Authors: Imogen Robertson

Tags: #Historical fiction, #Crime Fiction

Instruments of Darkness (30 page)

BOOK: Instruments of Darkness

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Graves put his hand to his pocket. He had four shillings, though they were owing to Molloy, but it would be enough to give him the appearance of a gentleman in a public place. They were not far from the coffee shop, which turned out to be a pleasant enough little house whose high bay windows were already full of customers at their pipes and papers, the long-handled coffee pots set among them like the hookahs in the Arab houses by the wharf. Mr Chase greeted half a dozen men as they entered, but found a table that would admit no more than himself and Graves in a more secluded corner, and ordered drink and pipes from a young serving girl who greeted him by name.

Graves looked about him. Each of the coffee shops that had become so much part of the fabric of London in the last years had developed its own character and its own clientèle within a few months of its existence. Where Graves usually went in Fleet Street to comfort himself in disappointment, or to celebrate any victory real or imagined, the drinkers looked pinched and bitter, or loudly traded barbs and satires. One could not take two steps before a friend or casual acquaintance placed an inkstained palm on one’s sleeve to whisper gossip or complain of their outrageous treatment at the hand of a printer, or to claim they had been insulted in the ill-read and ill-rhymed verses of another. Some men scratched at their badly fitting wigs and screwed up their eyes against the smoke to try and find floating free above them the right word, the right ringing phrase to seal a paragraph, make their friends jealous and their enemies fall like so many wooden soldiers. Others boasted at broad tables of their latest commissions and future successes, apparently oblivious to the fact that none of their companions was willing to look them in the eye.

Graves always felt a twinge of sympathy when he saw the boasters, knowing, as sure as he knew himself, that their desks were dusty and the pages empty. No man who has seriously begun a work speaks of it with such pride and pleasure. Only the idea is that delightful. It was the quiet men with an air of abstraction, deep lines in their foreheads and the impression of being continually almost in tears in whom Graves believed as writers, after his faith in the boasters and versifiers continually searching for a patron or cursing their enemies had failed.

Mr Chase’s preferred coffee house was altogether more comfortable. The men were as well-dressed as Mr Chase himself, and mostly as broad. There were no pretensions to high fashion - the waistcoats of the gentlemen were not heavily embroidered or strung about with fobs and seals, but the cut of the cloth was universally good, and the quality fine. Graves thought of his mother’s two tabbies, sleek, happy animals, licking their paws in front of the fire when they had enjoyed a successful hunt. Business must be in general good, despite the disturbances in town. Graves could fancy he heard an underlying purr among the talk and clatter of cups; the sound of men who even as they drank and drew on their pipes were making more money than their families and other dependants could spend.

Graves looked across at his companion. ‘Do you think the rioters are done, Mr Chase?’

Mr Chase looked up, as if surprised to find he was not alone.

‘Eh, my boy? Oh, perhaps. We shall know in a few hours.’ He pulled at his earlobe and his eyes clouded a little. ‘That is Mr Landers standing by the door. He is a Catholic with a neat little warehouse in Smithfields, and he looks a trifle wan. And there is Granger, a rival of his, in the other corner: he would set the mob on him without a second thought if he believed we would not suspect and shun him for it in future. We must wait and observe. The brewers will be nervous. Gordon’s lot have decided that brewing is a Catholic trade, and of course a distillery is the crowd’s favourite place to pillage and burn.’

Graves frowned and looked around the room again, noticing under the creamy prosperity he had observed at first, signs of abstraction and concern. The low murmur of talk seemed to change key in his inner ear and he felt a tension, overlaid by good manners and reticence, breathe through the air.

Mr Chase sighed. ‘But I wish to speak of something else, my boy, touching on these children.’

Graves drew himself straight. He had formed a plan of his own since dawn, deciding to take over Alexander’s business in Tichfield Street, and manage it for the sake of the children. Whatever their new prospects, he felt he could provide them with a safe home for some little time there. He prepared to explain himself, but Mr Chase prevented him, lifting his hand.

