From the Charred Remains (Lucy Campion Mysteries)

by Susanna Calkins

  He did. “I suppose he doesn’t want to talk to a constable.” He clipped his feet together, military style. “I’ll wait over here. And Lucy—”

  “Yes?”

  “Make sure Mister Petry doesn’t do any picking while I’m watching, alright?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” she said, walking over to Sid, who was now talking to a perfume-seller. The woman’s pocket was hanging a bit heavy at her side, not tucked away as it should have been. An easy mark.

  “Hey there, Sid,” she said. “Planning on buying some perfumes?”

  He grinned, not looking at all chagrined. “Lucy!” he said, moving away from the perfume stall. Only a quick flick of his eyes toward the woman’s purse betrayed his thoughts. “No one after you today?”

  “It seems not,” she said. “Listen. Where’s the man who followed me yesterday? We need to ask him some questions.”

  “‘We?’ Is Annie here?” Sid rubbed his light brown whiskers. “Oh. You meant the constable.” He looked disappointed.

  “Sid,” Lucy said firmly, drawing his arm in hers. She started to walk him toward the constable. “Constable Duncan isn’t concerned—at this moment—about your goings-on. I need you to tell him everything about that man you followed yesterday.”

  “I’ll point him out.” Sid grimaced. “You know, he’s a funny sort.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He didn’t come here straightaway,” Sid explained. “I followed him to The Sparrow. You know, the inn down by the docks.”

  Lucy shrugged. She’d not spent too much time in that area along the Thames, as she’d heard that sailors were a rough-and-tumble lot. “Do you think he’s staying there?”

  “I thought so. He didn’t go in though.”

  “No?” Lucy asked. “What did he do?” She waited for Sid to respond, but his eyes had slid over a buxom young woman carrying a large straw basket on her head. She pinched his forearm to reclaim his attention.

  “Ow!” he cried, rubbing his arm. “That hurt!”

  “Where did the man go?”

  “That’s the odd part. First, he hid behind a bush. Which meant I had to hide too, so he wouldn’t see me watching him.”

  “That is odd,” Lucy said, trying to imagine the scene. “Then what happened?”

  “He was watching the door of the inn, as far as I could tell. I was about to leave when a man came out of the inn. Gentry, you know? So our man followed the chap.” Sid pushed his gray cap back. “He followed him straight to the magistrate’s house, if you can believe that!”

  “To the magistrate’s house?” Lucy exchanged a glance with Duncan, who’d been listening intently. “Was the gentleman the Earl of Cumberland?”

  “Dunno,” Sid grinned. “Don’t know no earls.”

  After Lucy quickly described the Earl, Sid shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. That sounds like him. I saw a woman waiting for him a few houses down the way. Fancy-like, but not gentry, you know what I mean? She looked like she knew the Earl quite well. Plopped a kiss right on his cheek. Earl’s ladybird, if I had to guess.”

  “No, I think that was the Earl’s wife, Lady Cumberland,” Lucy said slowly. It surprised her that the pair had arrived to the magistrate’s home separately, and that neither had arrived in a carriage.

  “You don’t say?” Sid smirked. “She smelled of trade, that one did. I can always spot one of our own. They did go in together, that’s true enough.”

  Duncan interrupted them then. “Did the man say anything to the Earl, before he went inside?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did.” Sid looked at them expectantly. “I’ll tell you, for a small price.”

  Seeing the constable’s jaw clench, Lucy jumped in. “The constable’s not going to pay you for your information, Sid,” she said. “You need to tell him everything.”

  Sid frowned. “The man started shouting at the Earl. He said, ‘Get them back for me!’ Then he pitched a few rocks at them before they made it inside.”

  “‘Get them back for me’?” Lucy repeated. “You’re sure that’s what the man said?” At Sid’s nod, she asked, “Well, what happened next?”

  “Our fellow stayed outside, watching the magistrate’s door.” Sid put his fist in his other hand. “I didn’t like him hanging about, no siree. I thought he might have scared Annie. So I tore into him. Made like someone escaped from Bedlam, I did. Came at him, mad-like.” Sid smacked his lips. “Then, I followed him here.”

