The Emperor's Assassin (17 page)

“I'm thinking the same.”

“We'll keep the place round the clock. Try to stay out of view, somewhere in the house maybe, so you can get a good look at them if they come.”

Presley was about to turn back toward the rookery off Maiden Lane when Morton felt a sudden cold air of apprehension.

“Jimmy?”

The young Runner turned toward him.

Morton put Boulot's loaded pistol in his hand.

“You'll likely have no need of this…”

“You're likely right.” Presley closed his big fist around it with a nod and set off along the crowded and clamourous thoroughfare.

T
he Drury Lane Theatre was as busy as a December night, the public having learned that Mrs. Arabella Malibrant had returned and that her understudy was again relegated to a minor role. This was the final month of Dibden's
Revenge
, and the production had been a resounding success. The theatre was abuzz with speculation about the play now in rehearsals.

Morton stood in the lobby awaiting the evening's leading lady. A stage door existed, but Arabella occasionally had need of the attention of her admirers and would descend among them for a few moments, her unmistakable cumulus red curls making her immediately recognisable. A little ripple of excitement entered the lobby with her, washing through the gathering. Impertinent young men on the stairway turned their quizzing glasses upon her, and gentlemen of more senior years (and in the company of wives) tried not to be seen glancing Arabella's way. Even among the women present she had her admirers.

Morton could not help but warm a little with pride as
she took his arm, so that he might escort her out to their waiting hackney-coach. Arabella nodded and said “So kind” and a hundred variations thereof as they made their way through the throng. Here and there she greeted friends and acquaintances, enquiring after children, husbands, lovers.

For a moment they were held up by the crowd pressing around the doors, and Morton found a lovely pair of brown eyes turned their way. It took a moment for him to realise it was he, not the woman on his arm, who was the object of their interest.

“Mademoiselle Honoria,” Morton said, bowing.

“Monsieur Morton,” answered the young woman with a curtsy. She was in the company of her family—all but the elder count—who were engaged in an animated conversation in French. The words flew so quickly that Morton barely caught the gist—talk of returning home to France.

Morton would have introduced Arabella, but she was speaking to another, and by the time she had finished, the d'Auvraye clan had moved on, young Monsieur Eustache d'Auvraye leading the way; a tiny wave from the daughter's gloved hand as they passed out through the row of columns.

A moment later Morton handed Arabella up into their carriage, and they set off at a snail's pace in the press of conveyances. Arabella laid her head against his shoulder.

“Tired, my love?”

“It has been a full day, what with rehearsals, performances, and fittings—the latter in the service of Bow Street, mind you.”

“You saw Madame De le Cæur?”

“Her daughter came to see me so that I might have a
gown made. It shall cost a small fortune, but perhaps it will be worth it. We shall see.”

“I shall pay for it myself,” Morton said chivalrously.

“Thank you, Henry, but Arthur has already insisted that the bill come to him.”

Morton felt a strong sense of irritation at this news.

“Of course it doesn't matter who pays,” Arabella added. “The important thing is that we learn more of poor Madame Desmarches.”

“And how go your efforts to that end?”

“First I must gain Miss De le Cæur's confidence. To morrow we meet again. I shall test the waters then, though when I mentioned Madame Desmarches's name today, Amélie became terribly silent for a time. She knows more than she has told us, I am sure of that.”

“Something that can be said of most parties involved in this affair,” Morton reflected.

They soon arrived at Arabella's home in Theobald's Road. “Come up, Henry. I need comforting after my long day.”

“There is nothing I would rather do, but I must be off to Maiden Lane and relieve the man who is watching over a cully who might know something of this same murder.”

Arabella gazed at him in the poor light from her door lamp. “And how is one to compete with Mistress Duty?”

“Easily, if one is the celebrated Mrs. Malibrant. But tonight I could find no other to stand the middle watch.”

She smiled only a little. “Well, I shall dream of you as I lie in my warm bed, Henry Morton.”

Morton stopped off at his own lodgings in Rupert Street to change from his theatre clothes into something more
ppropriate to Maiden Lane. Wilkes, his manservant, was still stirring and brought Morton a letter.

“Sent over from the Public Office, sir. They wanted you to have it this night.” He held it out to Morton in a tremulous hand, a condition that had cost him his employment among the quality and eventually brought him into service with a lowly Bow Street Runner— much to that Runner's benefit. The older man fetched Morton's frock coat from the wardrobe.

Morton turned the letter over. “And what is this?” he wondered.

“I don't know, sir. Unusual coat of arms, though,” Wilkes observed.

“Is it?”

Wilkes nodded to the crest stamped at the top of the fine notepaper. His years amongst people of fashion had made him something of an authority on matters heraldic.

“Three chevrons, saltire”—he wrinkled up his nose— “the cross flory—a little unusual. The beast, I think, is a lion
salient
, although I must say, sir, it looks as much like a hedgehog as it does anything else. Certainly such devices are not English, nor even British. If I were to guess, with such a lion, I would say French.”

Morton broke the seal and opened the letter. “You impress me, as ever, Wilkes. It belongs to the Count d'Auvraye, although I do wonder how long he's had it.”

