From his brimstone bed, at break of day, A-walking the devil is gone.
—Robert Southey
In Southwark, west of Borough High Street, a ten minute stroll from London Bridge, lay ‘The Mint’, a labyrinth of rookeries where bailiffs and thief-takers dared not enter save in force. Coiners and cracksmen, prostitutes and pickpockets, footpads and beggars had long congregated in this maze of alleys and open cesspools and narrow filth-strewn streets. The notorious Jack Sheppard had trod these broken pavements. Jonathan Wild had kept his horses at the Duke’s Head in Red Cross Street.
Dilapidated buildings, broken-windowed and unroofed, stood shored up by great beams placed in the center of the road. Here paupers slept in bare dirt cellars, their slumbers sweetened by sewage bubbling up through the floors. In and around these ruins, behind the old three-story shops on the main streets, ancient houses lined narrow courts that remained unchanged since Cromwell had sent out his spies to hunt Cavaliers. In their midst squatted a timber building with a steep time-blackened roof, bulging bay windows and dormers, great eaves overhanging the ground floor; reminiscent of a spider snoozing in the middle of her web.
If the exterior of the house was as ramshackle as its neighbors, the interior was not, yet even the boldest of cracksmen dared not trespass here. Rumor claimed many things about this building, and its owner, and the horrors that lay within.
Rumor did not mention a certain room located at the rear of the house. Few who glimpsed it remained alive long enough to tell the tale. Horus thought of the chamber as his cenotaph, a somewhat ironic flight of fancy on his part, a cenotaph being a sepulchral monument erected in memory of a deceased person whose body was buried elsewhere.
Horus was responsible for any number of people being buried elsewhere.
Present in the cenotaph were none of the excrescences so fashionable since Napoleon’s ill-fated Egyptian expedition; no wallpaper featuring Egyptian motifs, no furniture carved with Egyptian emblems, although the chamber contained canopic jars in which human organs had been stored, an armchair fashioned from ebonized black beech and gilded wood, and a mummified cat. A carved stone sarcophagus, dating from the 20
th
Dynasty, rested against one wall. Anthropoid in shape, the sarcophagus was fashioned to resemble the human form; decorated with colored paintings and hieroglyphic inscriptions from spells found in the Book of the Dead; illustrated with (among other things) the lions of the horizon and the embalmer’s tent. Had the original occupant been male, the stone hands would have clutched a sculpted amulet. Since she was female, her hands lay flat on her breast.
Came a scratching at the heavy door. A slight, slender man slipped into the room. Gully had the knack of blending into his surroundings without attracting any more attention than a housefly.
Of Horus’s servants, Gully alone had entry to the cenotaph. If any of the other staff were curious, they kept their speculations to themselves, knowing (as the cook had put it) not only on what side their bread was buttered, but also what became of burnt toast.
Horus said, “And?”
A bead of perspiration broke out on Gully’s brow. “I searched top to bottom. The documents weren’t there.”
Those damnable documents,
thought Horus. If someone found them, what then? Would they be turned over to the authorities?
And which authorities might those be?
“Do you have the lists?” he asked.
Gully held out several sheets of paper. Horus took them from his hand. A Burlington House guest register
. D
escriptions of the costume each guest wore.
If he hadn’t known Diana, Horus had recognized her companion. To disguise Angel Jarrow required more than blue-powdered hair. Whoever Diana might be, she
wasn’t
Mr. Jarrow’s current inamorata, a circumstance worthy of note, since Angel was faithful in his fashion to the lady of the hour.
If
it had been Horus’s Diana that Angel embraced and not another. Horus’s Diana was distinguishable in that she wasn’t distinguishable at all.
He would have dealt with her at once, had he not been forced to waste precious time dealing with the Henry business. And so she had eluded him.
But not for long.
Horus began to read. Perspiration trickled down Gully’s cheek and dripped off his chin.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
—Sir Walter Scott
“It’s more than a man can bear!” moaned Viscount Ashcroft. “Or should be expected to, at any rate. First she goes into one of her takings, saying you are an excellent creature and she begins to despair of me — and why she should say she ‘begins’ to despair I don’t know; she’s been combing my head for the last fortnight — and I also don’t know why a man would want to take a lawful blanket when he already dwells under the hen’s foot!”
