Agnetti’s admiration for his sitters was a well-worn topic in London society. The newspapers liked to dwell at length upon the comings and goings at his gloomy old house in Leicester Fields: the parade of prostitutes through his parlour and the implication that they did more than sit for their supper. Artists had some licence when it came to disreputable conduct, but Mrs Agnetti had plainly had her fill of humiliation. Not that her husband seemed to care, given his behaviour since she’d walked out on him.
‘Lucy had no wish to be a maidservant or a milliner,’ he continued, ‘or any other penniless alternative to a life on the town. She may even have enjoyed her work. Some of my sitters do. She certainly enjoyed spending the money she earned.’
‘I cannot imagine any amount of money is worth the risks these women face.’
‘Until one has known poverty, how can one judge?’
‘Does one need to have known poverty to deplore the degradation of women?’
‘Is it not degrading to clean other people’s houses for a pittance? That was Lucy’s view on the matter. Her options were narrow, and she made her choices as she saw fit.’
Caro’s anger, kindling inside her ever since her visit to the magistrate’s house, suddenly blazed. ‘She was a commodity to her clients, bought and sold like a loaf of sugar. You may choose to believe that she wasn’t ground down by those exertions. I do not.’
Agnetti bowed his head. ‘Forgive my bluntness, madam. You are upset – and little wonder.’
She drew a breath, fighting to control her emotions. There was little sense in taking it out on Mr Agnetti. ‘Can I ask when it was that you last saw Lucy?’
‘Some months ago now. I regret to say that I was forced to dismiss her from my employ.’
‘Why was that?’
He sighed. ‘She stole some drawings from me, and she also stole from another gentleman of my acquaintance. I couldn’t have her in the house after that. Of all my sitters, she was the last I’d suspected would betray my trust.’
‘The magistrate said she left considerable debts. I suppose she was desperate.’
‘You surprise me. Lucy’s best years on the town were behind her, but it is only after forty when such women enter perilous times. Her plan was to buy a plot of land in Hampstead, on which to build houses to sell at a profit to fund her retirement. I have no doubt she would have done so, whatever her present difficulties. She was resourceful and determined.’
‘The magistrate mentioned that she had borne a child. I thought I might do something for him or her. Did you ever hear her speak of a son or daughter?’
Agnetti smiled sadly. ‘Regrettably, I don’t think you need worry upon that score. Lucy never spoke of her child. It is my guess that it must have died many years ago.’
‘But you knew she’d had one?’ The moment she’d spoken, she looked around at the paintings. ‘Oh, I see.’ He’d seen her naked.
Agnetti made no effort to fill the awkward silence that followed, simply turning back to the painting, lost in private contemplation.
‘The magistrate believes she was murdered by a passing stranger,’ Caro said, ‘but I think she knew her killer. She spoke to me before she died. She was trying to tell me something.’
He turned. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said: “He knows.” I wondered if one of her clients might have killed her.’
As she spoke, it occurred to her that Agnetti might have enjoyed Lucy’s favours himself. He had just admitted that he and Lucy had parted on bad terms. Could he have killed her? The possibility chilled her, and she was grateful for Miles’s looming presence.
‘It is certainly possible,’ Agnetti said. ‘Many times my sitters come to see me with blackened eyes or other bruises. They see it as a hazard of their trade. Someone attacked Lucy not long before I dismissed her. I presumed it was a client, though she did not say.’
Caro’s voice faltered. ‘My brother Ambrose knew her. I wondered if he could have met Lucy at your house? He commissioned a painting from you, did he not?’
Mordechai would have a seizure if he knew she was talking openly about Lucy and Ambrose. Agnetti too looked surprised. ‘The Castration of Uranus. It was two summers ago, as I recall. Mr Craven paid several visits to my home to discuss his commission, and Lucy was often around the place. They could easily have talked.’
Which would have been around the same time Ambrose had introduced her to Lucia at the supper party. Little wonder Lucy had discoursed so knowledgably about Naples after her conversations with Agnetti. Had she and Ambrose laughed at Caro together, amused by her credulity? She tried to summon anger, but felt only despondent.
