What Darkness Brings

Chapter 42



J

ud Foy was coming down the inn’s rickety back steps, his lips pursed in a tuneless whistle, when Sebastian reached out to clench his fist in the man’s foul, tattered coat front and swing him around to slam his back against the near wall.

“Here, here,” bleated Foy, his hat tipping sideways, his watery eyes going wide. “What’d you want to go and do that to me for?”

Sebastian searched the man’s mad, gaunt features for some ghost of the stout, brash sergeant who’d testified for the defense at Matt Tyson’s court-martial three years before. But the man was so changed as to be virtually unrecognizable. “I have a problem with people menacing my wife.”

“Me? I didn’t menace her. If anything, she menaced me. Shoved her little muff gun in my face, she did, and threatened to blow my head off.”

“You were following her. Watching her.”

“I wouldn’t hurt her. I swear I wouldn’t.”

“You threatened her cat.”

“I don’t like black cats. Ask anybody. They’re bad luck.”

“Harm a hair on that cat’s body, and I’ll kill you.”

“Over a cat?”

“Yes.”

“And they say I’m touched in the head.”

“Tell me what happened to you after Talavera.”

Foy’s face went slack with confusion. “What you mean?”

“How did you get hurt?”

“Don’t rightly know. They found me near the stables with my head stove in and bits of my skull poking out. Thought I was a goner, they did. But I fooled ’em, didn’t I?” He closed his eyes and huffed his eerie, soundless laugh.

“You don’t remember what happened to you?”

“I don’t remember much of anything from before then.”

“You’d recently testified at a court-martial. Do you remember the name of the man on trial?”

“Aye. That I do remember. It was Tyson. Lieutenant Matt Tyson.”

Sebastian released his hold on the man’s ragged coat and took a step back. “When you told me you saw me coming out of ‘his house,’ whose house did you mean?”

Foy grabbed his battered hat as it started to slide down the wall. “That diamond merchant what lived in Fountain Lane. Can’t remember his name now.”

“Eisler?”

Foy carefully replaced the hat on his head. “Aye, that was it. Daniel Eisler.”

“Why were you watching his house?”

“He had something that belonged to me.”

“What?”

The man’s thin chest shuddered with his silent laughter. “What you think?” He leaned forward as if whispering a secret, his breath foul. “Diamonds.”

“Eisler had your diamonds?”

“He did.”

“How did he get them?”

“Somebody sold them to him.”

“Define ‘somebody.’”

“Never give me my share, he didn’t.”

“Who? Who never gave you your share?”

“I can’t remember.”

Sebastian studied the man’s skeletally thin face, the gaunt, beard-stubbled cheeks, and rainwater gray eyes lit by an unearthly gleam. And he found himself wondering not for the first time just how much of the man’s madness was real and how much was put on for effect. “You say you were watching Eisler’s house on Monday?”

“I was.”

“Eisler was dead by then.”

“I know that.”

“Were you watching the house the evening before?”

“I was.”

“Did you see who came in and out that evening?”

“I did.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“Why should I?”

Sebastian took a menacing step toward him again.

Foy threw up his hands and skittered sideways along the wall. “All right, all right!”

“Who did you see?” Sebastian demanded.

Foy’s tongue flicked out to wet his dry, cracked lips. “Well, first there was this gentleman.”

“Who?”

“How would I know? Never seen him before.”

“How old?”

Foy shrugged. “Forty? Fifty? Hard to tell sometimes, ain’t it?”

“What did he look like?”

“You think I can remember?”

“Tall? Thin? Short? Fat?”

A frown contorted the man’s face. “Tallish. I think. Dressed dapper. I told you, I don’t exactly remember. I didn’t pay him no mind. Why would I?”

“How long did he stay?”

“Not long. Ten minutes. Maybe less.”

“What time was this?”

“’Bout the time it was gettin’ dark, I reckon. I didn’t see him too good.”

Sebastian tamped down a welling of frustration. “Who else did you see?”

Foy screwed up his face again in thought. “I think the doxy came next.”

“A woman? When did she come?”

“Maybe an hour later.”

“Do you remember what she looked like?”

Foy shook his head. “It were dark by then. Can’t nobody see in the dark.”

“How did she arrive?”

“Some gentleman brung her in a hackney. He waited in the carriage while she got down and went into the house. Then he drove off. And I didn’t see him, so there ain’t no use in asking me what he looked like.”

“If you didn’t see him, then how did you know he was a gentleman?”

“Because I seen his outline in the window when he leaned forward. He had a dapper hat on.”

“His hat? You know he was a gentleman by the silhouette of his hat?”

“Aye. He had one of them folding, two-corner jobs, like what the gentry wears to the opera.”

“You mean, a chapeau bras?”

“You think I know what they’re called?”

“And then what happened?”

Foy twitched one thin, ragged shoulder. “I dunno. I left not too long after that.”

“You didn’t see the woman come out again?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone else hanging around while you were watching the house?”

“No. It’s nearly all warehouses and storerooms down there now; have you noticed?” A tic had started up to the left of the man’s mouth, the grainy, filth-encrusted skin twitching in tiny, uncontrollable spasms.

Sebastian said, “I think you’re holding back on me, Foy. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Foy stared at him with vacant, rheumy eyes.

It might have been impossible to tell how much of the man’s madness was feigned, how much was acquired, and how much had always been there, but Sebastian did not make the mistake of believing the ex-soldier harmless. Madness was always dangerous, especially when coupled with brutal self-interest. Yet he suspected that Foy was outclassed in perhaps all but evil by those into whose orbit he had now drifted.

Sebastian said, “I don’t know how much of what you’re telling me is true, and how much is sheer, unadulterated balderdash—”

“That’s a right hurtful thing to say, it is.”

“—but I think you’ve stumbled into something you don’t understand here. Something that could get you killed.”

Foy grinned, opened his eyes wide, and pursed his lips to push his breath out in a mocking sound. “Ooo-ooo. Think I should be scared, do you? I’m missing a chunk of my skull and a part of my brain, and I’m still here, ain’t I? I reckon I’m a pretty hard fellow to kill.”

“No one’s hard to kill,” said Sebastian, and left him standing at the base of the stairs, a skeletal figure clothed in tattered rags that hung like a shroud about the frame of a man long dead.



Charles, Lord Jarvis, leaned back in his chair, his feet stretched out toward the hearth in his Carlton House chambers as he studied the man who stood before him. He found Bertram Leigh-Jones a slob of a man, big and unkempt but full of bluster and self-importance tinged, Jarvis suspected, with no small portion of vice.

Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to one nostril and sniffed. “I trust you understand your instructions?”

“I do, my lord. But—”

“Good.” Jarvis closed his snuffbox with a snap. “That will be all.”

“But—”

Jarvis raised one eyebrow.

Mr. Leigh-Jones’s full cheeks darkened. He set his jaw, said, “As you wish, my lord,” and bowed himself out.

Jarvis was gazing after him, a thoughtful frown on his face, when one of the ex-military men in Jarvis’s employ appeared at the entrance, his dark, rain-splattered cloak swirling as he swung it from his shoulders.

Jarvis smiled. “Ah, Archer. Come in and close the door. I have an assignment for you.”