Lord John and the Private Matter (Lord John Grey #1) 7

“How do you suppose he learned of your assignations at Lavender House?” Grey asked, ignoring the question. He wondered with a certain misgiving what Richard Caswell might have told about his own presence there, years before. Trevelyan had not mentioned it, and surely he would have, if …

Trevelyan shook his head, sighed, and closed his eyes against the glare of the sun off the water.

“I don’t know. As I said, Reinhardt Mayrhofer was an intriguer. He had his sources of information—and he knew Magda, who came from the village near his estate. I paid her well, but perhaps he paid her better. You can never trust a whore, after all,” he added, with a slight tinge of bitterness.

Thinking of Nessie, Grey thought that it depended on the whore, but did not say so.

“Surely Mrs. Mayrhofer did not smash in her husband’s face,” he said instead. “Was that you?”

Trevelyan opened his eyes and nodded.

“Jack Byrd and I.” He lifted his head, searching the rigging, but the two Byrds had flown. “He is a good fellow, Jack. A good fellow,” he repeated, more strongly.

Brought to her senses by the pistol’s report, Maria Mayrhofer had at once stepped from her boudoir and called a servant, whom she sent posthaste across the City to summon Trevelyan. Arriving with his trusted servant, the two of them had carried the body, still clad in green velvet, out to the carriage house, debating what to do with it.

“I could not allow the truth to come out,” Trevelyan explained. “Maria might easily hang, should she come to trial—though surely there was never a murder so well-deserved. Even were she acquitted, though, the simple fact of a trial would mean exposure. Of everything.”

It was Jack Byrd who thought of the blood. He had slipped out, returning with a bucket of pig’s blood from a butcher’s yard. They had smashed in the corpse’s face with a shovel, and then bundled both body and bucket into the carriage. Jack had driven the equipage the short distance to St. James’s Park. It was past midnight by that time, and the torches that normally lit the public pathways were long since extinguished.

They had tethered the horses and carried the body swiftly a little way into the park, there dumping it under a bush and dousing it with blood, then escaping back to the carriage.

“We hoped that the body would be taken for that of a simple prostitute,” Trevelyan explained. “If no one examined it carefully, they would assume it to be a woman. If they discovered the truth of the sex … well, it would cause more curiosity, but men of certain perverse predilections also are prone to meet with violent death.”

“Quite,” Grey murmured, keeping his face carefully impassive. It was not a bad plan—and he was, in spite of everything, pleased to have deduced it correctly. The death of an anonymous prostitute—of either sex—would cause neither outcry nor investigation.

“Why the blood, though? It was apparent—once one looked—that the man had been shot.”

Trevelyan nodded.

“Yes. We thought that the blood might obscure the cause of death, by suggesting that he had been beaten to death—but principally, its purpose was to prevent anyone undressing the body, and thus discovering its sex.”

“Of course.” Usable clothes found on a corpse would routinely be stripped and sold, either by the constables who found it, by the morgue-keeper who took charge of it, or, at the last, by the gravedigger who undertook to bury the body in some anonymous potter’s field. But no one—other than Grey himself—would have touched that sodden, reeking garment.

Had the fact of the green velvet dress not caught Magruder’s notice, or if they had had the luck to dispose of the body in another district of the City, it was very likely that no one would have bothered examining the body at all; it would simply have been put down as one of the casualties of London’s dark world and dismissed, as casually as one might dismiss the death of a stray dog crushed by a coach’s wheels.

“Sir?”

He hadn’t heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and was startled to find Jack Byrd standing behind them, his dark face serious. Trevelyan took one look at it, and headed for the doors to the companionway.

“Mrs. Mayrhofer is worse?” Grey asked, watching the Cornishman stumble through a knot of sailors mending canvas.

“I don’t know, me lord. I think she may be better. Mr. Scanlon come out and sent me to fetch Mr. Joseph. He says as how he’ll be in the crew’s mess for a bit, should you want to talk to him, though,” he added, as an obvious afterthought.

