C. Harris - What Darkness Brings

“Drunken talk is cheap.”

“True. But it’s a place to start, isn’t it?”

“It is, yes. Do you know where I can find this man?”

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

He dropped lightly to the paving, then paused with one hand on the seat’s high railing. He had the unsettling sense that there were unseen but powerful forces at work behind all this. Powerful and dangerous. He glanced over at her groom. “Is your man armed?”

She pressed her lips into a thin, tight line and shook her head. “I refuse to allow Jarvis to frighten me.”

“Jarvis frightens me, Kat. Please, just. . be careful.”

Returning to Brook Street, Sebastian sent for his valet and asked without preamble, “Ever hear of a somewhat unsavory Frenchman named Jacques Collot?”

Most gentlemen’s gentlemen would be outraged by their employer’s suggestion that they consorted with or were in any way familiar with the members of London’s vast criminal class. But Jules Calhoun was not your ordinary gentleman’s gentleman. Small and lithe, with a boyish shock of flaxen hair and a roguish smile, he was a genius at repairing the ravages the pursuit of murderers could at times inflict on Sebastian’s wardrobe. But he also possessed certain other skills useful to a man with Sebastian’s interests-skills that had their origins in the fact that he began life in one of the worst flash houses in London.

“I have heard of him, my lord,” said Calhoun. “I believe he arrived in London some ten or fifteen years ago. But I can’t say I know much about him.”

“Know where he lives?”

“No. But I can find out.”

Several hours later, Sebastian was seated at the desk in his library with Knox’s manuscript open before him when Hero came in.

She still wore her emerald green carriage dress, although the plume in her jaunty hat was now sadly drooping, for it had come on to rain. “Ah, there you are,” she said, taking off her hat to frown down at the bedraggled feather.

“So, did your crossing sweep talk to you?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

“He did. And you would not believe some of the things he told me.” She came to peer over his shoulder at the manuscript. “I didn’t know you read Hebrew.”

“I don’t. I’m looking at the pictures. They’re. . strange.”

She let her gaze run over the page, her eyes widening slightly at the illustration of what looked like a spinning wheel surrounded by odd symbols. “Where did this come from?”

“I’m told it was smuggled into the country for Daniel Eisler, although he died before he could take delivery. And I haven’t the slightest idea what it is.”

She turned the pages, pausing to stare at an illustration of a fanged demon with the wings of an eagle. “I could be wrong, but it looks as if your Mr. Eisler was interested in the occult.”

“What makes you think-” He broke off as Calhoun appeared in the doorway.

“I beg your pardon, my lord,” said the valet, beginning to back away. “I’d no notion her ladyship-”

“That’s quite all right,” said Sebastian. “Did you find Collot?”

“I did, my lord. I’m told he keeps a room at the Pilgrim in White Lyon Street.”

“Good God.”

The valet’s eyes danced with amusement. “I take it you’re familiar with the establishment?”

“I am.”

Calhoun cast a significant glance at Hero, who was busy thumbing through the tattered old manuscript. “Shall I have Tom bring the curricle around, my lord?”

“No; after last night, I told him I wanted him to rest today. Send Giles.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Who’s Collot?” Hero asked after Calhoun had gone. “And what is so nasty about the Pilgrim that neither you nor Calhoun care to sully my lady’s delicate ears with it?”

Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “Collot is a reputedly unsavory Frenchman who may have had something to do with Eisler’s death, while the Pilgrim is a den of vice and iniquity in Seven Dials.”

“Hmm. You’ll take a pistol with you, of course?”

“My dear Lady Devlin, are you perhaps worried about my safety?”

“Not really,” she said, a smile flickering around her lips as she turned back to the book. “Do you mind if I look at this while you’re gone?”

“You don’t by any chance read Hebrew?”

“Sadly, no. But I know someone who does.”

A quarter of an hour later, Sebastian walked down the steps of his house to find the curricle waiting, with Tom standing at the grays’ heads.

“What the devil are you doing here? I told you to take the day off and rest. Where’s Giles?”

“Giles is feeling peakish. And I done rested-for hours .”

Sebastian leapt up to take the reins. “I don’t recall hearing anything about Giles feeling ‘peakish.’”

Tom scrambled onto his perch. “Well, he is.”

Sebastian cast the tiger a suspicious glance.

But Tom only grinned.

Lying just to the northwest of Covent Garden, the nest of fetid alleys and dark courts known as Seven Dials had once been a prosperous area favored by poets and ambassadors and favorites of Good Ole Queen Bess. Those days were long gone. The once grand houses of brick and stone lining the main thoroughfares were now falling into ruin, their pleasure gardens and parks vanished beneath a warren of squalid hovels built of wood and given over to beggars and thieves and costermongers of the meanest sort.

The Pilgrim, on a narrow lane just off Castle Street, was technically licensed to sell beer as well as spirits but appeared to cater mainly to those who preferred their alcohol in the form of cheap gin.

“A go of Cork,” said Sebastian, walking up to the counter.

The gin slinger, a stout, aging woman with a massive bosom swelling out of the bodice of her ragged, dirty dress, looked at him through narrowed, suspicious eyes as she splashed gin into a smudged glass. “Wot ye doin’ ’ere? We don’t need yer kind ’ere. Yer kind is always trouble.”

“I’m looking for Jacques Collot. Know where I might find him?”

“Collot?” She sniffed and shook her head. “Never ’eard o’ ’im.”

Sebastian laid a half crown on the stained countertop. “If you do happen to see him, tell him I have a job he might be interested in, would you?”

“I told ye, I ain’t never ’eard o’ ’im.” But the coin disappeared.

Sebastian went to settle at one of the rickety tables at the rear of the room, the glass of pungent gin twirling back and forth between his fingertips. He even raised it as if to drink a few times, although he was careful not to let it touch his lips.

A sluggish fire burned on the shallow hearth, filling the room with a bitter smoke that didn’t encourage many of the patrons to linger. Sebastian watched a steady stream of men file into the low-ceilinged chamber, throw down a shot of gin at a penny a glass, then leave again. As far as he could tell, the glasses were never washed.

After some five or ten minutes, a stocky, middle-aged man with graying side-whiskers and one strangely wayward eye walked through the door. Bypassing the counter, he came straight to pull out the chair opposite Sebastian and sit.

They say Collot’s got a wandering eye, can’t control which way it looks, Calhoun had told Sebastian before he left Brook Street. He’s maybe forty or forty-five; about my height but carrying more flesh.

“I hear that you search for Collot,” the man with the faulty eye said in a heavy French accent. “I am not he, mais je puis -er, I can perhaps find him for you, if you wish. Yes?”

Sebastian nodded to the slatternly barmaid, who slapped a shot of gin down in front of the Frenchman, exchanged a veiled glance with him, and went away again.