Scandal Above Stairs_A Below Stairs Mystery

by Jennifer Ashley

  We’d have to find a hansom, because I would not have the patience to wait for an omnibus. I headed for South Audley Street, a wider artery where hansoms might abound.

  I heard a cry, shrill and hoarse, my name on the wind. I turned in a daze to see young James dodging and ducking his way toward us, his elbows jerking as he tried to shove his way through the crowd without earning a blow.

  “Mrs. Holloway!” he yelled as he ran for us. “Mrs. H., wait!”

  I halted as the son of the man I feared dead raced toward me. My heart sank when I saw the same desperate hope on his face that I felt on mine.

  “Is he well, James?” I cried, at the same time James nearly fell upon me and asked, “Have you seen him, Mrs. H.?”

  “We ain’t,” Tess answered for me. “Oh Lord, do ye think someone’s killed ’im?”

  James’s wide eyes were moist. “He never came home last night. I waited then I went back to me own boardinghouse. This morning, the landlady shows me in the paper a man’s been killed. We don’t know what to think. It can’t be him, can it?”

  “I don’t know,” I had to say. “James, find a hansom. We’ll go to the pawnbrokers and see what we can see.”

  “I already been there. They took the body away, and wouldn’t let me in. I went back to Da’s rooms in Southampton Street, but he never come home, his landlady says.”

  Mrs. Williams, who was housekeeper in the house where Daniel sometimes let rooms, was a keen observer. She’d have known if Daniel returned in the night and left again early, and would have said so. If she hadn’t seen him, then he hadn’t come home.

  My thoughts whirled. The pawnbrokers wasn’t far from the main Metropolitan Police’s headquarters at Great Scotland Yard, near where Charing Cross Road became Whitehall. I reasoned that the man’s body would have been taken to the morgue there, but even if it hadn’t, the police might direct me to the correct station.

  “All right, then, we’ll go to the police. James—the hansom. Hurry!”

  James scampered off, but Tess dug her fingers into my arm. “The police! I can’t be going there, missus.”

  I turned to her, too agitated to be gentle. “Why not? Are you a wanted criminal?”

  I would not be stunned if she were. Daniel knew some very odd people.

  Tess shook her head. “Last time the coppers got hold of me, I was almost hanged, wasn’t I? I’ll not let them near me again.”

  Her words cut through some of my terror. “Hanged for what, child? What are you talking about?”

  Tess’s fingers on my arm dug harder. “Thieving. There, now you know. I’m a tea leaf, ain’t I?”

  I looked her up and down. “Have you come to Lady Cynthia’s house to rob it?”

  “No. I never.” Tess’s wide eyes held fear. “I came to give you a bit of help, like Mr. McAdam told me to. He’s the one what got me off and made them let me go.”

  I could not be surprised, but it was a small detail I wish James had told me. “They can’t arrest you for a crime you’ve been acquitted of,” I said. “That’s the law.”

  “Yeah, but they might fit me up for something else.”

  I had no inclination to argue with her about it in the middle of the street. James waved his arm from where he stood on the step of a waiting hansom.

  “Stay, or come with me,” I told her. “It’s up to you.” I lifted my skirts and hurried to the cab, gabbling the direction to the cabbie before I scrambled inside.

  James held out his hand to Tess, who’d followed me more slowly, but she hung back, uncertain.

  “Tess,” I called sharply. “Make up your mind. I won’t let them take you, I promise.”

  Tess drew a long breath. She was afraid, I could see, with a dark fear I well understood. The police had swept me up and shoved me into Newgate once upon a time, and only Daniel’s arguments had let me out again.

  “Blast.” Tess snarled the word, gathered her skirts, and bowled headlong into the cab, barely touching James’s hand as he boosted her in. “Bleedin’ ’ell, I must be mad.”

  James swung himself inside, the three of us squashing into the small hansom as the driver started the horse. James sent Tess an appealing look. “Mrs. Holloway don’t like strong language, Tess. You’ll be out on your ear.”

