“My lord!” Palmer protested. “Think of the cost. Why, the styling alone—”
“I care not for its styling or its cost, puppy.” He seized the tailor by the elbow, pulled him up. “Nor for any of these embellishments.”
“My lord! You are hurting me!”
Without releasing the man, Garnthorpe jerked the lace away from his breeches. They gave with a satisfying rip and soon joined the wig on the floor. “Now, sir,” he said, shaking the man to further whimpering, “you may finish the doublet since I’ve already paid for it and its colour is none so vile. I will even concede to this style of breeches if you match the colour to the doublet’s and hang no poxy ribbons upon ’em. But as for this infernal whatchamacallit—” he tapped the tabby “—it is to go. A plain beige waistcoat will do.” He released the man, who retired three paces, clutching his elbow. “Beige? My lord, I could not hold up my head among my peers if it were known I allowed—” he shuddered “—beige!”
“I care nothing for your peers, fool. My only concern is a lady.”
“If she is indeed a lady,” the tailor replied, some of his hauteur returning, “and of the fashion herself, she will want—”
Garnthorpe took a step and the man shrank back, hands raised, the last pin held like an absurd miniature sword before him. “The lady wants me. Unadorned. In a simple wig. In plain clothes—they can be of good cut, certain. In boots.”
“My lord!” said Mr. Palmer, who’d now moved behind his cutting table and regained some composure. “If you keep these, my breeches most au courant, you cannot wear those boots.”
“What’s wrong with ’em?”
“They are country boots, sir, not even fit for elegant riding in Hyde Park. Further, they are worn and—and stained, sir. Horribly stained.”
Garnthorpe looked at the boots, which lay by the door. Now that the puppy mentioned it, they did appear stained. London’s streets would do that, for he disdained to affix onto them the iron pattens that kept most above the grime. Looking closer though, he saw that not only the brown of London’s foulness had besmirched them. Those stains were red, a deep, blackened red.
What was the damn song the tailor had been humming?
While you and I, dilly, dilly, keep ourselves warm.
“My lord? My lord? Are you quite well?”
Garnthorpe blinked. “I will attend to my boots, sirrah. I will wash them.”
“Indeed, my lord. And now that I know what you want, shall I, uh, continue?”
Garnthorpe grunted, let the man unpin him and carefully remove the clothes. He then went and donned what he’d shed earlier: plain black breeches, wool shirt and stockings, his black velvet doublet. Lastly, he pulled on his boots. The man was right in this: they were horribly stained. He would not like to appear before Mrs. Chalker at the theatre next week wearing boots so thick with blood.
16
OLD FOES
“They kill the cats,” said Coke, pushing a feline body dangling near him. The skin, tanned on the inside, knocked the one next to it, which set the next swaying too, and for a few moments all Pitman could see was the man’s dark face, now there, now not, revealed and then hidden by swinging fur.
Pitman reached out to steady what swung. “I have never understood it. They kill all the cats, and the small dogs too, both easy to catch. But then the rats, which they also have condemned but are harder to lay hold of, multiply.” He let go of the furs, which now spun in place.
“I suppose the authorities must act if they believe the plague has come.”
“It has come. I am a constable and have had the shutting up of several houses in my parish, may God forgive me.” He sighed. “Yet perhaps between the shutting up and the killing of all vermin, the disease will be curbed.”
“Let us hope so, Mr.—?”
“Pitman. No ‘Mr.’—plain Pitman to you. And you are Coke? Are you a genuine captain or is it just your title of the road?”
“A genuine captain once.”
“Good, then.”
They eyed each other. From outside, shouts came. “They’re in the brewery. Someone saw them. Let’s go!” Metal-shod boots clattered over cobbles.
“A brewery should keep them busy,” Pitman said. “And they will be about it awhile. That damn Irishman has set the hive a-buzzing.”
“Irishman?”
“A friend of yours. Maclean. He saw us run past the alehouse and named you.”
