‘They are wrong,’ Stokes said. ‘The West India lobby are a bunch of old women, and they always were. There will be a scandal, but it will be short-lived. People will forget. They won’t waste their pity upon a boatload of Negroes halfway across the world. Pounds, shillings and pence, that’s what will count at the end of the day. The price of tobacco, the price of sugar. Nothing more.’
I tucked the contracts inside my coat, giving him a last considered glance. ‘No,’ I said. ‘They are right, and you are wrong.’
*
I stabled Zephyrus at the coaching inn on Deptford Broadway, then walked down to the Strand. I stood for a time on the dock, watching black clouds roll in off the water. The air was heavy, and I felt the first pricks of rain. The Dark Angel lay out on the Reach, the winged woman’s austere gaze cast over Deptford. I would go to her again later, after dark.
I hired another boat from the same yard I’d visited before. Then I walked along the quay, turning my collar up against the rain. The sky trembled with a distant rumble of thunder.
The wharves were quieter because of the rain, only the stevedores out in force. Heads down, loading and unloading. I reached the warehouse where Nathaniel had taken me the other night, trying not to recall his nakedness, his lies.
I rattled the warehouse doors, and found them secure. From what Nathaniel had told me, I knew no one would be in there during the day. A passing stevedore shot me a suspicious glance, and I decided against going in the front. I walked round the side, looking for another way in.
In an alley round the back I found another door, also locked. I knelt in front of it, taking a slim leather roll from my pocket. It had been lent to me by Caesar John, and his men had spent the better part of an hour schooling me in the use of the tools inside.
Picking a lock, with guidance, in the warmth and safety of the sponging house, proved a different proposition to doing so here, out in the open. The lock was old and rusting, but I still made hard work of it. The rain ran down my face and froze my fingers. After about fifteen minutes, during which time I tried different sizes of pick, I felt something spring, and when I tried the door, it opened.
Immediately, I was hit by the foul stench inside. It was much stronger than it had been three days ago. I walked further into the warehouse, trying to ascertain where it was coming from. The smell was strongest at a point beneath the office stairs. A pile of old pallets and crates were stacked there, and flies swarmed around them. I swatted them from my face. A large tarpaulin lay on the floor behind the crates, covering something large and soft and heavy.
Steeling myself, I drew my sword, and used it to flick the tarpaulin back. A thick cloud of flies rose up, and I stepped back, covering my mouth. Filled with revulsion, I stared down at the body lying there.
He had plainly been dead some time, the flesh rotten, writhing with maggots. The cause of death was decapitation, flies feasting thickly upon the blood. The corpse of Jago, Nathaniel Grimshaw’s dog.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The rain was coming down harder now, the light eerie, a tobacco sky. I sheltered in the archway leading to the stable-yard of the Noah’s Ark, until I caught sight of the stable boy. I whistled, and he came to meet me, looking wary.
‘Mistress said I wasn’t to talk to you no more.’
I held up a penny. ‘Can you give this note to Master Grimshaw?’
Greed worked its magic as it so often did in Deptford. My note asked Nathaniel to meet me at the coaching inn up in the Broadway. No doubt his own greed would bring him running.
By the time I reached the Broadway, the rain was coming down in sheets. The High Street was a torrent, people running for cover. I noticed Mr and Mrs Monday hurrying by on the other side. They were followed by the mulatto boy, the little girl, and a black footman with an umbrella. Mrs Monday spotted me, and put her hand on her husband’s arm. The boy saw me too, and gave me a frank, curious stare. They hurried on.
I glanced up at Brabazon’s rain-washed window and saw a blurred figure behind the glass. He drew back, but I’d seen him, just as he’d seen me.
I heard someone calling my name and looked around. It was Scipio, running across the road to meet me. He raised his voice over the rain.
‘Abraham told me you were back. You saved her. Was she hurt?’
I remembered Cinnamon’s bruises, that silent stare. ‘Only a little. She is safe now.’