Grey glanced at the young man, and felt a twitch of recognition. Not the family resemblance to young Tom; something else. Jack Byrd’s eyes were still focused on his master, as Trevelyan reached the hatchway, and there was something unguarded in his face that Grey’s nervous system discerned long before his mind made sense of it.

It was gone in the next instant, Jack Byrd’s face lapsing back into an older, leaner version of his younger brother’s as he turned to Grey.

“Will you be wanting Tom, my lord?” he asked.

“Not now,” Grey responded automatically. “I’ll go and talk to Mr. Scanlon. Tell Tom I’ll send for him when I need him.”

“Very good, my lord.” Jack Byrd bowed gravely, an elegant footman’s gesture at odds with his seaman’s slops, and walked away, leaving Grey to find his own way.

He made his way downward in search of the crew’s mess, scarcely noticing his surroundings, mind belatedly searching for logical connexions that might support the conclusion his lower faculties had leaped to.

Jack Byrd knew of the difficulty, Trevelyan had said, referring to his own infection. It was he who informed me that Finbar Scanlon seemed an able man in such matters.

And Maria Mayrhofer had said that her husband threatened Trevelyan, asking what would happen to him once it was known that he was not only an adulterer but also a sodomite?

Not so fast, Grey cautioned himself. In all likelihood, Mayrhofer had only referred to Trevelyan’s association with Lavender House. And it was by no means unusual for a devoted servant to be privy to a master’s intimate concerns—he shuddered to think what Tom knew of his own intimacies at this point.

No, these were mere shreds of something less than evidence, he was obliged to conclude. Even less tangible—but perhaps the more trustworthy—was his own sense of Joseph Trevelyan. Grey did not think himself infallible, by any means—he would not in a hundred years have guessed the truth of Egbert Jones’s identity as “Miss Irons,” had he not seen it—and yet he was as certain as he could be that Joseph Trevelyan was not so inclined.

Putting modesty aside for the sake of logic, he blushed to admit that this conclusion was based as much on Trevelyan’s lack of response to his own person as to anything else. Such men as himself lived in secrecy—but there were signals, nonetheless, and he was adept at reading them.

So there might in fact be nothing on Trevelyan’s side, nothing beyond heartfelt appreciation of a good servant. But there was more than devoted service in Jack Byrd’s soul, he’d swear that on a gallon of brandy. So he told himself grimly, clambering monkeylike into the bowels of the ship in search of Finbar Scanlon, and the final parts to his puzzle.

And now, at last, the truth.

“Well, d’ye see, we’re soldiers, we Scanlons,” the apothecary said, pouring beer from a jug. “A tradition in the family, it is. Every man jack of us, for the last fifty years, save those born crippled, or too infirm for it.”

“You do not seem particularly infirm,” Grey observed. “And certainly not a cripple.” Scanlon in fact was a handsomely built man, clean-limbed and solid.

“Oh, I went for a soldier, too,” the man assured him, eyes twinkling. “I served for a time in France, but had the luck to be taken on as assistant to the regimental surgeon, when the regular man was crapped in the Low Countries.”

Scanlon had discovered both an ability and an affinity for the work, and had learned all that the surgeon could teach him within a few months.

“Then we ran into artillery near Laffeldt,” he said, with a shrug. “Grapeshot.” He leaned back on his stool and, pulling the tail of his shirt from his breeches, lifted it to show Grey a sprawling web of still-pink scars across a muscular belly.

“Tore across me, and left me with me guts spilling out,” he said casually. “But by the help of the Blessed Mother, the surgeon was to hand. Seized ’em in his fist, he did, and rammed them right back into me belly, then wrapped me up tight as a tick in bandages and honey.”

Scanlon had lived, by some miracle, but had of course been invalided out of the army. Seeking some alternate means of making a living, he had returned to his interest in medicine, and apprenticed himself to an apothecary.

“But me brothers and me cousins—a good number of them still are soldiers,” he said, taking a gulp of the ale and closing his eyes in appreciation as it went down. “And happen as none of us much likes a man as plays traitor.”

