“No; she’s not young enough for that. But she could very well have had a child by him.”
“Dear God,” said Hero softly. “Would he kill her too, do you think? If he thought she was a threat to him?”
Sebastian reached out to lift his son from her arms and hold Simon close. “This is a man who owns other human beings and has them whipped when they refuse to work. Who’s capable of slitting a helpless slave’s throat for mishandling a horse and who probably bashed in the skull of Rowan Toop on the off chance the virger might have seen something that could incriminate him. So yes, I think he’d kill her if he thought she might betray him.
“Her and her child both.”
Chapter 53
I t was early afternoon by the time Sebastian reached Fish Street Hill. The crowds had thinned, the cries of the sellers in Billingsgate Market largely stilled.
Leaving the curricle with Tom, he cut through the noisome alley to Bucket Lane. The sky had grown increasingly dark and heavy with clouds, the light thin and white and flat, the lane deserted except for a knot of ragged children playing some game with broken pieces of brick.
Sebastian walked up to one of the lads, a delicately boned, brown-eyed boy of perhaps ten or twelve, and held up a coin. “I’m looking for Juba. A shilling if you lead me to her.”
The boy stared at Sebastian with a hard, emotionless face. Then he made a quick grab at the coin.
“Ah-ah,” said Sebastian, lifting the shilling out of his reach. “You’ll get it, but not until you’ve led me to Juba.”
The boy’s expression never altered. Then his gaze broke to someone behind Sebastian.
“It’s you, ain’t it?” said a familiar voice.
Sebastian turned to find the woman called Juba standing in the middle of the lane, her fists on her slim hips, her head thrown back as she stared at him with suspicion and hostility and what he recognized as a touch of curiosity.
“Yes,” he said.
“Who are you? Really.”
“Lord Devlin. I want to know why Stanley Preston came to see you last Sunday.”
“He didn’t come to see me.”
“Then who did he see?”
She shook her head. “First you want me t’ believe you’re an idiot, and now you’re pretending t’ be some grand lord?”
“I am a lord. Not exactly what I’d call ‘grand,’ but a lord, nonetheless.”
She huffed a scornful expulsion of air. “And what’re you claiming is your interest in Preston this time? My lord.”
“I’m trying to figure out who killed him, and why.”
He saw the sudden leap of fear in those turquoise-hued eyes. “I didn’t kill him,” she said huskily. “I had no reason to kill him.”
“I know.”
“What difference it make to you, who killed this Preston, or why?”
“I happen to have a moral objection to people getting away with cold-blooded murder.”
“Sure then,” she said, her lip curling. “Rich man gets hisself killed, ev’rybody from Fleet Street to Bow Street is interested in finding who done it. But let somebody stab an old fishmonger in the back, and ain’t nobody cares.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Come. I’ll show you.”
She turned and strode toward a nearby battered door without waiting to see if he followed, as if whether he did so or not were a matter of supreme indifference to her.
He found himself in a narrow, dilapidated corridor smelling strongly of fish, thanks to the dripping pile of baskets and hampers stacked near the street. She pushed open the first door to the left, revealing a room that was small and meanly furnished but clean, with a scrubbed trestle table and crude benches and two pallets laid out near the cold hearth. On one of the pallets lay the body of an old woman, her face pale and waxy with death.
She looked to be perhaps sixty years old or more, her café-au-lait skin wrinkled and sunken with age, her hair steel gray and thin. But once she must have been beautiful, for the exquisite, regal bone structure she had bequeathed to her daughter was still clearly visible despite the ravages of age and mortality.
Sebastian raised his gaze from the dead woman to Juba. “When was she killed?”
“Last night. They be comin’ anytime now to sew her int’ her shroud.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Ain’t nothin’ to tell. She went out t’ fetch water, only she never come back. Banjo went lookin’ and found her not five feet from the pump. Breathed her last in his arms.”
“Banjo?”
“My boy.” She jerked her head toward the street. “That’s him you was talkin’ to just now.”
Sebastian studied her beautiful, tightly held face and read there a powerful mixture of grief and shock and fury. He said, “Tell me why Stanley Preston came here a week ago Sunday.”
She stared back at him. “Why should I?”