Where Serpents Sleep: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

by C. S. Harris

  Miss Jarvis plunged after her into a malodorous crowd of men in shiny corduroy jackets and greasy caps. A woman with the limp tails of codfish dangling from her apron brushed past with a sibilant hiss, her elbows clearing a path as she went. A porter bent nearly double beneath a huge dripping hamper that had soaked the shoulders and back of his canvas coat barked, “Move on, there! Move on.”

  Miss Jarvis whisked her skirts out of the way and kept going. “Have you learned more about Hannah Green?”

  Tasmin Poole said, “I got one or two ideas about where she might be, but I ain’t had time t’go there yet.”

  “Where?” asked Sebastian.

  The woman glanced over at him. “If I tell you and you find her, then she”—here Tasmin jerked her head toward Miss Jarvis—“won’t give me my money.”

  Miss Jarvis said, “You’ll be paid for any information that enables us to find Hannah Green. I’ve told you that.”

  Tasmin Poole stared out at the tangled rigging of the oyster boats moored along the wharf, each with its own black signboard and milling crowd of men and women massed around a white-aproned salesman. She bit her lip, obviously weighing the odds of being given a chance to track down the missing Hannah Green herself against the risk of divulging her information here and now. At last she said, “Hannah used t’work the Haymarket before she come to the Academy. She might have bolted back there.”

  Sebastian said, “I’ve been told Rose was in love with Ian Kane. Is that true?”

  Tasmin Poole’s laugh was a melodious peal of merriment that brought to mind palm trees swaying in a soft tropical breeze. “That’s rich, all right.”

  Miss Jarvis cast Sebastian a sharp look. He knew it was only with effort that she kept from demanding, And who is Ian Kane?

  To Tasmin, Sebastian said, “I take it Rose wasn’t particularly fond of Mr. Kane?”

  “She despised him,” said Tasmin Poole. She’d caught the eye of a red-capped fisherman in a striped jersey sitting on the side of his boat and smoking a clay pipe. The fisherman smiled, and Tasmin smiled back.

  Sebastian said, “For any particular reason?”

  Tasmin brought her gaze back to Sebastian’s face. “You mean, apart from the fact Kane’s a mean son of a bitch? Yeah. He’s hard on all his girls, but he was hardest of all on Rose. It was like he was tryin’ t’break her. Never did, though.”

  “She was afraid of him?” said Miss Jarvis.

  Tasmin threw her a scornful look. “We’re all afraid of him. But Rose—” She broke off.

  “Yes?” prompted Miss Jarvis.

  “Rose was afraid of someone else. She come to the Academy afraid.”

  “Any idea who she was afraid of?” asked Sebastian.

  The Jamaican twitched one thin shoulder. “She never was one to talk t’the rest of us.” She tipped her head to one side, her gaze thoughtful as she glanced from Miss Jarvis to Sebastian, then back. “You keep talking about Rose and Hannah, but you never ask nothin’ about Hessy.”

  Sebastian sidestepped a barrel piled high with black oyster sacks. “Who?”

  “Hessy Abrahams. She was another girl at the house. She left the same night as the other two.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her before?” said Miss Jarvis, sounding ever so slightly aggrieved.

  Again that faint twitch of the shoulder. “I didn’t think you was interested. You only asked about Rose and Hannah.”

  “You’re certain this Hessy Abrahams left with the other two women?” asked Sebastian.

  “Well, she sure ain’t been seen since.”

  For one startled moment, Sebastian’s gaze met Miss Jarvis’s. The air filled with the cries of the fish salesmen shouting, “Ha-a-ndsome cod! All alive! Alive! Alive, oh!” and “Here! This way for a splendid skate.”

  Tasmin Poole’s fingers crept up to touch her split lip. Then she must have realized what she was doing, because her hand fluttered away and she stared off across the shed with its piles of reddish brown shrimp and white-bellied turbots gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the gloom.

  “Looks like someone worked you over pretty good,” said Sebastian.

  The Cyprian’s palm cupped her bruised cheek, her lip curling. “Bloody magistrate.”

  “Sir William?” said Sebastian.

  She lifted her brown gaze to his. “That’s right.” She spit the words out contemptuously. “He likes it rough. Sometimes he gets carried away. This is nothin’. You should’ve seen what he did t’ Sarah once. Broke two of her ribs. She couldn’t work for near a month.”

  “Did he come to the house last week?” Sebastian asked suddenly.

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” said the Jamaican warily.

  “Which night?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know.” Suddenly frightened, she gripped the folds of her cloak more tightly around her. “I need t’be gettin’ back.” She threw an avaricious glance at Miss Jarvis. “You find Hannah Green in Haymarket, I get my money.” It wasn’t a question.