  “And he’s still here?” Lucy asked, looking at the sprawl of humanity made homeless by the Fire. “He didn’t leave?”

  “Naw, he’s still here. Last night, I could tell he was settling down, like everyone else here. I went over to Aubrey’s shop. Told Avery where he was, I did. And then I came back. As good as any place to rest my head.”

  “So where is he?” the constable said.

  Sid’s eyes had turned calculating again. “What’s in it for me? After all, I spent a day and night following this man. Time I could have spent earning some coins.”

  “You’ll tell me now.” Duncan’s tone brooked no nonsense. “As a good law-abiding citizen.”

  Sid clammed up, his features taking a sullen look. “Don’t have to.”

  This was getting them nowhere. Lucy decided to intervene. “What a clever lad you’ve been,” she said to Sid. “Following that man to the Sparrow, following him to the magistrate’s home, following him here. You’ve been ever so helpful. I’m sure Constable Duncan appreciates your help. He might even put in a good word for you, if you find yourself in a scrape.” She looked meaningfully at Duncan.

  “Of course,” Duncan said, through clenched teeth. “Now out with it.”

  For a moment Sid was silent. Resentment and the grudging wish for appreciation seemed to battle across his features. Lucy thought he might not answer the constable at all. Finally he spoke. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a small crowd of men sitting on a low stone wall. They were huddled around a small fire. “The one on the end.” He looked back at Lucy. “And I ain’t no ‘lad.’”

  Peering at the men, Lucy tugged Duncan’s sleeve. “I see him. It’s him, I know it.”

  Duncan nodded. “Stay here.” He walked over, Lucy on his heels, despite his order to the contrary. Looking down at the man, he said, “I’ll have a word with you.”

  The man looked up, wary. He still bore a mark, now a great purpling bruise, across his face where Lucy had struck him with the branch the day before. Recognizing Lucy, the man looked startled. He made as if to run away, but Sid had already grabbed him from behind. A few of the other men who’d been sitting near him edged away, although a few continued to look on vaguely, seeming to welcome the break in the monotony.

  “Going somewhere, soldier?” Duncan asked. “Not before you answer some of my questions.”

  Shaking free from Sid, the man slumped back on the wall, not making eye contact. Lucy wondered how Duncan had known he was a soldier. On closer inspection, though, she could see that the man bore the common wound found among many former soldiers. Injuries to the right forefinger and thumb, usually having been broken when muskets backfired during battle. She guessed this was what had happened to Avery, although he had lost his finger and his thumb outright.

  Seeming resigned, the man looked at them. “What, Constable? What do you want to know?”

  “Who are you?” Duncan demanded. “Tell me immediately, or I’ll have you hauled off to jail for assault.”

  “Assault?” the man asked, but with little surprise in his voice. “I just wanted what’s mine.”

  “You attacked me!” Lucy said angrily. “I could have been killed!”

  “You did all right for yourself,” the man muttered, rubbing the bruise on his head. “’Sides, I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I told you that already.”

  Duncan gave her a pained look. “Lucy, please.” He looked sternly at the man. “Speak. What was your business with this woman?”

  The man sighed. “My name is Asht
on Hendricks.” He jerked his head at Lucy. “I didn’t mean to hurt her, but the brooch she was holding belongs to me. Same as the ring. I know she has that too.”

  “Well, that’s a little hard to prove,” Duncan said. “We have it on good authority that those items belong to Lord Cumberland. Not to you.”

  Hendricks’s face first mottled, then paled. “To Lord Cumberland!” He spat. “My arse!” He then proceeded to let loose a string of profanities that shocked Lucy more than she liked to let on. Although some of it she couldn’t even understand, giving his thick accent.

  “Alright. Stop that!” Duncan said, holding up his hand. “You’ve admitted already that you attacked this woman yesterday. For that alone, you’re off to jail.” He pulled a whistle from under his shirt, and made as if to blow for a nearby bellman.

