Lord John and the Hand of Devils (30 page)

“You are entirely welcome to search the place.” Grey waved a hand toward the room and the door through which Tom Byrd had disappeared, presumably toward the barracks kitchen in search of refreshment. “Why the devil would he come here?”

“For that bit of shrapnel.”

For a moment, Grey looked blank; then memory returned. His hand rose involuntarily toward his chest, but he altered the motion, pretending instead to stifle a yawn.

“The bit of iron from Tom Pilchard? The leopard’s head? What on earth would he—or you—want it for?”

Jones measured him for a long moment before replying, but answered at last, reluctant.

“With the cannon gone, that may be the only evidence.”

“Evidence of
what,
for God’s sake? And what do you mean, the cannon’s gone?” he added, belatedly realizing that he had overlooked the other bit of Jones’s statement. “Who in Christ’s name would steal a burst cannon?”

“It wasn’t stolen,” Jones answered shortly. “The foundrymen took it—and the others. It’s been melted down.”

This seemed an entirely reasonable thing to do, and Grey said as much, causing Jones’s face to work again. He
was
grinding his teeth; Grey could hear it.

Jones abruptly shut his eyes, upper lip folded under his lower teeth in a way that reminded Grey of his cousin Olivia’s bulldog, Alfred. It was an amiable animal, but remarkably stubborn.

The chiming clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour: two o’clock. The captain was likely telling the truth about searching everywhere else before coming to Grey’s door.

Jones at length opened his eyes—they were bloodshot, enhancing the resemblance to Alfred—though the teeth remained fixed in his lip. At last he shook his head in resignation and sighed.

“I’ll have to trust you, I suppose,” he said.

“I am distinctly honored,” Grey said, with an edge. “Thank you, Tom.”

Byrd had reappeared with a tray hastily furnished with two cups of tea. The tea was stewed and black, undoubtedly from the urn kept for the night watch, but served in Grey’s decent vine-patterned china. He took a cup gratefully, adding a substantial dollop of brandy from the decanter.

Jones stared at the cup of tea in his own hand, as though wondering where it had come from, but essayed a cautious sip, then coughed and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth.

“The cannon. Herbert said he thought you knew nothing about the process of gun-founding; is that true?”

“Nothing more than he told me himself.” The hot tea and brandy were both comfort and stimulant; Grey began to feel more alert. “Why?”

Jones blew out his breath, making a small cloud of steam; the air in the sitting room was still chilly.

“Without describing the entire process to you—you
do
know that the bronze of a cannon is an alloy, produced by—”

“Yes, I do know that.” Grey was sufficiently awake by now as to be annoyed. “What does that—”

“I am sure that the burst cannon—all of them—had been cast from an inferior alloy, one lacking the proper proportion of copper.” He stared meaningfully at Grey, obviously expecting him to drop his tea, clutch his head, or otherwise exhibit signs of horrified comprehension.

“Oh?” Grey said, and reached for the brandy again.

Jones heaved a sigh that went all the way to his feet, and put out a hand for the decanter in turn.

“Not to put too fine a point upon the matter, Major,” he said, eyes on the amber stream splashing into his tea, “I am a spy.”

Grey narrowly prevented himself saying, “Oh?” again, and instead said, “For the French? Or the Austrians?” Tom Byrd, who had been loitering respectfully in the background, stiffened, then bent casually to pick up the poker from the hearth.

“Neither, for God’s sake,” Jones said crossly. “I am in the employ of His Majesty’s government.”

“Well, who the bloody hell are you spying
on,
then?” Grey said, losing patience.

“The Arsenal,” Jones replied, looking surprised, as though this should be obvious. “Or rather, the foundry.”

There ensued a tedious ten minutes of extraction which brought Grey to the point of wishing to gnash his own teeth. At the end of it, though, he had managed to get Jones to admit—with extreme reluctance—that he was not in fact employed by the Arsenal, as Grey had assumed. He
was
a genuine captain in the Royal Artillery Regiment, though, and as such had been sent to nose unofficially about the Arsenal and see what he could discover regarding the matter of the exploding cannons—the Royal Artillery having an interest, as Grey might suppose.

“Couldn’t be official, d’ye see,” Jones said, becoming more confidential. “The Royal Commission had already been appointed, and it’s their show, so to speak.”

Grey nodded, curious. Twelvetrees, who was a member of the Commission of Inquiry, belonged to the Royal Artillery; why ought the regiment be sending Jones to do surreptitiously what Twelvetrees was doing so overtly? Unless…unless someone suspected Twelvetrees of something?

“To whom do you report your findings?” Grey asked. Jones began again to look shifty, and a small premonitory prickle ran suddenly down Grey’s spine.

Jones’s lips worked in and out in indecision, but at last he bit the bullet and blurted, “A man named Bowles.”

As though cued by an invisible prompter, the teacup began to rattle gently in its saucer. Grey felt a monstrous sense of irritation; was he never going to be allowed to drink a full cup of tea in peace, for God’s sake? Very carefully, he set down the cup and saucer, and wiped his hands upon the skirts of his dressing gown.

