The Emperor's Assassin (18 page)

In the midst of these morose reflections, he heard, below, the staircase begin its wailing. Morton stood quietly and pulled himself back farther into concealment, listening intently. Slowly they came up. He tried to guess how many. Three at least, perhaps four. At the top of the stairs there was no hesitation—they turned directly toward Boulot's chamber. They'd been here before.

Morton risked a careful glimpse around the flue. But in the dimness of the unlit hall, he could barely see a little cluster of people at the far end. The knock on Boulot's door was quick, soft, confidential.

“Ouvrez. C'est nous.”

The demand that he open was also quiet, discreet, although Morton heard an urgency in the tone of the speaker. There was only silence in response.

“Boulot, c'est nous. Ouvrez.”

Now one of the other men in the hall—for those who spoke, at least, were certainly men—took it up. But his
voice was more husky, and Morton could not follow what he said, except to know that it, too, was a remonstrance, accompanied with more rapping at the door.

Now came the sound of a voice from within—Boulot, low, muffled, maybe still drunken, and too far off for Morton to understand either.

“Non, non,”
replied the first man in the corridor, his voice rising a little in impatience.
“Il n'y a pas de cause. Pas de danger. Ouvrez!”

Boulot must have been convinced that there was indeed no danger. After a short hesitation, there was a squeak of hinges, and the visitors all went in. Their voices continued inside, as the door closed behind them. Morton immediately left his place of hiding and went as quietly as he could to Boulot's door.

Within the room they were speaking quickly, intensely. He had almost to press his ear to the door to hear anything. At Bow Street Morton was thought fluent in French, but the truth was, he did better when he could see the speaker, hear clearly what that person was saying, when he could slow the sounds down, hearing them again in his mind. Standing in this dark hallway with his ear almost to the door, trying to follow this rapid babble of foreign voices, angry, voluble, interrupting one another—this was a different matter. It was maddening—he could grasp only fragments, parts of sentences, make out some speakers better than others. They were arguing, he could tell that. Boulot was defending himself, but oddly, his visitors did not seem to be accusing him. They seemed to be trying to mollify him, reassure him of their trust.

But the drunken Boulot kept repeating,
“Ce n'est pas ma faute!”
It was not his fault! He claimed to have had nothing to do with it.

Another voice, lower, impossible for Morton to hear. Calming, reassuring.

Finally Boulot seemed to understand and fell silent. Then the sound of a man weeping—Boulot. No one spoke for a long moment, and then a calm deep voice, almost impossible to hear.

They could not do it without him.
Assassiner
, another said. Assassinate.
“They would assassinate him,”
or something like. Morton felt a growing sense of alarm. Perhaps Boulot was not quite so pathetic as he seemed. But then, he remembered, the word in French was not quite the same as in English. It could mean plain “murder,” and perhaps, in the manner of all excitable continentals, they were just flinging their words about loosely, carelessly. Perhaps nothing so serious as assassination was at issue, or even killing of any kind.

Boulot spoke again, his words slurred one into the other.
Oui
, Morton heard.
Un bòtiment. Berman sur le quai. Ratton-berri.
Words Morton could not understand.
Nancy. “He could do no more. Leave him in peace.”

The door Morton held his ear to swept suddenly open, so that Morton all but fell into the room. The pale blur of five surprised faces, and then the largest of them charged him, catching him before he'd regained his balance and throwing him across the hallway and almost over the banister into the stairwell.

The others shot out the door in a panic. Morton made a grab for one, his fingers grasping futilely at the coarse buckram of a jacket. Cursing, he lashed out with his foot, half-tripping one of them, who careened into the stairwell after his fellows. Making a sprawling dive, Morton stabbed his hand though the banister posts, briefly catching the man's shoe, upsetting him completely
and sending him spilling head over heels down the groaning stairs. A voice cried in panic, then grunted with an impact, thumping sounds, and other voices shouting out in fear, as he must have fallen onto them. In an instant Morton had regained his feet, scooped up his baton, and pulled himself round the newel post to give chase down the staircase. But his quarry seemed all to have managed to regain their balance and resume their own descent. He charged after them, bellowing out to the inhabitants of the house to stop the thieves in the name of the king.

Down they all went, thumping and clattering in the lightless shaft, taking three and four steps at a bound, causing the flimsy staircase to shake and scream. By the time they reached the bottom hall, Morton had almost caught them up. They were just ahead of him, struggling through the front vestibule. Reaching out as he surged forward, he was just about to seize the hind-most—when he fell over something solid and went sprawling face-first. He had been tripped by a booted foot, thrust deftly out from one of the rooms. It withdrew in a trice, and the door of the room clapped closed again. The “traps” had no friends here.

Henry Morton had fallen hard. For a moment he lay stunned, wheezing and gasping to regain his breath. Then slowly, painfully, he pulled himself to his feet again. His knee throbbing, he pushed through the front door and stumbled out into the cooler air of Paul's Court. But from the darkness there came only the echo of receding footfalls.

Morton went a few paces down the almost black street, then gave it up and hobbled back. Boulot would not proclaim his innocence now.
Assassiner
, they had said, whatever the specific meaning of the word. Morton
would drag the drunkard down to Bow Street and keep him from his bottle until he'd told everything he knew.

Morton made his slow way up the stair, at each step his knee screaming in concert with the tread itself. When he reached the door to Boulot's room, he found it wide open, a lone candle guttering, and Boulot gone.

T
he slick surface of the Thames, that July morning, was scattered with boats of all shapes and purposes, from the river wherry that carried Morton and Presley, to swimmies and stumpies, dobles and peter boats. Morton could see the lightermen on their barges, lying alongside or to anchors, waiting for the tide to turn, searching the sky for signs of a breath of wind below the bridges. The river was a high road of commerce and transportation through the heart of London and out to the sea and the great world beyond.

