Where Serpents Sleep

“Indeed they will,” agreed Sebastian. “How well did you know Rose Fletcher?”

“Know her?” Maggie gave a harsh laugh that ended in a cough. “Aa’m a charwoman. You think them whores had aught t’do with the likes of uz?”

“But you knew who she was.”

Maggie sucked on her pipe. “Aye. She was the one who cried all the time. When she thought no one was looking, of course. But Maggie sees more than most.”

“Why do you think she cried?”

“Why do you think she cried?” said Maggie scornfully. “Why does any woman cry?”

Sebastian studied Maggie McQueen’s bright dark eyes, age-worn face, and work-gnarled hands. “Do they cry much?” he asked quietly. “The women of the Orchard Street Academy?”

Maggie shook her head. “Not most o’m. Most o’m have more’n they ever dreamed of—plenty of food, a roof o’er their heads, nice clothes.”

“But Rose?”

“That one . . .” Maggie hesitated, the smoke from her pipe drifting up to waft around her head. “She grew up dreaming of other things.”

Yet still she stayed, Sebastian thought, caught in a purgatory of her own making, trapped by self-loathing and misplaced guilt and suffering for the sins of others. Aloud, he said, “Why did you leave the Academy?”

Maggie knocked the ashes out of her pipe against the hearth and prepared to stand up. “You come around asking questions. They got nervous.”

“They?”

She shrugged. “Mr. Kane. Miss Lil. Thackery. Aa seen ’em loooking at uz. Wondering if Aa’d squawk. Old woman like uz, who’d notice if Aa disappeared one day? So Aa disappeared meself. Afore they could make uz disappear.” She hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and shot it at a nearby spittoon with flawless accuracy.

“Did you see Hessy Abrahams’s body?” asked Sebastian.

“ ’Course Aa did. Aa wrapped it in canvas, too.”

“Was she stabbed, as well?”

Maggie pushed to her feet. “Nawh. Twern’t no blooood on her. Somebody’d gone and snapped her neck. Just like a chicken ready for the pot.”

Chapter 44

SATURDAY, 9 MAY 1812

The Black Dragon lay somber and quiet in the cold light of early dawn, a dark lair for the shadowy prince of an underground realm of sin and despair. Ian Kane might not have all the answers to what had happened at the Orchard Street Academy on that fateful Wednesday night, but Sebastian had no doubt the Lancashire man knew more about those events than his charwoman. The problem would be getting close enough to the man to question him.

Sebastian watched the tavern for a time from across the street, where a scattering of ashes and a black scorch mark on the broken paving stones marked the spot once occupied by the hot potato seller. A few men turned to stare at him as they passed, their jaws unshaven, their eyes sunken. But the streets were largely empty. This was a district that really only came to life in the afternoon and evening.

A noisome alley ran along the south side of the tavern. Crossing the street, Sebastian took a deep breath and ducked down the passageway, his bootheels crunching the debris of broken bottles and oyster shells and rain- sodden playbills that fluttered halfheartedly in the breeze. Like most alleys in London, this one served the area’s residents as an outdoor chamber pot. It made a change from the smell of fish, but he doubted Calhoun would consider it an improvement.

After his last visit to the Black Dragon, Sebastian suspected his chances of simply strolling in the front door unmolested were limited. He needed a less direct entrance.

He found the door that opened onto the alley from the tavern’s kitchens and, just beyond it, a flight of rickety wooden steps that led up to the first floor. Beyond that the alley ended abruptly in a high brick wall. Sebastian was standing at the base of the stairs and considering his options when the kitchen door opened behind him.

He swung around to see a burly man wearing a brown corduroy coat back into the alley as he wrestled with an overflowing dustbin. He was followed by a second man with a broken nose and cauliflower ear who dumped an armload of broken-up crates to the side of the door, then straightened. Sebastian recognized Thackery, the ex- pugilist from the Orchard Street Academy.

“Well, well,” said Thackery, his small black eyes lighting up at the sight of Sebastian. “Look what we got here.” His smile widened to show his broken brown teeth. “I see ye forgot yer bloody walking stick.”

With a brick wall behind him and two thugs in front of him, Sebastian’s options had suddenly become limited. He took a step forward and slammed his bootheel into the pugilist’s right knee. “That is the one I hit before, isn’t it?” he said as the ex-fighter went down with a howl.

“Wot the ’ell?” The burly man in brown corduroy set down his dustbin with a thump and reached inside it to pull out a broken bottle. “Ye know this cove, Thackery?” Moving into the center of the passageway, he crouched down into a street fighters’ stance, the broken bottle held like a knife. “Looks like ye wandered down the wrong alley,” he said to Sebastian.