Pickpocket's Apprentice (8 page)

And then, in the spring of 1803, came the news he had longed to hear.

Sophy’s schooling was at last complete, and she would soon be coming home for good.

In Which John Pickett Makes a Surprising Discovery

The month of May was a torment for Pickett. Every day brought Sophy’s return a little nearer, and yet every day seemed longer than the one before. Everywhere he looked, he found reminders of her—even in a pawnshop. For it was after delivering coal to just such an establishment in Great Hart Street that he went inside to receive payment, and was obliged to cool his heels while the pawnbroker waited on another customer.

Pickett sighed, thinking of the impatient Tom waiting for him outside, for the woman’s business threatened to be protracted. She was dressed in unrelieved black and heavily veiled, so Pickett could form no opinion as to her age, but the refined accents in which she addressed Mr. Figgins reminded Pickett of the odd changes in Sophy’s speech since she had been sent to school, and he realized at once that this was what she was trying to emulate. For his part, Pickett hoped Sophy never succeeded: if ever a woman were to address him in such tones, he would be putty in her hands.

Mr. Figgins, however, appeared to be made of sterner stuff. “I’m sorry, Mrs., er, ma’am,” he told the veiled lady, “but I can give you twelve guineas, and not a farthing more.”

“But they are worth forty pounds, at the least reckoning!” the woman pleaded.

Pickett couldn’t imagine anyone being dissatisfied with the prospect of being paid twelve guineas. Why, such a sum would be more than half of the twenty pounds he needed to buy out the remaining two years of his apprenticeship. Overcome by curiosity, he shifted sideways until he was able to look over the lady’s shoulder. A necklace of green stones set in silver lay on the pawnbroker’s counter, gleaming in the sunlight shining through the window.

The pawnbroker shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You might try one of the fashionable jewelers in Mayfair. I believe Rundell and Bridge buys gems at secondhand sometimes. I’ve done business with them a time or two myself.”

“Oh, but they—that is, there are—reasons—why I cannot possibly take them to Rundell and Bridge. But if you have done business there before, might you not act as my intermediary?”

Mr. Figgins took an instinctive step backwards, putting up his hands as if to ward off an attack. “Look here, ma’am, I won’t be getting involved in nothing havey-cavey. I run an honest establishment here, and if I’m not mistaken, this fellow behind you is awaiting payment for his coal. Twelve guineas, ma’am. That’s the best I can do.”

Aware of his presence for the first time, the woman gave a guilty start and glanced over her shoulder, giving Pickett the briefest impression of a pale oval face behind the layers of fine black netting before she turned back to the pawnbroker.

“Very well, then, twelve guineas. I suppose beggars can’t be choosers,” she added with a sigh of resignation, leaving Pickett to marvel at a world in which twelve gold coins constituted beggary.

Two more weeks passed without incident, unless one counted the disturbing rumors communicated to Pickett over dinner at the servants’ table: Mrs. Granger had already been in consultation with one of London’s most fashionable dressmakers concerning a new wardrobe for Miss Sophy upon her return; a flurry of letters had gone back and forth between Mrs. Granger and her sister, who had married a knight and set herself up as a lady of fashion in Tunbridge Wells; Mr. Granger had met with his banker, and was prepared to dower his daughter with the exorbitant sum of forty thousand pounds. Pickett, listening to these reports in stoic silence, remembered Sophy’s passionate kisses and told himself that she would never agree to so mercenary a match, no matter how well-born the suitors for her hand.

Still, he could not deny that it would be a relief to see her again, and to hear these reassurances from her own lips. In the meantime, there was nothing he could do but continue to work for her father in an effort to prove himself so indispensable to the prosperous merchant that from apprentice to son-in-law would seem but a logical step.

Finally, the day of her return was at hand, and with it the longest day of Pickett’s life. The heavy sacks of coal seemed to hold twice as much, for surely it had never taken so long to empty them down the chutes before. Every customer, too, seemed to drag his heels in handing over bank drafts or counting out coins. Even the Bow Street Public Office, which was usually Pickett’s favourite stop along the now familiar route, disappointed him on this occasion.

