Death of a Radical

by Rebecca Jenkins

  “As well as ever, Sara.” The boy flung his arms about the poacher’s bulky waist. “Now then young man,” said Duffin, ruffling the child’s hair. “Let me just …” He opened his coat and produced a dead rabbit. Taking a piece of string from another pocket he tied it neatly about the back legs and hung it from a hook by the door. Sara kissed his cheek.

  “You’re a good friend,” she said. “Now sit you down. Dickon said you’d be by. He’ll not be long, if you don’t mind waiting.” The boy stared at Jarrett. “My youngest, Saul, Mr. Jarrett,” his mother said, the affection plain on her face. She went to the fire and lit a candle and brought it to the table, sheltering its flame with her hand. The light caught the gray threads deadening the brown of her hair. Jarrett smiled at the boy. Saul stood by Duffin’s chair, leaning against the poacher’s solid shoulder, his eyes downcast. Jarrett was reminded of Walcheren leaning over a fence; his horse would sometimes rest against him like that, when he was feeling affectionate. The boy was fiddling with something, rolling it between his fingers.

  “What you got there?” asked Duffin. He boy held out his trophy. “Your Burned Man’s button, eh? That’s quite a thing, that is. What do you think of that, Mr. Jarrett?” Duffin glanced at Jarrett with a twinkle in his eye. Saul approached with his hand outstretched. Jarrett looked down at the scorched button. He became very still. The candlelight fell on his face. It caught the movement of his hand as it went to his breast and felt in a pocket.

  “What is it?” asked Sara, her voice sharp with concern.

  Jarrett drew out a wadded handkerchief. He unfolded it on the table. He laid Saul’s button beside the first. The scorching had dulled its tooling but it had the same cable border. He picked each button up and peered at the back, leaning in to the candlelight. The flame flickered over tiny maker’s marks scratched in the metal. They matched. Saul edged closer, peering over Jarrett’s arm.

  “Where did you get the other?”

  “It was given to me. Why do you call it the Burned Man’s button?” Jarrett responded in an oddly distant voice. The boy leaned closer.

  “Found it in t’loft after t’fire,” he said.

  “The fire in Mr. Bedford’s stable loft, a few weeks back,” Sara Watson explained. “Michael White, him that was coachman before this one, he died there. Saul was helping the carpenter afterward and he found that.”

  “This Michael White—he was known to you?”

  “He was a stranger these parts. Mr. Bedford hired him in Leeds. He was a drinker, poor man. Irish. And not happy Irish. More melancholy and solitary. They found him with a bottle at his side and an overturned candle. It was a straw mattress, you see. Must have knocked the candle over, I suppose, and set light to it, when he was too drunk to help himself.” Jarrett heard the doubt in her voice.

  “Must have?”

  “We-ell, my Dickon, he was one of the first there to put the fire out and he thought it strange the man was not more burned. They put the fire out before the mattress was completely gone and the man just lay there on his back—”

  “On his back?” Jarrett queried.

  Sara frowned slightly at his urgency. “Dickon can tell you himself; here he is now.” Rapid feet mounted the outer steps. “Son,” she greeted him as Dickon came through the door, “Mr. Jarrett wants to know about the night Mr. Bedford’s coachman burned in his loft. How was it you found him?”

  Dickon dropped a kiss on the top of his mother’s head. He looked well satisfied with himself.

  “Flat on his back, staring up at t’ceiling,” Dickon answered.

  “His eyes were open?” demanded Jarrett, startled.

  “Aye. Doctor said it were heat; muscles draw back the lids. Give me the shivers—along with the smell, of course,” the young giant added meditatively.

  Jarrett met his eyes. “I’ve never heard that,” he said.

  Dickon stiffened.

  “Damn me! You don’t mean another one?”

  “Three deaths,” Jarrett replied, staring down at the two buttons in his hand. “Three murders, that’s my guess—that wool buyer, Pritchard, my cousin and Bedford’s coachman.”

  “Never! What the hell’s going on?” Dickon exclaimed. His mother dealt him a smart smack.

  “I’ll not have swearing in my house!”

  “Beg pardon, ma,” he responded sheepishly.

  “I wish I knew,” Jarrett said. “What about Lem? Have you found him, by any chance?”

