The Devil's Breath

by Tessa Harris

  Next he inspected her hands. They had seen work, but they remained young. Turning them over, he examined her fingers. They were wrinkled but her palms were still smooth, suggesting to him that she had been in the water for fewer than twenty-four hours. Moving down her body to her legs, Thomas saw that one, her left, appeared broken. He felt the shin bone. It was fractured just below the knee. He felt the other leg. There was a similar fracture there, too, suggesting that she had cracked both limbs when she hit the water. Furthermore, there was no sign of a struggle or a beating. All the evidence pointed to the fact that she jumped off a bridge. The weight of her clothes pulled her down and the tide had dragged her a few hundred yards downstream. Yet it was not so much how Agnes Appleton died that troubled Thomas, but why. Just what had made her do such a thing?

  Reluctantly he decided to conduct an intimate examination. The large round sores confirmed his fears. Agnes was suffering from the early stages of syphilis. She had, in all likelihood, been forced into prostitution, like so many young women who fell on hard times. He folded the cloth back over her face. How like Eliza she was, he thought to himself, but the body was beginning to turn in the heat and there was no time for sentimentality.

  It was growing late and he found Lydia sitting alone in the drawing room, staring forlornly at the topaz earring the woman at the workhouse in Hungerford had given her.

  “We shall look for this Mr. Faulks first thing tomorrow,” he assured her, settling himself beside her. “We will find Richard.”

  Chapter 23

  Death was beginning to visit the parish of Brandwick so regularly that the Reverend Lightfoot rarely left the church during what few hours of daylight there were. He found himself either in the vestry, writing up the register of deaths—there were very few baptisms and no marriages at all—or conducting funeral services in the nave. Only yesterday he had buried two more men and a child not four years old. Joseph Makepeace had asked for an extra pair of hands to help him turn the graveyard sods. In fact, the vicar was coming to regard funerals as rather mundane. They were neither celebrations of lives lived well, nor mournful services for those tragically cut short in their prime. They were mere formalities.

  He looked at the miniature of Margaret that he kept on his desk in the study. How he missed her guiding hand in everything he did. He still found himself asking for her opinion on matters, then turning to find no one there. So often he had told those recently bereaved that their loved ones had only passed to the other side. They were still present, albeit invisible. Only now he was coming to realize that this was not as simple as it sounded—it may even be a falsehood. When he spoke to her she never replied and soon, he feared, he would forget her voice, the way she walked, even her smile.

  The sun’s angry face had been screened behind the fog yet again, so he had worked by candlelight. The study door was open and, as he gazed at the little portrait, he heard his maid’s footsteps coming along the corridor. There was a knock.

  “You have a visitor, sir,” she told him. “Mistress Kidd.”

  For a moment he froze.

  “Shall I show her in, sir?”

  “Yes. Yes,” he said slowly, as if in two minds about receiving her. A moment later, Susannah appeared at the threshold.

  “Mistress Kidd. What brings you here?” he asked, rising from his chair. She walked in slowly, carrying a basket.

  “I have come to thank you, sir,” she replied.

  “For what?” His manner was strangely abrupt.

  “For the funeral service, sir.”

  He nodded his head.

  “And to say sorry, sir,” she continued.

  “Sorry?”

  She lifted her gaze. “For the way I . . .”

  His body grew rigid at the recollection of the moment in the cottage; how a thousand volts of electricity had surged through his frame at this woman’s touch, as if he had been struck by lightning.

  “Very well,” he said, not daring to look at her.

  There was an awkward silence until she stepped forward. “I brought you this,” she said, removing a cloth from her basket to reveal a pie. “ ’Tis apple,” she told him with a smile. “From my own orchard.” He did not look at it as she placed the pie dish on his desk, but kept his eyes lowered.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Another difficult pause followed before the widow took her leave.

  “I best be on my way, sir,” she told him, giving a shallow curtsy.

  “Very well,” he said. Then he instructed the maid: “Show Mistress Kidd out, if you please.”

  The girl did as she was told, bade the visitor a good day, and returned to the study. “Is there anything else you need, sir?”

  The vicar shook his head. “No, thank you,” he replied. But just as she was heading toward the door again, he called her back. “There is one more thing.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  He pointed to the apple pie on his desk. “Take that and feed it to the pigs.”

  Gabriel Lawson lived in a comfortable estate house that had once been inhabited by the late, and not-at-all lamented, lawyer James Lavington, who had died at the hands of Francis Crick. It lay overlooking Plover’s Lake on the Boughton estate. He had been given a small staff and a reasonable living, even though he found it necessary to supplement his income by other means on occasion. His gambling habits were proving a little costly and he had resorted to what he called “borrowing” a few pounds a month from the estate’s accounts to cover his expenses.

  That evening he had poured himself a brandy and was sitting by the fire awaiting his supper when there was a knock. A moment later his housekeeper appeared and exhorted him to come to the back door. There stood Ned Perkins in the half light of a murky evening. He was fingering his hat and looking troubled.

  “What is it?” asked Lawson.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir, but I thought you needed to know he’s back.”

