Honor's Kingdom (43 page)

Tentatively, she began to extend them toward me. “I’m ashamed that ever I took them. And twicet ashamed that ever I read them. ’Ad to read them over and over, I did, since I couldn’t believe the ’alf of what they was going on about.” She
lowered her eyes. “I didn’t know a woman could do them kinds of things to another woman.”

Henry Adams and I exchanged a glance that suggested we were not the men of the world we fancied ourselves. Out in the square, that drunkard still howled at the Lord to preserve the Queen.

“Oh, I know as there’s bossy women and girls as like things peculiar,” Miss Perkins continued. “But this is just the dirtiest! You’d think she was a man ’erself, the things she talks of doing to ’er sweetie.”

“Miss Perkins . . .” I began, as I sought to force things back into a sensible order, “ . . . you mean that these . . . these . . .” Of a sudden, I hesitated to take the missives from her. “ . . . you mean these are love letters written from one woman to another?”

“And absolutely filthy,” she said. “Nearly burned ’em, I did.”

When I failed to grasp the proferred letters, Miss Perkins took matters in hand. For her temper was up just thinking of the injuries implied to her fair sex. She stepped to the writing table and pulled the first ribbon until the bow dissolved and the letters spread themselves in a fan. Choosing one at random, she unfolded it and spread it out for all of us to see.

When we proved shy of reading the text in her presence—given the immense nature of the perversity involved—she stared at us as if we were bad little boys.

“Well, I thought you wanted to ’ave yourself a look,” she said to me.

“But . . .” I began again, trying to make all the pieces fit—where on earth was the value worth killing for, if the letters were not from a man of position, but from a woman? What woman in England maintained a position of such power and importance that she might be endangered by the existence of—

A wave of horror swept over me. And through me. And all around me.

“ . . . a woman,” I muttered, seeing an august portrait in the air. Could it be . . . was it possible . . .

“Well, if you won’t believe me, ’ave a look for yourself,” she told me. And she picked up the letter and held it up to my face. “See ’ow the bleedin’ cow signs it? Shameless as a slut on the docks, she is. ‘Your Old Pam.’ ”

It is a most peculiar situation to find yourself relieved that the Prime Minister of Great Britain has embarrassed himself by scribbling obscenities.

Henry Adams made a grab for the letters, but Polly was too quick for him. She interposed a volume of skirts and swept up the papers and dumped them into my hands. Not without dropping a few of them onto the floor. Lord Palmerston was a voluminous correspondent.

“There,” she told me. “If that’s the sort of nastiness you prefer to a girl what was all ready to treat you proper, good riddance.”

“Miss Perkins,” I said, “Polly . . . these aren’t . . . the letters are not from a woman. They’re from Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister. His nickname is ‘Old Pam,’ see.”

She made a delighted face. “Coo, ain’t ’e a dirty bird, then? The old bugger.”

“Jones, really,” Mr. Adams interposed, “you needn’t tell her—”

“Polly, you’re a good girl. A very good girl,” I told her. “You’re a very good girl, indeed. I . . . I believe I could kiss you!”

Of course, I did not mean it literally. And I regretted my speech the moment it was uttered. The words just come out, see.

“Well, don’t stop yourself on my account,” she told me, practically offering me one of those milky cheeks. “And to think ’e’s still capable of doing things like that, the old leaker,” she added. For even a penny-gaff songstress has some knowledge of the Prime Minister.

“Jones,” Mr. Adams said, “do you realize . . . that those letters could bring down the government?”

“Or control it,” I said, for I saw farther than he did.

“Coo,” Polly said. “I shouldn’t like to be ’im when ’is wife finds out.”

And the night was still in its infancy.

You might have slapped my face and I would not have felt it. Fair stunned I was. Not only by the magnitude of power those letters offered the possessor, but by my blindness in the face of the obvious. I should have known days before who had written the letters, for the evidence had been hurled in my direction until it lay in piles on every side of me.

