Frost Fair

by Edith Layton

  “Nice to be thinking about summer on a day like this, gone mad with the cold, dreaming of August, Mrs. Gow? Oh, she’s a treat, ain’t she?” Mrs. Gudge asked Maggie with a wink. “Oh cheer up, Mrs. Pushkin. Ain’t seen sight nor sound of that dashing runner, have you? Nor his bony crony, eh?”

  “You’ve a way with words, Mrs. Gudge,” her friend hooted.

  “It’s only the truth,” Mrs. Gudge said. “And we hear he was a nob too, that one, a viscount, no less, they all says, which goes to show you never can tell. Had I that much money, I’d be dining on lark’s tongues and such, and be the size of a barrel in no time, not looking like a scarecrow like he was—and don’t say a word about my girlish figger, Mrs. Gow, or I’ll be that dismayed with you.”

  They both laughed, but saw Maggie did not.

  “But you haven’t seen a wink of them, I’ll wager, my girl,” Mrs. Gudge went on. “Well, neither have we.”

  “That’s too bad,” Mrs. Gow said with a hoot of laughter, “leastways fer us it is!”

  “Aye, but it’s good news for the lass. It’s not on your plate anymore, to our way of thinking,” Mrs. Gudge said, leaning forward as her chair creaked in protest. “We ain’t seen so much as a grin out of you since that awful day, Mrs. Pushkin, and it’s been over a week. We’re here to say it’s done. The poor cove’s dead and buried, and there’s an end to it.”

  “I wish I could be sure,” Maggie said.

  “But ain’t it been a treat for business?” Mrs. Gudge said. “You been buying extra from us and lots more. Leastways, we hears lots of men been showing up at your back door.”

  This caused much laughter, amidst tea-scented snorts.

  “The butcher, the baker—and the coal carter, for starters,” Mrs. Gudge said. “And you’re wise to send that one on his way! Were I poor Eleanor, I’d settle him, I would. Why, if Mr. Gudge ever raised a hand to me!”

  “’E’d’ ’ave it off at the wrist! Or ye would, I should say, Mrs. Gudge, yer that quick with yer gutting knife!” Mrs. Gow exclaimed, with a screech of laughter at the thought.

  “Aye,” Mrs. Gudge said, after wiping her eyes on her sleeve, “the butcher, the baker but not the runner no more, nor his silent noble partner, neither. So it’s over, Luv, and done with, so give us a smile.”

  Maggie did. She was still smiling when she saw them out the door later, and found to her surprise she wasn’t pretending anymore. Her expression was contagious. It made Flea happy when he saw her later, and he went away with a huge silly smile himself when she assured him she was just fine, the way she’d done every day since the dead man had landed at her door. But this time he really seemed to believe her. And why not? She began to believe herself. It was over. She kept smiling, and the girls wore big grins for the rest of the afternoon too. Even little Davie stopped frowning.

  They laughed all through dinner, and after, when they sat in the front room together as usual. It was truly as if a storm had blown over them, and now they relaxed in the calm.

  But when it grew late, the girls begged Maggie to read them yet another chapter, even though they knew they had to go to bed early to wake with first light. They were restless. With all their work in the shop, still they were young, and didn’t get much exercise these wintry days. In spring and summer they had the parks to walk to together, and sometimes excursions on the river, or as a treat, a visit to a pleasure garden. But they’d only the shop and the street these days. It was too cold to venture farther. And too dangerous. They could never roam free in any weather. Not in London.

  There were gangs of wild children and those who preyed on any sort of children everywhere. The sprawling Newgate Prison compound lay just to the west, and so did the sharps and barkers and shills who might lure the innocent inside and into crime there too. The docks with their dangers of thieving mudlarks, drunken sailors and human wharf rats lay to the south. People and places too terrible for Maggie to warn them about lay to the east and north, but that they knew. None of them were exactly innocents.

  Annie had been with Maggie for six years now, but her only home before that had been the workhouse. Alice, a maid of all work, had been saved from a neighbor’s beatings three years past. Davie had only been with them six months; they’d found him wandering, half out of his wits from fear. He didn’t know where he’d come from or didn’t want to remember. He couldn’t read and couldn’t learn, and still didn’t speak much—and when he did he trembled.

