Murder in Grosvenor Square (8 page)

I supposed I could have sent for Donata’s carriage, but I knew she was using it tonight to take her from friends’ abodes to the theatre, and truth to tell, I couldn’t remember exactly where she’d gone. I only knew that Grenville, once found, would put things together in a rapid and efficient manner.

I made my way back to the two men and sank down beside Leland. His blood was black on his face, and I lifted his head to my lap. I patted his cheek, but didn’t have much hope of waking him. His breath grated, but at least he still breathed.

Travers lay a foot beyond us, his eyes staring at nothing. The lad I’d admonished so harshly in the tavern earlier today, who’d grinned at me in the end and sprang up with such exuberance, was dead.

I knew I ought to have sent Mackay running to Bow Street, or shouted for the Watch myself—though I doubted any night watchman would be brave enough to venture down here.

But the two lads found like this would raise too many questions. I did not want Pomeroy, or even worse, Spendlove, to see them like this, to reveal to the world that the two had been lovers. I might not be able to save the lad’s lives, but I could spare them that.

A strong voice came out of the darkness behind me, making me jump. “Captain.”

The word was followed by a man who strode toward me with the confidence that nothing in this place was more frightening than he was. I’d have been alarmed by his size and the fact that he carried a cudgel, if I hadn’t recognized him as Denis’s man Brewster.

“Do you have a conveyance?” I snapped at him without greeting.

Brewster took in the two young men, their clothes open and missing, and me sitting next to them, my legs sprawled. He gave me his usual stoic look from his great height and said, “I’ll take care of it, Captain,” then turned away and walked firmly back down the passage.

I had no need to wonder how Brewster had happened to turn up here. He’d been following me. Denis always kept watch on me, and Brewster had no doubt been haunting my steps since I’d made for Covent Garden this evening.

Once Brewster was gone, I came to myself, shaking off my stupor. Leland was too cold. I slid off my greatcoat and wrapped it around him.

I groped about in the dark and flashed the lantern around, but I could not find what had become of Leland’s coat and waistcoat. He wore a lawn shirt, so light it was almost silken to the touch, but the shirt gaped open, Leland’s collar and cravat gone.

The killer might have taken the clothes, or perhaps a person who’d come upon them had decided to steal a good coat rather than help the two young men. Leland’s coat and waistcoat could fetch a good price with a secondhand clothier who didn’t ask questions.

I gently buttoned Leland’s trousers, hiding the pale patch of skin and his flaccid member. I didn’t like to move him too much, but I laid him on his back then rose and made my way to Travers, restoring his clothing the best I could.

I sat down again, returning Leland’s head to my lap, the lantern a dim beacon next to us. I brushed Leland’s hair back from his face, examining his wounds, but I had not much doubt how he’d come by them. Someone had beaten the back and side of his head, but it was too dark to tell more than that.

Travers had been beaten even more severely.

I passed one of the longest hours I’d ever passed, alone in the dark passage with the two young men. I felt helpless and limp, aching.

After a time, I heard rattling at the end of the alley and the sound of a horse’s hooves on cobbles—a large draft horse, not the light stepping of a dandy’s carriage horses.

A flat-bedded dray wagon came to a halt at the passage’s mouth. The driver didn’t dismount, but Brewster dropped off the back. “You
stay
there,” he said in his rough voice.

The driver glanced about nervously, but he kept the reins slack in his hands and made no move to pull away.

Brewster came to me with his lumbering gait. “Where do you want ’em shifted to, Captain?”

“What do you make of the wounds?” I asked him instead of answering. While I had much experience with injuries made by pistols, carbines, bayonets, knives, and various forms of artillery, I’d never learned about the art of bludgeoning.

Brewster bent over the bodies with an air of a professional. “Hard to see in this light. But I’d say a piece of wood. One with nails in it.” He touched the side of Travers’s head where the blood was blackest. “He was smacked with the club, and the nails sticking out of the end went right in.”

I swallowed a sourness in my throat. “What the devil kind of man would do such a thing?”

Brewster shrugged. “I can see any number of coves around ’ere doing for ’em. They’d want to keep mollies, especially rich ones, away from their boys.”

“I very much doubt Mr. Travers and Mr. Derwent had any interest in the lads around here,” I said. “Which returns me to the question—what were they doing
here
?”