In the aftermath of the attack on Francine, Jack Byrd had told Scanlon and Francine that the Sergeant was likely a spy and in possession of valuable papers. And O’Connell had shouted to Francine in parting that he would be back, and would finish then what he had started.

“From what Jack said about the drab O’Connell stayed with, I couldn’t see that he’d likely come back only to murder Francie. That bein’ so”—Scanlon raised one eyebrow—“what’s the odds he’d come either to take something he’d left—or to leave something he had? And God knows, there was nothing there to take.”

Given these deductions, it was no great trick to search Francine’s room, and the shop below.

“Happen they was in one of the hollow molds that holds those condoms you was looking at, first time you came into the shop,” Scanlon said, one corner of his mouth turning up. “I could see what they were—and fond as I was by then of young Jack, I thought I maybe ought to keep hold of them, until I could find a proper authority to be handin’ them over to. Such as it might be yourself, sir.”

“Only you didn’t.”

The apothecary stretched himself, long arms nearly brushing the low ceiling, then settled back comfortably onto his stool.

“Well, no. For the one thing, I hadn’t met you yet, sir. And events, as you might say, intervened. I had to put a stop to Tim O’Connell and his mischief. For he did say he’d be back—and he was a man of his word, if nothing else.”

Scanlon had promptly set about collecting several friends and relations, all soldiers or ex-soldiers—“And I’m sure your honor will excuse me not mentioning of their names,” Scanlon said, with a small ironic bow toward Grey—who had lain in wait in the apothecary’s shop, hidden in Francine’s room upstairs, or in the large closet where Scanlon kept his extra stock.

Sure enough, O’Connell had returned that very night, soon after dark.

“He’d a key. He opens the door, and comes stealing into the shop, quiet as you please, and goes over to the shelf, picks up the mold—and finds it empty.”

The sergeant had swung round to find Scanlon watching him from behind the counter, a sardonic smile on his face.

“Went the color of beetroot,” the apothecary said. “I could see by the lamplight coming through the curtain by the stair. And his eyes slitted like a cat’s. ‘That whore,’ he said. ‘She told you. Where are they?’ ”

Fists clenched, O’Connell had bounded toward Scanlon, only to be confronted by a bevy of enraged Irishmen, come pouring down the stair and rushing from the closet, hurdling the counter in their haste.

“So we gave him a bit of what he’d given poor Francie,” the apothecary said, face hard. “And we took our time about it.”

And the people in the houses to either side had sworn blank-faced that they’d never heard a sound that night, Grey reflected cynically. Tim O’Connell had not been a popular man.

Once dead, O’Connell plainly could not be discovered on Scanlon’s premises. The body therefore had lain behind the counter for several hours, until the streets had quieted in the small dark hours of the morning. Wrapping the body in a sheet of canvas, the men had borne it silently away into the cold black of hidden alleys, and heaved it off Puddle Dock—“like the rubbish he was, sir”—having first removed the uniform, which O’Connell had no right to, and him a traitor. It was worth good money, after all.

Jack Byrd had come back the next day, bringing with him his employer, Mr. Trevelyan.

“And the Honorable Mr. Trevelyan had with him a letter from Lord Melton, the Colonel of your regiment, sir—I think he said as that would be your brother?—asking him for his help in finding out what O’Connell was up to. He explained as how Lord Melton himself was abroad, but plainly Mr. Trevelyan knew all about the matter, and so it was only sense to hand over the papers to him, so as to be passed on to the proper person.”

“Fell for that, did you?” Grey inquired. “Well, no matter. He’s fooled better men than you, Scanlon.”

“Including yourself, would it be, sir?” Scanlon lifted both black brows, and smiled with a flash of good teeth.

“I was thinking of my brother,” Grey said with a grimace, and lifted his cup in acknowledgment. “But certainly me as well.”

“But he’s given you back the papers, sir?” Scanlon frowned. “He did say as he meant to.”

“He has, yes.” Grey touched the pocket of his coat, where the papers reposed. “But since the papers are presently en route to India with me, there is no way of informing the ‘proper authorities.’ The effect therefore is as though the papers had never been found.”