  Tess only straightened her frock. “This is a special circumstance. We’re per— per— aw, something beginning with per.”

  “Perturbed,” I finished. “Now both of you, hush. I am already distracted as it is.”

  Thankfully, James and Tess fell silent as we careened through the press down South Audley Street. I had hoped the cabbie would have been one of Daniel’s friends, perhaps able to tell us whether he was all right, but I did not recognize the man.

  The cabbie trundled us down to Piccadilly and then east to Haymarket, down that busy thoroughfare to Cockspur Street and Charing Cross, past Trafalgar Square and the very tall column with Lord Nelson on the top. I’d laughed only a week ago with Grace that I’d never recognize Lord Nelson if I traveled back in time and met him in the flesh, because he wouldn’t have any pigeons on him.

  Grace had giggled, and I’d meant to tell Daniel my quip, to see if he would laugh too. My heart burned.

  The cabbie let us off in front of the Admiralty building. I paid him with the few coins I had in my pocket, vaguely wondering how we would afford to get home.

  I led the way across the mad crush of vehicles to the lane that was Great Scotland Yard, and so to the building that housed the Metropolitan Police.

  I remembered Mr. Davis reading in one of his newspapers that the police had outgrown its original building and would soon move to new digs nearby on the Embankment. This building looked plenty large enough to me for now. Floor upon floor of brown brick rose to the sky, grim in the gloom of the overcast day.

  An archway gave on to the front door. Constables lurked outside this, perhaps to keep criminals from rushing in and causing havoc. I walked past the constables, pretending I knew what I was about, James behind me.

  Tess lingered outside the door, but when a constable in a blue uniform, his brass buttons shiny, began to approach her, she turned her face from him and scuttled after me.

  Inside we found an echoing hall with a staircase, a desk at the far end. Men moved to and fro behind this desk and up and down the stairs, paying no attention to us. Some of the men wore uniforms, some were in plain suits, some carried sheaves of papers, and some were empty-handed, but all seemed to be in a great hurry.

  I approached the desk, holding my head high. James came a step behind me, with Tess, keeping her face averted, behind him.

  I was as wary as Tess of the constabulary. They had arrested me without a second thought when a man had pointed at me and accused me of no less than murder. I’d been shoved through a ridiculous trial presided over by a magistrate who’d thought himself a wit, and I’d been banged up in a trice. I owed Daniel my life.

  I stood at the counter for a good five minutes without anyone taking any notice of me. The constables and clerks glanced at me, but each apparently hoped another would ask me what I wanted.

  Finally, I rapped on the counter with my knuckles, fixing a uniformed sergeant sitting at a desk with a sharp stare. “Excuse me, young man.”

  Anger and impatience had returned the vigor to my voice, and the sergeant reluctantly dragged his attention from the papers before him and answered in a bored tone. “Yes? What is it, love?”

  “We have heard that a man was killed in the Strand.” I swallowed as the words threatened to choke me. “In a pawnbrokers. We might know him.”

  The sergeant rose to his feet and slicked down his dark hair with his palm. “The murder in the pawnbrokers?” He moved a few sheets on the desk, then nodded. “He’s here all right—coroner’s looking him over.” He pursed his lips as though about to whistle. “He’s a popular gent, is
our pawnbroker. You’re not the first to come to claim him. He ought to have sold tickets.”

  Another wit in London’s constabulary. “He might be the lad’s father,” I said in freezing tones. “Have some pity.”

  The sergeant peered at James, who had pulled off his hat and now bunched it in his rawboned hands, and his look softened.

  “Sorry, love—I mean, missus. Now then, if ye want to see the poor beggar, you sign your name in this book, and follow me.”

  He lifted a ledger and turned it to me, laying a pen and a pot of ink next to it. I dipped the pen into the ink and then carefully wrote my name beneath the illegible scrawls of the previous visitors.

  The sergeant did not ask for James or Tess to sign—I saw Tess’s body go slack with relief that he did not. The sergeant simply wrote the number three next to my name, slid the ledger out of sight, and beckoned us to follow him.