  Miss Jarvis said, “Just tell me where to meet you, and when.”

  “I’ll contact you.”

  “You don’t know who I am.”

  The Cyprian laughed. “I know who you are,” she said, and slipped away through the crowd gathered around an oak-sided Dutch eel boat.

  Sebastian stared down at the pierced, coffin-shaped barges floating at the eel boat’s stern. He’d never liked eels, ever since he’d watched as a boy when the half-eaten body of a drowned wherryman was pulled from the river, a dozen long black eels sliding sinuously away from it.

  Miss Jarvis said, “You’ve heard of this Sir William before. Who is he?”

  Sebastian swung his head to look at her. “Sir William Hadley.”

  “From Bow Street?”

  “The very one.”

  To his surprise, she let out a sharp laugh. “And my father pressured him not to investigate the fire. Now that’s rich.”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance. Sebastian squinted up at the sky. “We should have brought your carriage. It’s going to rain.”

  They turned their steps back toward the bridge. She said, “I gather Ian Kane is the man who owns the Orchard Street Academy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Lord Devlin.” She swung to face him, oblivious to the red-cheeked fishmonger at her side shouting, “Who’ll buy brill, oh? Brill, oh!” She said, “What else do you know that you’re not telling me?”

  He met her indignant stare with a bland smile. “Miss Jarvis, I am not some Bow Street Runner you hired to give you daily reports.”

  She was an inch or two shorter than he, but she still managed to look down her nose at him. “I would think that common courtesy—”

  “Courtesy?” He jerked her out of the way just as the fishmonger in the nearest stall slopped a bucket of water across his marble slab. “Believe me, Miss Jarvis, it is courtesy that prevents me from regaling you with the sordid details of this murder.”

  “If I were a man, or if I’d asked for your assistance in discovering the facts surrounding the murder of a cleric of impeccable character, you would tell me?”

  “Probably,” he said slowly, not sure where she was going with this.

  “Then I would like to point out to you that in this case, ignorance is not bliss. Last night, two men tried to kill me because of what I do not know.”

  They had reached that part of Billingsgate known colloquially as Oyster Street from all the oyster boats drawn up at the wharf. Sebastian stared at the bobbing red cap of a man in the hold of the nearest boat, his spade rattling over the gray mass of sand and shells at his feet. “Believe me, Miss Jarvis, you don’t want to hear about this.”

  “On the contrary, my lord Devlin. I do.”

  He studied her squarely held shoulders, the contemptuous twist of her lips. “Very well, Miss Jarvis. I will tell you. Ian Kane is an ex-miner from Lancashire who enjoys painting nude women and sunlit buildings. He also in all likelihood murdered his first wif
e. Whether or not he murdered Rachel Fairchild I do not know, but he certainly expressed a desire to do so, seeing as how when she ran away from his house last Wednesday, he was on the verge of selling her to a customer for two hundred pounds.”

  “Selling her?”

  “That’s right. We don’t quite put our women and children up on the auction block like the Americans, but we still sell four-year-olds to chimney sweeps and nubile young women to anyone with the coin to buy them.”

  He hesitated. She stared back at him, tight lipped, and said, “Go on.”

  “Very well. The customer in question—let’s just call him Luke, shall we? It seems that Luke is a thief. A very successful thief who, incidentally, had an ambitious project scheduled for Monday night, just hours after the murders in Covent Garden. Is that significant? I don’t know.”

  Her face was quite pale, but all she said was, “What else?”

  “Well, then there’s Rachel’s betrothed, the inappropriately named Tristan Ramsey. It seems Mr. Ramsey was very well aware of the fact that his future bride was not in Northamptonshire recuperating her health. In fact, he knew she was at the Orchard Street Academy.”

  “How did he know that?”

  “He went there as a customer.” He left it at that. Hero Jarvis might bring out the worst in Sebastian, but he wasn’t so ignoble as to tell her what Ramsey had done to Rachel there, on the stained sheets of that Covent Garden brothel. He said instead, “Ramsey told Rachel’s brother, Cedric Fairchild, where she was. According to Cedric Fairchild, he went to see her last week, but she refused to leave with him. Both men claim they don’t know why she ran away from home, or how she ended up in Covent Garden.”

  Miss Jarvis sucked in a deep breath that stirred the once-jaunty ribbons of her hat, now wet and limp. Two tiny lines appeared between her brows as she studied his face. He wondered what she saw there. “But you know, don’t you?” she said. “Or at least, you have some idea.”

  He stared out over the stairs of Billingsgate, to the wind-whipped, choppy brown river. He was thinking about the leper colony that had once stood in the marshes of what had since become St. James’s Park, and what Rachel had told her brother about the diseased and rotting outcasts who threatened society.