“The clerk is home sick in bed today,” he was informed by a fellow whose blue coat and red waistcoat identified him as a member of the Bow Street foot patrol. “The magistrate can write you out a bank draft, but he’s hearing a case at the moment, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait.”

It was all of a piece with the rest of this interminable day. Stifling a sigh, Pickett looked up at the magistrate’s bench. Mr. Colquhoun lifted bushy eyebrows just long enough to acknowledge him with an infinitesimal nod before scowling back down at the blowsy woman shrilly pleading her case before him.

“You can sit down, if you like,” the man in the red waistcoat said, jerking his thumb in the direction of a wooden straight chair positioned against the wall.

Pickett stuck his head out the door just long enough to offer a brief explanation to Tom for the delay, then walked over to the chair, picked up the broadsheet that someone had left lying in its seat, and settled down to wait. He glanced down at the paper in his hand.
Hue and Cry
, read the words printed in bold block letters across the top. He scanned the page, and found it contained descriptions of several cases the Bow Street force had not yet solved. Suddenly his eye was caught by the account of one Mrs. Albert Cranston-Parks, whose emerald necklace had been stolen. The lady’s abigail was being questioned as a person of interest, but no arrest had been made, and the emeralds themselves had not been recovered.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting, John,” Mr. Colquhoun said, striding toward him while the blowsy female was led away screeching curses in her wake. He was rather surprised to see the boy examining the latest copy of the
Hue and Cry
, for he had not known that John Pickett could read; he realized with some consternation that he had never asked. “It’s been quite a morning, and half the staff out with the ague. Give me a moment, and I’ll—”

“Sir, this isn’t right,” blurted out Pickett, waving the broadsheet at him.

The magistrate scowled. “What isn’t right?”

“These emeralds. They weren’t stolen. Mrs. Cranston-Parks spouted them.”

Mr. Colquhoun was still trying to assimilate the discovery that the boy could read when the significance of his words began to dawn, and he demanded, “What the devil are you talking about?”

“That maid didn’t steal those emeralds, sir,” Pickett said again.

The bushy eyebrows lowered in an expression of curiosity not unmixed with skepticism. “And how could you possibly know such a thing?”

“I didn’t steal them myself, sir, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Pickett put in hastily. “How could I? I never knew they existed until two weeks ago, when this Mrs. Cranston-Parks sold them at Alfred Figgins’s pawnshop.”

“I wasn’t aware that you were acquainted with the lady,” observed the magistrate, his voice heavy with irony.

“No, but I was delivering coal to Mr. Figgins’s shop in Great Hart Street and I watched her sell them for twelve guineas. She tried to get more, saying they were worth forty pounds at least, but Mr. Figgins wouldn’t give it to her. She was wearing a bonnet with a veil so that her face wouldn’t show, and—”

“And how, if her face were veiled, do you know it was Mrs. Cranston-Parks? Is it likely she would sell her jewelry for less than one-third of its worth? I will certainly send Mr. Foote over to Figgins’s pawnshop to inquire as to any emeralds that have come into his possession recently, but even if they were Mrs. Cranston-Parks’s missing emeralds, it is much more likely that you saw her maid.”

Pickett shook his head. “That was no maid, sir.”

“And what makes you so sure?”

Pickett hesitated, recalling his impressions of the veiled woman. There were her clothes, of course, and that bonnet, which were much finer than he’d seen any of the women on Mr. Granger’s staff wear, even on their days off. But clothes could be borrowed (with or without their owner’s permission), or even bought at secondhand. No, there was something else, something more difficult to counterfeit than clothes—the same thing, in fact, that had called the lady to his attention in the first place.

“It was the way she talked,” he told the magistrate. “She didn’t sound like a maid. Even Sophy doesn’t talk like that, though not for lack of trying.”

Mr. Colquhoun made a noncommittal noise to cover his own confusion. First there was the realization that John Pickett could read, and therefore was capable, in spite of his unsavoury past, of better things than to spend the rest of his life hauling coal. Then there was the chance— outrageous of course, but just within the realm of possibility—that this boy had by the merest happenstance solved a case that had confounded an experienced Bow Street Runner for a fortnight.

