At that moment a sharp gust exposed a patch of white brighter than the flagstone path. Wind tore the white patch from the pattern and blew it away in the shadows at the back of the garden. Cleo began shivering again. Her balcony seemed exposed, a stage, on which she stood in the light while in the dark an unseen audience watched.
Well, that was vanity or madness for you, imagining yourself on stage! Cleo bowed to the indifferent darkness and took herself off to find Charlie.
T
HE Tooth and Nail listed on its ancient foundation up a court in a warren of streets an easy distance from Covent Garden. Its doors swung open to all comers. In the mix of patrons, Xander and even Will represented the celestial end of prosperity while their guest Dick Cullen, a lean fellow of about twenty-five with a checkered waistcoat and a bitten ear, represented those presently out of luck. As Xander and Will were buying, Dick Cullen drank steadily. The man could put away ale.
A woman’s warm laugh triggered an image in Xander’s mind of his ragged bride, but he banished the thought. “So you’re out of work.”
Resentment had soured Cullen’s thin features. “Had a good situation at Truman’s Brewery until that night. A year ago ’twas.”
“Hell,” Will muttered. “A bleeding year ago.”
Xander quelled his brother with a look. Cullen spat on the straw-covered floor. “Took a cursed room. That’s my luck, you see, always rum.”
Cullen’s insistence before the magistrate that only his cursed room had led him afoul of the law had first alerted Xander and Will to his story. “Where is this cursed room?”
“Bread Street, where Mother Greenslade collects rents.”
Xander did not meet Will’s gaze. Bread Street ran northwest past Bredsell’s school toward the heart of the St. Giles rookery. “Why cursed?”
“Bloke died there. I had the lower. ’E and ’is boy had the upper. Something not right about the man.” Cullen shook his head.
“Tell me about the boy,” Xander invited, careful not to signal his deep interest in a seemingly random detail.
“ ’Ad nothin’ to do with
’im
.” More ale washed down Cullen’s scrawny throat.
“But you knew he was there,” Will prodded.
Cullen shrugged. He was not interested in boys, only in his own grievance. Will filled Cullen’s pint pot from a pitcher.
“Small, fair, almost pretty. Fellow never let ’im out. Boy like that should be good for some’at.”
“How old would you say he was?” Xander asked.
Cullen raised the pint pot. “It was Mother Greenslade ’at knew ’im. She’d sneak the boy a bit o’ cake on the sly, found ’im chained to the bed more ’an once.”
Chained
. Xander did not look at Will. A bitter taste filled his mouth, like ashes. He felt oddly cold, but he wanted to strike something. He could see himself swinging a pick, the pick biting into Bread Street, the pavement cracking and crumbling under blow after blow, the houses trembling and collapsing.
After three years of searching, he knew those ruined houses with their grimy rooms and broken furnishings, empty cupboards, foul smells, and dabs of greasy candles. He expected hunger and beatings would be part of Kit’s story, but
chained
. With effort he kept his hand steady as he produced a sketch of Kit made by their mother. “Did the boy look anything like this?”
Cullen glanced at the sketch and took another long pull at his drink. Kit had been eight when the sketch was made. He would have been near fifteen when Cullen encountered him. Maddening to have only this scrap of an image from long ago.
“Could be ’im. That’s the look of ’im. ’Ard to say.”
“You said the boy was fair?”
“Not so fair. Not so dark as yerself, mind.”
“You never spoke to the boy?” Xander continued, trying to keep a rein on his galloping impatience.
Cullen gave a vigorous shake of his head. “Wouldn’t do to cross that fellow. Fists like hams. ’Eard ’im knockin’ the boy about regular.”
“Never tried to stop him, did you?” Will did not hide his contempt for Cullen.
Cullen’s thin, sour features registered only indifference. He was the sufferer in his story.
“So, how did you get the room?”
“The big man died. You could ’ear ’im smashing about, crashin’ into walls. Wrenched the door clean off the jambs, came out on the stairs, just wild, waving his arms, ’is face blue like an ’anging, only no noose. Staggered back in the room and croaked.”