“Tide'll turn in two hour,” their waterman said. “Carry you back downriver afterward, sir, if you've a mind to return. I could tarry if ye not be too long.”

“We shan't be more than an hour or so, I wouldn't think,” Morton said.

“I'll abide then, if it pleases ye.”

Morton nodded his assent.

“Well,” Presley said, “we shan't find that poxy Frenchman in a temperance meeting. Beyond that the city is large, and we are few.”

“It is unfortunate. I thought Boulot too drunk to make any kind of escape, but when I returned to his rooms, I could find him nowhere.” Morton had waited for Jacobs, and the two of them had given the area around Maiden Lane a good combing. The estimable Boulot was not to be seen. Leaving Jacobs in Boulot's room, Morton had stumbled home in time to break his fast with Presley, and now the two were off to Barnes Terrace to keep the appointment with the Count d'Auvraye. Morton's poor brain hummed a high faint note from fatigue.

They'd found their waterman on the stairs at Beaufort Wharfs, where they'd also realised the reason for the early hour of their appointment—the count knew the tides on the river and when a boat might travel up to Barnes and when it might not.

Once they passed Vauxhall vinegar works, the London stench subsided rapidly, and it turned into a very fine morning to be on the water, with the summer sun shining, the green fields sliding by on either hand, and the casual traffic of barges and wherries causing no great congestion.

Morton had sent Wilkes with a note to Sir Nathaniel informing him of the talk he'd heard inside Boulot's room—threats of “assassinations”—but he'd felt a little foolish. After all, he had no notion of whom the victim might be. Or if, indeed, it really was to be an assassination, a murder, or was just wild talk.

“What are those Frenchies up to, then?” Presley wondered aloud.

Morton shrugged. “If Boulot is indeed a Bonapartist, then it would seem their intended victim must be a royalist of some stripe.”

“If they needed a ship, as you say, it could even be across the Channel.”

“I've thought the same thing. There are any number of prominent royalists who might be targets, including Louis himself.”

“Would you know them again were you to see them?” Presley asked.

“Nay, it were too dark, Jimmy. It's a demnable shame I couldn't keep hold of at least one of them.”

The younger man's beefy face frowned in thought as he squinted into the sun. He had his top hat on his knee, and the breeze was ruffling his thick brown hair. Morton watched as the steeple of St. Mary's, Chelsea, slipped slowly past on their right.

“Won't these folk have taken alarm now, what with them seeing you?” asked Presley.

“Perhaps. But I'm not sure they recognised I overheard any of what they said. They were skittish, though, that I'll say. I flushed them like a covey of quail. I wonder who they thought I was, for they ran me over before I said a word. They were fearful men. Fearful and suspicious.”

“Do you think they're the ones what murdered the count's mistress?”

“I don't know, Jimmy. They weren't visiting our drunken friend to buy wine, that's certain.” With that Morton lay down in the bottom of their wherry and let the ancient river rock him into a dreamless sleep.

Two hours later, as they came slowly around the final bend and Barnes village swung into view, Presley shook Morton awake. The two police men straightened themselves and put their hats back on, preparing to leave the untroubled world of the river behind. The elegant row of facades that made up Barnes Terrace was nestled
prettily in the curve, rising over the stone wall against which the waters lapped. But now they caught a flurry of motion there.

“What's the to-do?” muttered Henry Morton. Through the screen of trees a crowd of people could be seen, milling about on the terrace. As they drew closer, a babble of voices drifted across to them.

As the boat nudged into the wall, they leapt ashore and climbed a set of slippery steps. The commotion when they got up to the top was intense. Somewhere a woman was weeping, crying out hysterically, then again weeping and sobbing. The front door of one house was open, and a group of apparent neighbours gathered there, whispering amongst themselves.

“What's happened?” Presley asked a woman.

“Happened?” she said. “Murder, sir! Coldhearted murder.”

“We're from Bow Street,” Morton said, and pointed toward the open door. “There?”

“Yes.” Then she called out to the people before the open door, “Call the constable, the Runners are here.”

The gathering on the steps gave way to let the Bow Street men pass inside, and a heavy red-faced man met them at the door.

“Good lord, sirs! How did you come so quickly?”

“We've come to Barnes on another errand,” Morton said. “But what has happened?”

This was clearly the village constable, who looked as though he might swoon. Nothing of the sort had happened to him before, and he was clearly unequal to the situation.

“Two of 'em, sir. Two! Master and man.”

Now Morton's eye caught the trail, the spotted spoor of red that led up the steps, and without even looking at
the number, he knew whose house this was. He looked at Presley, who had made the same assumption, and then the younger man pressed himself past the constable and into the door.

“I didn't see them, sir,” the constable rambled on. “I've just come. Fetched by Mrs. Barkling.”

“This is d'Auvraye's house?” Morton asked. “Gerrard d'Auvraye?”

“So it is, sir.”

The Runner cursed.

“Morton!” Presley called from inside. His voice was hard. “Best come up.”

“None of you leave,” Morton ordered the crowd. “But keep yourselves back from this door.”

Inside, a man in servant's livery was sprawled facedown in the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs, his bald head toward them. A round pool of red spread visibly from his right side. Above him a bright rivulet of blood spilled, like a miniature waterfall, over the polished edges of the bottom three stairs, following him. Everything was motionless except that strange, slow falling of blood, as if the house were entranced. The crying of the woman was louder here, coming from the upper floor of the house.

The two Runners glanced at each other, and vaulting awkwardly over the body, Morton led the way upward.