Page 8 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

T hat night, shortly before midnight, the cloud cover broke up and for one brief, glorious moment, a full moon appeared to ride high in the sky and cast its silvery light over the huddled wet rooftops and sodden streets of the city. Sebastian stood at his open bedroom window, his outstretched hands braced against the sill, the air cool against his bare skin. He could hear the rattle of a night soil–man’s cart and a dog barking somewhere in the distance. Then he caught the rustle of bedclothes and a light step on the floor, and Hero came to stand beside him.

“Something’s troubling you,” she said, resting a hand on his hip. “What is it?”

“You mean besides the fact that one of my old friends is in danger of being hanged for a murder even I’m not convinced he didn’t commit?”

She leaned into him. “Yes. Besides that.”

He looped his arms around her, drawing her close. She was warm and soft and still vaguely languid from their recent lovemaking, and he pressed his forehead against her hair and said, “Imagine you’re a fourteen-year-old orphan alone on the streets of London. You’re cold, you’re hungry, you’re wet. You duck into a ruined, abandoned chapel to get out of the rain and see a dead man hanging upside down with his gold watch and fob dangling from his pocket in plain sight. No one knows he’s there—well, no one except whoever killed him, I suppose, but that person is presumably long gone. And, more important, no one knows you’re there. It would be the simplest thing to snatch that watch and run.

“But you don’t do that. Instead, you travel halfway across London to knock on the door of some ‘nob’ you’ve never met and ask him to come deal with the murder of a man who is nothing to you.” Sebastian paused. “Why would you do that?”

“Well…what if I’m poor and desperate but I’m not a thief, so I don’t know a fence I can sell the watch and fob to—at least, not someone I think I can trust. And I’m afraid that if I try to pawn something so distinctive, I’ll get caught and end up being hanged for the murder.”

“That sounds reasonable. So why not take the plump purse from the man’s pocket? Throw away the purse itself but keep the money.”

“Do you know for certain it was still there?”

“It was. I checked while I was waiting for Lovejoy.”

“Ah.” She was silent for a moment, considering this, then shook her head. “The only explanation I have is that I’m a good Catholic who promised my mother on her deathbed that I’d never steal or—” She broke off. “No; I give up. Why didn’t Jamie steal the purse? He’s cold, hungry, and alone. It makes no sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Sebastian rested the side of his head against hers and breathed in the sweet fragrance of her hair. “Lovejoy suggested the boy was too afraid to touch the body, but I have a hard time believing that. The Irish wake their dead. Not only that, but when you’re poor, you and your family live all together in one room—maybe even with another family or two in there with you. People you know die all the time, and until they’re buried, their bodies are kept in that crowded room, too, because there’s no place else. Boys like Jamie grow up with dead bodies. I can’t believe he was too afraid to reach his hand into a dead man’s pocket in search of a purse, even if the dead man was looking more than a bit gruesome.”

“So how do you explain it?”

“I can’t. And if I hadn’t been so focused on Hugh and what Farnsworth’s murder was going to mean for him, it would have occurred to me to question it all sooner. I need to talk to that boy again.”

Tuesday, 20 August

A light drizzle started up again shortly before dawn the following morning and was still falling when Sebastian drove through the dreary, wet streets of London toward the Tower Hill surgery of the anatomist Paul Gibson.

Traveling east into the humbler sections of the city, it was impossible to miss the devastation wrought on the nation’s poor by both the ending of the wars and the strange, deadly weather no one could explain. The streets were filled with wretched, pinch-faced children; worn, skeletal women willing to do anything—anything at all—for a couple of pennies; and ragged clumps of hollow-eyed ex-soldiers and sailors missing arms and legs or rendered hideous by scars.

By the time he drew up before the row of ancient sandstone houses that dated back nearly to the first days of the old Norman castle that loomed over them, Sebastian was in a grim mood. “Best walk ’em,” he told his tiger. “I’ll never understand how it can be this bloody cold when it’s the middle of bloody August, but here we are.”

“Reckon we just ain’t gonna have us a summer this year,” said Tom, scrambling forward to take the reins.

Sebastian grunted and hopped down to the worn cobbles of the lane.

Cutting through a narrow passage that ran along one of the low-slung houses, he reached the weathered wooden gate that led to a walled rear yard, at the base of which stood the high-windowed stone outbuilding where Gibson conducted his official postmortems. It was also where Gibson surreptitiously practiced new surgery techniques and expanded his knowledge of anatomy by performing illicit dissections on cadavers filched from London’s overflowing churchyards by body snatchers, or Resurrection Men, as they were sometimes called. But Bow Street carefully turned a blind eye to those activities.