  Dickon’s mouth broadened into a gleeful grin. He turned a chair about and sat astride, resting his muscled forearms on the back. “Summat.”

  “What?” invited Jarrett, amused.

  “Well, it was Jinnie that found him. She and me, we talked to young Lem Porter together. The man in question’s not tall. Well, Lem’s a longshanks; he said about Sim’s height.”

  “That would make him five foot four or five?” asked Jarrett. Duffin grunted.

  “Round about,” agreed Dickon, “and he’s got a black beard, curly like, and works in town. Or at least, so the lad thinks.”

  “That’s it?” Jarrett was disappointed.

  “He could be holding something back.” Dickon shrugged. “I almost knocked his block off, the way he kept sniggering and muttering how we didn’t know the half of it. He was going to meet the fella again tomorrow, but Jinnie’s talked him out of it.”

  “Why did you let her do that?” Jarrett was exasperated. “We could have used the opportunity to find this villain.”

  “Lem’s daft, Mr. Jarrett,” protested Dickon. “He’ll speak out of turn, say summat he shouldn’t. He’s neither quick nor strong and if this man is what we think him, he’s murdered three already. Lem’ll get hurt. You need to find another way.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Jarrett apologized ruefully.

  “Besides,” Dickon went on. “I’ve got summat better. Lem told Jinnie who it was that brought him to this bearded man.”

  “Oh yes? Who?”

  “A poisonous piece of piss they call Nat Broom.”

  “Him!”

  “You know him?”

  “Oh yes.” Jarrett exchanged a look with Duffin. He was thinking of his stolen boots. “And you know where to find him?”

  “Harry Aitken does. He’s heard Nat has a room in a passage behind Wharton’s yard.”

  “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go see the man,” Duffin said.

  “Read my mind.” Dickon raised his bulk from the chair. “He don’t have friends, so we should find him in. Let me just fetch a couple of lanterns. It’s dark down there.”

  Dickon led them down the hill toward the tanneries by the river. He turned down a ginnel and then into a passage hardly wider than he was. It ran between two buildings and bent around the back. Jarrett turned the blind corner and saw Dickon stopped ahead.

  “Up here,” he called back over his shoulder. “On the first floor.” A pale patch of light flickered on to the blank wall of the building opposite from a window above. There was a doorway and a staircase beyond.

  “Let me go first,” Jarrett said. The weaver stood back to let him pass. The staircase was narrow and dusty. The treads creaked and cracked under his feet. The light bobbing ahead of him touched a landing. He heard scuttling and saw a rat with red whiskers. It looked at him briefly, then vanished into the shadows. The pool of light illuminated a rusty trail of tiny footprints. He followed them to a lake of blood. His nose and mouth were filled with the sickly iron smell of it. The room was small. Sprays of blood arced on the lime-plastered walls. A bloody hand-print faced him. Beneath it lay a hunched shape that made wet, choking sounds. Jarrett crouched down, conscious of the liquid sucking at the soles of his boots. He gripped a bony shoulder and rolled the man over. His head had been battered and broken open. There was so much blood it was a miracle he was still alive. Nat Broom—his good servant’s clothes were quite ruined.

  They slung him in a blanket and carried him back to the Queen’s Head, listening to the sickenin
g noises and waiting for them to stop. But each rasping breath was followed by another, catching and labored and mixed with deep sighs. The Bedlingtons exclaimed over the blood and the sight. Mrs. Bedlington sent her boy for the doctor and her maids running about. They washed Nat Broom and bandaged him and made up a bed by the fire in a small room beside the kitchen.

  “All our upstairs rooms are taken. Besides, it’s warmer down here and we can keep an eye on him.” Mrs. Bedlington’s motherly face crumpled suddenly, as if she might cry. “What is the world coming to? He was never a good man, but who deserves this?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. B,” Jarrett said gruffly. He looked away to her husband. “He’ll need to be guarded, Jasper. The longer he lives, I fear someone may want to finish him off.” The publican held his eye a moment.

  “Is that right?” he responded. “Oh dear me!” he murmured involuntarily. He wiped his hands nervously on his apron. “I’ll make sure they all know to keep an eye out,” he assured Jarrett. “I’ll go to the lock-up and tell Constable Thaddaeus of this affair, but I wouldn’t expect much of him. He has his hands full. He’s got six ne’erdo-wells in charge because of the fairs.”

