Only Hero was different.
Chapter 43
“It’s fortunate you made your visit to Strand Lane dressed as a groom,” said Calhoun, picking up one sodden boot between a carefully extended thumb and forefinger. “From the looks of it, this lot’s good for naught else but the dustman.” His nose wrinkled. “And from the smell of it. Is it my imagination, or is the dressing room beginning to acquire a fishy odor?”
Sebastian settled back in his copper hip bath and closed his eyes. “I’ve noticed I’m becoming decidedly popular with the stable cats.”
“Tom tells me the horses are still missing.”
“I’ve set the constables to scouring every livery in the area. They may yet turn up.”
“What was your assailants’ plan, do you think?”
Sebastian tipped his head forward so he could probe the tender area near the base of his skull with careful fingers. “They probably would have waited until after dark to remove our bodies and dump us in the river someplace. Make it look as if we’d drowned when a wherry boat overturned or some such thing.”
Calhoun bundled the ruined boots and breeches together, then hesitated. “And would you still be interested in the whereabouts of Hessy Abrahams from the Orchard Street Academy?”
Sebastian glanced around. “You’ve found her?”
The valet was looking unusually serious. “Not exactly. But I’ve someone you’ll want to be talking to.”
“Oh?”
“A woman named Maggie McQueen. Until two nights ago she was a charwoman at the Academy. She left when she decided the atmosphere of the place was becoming unhealthy.”
“Unhealthy?”
“Lethal.”
“She knows what happened to Hessy Abrahams?”
“According to Maggie McQueen, Hessy is dead.”
Sebastian decided to take his town carriage. His head ached, and despite the hot bath, he was still occasionally racked by chills.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, my lord, you look like the devil,” commented Calhoun, taking the forward seat.
Sebastian sneezed. “I feel like the devil.”
Darkness had fallen, enveloping the city in a starless black blanket. They rode through streets lit by the flickering light of carriage lamps and the torches of running linkboys. A light rain had begun to fall, glazing the paving stones with a slick wetness and driving indoors the throngs that usually crowded around the city’s grogshops.
Their destination proved to be an unsavory flash house in a back alley in Stepney called the Blue Anchor, owned by Calhoun’s notorious mother. The timbers of the jutting upper story were gray with age. Passing drays had knocked bricks off the corners of the ground floor so that the building gave the appearance of an old man missing half his teeth. But inside, the Blue Anchor was warm and snug. Its ancient bar, booths, and wainscoting might be black with age, but the public room smelled pleasantly of beeswax mingled with ale and gin.
Sebastian sneezed again. “This is the infamous Blue Anchor?”
“Not what you were expecting, my lord?” said Calhoun. He led the way to a cabinet behind the stairs. “I won’t be a moment.”
Sebastian subsided into one of the comfortably worn chairs beside the fire, closed his eyes, and listened to the pounding in his head. Calhoun was back all too soon with a glass of hot rum punch for Sebastian and a wizened little woman with lank gray hair, a broad nose, and unexpectedly bright black eyes.
“Your lordship, this is Maggie McQueen,” said Calhoun, steering her toward the seat opposite Sebastian. “Now, Maggie, I want you to tell his lordship everything you told me.”
Maggie ran her shrewd gaze over Sebastian and evidently found him wanting. “What the blooody hell happened to you?” she demanded in a thick Geordie accent.
“I suppose you could say I fell in the river.” It wasn’t strictly true, of course, since the river had come to him. But he didn’t feel up to explaining it.
Maggie grunted. “Harebrained thing to have done. Were you foxed, then?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have that excuse.”
She grunted again. “The boy here, he tells uz you’re interested in what happened at the Academy a week ago Wednesday night.”
It took Sebastian a moment to realize that by “the boy” she meant Jules Calhoun. “Very interested,” said Sebastian, taking a sip of his hot rum punch. A tingling warmth began to spread through his body.
“Mind you, Aa never could make sense of it all,” said Maggie, extracting a white clay pipe from some hidden pocket and beginning to pack it with tobacco. “But then Aa divint think anyone could, ’cept maybe them two whores, and they’re long gone now, aren’t they?”
As long as he remembered that “Aa” meant “I” and that Geordies liked to put as many vowels as possible into a word, Sebastian figured he might be able to get through the conversation. He said, “You mean Rose Fletcher
