Chapter Six
The German count had spoken the truth, as far as it went, Fitzgerald thought: no evidence of the deadly palisade was to be found on Hampstead Heath.
He had seen Georgiana safely into a carriage bound for Russell Square, then set out on foot to view the wreckage himself. It was easy enough to find—perhaps a half mile back along the rutted carriageway meandering toward the village from the north. In the darkness of the previous hours his breathless struggle to carry an insensible woman had felt endless; in daylight, he’d managed the short distance in a few minutes.
A welter of churned mud announced the place. The carriage still lay where it had overturned, down the side of a ditch half-buried in the Heath; its shafts were shattered like straws. Fragments of wood and glass littered the bracken, and two of the four-horse team lay dead on the slope, legs splayed and eyes staring. The remaining pair, presumably, had broken free of the traces and run off into the night fog, suffering God knew what fate.
Torning’s party of men—three labourers from the village—were busy collecting rubbish; one of them was securing canvas tackle to the chest of a dead horse, preparatory to dragging it away.
“Poor beast,” Fitzgerald said.
The man glanced up. Sandy hair, a face indeterminately middle-aged, the nose blunt and veined. A drinker in Torning’s pub; a man of solid substance, with the neatly-mended clothes of a family prop.
“Terrible accident, it was. Coachman was drunk as a lord—broke his neck. And the
“How did it happen?”
“Ran up against summat in the fog.” The fellow looked back to his straps, securing a buckle with thickened fingers.
“That’s quite a wound in the horse’s chest,” Fitzgerald observed, crouching down to stare at a deep and ugly puncture. A vision of the spiked stockade rose in his mind. “Bled to death. I suppose this was one of the leaders?”
“Reckon. Took the impact full-on, and spared the others. They’ll be trotting down Islington High Street by this time, I wouldn’t wonder.”
“But what did it?”
“Sorry, sir?”
“What killed these horses? Overturned this carriage?”
The man glanced around vaguely. “There’s all kinds of rubbish out here in the dark, sir. It don’t pay to cross the Heath on a night without a moon.”
Fitzgerald pursed his lips. “I shouldn’t relish this job of work. How long have you been at it?”
“A good while now. Helped old Torning bring the corpus back to Well Walk, then the foreign gentleman paid us all to tidy up the mess, like.”
“The foreign gentleman?”
“German toff. From Windsor, Torning said he was.”
Fitzgerald abandoned the slope and walked back up to the carriageway, studying the trampled earth. A light rain had begun to fall, but it was still possible to discern the marks of a heavy object, dragged across the packed stone surface. While he’d beseeched the shade of John Snow at Georgiana’s bedside, the engine of their destruction had been carted away. That was natural; murder had been done, and murder must at all costs be concealed. But the swiftness of its execution suggested an efficiency—and the command of resources—far beyond a simple highwayman. The Queen’s carriage had not been attacked by a random thief. It had been the target of a conspiracy. Because Fitzgerald rode in it? —Or for reasons having nothing to do with him?
Like the barrister he was, he considered the evidence. They’d followed no predictable path last night, and they’d traveled at anything but a routine hour. Whoever overturned the carriage and tidied up the mess had done so with foreknowledge and a clear purpose. It was Fitzgerald who groped in the dark. He felt suddenly chilled. The unknown hand had taken such care—surely it would strike again...
“Are you a stranger here yourself, sir?”
He looked at the labourer. “From London. I was in that carriage last night.”
The man’s eyes widened.
Bedford Square sat in the heart of Bloomsbury: staid, respectable, and so anxious lest it be thought less fashionable than Mayfair, that shops and taverns were discouraged and the square itself pompously gated. Fitzgerald kept a set of lodgings on the north side, in one of the sedate row houses dating to the last century; his man, Gibbon, opened the door before he’d found his latchkey.
“Good morning, Mr. Fitz. Bath’s waiting and breakfast’s in twenty minutes.”
“The Lord knows I could do with both.” The rain had increased in force, and the world outside was wet and raw. He stepped into the narrow passage, pulling his hat from his head and leaving a trail of water all over the floorboards.
Gibbon surveyed him with dismay: mud-spattered coat and boots, collar wilted and cravat untied. “Aren’t you a sorry sight. Long night?”
Fitzgerald closed the door behind him. “Very. Have the morning papers arrived?”
“Already ironed and set out by the bath. Sad news about the Consort, in’t it? And him only forty-two. I don’t suppose the Queen had anything particular to say? Strange, you being called to Windsor at just the moment the Consort should be passing—you wouldn’t have happened to
Gibbon had little in common with the usual breed of superior servant. He had never learned the art of concealing all independent thought behind a correct façade. He was twenty-eight, with a curly mop of hair and a snub nose; he’d been in Fitzgerald’s service nearly seven years. They had met before a magistrate—Gibbon, a footman at the time, having been dismissed by his previous employer with an accusation of thievery. A valuable necklace had disappeared from the noble household. In the usual way, a servant would never merit representation; he would have little recourse but to protest his innocence, suffer the unequal course of justice, and be transported to Botany Bay. But Gibbon’s mother knew Septimus Taylor, Fitzgerald’s partner—and Sep thought the lad was owed a defence.
Fitzgerald was too little accustomed to the ways of gentlemen himself to mind the footman’s outbursts, his unbridled curiosity, his inadequate respect for station. He had taken an immediate liking to Gibbon. The footman’s despair at the ruin of his prospects had been little allayed by the discovery of the true culprit, the noble household’s fifteen-year-old son. Exposed as a thief, the young gentleman hanged himself in the gardener’s shed. When Fitzgerald told him the news, Gibbon had wept.
He’d proved a loyal man: coping with Fitzgerald’s temper, his sudden plunges into despair, his bouts of stunned drunkenness. Gibbon had fought off armies of duns when Fitzgerald was short of cash, and silently tightened his belt when Fitzgerald forgot to pay him. He never gossiped. He kept the lodgings tidy and food on the table.
“Gibbon, I have no anecdotes to share, no glimpses of Royalty to offer you. Have any messages come while I was gone?”
“No, sir. Excepting Mr. Taylor—his compliments, and would you step round to chambers when it’s convenient; but I reckon he didn’t intend for you to do it of a Sunday, and not when the whole world’s in mourning for Prince Albert.”
Fitzgerald stopped at the foot of the stairs. “Did Septimus call? Or send round a messenger?”
“Came himself, after you’d gone to King’s Cross last night. I told him you’d been summoned to Windsor. You’d have thought I’d said you’d gone to your hanging. But then, we all know Mr. Sep’s politics.”
Taylor liked to call himself a Radical, and publicly urged the end of the monarchy; he’d joined the Reform Club on the strength of his views, though Fitzgerald suspected the barrister’s allegiance was really to Alexis Soyer, the Reform’s celebrated chef.
He glanced at his watch as he mounted the stairs: half-past eight. “Thank you, Gibbon. I’ll be wanting a cab in an hour.”
“But you haven’t slept! Nor eaten!”
“Send up some coffee. I’ll breakfast with Mr. Taylor.”
He closed the bathroom door on his man’s protests, and slid into the water. With all the conversation, it was