  The only police station I had ever been to was Bow Street, which had been an old house converted through the centuries to the magistrate’s court and jail. Stories of the Bow Street Runners pervaded, brave thieftakers of the past.

  This building stood in what had been part of Whitehall Palace, back in the days it had been an actual palace, not simply government offices. Scotland Yard had been so called because ambassadors from Scotland had stayed in the buildings around it. Now this cold edifice, which opened from the street of Great Scotland Yard, held the noise and chaos of the police as they rushed about dragging criminals to jail. Most ordinary people no longer referred to our constabulary as the Metropolitan Police but thought of it chiefly by its location, Scotland Yard. I wondered, when the police moved to their larger offices down the river, if we would begin to call them “the Embankment.”

  The sergeant led us through a door in the back, along another hall, and down a flight of stairs. The air grew colder as we descended, leaving the softness of May behind. The basement was more like November, I decided as we hurried after our guide and tried not to dwell on what I’d find at the end of out journey.

  The odor of the morgue struck me before we reached it. They did their best, I suppose, keeping bodies cold and whisking them away for burial as quickly as possible, but the lingering scent of death and decay permeated the very walls.

  I halted outside the door to which the sergeant led us, the small sign next to it identifying it as the morgue.

  “James, you should wait here,” I said. I certainly did not want James, no matter how gutter-smart he was, distressed by the gruesome sights within. If the dead man proved to be Daniel, I would be looking after James from now on. I’d start by keeping him free of the sight of his father’s battered body.

  James gave a stubborn shake of his head. “I want to know.”

  “He’ll need to identify him,” the sergeant said without concern. “Best if it comes from the next of kin.”

  Both James and the sergeant looked at me, united in male obdurateness. I clenched my hands. “Very well, but, James, you stay well back until I look first. You too,” I said to Tess.

  Tess only nodded, her volubility gone. My respect for her courage rose. She was quite frightened to be here, but she’d come anyway out of concern for Daniel, James, and me.

  “Come on, then,” I said to the sergeant. “Let’s get on with it.”

  The sergeant ushered us into a dark room lit by windows high in the outside walls, the smell of death sharper here. On one wall was a large, thick door with a massive handle, chained shut. I did not like to think about what was behind it.

  The morgue was not as frightening as I imagined it—in spite of the darkness, it was quite clean and neat. A high table ran the length of one wall, its surface littered with glass vials and vessels, some empty, others filled with various colored liquids. Flat tables were lined up in the middle of the room between the pillars that held up the ceiling. All but the one table was empty—the body on that one, at the far end of the row, was covered with a sheet. My heart lurched when I beheld the man-shape under the cloth then dropped off into tiny beats I could scarcely feel.

  Did Daniel lie there? Daniel, whose laugh could warm a winter’s day, who had the knack of making the impossible happen, who knew people up and down the heart of London from magistrates to cabbies to outright thieves. Who was equally at home delivering crates of potatoes down the stairs to a kitchen as visiting a marquess in his home.

  I remembered Daniel keeping me out of sight at the pawnbrokers, making me wait until the man, Mr. Varley, had gone for certain before he’d let me out. He’d feared for me, not himself, the daft man. Had Mr. Varley returned last night, found out Daniel was working for the law, and dispatched him?

  Tess and James hung back as I followed the sergeant, my boot heels ringing, down the row of tables. As we rounded the pillar next to the last table, I saw that another man stood there, his head bowed as he contemplated the covered body.

  This man had very dark hair, the sunlight filtering through the high windows giving it a gloss. He dressed well, but his suit was rumpled, his coat awry. Large gloved hands curled and flexed, as though their owner did not know quite what to do with them.

  The stance, the hands, the hair were familiar. I walked quickly around the pillar and looked up at him. The man peered back at me nearsightedly a moment before he recognized me, then he jerked upright with a start.

  “Good Lord,” Mr. Thanos said. “You. That is to say—oh dear, if you are here, Mrs. H., it really must be him under this sheet.”