The sound of approaching footsteps made Agnetti turn. A young woman walked into the Rotunda and Caro was startled to see a knife in her hand. She was very tall, thin and pale, about nineteen years old, her hair so fair it was almost white, cropped shockingly short. With her white muslin gown and the knife, she might have stepped out of one of Agnetti’s paintings. The assistant, Caro presumed; the one who had given rise to so much scandal.
The girl gave Caro a cool, assessing glance, and then addressed Agnetti: ‘Mr Tyers is asking for you, sir.’
‘I apologize, Mrs Corsham,’ Agnetti said. ‘There is a small problem with the ticketing for tonight and I must attend to it. I trust that I will see you at Carlisle House before too long. I hope by then you will have fully recovered from your ordeal.’
He bent to kiss her hand, and then he and the girl left the Rotunda together. Caro waited a moment, and then walked over to the table. She picked up one of Agnetti’s sketchbooks, and leafed through it, looking for Lucy.
Many of the subjects she recognized: gentlemen and ladies of her acquaintance. Others she did not – mostly women, mostly young, mostly beautiful. In the second sketchbook, she found her: Lucy rendered in charcoal, a coil of dark hair resting against her cheek. Her eyes weighed the artist, bold and inscrutable.
A drawing of Lucy would be a useful thing for Mr Child to have, she decided. Agnetti wouldn’t miss it. The girl had left her knife on the table, and ignoring Miles’s inquisitive gaze, she used it to cut the drawing from the book. Rolling it into a scroll, she concealed it beneath her cloak, and stepped out into the rain-washed gardens.
CHAPTER NINE
‘I DIDN’T DO it,’ the woman screamed. ‘Shitten fucksters.’
The men pulling her along the street carried the distinctive red tipstaffs of the Bow Street Runners. A thin scholarly-looking man in a shabby coat hurried along in their wake, and Child guessed the woman was a whore caught robbing her client.
They dragged her into the Brown Bear tavern, which stood opposite Sir Amos Fox’s house on Bow Street. The Runners had used the Brown Bear as their headquarters for years, even turning the bedrooms upstairs into makeshift cells. Child pushed his way through the throng outside, into the crowded taproom.
Several bored-looking Runners sat at tables, writing in ledgers. The queues in front of them stretched out onto the street: mothers holding crying children, people shouting about stolen property, affidavit men come to swear false testimony for money. The woman was dragged up the stairs to the cells, still kicking and spitting. Towards the rear of the taproom, Bow Street Runners between shifts sat around at long tables, drinking and playing cribbage for pennies. Child picked out his friend, Orin Black, another Deptfordian exiled to London.
Orin waved him over, rising to shake his hand. Child liked that he could look him square in the eye, even if Orin could fit through a crack in a door sideways. The other Runners called him ‘the jockey’ and Child would have punched them in the mouth, but Orin seemed to take it all in his stride. His face was round and dimpled, with the faint ridge of a harelip, and he wore his own hair in a stubby queue, tied back with a yellow ribbon to match his waistcoat.
‘I was just going out on my rounds,’ he said. ‘Take a walk with me?’
They strolled along Bow Street in the direction of the market. ‘Lucy Loveless,’ Chil
d said. ‘What can you tell me about her murder?’
Since he’d turned his hand to thief-taking, he and Orin had established a mutually beneficial arrangement in the trade of information. Orin would pass him the names of victims of theft unimpressed by Bow Street’s efforts to recover their property, and in turn Child would pass him the location of any villain with a price on his head who he felt deserved to hang.
Orin raised an eyebrow, one thumb hooked into the pocket of his waistcoat, swinging his tipstaff. ‘I didn’t attend the scene myself, but the murder’s been the talk of the Brown Bear. Who’s your client?’
‘Between you and me? The lady who found her in the bower. She’s decided she cares.’
Orin grunted. ‘Only one who does. No one’s claimed the body. I’m surprised the Whores’ Club haven’t. They usually look after their own.’
‘I heard they threw her out. I’m going there next.’
Orin grinned. ‘Good luck with that.’