Maddie glanced at the other occupants of the viscount’s landau, who were intent on their own conversation, Matthew explaining to the twins that Hyde Park had been appropriated from the monks of Westminster when Henry VIII decided to extend his hunting ground.
Was she never to escape Henry VIII?
“That was just the start of it,” Tony continued. “Maman felt she should drop a hint or ten. It’s time I pled my case, lest you’ve mistook the reason I’ve been dangling after you. I said I didn’t think I’d taken
your
fancy to any marked degree, because I remembered Romeo and Juliet and all that romantical fiddle-faddle and thought Maman might stop ringing a peal in my ear if she believed my heart was broke, though
why
I should have thought it I can’t say because if Maman has ever cared a button for anything
I
feel, I ain’t seen indication of it yet — and then she flew into her tantrums and accused me of behaving scaly and said I should make sure you knew I had matrimony in mind.”
“High flights!” said Maddie, because Tony was waiting for her to say something, and calling his mama an archwife, however fitting, wouldn’t set a good example for her sons. Fortunately the boys were more curious about how King Henry had disposed of his numerous inconvenient wives.
“So you may say!” said Tony. His companion in humbuggery was according less consideration to his mama’s crotchets than he felt she should. “I asked what else Maman thought you’d think I had in mind, and said if she figured me the kind of fellow who went around offering females a slip on the shoulder she was all about in the head. Not that you’re the kind of female a fellow offers
a slip on the shoulder, didn’t mean to say you was.” Maddie made a stifled noise, and he eyed her anxiously. “You
ain’t
mistook it, have you? Me dangling after you?”
“Oh, no!” she gurgled. “How could I? After that pretty speech?”
Dashed if females didn’t find humor in the oddest things! “We could tell Maman you’ve taken me in dislike.”
“Then she’d find someone else for you to dangle after,” responded Maddie, having got her giggles under control. “And we’d both be in the suds. We will do much better to go on as we are.”
“Maman thinks you’re a biddable female,” Tony muttered. “That shows all she knows.
I
hope
you
know enough to get in out of the rain.”
“I am not a child,” soothed Maddie. “At the moment there’s not a dark cloud to be seen, so relax and enjoy the drive.”
No dark clouds, were there? In Tony’s opinion, not that anyone ever heeded his opinion, Maddie should keep an umbrella at the ready, sunshine or no.
Later in the day, the haut ton would congregate in Hyde Park, eager to see and to be seen. At this hour, the park was nigh deserted, only an occasional rider or carriage rattling by. Deserted, that was, save for workmen busy with preparations for the Great Fair, and gawkers who had come to watch, and the cows and deer and assorted wildlife found along the shore of the Serpentine Lake, which had been built, according to the knowledgeable Matthew, by Queen Caroline, consort of George II, in 1730, and was so called because of its sinuous shape.
The viscount craned his neck to take a better look around him, no easy feat due to the height of his cravat. He for one grew weary of the round of celebrations that began with Bony being banished and hadn’t ended yet, the most recent a great thanksgiving ceremony at St. Paul’s featuring Wellington and the Sword of State. But Tony wasn’t a shabbing fellow, nor begrudging either, so when Maddie mentioned this expedition he’d offered his landau and, entering into the spirit of the occasion, rigged himself out in a bottle green frock coat, sage pantaloons and a white waistcoat dotted with embroidered purple posies, at the last minute setting aside a many-caped driving coat because, since he wasn’t driving, it wouldn’t be the thing.
Tony wished he’d set aside his corset. He hadn’t realized he would be required to
bend
, and as a result was finding it difficult to draw breath.
The lesson had progressed to the plague of 1665, when a large number of the poorer inhabitants of London, who couldn’t escape into the country, brought their household goods and set up tents in the park. Benjie demanded to know the location of the camp. “Now you’ve done it,” sighed Maddie. “He won’t be satisfied until you’ve shown him the spot.” Tony found this schoolboy energy exhausting, but their mama didn’t seem to mind. She looked more the thing today, for which he took full credit: he’d refused to take her up in his carriage if she wore a single stripe.