“Can’t say as to that,” Brewster answered, though I’d spoken mostly to myself. “Need to get ’em away, though, before the Watch stumbles on ’em.”

He had a point. I could not wait any longer for Grenville’s carriage—I’d have to apologize for the summons later.

I tried to lift Leland, but my leg was sore from being folded up on the pavement in the cold. I couldn’t hold him.

Brewster took Leland’s slack body from me with surprisingly gentle hands. “Let me, Captain. You get ’em tucked in all comfortable on the dray and leave the carrying to me.”

His suggestion was sensible. I stayed with Travers, while Brewster carried Leland away, hoping without much hope that Gareth would blink his eyes, laugh, and tell me he and Leland had played a fine joke on me.

He didn’t. Travers lay still, dead, and would never joke again.

*

I wasn’t certain where to take them. If I rolled up in a dray in Grosvenor Square and carried two bodies inside Sir Gideon Derwent’s house, it would be in every newspaper the next morning. If I took them to Grenville’s, not far from the Derwents, the same thing would occur.

I contemplated taking them to my rooms in Grimpen Lane, but I had gossipy neighbors, none more than my landlady. Mrs. Beltan often stayed late in her shop, preparing for the next day, and the ladies across the street would visit her, knowing Mrs. Beltan sold her leftover bread at half price and sometimes even gave it away.

“I know a place, sir,” Brewster said, when I’d voiced my dilemma. “If you need to hide ’em for a bit.”

“Leland needs a surgeon,” I said.

“No matter. We’ll get ’em stashed away, and a surgeon can be fetched.”

Not ideal, but I wanted them out of the rain. “Lead on,” I said wearily.

Brewster gave me a nod and climbed up onto the seat with the driver. I settled in the back next to the tarp-covered bundle that was Leland and Travers, commending us all to the hands of a man who made a living committing murder for James Denis.

Chapter Eight

Brewster took us to a house in a tiny lane off High Holborn. Not the most affluent address, but the house was private. The narrow abode, the width of one room and a staircase hall on each floor, rose four stories to a ceiling lost in shadows.

The house was dark, no lights but a candle in a lantern Brewster held. I’d insisted on returning my lantern to the man I’d taken it from, much to Brewster’s amused disdain.

Brewster led me up two flights of stairs to a front bedroom. I could tell it was a bedchamber only when Brewster’s lantern cut through the vault of blackness to illuminate pale hangings around a large bed. I laid Leland on the bed’s coverlet, ignoring the blood and mud both of us smeared on it. “It’s bloody freezing in here,” I said over my shoulder. “Get a fire going.”

Brewster grunted, not liking to take orders from me, but he saw the sense in doing so. Soon he was banging around the fireplace and had a blaze going. He lit fresh candles in silver candlesticks, lighting up the small room.

The bedchamber was sparse, with only a bed, a washstand, and a night table. No curtains hung in the many-paned window, though they were draped heavily around the bed, which told me it was used. The washstand was from the past century, polished mahogany, the top with the washbowl made to swing open to reveal the slop bowl beneath. Grenville had one like it in the guest room in which I’d often stayed.

Leland was breathing, but that breath was labored. His lids were half-open, his eyes unmoving. “We need to find a surgeon,” I reminded Brewster. “A good one, not a quack.”

Brewster didn’t answer and started to trudge away.

“Wait,” I called. “What about Travers?”

Brewster paused in the doorway. “Still in the cart. He’s dead, inn’t he?”

“Bring him inside. Give him some dignity.”

The man did not hasten to obey. “He needs burying. He’s going to start stinking.”

“Then we will have to live with the stink. Put him in a ground-floor room and keep the mice away from him.”

Brewster scowled. “I can’t do everything, Captain. And Mr. Denis won’t like a corpse in his front room.”

I looked at him in surprise. “This is his house, is it?”

“Aye. He keeps it for business. Sometimes a ladybird.”

The idea that the ice-cold Mr. Denis ever did anything as sentimental as tuck a mistress into a discreet house was absurd. I nearly laughed, but the laugh would have been tinged with madness. I supposed every man needed to satisfy his bodily needs—God knew I enjoyed it—but Denis seemed to subsist on cold air alone.

