Sir Henry lifted his thin shoulders in a shrug. “The house was old and its timbers dry. It would have burned quickly. People frequently assume they have more time to get out than they actually do. They become disoriented and they perish.”
It was possible, Sebastian supposed. But he found it difficult to believe that none of those eight women had managed to stagger out of the smoke and flames into the night. “Bow Street is handling the investigation, I assume?” he asked casually.
Sir Henry nodded. “It’s not far from their offices, after all. I believe Lord Jarvis has requested Sir William take charge of the incident personally.”
“Lord Jarvis? What’s his interest in this?” Sebastian asked, curious to hear what the magistrate would say.
Sir Henry looked mildly surprised, as if the question hadn’t occurred to him. No one queried Lord Jarvis’s activities. “That I do not know.”
“And has Sir William ordered postmortems on the women?”
“I don’t believe so, no. Last I’d heard the bodies were to be turned over to the Friends for burial.” Sir Henry was looking troubled. After a moment, he said, “If I might be so bold as to inquire into your interest in this, my lord?”
Sebastian pushed to his feet. “I have no interest in it. I’m simply making inquiries on behalf of an acquaintance.” He turned toward the door, but paused to look back and ask, “You haven’t by any chance heard of a young prostitute named Rose Jones, have you? Eighteen, maybe nineteen years of age. Wellborn.”
Sir Henry thought a moment, then shook his head. “No. You think she was one of the victims?”
“She might have been.”
“Who was she?”
“That’s the problem,” said Sebastian. “I don’t know.”
Chapter 4
‟We received reports this morning that the Luddites have burned another cotton mill in the West Riding,” said the Right Honorable Spencer Perceval, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A small, thin man with a perpetually earnest expression, the Prime Minister paced nervously across the carpeted floor of the Carlton House chambers kept by Charles, Lord Jarvis.
“So I had heard,” said Jarvis, going to stand beside the window overlooking the Mall. He was a big man in every sense of the word. Tall of stature and wide through the shoulders, he carried perhaps twice the weight of the Prime Minister. He was also easily twice as powerful and infinitely more cunning. The reports from Jarvis’s own agents in Yorkshire had reached his desk the previous evening.
“Fortunately,” continued Perceval, still pacing back and forth, “by some miracle the local militia arrived quickly enough to arrest some score or more of the participants. We believe they’re the same men involved in smashing frames last month.”
“It was no miracle. Merely the careful planting of agents provocateurs.”
The Prime Minister spun to face him. “You have infiltrated the movement?”
“Did you think I would sit idly by while masked ruffians hamper the industrial production of this country and gather at night on the moors to practice drills and maneuvers like a bunch of bloodthirsty French revolutionaries? We have more troops fighting the Luddites here in England than we have against Napoleon in Iberia. I understand that the Prince is reluctant to move against his own people, but the time has come to put a stop to this nonsense.”
“It’s not just in Yorkshire,” said Perceval. “There are also indications that some of the workers in Lancashire—”
Jarvis made a rough noise deep in his throat. “Execute a dozen of these Yorkshire lads and transport a few hundred to Botany Bay, and your Lancashire louts will think twice before they go smashing any more machines.”
The Prime Minister looked troubled. “Yes. I suppose so. Still, agents provocateurs . . .”
“It’s on my conscience, not yours,” said Jarvis drily. “And if you are worried it will distress the Prince, we simply won’t tell him.”
“Yes, that might be for the best.”
Jarvis turned back to the papers spread across his desk. “If there’s nothing else?”
“What? Oh, no. Good day, my lord,” said the Prime Minister, and bowed himself out.
Jarvis stood beside his desk, his thoughts drifting away from the Prime Minister and the Prince and the Luddites, to matters of a more personal nature. The descendant of an old and powerful family, Jarvis owned a large and prosperous estate, as well as a comfortable townhouse on Berkeley Square. But he generally avoided his own houses as much as possible, passing most of his time either in his clubs or in the chambers kept both here at Carlton House and in St. James’s Palace. The Berkeley Square house was overrun with females, and Jarvis had little patience for members of the fair sex, least of all his half-witted wife or his grasping harridan of a mother. Once, Jarvis had had a son, David. The boy had seemed a disappointment at the time, although Jarvis had since come to realize he might have been able to make something of David had he lived. Instead, Jarvis had been left with only his daughter, Hero. The mere thought of her now was enough to bring a sour burn to his chest.
If she’d been born a boy, then he would have been proud of her, proud of her powerful will and her undeniable intelligence. But he’d left her too much in the care of her half-mad mother, who had exercised no control over the girl whatsoever. As a result, she’d grown up with a collection of ideas that could only be described as radical. As for this latest start of hers . . . well, at least she’d had the sense to come to him first, rather than bolting straight to Bow Street. He could handle Sir William. All that remained was to tidy up the loose ends.
Jarvis was very good at tidying up loose ends.
