Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,13
My wife, she sometimes takes in washing, but it is hard when she’s so heavy with child.”
“Your wife is English?”
He smiled. “Scottish. I also pose for artists at the Academy. They say I have ‘the look’ they want, whatever that means.”
He would be interesting to paint, Hero thought, with his hawklike nose and deep-set eyes and arresting bone structure. “Have you thought about going back to India?”
A wistful expression crept into the man’s sad, dark eyes. “I’m afraid my Marie wouldn’t like it there. But I think of it all the time, especially in the winter. I doubt there’s a Bengali in London who doesn’t think of it.”
“Are there many?”
“Oh, yes, my lady. They come here as Lascars.” Lascars were Asian sailors who served as seamen on British ships to replace the sailors who tended to die at such alarming rates in the East. Particularly during the war when the British Navy was impressing so many sailors, the East India Company was often seriously short of crews for their return voyages.
Dinesh drew a deep breath that flared his nostrils. “So many of the young men, they think it’ll be a lark, or at least a way out of misery. But they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into—the floggings, the wretched holes they’re expected to live in. The East India Company, they pay Lascars only one shilling for every five they pay an Englishman—and give them less food too. A lot of the men, they reach port and they won’t go back on a ship. So they starve here instead of in Calcutta.”
Hero had heard horror stories about Lascars starving to death in the streets of eastern London. She said, “How do people tend to treat you?”
He stared across the square, to where Hero could see Jules Calhoun talking to a woman selling apples. “Sometimes people insult me, call me ugly names,” Dinesh said slowly, the flesh seeming to pull tight across the bones of his face in a way that left him looking gaunt and troubled. “Some even hit me and spit on me. They have much hate in their hearts for anyone who looks different from them. They think the color of our skin makes us less than them—as if we were more animal than man. I am glad my son’s skin is so light. It will be easier for him.”
“What about the Chinese?” asked Hero, aware of a strange burning in her chest that was half shame and half rage. “Are there many Chinese people in London?”
“Not so many, no. Some also come as Lascars to replace the English sailors who die on the way to China. But they tend to stay close to the port.”
“I’m told there’s a little half-Chinese boy who hangs around this part of London—a child of perhaps eight or nine.” Hero was careful to keep her voice light. “I’m thinking it would be interesting to interview him. Do you know him?”
Dinesh shook his head. “No, my lady. Sorry.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“No, my lady.”
“Where would a child like that go, do you think?”
“Is he a street performer? Because most street performers move around. We need to. People get tired of seeing or hearing us. So he could be anywhere from Billingsgate to Covent Market to Portman Square.”
Hero was aware of Calhoun working his way back around the arcade, his alert, watchful gaze raking the crush of shoppers and sellers. “He might be a beggar,” she said. Or he could be reduced to stealing, Hero thought with a sudden upsurge of alarm.
“Beggars usually stay farther east,” said Dinesh. “Workingmen and -women tend to be more generous with beggars than folks around here.”
“That’s a sorry comment on the people of Mayfair,” said Hero, handing the musician his shillings.
Dinesh gave a very Eastern shrug. “It is what it is.”
* * *
“Anything?” Hero asked Calhoun when he walked up to her a few minutes later.
He blew out a harsh breath and shook his head, his gaze still hopefully scanning the crowd. “No, my lady. No one’s seen him.”
“Yet he was here just last week.”
“He was. But he was with Hayes then. People might not have noticed him as much.”
Hero watched a couple of ragged, appallingly dirty boys dart past, one tossing a loaf of bread—doubtless purloined—to the other. “Perhaps Devlin is having more luck.”
“Perhaps,” said Calhoun. But she knew from the pinched look on his face that he didn’t believe it any more than she did.