“Perhaps he will know a surgeon who can be discreet,” I said. “You can send word to him?”

“Oh, aye, he’ll know you’re here.” Brewster’s voice was hard, his annoyance apparent. “Anything
else
, sir?”

“Yes, hunt up Grenville. He will be racing to my summons at Seven Dials.”

Brewster didn’t bother to answer; he strode noisily out of the room and left me.

I heard him slam the front door of the house, but I also heard movement in the lower floors, presumably the driver carrying Travers inside.

I hunted up cloths from a cupboard in the hall, but I’d need to climb down the stairs for water or shout for the dray’s driver to bring it up. That assumed there was any water below, and the man wouldn’t have to run to the nearest pump.

I could at least wipe the mud and grime from Leland’s face. Leland remained insensible, making no noise or movement as I touched his bloody wounds.

All the while questions continued to whirl through my head: Why had Leland and Travers been in that dirty passage? Or had they been attacked elsewhere and carried there, arranged to be found as they’d been? The large quantity of blood suggested Travers had bled out on the cobbles where Mackay had first taken me. But who had moved them between the time Mackay had found them and I’d returned with him? Had Leland been conscious enough to try to get Travers to safety? Or had the killer returned and tried to hide them?

As to who had attacked the two, Seven Dials had no shortage of toughs and men who lived on anger. A street gang who’d come upon two toffs on their own, no matter what they’d been doing, wouldn’t mind giving in to violence. Discovering that they were mollies would have lent fuel to the fire. But where did Mackay come into it?

I would have no answers until Leland woke. I worried he’d never wake at all.

I do not know how long I sat in the dim light, cleaning Leland’s face, but presently I heard Brewster return. His heavy tread sounded on the stairs, combined with a lighter, more nimble one.

The man Brewster ushered inside was short of stature but had muscular arms, like a blacksmith’s. This gentleman said nothing to me but went straight to Leland’s side while Brewster lit more candles.

The surgeon—I assumed that was who he was—demanded water and clean towels. Brewster moved to oblige, far more quickly than he’d ever obliged me.

The surgeon had sallow skin and a fringe of brown hair around a balding head, but eyes that brooked no foolishness. Surgeons would never be given the status of doctors, since they worked with their hands—setting bones, cutting off limbs, taking out bits of a man’s insides—but the best ones saved more lives, in my opinion, than any doctor I’d met.

The surgeon turned Leland’s head to study his wounds, peeled back Leland’s eyelids, felt him for fever, and loosened the shirt I’d laboriously done up. “How long?” he asked me, his words clipped.

“I am not certain,” I said. “He was struck down at least an hour before I found him, I would say. And it’s been the better part of two hours since then.”

“You a surgeon?” the man snapped. “How do you know it was an hour?”

I was too tired to be offended. “I’m a soldier, or used to be. I’m guessing from the state of the wounds and the pallor on his friend, who did not survive, that they were struck down about an hour or so before I found them. Though I suppose Travers could have taken some time to die.”

The surgeon shook his head. “The man in the kitchen? He was dead minutes after he was hit. This one wasn’t so lucky.” He gestured to Leland.

Cold bit me. “You are saying he will die as well?”

“Depends on his constitution. He’s young. I’ll do my best for him.”

The man’s accent put him from outside London, somewhere in the west I’d say, though not as far as Cornwall. I’d had a Cornish man under my command in Portugal, and whenever he’d spoken in his native dialect, I hadn’t understood a bloody word he’d said. He’d understood me well enough, though, and survived many a battle to sail happily home to his wife and brood of Cornish children.

Brewster quickly returned with the water, so perhaps the house did have a working pump, or one close by outside. The surgeon began to clean away the dried blood, revealing many gashes in Leland’s head, face, and neck.

The man had brought his own needles and thread, and he sewed the larger wounds closed. I reflected that it was a mercy Leland was oblivious at the moment. The surgeon worked with admirable skill, but didn’t bother softening his stabs with the needle, his tugs on Leland’s raw flesh. I’d seen many a hardened soldier screaming as a surgeon held him down to stitch him back together.

When the surgeon finished, he rubbed an ointment on the wounds, then looked at me without expression. The man’s face hadn’t changed expression at all, in fact, since he’d entered.