  “No, please!” Hendricks said. He turned haggard eyes toward Lucy. “Please, miss. I humbly beg your forgiveness. I never meant to hurt you. I just needed to talk to you!”

  “By dragging her into the trees?” Duncan said. “Scaring her half to death?”

  “Miss, I truly am sorry,” Hendricks said. “I have—had—a daughter myself. About your same age, she was. I’d have near killed any man who dared lay a hand on her.”

  Behind her, she could hear Sid snort. Duncan made a similarly dismissive sound. Lucy laid a hand on the constable’s arm. Something about the man seemed so pitiful. Besides, it seemed important to hear what he had to say.

  “I’m sorry you lost your daughter,” she said. “Did she die in the plague?”

  “No, she was in Carlisle,” he said. “The plague was light upon us, thanks be to God. Some families in York did succumb.” He nodded respectfully at Duncan, having correctly identified his place of origin. Lucy looked at the constable, momentarily distracted. She wondered again if he had lost family in the great death.

  “The toll was nothing like it was in London,” Duncan said, not giving up his line of inquiry. “Tell me why you’ve been harassing the Earl.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Hendricks said, faltering.

  “The Earl said you tried to kill him,” Lucy pointed out, taking a step back, having retained a healthy fear of murderers. “That you’ve made several attacks on him over the last few months. You loosened the reins of his horse, took a shot at him.”

  “And I saw you throw rocks at him last night! Right outside the magistrate’s home!” Sid volunteered.

  Hendricks sighed. “I never tried to kill him. Scare him a bit, ’tis all.”

  “And to get back what’s yours?” Lucy asked. “The brooch and the ring, you said.”

  “You’re a long way from home,” Duncan said. “Just to reclaim a little treasure that you lost gambling.”

  “They belonged to my daughter. She died, just a few months ago. In childbirth.” Hendricks looked heavenward. Lucy thought for a moment he was praying, but then saw him blinking back tears. She shivered. So many women died that way, in the throngs of delivery. Even the most skilled of midwives could not always save them. “What about the babe?” Lucy asked. “Did it survive her travail?”

  Hendricks glanced at her. “He’s alive. A wonderful blessing he is too. I’ve got a wet nurse tending him these days, but I’ve already been gone longer than I would’ve liked. He’s the only family I have left, you see. My wife, my poor child’s mother, died long ago.”

  Lucy thought back to what she had gleaned about the card game from Tilly and Jacques Durand. “You put the brooch into the card game,” she said slowly, “which you then lost. We know the Earl put in the signet ring. We know you had already left the game, but stayed in the tavern, watching the game from another table.”

  “So it would seem that neither the brooch nor the ring are yours,” Duncan said sternly. “Yet you’ve claimed them as your own.”

  “The brooch belonged to my daughter!” Hendricks said, his voice becoming a bit wild. “I had to watch it get bid again and again! I want it back! I need it back!”

  “The brooch didn’t exactly belong to your daughter though, did it?” Lucy asked. She tried to adopt the magistrate’s tone when he questioned a witness. “Wasn’t it, in fact, made from your daughter’s bones?”

  At her question, Duncan looked taken aback. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him what she had learned from Dr. Larimer about the brooch.

  Mister Hendricks’s eyes had welled with tears. “Yes. I had the brooch made shortly after she passed. It was the last thing I have of my precious Amelie. I thought,” here he stumbled, perhaps seeing the disgust in their faces, “that her child deserved to have something from his mother. Something beautiful. I thought, a brooch…” His voice trailed off.

  “Well, why then would you have gambled it away?” Lucy asked. Truly, the man’s actions made no sense. “That scarcely seems like something you should do with such a treasured piece!”

  “I hardly know why.” Hendricks paused. “I suppose I wanted to remind Cumberland of who I was. What I had lost.”

  “Why ever would you do that?” Lucy asked. “Who is Lord Cumberland to you?”

  To this, the man remained silent.

  “You’ve explained the brooch, but not the ring,” Duncan pressed. “You’ve no claim on that ring.”

  “Oh, but I do. That ring belonged to my daughter too.”

