A Broken Vessel (9 page)

Julian gazed out at the street, unseeing. The rattle of carriage wheels and the clangour of hooves rang in his ears, but could not drown out the voice in his head—his own voice, speaking to Sally yesterday.
I didn’t mean you should dash off to the refuge this instant. Wait till tomorrow, for God’s sake. A day can’t make any difference.

He turned abruptly. “There’ll have to be an inquest. Dipper, go and find out when and where it is.”

“Now, sir?”

Julian’s brows shot up. Dipper ran for his hat, and was gone. Sally looked at Julian more closely. “What’s wrong? You disappointed we couldn’t ask Mary about the letter?”

“Rather.”

“Can’t be helped, I s’pose.”

“No.”

He went to the table, where his breakfast lay untouched. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Catch me drinking that stuff!” She wrinkled her nose and took another swig of ale.

He would have poured some coffee for himself, but she jumped up and did it for him. Then she studied him, her head on one side. All at once she asked, “Did Dip ever tell you how he come to be called Dipper?”

He looked up in surprise.

“It all started when we was kids. Our pa, he was a bricklayer’s labourer, but he took to drink, and kept missing work. And when he did go, he’d have the staggers, like as not, and finally he got the kick-out, and he couldn’t get honest work no more. So he took up with some burglars as taught him their trade, and George, our brother, as is older than Dip, went in with him.”

Julian sat down opposite her, stretching out his legs. He already knew Dipper’s story, but he was willing to hear it again. It was better than listening to those words reverberate endlessly in his mind:
A day won’t make any difference
. What had he been thinking of? How could he have miscalculated so disastrously?

She chattered on, “Our ma was a good soul, and straight as a pound of candles, but she couldn’t do nothing with Pa, and besides, she was sick of a consumption, so she was too weak to blow him up proper. Dip, he was little and limber, so Pa used to take him along on a job and hoist him through the window, so he could unlock the door and let in Pa and his pals. But later on Pa ’prenticed him to a pickpocket. Dip was tip-top at that lay. That’s why he was called Dipper—’coz he had such a knack for dipping his forks into other coves’ pockets.

“ ’Course, he was never easy in his mind about being on the cross. He knew it grieved Ma—and the worst of it was, it was mostly on her account he had to do it. She was took so ill, and Pa never did nothing for her—all the blunt he got, he spent on gin and fancy women. And finally Ma died, and Pa got nabbed and kicked the clouds” —she made a gesture eloquent of hanging— “and George, he was sent to Botany Bay. And I didn’t know what become of Dip, till I run into him t’other night.”

“What about you? What were you doing all this time?”

“Oh, there ain’t much to tell about me. When I was a kid, I picked pockets like Dip, but I never had the gift for it he had. Mostly I was a stall: I’d play up to a cove while me pal did him over. I give that up—I likes being on me own hook, and not having to answer to nobody. ’Sides, thieves is al’ays getting took up on account of the reward, and I can’t stick being locked up. So I went on the grind. Nobody bothers a honest whore, as is just trying to make her way in the world. ’Course, I lifts handkerchiefs off me flats, but that ain’t nothing. It’s mostly for sport of it, and to keep me forks in form.”

“How did you and Dipper get separated?”

“I got in a kick-up with another gal, and we was both sent to the house of correction. When I got out, I went to live in Ratcliff and married a sailor. I don’t mean married legal, in a church— just temporary, like sailors does when they comes ashore. I fancied him uncommon. He was a first-rater—sent me blunt for months after he went back to sea, and he didn’t even know I was full in the belly—”

She broke off, biting her lip.

He asked gently, “Do you have a child, Sally?”

“I did have. Becky, I called her. She only lived for about a fortnight. She wasn’t strong—right from the beginning, everybody told me she’d never stick it. I didn’t want to believe ’em. When she went, I cut up something mortal. Even now, I thinks about her sometimes, and I—” She swallowed hard, “I miss her.”

She wiped her nose on her sleeve. He gave her his handkerchief. She blew into it, then slipped it into her pocket. He pretended not to notice.

“It’s over and done,” she said. “I’ve put it behind me, mostly I’d like to have another one, though. I dunno why. If it was a boy, I couldn’t do nothing for him, and if it was a gal, she’d only end up like me.”

“You might marry.”

“Not likely!” she laughed

“Of course, I realize—” He broke off uncertainly.

“That I ain’t just what every mother’d like her son to bring home?” She grinned. “I expect there’s coves as’d marry rite all the same. But I ain’t so soft as that comes to! A friend of mine married her fancy-man, and she never had a farthing to call her own again—he took all she earned and turned it into drink. So she went to a parson and said, What’ll I do? and he said there wasn’t no help for it, ’coz why, ’coz the bastard was her husband, and everything she had in the world—everything she got by her own hard work— belonged to him. He said that’s the
law
. Is that true?”

“I believe so. The law doesn’t recognize a married woman as a person separate from her husband.”

“Well, with a law like that, what gal’d be so dicked in the nob as to get spliced? Not me, I can tell you!”

He regarded her thoughtfully. “Why have you been telling me all this?”

“ ’Coz you was blue-deviled, and I wanted to cheer you up. If you was any other cove, I’d’ve found better ways to do it than by talking, but you al’ays stalls me off when I makes up to you. So I thought I’d talk about Dip, ’coz he’s somebody you and me has in common, see?”

“Yes, I see. That was very kind of you, Sally.”

“There ain’t much I wouldn’t do for you, Lightning—if you’d let me.”

“You’ve done more than enough. Would you think me rude if I asked to be alone for a while?”