  “Bob and me we’ve nowhere special to be,” said Duffin, rubbing his dog’s ears.

  “I can take my turn tomorrow,” offered Dickon. Jasper left to inform the constable.

  Jarrett looked down at the waxy, absent face. The lids were not fully closed. Slips of eye glinted meaninglessly under the lashes.

  “Well, he’s not going to tell us anything now. Did Lem say anything else about this bearded man?” he asked Dickon. “Anything else at all?” Dickon shrugged.

  “Nothing worth knowing. Only that he liked his clothes.”

  Nat Broom’s head looked more peaceful rendered in pencil on paper. You could not hear him fetch those heaving sighs and rasping breaths. Jarrett examined his sketch. It was a face reduced to mere architecture. Unconsciousness had wiped away all character. The man on the bed sighed deeply. “If only they had found him out earlier!” Jarrett thought, in frustration. It was silent. Had he stopped breathing? Jarrett counted eight of his own heartbeats before Nat gasped and sighed again. Jarrett deepened the shading around the left eye socket. Someone knocked his elbow. Duffin’s dog inserted its head under his arm.

  “Everyone’s a critic,” Jarrett complained, stroking Bob’s rough coat. “Ezekial.”

  “Brought you some hot toddy, compliments of the house,” said the poacher. Jarrett took the mug gratefully.

  “That reminds me, I must pay the Bedlingtons for his care. Anything to report?”

  “The bar’s full of soldiers. They’ve discovered Mrs. B’s ale.” He propped himself up against the window sill.

  “What links an Irish coachman, an army wool buyer and my young cousin, Duffin? Do you see it?”

  “No.” Duffin lifted his mug to his lips. “Can’t say as I do.”

  “Just as we discover that Nat here was the man who introduced young Lem to this bearded twister in …”

  “This,” supplied Duffin, with a gesture toward the bed.

  “Someone tidying loose ends?”

  “If it’s connected.”

  “True.” Jarrett pulled his shoulders back. “But when so many acts of unusual violence follow one another in swift succession, it seems reasonable enough to suspect they might be connected.” Start at the beginning. “Why kill a coachman?”

  “Maybe he just likes killing,” Duffin suggested. “Could be no sense to it at all.”

  “I don’t see it. This man is careful and tidy. The first two murders nearly passed unnoticed—it was Grub’s death that tripped him. That was rushed. It looks as if Grub followed him out there to Quarry Fell. If so, why? What did he suspect? For God’s sake! The boy had only been here two days!” He unfolded the handkerchief once more. The button lay in stark relief against the white lawn, the yellowish thread still attached to it and the flake of leather. The tooling of the raised rope border around the pewter button was crisp and delicate. Pewter, not silver. “Too fancy for a plain man but hardly rich enough for a gentleman,” he murmured to himself. A yellow thread. Yellow gloves … He saw the words written in Grub’s hand heavily underscored on the back of a bill—a bill from the Royal Hotel in Leeds. Grub saw something in Leeds. Someone. He saw Strickland. No. It couldn’t be Strickland. But why was Strickland there? It’s a convenient rendez-vous. He had a meeting—a meeting with one of his men …

  “My cousin saw someone in Leeds.” Duffin tensed at Jarrett’s tone. “Bedford was there that day; he went to Leeds to collect his niece.”

  “You don’t mean Bedford—”

  “No. His coachman! Just think, Duffin. Why kill the first man; why kill the coachman?” Duffin looked at him blankly. “For his job!” Jarrett exclaimed impatiently. “He wanted his job.” Duffin sucked his teeth thoughtfully.

  “Trouble is Bedford’s coachman is one man who couldn’t have killed your boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was arrested that afternoon, at the fair. The colonel’s soldiers had him in lock-up all night.”

  *

  He listened to Duffin snoring gently in counterpoint to Nat Broom’s rasping breaths and sighs. He had not slept for days. He was beyond the boundaries of sleep. Nat Broom and he were two sides of the same coin: Nat trapped inside a sleeping body and he a waking one. He needed some air. He pulled on his greatcoat and opened the yard door. There was a smell, an intensely familiar smell. There was someone in the yard. He saw a dim patch of red, white facings and the glow of a pipe bowl. A sergeant sat on a barrel under the eaves smoking Spanish tobacco. His head was tipped back, his face turned up to the stars.