‘Thank the Lord.’ He wiped the moisture from his face, the rain pouring from his hat. ‘Stokes has dismissed me. He guessed I told you about Cinnamon.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I meant it. None of this was his fault – not really.
‘I don’t regret it. I couldn’t have her upon my conscience too.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘Try to find another post in Deptford, though I don’t expect it will be easy. Mr Stokes is dedication itself when it comes to a grudge. If I can’t, I’ll go to London. Try to find a post there. Hope I don’t end up like those drunks in the Yorkshire Stingo.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Perhaps I will look up Miss Cinnamon. Do you know where I can find her?’
I felt awkward. ‘I’m sorry. She doesn’t want anyone to know where she is.’
His smile faded. ‘I need to make my peace with her.’
‘That is her choice, don’t you think? You can’t blame her for mistrusting you.’
He didn’t answer and I could sense his pain. I spoke more gently: ‘You were your own man when it mattered. I’ll make sure she knows it. Perhaps in time she might change her mind.’
He stared into the rain, looking tired, suddenly older. ‘There’s something else I came to tell you. You asked me last time we met what Mr Stokes discussed at John Monday’s house the night Archer was killed. Abraham accompanied our master there, and overheard his argument with Peregrine Child afterwards. It seems it was Eleanor Monday who summoned them there, not her husband. She told them Captain Vaughan was being kept on board The Dark Angel and that Archer knew this.’
‘That was my suspicion too.’ I frowned. ‘John Monday wasn’t there?’
‘Apparently he’d left the house earlier with Mr Brabazon.’
Then Eleanor had been lying about his alibi. ‘Do you know why she told them this?’
‘She was worried someone would get hurt. Abraham said Child wanted to go to The Dark Angel, but Stokes wouldn’t let him.’
‘Why didn’t Stokes tell you this before, so you could tell me?’
‘He would have been implicating himself. He and Child knew a murder was likely to take place, and did nothing to prevent it.’
It made sense, and yet Scipio might have other motives for wanting me to suspect John Monday. I thought of the mulatto boy; Scipio gazing after Mrs Monday in the stable-yard.
‘When did you first come to Deptford, Scipio?’
He looked surprised by the question. ‘In the winter of ’74. Why do you ask?’
Then he couldn’t be the father. The child was at least nine, if not older. ‘Nothing. Just a foolish idea I had.’ Reassured as to his motives, I held out my card. ‘Call on me if you come to London. I may be able to help you find a new position.’
He didn’t take it at first, and I wondered if he was moved by the gesture. Perhaps he simply doubted that I’d make it back to London alive. Then he pocketed the card, and we shook hands.
He walked off down the High Street, and I watched until he was swallowed by the mist and the rain. A man who lived each day beneath the shadow of the slave ship’s mast.
*
In the taproom of the coaching inn, I took a seat near to the fire, where I sat steaming. The place was packed with merchants using the excuse of the rain to get drunk. I noticed Peregrine Child sitting alone, a bottle of wine in front of him. He studiously avoided looking in my direction.
Nathaniel Grimshaw arrived half an hour later. He was out of breath, his face flushed, his eyes bright. He plainly thought it was all within his grasp: the reprieve from slavery for which he’d
debased himself and others.
‘Well, Captain Corsham,’ he said, seating himself opposite me. ‘Do you have it?’
‘No, Nathaniel. I have not brought you any money.’
It was almost cruel to watch the destruction of his hopes. His head jerked, and his breathing quickened. That hard, flinty look came into those soft green eyes. ‘I notice Mr Child sitting over there. Why don’t we see what he has to say about that night we spent together at the warehouse? I’ll tell him how you held me down. Made me touch you.’
‘Yes,’ I said wearily. ‘Why don’t we? While we’re about it, we could take him down to the warehouse, and show him what’s underneath that tarpaulin of yours.’
Rarely had a face undergone so much metamorphosis in such a short time. His mouth went slack, and he made an odd noise in his throat. ‘What tarpaulin?’
Nathaniel might have been adept at concealing his true motives, but when taken by surprise, he was still the world’s worst liar.