  Not good weather for her children, Maggie thought, and tried to remember spring.

  “Well, that’s the end of that chapter,” she finally said, laying the book down, “and so to bed.”

  “Oh no, Missus!” Annie wailed. “How can we sleep not knowing what happens to the poor lady, what with a ghost in the castle and all?”

  “It’s only a story in a book, and well you know it,” Maggie said. “Off to bed with you all. It’s past time to sleep.”

  But she couldn’t when she got to her own bed. There was only so long she could gloat over her new treasure. And only so long she could think of what she had to do tomorrow. She was still listening for noises a half hour after she’d turned down her lamp, and plumping her pillow and turning it to its cool side yet again, when she heard someone scratching at her door.

  “Missus?” Alice whispered, when Maggie crept to the door, “there be someone outside, we seen him.”

  Maggie opened her door.

  “Aye,” Annie quavered, the two girls’ shadows fantastical as they wavered in the candlelight, “by the side, in the alley, twixt the front and back.”

  A small shadow spoke from behind them. “I seen it,” Davie whimpered.

  “It’s only a book, only a story, foolish to let it get you in such a bother,” Maggie grumbled, trying to sound convinced of that as she flung her night robe on. She went downstairs with them and looked out their window.

  But there was someone, or something, standing by the rubbish. She wouldn’t have noticed, but she saw it shift as though from foot to foot. So it was live, she thought with relief, though if it were a few hours earlier she’d never have thought about it being dead at all. About five feet tall, and cold, from the look of things—if it were alive it would have to be. It was freezing out, and now a fitful moon wrought strange shadows on more newly fallen snow.

  She could sit and wait until morning, like a mouse in a corner, waiting for the cat to walk away, Maggie thought. Or she could confront the thing and chase it. Or at least see what it was. It was like when you got a fish spine in your hand, she decided—you could pass agonizing moments easing it out, or you could yank it. It was sickening however you did it, but at least it was over faster that way. She didn’t think of herself as courageous. But it was late, and she was frightened, and so were her children, and there was only one of it whatever it was, and there were four of them. And after all, no matter how hard she looked she could see it was only five feet tall.

  She flung a coat on, picked up the bullseye lantern, lit and shuttered it before she could think better of it, and shushing the girls, stepped out the back door into the night. She placed her feet carefully so as not to make the frigid snow squeak, and crept up on the silent figure. When she got within two feet of it, she pulled back the shutter on the lantern, and ready to fling herself sideways if anything came hurtling towards her, and cried, “HOLD!”

  The face that turned toward her in the sudden spear of light from her lantern was young, and even more terrified than she was.

  “I’ve a pistol!” she lied, “don’t move!”

  The boy tensed, as if to run. But the mention of the pistol, and the blinding light in his eyes, froze him. He threw mittened hands in the air. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled. “I ain’t done nuffink, I swear!”

  “Then what are you doing here?” Maggie demanded, and added, because power had gone to her head, “No lies, or I will shoot!”

  “Spanish Will, he paid me half a crown, to keep watch, he did, you can ask him,” the boy panted,
trying to peer past the light to the figure who held it high. “Through the night, he said, to see who come in and went out of the fishmongers’, that’s all, I swear, don’t shoot.”

  She didn’t. She took him into the kitchen and gave him some hot tea instead. He said he was twelve, and looked ten. He lived by the river when he could find a place to sleep there, was dirty as a coal carter though whatever he was covered with didn’t smell as good, and was frightened half to death. Whether it was of her, or what Spanish Will would do to him when he found he’d been discovered, Maggie couldn’t say. She doubted the boy himself could.

  “Well,” she finally said, “I suppose it’s not your fault. You can keep watch from in here as well as out there. It’s too cold to breathe outside tonight, and I don’t want two dead bodies laid at my door, do I? But you listen,” she said shaking a finger at the starved-looking boy, “do you stir one step into my house or shop from where you sit tonight, you will regret it! And don’t say one word to my girls, nor give so much as a look at our Davie. You sit by the fire, and don’t stir a stump until I come down in the morning, or it will go hard with you, you hear? And Spanish Will won’t hear a word of this if you mind your manners, understand?”