“What happened to the boy?” Xander asked as lightly as he could.
“Gone before the death cart come. Mother Greenslade give me the room. That’s when my luck turned. Lost my situation inside of a week. Now no one will give me a place. Cursed is wot I am.” He hung his head over his drink.
“Maybe your curse is being too fond of Truman’s product,” Will said. “You’d best take care not to drown in it.”
Cullen glared at Will. “Wot’s a gentleman like you know about curses? They should pay is wot I say. Truman’s should pay. No one should take a man’s work from ’im.”
Xander put a hand on Will’s shoulder. To Cullen he said, “If you want another situation, I’ve got a need for men. Can you remember anything more about the boy?”
Cullen tugged his ragged ear and looked about at the other patrons hunched over their pewter pots or shouting beery oaths at one another. He clearly didn’t like to be seen talking to toffs. “I’ll come about. I know who’s on my side. Truman’s should look out for Dick Cullen.”
He fell silent and took another long pull of ale. Apparently he remembered the prime rule of the rookery—
don’t nark
.
Only the injustice of the curse had made Cullen reveal so much of his history before the magistrate. He had been threatened with six months in the stir, which he had taken ill, being a man, he claimed, who didn’t follow the usual larcenous practices of his neighborhood. He never dipped, never did a click. The constables had swept him up from the crowd around a fire in Gerrard Street, where he’d been an innocent bystander.
After a minute Cullen’s dull gaze swung back to Xander. “Mother Greenslade said one more thing. Said the boy was mute. Never ’eard ’im say nowt.”
“Hell,” Will muttered. “What are we doing here?” He shoved back the bench he sat on.
Xander stood. They had a lead. A look at the weekly Bills of Mortality would tell him exactly when and where such a man had died. There would be a name and a street number to start from. With his wife’s money he could hire men in the neighborhood and get them talking.
Xander tossed Cullen another coin. “If you want a situation, the East London Gas Company is hiring.”
Cullen fingered the coin with a dexterous move that put the lie to his ignorance of the pickpocket trade. Honest employment wasn’t the first means of eking out a living in his neighborhood.
Will laughed. “Watch out, Cullen, this fellow’s going to light your bleeding street. You and your kind will have to do an honest day’s work.”
“ ’Ey, I told you I was no prig.” Cullen was still protesting as Xander walked away. The smoky air of the dark street was welcome after the noise and stink of the Tooth and Nail.
“Cover up, man,” Will advised, “unless you want to end up lying on the cobbles with a bloody head and no boots.”
Xander closed his greatcoat over the snowy linen at his throat. “Kit’s alive.” He breathed biting air with the hint of an early hard frost.
“Not bloody likely. Cullen’s the worst kind of snitch. He’ll say anything to wet his throat. Maybe the boy was fair, or maybe dark-haired.”
“Cullen lacks the wit to invent such a story. Injustice makes him accurate.”
Will swore. “Cullen lacks the wit to see anything beyond his nose.”
“Kit was alive a year ago.”
“Dream on. Cullen’s boy was mute. Or did you miss that fact?”
It was an old argument, not worth pursuing, and they walked on in silence. In Will’s mind, it was plain that Kit was dead. They were searching for bones to bury and an end to hope.
Xander didn’t accept that. Maybe because he was to blame for Kit’s disappearance. “You’ve said all along that every drab, every bullyboy is tied to someone in power, someone who knows something. Cullen’s just the first step.”
Will grabbed Xander’s coat and spun him to a halt. “If Kit’s alive and free, why hasn’t he come home? If he is, or
was
, Cullen’s mute boy, why didn’t he come home a year ago? You burn enough bleeding candles he could find the way from France.”
