Thieves' Quarry (The Thieftaker Chronicles) (12 page)

One last time they descended the steep stone stairs that led into the vaults, barely trusting their footing in the inconstant light of the torches that lined the stairway.

When at last they set down this last man, Ethan straightened and stretched the stiff muscles in his back and shoulders. The air belowground was even colder than it had been above. It was damp as well, but Ethan thought it likely that the bodies would keep longer in the vaults than anywhere else they might have been placed.

“I meant no offense,” Rickman said.

Ethan looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

The doctor was tall and hale with a kindly, round face and piercing dark eyes. His features were youthful, but his curly hair, which he wore far shorter than was the fashion in Boston, had already turned white.

“I didn’t mean to anger you by pointing out what the men were singing,” the doctor explained.

Ethan shook his head. “You didn’t.” He retrieved the ship’s manifest from a low stone ledge where he had placed it some time before and began to walk down the narrow corridor of the vault, looking over the bodies. He could hear more rockets going off, although down underground the explosions sounded muffled and dull. He couldn’t hear the singing anymore. “Do you know many of these men?”

“Hardly any of them.” The doctor spoke softly in an accent that marked him as a native of southern England, perhaps Southampton or Portsmouth. “Last I heard, Captain Gell intended to ask some of the officers from the Twenty-ninth Regiment to join us here and help identify them.” He eyed Ethan in the torchlight. “Lieutenant Senhouse asked me to examine the men, but he still hasn’t asked me what killed them. The crewmen did, but not William. Neither have you, for that matter. Why is that?”

“I’ve been carrying the dead for hours, Doctor. As grim a task as that was I didn’t wish to make it worse. But you’ve raised the matter so why don’t you tell me what you think killed them.”

Rickman shook his head. “I have no idea. And what’s more, I don’t believe you. I think you do know, or at least can offer a theory. So before the officers arrive why don’t we dispense with the games? Tell me what happened to these men.”

Ethan didn’t answer right away. He should have denied that he knew anything, but something in the doctor’s manner stopped him. The man seethed with passion, with a righteousness that Ethan remembered from his own youth. In truth, Rickman reminded Ethan of another young man he knew—Trevor Pell, a minister at King’s Chapel who had first helped him with his work several years before when Ethan was inquiring into the death of Jennifer Berson. He wondered if Rickman would accept that Ethan was a conjurer, as had Pell.

Before he could say anything, though, he heard boots scraping on the stone stairs leading into the vault. He looked back at the entrance, and Rickman turned as well.

Two men stepped into the vault, both wearing bright red uniforms. One of the men appeared to be in his early twenties—a young officer, who looked at the bodies arrayed before him with an expression of abject fear. His eyes twitched; it seemed that he was continually fighting the urge to close them and shut out the horror before him. His skin looked pasty, even in the warm light of the torches.

The other man couldn’t have been more different. He was tall and broad in the shoulders. Some might have thought him handsome, though Ethan thought he looked more rough than refined, with a long nose, a strong chin, sunken cheeks, and widely spaced pale eyes. He wore his graying hair in a plait beneath his tricorn hat, a hat which he did not remove even here, in the presence of so many dead soldiers. His eyes swept over the bodies and came to rest at last on the doctor.

“Captain Gell sent me,” he said, his voice thick with an Irish burr. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me why, Doctor.”

“I’d suggest you look around you, Captain,” Rickman answered, his tone icy. “These men are the reason why.”

The officer’s mouth twitched. “I can see that. But what is it you require of me?”

“Captain Preston, this is Ethan Kaille,” the doctor said. “He is a thieftaker here in Boston, and is conducting an inquiry into the deaths of these men. All of them are from your regiment and one of them is missing. We need to match faces to names and see if we can determine which man escaped the fate of his comrades.”

To this point, Preston had ignored Ethan, but he fixed his eyes upon him now, a faint smile on his lips. “A thieftaker?” he said. “You think these men were robbed?”

Ethan stared back at him. “Yes. Of their lives, at the very least.”

The smile faded from the captain’s face. “All right. Let’s get started, then. I want to get back to my soldiers. The rest of them…” he amended after a brief, awkward pause.

