Sebastian let his gaze drift over the darkened, grassy banks of the nearby stream. “I wonder what the devil he was doing here. Somehow I find it doubtful he was looking for a warm hayloft.”
“I shouldn’t think so, no,” said Sir Henry, clearing his throat uncomfortably.
Sebastian pushed to his feet. “You’ll be sending the body to Gibson?” he asked. A one-legged Irish surgeon with a dangerous opium addiction, Paul Gibson could read the secrets of a dead body better than anyone else in England.
Sir Henry nodded. “I doubt he’ll be able to tell us anything beyond the obvious, but I suppose we ought to have him take a look.”
Sebastian brought his gaze, again, to the head on the bridge, the puddle of blood beneath it congealed in the cold. “Why cut off his head?” he said, half to himself. “Why display it on the bridge?” It had been the practice, once, to mount the heads of traitors on spikes set atop London Bridge. But that barbarity had been abandoned nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.
“As a warning, perhaps?” suggested Sir Henry.
“To whom?”
The magistrate shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”
“It takes a powerful hatred—or rage—to drive most people to mutilate the body of another human being.”
“Rage, or madness,” said Sir Henry.
“True.”
Sebastian went to study the ground near the bridge’s old brick footings. He carried no torch, but then, he didn’t need one, for there was an animal-like acuity to his eyesight and hearing that enabled him to see great distances and in the dark, and to distinguish sounds he’d come to realize were inaudible to most of his fellow men.
“What is it?” asked Sir Henry as Sebastian slid down to the water’s edge and bent to pick up an object perhaps a foot and a half in length and three or four inches wide, but very thin.
“It appears to be an old metal strap of some sort,” said Sebastian, turning it over in his hands. “Probably lead. It’s been freshly cut at both ends, and there’s an inscription. It says—” He broke off.
“What? What does it say?”
He looked up. “It says, ‘King Charles, 1648.’”
“Merciful heavens,” whispered Sir Henry.
Every English schoolboy knew the story of King Charles I, grandson of Mary, Queen of Scots. Put on trial by Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan cohorts, he was beheaded on 30 January 1649. Only, because the old-style calendar reckoned the new year as beginning on 25 March rather than the first of January, chroniclers of the time recorded the execution date as 1648.
“Perhaps it’s unrelated to the murder,” said Sir Henry. “Who knows how long it’s been here?”
“The top surface is dry, so it must have been dropped since the rain let up.”
“But . . . what could a man like Stanley Preston possibly have to do with Charles I?”
“Aside from sharing the manner of his death, you mean?” said Sebastian.
The magistrate tightened his lips in a way that whitened the flesh beside his suddenly pinched nostrils. “There is that.”
A church bell began to toll somewhere in the distance, then another. The mist was beginning to creep up from the river, cold and clammy; Sebastian watched as Sir Henry stared off down the lane to where the oil lamps of Sloane Square now showed as only a murky glow.
“It’s frightening to think that the man who did this is out there right now,” said the magistrate. “Living amongst us.”
And he could do it again.
Neither Sir Henry nor Sebastian said it. But the words were there, carried on the cold, wild wind.
Chapter 5
T he smell of freshly spilled blood had spooked the horses so that Sebastian had his hands full as he turned the curricle toward home.
“Is that really an ’ead on the bridge?” Tom asked as they swung into Sloane Street. “A man’s ’ead?”
“It is.”
The tiger let out his breath in a rush of ghoulish excitement. “Gor.”
Small and sharp faced, the boy had been with Sebastian for more than two years now. Not even Tom knew his exact age or his last name. He’d been living alone on the streets when he’d tried to pick Sebastian’s pocket—and ended up saving Sebastian’s life.
More than once.
Sebastian said, “It belongs—or I suppose I should say belonged—to a Mr. Stanley Preston.”
Tom must have caught the inflection in Sebastian’s voice, because he said, “I take it ye didn’t much care for the cove?”
“I barely knew him, actually. Although I must admit I have difficulties with men whose wealth comes from sugar plantations in the West Indies.”
“Because they grow sugar?”
“Because their plantations are worked not by tenants, but by slaves—mostly Africans, although they also use transported Irish and Scottish rebels.”