The Quiet Mr. Quigley.’ ” He chuckled at his own wit, an impoverished cousin of Mr. Disraeli. “Nary a fuss, and manners a’most as good as a gentleman’s.”

“Did he have callers?”

“Niver. Not a one. But for the last.”

“Do you know anything about his activities? What did he do? Where did he go?”

“He was a quiet one, Mr. Quigley. There’s na telling aught with that sort. Only go off riding every day, he did, with a horse got from Cameron’s stables, back of the house. Wasn’t that an unco business, though?” He looked at me with pickled eyes. “Why would a man take city rooms, when a’ he wanted to do with himself was go riding? It niver made na sense to me . . . but, then, he was an American. And they’re every one of them quare.”

“And what about that last and only caller? Did you see him?”

“Oh, to be sure, and I would na be like to forget that buckie, now would I?”

“And why would that be?”

“Well, we do na get a plenty of brown Indians in the Lord Byron. And we would na hae rooms free, if such was to come and ask. For we’re a proper establishment, and don’t allow whoring or niggers.” He trimmed the slack from his lips. “Unco it was to see him standing there, all dressed up proper like he was a white man. And Mr. Quigley must hae thought so, too, for he bolted down the steps to go off, as soon as I said he was called for.”

“And he never returned?”

“Sorry I was to hear of his misfortune,” the porter said. “For he niver forgot the needs of a working man.” At that, my informant extended his palm again.

I WENT AROUND TO the livery stable, Cameron & Sons, and asked if they knew ought of the late Mr. Quigley.

“A hard laddie on a horse,” the old fellow told me, glancing over his shoulder toward the tremor and stink of the stalls. “Aye, that one was set to ruin the best of horses, given time. I don’t know where he was going to day after day, but go he did every morning, only to come back as weary as the horse that was dragging him in.”

There was no more to be had from the stable, and I did not want a horse myself, I promise you, having of late had horse enough in the wilds of Mississippi. But the information was sufficient,
for now, in respect to Mr. Quigley. I had to wonder if the inspector had been so much the parsimonious Scotsman as he let on, with his concern about those ruined riding boots, or if he had tried to point me in a direction that he himself could not afford to take. Or was I only adding up numbers that belonged in different columns?

Certain it was, though, that Mr. Quigley had worn boots because he rode, and he rode because he had a place to go to on a horse, and that was a place where he could not stay at night, either for want of accommodation or in concern for his safety. But had he only been searching, or had he found what he was looking for on those hard rides? Had he found the wooden pavilion concealing the secret warship? And had he then been killed for his discovery? And here was India again, as unwelcome as ever, in the guise either of a murderer or of the murderer’s emissary. And still there was no hint of a single Rebel. Only of deadly Hindoos and Englishmen up to trouble enough for a thousand. And did it have anything at all to do with the letters?