“By all means,” Rickman muttered, just loud enough for Ethan to hear. “We wouldn’t want to inconvenience the man.”

Chapter

S
EVEN

Captain Preston’s manner might have been gruff, but he worked with swift efficiency, as did the young corporal he had brought with him. They moved down the line of dead soldiers, peering at their faces and, after a bit of deliberation, assigning a name to each one. Dr. Rickman held the manifest and checked off names as the officers worked. Ethan trailed behind them, feeling that with the bodies arrayed in the vaults his work here was complete.

Watching the other men, though, Ethan had an idea. He would have been best off waiting until he was alone with the dead soldiers, but he couldn’t be certain that such an opportunity would present itself.

“
Veni ad me,
” he whispered as quietly as he could. Come to me.

His conjuring sang in the stone walls and the ground beneath his feet, and Uncle Reg winked into view at his side, his russet glow almost bloodlike in the dim space.

Preston glanced Ethan’s way. “What did you say?” he asked. He gave no indication that he could see Reg or that he had felt Ethan’s conjuring.

“It was … a prayer,” Ethan said.

Reg grinned. The captain went back to examining the dead, but Rickman eyed Ethan for another moment. As soon as the doctor turned his attention to the manifest once more, Ethan looked toward the glowing ghost.

I need to know if any of these men were conjurers,
he said within his mind.
Do you understand me?

Reg nodded and began to drift back along the corridor past the bodies that had already been identified. A short distance from the stairway, he halted, hovering beside the body of a regular. He stared back at Ethan, his eyes gleaming in the shadows. Ethan could hardly believe that the ghost had found someone. He had thought this a lark.

You’re sure?
he asked in his mind, as he approached the dead soldier.

Reg nodded to him and drifted off once more.

Stopping by the soldier Reg had indicated, Ethan looked down at the man. He was a large, young man with a broad fleshy face and long black hair.

“Can you tell me this man’s name?” Ethan asked, still looking down at him.

“We’ve got him already,” Preston said.

“Yes, I know. What was his name?”

The captain glowered at Ethan. Finally he shook his head in disgust. “Go,” the captain told his corporal, his voice flat. “See who he’s talking about.”

The young officer joined Ethan by the dead soldier and looked down at the man. “That’s Jonathan Sharpe,” he said. “He was from York originally, but he fought over here against the French, and remained in Halifax with the regiment.” The young man turned to Ethan. “Why? Is there something wrong?”

“No,” Ethan said. “I thought I’d seen him before. Sorry to have troubled you.” The lie came easily to him, though once again he caught the doctor eyeing him. He wondered if Senhouse or even Geoffrey had revealed to Rickman that Ethan was a speller.

Looking past the doctor, Ethan saw that Uncle Reg hadn’t vanished again, as he thought the ghost might. Rather, he had positioned himself by the dead soldiers whom Preston and his aide had yet to identify. As before, the ghost’s glowing eyes were locked on Ethan’s. Deliberately, he turned to gaze down upon one of the men and then looked up at Ethan again.

“Can I go back to the captain, sir?” the corporal asked.

Ethan barely heard him. “Another one?” he whispered.

Uncle Reg nodded.

“I’m sorry?” the corporal asked.

With a sharp shake of his head, Ethan looked away from the ghost.

“Aye, of course,” Ethan told the man. “I’m sorry to have pulled you away from what you were doing.”

The man edged away from him and rejoined Preston. Ethan followed him, forcing himself not to hurry, though his pulse was racing. Could there have been two conjurers among these men? The odds against such a thing were staggering. There were maybe fifteen conjurers among all of Boston’s fifteen thousand residents, and yet it seemed that there had been two among these seventy-two soldiers.

He slipped past Rickman, Preston, and the corporal, walking until he reached Uncle Reg and the second conjurer the ghost had found. Ethan leaned back against the wall of the vault, and waited for the other men to reach this man.

You’re certain?
he asked Reg.

The ghost nodded.

Are there more, or just these two?

Reg held up two glowing fingers.

And you’re really sure about both of them?