  The boy shrank back in his chair, and nodded. She saw the girls into the room off the kitchen that they shared, and made sure they bolted their door. She took Davie to his cupboard and closed his door tight. She locked and bolted all the doors to the shop again, and then with one more threatening look to the boy, she left him near the hearth to keep his watch through the night.

  As the boy drowsed in unaccustomed comfort in her kitchen, Maggie sat up in bed, thinking about how safe she really was now. She was protected by a starveling boy, her own three child servants, the knife by her bedside, the mallet on the table by her door, and the small knife she kept under her pillow. She’d have to buy a pistol, she decided, then turned down her lamp, and tried to go to sleep.

  Chapter Seven

  If he could learn to ignore the way his own Mama looked at him these days, Lucian thought, he would learn to tolerate the whispers in his wake at his club as well. He could deal with the way conversation stopped when he entered a room, pretend he didn’t notice and ride that out too. He could, he supposed, even learn to ignore the way his usually plaint and complaint young mistress looked at him since the gossip had started, the way she jumped if he made a sudden movement, and grew round eyes if he merely raised his voice. But enough was enough.

  The boy he spoke to at Bow Street raced ahead of him to show him into the small room Spanish Will used as an office, and bowed him inside. Lucian brushed past the boy and strode into the room. The boy kept staring at him. With good reason. He was dressed simply and casually, but even so, more magnificently than anyone the workers at Bow Street usually saw. His greatcoat was open to show he wore a fawn jacket, buckskins and top boots, the sum of which even the boy could tally in his head, and which made his eyes widen. But the runner didn’t think the viscount looked well, even so. His face was white, grim. His eyes glittered and his mouth was held in a tight thin line. He looked like a man at the end of his rope, Will thought. Interesting.

  Lucian tossed a sheet of paper on to Will’s desk. “Have you seen this?” he asked tersely.

  Will glanced at the caricature. It was a simple cartoon, not as elaborate as most. It showed a well-dressed gaunt man looking as much like Death as he did like a gentleman, lugging a sack of gold with the words “Last Will and Testament” printed on it. A trail of coins spilling from the sack lead to a comical-looking dead man, laying naked on the cobblestones, plump belly up. A fat fishwife was shrieking, and the balloon over her head read, “Oh me! And I ordered flounder, I was sure!” Some of the spilled coins tastefully covered the dead man’s genitals.

  “Oh, aye,” Will said laconically, watching Lucian. “I saw it yesterday.”

  Lucian was taken aback. “You did?”

  “It’s my business to,” Will shrugged, “and so? Your point, my lord?”

  “My point,” Lucian said through gritted teeth, “is that this was displayed in a printshop window in St. James Street, and it’s vile slander!”

  “It hasn’t got your name on it,” Will said mildly.

  “It has that implication, and it’s unconscionable!”

  “Aye, likely it is,” Will agreed calmly, “but that’s how they make their money, my lord. The more scandalous they are the more they sell, the more they sell the more they eat. They hang them in the window and hope they catch on. It’s all they can do, and they change them every day with the way the wind of gossip’s blowing. The artist’s a young one, not brilliant, like Gilray—Gawd, but I do miss that man! He had a way with a picture, he did. Remember his Napoleon? Little dwarf always hopping mad. Made you laugh just to see him.

  “But the lad what’s done this one?” Will tapped the picture, “he’s not so good as Rowlandson, nor clever as Cruickshank neither, but he does what he can. You could wait ’til tomorrow, they’ll probably be stale by then and out of the window. Or buy up the lot now and burn them. They’re probably cheaper than firewood this winter, at that. It wasn’t a big printing. I asked.”

  “I am aware of how they make their money,” Lucian snarled. “The point is I want it stopped.”

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” Will said innocently. “Neither can you. my lord. It’s a free press…unless you smear the King or the Prince too openly, of course.”

  “I know that! I mean I want the conjecture stopped, and the only way to do it is to find the murderer!”

