Her speech had more in common with his wife’s than with his father’s, but he was so taken aback by what she said that it did not occur to him until much later to wonder at the way in which she’d said it. “You know who I am?” he asked, fighting back an unmanly urge to burst into tears.
“Of course I do! Why wouldn’t I?”
He shrugged. “No one else does.”
“Well, no,” she conceded. “But it’s a little different for me, you see.”
“Because you’re my—”
“Because I no longer exist, either,” she said apologetically, cutting off the words he would have said. “At least, not in a form you would recognize.”
He considered this qualifier. “Then you’re dead,” he deduced.
“Was there ever any doubt? Surely you cannot have thought I would have willingly abandoned you!”
“Moll—my stepmother, at least that’s what Da called her—she said Jack Pickett lived here with his wife. He—he married you, then?”
The fine eyes twinkled with mischief. “My dear boy, do you dare to cast aspersions on your mother’s honor? What sort of woman do you think I am?”
“How should I know?” he asked, spreading his hands in helpless frustration. “I always assumed I must be a—Da never told me any different. He never talked about you at all,” he added apologetically.
Far from being wounded by this revelation, she lifted one delicately arched eyebrow. “While you, on the other hand, chatter like a magpie about the things you feel the most deeply.”
He acknowledged this verbal hit with a self-conscious little laugh.
“In fact,” she continued, taking pity on him, “we married on the fourth of April, 1783—almost a full year before your own birth. Prompt, perhaps, but quite proper. If you have any doubts, you have only to go to St. Giles-in-the-Fields and look in the church registry.”
He made a mental note to do exactly that, even as he realized that he would not find his own baptism recorded there the following spring; after all, he’d never been born.
“Mum,” he said, trying out the name he could not remember speaking, “is this”—his gesture took in not just the two of them, but the street on which they stood and the wider world beyond—“is all this real?”
She considered the matter for such a long moment that he feared she would not answer. “I think,” she said with great deliberation, “that it might be, under certain circumstances.”
“If I don’t exist,” he deduced.
She inclined her head in agreement.
“But if I did exist, then you—wouldn’t.”
“Nonsense! No one lives on this earth, no matter how brief their stay, without leaving some trace of themselves behind. A part of me would always exist, in the person of one rather extraordinary young man. On the other hand, if one does not exist”—she shrugged—“it’s as the poet said: ‘No man is an island.’ Every life touches other lives, and if that touch is removed, then those lives are changed, sometimes in rather unexpected ways. But I think you’re beginning to understand that for yourself.”
“You give me too much credit, ma’am,” Pickett said with some asperity. “I don’t understand any of this!”
She turned away, glancing over her shoulder into the depths of the quiet house. “I wish I could explain, but I’m afraid I haven’t the time. I don’t think your father ought to find you here, for he would be bound to ask questions—you are so very like him, you know—and since he’ll be getting up for work soon—”
“ ‘Work’?” Pickett echoed, with a skeptical lift of one eyebrow that was highly reminiscent of his magistrate.
“Yes. He is underbutler for Lord Sedgewick. He might have been butler by now, were it not for his determination to spend his day off, and the evening of his half-day, beneath his own roof. Then, too, most butlers are forbidden to marry unless they happen to wed the housekeeper, and your father would not hear of my occupying such a position.”
Utterly uninterested in the domestic arrangements of upper servants, Pickett gave a cynical little laugh. “I hope Lady Sedgewick remembers to lock up her silver.”
“You wrong him, my dear,” she scolded gently. “You don’t really know him.”
Pickett could not agree. “I know enough,” he said darkly. “Maybe more than you do.”
A board on the floor above them creaked, and she glanced uneasily upward. “I’m afraid I haven’t time to debate the matter with you. You must go.”
“I—I had hoped I could stay here,” he confessed, and although he had not intended to beg, he could not deny that his voice held a plaintive note.
“Yes, I know you did. But there are—reasons—why that is impossible. Take care, my dear boy.” She patted his cheek, then gave him a little push and closed the door gently but firmly behind her.