  Lawson sighed. “The knife-grinder?”

  The foreman nodded sheepishly. “He be talking to the men now, by the threshing barns. Stirring things, he is.”

  Without a word, Lawson brushed past Perkins and marched over to the stables. Saddling up his horse, he rode out of the yard. “I’ll soon put paid to that troublemaker,” he said, galloping off toward the barns about a mile down the track.

  The steward found Joshua Pike standing on a bale of hay, addressing at least two score men. The light was dim and a few carried flaming torches. Lawson could see some of their faces in the half glow, men like Jack Budd and Tim Blackwell, men who were good workers. He was disturbed that they had allowed their heads to be turned by this rabble-rouser. Even more worrying was the fact that here were others, too, whom he did not recognize. Strangers, workers from nearby estates, he guessed.

  As he approached he could hear some of Pike’s words.

  “Every day this poison fog lingers you are risking your lives, and for what?” he cried, his arm rising and falling as he spoke.

  Some of the men cried “Aye,” in response. He was confident, belligerent, confrontational in his manner. If he wanted a fight, Gabriel Lawson told himself, he was ready for one.

  Skirting ’round the crowd, he guided his horse up to the bale where Pike was standing and loomed over him. Yet instead of falling silent, the young man, without bothering to look at the steward, pointed at him and cried out: “See, you are not free men. They would keep you in chains!”

  Incensed, Lawson nudged his horse closer to the knife-grinder, so that the animal’s breath wreathed his head. “You are trespassing, Pike,” he snarled. “This is private land.”

  But the troublemaker ignored Lawson’s words. Instead, he carried on addressing the men. “Have you no right to the land you work, brothers?”

  The steward felt his blood begin to boil. Such insolence. Such effrontery. He surveyed the men below. Some of them had directed their gaze toward him. Budd and Blackwell and a few others wore worried frowns. They started to retreat into the s
hadows. Seeing their wavering, Lawson decided to take advantage.

  “Have you not been given scarves and gloves to protect you from the fog while you work?” he cried. A few men mumbled in reply. “Have your hours not been lessened?” They were turning. He could see it in their gestures. Some of them muttered to each other. “Go home to your families and no more will be said,” he told them.

  The workers began to peel off in twos and threes, despite the knife-grinder’s exhortations. “We will win, brothers!” he called. “Be strong!” But his appeals were now falling on deaf ears, as more and more turned their backs on him and melted away into the murky darkness, Perkins among them.

  Now Lawson bent low from his horse down toward the bale, so that his face was level with Pike’s. Finally the young man turned; his tanned features bathed in the glow from a sconce that blazed nearby. He was smiling insolently.

  “If I catch you on this land again, I’ll see that you swing,” hissed Lawson.

  Still smiling, Pike shook his red-swathed head. “Your men may give you no choice,” he said. “If this fog kills many more, you’ll have to up their wages.”

  Lawson was minded to wipe the brazen smirk from his face with the back of his hand, but he restrained himself. The law was on his side. “Get out of my sight and never come back here again,” he growled through clenched teeth.

  The knife-grinder nodded, but he knew he had scored another small victory. He jumped down from the bale, strode over to his mule, and mounted it.

  “You should never underestimate the power of your men, Mr. Lawson,” he called as he turned and headed down the track.

  The steward shook his fist at him as he watched the mule carrying this thorn in his side back down the lane. That was the problem, he told himself. He knew only too well the sort of things his men were capable of.

  Chapter 24

  In the early hours of the next morning the deadly fog rolled into London. It came from the north and curled east up the Thames, so that by seven o’clock not a brig nor a barque could move from the wharfs. The temperature dropped like a stone and all sound was muffled by the pillow of poison that pressed down on the city.

  As soon as Thomas woke he knew it had come. He did not need to look out of the window. He could smell it on the air; the dry, clawing stench that was so familiar and so deadly. Dressing hurriedly, he went to wake Lydia.

  “ ’Tis here. The fog is here,” he told her, as she rubbed her sleepy eyes. Walking over to the shutters, he pulled them open to reveal the slate gray mist clinging to the panes. “We need to return to Boughton.”

  She sat up in bed, her hair tamed by a ribbon. “But Richard! What about Richard?” she protested.

  “We cannot continue our search in the fog, my love,” he told her, sitting down beside her on the bed. “All London will be paralyzed. We could be stuck here for days, if not weeks, if we do not head back today.”

  A look of despair scudded across her face. She knew what Thomas said was right, but she still clung to the hope that Richard was alive and close by. “Promise me we will return as soon as we can,” she pressed him.

  Thomas met her glare. “I give you my word,” he said, pulling her toward him.

  She nuzzled her head in his shoulder. “I know I am needed on the estate.”

  Thomas stroked her hair. In such a time of need, her place, he agreed, was at Boughton.

  Their carriage made slow progress to Snows Hill, where the regular coach left for Oxford. The fog was not as dense as it had been at Boughton. Nevertheless, the poor visibility made traveling hazardous. When they arrived, however, the porter told them the carrier company was canceling the service until the fog had lifted. By a stroke of good fortune their carriage driver heard of their plight and offered to undertake the journey to Oxford himself. So they set off. In a small and cramped vehicle designed for the streets of London that groaned on its axles over every rut in the road, they headed north through the spreading fog.

