I saw at once what he had seen, though I might have wished I hadn’t. Stumbling from the flames like a man emerging from his own grave came Aadil. His clothes and skin had been scorched, and most of his stockings had been quite burned off. Horrible red burns covered his legs, and his face was a mass of soot darker even than his skin. But what troubled me most was the blood. It was on his face, his arms, his legs, but mostly his chest, and it was bubbling forth.
Elias and I both ran forward and caught him as he toppled over. It took nearly all our combined strength to keep him from falling to the ground. Once we set him down, Elias tore open his shirt. “He’s been shot,” he said. “At very close range, from the look of the powder burns on his clothes.”
“What can you do?”
He said nothing and looked away. I understood there was nothing to say.
“Teaser is dead,” Aadil gasped.
“Save your strength,” Elias told him.
He managed the briefest of laughs. “For what? I go to Paradise, and I have no fear of death, so you need not trouble yourself to comfort me.” He paused here so he could cough out mucousy blood.
“You did what you could,” I said. “Who shot you, Mr. Baghat? Did you see?”
“I tried to save him, but I could not get to him in time.”
“Who shot you, Mr. Baghat?” I said again. “Who did this to you so we might avenge you?”
He looked away and his eyes closed. I thought he was already dead, but it happened that he had one more utterance in him. He said: “Get help. Celia Glade.”
Having uttered these words, he breathed his last.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
E MEANT NO DISRESPECT TO OUR NEWFOUND AND QUICKLY LOST associate, but Elias and I recognized that we would do well to avoid any notice that might fall upon ourselves, and we certainly had no wish to fall in with any constables who might show their faces. I knew too well that a visit before a judge, no matter what one’s degree of guilt or innocence, could easily end in a lengthy stay in prison, and I was in no mood to attempt to explain myself even before that most mythical of creatures, the honest magistrate.
Unwilling to face the chaos of another boat crossing, we found a hackney to take us across the bridge. Elias wrung his hands and bit at his lip, but I could tell he had control over his emotions and conducted himself with philosophy. It is a hard thing, even for one such as myself who has chosen a life often filled with violence, to see one man die before your eyes and to be in the same room with another and then learn he has, moments later, burned to death. As a surgeon, Elias was often confronted with injury and often had to inflict hurt himself, but it is quite another thing to witness violence visited upon the innocent, and he took it hard.
“What did it mean?” he said at last. “His last words about Miss Glade?”
Discovering Elias’s congress with her seemed now to be a lifetime ago, and I had no energy to spare to think of it then. The betrayal had been insignificant in the light of all that had happened, and I meant to treat it accordingly. “It could mean either of two things: that we must seek her help, or we must seek protection from her.”
In the dark of the hackney, I could see him nod methodically. “And which do you think?”
“I know nothing but that we must see Mr. Franco at once. I must learn what he knows of this Teaser fellow and Pepper’s invention.”
“He is supposed to be your friend,” Elias said. “Can it be that he serves the Company?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think it more likely that he has made some investments, perhaps knows more than he realizes, and that he was selected as Cobb’s first victim as much for Cobb’s convenience as my consternation.”
“To keep him from realizing a connection and revealing it?”
“That is my guess. Baghat and Teaser suggested he had some investment in the engine, and the engine is at the very heart of this madness. If there is a way to get our hands on the designs for the cotton-weaving device, we must get it to Ellershaw, and we must do so before midday tomorrow.”
“What?” Elias barked. “Give it to the Company? Have you not understood how monstrous it is?”
“Of course I do, but these companies are born to be monstrous. We cannot ask them not to be what they are. Ellershaw once said that government is not the solution to the problems of business, it is the problem of business. In that he was wrong. The company is a monster, and it is for Parliament to decide the size and shape of its cage. I shall not quarrel with Company men for seeking to make their profit, so there is great harm neither in keeping the plans from Ellershaw nor giving them up.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because the one thing I know about Cobb, the one thing of which I can be certain, is that he knows of the plans for Pepper’s engine and he is desperate to possess them. And so the plans must be found. We shall see who threatens whom if I dangle the plans over a fire or promise to deliver them to Craven House. It is time for us to drive this coach. My uncle is dead. Mr. Franco rots in jail. The men I seek to guide me end up murdered. It is foolishness to believe that we will fare much better unless we make new rules for this game.”
“Cobb now threatens only us and your aunt,” Elias said. “If we choose to ignore the threat, to elude whatever bailiffs he sends after us, he cannot stop us. As to your aunt, I have no doubt that the good lady will endure any temporary inconvenience, no matter how distressing, if you can use it to strike back at your enemies.”
Though he could not see it, I offered him a smile. It had been a terrible night for him, and for our friendship, but I knew full well what he had just said to me. He would risk Cobb’s wrath and stand by me. And I knew he risked far more than his freedom. Elias was a surgeon with a fine reputation; he had men and women of station to visit. He would risk it all to stand by my side and fight my enemies.
“I thank you,” I said. “With luck, this shall be resolved soon. We’ll know more after we speak with Mr. Franco.”
“Do you then propose that we simply go to sleep and await the opening of the Fleet Prison?”
I let out a humorless laugh. “No, I am in no mind to wait. We’ll go to the Fleet now.”
“They won’t let you visit a prisoner in the middle of the night.”
“Anything may be got at any time for silver,” I told him. “You know that.”
“Indeed,” he said. It was hard not to hear the bitterness in his voice. “Has not this whole affair been in defense of that view?”
THE COACHMAN APPEARED skeptical about taking us within the Rules of the Fleet, fearing we would refuse to pay him, and because of the peculiarities of that neighborhood, he would have no legal recourse. Paying him in advance quelled that anxiety, though he still appeared uneasy about a pair of men seeking to gain entrance to the Fleet at night. Nevertheless, he agreed to take us and await our return, though neither Elias nor I expressed much surprise when we heard his coach retreating the moment our backs were turned.
It was now well after midnight, so when I pounded upon the prison gates it took several minutes before anyone arrived to slide back the viewing latch and see who we were and what we wished for.
“I have great need to visit with a prisoner,” I said. “One Moses Franco. I must speak with him at once.”
“And I must be the king of Prussia,” the guard returned. “No visitors at night, and if you weren’t a miscreant out about nefarious work, you’d know that.” He sniffed a few times like an eager dog. “You smell like a chimney sweep.”