Instruments of Darkness (19 page)

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Authors: Imogen Robertson

Tags: #Historical fiction, #Crime Fiction

BOOK: Instruments of Darkness
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They managed only a few steps more before Susan was stopped by a hesitant female hand on her shoulder. The thin, birdlike face of Mrs Service was bending towards her. The bones of her neck stuck out, and her wrists were no thicker than Susan’s. She was a widow, starving in genteel poverty in a single room opposite the shop. People took her little bits of sewing from time to time, though it was known she was not particularly skilful, and the work was given more out of charity than any other cause. Susan thought Mrs Service knew this, and it made her sorry for her. She would always have her window open when Susan was practising. Sometimes she could see her leaning out of the window a little, straining to hear over the sounds of the street. Susan would try and play more loudly, impossible of course, but in her heart she sent the music across to her audience.
Looking a little flustered, Mrs Service held out a small cameo brooch of fruits and flowers in front of her, and said in a rush, ‘I wanted to give you this at the service, but there were so many people.’ Her tired eyes looked to Graves, and Susan, then to the ground again. ‘Your father once admired it. It would give me great pleasure to know you had it, and might wear it from time to time. I’ve liked hearing you play so much.’ Her voice cracked a little.
Susan took the brooch. ‘It’s very pretty.’
Mrs Service began to cry, and turned away from them.
 
Jane was waiting for them at the door to the shop, and held her arms out. Susan gave a little sob and broke free from Mr Graves to run to her and bury herself in her apron. Graves stepped hurriedly after her, then looked into the room as discreetly as he could. Jane caught where he was looking and nodded. The floorboards were scrubbed white. Susan straightened herself, squeezed Jane’s hand in her own, then turned into the shop ahead of them.
‘What’s going to happen, Mr Graves?’ the young maid asked.
Graves looked at the dust and muck on his shoes and shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I hope there may be a will. Are you owed?’
Jane waved him away. ‘I was paid two days ago, sir. Mr Adams was always most punctual.’
Jane was still a young woman, hardly out of her teens, but there was an air of sense and goodwill about her that made Graves feel a little hopeful. She was a thin girl, but straight and wiry.
‘Can you keep an eye on the shop and house a while?’ he asked. ‘Till we settle what should be done?’
Jane stood considering, and having decided, dusted her hands on her apron and looked him in the eye.
‘I’ve been wondering if you might ask that, and what answer I should give you, so here it is. I’d be happy to. But do you think I might have my mother along with me? I don’t like to be here on my own, nor do I want to leave her alone at the moment.’ She touched her hand to her head to suggest the blue cockades the rioters of the previous day had been wearing when they burned the Catholic Chapel in Duke Street and Golden Square. ‘She is willing,’ Jane added. ‘She is visiting a friend in Soho Square till I send her word.’
‘Perhaps we should ask Susan.’
But when they entered the shop, Susan was nowhere to be seen. A sudden spasm of alarm caught Graves in the throat and he shouted her name perhaps a little more loudly than was necessary. She sprang up from behind the counter.
‘I’m here.’ She saw the relief on his face and looked a little conscious. ‘Will you help me? It’s heavy.’
Graves made his way over to join her. She had shifted a bundle of scores to uncover a black wooden box large enough to take a manuscript sheet without folding. It was deep too and Graves felt himself grunt with effort as he brought it out onto the counter-top. He steadied it and told Susan what Jane had suggested.
‘Only if that’s agreable to you, miss,’ the girl added quickly. ‘If you think it’s for the best.’
Susan bit her lip and nodded quickly. The comb Miss Chase had put in her hair to hold it in place, wobbled a little.
‘Yes, please. That’s very nice of your mother to come.’
Her lip began to shake, and Jane stepped round the counter to her side.
‘Oh, miss! Look at your hair. You’ve been pulling your ringlets again, and you know your father likes you looking neat.’
She put her hand up to smooth Susan’s curls back into place and the tenderness of the gesture overwhelmed the little girl. She began to sob in earnest and, thinking it best to leave them a while, Graves went out into the parlour.
The remains of the dinner, so horribly stopped, had been cleared away, and the space was as tidy and cheerful as normal. Graves paused, as if by a sheer effort of will he could run time backwards, then Alexander would walk in and ask him to dine with the family. They would talk, and Alexander would mock him gently for his mute admiration of Miss Chase, and Graves would ask for all the news of the shop. Then they would look at some new score that had come into Alexander’s hands and the evening would melt away.
Graves sighed heavily, and looked around the room without a clear thought in his head, then seeing Alexander’s writing desk open in the corner, walked over to it, vaguely wondering if he might find there evidence of a will, or some inspiration as to how to take on the responsibilities with which his friend had left him.
Everything about the desk was neat and orderly. The sight depressed him, thinking of the tattered and scattered papers around his own little table. The lamp set above the desk was carefully trimmed, and the desk contained a convenient series of pigeonholes where bills and receipts could be kept, and correspondence sorted. The little box where Alexander had kept his ring was still there, still, Graves noted as he flicked it open with a fingernail, empty.
Graves sat down sadly and picked at the edge of the blotter, sure that whatever tasks were being given him, he was incapable of shouldering them. There was a sheet of paper under the blotter. He pulled it free and saw the first words of a letter begun on the day of the concert. It had the name and address of the shop at its top, and the date of 31 May 1780 in the firm and confident hand he knew to be that of his friend. It began:
My Dear Hugh,
You know, I think, only too well the reasons that caused my separation from the Hall, but an odd loss on my part, and the knowledge that my children are now growing, motherless and uncertain of their future, has caused me to
Here Alexander had broken off. Graves felt his heart constrict. He remembered the conversation with Alexander that night, his strange hints to his daughter, and the new resolve he had taken to live the life he had chosen, rather than make any attempt at reconciliation with his family. Graves bit his lip. If he had advised differently, the letter might have been completed. He should have questioned his friend more closely before he had given his advice. His answer had perhaps been too full of his own pride. He, after all, had left his own home, and perhaps he had encouraged Alexander to stay away from his to bolster his own decision. He remembered the weight and size of the black box in the shop, thought of its careful concealment away from Alexander’s neatly arranged business affairs in this more public room. Perhaps there were answers there, and some help for him.
He stood up swiftly, but in turning towards the door in the shop his eye was caught by a movement in the window into the back yard. His heart froze.
That face
. That yellow leering face that had flashed in front of his mind’s eye every other moment since he saw his friend dying on the floorboards in front of him. It was there, looking in at him through the window. He rocked backwards a step. The two men stared at each other a moment through the glass, each held by the other’s eyes, then Graves let out a roar of rage and charged to the door from the kitchen into the courtyard. The yellow man had turned and run through the side passage back into Tichfield Street.
‘Murderer! Killer! There! There!’ Graves screamed after him and threw himself forward in pursuit.
The street came alive as if, as the man dashed past, he transmitted an energy that awoke the people. More cries in the street, the houses themselves seemed to bend forward. More men in pursuit, a woman shrank to the wall with a scream as the yellow man tore past her and spun into Little Angel; he stumbled in the muck, but was up and running again before Graves could do more than brush the edge of his dirty coat. He had been wrong to turn this way. Now Londoners looking cautiously about them for the scenes of last night’s riots could see the approach of the chase, and hear the shouts of ‘Murder!’ as the desperate men charged towards them. The yellow man grabbed a basket from a narrow-waisted street-hawker and threw it back at his pursuers. Her burden of burned pies rolled on the ground, and though it was enough to trip one man, the rest kept coming with Graves at their head, his lungs bursting. The hawker screamed and spat at the yellow man, but was shoved aside in the instant and he ran on. Not far though, not far. He turned sharply into Chapel Street, scattering people and their goods, but a fat coachman, hearing the cry following him, launched himself against him from his right flank, and the yellow man fell into the dirt and refuse of the street with all the coachman’s bulk pressing him to the ground. The crowd descended, held his arms away from him, and someone pulled his knife from his pocket. He struggled, and no one man could have held him, but with twenty grasping him and pressing forward, he was lost. Graves came to a stop before him, and without pausing to fill his lungs, threw a punch that landed under the yellow man’s chin and let the crowd take his weight as he slumped insensible among them.
‘Smartly done,’ Graves heard from the crowd. A broad-shouldered man stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder as Graves raised his fist again. ‘But don’t kill him, or we’ll have to take you in too. Who is he?’
‘He killed Alexander Adams,’ Graves panted.
The crowd murmured and exclaimed. The broad man nodded soberly. ‘What magistrate is closest?’
‘Addington! Addington!’ the crowd shouted.
A barrow was produced with a young man to push it, and the yellow man was rolled onto it with a bit of rope round his wrist and another round his ankles. His head lolled like a guy’s ready for the fire, and the crowd began to process to the magistrate’s house to demand satisfaction of the law.
 
