Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,2
grown to both respect and like each other.
“He’s meeting me up in Somer’s Town.”
“You haven’t had dinner.”
Devlin adjusted the tilt of his black bicorn hat. “I’ll live.”
She crinkled her nose at him. “Can it really be Nicholas Hayes?”
“Calhoun doesn’t seem to have any doubts.”
“How does Calhoun know him?”
“He didn’t say.”
She went to stare out the window at the gathering darkness. “You think the little boy went back to the tea gardens?”
“I hope so. Because if not, then where the hell is he?”
Chapter 3
T he area known as Somer’s Town lay just to the north of Bloomsbury. Home to artists and writers and the middling sort of refugees from the revolution in France, it was the site of market gardens, brickfields, and several different tea gardens. The gardens were close enough to the densely crowded streets of London to make them an easy walk for young apprentices and seamstresses as well as the families of tradesmen, artisans, and shopkeepers. For sixpence, one could spend the day enjoying the fresh air of the country and listening to music while drinking tea or ale and eating roast beef and cakes.
And maybe getting stabbed in the back with a sickle, thought Sebastian as the carriage rolled through the hot, darkening streets of the city.
He shifted his gaze to the valet on the opposite bench. “So, are you going to tell me how you came to be acquainted with an earl’s son transported to Botany Bay eighteen years ago?”
Calhoun brought up tented hands to cover his nose and mouth, then let them fall. “I knew him before that—before he was accused of murder but after he was disowned by his father, the Earl. He had a room at one of my mother’s inns.”
“Ah.” Calhoun’s background was unusual for a gentleman’s gentleman. The son of an infamous underworld figure named Grace Calhoun, he’d grown up hanging around the most notorious flash houses in London. “The Blue Anchor?”
The valet gave a faint shake of his head. “The Red Lion.”
“Good God.” Situated in a back alley near Smithfield, the Red Lion was a known resort of thieves, cracksmen, blacklegs, and beau-traps. “What the devil was he doing there?”
“To be honest, I think he came there planning to kill himself.” A faint smile that hinted at old, fond memories lifted one corner of Calhoun’s mouth. “He changed his mind.”
“How long was he there?”
“Nearly six months. Shortly before he arrived, my mother had hired an ancient, broken-down valet to teach me how to ‘act and talk flash,’ as she put it. But my sixteen-year-old self was less than impressed with the dotard, and I didn’t want any part of her scheme. Then I met Hayes.”
“How old was he at the time?”
“Twenty, or thereabouts. My mother let him stay for free, hoping he’d succeed where the dotard had failed—teach me to dress, walk, and talk like a gentleman. She had ambitions of me becoming a confidence man, you see. Near broke her heart when I decided to take everything I’d learned and become a valet instead.”
“No doubt,” said Sebastian, who had met the formidable Grace Calhoun. She was the kind of woman a wise man didn’t turn his back on—or cross in any way.
Calhoun’s smile faded as he shifted to stare out at the shadowy streets flashing past, his body swaying with the motion of the carriage. “If it hadn’t been for Hayes, I’d probably have been hanged long ago.”
“I was under the impression he’d been transported for life, without eligibility for parole.”
“He was.”
“Yet he came back to England?” For a man transported for life to return to Britain without a pardon was to court a death sentence. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ve seen him since he came back?”
Calhoun nodded.
“Why did everyone believe he’d died in Botany Bay?”
“He told me they had a flash flood on some big river out there that swept him away from the chain gang he was on. When he came to, he was lying next to a dead man of about the same height, build, and hair color. The fellow was a freeman who’d once been a soldier, and he’d obviously spent some time in irons and been flogged, because his body was scarred. Hayes changed clothes with him, took his papers, and bashed in the dead man’s face with a rock until he was unrecognizable. And then he seized the first chance that offered to get away from the colony.”