“Thought I’d be seeing you bright and early this morning,” said Gibson, setting aside his knife as Sebastian walked toward the building’s open door.

The surgeon was a slim man, Irish by birth, with a jaunty dimpled smile and eyes as green as a Donegal glen. He was only a couple of years older than Sebastian, in his mid-thirties now, although he looked much older, his dark hair heavily laced with gray, the lines on his thin face dug deep by years of pain. His friendship with Sebastian dated back to the days when Gibson had been a regimental surgeon, when he and Sebastian had fought and bled, laughed and cried together from Italy and the West Indies to the high mountain passes of the Peninsula. Then a French cannonball tore off the lower part of Gibson’s left leg, and though he tried to keep going, the endless pain—and the opium he used to control it—eventually forced him to come here, to London, to open this small surgery near the Tower and teach anatomy at hospitals such as St. Thomas’s and St. Bartholomew’s. With the help of Alexi Sauvage, the mysterious Frenchwoman who’d become his lover, he’d recently managed to get the better of the phantom pains from his missing limb that had bedeviled him for so long. But his dark love affair with opium was proving brutally difficult to overcome.

Sebastian paused in the doorway to the crude, single-roomed building, his gaze on the mottled, naked body of the half-eviscerated middle-aged duke’s son who lay on Gibson’s stone slab. “Can you tell me yet what killed him?”

“Aye, that’s easy,” said Gibson, tossing aside the rag he’d been using to wipe his hands. “Someone did a commendable job of bashing in his lordship’s head. From the looks of things, I’d say this”—he broke off to point to the wound on the right side of Farnsworth’s head—“was the first try. It wouldn’t have come close to killing him, but it probably knocked him down. One assumes he must’ve fallen on his face. And then your killer—whoever he was—hit him again on the back of his head. And that was that.” Gibson looked up. “I can roll him over and show you that mess if you’ve a fancy to study it.”

“That’s quite all right; I saw it before.”

Gibson nodded. “Figured you would’ve. Pretty much caved in his skull, that blow. Death must have been virtually instantaneous.”

“Any other marks on him?”

“Well, you can see where the rope was pressing his boot into his ankle, and where the strips of cravat he was tied with were digging into his wrists and his knee. But by then he was already dead.”

“He was dead when the killer tied him up and hanged him?”

“Oh, yes; no doubt about that.”

“How long would you say he’s been dead?”

“Roughly? At least a couple of days at this point. We’re lucky the weather kept the bluebottle fly eggs from hatching, otherwise he’d have been crawling with maggots.”

“Lovely,” mustered Sebastian. “So since Saturday night?”

“That would fit.”

“It’s when he was last seen.” Sebastian brought his gaze back to the dead man’s bloated, discolored face. “Can you tell me anything—anything at all—about the man who killed him?”

Gibson crossed his arms at his chest and blew out a long, thoughtful breath. “Well, he’s probably right-handed—that is, if he first hit your duke’s son from behind and landed his first swing. Of course, if he missed the first time and only managed to hit him on the backswing, he could be left-handed. But if he hit him from the front and landed the first blow, then I’d say he’s likely left-handed.”

“Unless he missed and only landed his backswing?”

“That’s about it.”

“Well, that narrows things down.”

Gibson huffed a soft laugh and rocked back on his heels. “Other than that, let’s see…” He shook his head. “Nothing. Beyond that, I have nothing.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone being hanged the way he was? Upside down, I mean.”

All trace of amusement went out of the surgeon’s eyes. “Not since Spain.”

“I was thinking of that, too.”

Both men were silent for a moment. Then Gibson said, “You can’t think Major Chandler—”

“No. No, I don’t think it.” Don’t want to think it.

Gibson sucked in his cheeks and nodded. “But this is him, isn’t it? The man whose wife the Major ran off with?”

Sebastian looked up to meet his friend’s worried gaze. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

Sebastian’s next stop was a row of aging Stuart-era buildings on the south side of Golden Square.

Once, this area had been the height of fashion, home to noblemen, ambassadors, and High Churchmen. But it had already been fading for some time, and now that it was located on the wrong side of the Regent’s New Street, that decline would surely accelerate.

