“He’s the only man with a motive that I can see.”
“There’s no doubt it’s a powerful motive,” Devlin agreed, “knowing your son was killed and eaten by a shipload of starving men and women.”
“Did they kill the boy, do you think? He might simply have died. He was injured, after all. Without adequate food or water…”
“He could have died of his injuries. But there have been other instances in which starving Englishmen and women have been reduced to feeding upon their dead companions—or have drawn lots. The fact that this company kept quiet about what they did suggests the boy was simply killed out of hand.” He blew out a long breath. “I doubt we’ll ever know the truth.”
“No, you’re probably right.” Henry sighed. “I’ll take this information to Sir James at Bow Street tonight.”
Devlin fixed him with an uncomfortably fierce yellow stare. “I suppose you must, but—” He broke off.
Henry raised one eyebrow. “You think there’s something you’ve missed?”
“I don’t know. I wish I understood better the part Jarvis’s son played in all this.”
“There is no evidence that Matt Parker’s brother spoke the truth. Who would take the word of a hanged sailor against the testimony of the likes of Sir Humphrey Carmichael or Lord Stanton?”
The Viscount set his teacup aside and stood up. “In this instance? I would.”
Sebastian returned to his house on Brook Street to be intercepted in the hall by his majordomo.
“There is a woman here to see you, my lord. A foreign woman and a child. They insisted upon waiting, so I have put them in the drawing room.”
“A Mrs. Bellamy?” said Sebastian sharply.
“That is the name she gave. Yes, my lord.”
Sebastian turned toward the stairs. “Send up some tea and cakes, Morey, and tell them I won’t be but a moment.”
He found Mrs. Bellamy seated in one of the cane-backed chairs beside the front bow window. At the sight of him, her mouth parted in surprise and she dropped the black-edged handkerchief she had been clutching. The child, Francesca, perched on the edge of a sofa near the empty hearth, a scorched leather-bound volume clutched against her thin chest, her eyes huge in a wan, pale face.
“Mrs. Bellamy, Francesca. My apologies for keeping you waiting. You should not have troubled yourself to make the journey up to London to see me. I would have been more than happy to wait upon you in Greenwich, had you but sent word.”
The Captain’s widow cast her daughter a quick, enigmatic glance. “Oh, my lord! I did not wish to trouble you at all. I thought Mr. Taylor must have left your card with me by mistake, and I came only in the hopes you might be able to direct me to him. It was Francesca who insisted we stay.”
Sebastian went to pour the tea that stood, neglected, upon the table. “Please accept my apologies for the deception I practiced upon you in Greenwich. I feared if I approached Captain Bellamy under my own name, he might refuse to see me.”
Her brow wrinkled in confusion. “And why would that be, my lord?”
“I suspect the Captain was warned not to speak to me.” He held out a cup. “Please, have some tea.”
She took the cup automatically, but did not drink it.
He turned toward Francesca. “And you, Miss Bellamy? Would you care for some tea and cakes?”
“No, thank you,” she said with painful seriousness, and held out the leather-bound book. “We’ve brought you this.”
“What is it?” asked Sebastian, not moving to take it from her.
It was Mrs. Bellamy who answered. “The ship’s log. From the Harmony. The evening he—he fell in the river, Captain Bellamy spent hours sitting at the table after supper, reading the log and drinking rum. Before he went out, he threw it on the hearth and lit a fire. But the fire didn’t catch properly and Francesca pulled it out.”
Sebastian watched the child run one hand over the log’s charred binding. “Have you read it?” he asked, glancing at the widow.
She flushed and shook her head. Too late, Sebastian remembered what Tom had told him in Greenwich, that the Captain’s young Brazilian wife was illiterate. “No,” she said. “But Francesca has.”
Sebastian’s gaze met the child’s, and he saw there the horrified confirmation of everything he’d suspected and more. “You read what happened after the mutiny?” he asked softly.
“I read it all.”
Dear God, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “And still you brought it to me?”