“Maclean, eh? No friend to me.” Coke let out a low whistle. “I’ll pay him for that if I get the chance.”
“You may not. But I’ll pay him for you. I gave him two days’ grace to go back to his land, in return for certain information he provided me regarding you. He must have seen me see him and thought the hue and cry would protect him.”
“He was right. Thirty guineas was the price he called. There’s not a man in Alsatia wouldn’t sell three of his children for that.”
“Aye.”
More shouting. Both men listened, then this mob ran off too. “So, Captain,” continued Pitman, “you heard my offer. An easy time while we wait for them to go or …” He raised the cosh.
Coke studied the man for a long moment. He truly is enormous, he thought. His face. His hands. If need be, though, I will fight him. But I will hope that a better course presents itself. “You said something of sausage and a flask?”
Gentle as lambs, Pitman thought, once the game is up. Yet a memory of blood came, and though he sat when the captain did, he kept his cudgel in his hand.
He passed the flask over. Coke drank, grimaced—the beer was the same sour stuff from the tavern opposite the goldsmith’s. The dried sausage was better, and they both chewed upon it for a time in silence, as men ran to and fro below.
“This thirty guineas,” Coke said at last, pulling a bit of gristle from between his teeth. “I may be able to match it. To better it. If you let me go.”
“The necklace went for so much?”
“I do not know. I never got a chance to see what Di—what my boy brought me.”
“I cannot take tainted money.”
“Your conscience will not let you?”
Pitman smiled. “My wife will not. We are redeemed, sir. By God.”
“That must be nice for you. Baptists?”
“Nay, we are of the quiet people.”
“Quakers? I know little about them. But then, I know little about God. I leave him alone and he leaves me.”
“Forgive me, but he does not. God watches over you always and will judge you for your deeds.” Pitman shook his head. “And I cannot but think that he will judge you most severely.”
Coke chuckled. “Yet was not the thief crucified at Christ’s right hand forgiven and admitted to paradise?”
“He was not a murderer.”
“Neither am I.”
“Captain—” Pitman swallowed, then continued softly “—I was the next man into that carriage in Finchley.”
Coke started. “So you saw.”
“I did, God help me. The first to see what you had done. But not to reckon it.” He leaned forward. “I could comprehend killing in the heat if they resisted you. But the footman? The coachman? All three within? Especially the lady. In that fashion?”
“So you think you know me because you think I did that?” Coke passed his hand across his eyes. “Oh, I know what you saw. I saw it first, remember. But I did not do it.” He saw the denial in the other’s eyes. “I did not.”
“Sir, I have tried to understand. Indeed, it is the curse of my nature that I need to understand. And when you say you did not do these deeds, perhaps I take your meaning. For I saw many men in the late wars, uh, translated.” Pitman cleared his throat. “I do not believe in the devil as one outside ourselves, seeking our souls. But I do believe that each of us has demons within that, given the opportunity, will come out. Will come out because they are given that opportunity. Wars provide it. During them a man does some things, some terrible things, simply because he can.�
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Coke stared for a moment. “You were in the wars?”
“I was. A corporal in the London Trained Bands. I served throughout.”
“As did I,” Coke said. “My captaincy was in Sir Bevil Grenville’s Regiment of Foote.”
“An honourable band of men, I heard. Cornish, are you?”
“From Bristol, I. Near it, anyway. But my father had connections.” He paused. “Did we fight against each other? I wonder. I was mainly in the West.”
“And I in London and a little in the Midlands. And once I fought as far north as Marston Moor, by York. Were you there?”
“I was not. Though I was at Naseby.”
“As was I.”
Naseby, thought Coke. The ruin of the king’s cause.
Naseby, thought Pitman. That awful triumph.
For a few moments, while men ran in the streets and cat skins swayed in the warehouse, both men were not there. They were upon that field both had tried to forget. Both had only ever partly succeeded.
