Sebastian ran on, the wind whipping at his coat, the rain driving hard in his face. Shaking his head to clear the water from his eyes, he threw a quick glance over his shoulder to find Edward Maitland holding steady at about a hundred yards behind him, arms and knees pumping. The second constable had fallen away.
They were in that part of town where the fashionable streets of Piccadilly and Pall Mall fell away quickly to the narrow byways and seedy alleys of Covent Garden. The paving beneath Sebastian’s boots grew rough, the streets increasingly crowded. A huddle of ragged urchins cheered as Maitland slipped on a pile of manure and almost went down; an old woman in a tattered shawl called out, “God save you, young man!” as Sebastian sprinted past.
Then he heard Maitland shout, “Stop that man! He’s a murderer!” Looking up, Sebastian saw the top of the street blocked by a troop of Bow Street Horse Patrol on their way back from the city’s outskirts: three men in blue and red, mounted astride big bay hacks.
They spurred their mounts forward, hooves thundering in the narrow space between the two rows of old half-timbered houses. A side street opened up beside him and Sebastian pelted down it, only to find himself caught up in an eddy of ragged paupers, bird-chested men with stooped shoulders, and dirty-faced women in tattered gowns, their bone-thin hands clutching squalling infants wrapped in shawls. There were children, too: mat-haired toddlers and half-grown youngsters dressed in rags, their bare arms and legs covered with running sores. Here were the poor and desperate of the city, who had descended on St. Martin’s Workhouse in search of outdoor assistance and been turned away.
Sebastian fought to push his way through as the crowd swirled around the workhouse. Then a man at the end of the street seized an apple seller’s barrel and tossed it through the window of a nearby bakery. Shattered glass flew, setting off a roar that wavered through that pushing, seething sea of pinched faces and sunken eyes. “Bread! Free bread!”
The mob surged forward, a starving tide that swelled around Sebastian, carrying him into Flemming’s Row. And there at the top of the Row stood Edward Maitland, the three riders in the familiar blue and red of the Bow Street House Patrol ranged behind him. The horses stood with feet braced, heads jerking, nostrils flaring as the Bow Street men held their mounts steady, forming a virtual sieve of horseflesh through which the crowd streamed, surging ever forward, carrying Sebastian with them.
Twisting around, Sebastian fought to turn back, but the momentum of the mob was too great. He could see the flush of triumph in Maitland’s fair, handsome face, the wild exultation in his eyes as he and the Bow Street men simply waited for the crowd to drag Sebastian to them.
He was reminded of the riptide in the cove where he often swam as a boy. It could be a deadly thing, that cold tide, pulling the unwary inexorably out to sea. They’d learned early, he and his brothers, that the only way to fight the tide was to go with it. And so Sebastian quit fighting now and simply allowed the mob to take him, only using his height and weight to inch his way deliberately to one side, first to the curb, then up onto the narrow footpath fronting the row of houses opposite St. Martin’s.
Once the houses here had been grand, of three and more stories. But they had long since deteriorated into poor lodging houses, their sagging gutters sluicing rainwater, their broken windows stuffed with rags, their street doors either unlatched or missing entirely. He was careful to keep his gaze fixed on the men at the top of the street, lest some furtive glance betray his intent. And so Sebastian knew the instant it dawned upon Maitland what was about to happen.
With a quickly shouted warning to the Bow Street men, Maitland started forward, just as Sebastian ducked through the dark doorway that opened up beside him.
He found himself in a dimly lit hall stinking of urine and damp and rot. Once the walls had been covered in figured scarlet silk, which now hung in curling brown tatters from stained plaster fallen away in great patches to show the bare wood of the lath beneath. In an open doorway on his left stood a dark-haired little girl of about five, holding what looked like a newborn baby. The room behind her was empty.
She just stood there, silent and wide-eyed, and watched as Sebastian sprinted down the hall, past the broken banisters and bare, sagging steps of what had once been a grand sweeping staircase. The back door stood half ajar and Sebastian slammed through it on a run. Leaping off the broken stoop, he crossed a small yard bordered on two sides by looming, high brick walls and strewn with broken tiles and staved-in barrels and molding, stinking piles of refuse. What had once been a coach house lay at the bottom of the yard, but when Sebastian pushed against its ironbound oak door, he found it locked.
“
Beside him, a set of outside steps curled up to the loft. Pushing off, he bolted up the stairs. The hutch door at the top was locked, too. Sebastian kicked out once, twice. Wood splintered beneath his boot and the door swung inward on creaking hinges.
The loft was a crudely partitioned space. He crossed the room. Moldering piles of old hay crunched beneath his boots and sent up dust clouds to dance in the dim shaft of light filtering through the grime-and-cobweb-choked casement opposite. Throwing open the window, Sebastian swung first one leg, then the other over the sill and eased himself through the narrow space. The rain was coming down harder again, striking his bare face with cold, needlelike stabs. Lowering the weight of his body on his stretched arms, Sebastian sucked in a deep breath and let himself drop.
He hit the slimy pavement below in a roll and came up at a run, his feet slipping and sliding on a sour- smelling sludge of rotten cabbage leaves and old straw and unidentifiable muck. Ahead, the broken arch of the old mews opened up onto a side lane, the crowd thin enough here that he could push his way through, heading away from the workhouse and Maitland and the Bow Street Horse Patrol. From somewhere behind him came a shout, then another, and the renewed ringing of the alarm bell. Sebastian ducked his head against the rain and walked on, just another ragged, wet, grime-smeared man, unremarkable except for his height and the lean good health of his frame.
Chapter 49
“Here. Allow me,” said Sebastian, reaching past the stiffening Italian to push open the door.
“Mother of God,” whispered Donatelli, his face paling as the bread started to slip from his grasp. “Not you again.”
Sebastian caught the bread just before it hit the stoop, and gave the artist a wide smile. “Let’s have a little chat, shall we?”
“You didn’t tell me you and Rachel were lovers,” said Sebastian.
Donatelli sat in a worn, tapestry-covered armchair beside the parlor fire, his elbows on his knees, his dark curly head sunk into his hands. He lifted his head slowly, his jaw hardening. “I know this country of yours, the way you English are about foreigners.”
Sebastian stood on the far side of the room, his shoulders against the wall, his arms crossed at his chest. He knew his nation, too, knew its arrogance and its fears and its willingness to blame anyone foreign, without due process or anything even vaguely approaching rational thought. Donatelli was right; if the authorities had known the Italian was Rachel’s lover, it would have been Donatelli they’d have moved to arrest, however much the evidence might have pointed to Sebastian.
“I’ve heard Rachel was planning to leave London,” said Sebastian. “Did you know?”
Donatelli surged to his feet, his dark eyes flashing. “What are you suggesting? That she was planning to leave
Sebastian held himself very still. “So you were both planning to leave? Is that it? Why? After years of