The risks that Mr. Disraeli had been willing to run had been too great to be caused by a stack of debts—in England, debts were the very badge of a gentleman. Yet, he had been willing to risk career and reputation—even prison, perhaps. I should have seen it could not be a matter of chasing after a peerage for the rich man who held his paper. And then Lords Russell and Lyons, who were no friends to Mr. Disraeli’s faction, had come to Mr. Adams with their worries, implying that our Minister’s help was to be rewarded, without the least willingness to enter into detail about the help required. There was the Prime Minister’s notorious reputation as a fellow of more enthusiasm than virtue where the ladies were concerned. That boy in the Dutch cap, in Lambeth, who lived next door to the late Betty Green, had spoken of a tottering old man who come visiting. But I had leapt to the conclusion that he spoke of the elder Mr. Pomeroy, despite that gentleman’s obvious robustness. Death had been piled upon death with pestilential abandon. The private indiscretions of some lesser figure could not have been the cause of such a massacre. As for Betty Green—or Sarah Pomeroy—twas obvious why they had made her out not only a Jewess, but a Hungarian one. For a Jewess would create an embarrassment of race, but a Hungarian mistress might be portrayed as the agent of a foreign power. In whose arms the leading man in England had taken his repose.

Those letters had the power and promise to draw the likes of Lieutenant Culpeper into the matter. A pawn-broker’s life, or that of a boy, would be nothing against such stakes. Had Betty Green been wiser, she would have seen that death must be her destiny. For none who knew or suspected the secret, below the level of great social power, would be allowed to survive.

That meant that other deaths were in the offing.

I could have cursed. And I do not curse lightly, and wish not to curse at all. As much as I had deplored Inspector Wilkie’s subservience, and mocked the English as a servile people, the taint was still deep down in my own bones. For I, too, had looked downward instead of up. And if I
had
cursed, which I did not, I might have laughed thereafter. For I had been proposed as a clever detective— although I did not make that claim myself—yet I had failed to look through a lamplit window when invited.

But what had Palmerston’s follies to do with ships?

I had no more time to plod to conclusions, for the city’s clocks already had given us midnight, and I was to be at John Knox’s feet by one.

I turned to my companions. Young Mr. Adams had been as shocked as I was by the identity of the author of those epistles—perhaps he was even more shocked—but Miss Perkins expected less of the high and mighty, and she had taken upon herself the unbidden duty of examining the letters a final time, in case we had neglected some intelligence. Giggle and blush she did, and now and again she whispered, “The dirty old bugger . . .”

“Look you,” I said abruptly. As if to wake myself from the thrall of a dream. “We must divide the letters. Mr. Adams, you will take one packet. Miss Perkins, might I ask you to retain the other stack until I return?”

“You’re going out?” Mr. Adams asked me. “At this hour?”

“I have an appointment.”

He gave me a look that I found inappropriate and said, “Why, Jones, you old dog!”

Miss Perkins also scowled her disapproval.

“No, no,” I assured them. “It is a police matter, see. I am to meet a certain Inspector McLeod in the Necropolis, under the Knox statue. We must meet in secret, so that he will not be compromised.”

“That sounds queer,” Henry Adams told me.

“Yes. It does.” I walked over to the dresser, took one of the pistols from the case, and tucked it underneath my frock coat.
“And if it is as queer as I suspect it may be, I will be prepared.” I looked at him a touch severely, for the young man wanted gravity. “There is another pistol in the box. And it is loaded. If you find you have a need . . .”

“Really, Jones . . . I know nothing of pistols. I couldn’t possibly, you know.”

“Well, it is in the case. If anyone comes asking for the letters. I suggest you take it with you to your room.” I shifted my attentions to the White Lily of Kent, who now looked more alarmed than disapproving. “Miss Perkins, I recommend you stay here in this room, rather than returning to your own.” When she looked a bit too eager, I added, “Until I come back. Then you may retire to your own chamber.”

“I say, Jones. Shouldn’t I stay here with Miss Perkins? For the sake of her safety?”

“And who’s to protect me from you and your presumptions?” Miss Perkins huffed.

“You’ll be just next door,” I told Mr. Adams. “She can call to you, should the need arise.” I took up my cane and my topper. “I must go now, see. Keep the letters safe. Mr. Adams, I do suggest you take up the revolver.”