‘It was well thought out, I’ll give you that. You might have made a fine attorney with a mind that devious. I’m guessing it went like this. You knew something about obeah – from your father, I suppose – and so you decided to fashion a little play: the slaves’ revenge. You left the dead birds and those other offerings at the houses of the The Dark Angel’s sailors. It was probably you who spread the rumour the ship was cursed. You left offerings at your own house, so you wouldn’t be suspected. I think that’s what you were doing that night your mother saw Scipio, and you turned on him in the stable-yard. You also told Child you’d seen two African footmen running away to cast the blame elsewhere. Your plan worked, when the ship’s crew refused to serve on her. Vaughan went mad, and you were granted a temporary reprieve from slavery. You took advantage of the delay to extort money from frightened men, so that you could pay off your mother’s debts, and be spared slaving altogether. I’m afraid that’s the part I can’t forgive.’
Nathaniel narrowed his eyes, his defiance not quite spent. ‘You think I killed my own dog? You’re touched in the head.’
‘Yes, I do. I imagine all my questions about the obeah scared you, and you were determined to put me off the scent. You were probably saving the dog’s carcass for a repeat performance.’
I could almost hear the cogitations of his mind as he rethought his strategy. ‘I’d have had to get rid of Jago anyway, if I’d gone slaving.’ He licked his lips. ‘But who’s going to listen to you? Especially when I tell them how much you wanted my soft white arse. The mayor doesn’t like you, and Child does what he’s told. They’ll both want to believe me.’
‘I’m afraid the mayor and I have reached an accommodation. If Child does do what he’s told, then it won’t be to your benefit. Should you proceed with your allegations, I will tell everyone in Deptford about the obeah. I’ll also sue you for defamation and buy the judge. If that doesn’t ruin you, I will buy up your mother’s debts and foreclose. You need to understand what you’re dealing with, Nathaniel. The only person who risks ruin here is you.’
I willed him to accept it. My tone softened a little. ‘You didn’t want to end up like your father and Frank Drake, I understand that. But there has to be another way. Not this.’
His words came out in an angry, choking sob: ‘If there was another way, don’t you think that I’d have found it?’
He rose from the table, and I watched anxiously to see if he’d go over to Child. Yet he only stormed from the tavern, banging the door behind him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Nothing now stood between the killer and I, except my own ability to see the truth. I bought an ale, and then walked over to join Peregrine Child.
‘May I?’
‘I’m too drunk to stop you.’
I saw the truth of it in his glassy gaze, his flat, mottled face.
‘You came back,’ he said. ‘Death or glory. I salute you.’
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
He ran his tongue over his wine-stained teeth. ‘Hoping is different to thinking.’
‘I know you’ve been taking Stokes’s orders from the start. First he made you stand by while Archer was murdered. Then he made you protect me so I could solve the crime. Your head must have been spinning.’
He shrugged. ‘I like my job. I wanted to keep it.’
‘Why did you keep telling me to leave town? That wasn’t what Stokes wanted.’
‘You didn’t know what you were mixed up in, did you?’ He screwed up his eyes as the landlord lit the lamps against the gathering gloom. ‘If my days in Deptford have taught me anything, it’s that when a rich old bastard like Lucius Stokes gets clever, the rest of us had better run for cover. If I dance upon his strings, at least I choose to do so. You had no idea.’
‘Is that why you went to the archive? Were you trying to work out Stokes’s game?’
‘It made no sense to me. Usually it does. I didn’t like it.’
‘Then there’s Frank Drake. For a long time, I thought you were protecting a guilty man.’
‘I wasn’t. I did try to tell you.’
‘Yes, you were. He just wasn’t guilty of the crime I thought he was. Drake had dealings with a masonry and quarrying yard down in Southwark. I went there yesterday. The owner claimed never to have heard of him, but he was lying. I couldn’t think what business they might have had together, until I remembered the theft of gunpowder from the Navy Yard. It was the same night Archer was killed. I think you knew he was innocent of the murder, because you knew what he was really doing. How much did Drake pay you to turn a blind eye?’