Covent Garden was awash with the scents of kindling pleasure: woodsmoke to heat the water in the bathhouses, baking pies, mulling wine, and a hundred varieties of cheap perfume trailing the piazza’s working women. Ragged flower girls mingling with wizened penny bunters; buxom bagnio girls peering from the windows of the brothels and bathhouses; theatre spells strolling arm in arm with coffeehouse molls and jelly-house tarts; and painted courtesans peeping from the windows of their keepers’ carriages. Orin and Child walked between the fruit and vegetable stalls, the market-men casting anxious glances towards the ominous skies. Child bought himself an apple, while Orin eyed the vagabonds and urchins, looking for trouble.
‘Did you know Lucy?’ Child asked.
‘Not to speak to. I knew who she was. Everybody did. A few years back you’d have seen her name in the newspapers – appearances at the theatre on the arm of a duke, or a duel fought over her favours – that sort of thing. I used to see her going in and out of the Bedford Coffeehouse. But then she got older, like they all do, and there’s always younger girls for the newspapers to write about. Next step down from the Bedford is the Whores’ Club. She’d have had another ten years or so at that level. Then it would have been retirement, if she was lucky, or more likely she’d have turned bawd, or wound up like that.’ He gestured with his thumb at an ancient penny bunter with a stick, hobbling across the piazza, offering herself to disgusted tradesmen for a farthing.
‘My client says Sir Amos is convinced it was a random encounter in the bowers. Wrong place, wrong time.’
‘He’s probably right. You wouldn’t plan a killing like that. Too many people around. Too much risk of being disturbed – our killer got lucky. Lucy was stabbed more than a dozen times, mostly in the lower abdomen. That’s a real frenzy, Perry. Either he couldn’t control himself, or he enjoyed it. Mad or bad, that was the verdict of our lads on the scene.’
‘Or someone who had cause to hate her,’ Child said. ‘She had an enemy, her landlord says. Perhaps more than one. She’d been beaten badly a few months back, and someone was trying to ruin her life. My client saw a man in a plague doctor’s mask just before she found the body. That would be one way to mitigate some of the risk.’
Orin mused on this a moment. ‘If it was planned, why do it there? Why not some place quiet?’
‘Because his blood was up?’ Child was thinking it through as he spoke. ‘Maybe it wasn’t planned, maybe he’d just found something out about Lucy he didn’t like? Her final words were: “He knows.” My client thinks she was talking about the killer.’
‘A crime of passion, you mean?’
‘A spurned lover. A jealous client. She must have been meeting someone.’
‘Or a thieves’ dispute?’ Orin fingered the faint scar of his harelip.
‘So you concede it’s possible she knew him?’
‘I suppose so. There’s no witnesses, no suspects, only some Jewish lamplighter who looks as though he couldn’t harm a fly. No motive, beyond the obvious, except the sawbones doesn’t think she was raped.’
‘How about a weapon?’
‘Didn’t find one. Killer must have taken it with him.’
‘Bit of a risk taking a bloody knife out through the gate with all those guards.’
‘He takes risks. That’s the one thing we do know about him.’
Child pursed his lips. ‘How hard did they look? I ask because my client is convinced she saw a document next to the body, only Sir Amos told her he didn’t have it. Makes me question how diligent they were at the scene. Can you talk to the Runners who were there and see if anyone saw it?’
‘I might leave out the part about their diligence.’
Child grinned. ‘They were diligent enough at her rooms. Took some papers and drawings away with them, I’m told. Can you find out what they were? Get me a look?’
‘They’ll want paying.’
‘Naturally.’
They paused while Orin gave the eye to a pack of urchins idling near one of the fruit stalls, waiting for the stallholder to turn his back. The boys spotted him and ran off in search of easier pickings.
‘I had a murder like this last year,’ Orin said. ‘A whore found beaten to death. The killer’s mother turned him in after he came home covered in blood. All he’d say was that he didn’t know what had come over him. Maybe Sir Amos’s reward will provoke a similar prick of conscience. We’ve little enough else to go on, I’ll be honest.’
‘Why did Sir Amos take the case off Guildford’s hands?’ Child asked. ‘Given what you’ve just said. Doesn’t sound like him.’