‘I had hoped that there would be something else in that black box of Alexander’s,’ he said, ‘something that would spare me the necessity of speaking to you myself. But I fear there was nothing, or I would see it in your face.’

Graves blushed, which drew a smile from his companion.

‘Yes, I think I can read you well enough, young man. But do not let that shame you. It is good to be open in your countenance: it speaks well of your soul.’ He drew at his pipe. ‘I have known Alexander since his first days in town. It was I that lent him the money to establish himself.’ Graves tried to interject. ‘It was a loan only, and paid off in good time. The shop is unencumbered.’ He paused again and put one fat hand down on the table-top, lifting and dropping his fingers one by one as if observing the functioning of some new mechanical toy. ‘I’d give anything not to tell you what I am about to. It was a slip of Alexander’s, and - well, there it is. I cannot know it and not tell you. And I cannot
un
know it now, no matter what I would like.’

Graves drank from his coffee and waited. He had never seen Mr Chase look so uncomfortable. He kept pulling his waistcoat straight over his generous belly till Graves worried about the strain on his well-stitched buttonholes.

‘Alexander did not only desert his family over love of his wife.’ Graves stayed very still. Mr Chase glanced up at him, then back to his waistcoat, turning one bone button back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. ‘He suspected his father of something. A crime - a bad one. Something that disgusted him, at any rate. His mother died, you know, when he was just a scrap of a lad.’

Mr Chase abandoned the button and began to draw furiously on his pipe, as if he wished to disappear behind its cloud. His eyes darted back to Graves’s brown eyes and away again.

‘Can you tell me no more?’ Graves looked hard at him.

Mr Chase hunched his shoulders and looked fixedly over Graves’s shoulder.

‘No. He was drunk when he told me that much. There was mention of a locket. Some tin locket.’

‘Alexander was
drunk
?’

‘He had his slips, like any man - though I never saw him touch a drop of anything stronger than punch after the children were born. It was hard for him, starting out though, and for Elizabeth. Not a life he was used to. But whatever pride he had, he set it down and set to. The first plates he made, he made a hash of, lost some pounds on it and it hit him hard that night. But I went to see him the following day and he was back at his work. He grew to love it in the end.’

Graves let himself fall back slightly against the dark wood of his little bench.

‘I see. But can you really tell me nothing more than this?’

‘It may be nothing. Or nonsense.’

‘If you thought it all nonsense,’ Graves said, ‘I don’t think you would have told me.’

Mr Chase gave a reluctant smile. ‘Maybe. I think I am just adding my warning to Susan’s, to deal carefully with the Hall. Alexander had good reasons for staying clear, and we must be circumspect and watch over the children.’

Graves had just opened his mouth to ask something further when the door swung open. A lad in a dirty greatcoat three growths too large for him, his face streaked with soot and sweat, held it wide and yelled into the room. The blue cockade in his hat hung forward like a drunken devil urging him on.

‘The mob are up and working! Look to your business, gentlemen! Down with popery!’

Several men stood. Mr Landers crossed himself and shouldered his way out of the door. There was a general bustle as bills and coats were gathered. Mr Chase looked grim.

‘Come on, lad. Let us see what is afoot.’

IV.7

T
HE BACK ROOM of the Bear and Crown was crowded again, and although the populace of Hartswood had brought in the smells and tastes of high summer on their clothes and skin, the mood was dark. The room buzzed with low threat and fear. News passed from mouth to mouth, whispered, urgent; men and women bent their heads together and pulled apart, paler. Harriet found herself looking swiftly about the place as she entered like an animal looking for escape routes and hiding places.

The Coroner was not yet in his chair, but sat in the furthest corner of the room. Towering over him, his hand on his elbow, his heavy face a little flushed, was the Squire. The Coroner looked up at him, and Harriet was reminded of a pet rabbit she had had as a girl, who, if anyone other than her mistress approached the cage, would cringe back, her ears flat, eyes wide, nose twitching. A fox had got her in the end. The jury shuffled in the opposite corner like a threatened flock, pulling themselves inward, looking at their boots.