  “Tell me,” said Miss Jarvis.

  He swung his head to look at her, at her windblown brown hair and her once fine burgundy carriage dress now ruined by the slime and muck of the fish market. She was brilliant and well-educated and more aware of the harsh realities of the world than most women of her station. But the explanation that was beginning to take shape in his mind was too raw, too ugly to be spoken aloud.

  He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.”

  She didn’t believe him, of course. She remained uncharacteristically silent, her lips pressed into a thin, straight line, her shoulders stiff as he guided her to where Tom was walking the chestnuts up and down the lane. He handed her up into the curricle. She remained withdrawn, lost in her own thoughts, until he swung the horses out into traffic and headed upriver, away from where she’d left her own carriage awaiting her outside Paul Gibson’s surgery.

  “This isn’t the way to the Tower,” she said suddenly, looking around.

  Sebastian set his horses at a brisk trot toward Upper Thames Street. “I thought you might enjoy coming with me to pay a call on Sir William.”

  She cast him a withering glance. “No, you didn’t. You want me there for some other reason. What is it?”

  He gave her a wry smile. “You’re quite right, Miss Jarvis. My motives are entirely disreputable. I’m simply looking forward to watching Sir William explain to Lord Jarvis’s daughter his own involvement in the murder Lord Jarvis ordered him not to investigate.”

  Chapter 35

  “Keep’em warm,” said Sebastian, pulling up in front of the Bow Street Public Office and handing Tom the reins.

  Tom blew out a long breath through the gap in his front teeth and tried to look nonchalant. “I reckon maybe I’ll walk ’em around the block,” he said, casting an uneasy glance at the bustling entrance to the public office.

  “One might almost imagine,” observed Miss Jarvis as Sebastian ushered her into the smoky, pungent din of the public office, “that your tiger finds the prospect of lingering too close to Bow Street a decidedly uncomfortable proposition.”

  “One might,” Sebastian agreed. The public office was crowded with the usual assortment of beggars and pickpockets, constables and barristers. He collared a harried, bucktoothed clerk who tried to brush past them. “Miss Hero Jarvis and Lord Devlin to see Sir William.”

  The clerk cast a dubious eye over their slime-smeared clothes, his thin nose twitching as the smell of oysters and hake and brill engulfed him. “I’m afraid Sir William has left strict instructions that he never be disturbed for an hour after—”

  “If you think,” said Sebastian with that icy self-composure only the son and heir of an earl could achieve, “that Sir William will thank you for leaving Lord Jarvis’s daughter waiting in the common lobby of a public office, you obviously have not considered the matter.”

  The clerk was a pale-skinned man with protuberant eyes and a short upper lip that refused to cover his pronounced front teeth. He swallowed convulsively, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down above his modest cravat. “Lord Jarvis’s d—” He broke off, his eyes bulging even more. “Please follow me,” he said, tripping over his own feet in his haste to lead them up the stairs to the private apartments overhead.

  He escorted them to a small anteroom, then paused. “If you’ll just wait here,” he whispered, extending both hands out palm flat in a gesture reminiscent of someone quieting a congregation. The man should have been a cleric, Sebastian thought, instead of a clerk. “I’ll tell Sir William you’re here.”

  “Why do I get the impression Sir William makes it a habit of slipping away from his duties every afternoon for an hour’s nap?” said Miss Jarvis as she watched the clerk creep through the door to their left.

  “I suspect you’re—” He broke off as a wailing shriek arose from the far side of the door. “What the devil?”

  Miss Jarvis reached the door before him, pushing it open without ceremony. The room was small, a cross between an office and a storage room overflowing with untidy files. The clerk stood just inside the door, his mouth now opening and closing silently on his large front teeth.

  Sir William half sat, half lay in an awkward pose in a padded chair behind a battered oak desk, his eyes wide and staring, his jaw slack, his head lolling at an unnatural angle.

  Sebastian expected Miss Jarvis to scream. Instead she said calmly, “Good heavens, someone’s broken his neck.”

  Jules Calhoun’s nose twitched. “What is that smell?”

  “Fish.” Sebastian tossed his coat to one side and stripped off his waistcoat. “I need a bath.”

  “It’s coming, my lord,” said the valet, picking up the offending coat with one crooked finger and heading for the door.

  “Oh, and, Calhoun?”

  The valet turned. “My lord?”

  “Somewhere in this city are two whores who formerly graced the parlor of the Orchard Street Academy. One, named Hessy Abrahams, hasn’t been seen since Wednesday of last week. The other, Hannah Green, arrived at the Magdalene House with Rose Fletcher but fled before the fire. She may or may not have gone to ground in the Haymarket. I need to talk to both of them—if they’re still alive.”