From the Charred Remains (22 page)

“I’m sorry you lost your daughter,” she said. “Did she die in the plague?”

“No, she was in Carlisle,” he said. “The plague was light upon us, thanks be to God. Some families in York did succumb.” He nodded respectfully at Duncan, having correctly identified his place of origin. Lucy looked at the constable, momentarily distracted. She wondered again if he had lost family in the great death.

“The toll was nothing like it was in London,” Duncan said, not giving up his line of inquiry. “Tell me why you’ve been harassing the Earl.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Hendricks said, faltering.

“The Earl said you tried to kill him,” Lucy pointed out, taking a step back, having retained a healthy fear of murderers. “That you’ve made several attacks on him over the last few months. You loosened the reins of his horse, took a shot at him.”

“And I saw you throw rocks at him last night! Right outside the magistrate’s home!” Sid volunteered.

Hendricks sighed. “I never tried to kill him. Scare him a bit, ’tis all.”

“And to get back what’s yours?” Lucy asked. “The brooch and the ring, you said.”

“You’re a long way from home,” Duncan said. “Just to reclaim a little treasure that you lost gambling.”

“They belonged to my daughter. She died, just a few months ago. In childbirth.” Hendricks looked heavenward. Lucy thought for a moment he was praying, but then saw him blinking back tears. She shivered. So many women died that way, in the throngs of delivery. Even the most skilled of midwives could not always save them. “What about the babe?” Lucy asked. “Did it survive her travail?”

Hendricks glanced at her. “He’s alive. A wonderful blessing he is too. I’ve got a wet nurse tending him these days, but I’ve already been gone longer than I would’ve liked. He’s the only family I have left, you see. My wife, my poor child’s mother, died long ago.”

Lucy thought back to what she had gleaned about the card game from Tilly and Jacques Durand. “You put the brooch into the card game,” she said slowly, “which you then lost. We know the Earl put in the signet ring. We know you had already left the game, but stayed in the tavern, watching the game from another table.”

“So it would seem that neither the brooch nor the ring are yours,” Duncan said sternly. “Yet you’ve claimed them as your own.”

“The brooch belonged to my daughter!” Hendricks said, his voice becoming a bit wild. “I had to watch it get bid again and again! I want it back! I need it back!”

“The brooch didn’t exactly
belong
to your daughter though, did it?” Lucy asked. She tried to adopt the magistrate’s tone when he questioned a witness. “Wasn’t it, in fact,
made
from your daughter’s bones?”

At her question, Duncan looked taken aback. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him what she had learned from Dr. Larimer about the brooch.

Mister Hendricks’s eyes had welled with tears. “Yes. I had the brooch made shortly after she passed. It was the last thing I have of my precious Amelie. I thought,” here he stumbled, perhaps seeing the disgust in their faces, “that her child deserved to have something from his mother. Something beautiful. I thought, a brooch…” His voice trailed off.

“Well, why then would you have gambled it away?” Lucy asked. Truly, the man’s actions made no sense. “That scarcely seems like something you should do with such a treasured piece!”

“I hardly know why.” Hendricks paused. “I suppose I wanted to remind Cumberland of who I was. What I had lost.”

“Why ever would you do that?” Lucy asked. “Who is Lord Cumberland to you?”

To this, the man remained silent.

“You’ve explained the brooch, but not the ring,” Duncan pressed. “You’ve no claim on that ring.”

“Oh, but I do. That ring belonged to my daughter too.”

Duncan looked disbelieving. “Thinking she’s noble, is she? What, you have a clinch with her mum? The Earl would have recognized her as his daughter then, wouldn’t he? His wife hardly seems cast off.”

“No!” Hendricks said, aghast. “My daughter’s me own.”

“How can that be then?” Lucy asked, her mind flashing through a number of possibilities. “You mean the Earl gave the ring to her? Why ever would he have given your daughter such an expensive piece? Was she his—?” She couldn’t bring herself to say “mistress,” the man looked so openly distraught.

“Not the Earl. His son,” Hendricks said through clenched teeth. “The less-than-honorable Master Clifford.”

“Lord Cumberland’s son,” Duncan stated, looking suddenly weary. “He dallied with your daughter.”

Lucy detected an accusing note in the constable’s tone. Hendricks also seemed to hear it too, and flushed. “I was away, you see. Fighting for King Charles in Holland. Fought against the French too.” He paused. “I thought I had placed Amelie in service at a good home before I left. She was a ladies’ maid for Lady Cumberland. That’s where she met their son.”