Jarvis might have owed his introduction to Court to his distant kinship to George III. But it was his incomparable intellect combined with the formidable strength of his will and his cunning that had made him indispensable first to the King, then to the Regent. The position of prime minister could have been his in an instant, had he wanted it. He did not want it, being content to leave the nominal governance of the country to men such as Spencer Perceval and the Earl of Hendon. None understood better than Jarvis the limitations of power politics. He found it far more satisfying—and lucrative—to exercise power from the shadows. There was no one more powerful in all of England than Jarvis. But then, there was no one in England more fiercely devoted to his King and his country. For the sake of England and the dynasty that ruled her, Jarvis would do anything.
A scratching at the door brought his head around. A pale-faced clerk bowed and said, “Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith to see you, my lord.”
“Send him in.”
Hat in hand, the Colonel advanced halfway into the room and sketched a low bow. “You wished to see me, sir?”
The Colonel was a tall man. Not quite as tall as Jarvis, but superbly muscled, with dark hair and gray eyes. A former cavalry officer, Epson-Smith had now served Jarvis for more than three years. Of all Jarvis’s agents, he was the most intelligent and the most ruthless.
Jarvis drew an enameled snuffbox from his pocket and opened it with one flick of his finger. “Last night, someone killed a half dozen whores at a house of refuge run by the Society of Friends near Covent Garden. I want you to find out who did it and kill them.”
A flicker of surprise passed across the Colonel’s normally impassive features. “The Regent has an interest in the incident?”
Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. “It’s a personal matter.”
Colonel Epson-Smith inclined his head. “I’ll get on it right away, sir.”
“Discreetly, of course.”
“Of course.” Epson-Smith bowed again and withdrew.
Chapter 5
Long before he reached what was left of the Magdalene House in Covent Garden, Sebastian could smell the fetid odor of old smoke hanging heavy in the cool air.
The house had collapsed in on itself, leaving only a smoldering, burned-out husk of blackened bricks and charred timbers. Three men with dampened hides wrapped around their boots and cloths covering the lower part of their faces were carefully raking their way through the ruins. A small crowd of ragged women and children had gathered at a nearby corner to watch, their faces drawn and solemn. Even the baker’s boy was silent, his tray of cooling buns hanging forgotten from its band around his neck.
Sebastian spotted Paul Gibson crouched awkwardly beside a small body in a ripped, stained gown of yellow cotton. Six more bodies lay in a neat row along the footpath. Four of the bodies looked badly burned, their skin blistered and black, their faces charred beyond identification. But a couple of the women had obviously been sheltered by falling debris, their bodies battered and scorched but still recognizable.
Hunkering down beside his friend, Sebastian found himself staring at a young girl, her slim form relatively untouched by the fire. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years of age, her face still full-cheeked and childlike, her cornsilk-fine fair hair fluttering gently in the smoke-tinged breeze. But what drew Sebastian’s attention, and held it, was the ripped and bloodied bodice of her simple muslin gown. “Could that have been done by a falling timber?” he asked.
Paul Gibson shook his head. “No. She was stabbed with a knife. There, in the side”—he pointed—“and several times here, in the chest.”
“Bloody hell,” said Sebastian softly. “She was right.”
“Who was right?” Gibson glanced up at him. “Did someone survive this?”
“So it would seem.” Sebastian nodded toward that long, silent row. “What about the others?”
His lips compressing into a thin line, Paul Gibson turned his head to follow Sebastian’s gaze. The Irishman had spent years as an army surgeon, dealing with all the unspeakable horrors of a battlefield’s carnage. He now taught at St. Thomas’s, in addition to keeping a small surgery near the Tower. But despite it all, Sebastian knew that any premature or violent death still troubled Gibson. It was why, late at night in the small, secluded building at the base of his unkempt garden, he could frequently be found exploring the mysteries of life and death with the help of a series of cadavers culled from the city’s untended church-yards. No one in London could read a dead body better than Paul Gibson.
“The others are much the same,” said Gibson. He lurched to his feet, stumbling slightly as his one remaining good leg took his weight; he’d lost the lower part of his other leg to a French cannonball. “Several are so badly burned it would be impossible to say how they died without a proper postmortem. But I’ve found at least one more that was stabbed, and another who had her throat slit.”
“Could any of them have been shot?”
“Actually, yes. The woman at the far end was definitely shot. How did you know?”
Sebastian stared at that distant blackened form. “Is she identifiable?”
“Maybe by her mother. Although I wouldn’t want her mother to have to remember her looking like this.” Gibson glanced around as a hoarse shout went up from one of the men working through the smoldering ruins. “Looks like they’ve found another one,” said Gibson. “That makes eight.”
Sebastian blew out a long, slow breath. “Jesus.” He watched as two men stumbled out of the ruins, a makeshift stretcher carried between them.
“This un ’ere’s in bad shape,” said one of the men as they eased their burden down on the footpath. “Please God it’s the last.”
Gibson hunkered down beside the charred, blackened form, but said, “This one’s so burned that even with a proper autopsy—”