He smiled and kept looking at his boots, saying, “Why, you’re as good as your husband for a face, Mrs. Westerman. I would not have spoken, but I served with the captain when he was nothing but a scrap of a lad, and he touched his hat to me a few times in Gibraltar when you were there and on his arm, and looking as pretty a thing as ever man got hold of.”
Harriet’s eyes brightened. “Of course! James told me you stood between him and a whipping once.”
Proctor laughed, a great throaty rumble from his belly. “I did, I did. Told you that, did he? He returned the favor in time.” He cleared his throat and examined the earth floor with great concentration. “Sorry to hear he’s gone a bit. .” He touched his hand to his forehead. “We’ve been grieving for you and the little ones up and down the river. Us that know him.”
Harriet found she could not speak, but she nodded.
“So tell us then,” Crowther asked. “How was this man tied?”
The younger man stepped forward and flicked the bottom end of the sheet up the body a little brutally, letting them see a pair of sodden white stockings and the start of the pale breeches above them. The ankles were bound together with rope the thickness of a thumb. Its long end had been neatly curled across the dead man’s shins when he had been laid on the table, rather than cut free or left trailing on the earth floor. Harriet’s mind flickered with images of ropes coiled on the decks of her husband’s commands. She believed a sailor would stop to neaten any piece of loose stuff like that, even if he saw it in a burning house. The stockings dripped onto the floor.
“See for yourself,” Jackson said. “The other end of the rope was tied to something heavy enough to hold him against the tide. Meant to hold him under, I reckon, though if it was meant to hide him too, it did a poor job in the end. We spotted him from the bank just after dawn. You could see wig and coat enough to guess it was a man.”
Proctor put his head on one side and pulled at his beard. “Another three, maybe four yards out toward the middle of the river and we’d never have seen him till the fish were done feasting. Tide is a monster on the Thames. Where he was stuck, he would have been covered by ten feet at high water. Funny rope too.” Crowther lifted his eyebrows and Proctor pulled harder on his beard. “It’s braided. Not laid.” Harriet nodded, and Proctor met her eye, satisfied to see she had understood. “I’ve not seen it used much on the river, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Thank you, Proctor,” Crowther said. “May I ask if you found anything on this man’s body? And how did you know his name?”
The two men in front of him looked rather uncomfortable. It was Proctor who replied.
“His pockets were empty, and there was no fancy stuff on him. As to his name, some woman in the crowd spoke it, but she was gone before she said any more. I don’t know this fella. Can’t have much business across the river, or far along it, or we’d have seen the face, I’d reckon.”
Crowther nodded. “Very well, and thank you.” Then, turning to his host he added, “And thank you, Mr. Pither. You may all leave us with the body.”
The three men shuffled out, but as he passed her, Proctor put his hand out and Harriet felt it close with gentle pressure on her arm. She looked up into his face and saw her own history of foreign waters and winds behind his eyes. It was only a moment, and he was gone, ushered back out into the yard by Mr. Pither, who looked, beside him, like a pilot fish trying to shepherd a whale.
7
In Jocasta Bligh’s early days in Town, when she worked in the Rose and Grape tavern in the thick of the city, she’d lived in rooms shared with ten others where the banisters were stolen to feed the feeble fires of the residents. A hard place to keep yourself to yourself if that was what you wished, though Jocasta had managed it. Then the cards had arrived, whistling and chattering into her life.
They had come to her by accident or chance, as most things do. She’d discovered them, a little greasy and torn, wrapped in a newspaper, in a dingy corner of the dingy bar where she earned enough pennies to keep from starving. She kept them about her, thinking their owner might come back and ask for them, but a month later no one had done so, and she had grown to like looking through the pictures of strange people, the designs that looked like playing cards, but weren’t. Cups and swords, coins and clubs; men, women, stars and angels. Then a seed merchant, a Frenchman, had spotted her dealing them to herself in a quiet moment when the publican wasn’t hovering, and had some talk with her. The cards were known in his country, he said, people used them to tell fortunes, and for a week he found her out every night and told her more; the meanings he gave to the pictures, and how to lay down the cards so their messages bled into each other to make new stories. It was like mixing wines, he told her. One card lay next to another, and some new thing emerged that tasted like neither, only existing where they joined.
The regulars thought for a while that the “Northern Fortress”-what they called her in those days-might have been breached. But there was nothing in that. Jocasta learned; the seed merchant completed his business in London and left; and she was there with her picture cards and a little hope.
The drinkers heard and asked, so she started telling fortunes for the people who drifted through the bar, getting them to lay down the cards and turn them over. People began to seek her out, scraping up pennies and the occasional shilling to have her tell them what she heard in the pictures till she found herself with enough chink in her pockets to take this room and leave off working for others. Twenty years ago now that was. Twenty years of pretty comfortable with a candle. Men she avoided, but for the last ten years she’d had Boyo. She was grateful, and when she had walked her feet off to arrive in London, having abandoned her home of mountains and lakes, she had never expected to feel like that again.
Not happy though. Every now and again, just when you were feeling a little too at ease, the cards had a habit of tapping you sharp-like on the shoulder and reminding you there was a price to be paid still. She did not like having to know some of the things they insisted on telling her. There had been a knock or two at the door since Kate Mitchell went off, but Jocasta hadn’t moved from her place or shifted the lay she had made for the young woman.
Jocasta looked hard at the cards till her head began to ache. All Swords. A dark woman. The Magician with his sticks and balls laid out before him, upside down. The Moon all sick and fading, The Hermit with his lantern and stick like the watchman up in Seven Dials-it was so like the man you’d have said they’d used him as a model. Then The Tower. Most of the cards could be kind or vicious with their predictions, depending on how they fell and what conversations they had with their place or the other cards near them. The Tower she’d never seen as anything but angry, though.
She smelled the sea again. She’d seen it only the once, but she remembered the stink. Then she got again that smoky smell, and these lies. Not the normal man-woman lies, not the kind ones or the cruel, or the words you just let slip that might be true when you say them but are lies as soon as sunlight hits them. Those lies she saw in the cards all the time, but these were others. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes. Had the thing been done? Was there still any stopping of it? That the cards would not tell her.
Once, when she was just beginning to turn the cards for other people in the tavern and winter was making the roads more dirty and foul than ever, a man had asked to have his fortune read as a lark with his friends. She’d laid them out and looked up into his square red face, and blurted out that he would be dead before the year’s end. He’d stopped laughing, but asked her how, all the time acting like he was paying no mind to it. Again, without a thought she told him he’d be hanged, and he pushed his way out of the bar and onto the streets in a rage. His friends had thought it all fine entertainment and given her more than she usually asked for in coins, then followed him out. The next day the whole street was alive with the story, and Jocasta felt ashamed. The day after, news reached them that the man had been taken up by one of the thief-takers, was a known highwayman and was likely to be at Tyburn before the end of the month.