“Who told you that?”
It had occurred to Sebastian that Lovejoy’s constable had probably agitated the neighborhood to the extent that any stranger suddenly appearing in their midst that day would be immediately suspect. So he twisted his cap in his hands and said, “Constable, ma’am. Well, I s’pose I should say, the innkeeper of the Red Fox, what had it from the constable. That’s where I’m stayin’, you see—at the Red Fox, on Fish Street Hill. When the innkeeper heard I’d come t’ town lookin’ for Mr. Preston, he said, ‘That’s right queer, for we had a constable here just this mornin’ askin’ about him. Said he’d been in Bucket Lane.’” Sebastian’s Silas Nelson leaned forward eagerly. “Have you seen him, then? Oh, please say you have.”
Her expression turned from one of suspicion to mild disgust. “Who are you?”
“I’m Silas Nelson, ma’am.”
“You already told me that. What I mean is, where you come from? What you want with Preston?”
“I’m from Dymchurch, ma’am, down in Kent. I come up to London because my sister’s been takin’ care of me. But she done gone and died, and now what’m I to do? I remembered her husband had some dealin’s once with Mr. Preston, so I come to town, hopin’ maybe he could find somethin’ for me to do. I hear he’s powerful rich. Only, I don’t know his direction and London is ever so big. I’d no notion; it’s nothing like Dymchurch, you know. I was puzzlin’ on how to even begin lookin’ for him when the innkeeper tells me about Bucket Lane.” Sebastian gave a broad grin. “So here I am.”
“You’re an idiot.” It was said more as a statement of fact than as an insult.
Sebastian widened his grin. “Yes, ma’am.”
She pushed out her breath between her teeth and shook her head. “Your Mr. Preston don’t live ’ere. He lives in a grand house out Knightsbridge way. Or I suppose I should say, he did. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Sebastian let his face fall ludicrously.
“That’s right.”
“But . . . what’m I to do?”
“Go back to Kent?” she suggested.
“But . . . you did know Mr. Preston, yes?”
She didn’t deny it, but simply stared at him, waiting for him to finish.
He leaned forward. “Maybe . . . maybe you know somebody could find me work? I may not be smart, but I am strong. Sorta.”
“Sorry.” She threw an expressive glace at the surrounding squalor. “Take a look around. People here have a hard enough time feedin’ themselves, let alone findin’ work for others. And you’re wrong; I didn’t know Preston.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “The only people like me that man ever knew was workin’ in his sugarcane fields and callin’ him massa.”
Sebastian looked confused. “Ma’am?”
“Never mind.” She jerked her head toward the passage leading back to Fish Street Hill. “Just . . . get out of here before somethin’ happens to you. This ain’t no place for the likes of you.”
“Ma’am?”
“You heard me. Take yourself off. Now.”
Sebastian pulled his cap down on his head with both hands and allowed his whole being to sag with dejection and despair as he turned back toward Fish Street Hill.
He paused at the dark mouth of the passage to look back.
She still stood in the middle of the muddy lane, her arms crossed at her chest, her gaze narrowed as she watched him. Although whether she watched to keep him from harm or to make certain he actually did leave, he couldn’t have said.
Sebastian settled against the worn squabs of the hackney carrying him back to Brook Street, his gaze on the tumbledown buildings and ragged, desperate people that flashed past on the far side of the carriage window. The farther west they traveled, the finer the shops and houses became, the wider and better paved the streets, the better dressed—and better fed—the people, until it seemed to him that he might have entered a different land.
Their society was one of infinitesimally exact gradations, with each individual acutely aware of his or her own place in relation to all others. Grand nobles such as Sebastian’s aunt Henrietta were casually contemptuous of mere landed gentry such as Stanley Preston. Yet Preston had considered himself fully justified in despising—and protecting his daughter from—the likes of Captain Hugh Wyeth, who might be gently born but was nevertheless woefully impoverished.