Once, Houndsditch had been nothing more than a defensive trench dug along the western edge of London’s city walls. Running southeast from Bishopsgate to Aldgate, it eventually grew so foul with refuse and offal and the bloated carcasses of dead dogs that city officials ordered it filled in. Never a fashionable area, it was occupied today mainly by immigrants and their descendants, particularly Huguenots from France, Jews from the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland, and, increasingly, the Irish. The poverty of the residents made it a center for rag fairs and secondhand shops. Crude stalls piled with everything from battered tin saucepans and worn-out boots to cheap tallow candles lined the street, while bellowing vendors dispensed hot tea from cans and guarded piles of sliced bread and butter from the hordes of ragged, starving children. The air was thick with the smells of herring, smoke, effluvia, and despair.
Priss Mulligan’s establishment stood on the corner of Houndsditch and a dark, narrow alley that curled toward Devonshire Square. Only two stories tall, with filthy, small-paned windows and sagging lintels, the structure looked to be in the final stages of dilapidation, its walls so darkened by grime as to appear almost black. Sebastian had to lean hard against the battered, warped door; a small brass bell jangled as it swung open.
He’d been expecting something similar to Basil Thistlewood’s eclectic collection of rare treasures mixed indiscriminately with the curious or merely odd. But this was more like a thieves’ den from a child’s fable, with exquisitely painted porcelain vases, snuffboxes with intricate filigreed lids, willowy Chinese maidens carved from ivory, gilded saints’ images, even a life-sized winged horse of glistening white marble.
He turned in a slow circle, trying to take it all in. When he came back around, he found himself being studied by a pair of beady black eyes.
“Who might you be, then?” demanded Priss Mulligan.
She couldn’t have stood more than four foot ten and was nearly as broad as she was tall, with thick dark hair and creamy white skin and puffy round arms that ended in incredibly small, childlike hands.
“A potential customer?” Sebastian suggested.
She gave a disbelieving grunt. “’Tis possible, I’m supposing. But is it likely?” She pursed her lips and shot a stream of tobacco juice into a nearby can. “Nah.”
In age, she could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty, her massive hips churning beneath her high-waisted, brown bombazine gown as she came forward, her gaze never leaving his face. “You ain’t a beak; that I can tell, just looking at you.”
“No,” agreed Sebastian.
She sniffed and wiped her lips with the back of one hand.
Sebastian said, “I understand you recently sold a Spanish reliquary to a friend of mine.”
“Oh? And who might your friend be?”
“Stanley Preston.”
“Him as just got his head cut off?”
“So you did know him?”
“Sure, then, but any fool on the street would recognize that name. Ain’t often a body gets his head lopped off in London—leastways, not these days.”
“You didn’t sell him a reliquary?” Sebastian nodded to a gilded bronze receptacle molded in the shape of an arm—presumably because that’s what it contained. “Rather like that, except a foot.”
“Came out of a church in Italy, that one did.”
“How did it end up here?”
“émigré sold it to me, just last week. Always coming in here, they are, looking to unload all manner of things. Need the money, you see.”
Sebastian caught the faint sound of a man’s hushed breathing coming from behind the curtained doorway at the rear of the shop. Someone was there, watching and listening.
He kept his gaze fixed on the woman before him. “Seems a curious item to pack when you’re fleeing for your life,” he said.
Priss Mulligan’s lips pulled back in a smile that showed small, sharp teeth stained brown by tobacco. “Some people have no sense.”
“When was the last time you saw Mr. Preston?”
“Didn’t say I had seen him, me.”
Sebastian studied the woman’s plump, creamy face and small, still faintly smiling mouth. Like most people who made their livings by buying and selling, she was shrewd and crafty and doubtless far from honest. But there was something else about her, something that went beyond mere venality. She was a woman whom even cocksure young boys would cross the street to avoid; whose presence made horses snort nervously and dogs slink, bellies to the ground. The degree of malevolence in her was palpable.
She was looking at him with narrowed eyes. “Have I seen you before?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
She smiled wider and pointed one fat, stubby finger at him. “I know what it is. You look more’n a bit like that rifleman keeps a tavern just off Bishopsgate. Got those same nasty yellow eyes, he does.”
“Interesting,” said Sebastian, careful to keep his voice bland, almost bored, although in truth he was fully aware of the existence of a Bishopsgate tavern keeper who looked enough like him to be his brother—or at least a half brother. “You essentially have two choices: You can either answer my questions, or I can suggest to Bow Street that an inspection of your premises might yield some interesting results.”
Her breath was coming fast now, in angry little pants. “Folks around here’ll tell you, it ain’t a good idea t’ mess with Priss Mulligan.”
“So I’ve heard.” Sebastian let his gaze drift around the crowded shop. “I don’t see any human heads.”
“Only heads I ever sell are saints’ heads, covered with silver or gilt bronze. Like that arm there.”
“When was the last time you saw Stanley Preston?”
“Never said I did; never said I didn’t.”