Who Buries the Dead (29 page)

S
ometimes, solving a murder could be as simple as asking the right questions. Except that in this case, Sebastian hadn’t been asking the right questions.

At least, not about the right person.

He spent the next several hours visiting those London coffeehouses and pubs favored by men with extensive connections to the West Indies. The conversations were oblique, the queries carefully worded, the answers often guarded or merely suggestive.

But in the end, the information he gleaned was damning.

Hero was strolling the rear gardens with a bundled-up Simon in her arms when Sebastian walked up to her. Her cheeks were pleasantly flushed by the cool air. But her eyes were troubled, and he knew that whatever costermonger’s story of hardship and deprivation she’d heard that morning still haunted her.

He said, “Difficult interview?”

She drew a deep breath and shifted Simon’s weight so that she could press her cheek against the child’s. “A little girl. She sells nuts in taverns. Alone.”

He wanted to say,
Why don’t you stop doing this to yourself? Why torment yourself with the ugly realities of a part of London life of which most gentlewomen remain blissfully ignorant
? But he knew that was precisely what she wanted to change; she wanted the spoiled, complacent, self-satisfied residents of the West End to know what life was like for those less fortunate. In her own way, she was as driven as he.

The baby fussed, and she loosened her hold on him, saying, “I’ve heard back from my Fish Street Hill costermonger. He contacted me after I talked to Sarah.”

“And?”

“He says Stanley Preston was in Bucket Lane to see a woman. Unfortunately, she refuses to speak with us, although he did accidentally let slip a name: Juba.”

Juba. It was an African name, often given in the American colonies to girls born on a Monday morning. Sebastian suspected it belonged to the beautiful, dusky-skinned woman who had confronted him in the lane.

“You think this Juba could be Preston’s daughter?” said Hero.

“Actually, I think it far more likely her connection is to Sir Galen Knightly.”

“
Knightly?” Hero stared at him. “Are you serious?”

She listened while he told her of the sudden aversion to Knightly that Preston had expressed the morning of his murder, of the dark-haired gentleman who had questioned Cian O’Neal, and of Sebastian’s own conversations with various West Indies planters.

“Knightly told me once that he inherited his plantations and slaves,” said Sebastian. “He claimed to be a kindly master who would gladly free all of his slaves if the law didn’t make it so onerous. But none of that is true. He’s actually extended his holdings of both land and slaves in the years since his great-uncle’s death. And while there isn’t a planter in Jamaica who doesn’t make use of the whip, I’m told Knightly’s punishments can be unusually brutal—particularly if he’s enraged. They say he doesn’t lose his temper often, but when he does, he’s vicious. He once personally slashed a slave’s throat with a cane knife when the man mishandled a favorite mare.”

“Killed him?”

“Yes. Practically took off the poor man’s head—although of course they made up some tale for the authorities.”

“So what do you think Stanley Preston and Douglas Sterling could have done that drove Knightly into a murderous rage?”

“I think Sterling must have told Preston something that Sunday morning, something that convinced Preston he didn’t want his daughter to marry Knightly and that sent him to talk to Juba in Bucket Lane.”

“But Preston knew Knightly well. He had to know of his temper and his treatment of his slaves. So what could Sterling possibly have said that would suddenly turn Preston against the man?”

“Knightly told me once that Preston had a horror of miscegenation. And Juba is part African.”

“You think she could be Knightly’s daughter?”

“No; she’s not young enough for that. But she could very well have had a child by him.”

“Dear God,” said Hero softly. “Would he kill her too, do you think? If he thought she was a threat to him?”

Sebastian reached out to lift his son from her arms and hold Simon close. “This is a man who owns other human beings and has them whipped when they refuse to work. Who’s capable of slitting a helpless slave’s throat for mishandling a horse and who probably bashed in the skull of Rowan Toop on the off chance the virger might have seen something that could incriminate him. So yes, I think he’d kill her if he thought she might betray him.

“Her and her child both.”

I
t was early afternoon by the time Sebastian reached Fish Street Hill. The crowds had thinned, the cries of the sellers in Billingsgate Market largely stilled.

Leaving the curricle with Tom, he cut through the noisome alley to Bucket Lane. The sky had grown increasingly dark and heavy with clouds, the light thin and white and flat, the lane deserted except for a knot of ragged children playing some game with broken pieces of brick.

