The Murder of Mary Russell (15 page)

I
t was a mistake, I told myself, to think of Samuel Hudson as human.

Samuel was the sort of creature who learns emotions as a mask, whose true empathy is precisely nil, whose only interest lies in his own comfort and preservation. Some of his sort make no attempt to hide their contempt for the human race, and end their days in prison or a noose. Others manage to learn early the lessons of survival, that even prey can have teeth, and become expert at hiding their contempt until the act can be set aside.

Samuel Hudson had set his act aside. Seeing his face, I felt the same visceral reaction of any normal person: run, fast and far.

I had seen men in India charming cobras, not by music or mesmerism, but by a cautious teasing: the snake feels threatened enough not to let down its defences and slither away, yet safe enough not to strike. There is a precise balance between threat and reassurance, distance and presence, while the charmer waits—either for a partner, or an opportunity.

God only knew where Holmes was. It would have to be an opportunity.

I led Samuel through the kitchen and sitting room to the front entranceway, where cupboards filled the space beneath the stairs. I started pulling open doors, trying to sound helpful yet puzzled.

“This is where we tend to put all manner of whatnot,” I said, my voice muffled by a stack of aged blankets. “Your crate shouldn't be too buried. It came only a few months ago.” I closed that door, and opened the next, every inch of me unhappy about having my back turned on this man.

He was waiting for me to pull out a weapon: I could feel the tension in his finger. And indeed, one might expect that in a household such as ours, this storage area would be just the spot to conceal a gun—were it not for two problems: Mrs Hudson, and Holmes himself.

Mrs Hudson simply detested guns, and refused to dust any shelf or clear any cupboard when she knew there was one stored there. (I had long ago decided that the tiny, ivory-handled derringer I had once seen in the depths of her wardrobe—a place where I had absolutely no business to have gone—was a decorative little fake.) Holmes, on the other hand, though not fond of guns for reasons I could understand, did acknowledge them as a necessary evil. However, he insisted on knowing
precisely
where each was, that he could lay a hand on it, instantly, blindfolded, on a black night.

A storage cupboard where things were forever being shovelled about made a poor place, therefore, for a loaded weapon. The most lethal things here were a crossbow with a broken string and a weighty set of bocce balls.

I dropped to my heels for the last door, pulling out three pairs of rubber boots, a stack of books headed for my library in Oxford, and a repair kit for bicycle tyres. Behind them was a wooden shape, just where I remembered it.

With my left hand resting casually on the topmost book of the pile, a history of the Punjab rendered satisfyingly dense by many glossy illustrated pages, I turned an eager and virtuous face up at him, to ask, “Is this your crate?”

T
he next day, Clarissa was feeling the effects of long hours of walking followed by the slams and sway of a hansom—she should have spent the extra for a growler. Childbirth, it seemed, took some time to get over, like pleurisy and broken legs. A solid night's sleep would help—although last night had been better than most. Samuel seemed to have been tired out by the day, and only woke every couple of hours instead of every twenty minutes. Such luxury!

Sunday was Clarissa's usual day to give The Bishop his week's tribute. Since August, she had been sending what little there was with Billy. Once, the boy had set off with nothing more in hand than a note from Clarissa concerning her health and the weather. He had returned with a bruised face and a threat from the man that she should hurry up and birth her brat.

Today being Sunday, normally she would have roused herself for the trip to Whitechapel. However, Billy had paid the price for her failures: it was only fair that he should get credit for their success.

“Billy, you think you can carry our takings to The Bishop without losing them?” she asked.

He turned on her a look of infinite scorn. He'd been carrying coins and notes around the city for half his life: being known as one of The Bishop's lads meant the thugs tended to let you be.

So she laboriously penned a list of what they had taken and what she had kept, along with a polite note thanking The Bishop for his patience. (She had to check the spelling with Billy, since words that came freely from her tongue proved slippery on paper.) She bundled the silk handkerchiefs, a ladies' looking glass, two hair-pins, and a watch-fob into a tight bundle. She slipped it and the note into a bag, added The Bishop's cut of the coins, and tugged the strings shut. Billy, dressed in his loosest trousers, threaded his belt through the strings and dropped the bag inside. She pressed a coin into his palm and told him to buy himself some bread and coffee on the way.

