Page 15 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)
Paul Gibson was standing with his hands on his hips, his gaze thoughtful as he stared down at the waterlogged, days-old corpse of a woman laid out on the slab before him, when Sebastian walked up to the stone outbuilding’s open doorway.
“Good God,” said Sebastian, cupping a hand over his nose and taking a quick step back when the smell hit him. “Where did that come from?”
“Rotherhithe, via Old Father Thames.” The surgeon sighed. “At one time this was a young woman, perhaps comely, surely bursting with enough hopes and dreams to fill a long lifetime. Now she’s just…rotting flesh.”
Sebastian cast one swift glance at the gruesome cadaver, then looked pointedly away. “Who was she?”
“No idea, and unfortunately no way of finding out. Most young women pulled from the river are considered suicides and simply consigned to the oblivion of the local parish’s poor hole after a cursory inquest. But this one was found by a certain civic-minded Quaker who’s had the misfortune over the past couple of years to find two other such young women washed up on a property he owns. He said he was tired of seeing them buried anonymously and wanted to try to identify this one, which is how she ended up here.” Gibson reached for a sheet and spread it over the body with the tenderness of someone tucking a loved one in for the night. “All for naught, of course.” He looked up. “What are you doing here, anyway? Please tell me there hasn’t been another murder.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I’m wondering if you found a piece of paper in one of Lord Preston’s pockets.”
“I had a message from Bow Street a bit ago, asking the same question, and I can tell you the same thing I told them: No.” Gibson nodded toward a chipped enameled bowl that rested with the pile of Farnsworth’s neatly folded clothes on a wooden shelf beside the door. “That’s the contents of his pockets there.”
The bowl contained only a few items, most of them predictable: Farnsworth’s macabre pocket watch and fob, his coin purse, a fine silk handkerchief, a leather case of calling cards, a delicately carved wooden pipe and bag of tobacco, an ivory toothpick in its case, and a supple, fine leather pouch that opened to reveal several neatly folded segments of cured sheep’s intestines.
The Italians called them guantos , gloves, while the French referred to them as “English riding jackets.” And because young men on the Grand Tour had once tucked examples of such curiosities into their letters home from France, the English tended to call them “French letters.”
“Well,” said Sebastian after staring at the condoms in silence for a moment. “This tells us something interesting about the morally upright Lord Preston Farnsworth.”
“It does indeed. Except that I’m afraid he obviously didn’t always use them.”
Sebastian looked up to meet his friend’s gaze.
“It’s the only other thing I noticed in finishing his postmortem,” said Gibson, “and the Chief Magistrate of Bow Street has made it quite clear that I’m not to make any reference to it at tomorrow’s inquest. It was an old infection, and he’d obviously received treatment. But mercury does its own lasting damage, and the disease rarely actually goes away, of course.”
What was it about sex, Sebastian wondered, that caused nations to name its more embarrassing aspects after their enemies? The English called it the French pox, while the French called it the Italian disease and the Turks called it the Christian disease. He said, “Farnsworth had syphilis?”
Gibson nodded. “For a good ten years or more.”
“So he carried these”—Sebastian held up the leather envelope—“to protect someone else. A mistress, perhaps?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps he thought he was cured and was afraid of catching it again. Either way, it doesn’t exactly fit the saintly image he liked to project, does it?”
“No. No, it doesn’t.”
?“Do you think Tess knew?” Hero said later that evening when they were having a quiet glass of wine in the drawing room before dinner.
“That her husband had syphilis, you mean?” said Sebastian. He thought about Hugh saying wistfully, I suppose if we’d had children, and felt an aching sadness settle over him. “Probably. I think Lovejoy was planning to spend the day interviewing Farnsworth’s servants; it will be interesting to hear what his valet had to say.”
Hero went to stand by the window, her gaze on the rain-drenched street below. “You think he’ll tell the truth?”
Sebastian considered this. “Maybe not—at least, not if he’s hoping for a nice severance bonus from Lady Hester.” He went to stand beside her, his gaze, like hers, on a sodden costermonger in a red kerchief, his shoulders hunched against the rain as he pushed his barrow down the street. It had been raining hard for the last several hours, and the man looked cold, tired, and miserable.
“Was it raining last Saturday evening?” he asked. “I can’t recall.”
“It was, yes. It started shortly before dinner.”
“So around eight?”
“Something like that. Why?”
“Just wondering.” Sebastian was silent as they watched the costermonger turn his cart onto Davies Street, where a man stood at the corner: a tall, well-dressed man in a light gray driving coat with a fashionable profusion of shoulder capes, highly polished French-style riding boots, and a broad-brimmed hat he wore tipped low over his eyes. A scarf hid the rest of his face from view.
“What is it?” asked Hero when Sebastian’s eyes narrowed.
“There’s a man across the street, near the corner of Davies. I noticed him standing there when I first came down from dressing for dinner.”
“He could be waiting for someone.”
“In the rain?”
“Uncomfortable, but certainly possible.”
“Maybe.” Sebastian pushed away from the window and turned toward the door. “But I think I’ll just go ask him.”
?Sebastian slammed out of the house, the wind blowing the fine misty rain in his face, his right hand resting significantly in the pocket of his coat. He had made it to the base of the steps and was about to start across the wet street when the man near the corner turned and ran.
“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian under his breath and took off after him.