She nodded, the muscles in her jaw held tight. “It’s why Adrian died, isn’t it? It’s why they all died. Because of what Papa and their parents did on that ship.”
Impossible to lie to the child. All he could say was, “I suspect so.”
“Do you know who is doing it?”
“Not yet.”
She laid the log on the tea table and pushed it toward him. “Perhaps this will help.”
Chapter 52
Hendon spent most of Saturday afternoon at Carlton House, dealing with a fretful Prince. He was leaving the palace and heading up the Mall when Kat Boleyn drew up her phaeton and pair beside him with a neat flourish.
“I’d like a word with you, my lord,” she said. “Drive with me a ways?”
Hendon looked at the woman before him. She wore a hunter green driving gown embellished with brass epaulets and set off by a cocky green chip hat with a curling ostrich feather. Hendon didn’t hold with females driving phaetons. He dropped his gaze to the restive horseflesh between the traces and was tempted to plead some excuse. But the fact that she had deliberately sought him out raised a glimmer of hope in his breast. Perhaps he might find some way to scotch Devlin’s marriage scheme after all.
He stepped up to the curb and said quizzically, “You wish me to ride with you in that rig?”
She let out a peal of musical laughter. “I promise not to overturn you, my lord. George,” she said to the groom seated beside her, “wait for me here.”
“Yes, miss.”
Hendon climbed up to settle in the space vacated by the groom. She gathered her reins, but before she gave the horses the office to start, she handed Hendon a small painted porcelain oval—a miniature of a dark-haired woman with flashing green eyes and a smile that had once stolen Hendon’s heart.
“Do you recognize this?” Kat Boleyn asked.
Hendon’s fist closed around the filigree-framed porcelain so hard the metal bit into his flesh. “No.”
She cast him a swift glance. “You lie, my lord. The truth is writ plain on your face. Her name was Arabella Noland, and she was your mistress, was she not?”
“What if she was? You think that showing me her portrait now will somehow soften my attitude toward your plans to marry my son? Well, let me tell you something, girl: you’re fair and far out!”
She said nothing, her attention all for the task of guiding her horses through the heavy Saturday-afternoon traffic.
“Where did you get this?” he asked at last.
“It was given to me by Arabella’s sister, Emma Stone.”
“That hateful woman,” said Hendon. “Why should she do such a thing?”
“Mrs. Stone also gave me this portrait of you.” She held out another miniature, and after a moment, Hendon took it from her.
“They are a matched set. Did you give them to Arabella? I wonder. Were they part of your farewell gift to her when you discovered she was with child?”
“No,” he said gruffly, unable to grasp her point. “They were a birthday gift. Why?”
She cast him a look he couldn’t begin to comprehend. “But you knew she had a child by you.”
Hendon worked his jaw back and forth. He saw no point in denying it. “Have you told Devlin of this?”
“No.” She feathered the turning onto Whitehall. “Did you know of the child?
“I knew. It’s why she left me.”
“She left you?”
Hendon grunted. “I assumed you must know t
he whole story. It was my intention to take the child away after it was born. Give it to a good family, to be raised in the country.”
“You would have taken her child away?”
The edge in her voice caught him by surprise. He shrugged. “It’s the usual practice. Arabella was distraught at the suggestion, but I thought she’d come around. Instead, she left without even telling me she was going.”
Wordlessly, Kat Boleyn eased her pair around a brewer’s wagon obstructing the road. Hendon let his gaze rove over her high cheekbones, the impish line of her nose, the sensuous curve of her lips. He’d always thought she had something of the look of Arabella. And then, from somewhere unbidden came a powerful sense of disquiet.
“Why did Emma Stone give you these miniatures?” he asked again.
“Emma Stone is my aunt.”
Hendon opened his mouth to deny it, to deny everything she was suggesting. Then he shut it again. If any other young woman had come to him with such a claim, he would never have accepted her statements at face value. But this woman of all others had no reason to claim him as her father and every reason not to.