Samuel stirred, fed, and actually went back to sleep. She took advantage of the respite to tidy the room and mend a pair of Billy's trousers, sitting at the window where the grind of iron wheels and the cries of street vendors drowned out Samuel's wheeze. Might she feel more…maternal about the infant if she wasn't so flattened by exhaustion? Shouldn't a mother and child make more of a partnership? Instead, he felt like a whirlpool, one more thing sucking her down into the dark.

Ah well. She had Billy. And Samuel would get easier.

Thinking of Billy, she'd neglected his schooling this past week: where had they got to, anyway? He'd been reading aloud to her, sounding out the words of a copy of
The Old Curiosity Shop
that she'd bought from a vender's barrow. It was missing its first few pages, but they'd soon caught up with the story. When she came to an end of her slit seam, she put down her needle and picked up the book, opening it to the green ribbon he'd left to mark their place. She tried always to review material before giving it to him, lest he think the teacher knew less than her student.

She read now under her breath, wondering why Mr Dickens felt it necessary to use so many long words. Still, once she'd picked through the individual words and got their shape, she could usually string them together to get their meaning, almost like speech.
Through this…de.lir.i.ous
…(Delirious? What was that?)
scene, the child, fri—frightened and re.pell—repelled by all she saw, led on her be.wil.der—bewildered charge…
And so on.

It was both exhausting and exhilarating to tease a story from endless and identical rows of black marks on the page. She had just reached the part where Nell was comforting her grandfather under the noses of two sleeping men (the illustrations helped, a lot) when a knock came on the door. She dropped the book with a bang, scrambling upright.

Samuel peeped, but did not wake. She stared at the door, heart in mouth, waiting for the Demander to bash it down, but the thin wood remained shut. She swallowed, and tip-toed over to put her ear to the crack.

Either her shadow betrayed her, or her visitor's hearing was very sharp. “Miss Hudson? I'd like a word, if you please.”

Not one of The Bishop's men—not with that accent. She placed her hand against the cold iron, turned the knob—and the door pushed in, gently but firmly. She stepped back in surprise as a gangling, smooth-faced figure came through her door, eyes darting around as if making an inventory of the room, her clothing, and the books on the shelf.

He was little more than a lad, despite his six feet and more of height, all bones and a beak that made him (in a never-forgotten phrase from her mother) “look laik he was bein' led about ba his nose.” His hair appeared to have been trimmed by three impatient snips from a pair of dull shears, his hands were dotted with odd stains and what looked like burns, and his overcoat, although of an excellent cut and jet-black cloth, had been made for a smaller man. He seemed to be leaning into a strong breeze as he swept past, almost sniffing with that absurd nose as he surveyed the room.

One long hand came up to remove the silk hat that rested upon his ears, a hand-me-down from some larger head. As his sleeve went up, her eyes followed the cuffs, also dotted with stains, that protruded from the too-short sleeves of his jacket. At that, she recognised him.

“You!” she exclaimed.

“I,” he replied. He cocked his head to read the title of the book splayed across the floor.

“You were in the zoo yesterday. Watching me.”

“Yes.” He picked up the Dickens story and laid it upon her chair, a gesture less of tidiness than of masculine claim. Clarissa's self-possession stirred: so this lad imagined himself a man, did he? He'd seen a woman burdened by two small children, a woman not entirely without looks, a woman with little cash (a hansom, instead of a growler) and no man in sight: a woman whose vulnerability he could exploit? Well, this stripling was in for a surprise.

She drew herself up, summoning the kind of amused womanliness that reduced young men like this to quivering infancy.

“My dear boy,” she began—except that he then turned to look directly at her, and she was rooted to the floor, rendered speechless by a pair of cold, vivid, steel-grey eyes.

His were the eyes of an old man, and did not belong above cheeks that scarcely knew a razor. That gaze had seen everything, knew everyone, would be surprised at nothing, and it flicked through Clarissa Hudson's layers like a scalpel through flesh, getting to the bone of her in nothing flat. Her crimes, her catastrophic love affair, her father's rule, the responsibility for a sister, a mother's leaving her—down to the person that was little Clarissa Hudson, Australian transportee.

And then a whimper came from the corner, and the grey eyes went wide as they searched for the source of the noise. They found the corner where Samuel lay, then returned to Clarissa. For the first time, he looked young.