The landau halted so Benjie could inspect the site of the plague camp. The next thing Tony knew, the small party was strolling through the park. Stiffly strolling, in his case, his new corset not having been designed for the taking of exercise.
The boys, and their tutor, were a short distance ahead, discussing Mr. Oliver Cromwell, who during his tenure as Lord Protector of Parliament had suffered an attempt on his life while riding through Hyde Park. Maddie drew closer to Tony, as if she expected Mr. Cromwell’s ghost to be lurking among the trees. Which reminded Tony that she still hadn’t explained why she’d fled Burlington House as if the hounds of hell were snapping at her arse. And so he asked.
Since he phrased the inquiry rather more politely, Maddie merely said, “I thought I saw — but I must have been mistaken. Did you notice a pharaoh? Or anything unusual?”
The queerest thing the viscount had noticed was one Colonel Armstrong, dressed as a patched and painted lady from the reign of Queen Anne, who had sat fanning his hooped and beruffled person while his maids of honor clustered round. Tony reminded himself to discover what manner of corset the colonel had employed. “That depends on what you’d consider ‘unusual’.”
“Well, I did.” Dare Maddie tell Tony what she’d seen? “It disturbed me very much.”
“Then you shouldn’t have watched!” he scolded. “Warned you, didn’t I? Lightskirts and libertines?”
“Not that manner of disturbing. I met your cousin-in-law there.”
Tony said, bewildered, “Bea?”
“Not Mrs. Denny, Mr. Jarrow.” Maddie fell silent, debating with herself. Matthew’s voice drifted back to them, explaining how, after Mr. Cromwell died of natural causes, his body had been exhumed and executed posthumously and left to dangle in a cage at Tyburn as warning to others who might conspire to depose the monarchy, which prompted the twins’ curiosity about the gallows that once stood at the northeast corner of the park.
Tony recalled the time his cousin-in-law had spent talking with Maddie at Bea’s musical party. “I’m supposed to drop a word. Maman says to tell you Angel is on the downward pathway to perdition and she don’t doubt he’ll arrive there before long. Seems to me it’d be deuced uncomfortable to be forever tripping over females, but each man to his own taste.”
Maddie smiled to imagine Tony thus tripping. Confidences, she decided, would be unwise. “Lady Georgiana needn’t concern herself. I’m hardly the sort of female to catch Angel Jarrow’s eye.”
“I shouldn’t say there
is
a sort. I recall a dark marchesa and a little opera dancer whose hair was yellow as a crow’s foot—” Tony broke off, wondering how best to extricate his foot from his mouth. His embarrassed gaze fell on a grubby, curly-headed urchin wearing patched boots and a shabby dress, who was sauntering along the pathway. She gave him a gap-toothed grin.
Tony reached into his pocket, tossed her a coin. She caught it in mid-air. “Ta, guv.”
“Poor mite. That was kind of you.” Maddie watched the urchin continue along the path. “Do you dislike Mr. Jarrow, too?”
“Angel ain’t going to offer
me
carte blanche! I like him well enough. Everybody does. Or everybody but the highest sticklers, and they probably like him too, but daren’t say so out loud.” Tony’s voice trailed off as he noticed a handsome phaeton drawn by a pair of matched bays pulling up so the driver might speak with a woman mounted on a dainty dappled mare. Tony knew a great deal about the Contessa DeLuca, his mama not needing to be acquainted with someone to air her opinion of them. He admired the contessa’s emerald green riding habit, the jaunty cap that perched on her chestnut curls. Less appealing was the sulky expression on her face as she spurred her mare and rode away.
“Hah!” ejaculated Tony. “Speak of the devil and he’ll come calling. I never heard it was also true of angels, but there he is. And
hat
, my girl, was
the sort of female a fellow offers a slip on the shoulder, and you’re not to have anything to do with her if she should come in your way!”