What happened next was heartbreakingly obvious. Lucy stiffened, sensing Duncan’s thoughts from the way his eyes flicked toward her. Gentry don’t marry servants, they just use them for their own pleasures. Lucy felt sick. The master of the household was expected to protect his servants, but as was so common, the younger, comely women were often abused in the households of the very men who had promised to protect them. She had a stack of ballads in her pack that sang about this very moral tale.

Hendricks went on. “About four months ago, I received a letter from Amelie. She was so happy! She was bearing Clifford’s child, but thought it would be all right because the young man intended to marry her, she said. In secret. But why keep it secret? Made no sense to me.”

“They could have had a good reason!” Lucy said, digging her toe in the dirt.

Both men looked at her, with pitying expressions. “No, lass. He didn’t have a good reason. He was just a flippery fellow, afraid to stand up to his parents,” Hendricks said. “It took me almost two months, but at last I managed to get temporary leave from my captain, and I raced home, hoping it was not too late. Of course, it was. My daughter was already eight months along in her confinement by that point. The Countess had ousted her out of the household, claiming she’d thieved from them. Branded her a whore too. Dismissed without a reference, she was. My daughter, heartbroken and sick as she was, she couldn’t bear to tell me of her shame.” He wiped his eye. “Thanks be to God, my dear lass had found a home in a Quaker household to spend her last days. The women there were taking care of my dear child, who was already suffering greatly.” His voice caught a little in his throat. “She was so frail and pale when she saw me. Yet still so happy about the babe. She swore to me, and the midwife who had attended her, that the marriage had happened, but neither the cad nor his parents would acknowledge either her or the babe.” He sighed. “Labor came early, but lasted too long, and no one could save her. Why he would no longer acknowledge it, I could not understand. She died, holding the babe—Ambrose—in her arms.”

Hendricks’s face and voice grew hard. “I was determined to get justice for my child, and her son. Right now, unrecognized, my grandson’s considered a bastard, not legitimate. I went to see Cumberland and his blasted son soon after my daughter died, but neither would see me. Not too long later, the ring was stolen from my possessions. I know it was the Earl who took it! His henchmen at least!”

He pounded his fist into his other palm. “I just wanted what was mine. I would never have put Amelie’s dear brooch in that wretched game, except I wanted to see his face. I knew he would know what it was. What it meant. What his son’s arrogance had done to my family.”

“Then what happened?” Lucy asked. The man’s distress was hard to bear. Against her will, she found herself believing him. Almost.

“The Earl took that bloody signet ring off his finger and added it to the stakes. He was taunting me, you see. He’s as good a player as that damn card sharp, Jack. He knew he’d win it back. I never played cards myself. Lost everything right away. Everything! I watched them pass the brooch around for a while—fingering it with their damnable dirty fingers! Though I had to leave the game, I couldn’t bear to leave the tavern. I set back to finish my pint to wait out the game. I suppose I had it in my mind that I might approach the winner at the end; try to get the brooch back privately.”

“So you were there when the poem got read?” Duncan asked.

Hendricks nodded. “Put in by the dark foreign gent. I saw him start to yell at Jack too. But when I heard the bells ringing I knew something dreadful was happening nearby. I went out the front door of the tavern, smelled the smoke.” He straightened up. “I’m a soldier, you see. Knew I had to report in for duty. I left, knowing there was little else I could do.”

He continued. “I spent the next few days trying to help the fire brigade control the fire. Blew up a few buildings too. That blaze was mighty indeed. I hope to dear God that we must never suffer such a thing again.” Rubbing his eyes, he seemed trying to control himself. “A few days passed before I heard that the Cheshire Cheese had burned down. I assumed the Earl still had everything. It wasn’t until I heard this lass here”—he nodded at Lucy—“read that wretched poem that I realized the brooch and ring might have survived the fire too. I began to wonder if she had the ring and brooch. I just had to have them back. I’m dreadful sorry, miss, for frightening you.” Hendricks looked at Duncan. “Are you going to arrest me?”

“That’s up to Miss Campion here.”

Lucy could not stay angry at the man any longer. “I don’t wish to press charges.”

