C. Harris - Who Buries the Dead

The stretch of the bridge approach known as Fish Street Hill was crowded with shops selling everything from cod and periwinkles to stores of wine, pitch, and tar. But in the warren of narrow lanes and mean courts to the west lived the fishmongers themselves, along with the costers who bought the fish of Billingsgate to sell on the streets of London.

Sebastian arrived by hackney, slipping easily into the persona he had chosen to adopt: Silas Nelson, a somewhat mentally deficient bumpkin from a small village in Kent. By the time he paid off his hackney at the entrance to the narrow passage leading to Bucket Lane, all trace of the self-confident viscount had vanished. His shoulders slumped, and he walked with his head thrust forward, his gaze flitting nervously from side to side, a foolish half grin plastered on his slack features.

It was a trick his former lover, Kat Boleyn, had taught him long ago, when she was first making her mark on the stage and he was an idealistic youth just down from Oxford. “It’s not enough simply to dress the part of a character,” she’d told him. “You need to let their personality infuse every fiber of your being-the way you walk and talk, your attitude toward yourself and others, even life itself.”

The lesson had served him well during the war, when he’d operated as an exploring officer in the mountains of Italy and the Peninsula. .

But he slammed his mind shut against those memories.

Now, shuffling along with an awkward gait, he cut through the passage to find himself in a dim lane of bleak, dilapidated houses that seemed almost to touch overhead, shutting out all sunlight. Tattered laundry hung from upper-story windows, while vacant-eyed children and half-starved, snarling dogs clustered in the narrow stretch of mud and steaming garbage that passed for a street. The air was thick with the smell of decay and excrement and the inescapable, oppressive odor of fish.

He knocked on the first door to his right and waited, still vaguely smiling.

No one answered.

Tipping back his head, he peered up at the cracked, grimy windows of the overhanging second story. He could feel the inhabitants inside, hear their soft whispers and furtive movements. But the door remained closed.

He moved on to the next house and rapped loudly on the worn, weathered door.

Silence.

“Hey!” he hollered. “Anybody home?”

Farther down the lane, a door opened and an old man came out leaning on a cane, a cap pulled low over his ears and a tattered scarf wrapped thick about his neck.

“Excuse me,” called Silas Nelson, hurrying toward him. “Can I talk to you?”

The man glanced once at Sebastian, then turned to walk in the opposite direction, his cane gripped tightly in his fist.

“Hey! I’m lookin’ for Mr. Stanley Preston; you know him?”

The man kept walking.

Silas Nelson drew up, his shoulders slumping more than ever. “Why won’t anybody talk to me?” he asked of the now empty street. Even the children had disappeared.

“Who’re you?” demanded a voice behind him.

Sebastian spun around.

A woman stood in the center of the muddy, refuse-strewn lane, her arms crossed at her chest, her head thrown back as she stared at him with narrowed, startlingly turquoise eyes. She looked to be somewhere in her thirties and was stunningly beautiful, with smooth café au lait skin and rich dark hair that peeked from beneath the red kerchief she wore around her head. She was built tall and slender, with a graceful long neck and high cheekbones and full lips.

“You deaf or somethin’?” she asked when he didn’t answer. “I said, who are you?”

“Silas Nelson, ma’am,” said Sebastian, snatching off his moth-eaten cap and executing a jerky bow.

The woman sniffed. “Ne’er seen you before. What you doin’ here?”

“Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but I’m lookin’ for Mr. Preston-Mr. Stanley Preston. Would you know him, by chance?”

“Ain’t no one by that name lives round ’ere.”

“I’m told he was here last Sunday.”

“Who told you that?”

It had occurred to Sebastian that Lovejoy’s constable had probably agitated the neighborhood to the extent that any stranger suddenly appearing in their midst that day would be immediately suspect. So he twisted his cap in his hands and said, “Constable, ma’am. Well, I s’pose I should say, the innkeeper of the Red Fox, what had it from the constable. That’s where I’m stayin’, you see-at the Red Fox, on Fish Street Hill. When the innkeeper heard I’d come t’ town lookin’ for Mr. Preston, he said, ‘That’s right queer, for we had a constable here just this mornin’ askin’ about him. Said he’d been in Bucket Lane.’” Sebastian’s Silas Nelson leaned forward eagerly. “Have you seen him, then? Oh, please say you have.”

Her expression turned from one of suspicion to mild disgust. “Who are you?”

“I’m Silas Nelson, ma’am.”

“You already told me that. What I mean is, where you come from? What you want with Preston?”

“I’m from Dymchurch, ma’am, down in Kent. I come up to London because my sister’s been takin’ care of me. But she done gone and died, and now what’m I to do? I remembered her husband had some dealin’s once with Mr. Preston, so I come to town, hopin’ maybe he could find somethin’ for me to do. I hear he’s powerful rich. Only, I don’t know his direction and London is ever so big. I’d no notion; it’s nothing like Dymchurch, you know. I was puzzlin’ on how to even begin lookin’ for him when the innkeeper tells me about Bucket Lane.” Sebastian gave a broad grin. “So here I am.”

“You’re an idiot.” It was said more as a statement of fact than as an insult.

Sebastian widened his grin. “Yes, ma’am.”

She pushed out her breath between her teeth and shook her head. “Your Mr. Preston don’t live ’ere. He lives in a grand house out Knightsbridge way. Or I suppose I should say, he did. He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Sebastian let his face fall ludicrously.

“That’s right.”

“But. . what’m I to do?”

“Go back to Kent?” she suggested.

“But. . you did know Mr. Preston, yes?”

She didn’t deny it, but simply stared at him, waiting for him to finish.

He leaned forward. “Maybe. . maybe you know somebody could find me work? I may not be smart, but I am strong. Sorta.”

“Sorry.” She threw an expressive glace at the surrounding squalor. “Take a look around. People here have a hard enough time feedin’ themselves, let alone findin’ work for others. And you’re wrong; I didn’t know Preston.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “The only people like me that man ever knew was workin’ in his sugarcane fields and callin’ him massa.”

Sebastian looked confused. “Ma’am?”

“Never mind.” She jerked her head toward the passage leading back to Fish Street Hill. “Just. . get out of here before somethin’ happens to you. This ain’t no place for the likes of you.”

“Ma’am?”

“You heard me. Take yourself off. Now.”

Sebastian pulled his cap down on his head with both hands and allowed his whole being to sag with dejection and despair as he turned back toward Fish Street Hill.

He paused at the dark mouth of the passage to look back.

She still stood in the middle of the muddy lane, her arms crossed at her chest, her gaze narrowed as she watched him. Although whether she watched to keep him from harm or to make certain he actually did leave, he couldn’t have said.

Sebastian settled against the worn squabs of the hackney carrying him back to Brook Street, his gaze on the tumbledown buildings and ragged, desperate people that flashed past on the far side of the carriage window. The farther west they traveled, the finer the shops and houses became, the wider and better paved the streets, the better dressed-and better fed-the people, until it seemed to him that he might have entered a different land.