He still looked doubtful. Then, of a sudden, he put on the look of a gentleman who has found himself in the street without his hat. “Oh, Jones! I didn’t mention—this morning, just before leaving, I heard that Reginald Pomeroy had hanged himself. In his cell. Really, can you imagine?”

THE DRIVER TOOK ME as far as the Cathedral, for that was as close as he would go at night. Clattering off across the cobbles, the hack left me alone. The tower and roof of the great stone church showed black against the sky, with that strange feel holy places have when they are unattended. The gaslights stopped, and there was not so much as a lamp in a gate-keeper’s window to help me. Across the square, the clergy slept in their comfortable houses, battling the forces of darkness with their snores. Beyond, the land fell off. I knew there was a ravine, and an old
bridge that crossed it to enter the place of the dead, for I had seen that much by light of day. The Necropolis was a steep lump of a hill. I remembered it studded with statues and crypts, with trees to cool the mourners and the mourned. But all I could see was a haziness, more a hint than a hill. The filth of the air and the moonless night did not make a man feel welcome.

Yet, faith is armor against the unseen world, if such a thing there is. And soldiers learn to cherish the night, if they survive long enough to learn its ways, for darkness is a friend to veteran infantry. I tapped along to a graveled descent, then onto the stones of the bridge.

A dog took up his barking in the distance, and other hounds basked in their noisy comradeship, making a competition of their howls. It sounded like all of the dogs in the city were at it.

But there was only silence where I walked, in the dank, black nearness. At the end of the bridge, a gate stood askew, from neglect or by design. I slipped me through and tried to take my bearings. The smoke of the day had lingered here, and I could not see a pistol shot ahead of me. I chose an upward path, only to find it led me down again. And then I found another that seemed to help me up toward my goal, for I had seen the statue in the daylight, and it stood just below the crown of the hill.

That track, too, veered off, and I picked a branch that promised—again—to aim me toward the crest. The air was so foul I could barely see the gaslamps of the city below. Weak stars they were, on a glowering night.

The path reached a dead end.

I retraced my steps, or hoped I did. Then I began to explore a slightly broader way I come upon, a lane the width of a mortuary coach.

After teasing me upward for a stretch, that course, too, turned down. As if the hill did not want to receive me.

The crypts that lined the trails were built into the hillside, some new and others of sufficient antiquity to have their marble and granite broken off and strewn where it might trip a careless
man. The lingering smoke from the manufactories gave the place a fitting scent of brimstone. All in all, I did not like my surroundings.

Those dogs went at it with a force renewed. And, yet, they seemed a hundred miles away.

Path after path—perhaps the same paths retaken—all betrayed me. At last, I resolved to climb straight up the embankments, and I did. Only to find myself against a sheer wall of rock.

Back down I went, past a masoleum that harbored rats. They chirp almost like birds when you surprise them.

There is strange, how a man under threat can lose his fear in a welter of impatience. I might have been going to my death, but my caution had been replaced by a streak of temper at my inability to reach the place of appointment.

I tried my luck with a break in the brambles girdling the hillside between the crypts and monuments, and found myself on a higher path at last. Sweating I was, despite the coolness of that summer night. Now, I am a man who has a good sense of direction, and a hard-won feel for the features of the earth. But I could not have said which side of the hill I was on by then, or how near the crest. I tried to confirm the time, but the darkness would not let me read my pocket watch. When I replaced it, I felt the pistol behind my belt. Reassuring it was, though it is sinful to say so.

I climbed along the trail and found myself amid a field of graves. Interspersed with sepulchres and marble angels, the paleness of the headstones loomed up from the night in the moment before I would have stumbled over them.

I stopped. Not because I had decided to, but because my instincts—those of an old soldier—had decided for me.

I listened, and heard nothing but those dogs. Just quieting now. There were no footfalls, and no breaths but my own. I smelled only the dirty air, and damp earth, and some rot. Yet, there was a thing I did not like.

If McLeod was there, he should have shown a light. Even if he meant to betray me, he should have had a signal lamp to guide me to my fate.

The cathedral clock tolled one, and lesser churches added their metal harmonies. I worried that, if honest, the inspector might leave, deciding I would not come. But I no longer thought the business an honest one, if ever I had. I believe I only wanted resolution. But now, among the graves, I knew that not all of my sweat come from my climb.