The woman Sebastian was here to see was a French cartomancer who kept rooms on an upper floor of one of the houses in the row, and as he climbed the flights of stairs, he found himself remembering the things she had told him—and not told him—when he’d first met her several years before. By the time he reached her floor, he was heartily regretting his decision to come and might have turned around and simply left if her door hadn’t opened to reveal a fine-boned woman dressed in an elegant, old-fashioned gown of dusky blue satin with a fitted bodice and a skirt draped à la polonaise.

“Ah, you’re here,” said Madame Blanchette in her soft Parisian accent, and stepped back to allow him to enter.

She was a small, olive-skinned woman somewhere in her fifties or early sixties, with dark eyes and graying hair and a determinedly straight back despite the pronounced limp that was said to date from the earliest days of the French Revolution. “Expecting me, were you?” he said as she closed the door behind them and led the way to her small parlor.

“One assumes that since the death of Sibil Wilde, the number of cartomancers of your acquaintance is now somewhat limited.”

He managed to stop himself from asking how the hell she knew he needed a cartomancer. But then a faint gleam of amusement shone in her eyes and she said, “It’s in all the newspapers, you know—the manner in which he was found hanging, I mean.”

“Ah.” Sir Henry wasn’t going to like that.

Her parlor was as strange as he remembered it, filled with a variety of crystals, brass bells, ancient leather-bound books, and dark, fantastically carved furniture that looked as if it belonged to another time and another place.

A distant time and place.

He sat on the tapestry-covered settee she indicated and waited while she settled in the chair opposite, a medieval-looking, high-backed thing carved with an assortment of winged mythical creatures and writhing, naked men. She said, “The cards I read are of my own creation, you know. I don’t use the tarot.”

“I know. But you are familiar with it.”

She inclined her head but said nothing.

Reaching into the pocket of his coat, he drew forth the card he had brought with him and laid it on the Syrian-looking inlaid table between them.

She stared at it a moment, then reached to pick it up, her lips pursing as she fingered it thoughtfully. “He was found exactly like this?”

Sebastian nodded. “Hanging by one foot from a rope tied to a beam in the chapel’s roof, with the knee of his other leg bent and his hands tied behind his back.”

She kept her gaze on the card. “I’m told it can take over a day for a man to die when hanged upside down. He’s fortunate he was dead first.”

“That wasn’t in the papers.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She looked over at him. “Not all tarot decks show the hanged man upside down, you know. In the Tarocco Siciliano, he hangs right side up, by his neck, from a tree limb. And I’ve seen a Spanish deck that shows him hanging upside down, naked, from both feet.”

“But this version is typical of the decks popular in the south of France, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Those and others.” He waited, and after a long silence she said, “As to what the card means…it varies, of course, depending upon the reading and the other cards that surround it. I have heard that this method of hanging—by one foot, upside down—was used long ago in Italy for traitors.”

“Is that what it symbolizes? Betrayal?”

“It can. But there are other, more subtle meanings. Some see it as a warning of the need to reevaluate a situation, to pause and perhaps look at things from a new perspective. Others consider it a card of sacrifice, of the acceptance of one’s fate, or even of redemption.”

“So which meaning did Farnsworth’s killer intend?”

“Perhaps all of them.” She handed the card back to him. “Or none of them. You are assuming that whoever killed the man and left him hanging this way knew the meaning of the card he was imitating.”

“How well-known is the tarot?”

She shrugged. “Interest in the cards for divination has been growing here in England, particularly since the well-publicized deaths of the Weird Sisters last summer. And you must remember that the deck was originally designed as a card game.” She kept her gaze on his face. “Why do you think he was left like this?”

“I don’t know. Hanging upside down is used as a form of degradation. So perhaps it was done in revenge.”

She seemed to consider this, although he had the impression the idea was not new to her. “That’s what worries you, isn’t it?” She paused. “Have you spoken to him yet? Your friend, I mean.”

Sebastian knew a spurt of alarm mingled with anger he made no effort to disguise. “Didn’t you see that in your cards?”

To his surprise, her eyes sparkled with silent laughter. “You still don’t believe in them, I take it?”

Sebastian pushed to his feet. “I believe in very little.”

“But you do believe in some things,” she said, walking with him to her front door. “You believe in honor and friendship, justice and truth. And those beliefs make you vulnerable.”

He paused with the door open to look back at her. “Is that supposed to be a warning?”

The amusement was back in her eyes. “What makes you think it’s not simply an observation?”

He studied her enigmatic face. “You know something you’re not telling me.”

“Perhaps. But I don’t think you’re ready to hear it yet.”