C. Harris - Who Buries the Dead

“On occasion.”

“Such as?”

“Och, this ’n’ that.”

The breathing from the far side of the curtain grew harsher. Faster.

Sebastian said, “Must be something of a disappointment, to lose one of your best customers.”

Priss Mulligan worked the wad of tobacco in her jaw. “I got others.”

He touched his hand to his hat. “Thank you for your help.”

“Anytime, yer lordship. Anytime.”

He didn’t bother to ask how she knew he was a lord. The truth was, asking any question of the Irishwoman was unlikely to elicit either a direct or an honest response. People like Priss Mulligan lived their lives behind a miasma of subterfuge and deliberately generated fear. It said something about Stanley Preston that he had done business with the woman. Repeatedly.

Sebastian walked out of the shop into the ragged crush of Houndsditch’s overcrowded, desperately poor residents. The light was beginning to fade from the sky; whatever warmth there might once have been was gone from the day.

As he turned toward Bishopsgate, where he’d left Tom with the curricle, he was aware of a nondescript, slope-shouldered man slipping from the noisome alley alongside the shop to fall into step behind him.

With the approach of evening, a fierce bank of clouds had scuttled in from the east, their roiling dark underbellies tinged with a strange, coppery green glow. Billowing gusts of wind sent handbills fluttering over the uneven paving stones and flapped the worn black shawl of a stooped old woman hawking nuts from a rusty tray. The knots of dirty, pinch-faced children huddled closer to the braziers of the coffee stalls and hot-potato sellers, their hollow eyes following Sebastian without curiosity or comprehension as he passed.

He paused as if to study the colorful caricatures displayed in a print shop’s dusty window, being careful not to glance toward the slope-shouldered man in polished black boots who drew up abruptly and started fumbling in his pockets as if in search of a handkerchief. When Sebastian walked on, the click-click of the man’s bootheels was just audible above the din of rattling cartwheels and the shouts of the children and the singsong cries of the street sellers.

Sebastian quickened his pace and heard that distinctive click-click speed up. When he slowed, so did his shadow. Then, as they neared the end of the lane, Sebastian turned abruptly and strode back toward Priss Mulligan’s shop.

The slope-shouldered man paused, his eyes widening ever so subtly. Of medium height and lanky despite his small potbelly, he had stringy black hair worn long enough to hang over his collar and a noticeably asymmetrical face with a bulbous nose and crooked mouth. But he was obviously convinced that Sebastian remained oblivious to him, because he simply turned as if to watch a brewer’s wagon full of empty casks that was rattling up the street, its tired horses hanging their shaggy heads, the malty aroma of ale mingling with the smell of roasted nuts and hot coffee and dung.

“Who are you?” demanded Sebastian, walking right up to him. “And why the devil are you following me?”

He expected the man to run, or at least to deny following him. Instead, the man laughed, his face instantly transforming from bland abstraction into a mask of glee. “I’d heard you were good,” he said. “But I didn’t credit it, meself.”

“Your mistake.”

“Ain’t it just?”

Sebastian studied the man’s beard-shadowed face, the grimy collar and filthy hair. His clothes were those of a workman down on his luck-or someone who had other reasons for doing his shopping at the rag fairs of Rosemary Lane.

“Who are you?” said Sebastian again.

The man tipped his hat and bobbed his head, as if making an introduction. “Name’s Flynn. Diggory Flynn.”

“Why were you following me?”

Diggory Flynn’s eyes slid away, his tongue flicking out to wet his full, oddly misshapen lips. “Didn’t mean you no harm.”

“And why should I believe you?”

“Never did you nothing, now, did I?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Someone took a shot at me, just last night. Could have been you.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that.”

“Who set you after me?”

“What makes you think anybody did?”

“Who told you I’m ‘good’?”

A strange quiver passed over the man’s lopsided face, then was gone. “You’ve got a reputation, you do.”

Sebastian resisted the urge to grab the man by the front of his coat and shove him up against the dirty brick wall of the wretched shop beside them. “Why were you following me?”

“You got some folks worried, you do.”

“Who?”

The man had the strangest eyes, one a pale blue that burned with a fierce intensity, as if lit from within by a fire bordering on madness; the other was light brown. “You think on it, you’ll know.”

“Where’d you get the boots?”

“The boots?” He cast an admiring glance down at them. “Won ’em off a hussar captain, I did. Ain’t they grand?”

“I knew exploring officers in the Army who had no trouble rubbing grease in their hair or dressing themselves in filthy rags, but for some reason they really, really hated wearing anything but their own boots. It got them killed sometimes.”

Diggory Flynn’s face shone with merriment. But all he said was, “I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that. Weren’t ever in the Army, meself.”

Sebastian took a step back, then another, his gaze never leaving Flynn’s face. “Turn around and walk back the way you came.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

Flynn touched a hand to his battered slouch hat. “Yes, sir,” he said, his grin never slipping. Then he thrust his hands in the sagging pockets of his worn-out coat and sauntered back up the lane, whistling “Bonny Light Horseman” softly beneath his breath.

“I assume this Diggory Flynn is the man you heard behind the curtain in Priss Mulligan’s shop?” said Hero.

She was seated in the armchair beside the bedroom fireplace, one hand trailing lightly over the back of the big, long-haired black cat stretched out beside her. The cat had adopted them some months before, although they’d yet to come up with a name that seemed right for him. It was nearly midnight; the fire on the hearth filled the room with a warm golden glow, while outside, a howling wind buffeted the house and sent the rain clattering against the windowpanes.

“It’s possible,” said Sebastian, holding his dozing son against his shoulder, his palm splayed against the child’s tiny body as he walked back and forth.

“Yet you don’t sound convinced. Why?”

He found himself reluctant to put his suspicions into words. “She certainly has a nasty reputation. And I suspect it’s well earned.”

“It’s odd, but he sounds rather like the man I saw at Covent Garden Market this morning.”

Sebastian turned to look at her. “What man in Covent Garden?”

“I thought I told you about him. It was my coster guide, Lucky Gordon, who noticed him first. He was simply standing there, staring at me. But when I tried to approach and ask what he wanted, he disappeared.”

Sebastian went to lay the sleeping babe in his cradle, then stood for a moment, watching the firelight dance over the child’s soft cheeks and the gentle curve of his dusky lashes. And he knew it again, that chilling whisper of fear, that shuddering awareness of how fragile and vulnerable were the lives of those he loved.

“What?” asked Hero, watching him.

“As of dawn this morning, I had never heard of Priss Mulligan. So why would she have set someone to follow my wife?”

“Why would anyone?”