  7

  My spirits, which had held a tiny bit of hope, plummeted as Mr. Thanos spoke. I’d hoped, upon seeing Mr. Thanos, that he would tell me all was well, that Daniel was safe elsewhere and simply playing another part.

  Elgin Thanos was a dear friend of Daniel’s and a genius, at least as far as mathematics and calculations were concerned. He could take a jumble of numbers, turn them around in his head, and come up with amazing conclusions.

  Toward the rest of life, he was always a bit muddled. Today his coat was misbuttoned, and his cravat was half twisted around his neck, as though he’d dressed hurriedly and not bothered to look into a mirror. He appeared as though he hadn’t slept in some time or eaten properly either.

  “Mr. Thanos,” I greeted him. “I am sorry to see you under such circumstances.”

  “So am I, dear lady.” Elgin cleared his throat. “He was supposed to have met with me yesterday and never turned up. I am bad at keeping appointments, but our friend? Not in the least. Then what do I see in my morning newspaper? I raced out to the shop where he’d planted himself like a spider in a web, to see it crawling with constables. They shoved me in the direction of the Yard, and here I am.” Elgin glanced at the body. “Not a sight for ladies, I think. You wait over there, and I’ll have a look.”

  Elgin’s skin held the darkness of his grandfather’s Greece, but at the moment, his face wore a sickly pallor. I raised my chin.

  “Nonsense, Mr. Thanos. I am made of stern stuff.” I did not feel so stern at the moment, but needs must. “Come along, sergeant. We’d better get it over with.”

  The sergeant stepped to the end of the table. “I won’t show you his face. It’s pretty much gone and a gruesome sight. It was the blows to his head what killed him, coroner says.”

  So speaking, he folded back the sheet from one side of the body, exposing the man’s shoulder, arm, and chest.

  The poor fellow was naked, a thick red scar running down the center of his body where I suppose the coroner had opened him up. His flesh was gray with death, the black hair on his chest and arms all the more stark. He had quite large hands, almost square, with blunt fingers covered with calluses and scars, the nails uneven and broken. The hands were outsize in comparison with the rest of his body, which was of ordinary height, no taller than the sergeant beside me.

  Watery relief coursed through me. I looked up in elation at Elgin, who was squinting hard. �
�Use your spectacles, Mr. Thanos. This is not him.”

  Elgin blinked as though he’d forgotten his eyesight was poor, and pulled out the silk bag that held his spectacles. He looped them on, then bent forward and peered at the dead man’s exposed flesh.

  “You’re right, by Jove.” Elgin hooked his finger around the man’s thumb and carefully lifted the hand. “Our friend has the hands of a working-class man, yes, but this fellow has done some hard labor. As in the quarries of Dartmoor.” He gently lowered the man’s arm, his voice more matter-of-fact. “Wouldn’t you say, sergeant?”

  The sergeant gave the body a quick glance. “Most like. He’s got the look of a prisoner. Question is, what’s he doing in London? You saying you don’t know him, missus? Sir?”

  “No,” I said, trying to keep the joy out of my voice. “He’s a stranger to me.” I wondered if he was the man called Varley, but I could not be certain. I hadn’t seen enough of him through the crack in the doorway.

  “A stranger to me as well,” Elgin said. “I wonder who the devil he is?”

  Now that his worry was gone, Elgin’s curiosity returned.

  I felt a rush of air at my side, and James was there, gazing avidly at the body. “That’s not my dad.” He turned to me, his eyes shining. “It’s not my dad.”

  I put my arm around his shoulders and gave him a squeeze. “No, it is not. Let us thank God.”

  James nodded fervently, tears on his lashes. He hastily wiped his nose, his cheeks reddening.

  Tess cocked her head to study the man’s wan flesh before the sergeant dropped the sheet over him again. “The thing is,” she said, her voice regaining its robustness, “if that’s not James’s dad under there—where the bloody hell is he?”

  * * *

  * * *

  An excellent question. The sergeant thought so too, as shown by the way he moved to block our way out of the room.