“My God,” he whispered. “I always thought you resembled her, but I never imagined…” His voice trailed off. He stared across the tops of the elms in the park, their leaves suddenly so brutally green against the blue of the sky that he had to blink several times.
“What are you going to do?” he asked at last.
“Tell Devlin. What else can I do?”
He studied the beautiful, hauntingly familiar face beside him. He had always thought of her as his adversary, the woman he had to fight to prevent her from ruining Devlin’s life. He found that he still thought of her that way. He had to think of her that way. He could allow himself nothing else. Not now. “You could simply go away,” he suggested.
“No,” she said fiercely. “I won’t hurt him like that again. Not a second time.”
“Then let me be the one to tell him.”
He thought at first she meant to refuse him. She drew in a quick breath, then another. And it was only then that he realized she was fighting back tears.
“Very well,” she said, drawing up before the palace. “But you had best tell him right away, because the next time I see him, I will tell him if you have not.”
Chapter 53
Outside, the sun shone brightly on the last of what had been a fine September day. Sebastian could hear the sound of children laughing and calling to one another as he walked into his library and laid the Harmony’s long-lost log on his desktop. For the briefest instant, he found himself hesitating. Then he opened the charred leather binding and stepped back into a dark and terrible episode.
The voyage’s first weeks out of India had been uneventful, and he skimmed them quickly. Some captains kept extensive, chatty logs. Not Bellamy. Bellamy’s entries were terse, impatient—the hurried scribblings of a man who kept his log to satisfy his ship’s owners rather than himself. He made only brief lists of his passengers, officers, and crew. Sebastian ran through the names, but there were no surprises. There had been twenty-one crew members. There, near the bottom of the list, Sebastian found the name Jack Parker, but he recognized none of the others.
He flipped through the days, the long layover in Cape Town, the fine sailing as they headed up the west coast of Africa. And then, on the fifth of March, Bellamy had written:
2:00 a.m. Strong gales with a heavy sea. Clewed up sails and hove to.
6:00 a.m. Strong gales continue from the WSW. Carried away the main topmast and mizzen masthead.
3:00 p.m. Shipped a heavy sea, carried away the jolly boat and two crewmen.
There was only one scrawled entry for the next day, 6 March.
10:00 a.m. Gale continues. No idea of our position at sea. Reckoning impossible in storm.
Two days later, Bellamy wrote:
8 March, 7:00 p.m. Shipped a heavy sea, washed away the long-boat, tiller. Unshipped the rudder. Cabin boy, Gideon, suffered a broken arm. Plucky lad.
As bad as things had been, on the ninth of March they got worse.
11:00 a.m. Pumps barely able to keep water from gaining. Crew restive. Cargo thrown overboard, but ship still lying heavy in the water and listing badly to starboard.
2:00 p.m. Ship suddenly righted though full of water. A dreadful sea making a fair breach over her from stem to stern. We are surely lost.
5:00 p.m. Gale dropped to strong breeze. Employed getting what provisions possible by knocking out bow port. Saved twenty pounds of bread and ten pounds of cheese, some rum and flour, now stored in maintop.
10 March. 6:00 a.m. Isaac Potter slipped into hold and drowned before we could get him out. Committed his body to the deep.
10:00 a.m. Crew restive. It is obvious that if we don’t spot a ship soon, the Harmony must be abandoned. Yet with no jolly boat or long boat, all cannot be saved.
11 March. 2:00 p.m. Crew mutinied and abandoned ship, taking most of remaining provisions and water. Officers and passengers left aboard. God save our souls.
13 March. 5:00 p.m. Stern stove in. I know not how we stay afloat. Made tent of spare canvas on forecastle. Able to salvage a bit of rice and more flour from below. Rationing half a gill of water each per day, but even at this rate it will not last long.
14 March. 7:00 a.m. Small shark caught by means of running bowline. Sir Humphrey rigged up a teakettle with a long pipe and a stretch of canvas to fashion a kind of distillation. But it affords only one wineglass of water a day each, barely enough to maintain life. Gideon feverish.
