Page 33 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

Friday, 23 August

E arly the next morning, Paul Gibson was washing his hands in a basin of pink-tinged water when Sebastian came to stand in the open doorway of the surgeon’s stone outbuilding. What was left of Half-Hanged Harry still lay on the stone slab in the center of the room, eviscerated and pale in the early-morning light.

“Finished?”

Gibson nodded and reached for a ragged towel to dry his hands. “Just now. But if you’re looking for answers, I don’t have any. He was shot, then hanged. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Was he dead before he was hanged?”

“I’d say so. The bullet severed one of the arteries to his lungs; he would have drowned in his own blood within minutes.”

“Hopefully that was quick enough.” Sebastian remembered Sanson, Paris’s longtime public executioner, telling him once that the human brain remains aware for at least one to two minutes after death. And who should know better than a man who had chopped the heads off literally thousands of people?

He forced himself to look again at what was left of Harry McGregor, at the thick purple wheal-like scar left around his neck by the rope the Crown had used to try to hang him fifteen years before; at the shackle scars on his wrists and ankles cut deep by his years as a convict in Botany Bay; at an old knife scar on his side. “He lived a hard life.”

“That he did. His back is nothing but scar tissue on scar tissue. I wouldn’t want to try to guess how many times he was flogged.”

Sebastian moved over to study the chipped enameled bowl containing the contents of the dead man’s pockets: a simple clay pipe, a few coins, a broken comb. “Nothing interesting?”

“Nothing.”

He turned to meet his friend’s worried gaze.

“You’ve no idea who’s doing this?” said Gibson, his arms hanging loose at his sides as he leaned back against the wooden shelf behind him.

Shaking his head, Sebastian went to stand in the open doorway and draw the cool, damp air of the morning deep into his lungs.

?That same gray morning, Hero paid a call on the Tothill Fields Bridewell.

The original Bridewell lay in London, in a cluster of decrepit brick buildings that had once formed part of an early sixteenth- century palace of Henry VIII. The palace had taken its name from the nearby St. Bride’s Church and its ancient holy well, and when Henry’s son, Edward VI, handed the palace over to the City of London for the incarceration of vagrants, beggars, petty criminals, and “wayward women,” the name Bridewell went with it. There were now well over a hundred such institutions, all called Bridewells, scattered across England. They were considered “houses of correction” rather than prisons, for their purpose was not simply to imprison those guilty of disorderly behavior but to “correct” it through the use of hard labor, rigid discipline, and liberal use of the whip.

The Westminster Bridewell lay near Vincent Square in the wretched southwestern part of the city known as Tothill Fields. When Hero’s yellow-bodied carriage and snorting team of fine blacks drew up before the Bridewell’s forbidding stone doorway, a troop of soldiers in the nearby artillery ground, a gang of schoolboys, and a passing farmer all turned to stare. She sent one of her liveried footmen to warn the keeper of her imminent arrival and was still descending the carriage steps at a leisurely pace when the man came hurrying out to greet her. It wasn’t often that someone like Mr. Horace Bottomley received a visit from such an important personage as the daughter of the Regent’s most formidable cousin.

“Lady Devlin— dear Lady Devlin!” he exclaimed, bowing low. “Welcome! Such an honor. Such a great honor.” A small, plump-faced man in his middle years with a balding head, round belly, and pasty complexion, he clasped his hands together and brought them up to hold them tucked beneath his chin as he straightened. He had a determined smile plastered on his face, but his small, watery eyes were tense and wary. There was a growing campaign initiated by Quakers such as Elizabeth Fry to improve the brutal, inhumane conditions that existed in British prisons, and it was obvious that Mr. Bottomley feared his Bridewell was about to become the social reformers’ next target. He cleared his throat. “How very kind of you to pay us a visit.”

Keeping her expression solemn, Hero ran a critical eye over the miserable huddle of ancient buildings. “When was this Bridewell built?”

“In 1618, my lady,” he said proudly with another bow. “Then expanded in 1675.”

“So it’s nearly two hundred years old. I must say, it does look it, doesn’t it?”

Mr. Bottomley swallowed. “If you’ve come for a tour of the facility—”

Hero brought her gaze back to his face. “Yes, I would like to arrange an inspection, perhaps for sometime next week. But today I’m interested in speaking to one of your inmates, a woman named Letitia Lamont.”