Does that explain it, then? Pitman asked himself. Things witnessed on a battlefield? The horror? Slaughtering others before they slaughter you? The first man you kill, terrible; the second, a little easier; by the third, a habit formed? But at every death the terror never leaving you? Knowing that unless you stick a pike in their guts, they will stick one in yours?
He looked again at Coke. His face was calm—and that made Pitman suddenly angry. “War might explain your actions a little, Captain. But it does not excuse. Not what you did. Not that.” He saw the interior of the coach again. The lady. The blood. How it was used. It further fuelled his anger. “And you claim to leave God alone? When you blasphemed him by writing his words in the victim’s gore upon the coach’s walls?”
“What you are talking about?”
“What you wrote from Revelation. ‘For the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ ”
“That was written there?”
“The numbers were. Chapter and verse.”
“I did not write them.”
“Of course not. It was your demon who did.” Pitman’s anger went as swiftly as it had come. “But they will hang you,” he continued, “once for a madman, once for a murderer—and justice will be done.” Coke opened his mouth to deny again—then closed it. He studied Pitman’s face, the righteous anger there. You need to understand me, he thought. Is that what you said? And now you think you have done so? But I do understand you. For you are not merely a thief-taker. You are an angel of justice. And there my hope lies.
Instead of denying further, Coke said, “I will acknowledge that I may be hanged as a thief. The laws of the land demand it—even though those same laws did not prevent the stealing of my family lands. Never mind that. But you speak of the justice that sees the highwayman hanged. What then of the murderer?”
“You hang as both. You are equally dead and equally punished.”
“Am I?” Coke tipped his head. “Any man who saw the slaughter in that carriage would want to have the true culprit apprehended. If the wrong man is hanged for the crime, the slaughterer who did those … those things lives to do them again. More guts will be spilled—and the lady we both, I suspect, admired goes unavenged. If you have even the slightest doubt that I am the murderer of Finchley—and surely the fact that you have not coshed or shackled the mad dog shows you must have that tiny doubt—you must give me the chance to prove that I am not he.”
“The judge will give you your chance.”
“Come, you have been to court, sir. You know the judge will do only what the mob demands—that the Monstrous Cock dance the Tyburn jig before them. I will be lucky if it is only that, that a charge of treason is not somehow laid and proven, so the people can watch me hanged, drawn and quartered. Or that my crimes are not labelled witchcraft so they can see me burn.” He shook his head. “Nay, sir—you claimed before that you would not accept tainted money. How much more tainted will your thirty guineas be when innocent blood washes it? When the true murderer lives, perhaps to murder again? Could you live with that?”
Pitman saw then in his mind’s eye his home, his hungry children, his wife’s belly swelled by the two yet coming. But then he imagined his wife’s face, heard her voice: “You have to do the right thing, Pitman. God will not keep blessing us if you do not.”
He drew a deep breath. “How can you prove you are not the murderer?”
Coke paused before he spoke. “By taking you to his latest victim.”
“You mean your demon has killed again?”
“I mean, sir, that the murderer has. It is clear to me only now, in this conversation with you, that the two crimes are linked. The carriage and this cellar where the new victim lies. If he still lies there. He did last night and I can only hope he has not yet been disturbed.”
“Where is this cellar?”
“In the parish of St. Giles in the Fields. Not far.”
“I know where St. Giles is.” Pitman chewed at his lip. Curse the fellow, he thought. Coke had made him doubt—which he had to admit he did already. For despite the evidence of that night, nothing he’d known of Captain Cock led him to believe the man capable of committing such crimes. Nothing he’d discovered in their conversation today had changed that opinion. “Even if you prove you are not a murderer, I could still hand you over for a highwayman and collect my reward.”
“You could. Perhaps you will. Let justice be done.”