  Duncan looked disbelieving. “Thinking she’s noble, is she? What, you have a clinch with her mum? The Earl would have recognized her as his daughter then, wouldn’t he? His wife hardly seems cast off.”

  “No!” Hendricks said, aghast. “My daughter’s me own.”

  “How can that be then?” Lucy asked, her mind flashing through a number of possibilities. “You mean the Earl gave the ring to her? Why ever would he have given your daughter such an expensive piece? Was she his—?” She couldn’t bring herself to say “mistress,” the man looked so openly distraught.

  “Not the Earl. His son,” Hendricks said through clenched teeth. “The less-than-honorable Master Clifford.”

  “Lord Cumberland’s son,” Duncan stated, looking suddenly weary. “He dallied with your daughter.”

  Lucy detected an accusing note in the constable’s tone. Hendricks also seemed to hear it too, and flushed. “I was away, you see. Fighting for King Charles in Holland. Fought against the French too.” He paused. “I thought I had placed Amelie in service at a good home before I left. She was a ladies’ maid for Lady Cumberland. That’s where she met their son.”

  What happened next was heartbreakingly obvious. Lucy stiffened, sensing Duncan’s thoughts from the way his eyes flicked toward her. Gentry don’t marry servants, they just use them for their own pleasures. Lucy felt sick. The master of the household was expected to protect his servants, but as was so common, the younger, comely women were often abused in the households of the very men who had promised to protect them. She had a stack of ballads in her pack that sang about this very moral tale.

  Hendricks went on. “About four months ago, I received a letter from Amelie. She was so happy! She was bearing Clifford’s child, but thought it would be all right because the young man intended to marry her, she said. In secret. But why keep it secret? Made no sense to me.”

  “They could have had a good reason!” Lucy said, digging her toe in the dirt.

  Both men looked at her, with pitying expressions. “No, lass. He didn’t have a good reason. He was just a flippery fellow, afraid to stand up to his parents,” Hendricks said. “It took me almost two months, but at last I managed to get temporary leave from my captain, and I raced home, hoping it was not too late. Of course, it was. My daughter was already eight months along in her confinement by that point. The Countess had ousted her out of the household, claiming she’d thieved from them. Branded her a whore too. Dismissed without a reference, she was. My daughter, heartbroken and sick as she was, she couldn’t bear to tell me of her shame.” He wiped his eye. “Thanks be to God, my dear lass had found a home in a Quaker household to spend her last days. T
he women there were taking care of my dear child, who was already suffering greatly.” His voice caught a little in his throat. “She was so frail and pale when she saw me. Yet still so happy about the babe. She swore to me, and the midwife who had attended her, that the marriage had happened, but neither the cad nor his parents would acknowledge either her or the babe.” He sighed. “Labor came early, but lasted too long, and no one could save her. Why he would no longer acknowledge it, I could not understand. She died, holding the babe—Ambrose—in her arms.”

  Hendricks’s face and voice grew hard. “I was determined to get justice for my child, and her son. Right now, unrecognized, my grandson’s considered a bastard, not legitimate. I went to see Cumberland and his blasted son soon after my daughter died, but neither would see me. Not too long later, the ring was stolen from my possessions. I know it was the Earl who took it! His henchmen at least!”

  He pounded his fist into his other palm. “I just wanted what was mine. I would never have put Amelie’s dear brooch in that wretched game, except I wanted to see his face. I knew he would know what it was. What it meant. What his son’s arrogance had done to my family.”

  “Then what happened?” Lucy asked. The man’s distress was hard to bear. Against her will, she found herself believing him. Almost.

  “The Earl took that bloody signet ring off his finger and added it to the stakes. He was taunting me, you see. He’s as good a player as that damn card sharp, Jack. He knew he’d win it back. I never played cards myself. Lost everything right away. Everything! I watched them pass the brooch around for a while—fingering it with their damnable dirty fingers! Though I had to leave the game, I couldn’t bear to leave the tavern. I set back to finish my pint to wait out the game. I suppose I had it in my mind that I might approach the winner at the end; try to get the brooch back privately.”