came unthinkingly to an earl’s son. His movements grew heavier, his demeanor pugnacious, argumentative. It was an acting trick Kat Boleyn had taught him years ago, when they’d been young and in love and blissfully, dangerously ignorant of the shared blood that flowed through their veins.
The footpath here was narrow, and crowded with a variety of goods spilling from the surrounding shops. Transformed now into Mr. Taylor, constable, Sebastian dodged stacks of tinware, trestle-mounted trays displaying colorful ribbons, a canvas piled with salted cod whose fishy odor mingled unpleasantly with the stench of freshly spilled blood and raw meat coming from the butcher shop and the knackery beyond.
A side of beef, a row of sheep’s heads, and what looked like half a hog hung in the open shopfront. Ducking beneath the sheep’s heads, Sebastian stepped onto a sawdust-covered floor where flies buzzed over trays of sausages and piles of tripe and blood pudding displayed on a long scrubbed bench; more flies coated the glistening joints hung from hooks screwed into the wall. Behind the bench, a grizzle-headed man in a bloody apron was hacking at a half-dismembered carcass lying on a thick block. A channel cut into the perimeter of the block caught the blood and drained it into a tin bucket below. As Sebastian’s shadow fell across his work, the man glanced up, grunted, and turned away again.
He looked to be in his fifties, his face lined and darkened as if by years spent beneath a powerful sun. Several days’ growth of gray beard shadowed his lean cheeks and pronounced jaw; his eyes were small and dark and wary beneath beetled brows. He was essentially an older, darker version of the Corporal Obadiah Slade who’d once raped a twelve-year-old Portuguese girl, then smashed in her head for the sheer joy of watching her die.
“You’re Jack Slade?” said Sebastian, every trace of the aristocratic West End carefully scrubbed from his diction.
“Aye.” Slade worked his cleaver free from between two ribs, then let it fly again.
“I’m told you paid a visit to Bishop Prescott Monday afternoon.”
The cleaver hesitated for one betraying instant, then fell heavily. “What if I did?”
“Care to tell us why?”
The butcher kept his gaze on his work, but Sebastian saw an angry muscle tighten along his heavy jaw. “What do ye mean, ‘why’?”
“It’s not a particularly obtuse question.”
“I’m a simple man.”
“Simpler than ‘why’?”
Jack Slade sank his cleaver into the side of beef and left it there, quivering. He straightened slowly, uncoiling a big body laced with muscle. “The Bishop likes me pork chops, see? I brung him some. It’s as simple as that.”
It was the most improbable tale Sebastian had ever heard. He said, “You do that often?”
“On occasion. It ain’t somethin’ I’d do fer jist anybody, ye understand. But the Bishop, he was a special customer.”
“He must have been.” Sebastian studied the sheep’s heads hanging in the doorway. “Lamb chops, did you say?”
“That’s right.”
“So you’re saying—what? That the Bishop didn’t like the looks of your lamb chops?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Ask anybody on the street, they’ll tell ye. Ye want fresh meat, ye go to Jack Slade.”
“So maybe you brought him lamb chops when what he really wanted was your pork chops.”
The butcher’s nostrils flared. “Ye’re tryin’ t’ be funny. Is that it?”
“What I’m trying to do is understand why a visit from a simple butcher would trouble someone like the Bishop of London.”
Slade’s eyes narrowed. “Who told you my visit troubled the Bishop?”
“Does it matter?”
“I s’pose not.” Slade turned to pull his cleaver from the half-dismembered carcass. “Except that whoever said it, he’s wrong.” Slade kept his gaze fixed on the meat before him; Sebastian kept his gaze on that cleaver.
Sebastian said, “So you’re suggesting the Bishop wasn’t distressed?”
“No. I ain’t sayin’ that. Fact is, Prescott was already in a high dander when I seen him. What I’m sayin’ is, it had nothin’ to do with me.” The man’s fist tightened around the cleaver, his jaw clenching belligerently as he spat the words out. “Ye bulls just won’t let a man alone, will ye? I done me fourteen years in Botany Bay. Lost me poor wife whilst I was there, then earned another seven for a spot o’ trouble I got into in Sydney Town. It took me three years on top o’ all that t’ earn the wherewithal t’ buy me passage back home. But I’m a free man now, ye hear? And there’s nothin’ the lot o’ ye can do about it. So why don’t ye get out o’ here and go bother some other poor sod?”
The man’s sun-darkened skin suddenly made sense. Sebastian said, “What were you transported for?”
“Like ye don’t know.” With a flick of the wrist, the butcher sent the cleaver flying to bite into the wooden board between them. It twanged a moment, then stilled.
“It was murder, wasn’t it?”
“I’m closin’ me shop now,” said Slade. Ripping off his bloody apron, he pushed through the ragged curtain that screened an alcove in the back, leaving Sebastian alone with the flies and the stench of raw meat and blood.
Sebastian was heading back down the street when he saw Obadiah Slade.
The man came charging up the hill, his heavy fists clenched at his sides, his powerful jaw set hard. For one intense moment, he stared straight at Sebastian. But the rough clothes and grayed hair and unmilitary-like bearing confused him. Sebastian saw the man frown, as if trying to capture a fleeting memory.
Sebastian brushed past him and kept walking.
Obadiah Slade hadn’t made the connection yet between this unfashionably garbed, subtly older Londoner and the young officer in the Peninsula who’d once tried to have him hanged.
But eventually, it would come.
Chapter 14
“Never tell me Obadiah Slade is involved in this?” said Paul Gibson, glancing up from the naked, eviscerated corpse stretched out on the stone slab before him.
Sebastian had driven here, to Gibson’s surgery on Tower Hill, from Monkwell Street. Now he took one look at what Gibson was doing in the eighteenth-century cadaver’s bowels, and shifted his gaze to the unkempt yard outside. “Maybe. Maybe not. But his father is definitely hiding something.”
“Is the father anything like the son?”
“Yes.”
“Then I suggest you be careful, my friend.”
“I intend to.”
With effort, Sebastian brought his gaze back to the grinning fright on the slab. “What can you tell us about this one?”
“Well . . . judging by his teeth and certain other features, I’d say our friend here was about forty years old when someone stuck that dagger in his back. He was an unusually large man, well over six feet tall, and probably twenty-five or more stone.”
“A very large man,” said Sebastian.
“From the condition of his internal organs, it’s obvious he ate too much and drank too much.”
“Not exactly unusual.”
“Unfortunately, no. He still had most of his teeth, but at some point he must have broken his left forearm. It didn’t heal well. See?”