“I have not heard of the family, sir. But there are ever so many counts over there, even if one doesn't heed the lot that Bony hatched. Is the letter something important?”

“A request by d'Auvraye, or at least from his secretary, to meet with the count in Barnes tomorrow morning. I shall be in late tonight and up early, I'm afraid.”

“I'm sorry to hear it, sir.”

Morton smiled at the man, as much a friend and confidant as a servant. “Can't be helped. Will you have a breakfast ready for Mr. Presley and me at six?”

“Six it is. Coffee will be steaming.”

“You are a warm hearth in a cold world, Wilkes.”

The older man performed a slight gracious bow, his trembling hands held carefully out of sight behind his back.

M
orton was back in Paul's Court a few minutes later, as the church bells were giving midnight to the great city, soon to be almost silent. The dingy little close was even emptier and darker than it had been during the day, with only a faint greyish glow showing in a couple of windows around its narrow space. He climbed the stairs of the doss house and found Presley tucked into the shadows down the hall from Boulot's room, concealed behind a massive crumbling chimney. They spoke in whispers.

“Anything stirring, Jimmy?”

“Some time ago I heard our man jabbering in his cursed language—too drunk for even a Frenchman to understand, I'll warrant. Quiet as the grave, upstairs and down. Couldn't you find anyone to stand watch? Farke or some other?”

“Jacobs is coming at four, and we're up the river at seven. Come by my lodgings at six, and Wilkes will find us somewhat to break our fasts.”

“Up the river?”

“The count has invited us up to his country home tomorrow morning. Perhaps for a bit of shooting.”

“Ah, I wonder what he has to tell. Remembered something he didn't tell when last you met?”

“Maybe, Jimmy. Maybe. We'll just go up there and see. But for now…”

Presley crept back down the rickety stairs, each tread crying out as his weight came to bear, as though they'd carried too much over the years and could stand it no more.

Morton settled himself silently into Jimmy's hiding place, sitting on what seemed to be an old wine cask. Below him the house lay quiet, with only the low murmur of an occasional voice or, somewhere in the deeps, a cough, the sound of a door closing. The fumes of urine, which had assailed his nostrils and eyes like a physical force, gradually faded from his attention, and he began to turn over the day's developments.

He had obtained a new piece of intelligence at Bow Street after he had left Jimmy to stand guard over Boulot. John Townsend had returned from his little jaunt into the country.

“Well, Mr. Morton,” the elder Runner had told him, as he leaned on the mantelpiece in Sir Nathaniel Conant's anteroom and stuffed his briar, “Waltham-stow's a sleepy place, with one very great advantage for an officer of police. Folk having considerably less excitement in their lives than is normal in our metropolis, they are consequently much starved for subjects of conversation and far more prone to watch for and talk about even the smallest doings of their neighbours. And to do it gratis, I might add.”

Morton gave a brief grunt of laughter. “In the public interest only, of course.”

“Of course. So it was no great matter for them to direct me toward a Frenchman of the Protestant faith— whose name is Dubois, incidentally—known to have amongst his labourers a hefty-sized man named Gil. But when I sought out Farmer Dubois, I learned from him that his man, Gilles Niceron, had just recently gone off, without warning and without explanation.”

“Really? How recently?”

John Townsend had lit his pipe and drew deeply before fixing Morton with a meaningful look.

“Four days past.”

Letters would be sent to all the magistrates of London and the surrounding counties, asking them to have their officers look out for one Gilles or “Gil” Niceron— tall, seventeen stone or more, dark of hair and, of course, French-speaking.

Morton shifted now on his hard seat in the top-floor darkness, as he mused. There were connections between Boulot, d'Auvraye, and the woman buried beneath the snowdrift on Surgeon Skelton's bloodstained table. Boulot had not fired his pistols at a phantom, and he had not made that visit to the count by chance, not the very day, the very hour the French aristocrat had turned against his mistress. But what were they? What actually linked these men?

His thoughts were interrupted, however, by sounds in back of him, the opposite direction from Boulot's room. From behind the thin wall against which he leaned, the moans, the cadenced gasps… the age-old sounds of a man and a woman. Morton could not help but listen, his blood stirred a little in mere animal sympathy. But pitifully soon a slight speeding up, the single louder grunt. And then silence. One low mutter, and silence again. Was this how it was, then, in a place like Paul's Court?
The joy that ought to be equal for all, in castles and hovels alike—was it not, in fact, smaller and nastier and shabbier for the poor, the miserable, the denizens of narrow tenements and narrow lives? Henry Morton could well believe it. He had been raised on a steady diet of the improving works of Hannah More and Elizabeth Hamilton, forced down his throat by his Evangelical “aunt.” But it was a food he had hated and resisted with every particle of his young soul. He would never, ever accept that
anything
was better in poverty, the way the lady authors and their moralizing ilk constantly claimed. Because nothing was. Not love or friendship, not character, virtue, or human-kindness, not wisdom, nor the simple pleasures. Nothing. The only good poverty ever produced—and then only sometimes—was the passionate desire to get out of it.