16 March. 10:00 a.m. Sir Humphrey has improved upon his distillation process. We can now manage nearly two wineglasses each per day. Barnacles gathered from side of vessel and eaten raw, but they will not last.
23 March. Suffering much from hunger. Gideon hanging on, though I know not how. No nourishment now for seven days.
24 March. 2:00 p.m. Saw a ship to windward. Made signal of distress, but stranger hauled his wind away from us.
25 March. 7:00 a.m. I like not the mutterings amongst the passengers. They have been awaiting the death of the cabin boy, Gideon, intending to feast upon his dead body. But he has not died, and now there is talk of killing him.
5:00 p.m. A dark day for us all. Over the objections of myself and Mr. David Jarvis, the passengers and ship’s officers voted to hasten Gideon’s death. Mr. Jarvis sought to protect the lad, but the others rushed him and in the altercation a cutlass was thrust through young Jarvis’s side. I thought for a moment Gideon would be saved, for they would make their meal of Mr. Jarvis instead. But, though injured, the young man defended himself stoutly, and they returned to Gideon.
Reverend Thornton delivered the last rites while Lord Stanton held Gideon down and Sir Humphrey Carmichael slit his throat. The poor lad’s blood was caught in a basin and shared amongst the passengers. Then the body was cut up into quarters and washed in the sea. They drew lots for the choicest parts. The Reverend and Mrs. Thornton drew the poor lad’s internal organs; Sir Humphrey an arm; Lord Stanton and Mr. Atkinson shared a leg, and so on. Even those such as Mr. Fairfax and Mrs. Dunlop, who had argued against the killing of the lad, did not fail to join in once the evil deed was done.
Only Mr. David Jarvis, wounded though he was, refused to partake of the feast. “Why should I condemn my soul to hell,” he told them, “so that I might live for one or two days more? I know well who you will fall upon once you’ve picked clean the bones of this poor lad.”
I myself found I could not quiet my stomach sufficient to eat the poor lad’s flesh. But when they passed the cup of his blood, God help me, I drank.
Pushing up from his desk, Sebastian went to pour himself a glass of brandy. But the brandy tasted bitter on his tongue and he set it aside.
Through the window overlooking the street he gazed down on a lady’s barouche driven at a smart clip up the street. A child chasing a hoop along the footpath glanced up to shout something, and the golden sunlight fell gracefully on his
honey-colored hair and ruddy cheeks.
It was easy to condemn the passengers and officers of the Harmony, Sebastian realized, easy to sit in security and comfort and reassure oneself of one’s own superior moral fiber and courage. But no man can truly know how he will act until faced with such a choice: to hold to his convictions and embrace death, or to kill and live?
Reaching again for his brandy, Sebastian drank it down. Then he went back to his desk and read.
26 March, 8:00 a.m. English frigate hove in sight. Hoisted the ensign downward and the stranger hauled his wind toward us. Remains of cabin boy thrown overboard. Mr. Jarvis holding on to life, but he lost consciousness as the Sovereign hove to, and I doubt he will live to see another dawn.
There was one last line, entered in a shaky scrawl, then nothing.
10:00 a.m. Committed his body to the deep.
Chapter 54
Sebastian closed the log, then sat for a time staring down at the charred leather. It was one thing to suspect that the passengers and officers of the Harmony had resorted to cannibalism and murder, but something else entirely to read the terse record of their long, horrible ordeal.
The Harmony’s log explained much about the recent killings that had before seemed incomprehensible. He now understood that the strangely varying mutilation to which each of the victims had been subjected corresponded exactly to the lots drawn by their parents after Gideon’s murder. Adrian Bellamy had been spared the others’ butchery not because his killer had been interrupted, as they’d supposed, but because his father, Captain Bellamy, had not himself partaken of the dead cabin boy’s flesh.
Why Mermaids Sing Page 19