He said nothing of any of this to John Pickett, however, but gave the boy a bank draft and sent him on his way, apologizing once again for keeping him waiting. But he stood there studying the
Hue and Cry
long after the coal wagon rumbled up the street, and made up his mind to have a word with William Foote.

In Which Mr. Colquhoun Conducts a Private Investigation

Before he broached the subject with Foote, however, Mr. Colquhoun wanted to carry out an investigation of his own. He began his quest at Figgins’s pawnshop in Great Hart Street, where a discreet inquiry yielded the information that yes, such a piece had come that way only a fortnight earlier.

“In fact, it’s in the back room now, locked away in the safe,” the pawnbroker confided, jerking his thumb in the direction of a door that led into the rear of the shop. “I haven’t quite decided what to do with it. Rundell and Bridge would probably give me thirty guineas for it, but I’ve been in this business long enough to have an instinct for these things, and I can’t help thinking a certain private gentleman might be willing to cough up more than that.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Mr. Figgins, but I doubt the private gentleman you have in mind has any idea it is in your possession,” the magistrate informed him. “Still, your instincts are not entirely at fault; it might interest you to know that this particular piece is at the center of a Bow Street investigation.”

Figgins nodded sagely. “Don’t surprise me none, I must say. I knew there was something havey-cavey about the business from the minute that woman walked in the door.”

“What woman?” Mr. Colquhoun asked blandly.

“The woman who brought those gewgaws in, wanting forty guineas for ‘em. You know there’s something in the wind when a lady walks in with her face veiled so thick you wouldn’t know her from Adam—not that Adam ever had so tidy a figure, I’ll be bound.”

“You call her a lady,” observed the magistrate, recalling Pickett’s impressions of the veiled female. “Yet could she not have been a lady’s maid, carrying out a discreet errand for her mistress?”

“Begging your pardon, your worship, but she was no lady’s maid! Not with that plummy voice, like she was Queen Charlotte herself. No, she was a lady, I’ll take my affydavy on it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Figgins, but I daresay it won’t come to that. I will have to take the emeralds in evidence, however, so if you will fetch them from the safe, I will refund whatever sum you paid for them.”

“Of course, your worship,” Figgins agreed, and disappeared through the back door. He returned a moment later with the emerald necklace. “Here you are, sir. I gave the lady fifteen guineas for it, so if you’ll give me that amount, we’ll call it even.”

The magistrate’s eyebrows descended ominously over blue eyes suddenly grown cold. “Fifteen guineas, you say?” he asked, silently blessing John Pickett and his unexpected literacy, to say nothing of his attention to detail. “Are you quite certain it was not twelve?”

“Mayhap you’re right, your worship,” the pawnbroker muttered. “It was a fortnight ago, after all. Daresay I forgot.”

“I daresay you did,” Mr. Colquhoun concurred dryly, and wrote out a bank draft on the Bow Street Public Office in that amount.

Five minutes later, he had left the pawnbroker’s establishment and hailed a hackney to convey him to quite another part of town. Upon being set down before an imposing residence in Park Lane, he lifted the ornate brass knocker and let it fall, then requested of the butler an interview with Mrs. Cranston-Parks.

“I shall inquire if Madame is at home,” announced the butler with the air of one granting an undeserved favour. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Patrick Colquhoun, magistrate,” he said, and had the satisfaction of seeing the slightest flicker of surprise in the man’s eyes.

“Certainly, sir. If you will condescend to step inside, I shall inform Madame.”

The butler left him to wait in a tiny saloon whose delicate chairs were clearly not intended for long periods of sitting. Fortunately, he had not very long to wait before the butler returned to inform him that Madame would receive him in the Blue Saloon.

The woman awaiting him in this aptly named chamber was quite young, certainly no older than five-and-twenty. She was not veiled on this occasion, and so Mr. Colquhoun was struck with the full force of the trim figure so aptly described by Mr. Figgins, as well as a head of abundant chestnut hair and wide, frightened grey eyes.