Imogen Robertson - Anatomy of Murder

“I hate spies, Crowther. The fact that Fitzraven seems to have been a prying, sneaking little man makes me suspect him strongly.”

“We should bear in mind that the most successful of their breed are more likely to wear a charming and honest face.”

That was the last moment when it occurred to Harriet that she still had time to withdraw. She could picture the scene upstairs-Lady Susan entertaining the younger children with Rachel, and Mrs. Service at their side-and wondered to herself if she might join them, might be free and easy, and foul neither her mind nor her reputation with further association with violent death. Then she thought of her husband and felt, with a sensation like sand running through her hands, that her days of ease were perhaps in any case over. She might join the party upstairs, but at present she would only bring darkness with her.

Let Palmer make use of her, then.

Jocasta, Sam and Boyo made a breakfast from the strips of bacon the boy found in the crock, and it did Jocasta some good to watch him cooking the meat with such a tender care, humming to himself over the fire. When the first knock at the door came and a thin man in a tatty overcoat arrived to have his cards read, Sam skipped out to clean their cuttles at the pump, and when there was a gap in the flow of people coming to be told what they already knew and bite their thumbnails over it, he set the kettle to boil over the fire and brewed a dish of tea for her. She sat back in her seat to drink it, and nodded to him to get some into himself too. It had been an ordinary morning. Three girls coming to ask if they should marry, an older woman wanting to know if her husband was getting too friendly with their neighbor’s wife, and the thin man who’d been told if he handed ten pounds to a friend of his to hold he’d have fifteen before the end of the year. The girls would marry, though two were tying themselves to lazy fools if the cards were right, the woman was unjust, and the man would have less trouble if he just threw his money into the Thames today and have done. But while the cards had told stories to each of them in their usual way, they had not ceased teasing at Jocasta. At the center of every spread she laid out, she saw that house in Salisbury Street. Now she set down her tea and sniffed, pulling the box toward her. Sam sat up with interest and watched her lay out the cards cross-fashion.

“All right, all right,” she said under her tongue as she slapped them down. “Have your way and talk if you will. Stop you interrupting stories other people have paid for, at any rate.”

Here it all was again. This time with The Tower high and present. She could almost hear the little people diving from it, screeching as they fell. She thought of Kate’s heart-shaped face, and weak little chin.

Sam leaned over and tapped it all careful, careful.

“I do not like this card,” he said. Jocasta glanced across at him, all serious but with the sweets of childhood about him still. He looked to her like a box unopened, a roll of fabric still wound tight, a pack uncut, dice rattling across a playing board before they are still and the number is fixed for counting and paying.

“Where are your people, Sam?”

He did not look at her. “I haven’t got any people. Ripley, maybe. He used to let me sleep round the back of the chophouse and drop me ends and leavings when he could, but the bastard who runs the place found out and threatened us both with a stealing charge if I came back.”

There were so many homeless children in London, and so few made it even as far into the game as this little scrap.

“And previous to that?”

“Workhouse, with my dad. Southwark. Drink killed him a while back and I ran.”

Jocasta swept up the cards, straightened and shuffled them and offered the pack to him. He cut it and lifted his half to show the picture at the bottom. Page of Cups.

Jocasta considered it, then shifted on her seat and rubbed her nose. “Do me a job now and fast, and I’ll let you have the chair here tonight.”

Sam was all attention. “What’s to be done, Mrs. Bligh?”

“Go to Salisbury Street again. See what that family are about, then go get Ripley to read that note. Then come back here. That fair?”

“Thanks, Mrs. Bligh. I’ll be right back here.” He stood up and almost fell over his feet in his eagerness to be of help. Then he turned back with a wide grin. “Bye, Boyo!” The terrier got to his feet and wagged his tail hard.

“Dog, you are a tramping thing,” Jocasta muttered as the door closed. “It was my bacon you breakfasted on.” Boyo snuffled and tucked his nose under Jocasta’s hand, his tail still going like the clapper in a fire bell.

Great Swallow Street was respectable enough, and many of the houses there would begin to fill as the season progressed with people of middling gentility. Some of the buildings, however, had been split and resplit into ever-smaller apartments, and though the lodgings there were palatial in comparison with the piled-up, patched-up hovels and garrets into which most of London’s populace was crammed, they suggested nevertheless struggle and compromise. The road itself was a thoroughfare to the farms that fed the great city, and as Harriet and Crowther walked along the pavement, the road was jammed with families making their way out into the fresh air in Sunday clothes and bad temper.

They found the house where Mr. Fitzraven had been lodging without great difficulty and summoned his landlady to the door. Behind them, the laughter and calls of the crowd mingled with the sound of horses and cartwheels churning the mud and mess of the city. One cart had become lodged in a rut, and the owner was trying, red-faced and sweating, to force his horse into movement under the heavy stare of his passenger-a large woman in a drooping bonnet and skirts of ferocious rigidity. She held one child in her lap while two others, who had the alarmed look of the recently scrubbed, hopped about in the cart behind her, more fully driving the wheel into its wedged position. A rather pale-looking young man with a good-looking wife on his arm walked by. The girl seemed bright enough, her blond curls bouncing out from under her neat little bonnet, but her husband looked tense and unhappy. Behind them, a woman of middle age followed, her mouth a thin line and her spine straight as steel. She had her eyes on the back of the young woman’s head and there was no fondness in them.

Fitzraven’s landlady gave her name as Mrs. Girdle when she finally made her appearance at the street door, then led them into her own parlor, a narrow room at the front of the house where the business of the street and the comings and going in her own home could be easily observed. The room suited her, being somewhat pinched, cramped and pretentious without elegance. The furniture was too large and dark for the space, and gave the impression of a room filled with fat and uncongenial relatives forced into a joint vigil around a miser’s deathbed. She herself was a narrow woman, thin and straight, with iron-gray curls showing under her cap and a strangely high collar. It seemed when she spoke that her chin was constantly lifting and worrying from side to side, as if it feared it was about to be drowned by the starched lace below it. Harriet suspected that trying to maintain her gaze would lead to sea-sickness.

When they told her of Fitzraven, Mrs. Girdle at once burst into tears, collapsing back into her armchair like a snapped plank and lifting her apron to her face. Then, after a few moments of sobbing, her back straightened and her words came forth in a torrent. Her voice had a high-pitched whine to it as if the words were being forced out of her pursed mouth under considerable pressure. Much of what she said at first neither of them entirely understood, but it seemed Fitzraven had been a man of talents and civility without parallel, a man who would lay down his life for the right, and shared every opinion of hers she had ever thought to form, displaying a judgment so sound even her father, a man of rigor in these matters, would have been happy to praise, and his loss would never be appreciated by anyone as keenly as herself. She had, it seemed, been on the point of an introduction to Manzerotti himself, who was Mr. Fitzraven’s great friend, she assured them, and she had sent her particular compliments to that gentleman through Mr. Fitzraven, and been told they were received most graciously. And now who was to pay the rent on his rooms? He’d taken them through the season and she’d turned down a dozen other gentlemen. Not that she blamed Mr. Fitzraven himself, of course.