Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,10
so.”
“Ji didn’t know the name of the man Hayes was planning to meet in the tea gardens last night?”
“No. Or, at least, he said he didn’t.”
“Do you have any idea where Ji might have gone or how to set about finding him?”
“No, my lord. Believe me, I wish I did.” The valet took a deep breath. “With your lordship’s permission, I’d like to spend the day looking for the lad.”
Sebastian nodded. “We need to find him, and quickly. Was Ji with Hayes when you met him at Oxford Market?”
“He was, yes.”
“Would he run if he saw you, do you think?”
“I don’t know. He ran away from me last night, didn’t he?”
“True. But he was scared.”
Calhoun thrust up from his seat by the cold hearth and went to stare out the front windows. The sun was already high and hot; it was staging up to be another brutal day.
After a moment, he said, “Is Ji in danger, do you think?”
Sebastian was aware of a sense of disquiet settling low in his gut. “That child might not know whom Hayes was meeting last night. But if the killer thinks there’s a chance he does, then I’d say yes, he’s in danger. Grave danger.”
Chapter 9
H ero was dressed in a plain walking gown of soft gray sarcenet and positioning a simple high-crowned bonnet on her head when Sebastian came to stand at the entrance to her dressing room.
“You’re going to look for that child, aren’t you?” he said, watching her.
She kept her gaze on her reflection in the mirror as she tilted the hat just so. “How can I not? It’s ghastly to think about such a young child all alone in a strange city. In a strange country.”
“I thought you were planning to start the interviews for your next article today.” Much to the disgust of her father, Hero was writing a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle on the poor of the city. She’d profiled everyone from London’s street children to its pure finders and night-soil men, and each article enraged Jarvis more than the last.
“I am. But I don’t see any reason why I can’t do both. This article is about the city’s street musicians, and it occurs to me that one of them might have seen the boy. There can’t be that many half-Chinese children roaming around London, and street performers do tend to pay attention to their audiences.”
“I’ve given Calhoun leave to search for the boy as well. I think he plans to begin in Oxford Square, which is where he and Hayes met.”
Hero glanced over at him, her arms falling to her sides, her gray eyes clouded with worry. “If you were a child alone in a strange land, where would you go?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible he’s gone back to where Hayes was staying. But at the moment I haven’t the slightest idea where that was.”
“How will you even begin going about finding who killed him?”
“All I can do is start with the evidence I have—which at the moment consists mainly of Nicholas Hayes’s body.”
* * *
Paul Gibson’s surgery lay in a narrow medieval lane on Tower Hill, virtually within the shadow of the great Norman castle that had guarded London and the Thames for over seven hundred years. He’d been an Army surgeon at one time, until a French cannonball tore off his lower left leg, leaving him racked by phantom pains. When the pains—and his increasing consumption of the opium he used to control them—grew to be too much, he’d come here, to London, to open his surgery and teach anatomy at the hospitals of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Thomas’s. But he continued to work at expanding his knowledge of death and the human body, largely by way of surreptitious dissections performed on cadavers filched from London’s overflowing graveyards by gangs of body snatchers euphemistically referred to as “resurrection men.”
Irish by birth, Gibson was in his thirties now and thinner than he should be, thanks to his opium consumption. His friendship with Sebastian dated back nearly ten years to the days when both men had worn the King’s colors and fought the King’s wars across the Old World and the New. It was Sebastian who’d held his friend down when they sawed off the mangled remnant of Gibson’s shattered calf, and Gibson who’d helped save Sebastian when some painful truths about his parentage came close to destroying him. Theirs was a bond that transcended class, nationality, and other such trivialities.