Graves’s brain was clogged and weary as he made his way back to the street door of the Chases’ home. He had sent messages back to Susan and Miss Chase through the evening, telling them first that the man had been taken, then later that with little ceremony, on his evidence, and to the delight of the crowd that accompanied him, the yellow man had been sent to Newgate to await trial at the Old Bailey sometime in the next week.
Once he had come round and realised his position was hopeless, the yellow man had become surly. He refused to speak other than to curse and call down every revenge imaginable on Graves and the children, but would give neither his name, nor any reason for his attack on Alexander. The crowd had jeered him, the magistrate, looking exhausted and fretful, merely nodded at Graves’s evidence and sent the yellow man away under guard within half an hour of reaching his house in Covent Garden.
The crowd that had travelled with Graves were disposed to make a hero of him, and it was with difficulty he had managed to free himself from them and their congratulations. He could have drunk himself to death on their credit, but was haunted by his thoughts of Susan and Miss Chase waiting for him with the black box between them. Still, as he walked past Seven Dials he was aware that his fame had spread. His neighbours approached to pat him on his back, or nod, or smile at him significantly. His legs ached after running down the yellow man, and his knuckles were bruised. He did not think to pause at his lodgings again, merely passing them by on his way to Sutton Street to rejoin the Chase family. As a shadow stirred next to him, he was ready to smile and wave off congratulations again.
‘A conquering hero, Mr Graves, you are!’
Graves felt his heart sink. He knew the voice; this was not going to be a pleasant meeting. The shadow unfurled itself from the wall. A tall wizened-looking man with green teeth smiled at him like the crocodile Graves had seen exhibited at Vauxhall the previous year.
‘Mr Molloy. Good evening.’
‘Isn’t it though? Only one thing could make it more pleasant . . .’ He paused and pulled Graves back into the shadows for a moment as a group of men wearing blue cockades in their hats, their faces dirty with soot, barrelled past them. He released Graves’s arm and continued as if nothing had occurred ‘. . . and that is my money.’
‘I have none.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have bought yourself that pretty coat, or new shoes. The tailor has sold me your bill, and I’ll be paid, or you’ll be in the Marshalsea by Monday night.’
The smile never shifted from his face as he spoke. Graves lifted his arms.
‘For God’s sake, have pity! My friend has been murdered, his children put into my care! I cannot get the money for some days.’
‘Yes, I’ve been hearing all about your adventures, son. Talk of the parish - most commendable. I esteem you for it, and am sorry for your loss, but pity does not make a man wealthy, you know. And I have a fancy to be a wealthy man. Now Adams had a nice little concern in that shop, didn’t he?’

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