Page 3 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)
T he rain had eased off by the time they left, although the air was still cool and damp against their faces, the sky above heavy gray, the city’s cobblestones and granite setts glistening with wet. Sebastian had decided to take his curricle, both because the chestnuts needed exercising and because after months and months of endless rain he was sick and tired of riding in a closed carriage.
The boy, Jamie, sat hunched on the high seat beside him, his shoulders rounded and his hands clasped between his knees so tightly the knuckles showed white. He was obviously frightened. But then, reasoned Sebastian, what lad wouldn’t be after stumbling upon such a gruesome corpse?
“What made you think to come to me with what you’d found?” asked Sebastian as he turned the chestnuts down Bond Street toward Piccadilly.
Jamie cast him a quick sideways glance, then looked away again. “Heard about ye from Father, ye see. He told me about how ye solve murders, sometimes even when the other nobs don’t want ye to be solvin’ ’em.”
“And where is your father now?”
A quiver passed over the boy’s features, then was gone. “Dead. These past two years and more.”
“And your mother?”
“I don’t even remember her.”
I’m sorry, thought Sebastian. But he didn’t say it, because the rigid set of the boy’s shoulders told him any expression of sympathy would not be welcome.
He was aware of the boy tensing up tighter and tighter as they threaded their way through the sodden traffic on Piccadilly and then turned in to the deserted remnants of Swallow Street. Once, this had been a thriving if somewhat aged neighborhood of small shops, workshops, modest houses, livery stables, blacksmiths, and pubs. Most were now reduced to rubble, with only rain-soaked stacks of salvaged timbers or piles of old bricks and stones standing here and there. The Regent had an ambitious scheme to push a broad, architecturally consistent avenue through the western end of London, all the way from Carlton House in Pall Mall to what they were now calling Regent’s Park, and the longest stretch of it was slated to run right through here. Little had as yet actually been built, largely because of the economic woes that had beset the country since the ending of the French wars. But the wholesale destruction of everything in the project’s path was well underway.
“In there, he is,” said Jamie, nodding to a crumbling stone archway that still stood midway up the street. As Sebastian turned in to the ancient courtyard, he could see what had once been a private chapel tucked into one corner. Built of the same golden sandstone as the ancient archway, the chapel—like the arch—was the relic of a decrepit, now half-demolished Tudor-era mansion. The chapel’s door was already gone, part of the roof appeared to have caved in, and the facade’s single lancet window gaped blankly, its delicate stone tracery empty and broken. Sebastian had been here once before, although for an entirely different reason.
“Do you live around here?” asked Sebastian, reining in before the ruin.
The boy kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. “I do not.”
Sebastian waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “So what were you doing here, in the chapel?”
“Ducked in there to get out of the rain, I did. If I had the doin’ of it again, I reckon I’d just get wet.” A quiver passed over the boy’s features as he glanced at the chapel’s dark, ominously yawning doorway. “I don’t need t’ be goin’ in there again, do I?”
“Yes.”
The boy’s nostrils flared on a quickly indrawn breath. Then he gave a jerky nod, braced one hand on the edge of the seat, and jumped down.
For a moment, Sebastian thought he might run, but he didn’t.
“Walk them out on Swallow Street,” Sebastian told his young groom, Tom, as the tiger scrambled forward to take the reins. “And be ready to get out of here fast and head for Bow Street if this is a trap.”
Tom glanced over to where Jamie now stood, his hands tucked up under his armpits, his solemn gaze on the doorway before him. “Ye reckon it might be, gov’nor?”
“No.” Sebastian leapt lightly down to the broken cobbles of the ancient, shattered courtyard. “But I could be wrong.”
?Sebastian saw the hanging body’s menacing, swaying shadow first, its arms akimbo and one leg bent up so that it appeared to be dancing a bizarre pirouette over the crumbling, rain-streaked altar.
He glanced at the boy beside him. “You all right?”
Jamie nodded, his face pale and grim. Sebastian had expected him to try to hang back, but he didn’t.
Due to the orientation of the old Tudor house, the door from the courtyard entered the chapel’s southern wall, up near the altar, with the columned nave stretching away into shadow to their left. Debris from the partially collapsed groin-vaulted ceiling filled the dark, musty interior, so that they had to pick their way carefully over rain-soaked segments of broken, age-darkened timbers and shattered stones. Whatever pews might once have been here were long gone, doubtless carried off by the area’s impoverished residents for firewood. But through the scattered rain puddles and bird droppings at his feet, Sebastian could catch glimpses of half-obliterated inscriptions on the worn paving stones. Beloved daughter of…Here lyeth the body…buried this day…
“You’ll be findin’ him just there, sir. At the back,” said the boy softly.
“I see him,” said Sebastian as they came abreast of one of the chapel’s slender columns and the dead man himself came into full view. “Damn.”
The man had been hung by one ankle from an old wooden beam exposed by the collapsed stone vaulting above. Blood from the gory mess someone had made of his head had dripped down to pool on the worn paving stones beneath him and congealed there. A piece of white cloth Sebastian suspected was the dead man’s own cravat lashed the foot of his bent right leg to his straight left knee. His elbows were also bent, his hands hidden behind his back. As the body swayed again in a gust of wind that whistled through a gaping hole in the chapel’s rear wall, Sebastian could see that the same white cloth had been used to bind together the dead man’s wrists.
“Ye know who he is?” whispered Jamie, taking a step back.
Sebastian studied the hanging man’s blood-streaked, distorted features, now a ghastly reddish purple thanks to what was known as the “darkening of death.” He’d been in his late forties, big and stocky, with a full face and dark hair. His clothing was that of a prosperous gentleman who patronized London’s best tailors without falling victim to the lures of extreme dandyism; his only jewelry was a macabre and highly distinctive gold watch that dangled from the pocket of his pantaloons, with a single fob attached to the end of its chain.
His heart beating heavily in his chest, Sebastian hunkered down to take a closer look at that watch. Exquisitely rendered in the shape of a skull decorated all around with reliefs of Adam and Eve and the Grim Reaper, the watch was hinged at the back of the cranium so that the lower jaw dropped down to reveal its elaborate dial. It was a kind of memento mori, carried by its somber-minded owner as a reminder of human mortality and the brevity of life. And even if he hadn’t recognized the dead man’s discolored features, Sebastian would have recognized that watch.
“I know him,” said Sebastian, his voice flat.
He was aware of the rain starting up again, pounding on what was left of the roof and slanting in through the holes in the walls and ceiling. “When exactly did you find him?” Sebastian asked—or rather started to ask. Except he knew even before he twisted around to be certain that he was now alone in the chapel.
Jamie Gallagher was gone.