Sebastian walked up to one of the lads, a delicately boned, brown-eyed boy of perhaps ten or twelve, and held up a coin. “I’m looking for Juba. A shilling if you lead me to her.”

The boy stared at Sebastian with a hard, emotionless face. Then he made a quick grab at the coin.

“Ah-ah,” said Sebastian, lifting the shilling out of his reach. “You’ll get it, but not until you’ve led me to Juba.”

The boy’s expression never altered. Then his gaze broke to someone behind Sebastian.

“It’s you, ain’t it?” said a familiar voice.

Sebastian turned to find the woman called Juba standing in the middle of the lane, her fists on her slim hips, her head thrown back as she stared at him with suspicion and hostility and what he recognized as a touch of curiosity.

“Yes,” he said.

“Who are you? Really.”

“Lord Devlin. I want to know why Stanley Preston came to see you last Sunday.”

“He didn’t come to see me.”

“Then who did he see?”

She shook her head. “First you want me t’ believe you’re an idiot, and now you’re pretending t’ be some grand lord?”

“I am a lord. Not exactly what I’d call ‘grand,’ but a lord, nonetheless.”

She huffed a scornful expulsion of air. “And what’re you claiming is your interest in Preston this time?
My lord.
”

“I’m trying to figure out who killed him, and why.”

He saw the sudden leap of fear in those turquoise-hued eyes. “I didn’t kill him,” she said huskily. “I had no reason to kill him.”

“I know.”

“What difference it make to you, who killed this Preston, or why?”

“I happen to have a moral objection to people getting away with cold-blooded murder.”

“Sure then,” she said, her lip curling. “Rich man gets hisself killed, ev’rybody from Fleet Street to Bow Street is interested in finding who done it. But let somebody stab an old fishmonger in the back, and ain’t nobody cares.”

Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Come. I’ll show you.”

She turned and strode toward a nearby battered door without waiting to see if he followed, as if whether he did so or not were a matter of supreme indifference to her.

He found himself in a narrow, dilapidated corridor smelling strongly of fish, thanks to the dripping pile of baskets and hampers stacked near the street. She pushed open the first door to the left, revealing a room that was small and meanly furnished but clean, with a scrubbed trestle table and crude benches and two pallets laid out near the cold hearth. On one of the pallets lay the body of an old woman, her face pale and waxy with death.

She looked to be perhaps sixty years old or more, her café-au-lait skin wrinkled and sunken with age, her hair steel gray and thin. But once she must have been beautiful, for the exquisite, regal bone structure she had bequeathed to her daughter was still clearly visible despite the ravages of age and mortality.

Sebastian raised his gaze from the dead woman to Juba. “When was she killed?”

“Last night. They be comin’ anytime now to sew her int’ her shroud.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Ain’t nothin’ to tell. She went out t’ fetch water, only she never come back. Banjo went lookin’ and found her not five feet from the pump. Breathed her last in his arms.”

“Banjo?”

“My boy.” She jerked her head toward the street. “That’s him you was talkin’ to just now.”

Sebastian studied her beautiful, tightly held face and read there a powerful mixture of grief and shock and fury. He said, “Tell me why Stanley Preston came here a week ago Sunday.”

She stared back at him. “Why should I?”

“Because whoever killed your mother also killed Stanley Preston—and at least two other men. And because if he feels threatened, he may not stop there; he may decide he needs to eliminate you and your son as well.”

A pulse had begun to beat wildly at the base of her long, elegant neck. But a lifetime of suspicion and resentment held her silent.

“Tell me,” he said softly.

She went to stand before the cold hearth, where a few chipped cups and plates rested on a rough shelf.

He said, “I’ll see that you come to no harm.”

She gave a harsh laugh. “Why should I believe you?”

“Do you have a choice?”

She stared back at him, her hands fisting in her apron, her strangely hued eyes wide with fear and mistrust.

“Tell me,” he said again.

Slowly, haltingly, she began to talk. And as he listened, Sebastian came to realize that he had misjudged Knightly’s motives entirely, that the secrets the man had killed to protect were far more dangerous than Sebastian had ever imagined.

When she finished, he said, “I want you and your boy to come away from here, come with me so that I can keep you safe until this is all over.”