Child called to the serving girl to bring another bottle. Very slowly and deliberately, he filled his glass, and drank it off in two gulps. ‘I imagine you look at Deptford, and see a midden of crime and corruption, but you don’t know what it was like here before my watch. I keep the thieves out of the warehouses, I stop the dockside feuds from spiralling, and if a woman’s husband gets too free with his fists, she knows she can come to me. Laws are just ink on a piece of paper. You can enforce the letter, not the spirit. Or you can do it the other way around. I take a fraction of the bribes of my predecessors, and I never lock up men I know to be innocent. I don’t say it’s perfect. I don’t deal in absolutes.’
‘And Drake?’
He was silent a moment. ‘Drake was different.’
‘Because he was your dead wife’s brother?’
He filled his glass, drank it down. For another long moment he said nothing, and I thought he was going to close up on me again, but then he spoke: ‘Drake got to me at a bad time – just after Liz and our child died. I’d not been magistrate very long, only a year. I let Drake off a crime I shouldn’t have – a woman died, he said it was an accident. Perhaps I felt I couldn’t judge, I don’t know. Anyway, it tied us together. I couldn’t ever send him down for anything after that, because if he was facing a hanging, he had nothing to lose by peaching on me.’
I felt as if he was telling me this because he wanted me to understand him, because he didn’t want me to lump him in with Stokes and Drake and all the rest.
‘That night Mrs Monday summoned you to her house,’ I said. ‘She thought either her husband or Brabazon was going to kill Archer. Which one of them was it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’
Brabazon must have gone straight to his dinner in Greenwich after he’d left Monday’s house, but he could have gone to the ship afterwards. I only had his word that he’d called in on Daniel Waterman – and Waterman was dead. But Monday had no alibi either. One or the other – or both together? Captain Vaughan would know – assuming he was still alive. So many of the answers lay on that ship.
‘I liked Archer, you know,’ Child said. ‘He had spirit. Funny too. And he didn’t give a fuck who told him no. I respected that.’
I took the silver ticket from my pocket and put it on the table between us. ‘When I showed you this ticket before, I think you recognized it.’
He m
ade no move to touch it. Nor would he look at me. He just stared at the ticket, and seemed to supress a shudder. ‘There is a house near Greenwich, on the outskirts of Lee, outside my jurisdiction. The owner pays off the magistrate, so they never have trouble. You take that ticket there, you’ll see what I mean.’ He described the house and gave me directions to it.
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? Stokes wanted you to help me.’
‘I didn’t see what it could have to do with any of this. And I wanted nothing to do with that place – I never did.’
‘Is it a brothel?’ His squeamishness was as uncharacteristic as his reticence.
‘I wouldn’t call it that. Look, go there, if you must, but just know this: I didn’t let them set up shop in Deptford. They offered me a lot of money, but I didn’t take it. Believe me on that, Captain Corsham, if nothing else.’
Glancing at my watch, I calculated that I could make it to Lee in less than half an hour. Assuming my inquiries there didn’t take too long, I could be back in Deptford to go to The Dark Angel later tonight.
‘I heard you took Stokes’s Negress off that ship,’ Child said. ‘I am glad of it. Will you tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t help her?’
I frowned. ‘She came to you?’
‘Not this time. The last time. The day before Archer was killed. She came to the watchhouse, crying, saying Stokes was going to send her to his Caribbean plantations. She wanted an injunction. Archer had explained the law to her.’
I stared at him. ‘Stokes was going to send her away before?’
‘Aye, like I said.’
That was what Cinnamon had meant, I realized, when she’d said that it would have been too late for Archer to take her to London. Another day, and she’d have been aboard a Guineaman.
‘Why was Stokes sending her away? Why did he change his mind?’
‘She was on that ship when the slaves were drowned. The West India lobby didn’t want her in England. They were worried she might tell Archer what she knew. After Archer was killed, Stokes convinced them to let her stay.’
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