“I need to—” she began.

“Yes,” he said, and gave a wave of those long fingers.

Loosed at last, she retrieved the infant. When she turned, the intruder was running that penetrating gaze along the buckling wallpaper, the shawl she'd draped over a worn place on the chair, the polished silver frame around Alicia's face, and the bowl of apples on the table. He moved over to the bedroom doorway, to survey those contents: three frocks of incongruously rich fabric, hanging high off the floor: neatly tucked bedclothes; tidy stacks of baby things; smaller piles of garments belonging to her and to Billy. His gaze came to rest on the window that looked out onto the bricks of the next house.

The glass was spotless.

With a nod, he retreated to the small table with Billy's schoolbooks on it. Clarissa became aware that she was holding Samuel like a shield; aware, too, that she was tempted to brazenly settle her infant to the breast, in hopes of driving the lad away.

But no: he would not leave. She doubted he would even turn his back.

The boy spoke at last, his voice high, biting, and of the upper classes. “You are the daughter of James Hudson?”

Whatever she'd expected, it was not this.

“I…he…” She stopped. “What has Pa done now?”

He bounced the silk hat against his leg a few times, his eyes icy with condemnation. “Your father is a blackmailer. His threats killed a man, the father of a friend of mine. I shall make him answer for it.”

The declaration should have sounded absurd, coming from one so young. Instead, Clarissa felt the lad could have given The Bishop lessons in fury. Blackmail—Pa? Well, maybe, if he was desperate—but,
killing
the man in the process? A man with a social connexion to this terrifying invader—worse, a connexion that, judging by the emphatic way he spat the word “blackmailer,” was very personal.

“I…I don't, I'm sorry. Do you—” But at that point, Samuel decided to join the conversation, less from hunger than to protest her squeezing arms. She'd never been so glad to hear his cry. Maybe she could drive the lad out, at least long enough to gather her thoughts. “I need to feed him,” she said faintly.

“By all means,” he said, sounding more irritated than distressed. Rather than retreat into the hallway, he merely took up a position at the window, staring at the street below.

She, however, did fall back to the bedroom before putting Samuel to her breast, leaving the door ajar. The moment the infant cries subsided, the young man spoke up.

“I can see that your father does not live here. Do you know where he is?”

“I last saw him in the summer, and—”

“When, exactly?”

“June, I think? Perhaps early July. It was the first time I'd seen him since November. We had an argument. He…shall we say, he had not made friends in London. At the time, I had no idea where he'd gone, but when he came back, in early summer, he said he'd been signed on as a sailor. He looked much the worse for wear, almost haggard, with—”

“Tar on his sleeve?”

“Well, yes. How did you know?”

“I saw him soon after. What did he want from you?”

“He assumed I would be glad to resume the…arrangement he and I had, an Act we put on in order to earn—”

He was suddenly standing in the bedroom doorway. “Miss Hudson, you and your father are a pair of scoundrels, bilking the wealthy from Manchester to Monte Carlo.”

She stared. “You seem remarkably”—
well informed
—“sure of yourself, young man.”

“I make it a point to know what other people do not.”

Samuel stirred, as if the flow of his meal had been cut off. She shifted him to the other side, briefly exposing herself to the young man, but he did not react—rather, he reacted internally, but seemed somehow both to notice his own discomfort and set it aside.

“Very well,” she said. “Since you know what we did, it will not surprise you to learn that he was looking to resume our partnership. However, as I said, he looked too decrepit. Even if I'd been willing, it would have taken a lot of time and effort to clean him up. In any event, I had recently made an arrangement—a financial arrangement—with a gentleman here in London.”

“You went to work for The Bishop.”

“You
know
him?” This young man looked nothing like The Bishop's usual clientèle—far less a partner.

“We have met.” The flat statement did not suggest a social event.

“I was a bit desperate, back in April. Mr Bishop offered me a degree of protection—and one of his young charges as a partner. Since my father owed him a great deal of money—still does, so far as I know—I was not about to cross the man by going back into partnership with my father. So I sent Papa away.”

“What did he say when you did so?”

“Something about having another card to play. A friend, in Norfolk, I believe. Although I didn't know my father had any actual friends. I presumed he had some kind of dodge in mind, although he said nothing about blackmail. I am sorry about your friend's fa—”