Page 105

Edward approaches the laystall, determined not to let the stink of shit put him off. A gull cries sharply across the sky and he glances up between two towering buildings with boarded-up windows, watches its arced flight path behind a chimney.

“Watch it!”

Edward catches himself just in time to swerve around a night-soil man pushing a cart—thankfully empty, though still reeking—and the man walks unceremoniously past him, up the ramp Edward is walking down. Edward mutters an apology, but it is lost over the bustle of morning traffic and he does not bother to call after him. In the last forty-eight hours he has felt so much older—the things he has heard, the things he has seen... He has no energy, no mind any more to care if he has upset anyone. The image of Coombe’s blood-soaked body swims in his mind’s eye. Was his quest for recognition really worth all this? If he had known that meeting Pandora Blake would result in so much chaos, would he have done it? Would he have listened to the old man who helped him that day in the coffeehouse? A part of him is not sure.

Edward continues down the sloping ramp to the river’s edge, looking for the man he saw the day he and Dora transported the pithos to Lady Latimer’s. He does not see him at first amidst the crowd of laborers hauling carts of excrement onto a waiting barge, and for a moment Edward panics, wonders if he has misinterpreted Coombe’s infantile scrawl, but then he sees him. The man named Tibb has removed his cap, is scratching his ear, and Edward rushes forward, his boots sinking into the gritty sand.

“Jonas Tibb?”

The man turns. He looks Edward up and down, but there is no spark of recognition.

“Mr. Tibb, my name is Edward Lawrence. I was with Miss Blake and Mr. Coombe when you transported a vase to Lady Latimer’s the other day.”

“Ah, yes.” Tibb frowns. “You were pushing your nose into business that wasn’t your own.”

Edward bristles. “Thing is, Mr. Tibb, it is my business now, and yours too, I have no doubt.”

There must be something in his tone, for Tibb shoots him a wary look. He shoves his cap down on his head again, covering his ears.

“Listen, I just do what the money tells me to. It isn’t my business to know more than I need to. Knowing things,” he says with a grimace, “gets you in trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” Edward says, and gives a humorless laugh. “That I can attest to. And Matthew Coombe too, it turns out.”

Tibb screws his eyes. “Eh?”

Edward sighs. “I think you know I am here to ask about Hezekiah Blake. His dealings, what you know of them.”

“I know very little. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

The man makes to get by him but Edward places a hand on the flat of Tibb’s chest.

“Coombe is dead.”

This stops him.

“What?”

“I found his body—and two others—in his lodgings. Not half an hour ago.”

Tibb stares. Something shifts on his face. He stamps his feet, buries his hands into his coat pockets.

“This way,” he says quietly.

The man leads him back up the ramp, past the night-soil men, done for the night, seeking their beds. Edward slows, struck by the variety of men under Tibb’s employ—men of all different colors and creeds, men who by their differences have been relegated to such lowly work—and again it occurs to Edward how lucky he is. He thinks too of Fingle, his position at the bindery, what it must mean to him to have achieved the security of a stable position and the respect that so many of his fellow men are denied, and Edward swallows, feels ashamed for acting so churlishly toward him in the past.

“Mr. Lawrence?”

Edward looks back to Tibb, picks up his pace. Tibb ducks down a small alley, so small Edward did not see it walking past, and shows him through a weathered door into the tiniest office Edward has ever seen. The foreman gestures to a stool, shuts the door behind him, then seats himself at another tucked behind a table no wider than the stool itself.

“Matthew Coombe is dead, you say? His brothers too?”

“The state of them...” Edward pales at the memory. “You could hardly tell.”

Tibb grimaces. “Do you know how?”

“The one looked like he’d been dead more than a few hours. A day, perhaps. His skin was mottled. Bloated, maybe.”

The other man nods. “Matthew said Sam caught a fever. And Charlie? Matthew himself?”