‘Politics, would be my best guess. Perhaps he owes Guildford a favour, or he wants them to owe him one. He’s got his eye on a seat in Parliament; perhaps he fancies Surrey? Whatever it is, I’ll tell you one thing for certain, it will be to the benefit of Sir Amos Fox.’
Outside the Bedford Coffeehouse, a man was playing a whistle, trying to get his dog to dance for money. It kept sniffing after old food, and a party of young gentlemen sitting at one of the outside tables jeered.
‘How about this Lord March?’ Child said, eyeing the men with dislike. ‘Could it have been him?’
‘There was no blood on his clothes. You’d expect there to be if he’d done it.’
‘My client says the plague doctor was wearing a long black coat. Lord March could have discarded it and then returned to assist Mrs Corsham when he heard her scream?’
‘You know he’s the Earl of Amberley’s heir? Mentor to the Prince of Wales? I’d be careful what you say and who you say it to. Look, we had no cause to suspect him. He was helpful and courteous, our lads said. Not often they get to question a peer of the realm.’
Child grunted. ‘One of Lucy’s neighbours saw her arguing with a redcoat officer only a few days before she died. Said she’d thought she’d seen him around Covent Garden causing trouble.’ He described the man, his duelling scar.
‘I’ll look out for him,’ Orin said. ‘We get a lot of gentlemen like that down here. They think it great sport to get drunk and break up a tavern, then pay off the taverner. Or start a brawl in a bawdy house. A few years back, a group of them rolled an old lady down a hill for fun. Broke both her arms. Arrest them and they only buy their way out, or their fathers intervene. Half of them have debts that’d make your eyes water, but it don’t stop them spending.’ Orin gave him a sidelong glance. ‘Talking of which, they say Finn Daley’s looking for you.’
‘He found me. I’m still here.’
‘Just watch yourself, Perry. I don’t want to be hauling you out of the Thames.’
‘If I find this murderer, you won’t have to. You’ll talk to the Runners at the scene and the ones who took Lucy’s papers?’
‘Deptford till we die, right?’ Orin punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come back tomorrow. I’ll see you right.’
CHAPTER TEN
CARO’S BREATHING QUICKENED as she turned into the Dark Walk. Memories assailed her. The constables and the blood and Lucy and Lord March. The man in th
e plague doctor’s mask. The ground outside the bower was a churn of mud from the rain and all the comings and goings. Steeling herself, she walked inside.
The willows slouched under the downpour, the stone bench slick and black. All trace of Lucy had been removed, save for a darkened patch of grass. The mineral stench of blood clogged Caro’s nostrils, but memory had seeped into reality. Lucy’s fingers clutching her own. He knows.
‘What are we looking for, Mrs Corsham?’ Miles said.
‘A document of some kind, perhaps a letter.’
Together they scanned the grass. Caro wondered if it had been kicked into the undergrowth in all the confusion. She crouched down, muddying her petticoats, ignoring Miles’s protests. Edging deeper into the trees, her sleeves catching on branches, she felt around on the mossy ground. After a little while spent crawling around, her fingers brushed something small and hard in the grass. A gentleman’s signet ring, encrusted with earth. Gold, with a waxy red stone. It looked very old.
‘Whatever are you doing down there in the dirt?’
She looked up sharply at the sound of his voice. Lord March stood at the entrance to the bower, an exotic bird amidst the foliage, in a sky-blue coat of moiré silk embroidered with silver thread. She scrambled to her feet, her fingers forming a fist around the ring. ‘Miles, wait by the carriage.’
The footman started to object, but she silenced him with a look. He handed her the umbrella and left the bower.
‘What are you doing here?’ she addressed Lord March.
His face in the dappled half-light resembled an older man’s: lined with fatigue, his complexion pale, his cheeks hollow. Too much fast living with Neddy Dodd-Bellingham, she supposed. He’d recently cropped his dark hair fashionably short – Dodd-Bellingham’s influence again – tousled on top, with side whiskers over the ears. A waft of civet scent as he moved closer, his dark, intense gaze raking over her.
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