To Pickett, standing alone and abandoned in the street, it seemed as if his life was unwinding in reverse, like thread uncoiled from a spool. From the elegant town house in Curzon Street where he lived with his wife, he’d gone to Bow Street and a two-room flat in Drury Lane, then to a coal merchant’s house along the river, and, finally, to the narrow streets and back alleys of St. Giles. He recalled bitterly the daydreams of his childhood, when he’d imagined how different his life might have been if his mother had still been there instead of the hostile and frequently drunken Moll. Well, now he had the truth, and it appeared there was very little to choose between them. If this was the vaunted “mother’s love,” subject of so much sentimental verse, he thought it vastly overrated.
Still, he had no desire to be discovered there by his father—on that, at least, he and his mother were in full agreement—so he retraced his route to the river, shivering with every step. He’d lost his coat in fleeing the constable, and given his waistcoat to the unfortunate Miss Braunton, and his thin cambric shirt offered little protection against the sharp wind. Finally, having nowhere else to go, he was forced to seek shelter from the elements beneath a bridge. Weary of body and battered of spirit, he collapsed onto the ground, pausing only long enough to pull a few crumpled sheets of abandoned newspaper about his ears in an approximation of a blanket before succumbing to an exhausted slumber.
11
In Which John Pickett at Last Finds His Wife
...Sort Of
Some time later—just how long, he could not have said—Pickett became aware of a slight pressure on his left foot. He scratched at it with his right, and encountered something soft and yielding—something, in fact, that felt very much like a human hand. Startled, he opened his eyes to find that it was now early morning and a fog hung over the river, through which a pale sun glinted feebly off the dirty blond hair of the urchin attempting to relieve him of his shoes.
“Here now, stop that!” Pickett exclaimed.
The young thief, realizing the jig was up, quickly took to his heels. Pickett threw off the newspapers that had made a very poor substitute for a blanket, and a headline in bold black type fairly leaped from the page:
FIELDHURST KILLER SENTENCED TO HANG
His gaze quickly scanned the column, which informed the reader that a jury of twelve good men and true had found the Viscountess Fieldhurst, formerly Miss Julia Runyon of Norwood Green in Somersetshire, guilty of the murder of her husband, the eminent diplomat Frederick Bertram, sixth Viscount Fieldhurst, and that the murderess was to be held at Newgate Prison while she awaited execution, at which time she would hang by the neck until dead.
“Oh, no. Oh, nonono...”
As he cast off the broadsheet and scrambled to his feet, it occurred to Pickett that if he’d had his way, he would have spent the night safely beneath his parents’ roof, never even knowing that scarcely more than a mile away, Julia was in mortal peril. He wondered fleetingly if his mother had known about Julia, if this, more than the need to avoid his being seen by his father, had been the real reason she’d turned him away. One thing was certain: he had no time to waste in returning to the house in Denmark Street to ask.
He’d had almost no sleep in twenty-four hours, but Pickett had never been more fully awake as he set out at a run for the forbidding edifice that was Newgate Prison. He had more than a passing familiarity with the building, as his duties with Bow Street had occasionally taken him there. A dark, almost windowless structure designed to warn of the misery that awaited within for those who flouted the law, it even boasted chains carved over its entrances, for those oblivious to subtler allusions. More ominous still was the crew of carpenters hard at work erecting a scaffold near the main entrance. Pickett could not suppress the thought that it was intended for Julia. Deliberately averting his gaze, he hurried inside and, after interrupting the keeper’s amorous tryst with one of the prison laundresses, asked to be taken to the cell where Lady Fieldhurst was being held.
The keeper displayed no surprise upon hearing this request, and his lack of curiosity was itself no surprise to Pickett; the more adventuresome ton bucks sometimes obtained permits from the Lord Mayor allowing them to visit the prison, where they amused themselves by viewing the miserable wretches incarcerated there as if they were animals in a menagerie. Pickett had no illusions as to being mistaken for a buck of the ton in his present disheveled state, but he had no doubt the murder trial of a beautiful young woman of the aristocracy would arouse a great deal of interest across a range of social classes.
