starvation, piled in alleys or doorways. Or he found the old, dead of disease, the cold, or
4
alcohol poisoning. 'Suppose we'll never know now.' He wrinkled his face. 'But I'm damned if I can think 'ow 'e came to be down 'ere stark as a babe!' He gave the sewerman a sour look. 'But I've got your name, my lad-and I'll know where to find you again-if as I should want to!'
When Pitt went home that evening to his warm house, with its neat window boxes and scrubbed step, he did not mention the matter. He had met his wife, Charlotte, when he had called at her parents' extremely comfortable, respectable home to investigate the Cater Street murders five years ago, in 1881. He fell in love with her then, never believing a lady of such a house would consider him as more than a painful adjunct to the tragedy, something to be borne with as much dignity as possible.
Incredibly, she had learned to love him as well. And although her parents hardly found the match fortunate, they could not refuse a marriage desired by a daughter so willful and disastrously outspoken as Charlotte. The alternative to marriage was to remain at home in genteel idleness with her mother or to engage in charitable works.
Since then, she had taken an interest in several of his cases- often to her own considerable peril. Even when she had been expecting Jemima, it had not deterred her from joining her sister Emily in meddling in the affair in Callander Square. Now their second child, Daniel, was only a few months old, and even with the full-time help of the maid, Gracie, she had plenty to occupy her. There was no purpose in distressing Charlotte with the story of the dead youth found in the sewers below Bluegate Fields.
When he came in, she was in the kitchen bending over the table with the flat iron in her hand. He thought again how handsome she was-the strength in her face, the high cheekbones, and the richness of her hair.
She smiled at him, and there was the comfort of friendship in her glance. He felt her warmth, as if in some secret way she knew not what he thought but what he felt inside, as if she would understand anything he said, whether his words
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were fluent or not, easy or awkward. It was a sense of coming home.
He forgot the boy and the sluice gates, the smell of the water. Instead, the quiet certainties washed over him, driving out the cold. He kissed Charlotte, then looked around at all the safe, familiar things: the scrubbed table, white with wear, the vase of late daisies, Jemima's playpen in the comer, the clean linen waiting to be mended, a small pile of colored bricks he had painted as a toy-Jemima's favorite.
Charlotte and he would eat and then sit by the old stove and talk of all kinds of things: memories of past pleasures or pains, new ideas struggling to find words, small incidents of the day.
But by noon the next day, the body under Bluegate Fields was forced back to his mind sharply and unpleasantly. He was sitting in his untidy office looking at the papers on his desk, trying to decipher his own notes, when a constable rapped on the door and, without waiting for an answer, came straight in.
'Police surgeon to see you, sir. Says it's important.' Ignoring any acknowledgment, he opened the door wider and ushered in a neat, solid man with a fine gray beard and a marvelous head of curling gray hair.
, 'Cutler,' he announced himself smartly. 'You're Pitt? Been looking at your corpse from Bluegate Fields sewers. Miserable business.'
Pitt put down his notes and stared at him.
'Indeed.' He forced himself to be civil. 'Extremely unfortunate. I suppose he drowned? I saw no marks of any kind of violence. Or did he die naturally?' He did not believe that. For one thing, where were the clothes? What was he doing down there at all? 'I suppose you haven't any idea who he was? No one claimed him?'
Cutler pulled a face. 'Hardly. We don't put them up for public exhibition.'
'But he drowned?' Pitt insisted. 'He wasn't strangled or poisoned or suffocated?'
' No, no.' Cutler pulled himself out a chair and sat down as though preparing for a long stay. 'He drowned.'