The frozen smile slid off Mr. Bottomley’s face as his eyes bulged. “Letitia Lamont? You want to see Letitia Lamont?”

“Yes. She is here, is she not?”

Bottomley cleared his throat again. “Oh, yes; she’s here.”

?It was decided that the best place for Hero to interview the woman was in what Horace Bottomley called the “passroom.” It turned out to be a long, narrow hall lined on each side with a row of crude low wooden boxes, each with a thin layer of dirty straw. It took Hero a moment to realize they were beds—of a sort. The Bridewells were the only prisons in London that provided their inmates with any bedding at all. The Bridewells were also one of the few such institutions that regularly kept their female inmates separate from the men or provided the women with female matrons rather than predatory male guards.

The passroom was empty, for the women who slept in these crude wooden boxes were in the workroom engaged in the mindless, painful task of picking oakum. While she waited for Letitia to be brought to her, Hero went to stand at the small barred window cut high into the room’s end wall. It was so high that most of the inmates were probably unable to see out of it, and its view of the foggy, soot-stained brick courtyard beyond was wretched. As she watched the rivulets of rain chase each other down the dirty glass, Hero felt a chill crawl up her spine and found she had to take a deep breath.

The sound of approaching footsteps brought her back around.

“Here she is, Lady Devlin,” announced the matron, a stout, middle-aged woman in a brown stuff gown topped by a bulky knitted shawl. “Go on, get in there—and mind yer manners, ye hear?” she hissed to the woman beside her.

In the course of her research for various projects, Hero had met dozens of prostitutes of all ages. A few were gay and saucy, but most were either bitter and defiant or frightened and ashamed. And all of those interviews had left her with a deep and abiding loathing for women such as Letitia Lamont who preyed upon and exploited their more vulnerable sisters. Abbesses, they were called, or procuresses, madams, whoremistresses, bawds, panderers, and nymph-keepers. They were almost without exception vicious, predatory, and utterly amoral. Brutal, merciless, and pitiless, they preyed on the young, the weak, the helpless, the innocent and ignorant. Most such women were old crones, and that was what Hero had been expecting.

But the woman who called herself Letitia Lamont was probably no more than thirty-five or forty and not unattractive, with a narrow face and pale hair that would have been beautiful if it weren’t so lank and dirty. In defiance of her surroundings, her carriage was proud, although her cheap, worn uniform hung on her thin frame in a way that suggested she had lost weight during her months in the house of correction. But then, Bridewells were not known for feeding their charges well, and one of their favorite forms of punishment was withholding food from troublesome inmates.

The woman paused just inside the doorway, her hands on her hips, an insolent smile curling her lips as she regarded Hero across the width of the room. “Well, well, well; look at the fine lady who wants to talk to me.”

“You’re Letitia Lamont?” said Hero.

The woman pursed her lips and struck a pose. “If that’s who you want me to be.”

“She’s Letitia,” growled the matron, giving the abbess a nudge. “And remember what I told ye.”

The look the abbess flashed the woman was fierce enough to make even that hardened matron take a step back.

“Thank you, Matron,” said Hero. “You may wait outside the door. I’ll call you when we’re finished.”

The matron hesitated a moment, then withdrew.

“Not afraid to be alone with me?” said Letitia, turning her cold pale blue eyes on Hero.

“No.”

The abbess’s accent was not what Hero had expected. Not East End London, but what sounded more like Kent. Her diction was also surprisingly good. Either she had been born into a different social stratum than the one she now occupied, or she had worked very hard to elevate her speech. Impossible not to wonder about this woman’s life, about what had brought her to…this.

As if sizing Hero up as a candidate for one of her houses, the abbess let her gaze rove over Hero, taking in her fine green wool carriage gown, the dashing hat with its two nodding cream plumes. “Bit of a Long Meg, aren’t you?” she said at last. “You’d have a hard time if you ever had to make a living on the streets. Men don’t like tupping a woman who towers over them when they take her up against an alley wall.”

It was said to shock, but Hero had dealt with her kind before. She shrugged. “Understandable, I suppose.”

Something that might have been disappointment flickered behind the woman’s wintry eyes. She took a step closer and tried again, letting her accent become broader, more common, until Hero was left wondering which was real and which assumed. “Hard t’ do it standin’ up when ye’re so mismatched. A fellow’d need a step stool to take ye like that, wouldn’t he?” She leaned in even closer. “Ye ever done it standin’ up?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Huh.” The woman met Hero’s gaze and held it. “I think perhaps you have.” Letitia shrugged and swung away, her more careful diction returning. “Why do you want to talk to me, anyway?”