“ ’er cell’s thataway,” the keeper informed him, withdrawing his hand from his inamorata’s skirt in order to point Pickett in the right direction.
“I thought the women’s cells were on the other side,” Pickett objected, indicating the opposite end of the building.
“Aye, but she’s bein’ ’eld for execution, ain’t she?”
“Do you mean to tell me she’s being housed with the men?” demanded Pickett in mounting horror.
“Keep yer skirt on,” recommended the keeper. “She’s in an ’oldin’ cell by ’erself, there bein’ no other females goin’ to the gallows just at present. If you don’t believe me, just ask the guard. “ ’e’ll show you.”
Pickett thanked the man—although his thanks were drowned out by the squeals of the laundress as the keeper thrust his hand back up her skirt—and started down the corridor in the direction he had indicated. Devoid of sunlight due to the lack of windows, the passage grew darker the farther he went, and it seemed to Pickett that he could almost feel the walls closing in on him. A man paced the corridor at the far end, a man who appeared to be a guard, if one were to judge by his bored mien as well as the ring of keys he slapped rhythmically against the palm of his hand with every step.
“Excuse me,” Pickett called as he approached. “I should like to see Lady Fieldhurst, if I may.”
The guard looked him up and down, but offered no comment. Instead, he stopped before one of the metal doors and slid open a narrow sheet of metal at roughly eye level, revealing a slit that allowed him to see inside the cell on the other side of the door.
“Ye’ve got a visitor,” he informed its occupant.
Pickett could not hear her reply, but she had apparently inquired as to his identity, for the guard responded, “ ’ow should I know? I’m not yer bloody butler.” He thrust a key into the lock and flung the door open.
Pickett entered the small chamber and, finding the cell lit and warmed (if one could call it that) by the flickering light of a small brazier, finally beheld his wife.
She was clad in the same mourning gown of black bombazine that she’d been wearing when he’d interviewed her on the morning after her first husband’s death. But now the dress was torn and dirty, and hung on her slender frame in a manner that suggested she had lost weight—an impression strengthened by the hollows in her cheeks that sharpened her chin and made her eyes appear somehow too large for her face. There was no sign of a pregnancy; had she miscarried? But no, he had never been born, so there had never been a pregnancy. Still, she was hardly the picture of blooming health: The dark circles beneath her eyes gave her a bruised look, and her golden hair was now dull and limp. Nor was it pinned up in her usual style; instead, it had been hacked off at about the level of her chin so as not to become tangled in the hangman’s noose.
She was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
As he stared at her, she met his gaze with one of dull resignation. “Well?” she prompted. “Who are you?”
12
In Which John Pickett Hatches a Scheme
“Do you not know me, Julia?”
To be sure, no one else had, but it had never even crossed Pickett’s mind that Julia might not: Julia, who had married him in the teeth of all opposition. Julia, who had professed her willingness to live under a bridge with him, if he could not be happy in her Curzon Street town house.
Julia, who now stiffened at what clearly seemed to her a shocking familiarity. “So free with my name, sir?”
“I beg your pardon—my lady.” He could not fail to recognize the irony as he recalled how awkward it had once seemed, calling her by her Christian name, when now it seemed so very wrong to call her by anything else. “My name is John Pickett. I’m—” I’m your husband, he thought as he sketched a bow, and we’ve said and done things together that would put you to the blush if I were to tell you even half of them. “I’m—I was—with Bow Street.”
“I see.” Her chin came up at this declaration, but this show of bravado could not conceal the fear in her eyes. “Is it you, then, that I have to thank for my present circumstances?”
“No! That is, I’m sorry I wasn’t here to—” He broke off and tried again. “My lady, I know who killed Lord Fieldhurst, and I know it wasn’t you. Proving it may be difficult, but with your permission, I should like to go to Bow Street and urge the magistrate to request a stay of execution while we—while they—put together a case.” Provided, of course, that Mr. Colquhoun wasn’t still at home, sleeping off the effects of last night’s excesses.