  “That brings back memories,” Jarrett said. “The smell of your pipe.” The sergeant shifted his head slightly to cast him an idle glance. An angry puckered scar ran from his left temple, skewing the corner of his eye on its way down to his chin. This, along with his flat nose and a drooping mustache gave him a truculent, melancholy air. Jarrett looked up at the sky. The moon peeped coyly over a wisp of cloud.

  “It’s getting warmer. Been cold enough of late.”

  The sergeant grunted. He took his pipe from his mouth. “Nothing to the bitter chill of the mountains of the peninsula,” he declared and resumed his puffing.

  “That’s the truth. I’ve spent winter in the Portuguese hills.”

  “Thought you might have,” the sergeant said with some satisfaction. He tilted his bulk to reach in a pocket.

  “Share a pipe?” he offered.

  “No. Thank you. Just like the smell.” He had never taken to the habit. He had found it bad for the health. When a man spent much time on the wrong side of enemy lines he soon learned that the smell of burning tobacco carried in open country.

  “Got this in the retreat from Corunna,” the sergeant said, indicating the scar on his cheek. He cocked his good eye at Jarrett speculatively. “You?”

  “I’d just got back from Walcheren then.”

  “Fever posting! Rather you than me.”

  “That retreat wasn’t so easy either.”

  The sergeant grunted. “There were so few of us left, they parceled us out all over. I ended up here. Recruiting party, or supposed to be!” he spat in disgust. He pulled on his pipe.

  “Made many arrests, then, with the fairs?” Jarrett asked. The sergeant snorted.

  “Not likely! Don’t know what we’re bloody here for.”

  “What happened to those three taken up on opening day? Someone told me they were out to murder the magistrates.”

  “No such luck. Just drunks. Magistrate let them all out the next day.” He fussed with his pipe bowl and sucked the stem industriously.

  “Two miners and a townsman, fighting drunk, as I recall,” Jarrett mused. “That should have been a lively night in the lock-up.”

  “You would have thought, wouldn’t ya? The lads were all set to lay bets. The townsman was a scrappy little chap. Full of vigor a
nd ready to have at it but colonel shoved his oar in. Scrappy, you see, is in the employ of one of the big noises these parts. He was to be kept safe and quiet away from the others by colonel’s direct orders.”

  “Undisturbed.”

  “Locked up in his very own accommodations out back.” Jarrett thought of the duke’s warehouse the soldiers were using for their barracks. There was one lockable shed. It stood some yards off, on its own by the river. It was cold that night. If he knew soldiers, with their officers at the play, they would stay by the fire.

  “That was troublesome, having to check on him through the night.”

  “No need.” The sergeant shook his head. “Colonel said he should be left to sleep undisturbed. And I always obeys my officers. Colonel came back himself in the morning and let the man out. Scrappy must have been servant to a friend of his.” He leaned back his head and stared up into the infinite night. “Christ!” he said. “Bloody home postings! Much more of this and I shall grow moss.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Nat Broom was still breathing—a little more calmly now. The Reverend Prattman’s bell-ringers had begun to warm up their bells. Sunday. Another day and night gone by and no nearer to Grub’s murderer.

  “Down this way, you say? Well, if you don’t think I’ll disturb him, we’ll just say good morning.” A skipping step pranced down the corridor. Jarrett moved swiftly to the door just in time. Hester’s bright face smiled up at him. She had a Sunday ribbon tied fetchingly in her curls. Concerned that she should not see the ugliness in the bed, he swept her giggling into his arms.

  “Good morning, Hester,” he said. “You’re remarkably clean.” They stepped out into the corridor. Meg Teward waited to greet him. Her bonnet was tied with a large lilac bow under one ear. Her elfin head tilted as if the weight of the ribbons pulled it down.

  “Mr. Jarrett! We’re on our way to church; we’ll not stay.” She dropped a shy look at the parcel she held in her gloved hands. A flush of carmine touched her cheekbones. “You were such a comfort that day, when …” she trailed off.

  “Please don’t mention it!” he responded, rather more robustly than he had intended. Her pale eyebrows drew together in a little frown. Hester squirmed. He released her and she went to take her mother’s hand.