“I’d like to ask you some questions about Lord Preston Farnsworth.”

Whatever the woman had been expecting, it wasn’t that. She turned back around. “Oh, you would, would you? And why the bloody hell should I answer these questions of yours?”

“Because I’ll pay you a pound.”

“Make it three, and I’ll consider it.”

Hero drew a pound from her reticule and held it out. “One now, one afterward— if you’re cooperative, and if I’m satisfied as to the veracity of your answers.”

Letitia plucked the money from Hero’s hand. “Deal.” Tucking the coin into the bodice of her gown, she wandered the room, fiddling absently with this and that.

Hero stayed where she was, watching her. “How long have you been here, in the Tothill Fields Bridewell?”

“What time is it?”

“Just past ten.”

Letitia paused, her head falling back as she stared up at the ancient, heavily beamed ceiling. “Let’s see…five months, twenty-nine days, and eighteen hours.”

“You were given six months?”

“It’s the usual sentence.”

“From what I hear, you were lucky to be sent here rather than to Newgate.”

“ Lucky? You think so?” The woman turned to face her again, holding out red, swollen hands with torn nails and open, weeping sores. “They don’t make you pick oakum till your hands bleed in Newgate. In Newgate, I could’ve worn my own clothes and bought myself a real bed—along with real food and water to wash with.”

Anyone else, Hero might have felt sorry for. But not this woman; not someone who’d earned the money to buy such comforts by luring innocent, ignorant girls fresh up from the country into a brutal life of exploitation, degradation, shame, and early death.

Hero had to work to tamp down her revulsion and keep her voice even, unemotional. “I’m told Lord Preston Farnsworth was responsible for your arrest and conviction. Is that true?”

The abbess’s brows drew together in a quick frown. “And if he was?”

“You know he’s dead?”

A tight, fierce smile curled the woman’s lips. “Not only dead, but hung upside down like a gutted pig. That must’ve been a fine sight to see.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is that why you’re here? You thinkin’ I killed him?” Her accent was slipping again as she waved one hand through the air in a gesture that took in the grim narrow room, the dirty barred window, the stout matron waiting outside the open door. “And how ye reckon I managed that from in here?”

“With the help of your bully boys. A woman like you must have them.”

Letitia laughed. “Oh? And what’s a fine lady such as yourself know about bully boys?”

“Not a great deal, but enough.”

The laughter went out of the woman’s face instantly in a way that sent another chill down Hero’s spine. There was something palpably evil about this woman; evil and dangerous. Hero had the unshakable conviction when she looked into the abbess’s eyes that she was staring into a yawning abyss; that there was no soul within, only grasping selfishness and unbridled desire.

Letitia shrugged her thin shoulders. “I didn’t kill him. I’m not denying I’d like to have—I might even have been planning on it. But someone beat me to it.”

“So who do you think did kill him?”

“How the hell would I know? There must be a hundred or more people out there who’d have stood in line for the chance to do in the bugger, and hundreds more who’d cheer ’em on.” She paused, her expression becoming shrewd, speculative. “Why you care, anyway? What was he to you?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Then why you here, askin’ me all these questions? Paying me so’s you can ask them?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might.” She walked back to Hero, not stopping until she was right in front of her. “Tell me this: Has Bow Street found his rooms yet?”

Whatever Hero had been expecting, it wasn’t that. “What rooms?”

The saucy smile was back on the woman’s face. “He kept them, you know.”

“For what purpose?” As soon as she’d said it, Hero realized the answer was obvious.

Letitia leaned forward, her eyes going wide as she said in a husky, suggestive whisper, “Use yer imagination, yer ladyship.”

Hero had to force herself to stand still and not take a step back. “And precisely where are these rooms supposed to be located?”

Letitia straightened. “Now? I’ve no idea. Six months ago, they were in Jermyn, but I doubt they’re still there. He changed them regularly, you know.”

Hero studied the woman’s hard, mocking face. “You can’t say where these rooms are, and yet you expect me to believe they exist?”

“Oh, they exist, all right.” Letitia held out her hand, palm upward, fingers curled. “And you owe me another pound.”