What Darkness Brings

Chapter 55



S

ebastian found the name he was looking for entered under the heading for June 1812.

Major Rhys Wilkinson’s debt was for five hundred pounds and had been partially repaid.

He set aside the ledger and rose to go stand with his palms resting on the windowsill, his gaze fixed unseeingly on the misty street before him. He tried to tell himself that the death of both men on the same night could be a coincidence. That Rhys was not the kind of man to commit cold-blooded murder over a debt of five hundred pounds. But he was haunted by the memory of a young girl with a dusting of cinnamon-colored freckles across her sunburned nose, who’d once shot a Spanish guerrilla point-blank in the face.

He was still standing at the window some minutes later when Hero’s stylish yellow-bodied town carriage drew up before the house. He watched her descend the carriage steps, a ragged, incredibly dirty, gape-mouthed child clasped firmly by one hand.

“We’ll have sandwiches, cakes, and hot chocolate in the library, as soon as possible,” he heard her tell Morey, her footsteps brisk as she crossed the black-and-white-marbled entry hall. The room filled with the scent of coal smoke and fresh manure and grimy boy.

“This is Drummer,” she said, releasing the child’s hand so that she could loosen the ribbons of her bonnet and yank off her gloves. “He’s a crossing sweep at St. Giles, but he also works in the Haymarket in the evenings, helping gentlemen too shy to descend from their carriages to find girls.” She gave the boy a nudge forward. “Make your bow and tell his lordship about Jenny.”

The boy stumbled forward, a grubby wideawake cap clutched in both hands, his skinny chest jerking with his agitated breathing.

“Jenny?” prompted Sebastian when the lad remained mute.

“Jenny Davie,” supplied Hero. “She’s seventeen, and last Sunday evening she was hired by a gentleman in a hackney who was known to procure girls for a nasty old goat living in St. Botolph-Aldgate.”

Sebastian led the boy closer to the fire, where the black cat looked up in slit-eyed annoyance at their intrusion. “What did this gentleman look like?”

Drummer raised a shoulder in the offhand shrug of a lad to whom one member of the nobility was pretty much like the next. “I reckon ’e looks like a nob.”

“My age? Younger? Or older?”

Drummer frowned with the effort of thought. “Younger, I’d say—by a fair bit.”

Sebastian and Hero exchanged glances. So Jenny Davie’s procurer had not been Samuel Perlman.

“Fair?” asked Sebastian. “Or dark haired?”

“’E’s got a mess o’ curls as gold as a guinea. The girls always go with ’im real quick, because ’e’s so good-lookin’. But ’e ain’t never ’ad nothin’ to do with any of ’em. Jist takes ’em to that old codger.”

Blair Beresford, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “Tell me about Jenny Davie.”

Again that twitch of the shoulder. Circumstances had obviously taught Drummer long ago to take life—and people—as he met them, with little time for analysis or criticism. “Wot’s there t’ tell? She’s a doxy.”

“Where does she live?”

The boy’s gaze slid away. “She used t’ keep a room at a lodgin’ ’ouse in Rose Court.”

“But she’s not there anymore?”

Drummer shook his head. “There’s been a mess o’ people lookin’ for ’er.”

“Oh? Such as?”

“Well, the curly-’eaded cove what ’ired ’er, fer one.”

Interesting, thought Sebastian. “Who else?”

The boy’s shoulder twitched. “Some Frenchman. “’E’s been lookin’ fer ’er real ’ard. He’s even offered blunt to any o’ the lads what could tell ’im where she’s gone.”

Sebastian saw Hero’s eyes narrow and knew that the boy had not yet told her this part of his tale. “What does he look like?”

“’E looks like a Frenchman.”

“Tall? Short? Old? Young? Dark? Fair?”

Drummer frowned. “Older than you, and shorter—but not real old or real short. I reckon ’e ’as a real bad pockmarked face, but I didn’t pay him a whole lot o’ mind. I mean, I ain’t about to bubble on Jenny, so why would I? She said if anyone was to come lookin’ fer ’er, we was t’ keep mum.”

“So you do know where she is.”

The boy sucked in a quick breath as he realized his mistake. He edged toward the door but was stopped by the entrance of Morey, who came in bearing a heavy tray loaded down with sandwiches, small cakes, and a pitcher of steaming hot chocolate.

Hero said, “Here, let me fix you a plate of sandwiches. Do you prefer ham or roast beef?”

