“Someone from the regiment identified him. In another day it probably would have been impossible. Parts of the body were already virtually reduced to bones, but thanks to the way he was lying, the face is actually fairly well preserved.”
Sebastian held his handkerchief to his nose and resisted the impulse to take another look. “Any idea how he died?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” Gibson turned around to reach for a tin basin. “I found this in his heart.”
Sebastian stared down at a bloody pair of strange, broken blades, handleless and oddly shaped. “What are they?”
“It’s a broken pair of sewing scissors,” said Gibson, setting the bowl aside so that he could demonstrate an upthrusting, twisting motion. “Whoever killed him must have stabbed him with the scissors, then broken them off when they hit a rib.”
“So he was killed by a woman,” said Sebastian.
“Not necessarily, but more than likely. Did Hannah Green ever mention how Rachel Fairchild killed the man in her room?”
Sebastian shook his head. “She may not have known.” He went to stand in the yard just outside the door to try to breathe. It didn’t help.
Wiping his hands on a stained cloth, Gibson came out with him. “I heard about the fire at the Academy last night. That makes four more dead.” He brought up one splayed hand to rub his temples. “I thought I’d left carnage on this scale behind when I got out of the Army.”
Sebastian jerked his head toward the dark, foul room behind them. “That body on your slab was once a hussar captain, remember?”
Gibson’s hand slipped back to his side, his eyes widening. “What are you saying? That you think these killers are military men?”
“It’s what war teaches us, isn’t it? Not just to kill, but to kill on a grand scale.”
“There’s a difference between killing enemy soldiers on a battlefield and slaughtering unarmed Englishwomen in a London slum.”
“You mean because one is sanctioned by authority and the other is not?”
“Well, yes.”
In the silence that followed, the endless drone of buzzing flies sounded both abnormally loud and oppressively familiar. It was the sound of death. Sebastian said, “Some men learn to like killing. Or at least, they learn not to shrink from it. And that can be just as dangerous.”
Gibson squinted up at the clouds beginning to gather on the horizon, his face grim. Sebastian knew what he was remembering, the images that haunted both men’s dreams. The Portuguese peasants shot down in their fields along with their mules and their dogs. The Spanish families burned alive in their farm-houses. Gibson said, “But for British soldiers—officers—to kill Englishwomen . . .” He shook his head. “I know that shouldn’t make a difference, yet to most people it does.”
“It makes a difference because most people have a tendency to see anyone who speaks a different language or has darker skin as somehow less human than themselves. But a lot of people see prostitutes as less than human, too. Their lives are considered cheap. Expendable. If it hadn’t been for Miss Jarvis, the eight women who died at the Magdalene House would already be forgotten.”
“But why would hussar officers want to kill the Prime Minister?”
“I don’t know,” Sebastian admitted.
Gibson jerked his head toward the dank room behind them. “If it’s true . . . if Max Ludlow was one of the three men Hannah Green was telling us about, then who were the other two?”
“At this point, I’d put my money on Patrick Somerville being one of them.”
“The hussar captain from Northamptonshire? Do you think Hannah could identify him?”
“She might not be able to remember names, but women in her line of work learn to recognize faces.”
“Yet it won’t be enough, will it?” said Gibson. “Even if Somerville was at the Academy the night Rachel Fairchild and Hannah Green fled, there’s still nothing to tie him to the Magdalene House killings. Or to last night’s attack.”
“No. But Miss Driscoll might be able to do so.”
Gibson looked confused. “Miss Driscoll. Who is she?”
“The Academy’s blind harp player.”
Gibson’s frown deepened. “If she’s blind, how can she identify him?”
Sebastian thought about explaining, then gave it up. “Never mind. Just lend me some paper and a pen, would you?”
Chapter 53
The difficult part, Sebastian realized, would be finding a surreptitious way for Miss Driscoll to hear Patrick Somerville speak. Much easier to first show Patrick Somerville to Hannah Green, he decided, and see if she recognized him.
Leaving Gibson’s surgery near Tower Hill, Sebastian directed his coachman to Grace Calhoun’s Red Lion Tavern in West Street. Lying just a few houses from Saffron Hill on the north side of one of the last uncovered stretches of Fleet Ditch, the Red Lion was well-known as the resort of thieves and the lowest grade of the frail sisterhood.
He found Grace in the tavern’s back parlor, polishing pewter tankards. She was a tall woman, taller even than her son and just as lean, with a face that was all sharp planes and interesting angles accentuated rather than blurred by the passing of the years. At the sight of Sebastian, she turned the tankards over to a gnarled old man with a gray whiskered face and a wooden peg for a leg, and came out from behind the counter.
She had bright, intelligent brown eyes and hair the color of storm clouds she wore neatly tucked beneath a fine lace cap. In her youth, she must have been striking. She was still handsome—and very, very astute. “So you’re the fine lord my Jules has been telling me about,” she said, looking Sebastian up and down without a smile. “It was never my intention to see the boy set up as a gentleman’s gentleman, you know. I hired that old fool of a valet to teach him how to talk and act and dress like a gentleman. Not to teach him to be a gentleman’s gentleman.”
“He is a very good valet.”
“It’s not what I’d intended.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I s’pose you’re here to see that young trollop Jules asked me to mind.”
“I hope Miss Green hasn’t been causing you any trouble.”
Grace Calhoun gave a derisive snort. “That one. She’s a taking little thing—I’ll grant you that. Which is lucky, seein’ as how she ain’t got the sense God give a fencepost.” She cast him another assessing glance, then turned back to her tankards. “Last I saw her, she was in the yard.”
He found Hannah Green sitting cross-legged in a corner of the cobbled yard near the dilapidated stables, the fitful sun on her bowed bare head, her arms full of three wiggling, squirming black-and-white kittens. “Do look, Lord Devlin,” she said merrily when she saw him. “Aren’t they just the sweetest things you’ve ever seen? I always wanted a kitten.”
She was still wearing the spangled pink-and-white-striped gown, but without the rouge and the burgundy plumes, she looked even younger than before, no more than fifteen or sixteen at the most. Sebastian watched her laughingly peel one adventurous kitten off the top of her head, and it occurred to him that he was beginning to collect dependent females. He had no idea what he was going to do with either of them.