Crowther set down chairs and Rachel and Harriet took their places beside him. The presence of the vicar had prevented any sort of conversation between them. Harriet had murmured something to him of her visit to Wicksteed and received nothing more than a nod. Her own speaking looks of enquiry met with no better - simply a frown and a wave of the hand. Rachel had hold of the young lad, Jack, who had found Nurse Bray’s body, and was trying to talk to him, but Harriet could tell that her sister’s thoughts were wandering. The boy had to tell her twice what his favourite duties were in the Thornleigh household. He had arrived walking by Hugh, or rather a little behind him, but when he noticed Rachel in the crowd he had made straight for her and taken her hand. Thornleigh had merely greeted them and turned away.

The Squire released the Coroner and swung his eyes across the room. He offered a stiff nod to the party from Caveley Park, and seemed almost on the point of approaching them when the vicar slid softly to his side. The Squire bent his head to listen, then shot a look of alarm across at them and to where Hannah stood by Michaels’s massive bulk and his slim wife at the back of the room. Without taking his eyes off the conversation Crowther leaned over slightly to Mrs Westerman and spoke to her, barely opening his lips.

‘The Squire fears we are in danger of hanging Mr Thornleigh, and would rather we did not.’ He saw Harriet stiffen slightly. ‘He may challenge what we have to say, Mrs Westerman. Are you sure you should be here?’

Harriet looked about her. The faces of her neighbours were uncertain and strained. There was no one in the room who did not know about Joshua, and none, she suspected, that did not know of the experiment with Michaels’s dog. The inquest might just have the name of Madeleine Bray on the docket at the moment, but the room was alive with a doubly murderous fear.

‘We will stay. But where is Alexander?’

Crowther blinked slowly. ‘I have the name of the street in London, but Mrs Westerman, I must tell you, the Squire knows something of me that you do not . . .’

She turned and looked at him sharply, but before he could continue, the Coroner took his place and cleared his throat.

‘We are gathered here to enquire into the death of Miss Madeleine Bray who, it seems, hanged herself in the old cottage on the edge of the Thornleigh woods this Saturday just past . . .’

There was a general drawing in of breath, and a groan from the back of the room.

‘Murdered, man! Hung ’ersel’, indeed.’

Harriet glanced at Michaels, who had moved up alongside them and was staring with steady attention at the Coroner. Another voice growled from the window, ‘And Joshua murdered too only yesterday - or are we calling
that
an accident?’

The crowd murmured agreement. The Coroner’s eyes flicked round the room, and he licked his lips. The Squire raised his voice.

‘There is evidence that that death too was accidental,’ he said, and the crowd grumbled, ‘but I must have quiet, please. Gentlemen - and ladies,’ he added with a nod towards Harriet and Rachel, then shuffling his papers he continued with a sniff, ‘Sorry to see you here again, Mrs Westerman.’

Harriet flushed a little, but remained looking straight ahead of her. The Coroner cleared his throat again, his eyes spun about in his head, and Harriet imagined what he would look like if she pulled off his wig and stamped on it. The image gave her a grim satisfaction, though she was careful not to smile.

‘But we are here to discuss only the death of Nurse Bray, if you please,’ the Coroner continued primly. ‘Now the jury have viewed the body in the chapel at Thornleigh Hall.’ Crowther turned pointedly in his chair to look at where the Squire was standing, as immobile as Michaels on the other wall. He met his eye steadily. The Coroner hurried on: ‘And we saw there no evidence of anything suspicious.’

Crowther stood up. ‘Nonsense!’

The crowd began to whisper. The Coroner fluttered his hands in the air.

‘Mr Crowther, please be seated! This is a court of law.’

Crowther remained on his feet. He was carrying a cane, and knocked its end against the stone flags so the sound echoed round the room like a gunshot.

BOOK: Instruments of Darkness

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