Xander shook off his brother’s rough hold. It was a hard question, but there would be an answer. Xander had read the Bills of Mortality for nearly three years and investigated the deaths of countless children. In all that time, in all those losses, he was sure no child, no matter how nameless, had been Kit. But, as Will demanded, if Kit was not dead, where was he? Was the man with fists the one who had taken him? Had the man acted alone? Was there some threat or some harm that kept Kit from coming back to them? If he had escaped his captor or captors, how did he live and where, and what had he endured?
Once again the unanswered questions escaped the dark corners of Xander’s mind and clamored for his notice. At the next turning Isaiah waited with the carriage.
“Cullen’s story doesn’t mean that Kit’s in London, you know.” Will stood at the curb. “He could have been sold to some damned sodomite ship captain for a cabin boy and be halfway around the world.”
Xander paused, staring into the darkness. He stood not a mile from where Kit disappeared. No lamps illuminated the way. Only a faint glow came from behind grimy windows. It was a dark place to experience sudden clarity of mind. In a space smaller than one of his father’s grand estates lived thousands of Londoners like Cullen, dogged, soured by life, scrambling to survive, men and women down on their luck. Two of them had seen Kit
alive
within the last year.
Maybe it wasn’t a clear mind after all, maybe it was just an untwisting of his gut, released from gnawing uncertainty, but Xander felt the rightness of it. Of all the fates they had feared for Kit, he could only have one fate after all, and this was it.
When Xander had first brought the news of Kit’s disappearance to their mother, she had cried out, “They’ve taken him,” and swooned. Her reaction had fixed in Xander’s mind the idea of a conspiracy, of a plot to sell boys for profit. Cullen’s story refuted that theory. Kit’s fate was this. In a crime of opportunity, a stranger, an odd man, almost a goblin of the night, had snatched the boy.
Xander swung himself up into the coach. Tomorrow he knew where to begin. The East London Gas Company would pry open Bread Street, with money, with ale, with picks and axes, with whatever it took to unearth the secret of Kit’s disappearance. Maybe he would have to offer an army of Cullens free beer to loosen their tongues.
C
LEO found Charlie flopped on a low bed in a room under the attic ceiling, his nose in a book. It was a boy’s room, furnished with worn wood and wool, plain and homey. Nothing like the room her husband had assigned to her.
Candles burned in all the sconces and in a lamp on a table by the bed. A coal fire blazed extravagantly in the small hearth. A framed map of the world and a pair of hanging shelves crammed with books filled the wall above the nicked table and plain chair. A stack of faded quilts covered an old trunk next to a pine wardrobe, its door ajar. Charlie’s discarded valise lay on the floor in a corner.
Cleo knocked and Charlie looked up. “What did you find?”
“Ben Franklin.” He held up his book.
“Really?” Cleo came and sat on the bed. Charlie rolled over and pushed himself up against the headboard.
“Bluebeard didn’t murder you, I guess.”
“Not yet. Shooting, drowning, beheading, and dismemberment were mentioned, however.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. “I counted twenty closets on the way up here,” he confided. “Oh, the house is all light and fine furnishings, but the man has secrets. Did you see how many keys his servant Amos has? I tried some of the closet doors. All locked.”
“I was bamming you. I’m here, alive, and you look cozy enough.”
Charlie had the grace to look sheepish. “It is a bit like my old room.”
Cleo peered at a small, framed saying over the bed, trying to make out the letters in blue stitching on plain muslin.
Are all the dragons fled?
Are all the goblins dead?
Am I quite safe in bed?
The words made her smile. Likely her fearsome husband had been a boy in this room once with a no-nonsense nurse who tucked him in with a rhyme to banish his fear of the dark. She shook her head at the idea. She could not imagine Xander Jones ever needing anyone’s comforting embrace, but he had once been Charlie’s age, and once, younger still, and there had been no father. At least she did not know what his relationship with his father had been. The Marquess of Candover had a pair of daughters, the Lyndhurst girls. Cleo had known them, had been present at Sally Lyndhurst’s come-out, a grand affair. She was sure Xander could not have escaped the knowledge that his father’s heirs danced and glittered mere blocks away. Yet, if this had been his room, someone had cared for him and even loved him as a child.