  “Oh, so you already bought up the lot?”

  “I bought them, and told them that if they printed more they’d find themselves in court.”

  “But so would you, my lord, think on. Be sure, they will.”

  Lucian put two long hands on Will’s desk, and from the way they flexed, it was clear he’d have preferred to put them around the runner’s neck. He put his weight on them and leaned forward, glaring. “Look. Stop ‘my lording’ me to death. Stop being amusing. Stop playing with me. Find the murderer. That’s what I’m here to say. I’ll up the reward another one hundred pounds, do you hear? That’s right, one hundred more. A fortune for most runners, although I suppose, not you. It doesn’t matter. Just find the murderer.”

  “Hmm,” Will hummed, not blinking in the furious face of the man whose own face almost touched his now. “Wouldn’t I love to, though? Another hundred, plus the extra fifty your brother posted yesterday does make a tidy sum, my lord.”

  Lucian blinked. He straightened and stood back. His eyes went flat. Will had seen men look like that when they heard their own sentence of death pronounced. The viscount had obviously been dealt a stunning blow. Anguish shadowed that thin face, the man looked crushed… No, Will thought, if you put this man on a rack for a week, he’d only looked rumpled. But the pain was there now, in the back of those blinded gray eyes.

  “My brother?” Lucian murmured. “But…I told him I’d taken care of it…”

  “So you did, or so he said. But he was worried. Very worried.”

  “About me?” Lucian asked softly.

  “About all of this,” Will said with a shrug, “or so I gathered. Very devoted to your uncle, he was. And though he didn’t say it, he knows you weren’t. I think that’s all it was, but then you know him better than I do.”

  “I don’t,” Lucian said, almost to himself. “The truth is, I do not. Difference in ages, difference in upbringings… But that’s neither here nor there,” he said more briskly. “It’s getting out of proportion now. A tragedy, certainly. But now it’s on its way to becoming a scandal. The thing is, Mr. Corby, I want to do all I can to get this resolved. Uncle’s dead, killed in an unpleasant, unforeseen fashion. No one knows why, we don’t even know why he was found dead where he was. Some think they might have a guess,” he said with an ugly twist to his mouth, as though he’d bit on something even more bitter than his words, “but we both know otherwise.” He paused and a
dded, “or at least, I know otherwise.”

  He ran a hand through his neatly brushed hair, causing it to ripple and fall out of its precise style, and he didn’t seem to notice or care. His voice held baffled pain, a rare thing for him, and it was a mark of the runner’s knowledge of men that he knew it.

  “I didn’t do it, or know it was done,” Lucian said. “I must discover who did. It’s not just my reputation—I suppose it is. But I need an answer. Uncle behaved erratically and paid for his carelessness with his life. When a man acts so out of character there must be a reason, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out.”

  “Neither can I—yet, that is to say,” Will said. “From the look of things right now we may never find who done for him. But you’re right. At least, we should be able to know why. Take a chair, if you will, my lord. There’s some things we should talk about.”

  Lucian sat, and waited, watching as the runner tapped his pen against the desk a few times. A smooth, cruel face, Lucian thought, that gave nothing away. A very clever man, to be sure. The runner treated him with utmost civility, Lucian realized, and yet at the same time with no respect at all. He might well be as good as he said he was.

  Spanish Will turned unreadable eyes on his visitor. “Your brother mentioned something about a bride gift your uncle might have been after buying at a bargain, in that part of town. That’s a lively possibility.”

  “At a fish store?” Lucian said on a bitter laugh. “Hardly. Uncle was not the sort to buy his lady love oysters. I doubt he even knew what they’re supposedly good for.”

  Will smiled more warmly than the jest deserved. It was a weak attempt at a joke, but he appreciated it for what it was. The nobleman was obviously, in his chilly way, trying to be congenial. Better and better.

  “Well, he might not have been killed right there, as Mrs. Pushkin noted; he may have already been dead when he got there,” Will said as affably. “He may have stumbled there, or been dropped when his murderer took alarm. But the thing of it is, my lord, that he might have been killed on the way there.”