“You’re saying that Rhys stole some diamond? But Rhys would never do anything like that! You know Rhys.”
“I know. I think Jenny Davie has it. And unless I can stop him, she’s liable to be Leigh-Jones’s next victim.”
It took what felt like an age for Sebastian’s hackney driver to battle through the city’s Saturday night traffic to the St. Botolph-Aldgate home of Bertram Leigh-Jones. Then the housemaid who opened the door to Sebastian’s curt knock dropped an apologetic curtsy and said, “Begging your lordship’s pardon, but Mr. Leigh-Jones isn’t here.”
“This is rather important,” said Sebastian, aware of a rising sense of urgency. “Would you happen to know where he’s gone?”
“I’m afraid he didn’t say, my lord. Some Frenchman come to see him maybe half an hour ago, and they all went off in his gig.”
“‘All’? Was someone else with them?”
The housemaid nodded. “Oh, yes, my lord. The Frenchman brung a girl with him. A tiny slip of a thing, she was, and so scared.”
Jenny, thought Sebastian. Damn, damn, damn.
Aloud, he said, “You have no idea where they might have gone?”
The housemaid screwed up her face with the effort of thought. “I think they might have said something about Southwark, but I couldn’t tell you more than that.”
“Southwark?”
“Yes, my lord,” she said.
But Sebastian was already running to his hackney.
Chapter 58
T
he ancient abbey of St. Saviour in Bermondsey, on the southern bank of the Thames, had once ranked amongst the proudest religious houses in England, patronized by kings and favored by widowed queens in need of a place of refuge. Now only the lay church, a crumbling gatehouse, and a row of abandoned, half-demolished dwellings survived, their age-battered stone walls and broken slate roofs gleaming wet in the fitful, misty moonlight.
Why Leigh-Jones and his pockmarked French cohort would bring Jenny Davie here, to her old childhood home, Sebastian could only guess. But as his hackney swept around the curve of the ancient elevated causeway that once led to the priory, he caught sight of a gig drawn up beside what was now the parish church of St. Mary Magdalen. The gig was empty, the bay between the shafts grazing contentedly in the rank grass that grew along the wayside. Sebastian could see a narrow beam of light, as if from a shuttered lantern, weaving amongst the mossy gray tombs and tumbled headstones of the dark, fog-shrouded churchyard beyond.
“Pull up here,” Sebastian ordered.
The hackney driver obliged. “Ye want I should wait fer ye again, yer lordship?” he asked hopefully. He obviously considered a night of dozing on the box far preferable to one spent constantly hustling new fares.
“Just take care to keep out of sight.” Sebastian dropped quietly to the ground, then handed up his card to the jarvey. “And if anything should happen to me, take this to Sir Henry Lovejoy in Bow Street and tell him what you know of this night’s work.”
“Aye, my lord.”
Leaving the hackney in the shadows of a line of darkened, dilapidated shops, Sebastian slipped down the street. The air here was heavy and wet, and thick with the pungent odors of the nearby tan yards and glue manufactories and breweries. On the flagway beside the church’s ancient medieval tower, he paused, a cold wind billowing the mist around him.
He could see them now, three mist-shrouded figures: the magistrate’s form tall and bulky; the Frenchman small, agile; the girl dragged along with one frail arm gripped in Leigh-Jones’s meaty fist as they worked their way through the sunken, crowded graves. The moon had utterly disappeared behind the thick, bunching clouds.
The wall surrounding the churchyard was built of stone and low and crumbling; Sebastian climbed it easily. Hunkering down, he was slipping cautiously from one tomb to the next when the girl’s voice, sounding surprisingly strong, stopped him.
“This is it,” she said.
“You’re certain this time?” snapped Leigh-Jones, raising his lantern to peer at the tomb before them.
“I think so.”
The Frenchman gave a scornful laugh. “That’s what she said before she wasted ten minutes digging around the foundations of the last tomb where she insisted she’d hid it.”
“It ain’t easy to see in the dark! Maybe if we could come back tomorrow when it’s light, I could—”
Leigh-Jones said, “Just shut up and dig.”