This time Reg scowled at him.

Right. Sorry.

Ethan watched Preston and his corporal. Seeing that they remained engrossed in what they were doing, Ethan turned his attention to the man Reg had indicated. He appeared to be somewhat older than the other soldiers; there were lines around his mouth and eyes, and his brown hair was flecked with silver. But he had a boyish face, with round cheeks and a smooth brow. Ethan guessed that he would have had a pleasant smile.

Before long, Rickman and the others reached the man.

“Do you know this one, Corporal?” Preston asked.

“Not well, sir, no. I think his last name might be Osborne.” The young man looked back at the doctor. “Is there an Osborne on the manifest?”

Rickman searched the list. “Here he is. Caleb Osborne.”

The corporal’s expression brightened. “That’s it! Caleb. Another who came to fight the French and stayed in these parts.”

Ethan caught the ghost’s eye and held Reg’s gaze. Caleb Osborne and Jonathan Sharpe. He would learn what he could of them, as well as the man who turned out to be missing.

They reached the last of the dead a short time later, and once the corporal had identified this last man, Rickman thumbed through the pages of the manifest.

“That’s most of them,” he said, sounding weary. “But there are still nine who neither of you knew.” He turned to Ethan. “I’m afraid we won’t have a name for you tonight.”

“The officers who spent the most time with these men died with them,” Preston said. “They would have been able to identify all of them, obviously. But I’ll go back to my ship. Maybe one of my sergeants will be able to help with these last few.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Ethan said.

“You didn’t answer me before,” Preston said. “At least not really. What is it you think the missing man did?”

Ethan shrugged, making an effort not to look at Uncle Reg. “I don’t know. He might simply have deserted. Or he might have had something to do with the deaths of these others.”

Preston turned to the doctor. “And how exactly did they die?”

Rickman was watching Ethan. “We don’t know that, either.”

“You must have some idea, Doctor. Nearly a hundred men are dead—the crew in addition to these regulars. Was it an illness of some kind? Could it be yellow fever so far north this time of year? Was it influenza? It couldn’t have been smallpox—not from the looks of these men.”

At last Rickman turned to face the captain. “We’re still trying to determine what it was. There are several possibilities, but we don’t know yet.”

Preston frowned. “Well, you should inform us when you do.”

“Of course, Captain.”

The captain glanced once more at Ethan and left the vault. The corporal hurried after him.

Neither Ethan nor the doctor said a word until the sound of the officers’ footsteps on the stone stairway had receded. Ethan heard no more rocket explosions, but he couldn’t say for certain when they had ceased. Uncle Reg still lurked beside him in the corridor, and it occurred to Ethan that because he had summoned the ghost, Reg couldn’t leave until he dismissed him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to in front of Rickman.

“What do you think I should tell the captain, Mister Kaille?” the doctor asked after some time, looking over the corpses arrayed in front of them. “Shall I make up some tale about yellow fever or pleurisy?”

“I’m not a doctor,” Ethan said, stepping past him and starting to make his way toward the stairway.

“I didn’t say you were. But I knew a man once—you remind me of him.”

Ethan halted, took a breath, turned.

“He was a wheelwright in Farnborough,” Rickman went on. “He kept to himself, but he was well known in the city nevertheless. Strange things always seemed to happen when he was around. Inexplicable things. One winter he took ill, and I was called in to look at him. He had a tumor—it should have killed him. And yet by spring he was well again, and he lived to be an ill-tempered old man.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“There were whispers, rumors,” the doctor said, walking toward Ethan. “People said that he cured himself with witchcraft, that in fact he had drawn upon the dark arts throughout his life. He never did anything too grand. I don’t believe he wanted that kind of attention. But I do know that nothing short of witchery could have saved his life.”

Ethan could no longer look Rickman in the eye. “Again, I have to ask you: What does this—?”

“I believe these men were killed by some sort of devilry,” Rickman said. He stopped a few paces short of where Ethan stood. “What’s more, I believe you know this already, and that you were asked to inquire into their deaths for that very reason.”

“I see,” Ethan said. “So you also suspect that I’m a conjurer myself.”