“I would be a fool to withhold my permission, since it appears to be my only chance of a reprieve, but you will forgive me for not holding out much hope for your success. You haven’t much time to work with, you know.”
“When—that is, how long—?” Pickett stammered, searching for a diplomatic way to phrase the question. Alas, there were no words that could tactfully inquire, When do they mean to hang you?
Julia, recognizing his dilemma, took pity on him. “The execution is set for today at noon.”
“So—so soon?” Pickett asked, feeling as if he had received a blow to the solar plexus.
“If you wish to withdraw the offer, I understand.”
“No!” Far from reneging, Pickett resolved to go to Mr. Colquhoun’s residence and roust the magistrate from his bed, if necessary. “I must go now—I’m sure you agree there is no time to waste—but shall I come back and tell you what I discover?”
She nodded. “That would be very kind of you, Mr. Pickett.”
“In the meantime, is there anything you need? Anything else, I mean, anything I could bring you—” Granted, he had no money with which to purchase any item she might request, but in his misspent youth he had managed to eke out a living through petty thievery; he would readily do so again, if only he might dispel the shadows from her eyes.
“Thank you, but no,” she said, giving him a bleak smile.
He knew her well enough to understand what she didn’t say. With her execution only a few hours away, she didn’t expect to live long enough to need anything beyond the contents of the small, dark cell: the narrow cot, the modicum of heat and light provided by the coals in the brazier, and the meals, such as they were, provided by the guard. He would have taken her in his arms and stroked her ravaged hair, but he knew she would see this as an insult rather than a comfort. And so he bade her goodbye, touched his hand to the brim of a hat that wasn’t there, and returned once more to Bow Street.
He had all the felicity of discovering that, yes, Mr. Colquhoun was in his office, but there, it seemed, his luck ran out.
“Let me remind you,” the magistrate said sternly, “that Lady Fieldhurst was found guilty of murder by a jury of her peers—”
“Her peers? Her husband’s, more like,” Pickett interpolated.
Mr. Colquhoun heaved a weary sigh. “Look here, young man, I have no doubt you sincerely think you know something, but getting a stay of execution is not as easy as you seem to think, and certainly not on no more evidence than a baseless accusation.”
“It isn’t baseless,” Pickett insisted. “If you don’t believe me, go to the Foreign Office and ask them. They’ll tell you—”
But even as Pickett urged this course of action, he remembered his own failure in making anyone there listen to him, and knew such an attempt was unlikely to succeed even if he could persuade Mr. Colquhoun to pursue it. Either way, there seemed little chance of putting the question to the test, for the magistrate pressed one hand to his temple.
“Stop shouting at me,” he grumbled, although Pickett had hardly raised his voice. “I’ve the devil of a head this morning, and I’m due back at the bench, so if you’ll excuse me—”
Mr. Colquhoun heaved himself to his feet, and Pickett knew there was no help to be had from his last, best hope. He knew of no one else who possessed the influence, let alone the desire, to plead in Julia’s behalf.
As he left the Bow Street Public Office, however, it occurred to him that he did, in fact, number one such person among his acquaintances. He did not particularly look forward to the prospect of begging a favor from this gentleman, of all people, and especially not in his present guise; a night spent beneath Blackfriars Bridge had, he feared, done nothing to improve his appearance. Still, the loss of such insignificant things as his pride and self-respect was surely a small price to pay in exchange for Julia’s life—even if he himself could have no part in that life once it was spared. And so he trudged back to Mayfair and the Albany flat where resided one Lord Rupert Latham.
“John Pickett,” he informed the goggle-eyed manservant who opened the door in answer to his knock, “of—John Pickett,” he finished lamely, once more regretting the loss of the authoritative phrase “of Bow Street” that had been so useful in his dealings with such uncooperative persons as the man he had come to see. “I should like to have a word with Lord Rupert, if I may.”
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