a sturdy pair of leather boots, only gently worn by their previous owner.
“Ye want to know more about the crossin’ sweeps?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Not today. I was thinking about how you told me that you and your friends often go to the Haymarket in the evening.”
“Y-yes,” he said slowly, obviously confused by this new line of inquiry.
“Have you ever found girls for a gentleman who takes them to an old man living in a ramshackle house just off the Minories in St. Botolph-Aldgate?”
Drummer froze, his skinny little body tense, as if he were about to bolt.
“Don’t worry,” said Hero gently. “You won’t get into trouble for it. I’m trying to find a girl who was taken there last Sunday night. Do you know who she is?”
Drummer cast a quick glance around, as if to reassure himself that no one had overheard her question.
Then he nodded solemnly, his eyes wide and afraid.
Chapter 55
S
ebastian found the name he was looking for entered under the heading for June 1812.
Major Rhys Wilkinson’s debt was for five hundred pounds and had been partially repaid.
He set aside the ledger and rose to go stand with his palms resting on the windowsill, his gaze fixed unseeingly on the misty street before him. He tried to tell himself that the death of both men on the same night could be a coincidence. That Rhys was not the kind of man to commit cold-blooded murder over a debt of five hundred pounds. But he was haunted by the memory of a young girl with a dusting of cinnamon-colored freckles across her sunburned nose, who’d once shot a Spanish guerrilla point-blank in the face.
He was still standing at the window some minutes later when Hero’s stylish yellow-bodied town carriage drew up before the house. He watched her descend the carriage steps, a ragged, incredibly dirty, gape-mouthed child clasped firmly by one hand.
“We’ll have sandwiches, cakes, and hot chocolate in the library, as soon as possible,” he heard her tell Morey, her footsteps brisk as she crossed the black-and-white-marbled entry hall. The room filled with the scent of coal smoke and fresh manure and grimy boy.
“This is Drummer,” she said, releasing the child’s hand so that she could loosen the ribbons of her bonnet and yank off her gloves. “He’s a crossing sweep at St. Giles, but he also works in the Haymarket in the evenings, helping gentlemen too shy to descend from their carriages to find girls.” She gave the boy a nudge forward. “Make your bow and tell his lordship about Jenny.”
The boy stumbled forward, a grubby wideawake cap clutched in both hands, his skinny chest jerking with his agitated breathing.
“Jenny?” prompted Sebastian when the lad remained mute.
“Jenny Davie,” supplied Hero. “She’s seventeen, and last Sunday evening she was hired by a gentleman in a hackney who was known to procure girls for a nasty old goat living in St. Botolph-Aldgate.”
Sebastian led the boy closer to the fire, where the black cat looked up in slit-eyed annoyance at their intrusion. “What did this gentleman look like?”
Drummer raised a shoulder in the offhand shrug of a lad to whom one member of the nobility was pretty much like the next. “I reckon ’e looks like a nob.”
“My age? Younger? Or older?”
Drummer frowned with the effort of thought. “Younger, I’d say—by a fair bit.”
Sebastian and Hero exchanged glances. So Jenny Davie’s procurer had not been Samuel Perlman.
“Fair?” asked Sebastian. “Or dark haired?”
“’E’s got a mess o’ curls as gold as a guinea. The girls always go with ’im real quick, because ’e’s so good-lookin’. But ’e ain’t never ’ad nothin’ to do with any of ’em. Jist takes ’em to that old codger.”
Blair Beresford, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “Tell me about Jenny Davie.”
Again that twitch of the shoulder. Circumstances had obviously taught Drummer long ago to take life—and people—as he met them, with little time for analysis or criticism. “Wot’s there t’ tell? She’s a doxy.”
“Where does she live?”
The boy’s gaze slid away. “She used t’ keep a room at a lodgin’ ’ouse in Rose Court.”
“But she’s not there anymore?”
Drummer shook his head. “There’s been a mess o’ people lookin’ for ’er.”
“Oh? Such as?”
“Well, the curly-’eaded cove what ’ired ’er, fer one.”
Interesting, thought Sebastian. “Who else?”
The boy’s shoulder twitched. “Some Frenchman. “’E’s been lookin’ fer ’er real ’ard. He’s even offered blunt to any o’ the lads what could tell ’im where she’s gone.”
Sebastian saw Hero’s eyes narrow and knew that the boy had not yet told