The boy swallowed hard. “Can I ’ave some o’ both?” he asked in a small, hopeful voice.

“You certainly may.” She heaped the plate with a generous selection of dainty sandwiches. “Is Jenny a London girl, born and bred?”

Drummer shoved a sandwich in his mouth and shook his head. “She and Jeremy—that’s ’er brother—grew up Bermondsey, down in Southwark. I remember ’im tellin’ me their family ’ad a room over the gatehouse o’ some old abbey down there. But their folks died o’ the flux some years ago, and they didn’t ’ave no kin, so they come up to the city lookin’ for work.”

“Is that where she’s gone now?” asked Sebastian. “To Southwark?”

Drummer swallowed another bite of sandwich. “Nah. I wouldn’t a told you if it was.”

Hero poured the boy a mug of hot chocolate. “We want to help Jenny, not harm her. She needs help, Drummer. I’m afraid those other men you mentioned who are looking for her might kill her if they find her. And they are determined to find her. You must tell us where she is.”

The boy paused in midchew, his gaze going from Hero to Sebastian and back.

Hero said, “I understand it’s difficult to know whom to trust.”

Drummer swallowed, hard.

“Tell us,” said Sebastian, his voice quiet but implacable.

“White ’Orse Yard,” Drummer blurted out, his chest jerking with the agitation of his breathing. “She’s got a room at the Pope’s ’Ead in White ’Orse Yard, jist off Drury Lane.”



Sebastian took the boy with him, along with a hamper packed with more sandwiches and cakes, and a warm coat that had recently grown too snug for Tom. Hero was cross about her inability to accompany them, but even she had to admit that the uproar provoked by the appearance of a gentlewoman in a Drury Lane tavern was unlikely to be helpful.

The warren of narrow, crooked alleys and foul, dark courts around the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters had long ago degenerated into a precinct of flash houses, low taverns, and rat-infested accommodation houses where families of ten or more could be found crammed into a single small, airless room. Sebastian made certain both his coachman and the footman were armed, and slipped a small double-barreled flintlock into his own pocket.

It was still several hours before nightfall, yet already the narrow cobbled lane leading to White Horse Yard was filling with a rough, half-drunken crowd and a thick mist that drifted in a dense, wind-swirled, suffocating cloak between the tightly packed houses.

“Why did she take refuge here? Do you know?” Sebastian asked as the carriage drew up at the end of the lane.

Drummer shook his head, his mouth full of cake. “I think meybe she used to work round about ’ere, when she first come up to London.”

“How do you know she’s here? Did she tell you?”

“Her brother, Jeremy, tumbles with us. She wanted ’im to bring ’er some o’ ’er stuff a couple days ago and ’e asked fer me ’elp. Only, she were right cross when she see’d me. That’s when she made me promise not to tell where she is.”

“She’s right to be cautious.”

The boy looked doubtful but paused to grab a couple more sandwiches and thrust them into his pockets before tripping down the carriage steps in Sebastian’s wake.

Sebastian grasped the lad firmly by the arm and held on to him as they worked their way through the surging, boisterous crowd. The damp, smoky air was thick with the smell of broiling meat and unwashed bodies and the pervasive, inescapable stench of rot.

The Pope’s Head in White Horse Yard occupied what looked as if it had once been the carriage house of a long-vanished grand residence, its redbrick facade now worn and blackened by grime, a broken gutter dripping a line of green slime down one side. As they approached the inn, the door flew open and two drunken soldiers staggered out, arms linked around each other’s shoulders and heads tipped back as they sang, “King George commands and we obey, o’er the hills and far away . . .”

Drummer hung back, eyes wide, lips parted, chest jerking with his agitated breathing. “Do I gotta go in wit’ ye? I mean, ye know—”

“Yes,” said Sebastian, hauling the boy across the entrance passage to the inn’s dark, narrow staircase. “I need you to convince Jenny that I’m here to help her.”

“She ain’t gonna be happy I brung ye.”

Lit only by a single smoking oil lamp, the stairs creaked and groaned beneath their weight. But the telltale sounds of their approach were lost in the convivial roar from the taproom and the raucous laughter from a chamber at the end of the hall and a man’s well-bred voice raised in anger on the far side of the door nearest the top of the steps.

“Where is it, damn you? I know you took it. Where is the diamond? Did you—”

The rest of his words were swallowed by a woman’s terrified scream.