She glared at him and got up. “Some folks,” she said darkly, “wouldn’t know a good thing if it was to bite ’em in the cods!”

“The inquest is at two o’clock, sir, at the Rose and Thorn, in Guilford Street.”

“What, today? How the devil did Harcourt arrange for it so quickly?”

“I talked to some of the neighbours, sir—them as lives around the refuge. They says Mr. Harcourt wants to get it over slap off, afore the leers takes too much interest.”

“The newspapers will be one too many for Mr. Harcourt. This is the kind of story they flock to—a fallen woman, a tragic death, a mystery surrounding the woman’s identity.”

“I dunno, sir. The neighbours says Mr. Harcourt has some great guns for patrons: well-breeched tradesmen, parsons, even a gentry-cove or two. He’s counting on them to clap a stopper on the hurly-burly about Mary’s death.”

“Is he?” But there may be rather more hurly-burly than you expected, Mr. Harcourt, Julian thought. “Dipper, I mean to go to the inquest, and I want you and Sally to come with me.”

“You going to hand over the letter, sir?”

“I can’t see that I have any choice. It will be rather awkward explaining how we came by it, but still, it’s evidence that might throw light on Mary’s death. We can’t in all conscience keep it back. All the same—”

“Sir?”

Julian shook his head. “There are things about Mary’s death that don’t make sense to me. They may all be explained at the inquest, but if they’re not—Well, never mind that now. The reason I want Sally to come is that I should like to know if whichever of those three men she stole the letter from is there, and, unless he turns out to be Avondale, she’s the only one who’ll recognize him. But tell her to wear a veil. It’s just possible we may have reasons for not wanting
him
to recognize
her
.”

CHAPTER
7

T
he Rose and Thorn was a neat, respectable eating-house near the refuge. The inquest was to be held in its large back parlour. Tables had been cleared away to make room for the coroner and jury. The numerous spectators sat on chairs and benches, or in booths along the sides of the room. Julian, Dipper, and Sally found a corner booth and sat down, looking about them.

Harcourt was there, moving suavely among the crowd, with a becoming mixture of sorrow and disapproval.
I regret that poor young woman’s death, but I am shocked and repelled by the manner of it,
he conveyed. A group of dowdy matrons trailed after him, hanging on his every word. Julian recognized Mrs. Fiske among them. Many of the other spectators were stout, important-looking business or professional men and members of the clergy. These must be the wealthy and influential patrons Dipper had heard about.

A couple of journalists stood by, idly kicking the wainscotting or cleaning their nails with penknives. Julian identified them by their expressions of mixed cynicism and curiosity, and by their evident habit of mistaking their trousers for blotting-paper. On the whole, though, Harcourt seemed to have been remarkably successful at keeping this business out of the newspapers.

“Do you see any of your three men?” Julian whispered to Sally, who had been peeking out from under her veil.

“No, none of ’em,” she whispered back. “If one of ’em comes in, I’ll tip you the nod.”

There was a small stir as the coroner and jury entered. But to Julian’s surprise, the reporters were not looking that way. They were nudging each other and glancing toward the other end of the room, where a corpulent elderly man had just hobbled in on crutches. He had one foot bandaged, as if with gout. His head was bald and shiny on top, with tufts of white hair at the sides. His clothes were very plain, but, to Julian’s practised eye, impeccably tailored and costly. He wore an immense, old-fashioned gold watch and a gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Julian had great faith in the instinct of journalists for knowing what was really important. While the coroner fussed over some papers and made a pontifical speech to the jury, he sent Dipper to find out from the reporters who the man on crutches was.

Dipper conferred with them briefly and returned. “He’s Mr. Samuel Digby, sir. He’s a very warm cove, and a beak, and lives in Highgate.”

Julian had heard of him. He was a retired wool merchant, very plump in the pocket, who had made a name for himself as a shrewd magistrate, severe but just. He was also renowned as a philanthropist, although he was selective in his charities. Julian wondered what could have brought him all the way from Highgate, with a gouty foot that sent spasms of pain across his face whenever he moved. Was he one of Harcourt’s patrons? If so, he showed no inclination to mingle with the others.

There was a short recess, while a parish officer took the jury into another room to view the body. They filed back in again, much sobered, and the coroner called the first witness.

This proved to be Margaret Muldoon, otherwise known as Wideawake Peg. She had been kept in another room, perhaps in compliance with Harcourt’s rule against the inmates of the refuge mixing with strangers. She described how she had found Mary cold and dead at about seven o’clock that morning, with the empty laudanum bottle on her night-table. The coroner found her Irish sense of drama a little overwhelming and kept her testimony as short as he could.

Florrie Ames’s testimony was even shorter. She recounted how she had looked in briefly on Mary and tried to wake her, and how she had noticed the laudanum bottle on the night-table but thought it was only Mary’s medicine. The journalists had to be admonished for winking at her during her testimony. She stole a smile at them as she and Peg were ushered out.

The next witness proved to be a very dignified and supercilious doctor, a prominent member of the Royal College of Physicians, who had examined Mary soon after her death. He made clear that, but for his high regard for Mr. Harcourt, he would not dream of lending his name and expertise to such a sordid proceeding. The coroner was duly awed, and treated him with great deference. No doubt about it, wealthy and powerful patrons had their uses.

The deceased was a female between the ages of sixteen and twenty, the Great Doctor testified. She was somewhat thin, but otherwise showed no sign of ill health. He had examined her body at about ten o’clock this morning, which he understood was some three hours after she was found dead.