Pitman raised his eyes to the heavens. Why, O Lord, why? “We will wait a little longer, for the chase to die away. And then you will take me to this cellar. Only then will I decide your fate.” He reached into his cloak and pulled out manacles. “But you and I will be joined by these, Captain. I do not ask for your pledge. What man would not escape the noose if he could, despite the giving of his oath? But I’m damned if I am doing any more running this day. I’m too old for it, by heaven.”
“As am I.” Coke sniffed. “Though I hope we may leave soon. These cat skins may have been tanned, but how they reek!”
“They do. It is strange, is it not, what they say? That there are many ways to skin a cat. I can think of only one.” He spun one of the furs. “But there are many ways to prove a man a murderer, Captain Coke. As you shall see.”
They left an hour before sunset, the manacles that joined them, left wrist to right, concealed beneath Pitman’s cloak, slung over their arms.
As they walked, Coke tried to tell a little of why and how he’d discovered the body they were about to visit, stating that he was on a mission for a lady, whom he did not name. But Pitman merely grunted, so Coke went silent. The thief-taker still thought he was the murderer.
From the murky warren of Alsatia, and after a brief time on the wider, better lit streets around Lincoln’s Inn, they entered the equally twisting lanes of St. Giles. Before the Maidenhead, a low tavern whose crudely drawn sign depicted a frowsy lady most unlikely to have retained hers, a gang of link boys were dipping wands into a tub of molten wax. At Coke’s insistence, Pitman bought two links, lit them, then went with the captain down an especially dark alley.
They stopped before a crumbled archway. “Are you sure this is the place?”
“Carrier Court.” Coke raised his link. “Here is my mark.”
His flame lit the scratched cross. “At least it is not painted red,” said Pitman. “No plague here.”
“None that is owned. Come.”
Though evening light yet lingered, it did not do much to enhance the courtyard, still as grey and dingy as it had been the day before. No children danced around the well today; indeed, save for a piebald dog that rooted in the rubbish of one corner and ran off snarling when they entered, nothing stirred. Yet Coke still had the feeling they were observed, thought he heard a girl’s giggle from the shadows.
“Well, sir?” said Pitman, shaking the manacles. “Where do you lead me?”
“Over here,” Coke replied, setting off as he said it,
though his feet dragged a little, as if they too were shackled. A small part of him hoped that the body was gone. A day had passed; surely someone would have nosed out the fellow. Coke’s proof would be gone. But he would be spared the sight again.
As soon as they stepped into the dank stairwell, he knew differently. The scent had been ripening before. Now it was ripe. Instinctively he raised a hand to his face—bringing Pitman’s up with it.
“I do not think you can run from me now,” the big man said, handing over his link so he could unchain himself from Coke, then chaining Coke’s wrists. “As long as you go first,” he added, taking his wand back, gesturing down.
It threatened to unman them both, the stench beyond the last door. Indeed, if either had fled back up the stairs, both would have done so. But neither did, and taking a steadying breath, foul though it was, Coke and Pitman entered the cellar.
“Where is he?”
Coke’s reply was to wave his link toward the corner. Pitman approached and crouched. “I cannot see,” he called. “Bring your light over here, man.”
“I can do better than that.” Coke remembered now the snuffing of the reed torch when he’d fled before. He lifted his flame to the charred reeds and blew. They glowed, flared, and a dancing light filled the cellar.
“Did you place that there so you could better work, Captain?”
“I found it. When I found that,” he replied.
“Him,” corrected Pitman. “Take this,” he said, holding out his wand. “Stand close so I can view him properly and still see you.”
“You will not wish it when you do,” replied Coke softly, but moved nearer nonetheless.
Strangely, the stench diminished at its source. Or rather, Pitman realized, sight overwhelmed scent. Nevertheless, he was careful in his study. Noted the missing ears and single eyelid, the burns, the slashes, the wounds that had opened up the cavity, the guts drawn out. And yet, in the carnage he saw the same order that he had seen in the coach. Some of the havoc was indiscriminate, but some was precise. Done by someone who knew how to open up a body.
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