The constable drew her to the side by the arm. It seemed as if he wanted to shake her. “Lucy, he dragged you behind some trees and assaulted you,” he said, searching her face. “I cannot let you forgive him for this.”

She shook herself free of his grasp. “I know. But I hit him over the head as well. I might have killed him.”

Duncan scowled, but allowed her to lead him back to the man. “Well, since Lucy has decided to let the matter go—and I hope you appreciate what that entails—and since I have no direct evidence that you were the one who assaulted the Earl, I will give you leave.” Duncan looked at him sternly. “Stay away from the Earl, and Lucy. Do you hear me?”

Hendricks slumped a bit. “Thank you, miss. Again, I’m dreadfully sorry for frightening you.”

Lucy nodded without looking at him again. Suddenly his humility, born of sorrow and shame, were too hard to witness. She watched him lurch away. A sad man, to be sure. Yet was he truly so innocent? They only had his word, against the word of an earl, even if that earl had already shown himself to be less than reputable. What was the truth of the matter, she wondered, watching him pass stiffly down the dusty street.

Duncan turned back to Lucy. “You’ve been taking a lot of risks.” There was a question in his voice. “I understood when you took risks when your brother’s life was at stake. But now?” He looked at her intently. “For a stranger?”

“You don’t approve?” Lucy said, feeling weary. She pulled her cloak around her shoulders.

“I just don’t know anyone else like you.” He seemed to be searching for words. “Any woman like you, that is. Because you do remind me of soldiers I’ve known.” Then he corrected himself. “Except soldiers are trained to follow orders. You don’t truly follow orders, do you?”

“Not so much,” Lucy said, looking back at him over her shoulder.

14

A few days had passed since Lucy had encountered Hendricks at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The urgency she’d been feeling about the puzzle had subsided, under the comfortable reliability of her everyday work. Lucy no longer feared getting her fingers caught in the press, and had grown quite adept at setting the type. Master Aubrey had even published another broadside she had written, about the cleanup of Fleet Street. But now she was quite disappointed with what he was telling her.

“I don’t understand why you won’t print it!” Lucy said again to Master Aubrey, trying hard to keep her tone in check. “It’s like any other penny ballad we sell.”

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” the printer said. He read the title out loud. “‘Robert Hubert, A Watchmaker Wrongly Accused.’ I just can’t print it.”

“But why not?!” Lucy pleaded. Last night, she’d worked ’til midnight on the piece, despite being exhausted by her day’s labors.

Master Aubrey rubbed his ruddy beard. “People need to blame someone for the Fire. Hubert claimed to have set it. If we print this,” he said, shaking Lucy’s paper in his hand, “we’re liable to see our own shop torched to the ground.”

“I’ll print it myself! I won’t put your name on it,” Lucy said, her voice rising. “The truth deserves to be out.”

Master Aubrey’s fleshy face grew mottled, a sure sign he was losing patience. “You’ll be out on your ear if you do, without a proper reference.” He wagged his finger at her. Lucy could not help but flinch. This was the first time she’d ever seen the printer look truly angry. “No more of your pretty wheedling ways. We can’t print this, and that’s final.”

She received no sympathy from Master Hargrave either, when she asked him about it later that evening. She’d gone over to the Hargraves’s household under the guise of seeing Annie, but with the will to seek out the magistrate. “It’s out of my hands, Lucy,” the magistrate had said, somewhat sadly. “The watchmaker seems determined to have himself killed. He has confessed several times to starting the cursed conflagration.”

“But three of the Fariners paid to be on the jury!” Lucy protested. Even as she spoke, she felt a bit sick. This was the closest she’d ever come to arguing with the magistrate. Nevertheless, she went on. “Isn’t it a bit convenient that the owners of the bakery were on the jury?”

“Convenient? Of course it is.” The magistrate sighed. “What a wretch that man is. So eager to part with his life.”

“But his wits are addled. The Fariners are using his illness for their own ends,” she said tearfully. “I’ve heard you and Dr. Larimer both say so. Adam too.”

The magistrate just patted her hand. “My dear, some battles just cannot be fought, I’m afraid.”

Finally, she turned to Adam when he arrived home an hour later. They were standing together in the drawing room, on one of the rare nights he’d not worked late with the surveyors. “Lucy,” he said, after listening to her explain the piece she wanted the printer to publish. “It’s as Father says. There is nothing we can do for the poor man—except hope that he comes to a speedy end. Let us think happier thoughts.”