  Before their departure, Thomas had written a letter to the chimney sweep mentioned in Agnes’s last letter and left it in the care of Dr. Carruthers. As soon as the fog allowed men to go about their normal business, his mentor would facilitate its delivery. Just what the sweep’s reaction would be was anyone’s guess, but Thomas hoped that he would be able to return to the capital very soon to negotiate with Mr. Faulks in person. That was, of course, if he was not too late already. They were still no closer to fathoming the identity of this mysterious clerk who preempted their every move. Always seemingly one step ahead of them, he may well have already approached the sweep.

  Thomas looked across at Lydia as her body swayed with the movement of the carriage. She smiled weakly at him. Her skin was pale and her eyes red-rimmed from both the stinging mist and from crying. Now that the fog had hit London, returning to Boughton was the best course of action, he told himself, even though what they might find on their arrival still filled him with dread. In all probability the cloud still lingered and there may well be many more struck down, their lungs burning from the sulfur. Yes, the sooner he could get back to the estate, he assured himself, the better it would be for everyone concerned.

  The carriage clattered into Oxford in the early evening. All the way along the road from London the air had been murky but it had only slowed their journey a little. Thomas had never been happier to see the pepper pot dome on the top of Christ Church College. The fog that had previously obscured the haze had been greatly dispersed during their absence.

  They spent a reasonable night at The Black Horse and set off for Boughton the next morning in relatively good spirits. The cloud had lifted to the rounded tops of the hills to reveal that everywhere the once-green leaves on the trees were now scorched and withered. The pastureland, too, was brown and parched. They took in the harrowing scene in silence until Lydia spotted something strange.

  “What are those men doing?” she said, pointing out of the carriage window. Thomas leaned over to see. A human chain, spaced a few yards apart, was walking in a line from the top of one of the hills. The men’s eyes were cast to the ground as they progressed down the slope toward the lane.

  “They seem to be looking for something,” remarked Thomas. He pushed down the carriage window. The same sulfurous stench still lingered, but it was not as strong.

  He signaled to the men as they approached. One of them walked over to the carriage.

  “What goes on here?” asked Thomas.

  The man pushed his hat to the back of his head and scratched his forehead with his thumb. “We’re searching for a missing person, sir,” he replied.

  Now Lydia leaned out of the window and, obviously recognizing her, the man quickly uncovered his head. “Your ladyship,” he said gruffly.

  “Who is missing?” she asked.

  The man frowned. “ ’Tis Lady Thorndike, ma’am,” he replied.

  A shocked look registered on Lydia’s face. “How long has she been missing?”

  “Three days now,” he replied. “She said she were going for a walk and no one has seen her since.”

  “We will do all we can to help,” Lydia told him. “I will speak with Sir Henry.”

  The man bowed and Thomas gave the signal to the driver to move off.

  “Lady Thorndike has spent a night away from her own bed before,” she told Thomas knowingly, “but three days without a word . . . Poor Sir Henry must be sick with worry.”

  “Will you organize a search party at Boughton?”

  She nodded. “Just as soon as I can.”

  There was more bad news waiting for Thomas and Lydia on their return. Despite the fog lifting slightly, more and more men, women, and children were falling sick. Gabriel Lawson updated them on events in the study.

  “I’ve lost two more workers since you left, your ladyship,” he reported. His sunburned face seemed much paler now that it had not seen the sun for almost three weeks, noted Thomas. “They say their families are being hit, too. Tim Blackwell has lost both of his babe
s. The grave diggers are burying them so quick that the vicar can’t keep up with them.”

  Thomas intervened. “And the scarves? They are wearing them?”

  Lawson eyed the doctor with unveiled hostility and addressed his reply to his mistress. “They wear them and they are faring better than those who don’t on the Thorndike estate—there’s half a dozen dead there—but ’tis the young and the old who seem to be worst off.”

  Thomas thought of Will Lovelock and his asthma. Thankfully he had been spared, but it was inevitable that those with a weakness would be most affected.

  “And what of morale generally?” Lydia tried to be more positive in her tone.

  Lawson sighed. “The men are not happy, your ladyship. I cannot lie. The troublemaker returned, stirring things up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lawson darted a glance at Thomas. “They want more money to work the fields in the fog,” he told her.

  Lydia nodded. “I understand,” she replied. “But ’tis not possible. Not with our income down.”

  “This troublemaker. He is not from the estate?” interrupted Thomas.

  Again Lawson addressed his reply to Lydia. “He is a traveler, my lady. A knife-grinder. His name is Joshua Pike, and he has been calling the men to action, telling them they should demand higher wages.”

  “And he has been trespassing on my land?” She suddenly went on the offensive.

  “He has, but I told him in no uncertain terms to leave,” replied Lawson.

  Lydia sighed deeply and looked at Thomas. “I see,” she said. “If he returns we shall have to call the constables to deal with the matter.”