“No.”

“Don’t you understand—”

“What you think?” She took a quick step toward him, one arm slashing through the air as she cut him off, her features stiff with an anger born of a lifetime of slights and insults. “That I’m a fool—or as much of an idiot as your Silas Nelson? No. I ain’t puttin’ our lives in your hands. This is our home. Here, we surrounded by people knows us. People we trusts. Costermongers always take care of their own. You got what you come for. Now, get out of here.”

He drew a calling card from his pocket and held it out to her. “If you change your mind, or if anyone should threaten you in any way, come to me. Number forty-one Brook Street.”

She made no move to take the card, and it occurred to him she probably couldn’t read it if she did. Hero had told him that fewer than one out of ten of the city’s costermongers were literate.

He laid the card on the trestle tabletop. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said.

But she only stared back at him, her face hollow with grief and eyes cold with resentment.

Sebastian’s next stop was Blackfriars Bridge, where he had a short conversation with the owner of Douglas Sterling’s favorite coffee shop. Then he drove to Park Lane, where he found his aunt Henrietta’s shiny carriage drawn up outside her town house and the Dowager Duchess herself smoothing on a pair of elegant kid gloves in the grand entrance hall.

“I don’t have time to talk to you now, Devlin,” she told him, still busy with her gloves. “I’m on my way to Sally Jersey’s.”

“This won’t take long. I want to know what you can tell me about the birth of Sir Galen Knightly.”

“Knightly?” She looked up at him. “Good heavens. Has someone killed
him
now?”

“No.”

She stared at Sebastian, her blue St. Cyr eyes going wide and still with comprehension. Then she glanced at her wooden-faced butler and said, “Tell Coachman John I shan’t be but a moment.”

She led Sebastian to a small withdrawing room.

Sebastian said, “That bad, is it?”

“Well, it’s certainly not a tale I’d care to relate in front of the servants. Sir Galen’s father was Beaumont Knightly, eldest son of the old baronet, Sir Maxwell Knightly, and as dissolute a young man as ever joined the Hellfire Club—which is truly saying something, I’m afraid. Gambling, drinking, women, dueling—the usual, only far, far worse. If even half the tales told of his conduct were true, he must have cost his father a fortune. In the end, old Sir Maxwell shipped him off to a maternal uncle who owned plantations in the West Indies.”

“Jamaica?”

“Yes. Most people thought old Sir Maxwell was hoping the yellow fever would carry the reprobate off, so that a younger brother could inherit.”

“Only, no such luck?”

“Not quickly enough, at any rate. The young man hadn’t been on the island a month before he seduced the daughter of a local plantation owner. As I understand it, the girl’s father was on the verge of shooting the ne’er-do-well when she announced she was with child. So Beau Knightly was allowed to live, on the condition he make an honest woman of the foolish chit.”

“Doesn’t sound like anyone I’d want as a son-in-law,” said Sebastian.

Henrietta shrugged. “Perhaps the girl’s father intended to shoot the rascal after the child was born. But in the end, he didn’t need to. Both Beau Knightly and his bride died of the fever less than a year later.”

“What happened to the child?”

“He also fell ill with the fever, but obviously survived. He was eventually brought to England to be raised by his grandfather. Carelessly conceived the boy may have been, but he was still old Sir Maxwell’s heir, after all.”

Maybe,
thought Sebastian.
Or maybe not.
“Tell me about this maternal uncle.”

“Kitch McGill? Good heavens; why do you want to know about him?”

“Humor me.”

“Well, let’s see. He was a younger son, of course. The family sent him off to Jamaica after he half killed some constable with his bare hands. He did quite well for himself there, in the end. But he’s been dead twenty or thirty years now. Never did have any children of his own—leastways none he could acknowledge. His wife was barren, which is how he ended up making Sir Galen his heir.”

“Did he ever come back to England?”

Henrietta frowned. “Only once, if I remember correctly. I believe he brought the child and his nurse back to Sir Maxwell, after Beau Knightly’s death.” She fixed him with a hard glare. “And now, not another word do you get out of me until you tell me what this is all about.”

But Sebastian simply gave her a resounding kiss on one powdered and rouged cheek and said, “Thank you, Aunt. Enjoy your visit with Lady Jersey.”