“Oh, you know him, do you?” Jones’s red-rimmed eyes fixed on Grey, suddenly alert.

“I know of him.” Grey did not wish to admit to his relations with Bowles, let alone discuss them. He had met the mysterious Mr. Bowles once, and had no wish to repeat the experience.

“So you had no official standing at the laboratory?”

“No, that’s why I needed Gormley.”

Herbert Gormley had no great authority within the hierarchy of the Ordnance Office, but he had the necessary knowledge to locate the remains of the exploded cannon, and sufficient administrative skill to have them quietly brought to the guns’ graveyard near the proving grounds and sequestered there for autopsy.

“There are hundreds of broken guns there; they should have been safe!” Jones’s teeth were clenched in frustration; in hopes of preventing further damage to the man’s molars, Grey poured more brandy into his empty cup.

Jones gulped it and set down the cup, eyes watering.

“But they weren’t,” he said hoarsely. “They’re gone. There were eight of them under my investigation—all gone. But
only
those eight—the ones Gormley found for me. Everything else is still there. And now Gormley’s gone, too. You can’t tell me that’s coincidence, Major!”

Grey had no intention of doing so.

“You do not suppose that Gormless—Gormley—had anything to do with the removal of the exploded cannon?”

Jones shook his head violently.

“Not a chance. No, he’s onto me. Has to be.”

“He? Whom do you mean?”

“I don’t fucking
know
!” Jones’s hands clenched together in an unconscious pantomime of neck-wringing. “Not for sure. But I’ll get him,” he added, giving Grey a fierce look, with a glimpse of clenched, bared fang. “If he’s harmed poor little Herbert, I’ll—I’ll—”

The man would be toothless before he was forty, Grey thought.

“We will find Mr. Gormley,” he said firmly. “But wherever he is, I doubt that we can discover him before daylight. Compose yourself, Captain, if you please—and then tell me the goddamn truth about what’s going on at the Arsenal.”

The truth, once extracted and divested of its encrustations of laborious speculation and deductive dead ends, was relatively simple: Gormley and Jones had concluded, on the basis of close examination, that someone at the foundry was abstracting a good part of the copper meant to be used in the alloy for casting. Result being that while new cannon cast with this alloy looked quite as usual, the metal was more brittle than it should be, thus liable to sudden failure under sustained fire.

“Those marks you noticed on Tom Pilchard,” Jones said, describing a series of semicircles in the air with a blunt forefinger. “Those are the marks where holes left in the casting have been plugged later, then sanded flat and burnished over. You might get a hole or two in any casting—completely normal—but if the alloy’s wanting, you’ll get a lot more.”

“And a much higher chance of the metal’s fracturing where you have several holes together, such as those I saw. Quite.”

He did. He saw himself and four other men, standing no more than a foot away from a cannon riddled like a cheese with invisible holes, each charge rammed down its smoking barrel one more throw of crooked dice. Grey was beginning to have a metallic taste in the back of his mouth. Rather than lift the cup and saucer again, he simply picked up the decanter and drank from it, holding it round the neck.

“Whoever is taking the copper—they’re selling it, of course?” Copper was largely imported, and valuable.

“Yes, but I haven’t been able to trace any of it,” Jones admitted, moodily. “The damn stuff hasn’t any identifying marks. And with the Dockyards so handy…might be going anywhere. To the Dutch, the French—maybe to someone private, the East India Company perhaps—wouldn’t put it past the bastards.” He glanced at the window, where a slice of night still showed black between the heavy curtains, and sighed.

“We will find him,” Grey repeated, more gently, though he was himself by no means so sure of it. He coughed, and drank again.

“If you are correct—if copper has been abstracted—then surely whoever is responsible for the casting would know of it?”

“Howard Stoughton,” Jones said bleakly. “The Master Founder. Yes, most likely. I’ve been watching him for weeks, though, and he’s not put a foot wrong. No hint of any secret meetings with foreign agents; he scarcely leaves the foundry, and when he does, he goes home and stays there. But if it
is
the copper, and it
is
him, and Gormley’s found some proof…”

Another thought occurred to Grey, and he felt obliged to put it, despite the risk to Jones’s tooth enamel.

“We have two assumptions here, Captain, do we not? Firstly, that you and Mr. Gormley are correct in your assessment of the cause of the cannons’ failure. And secondly, that Mr. Gormley is missing because he has discovered who is responsible for the abstraction of copper from the Arsenal and been removed in consequence. But these are assumptions only, for the moment.

“Have you considered the alternative possibility,” he said, taking a firmer hold of the brandy bottle in case he should require a weapon, “that Mr. Gormley might himself have been involved in the matter?”

Jones’s inflamed eyes swiveled slowly in Grey’s direction, bulging slightly, and the muscles of his neck bunched. Before he could speak, though, a discreet cough came from the vicinity of the hearth.

“Me lord?” Tom Byrd, who had been listening raptly, poker in hand, now set it down and stepped diffidently forward.

“Yes, Tom?”

“Beg pardon, me lord. Only as I was in the Lark’s Nest Wednesday—having stopped for a bite on my way back from the Arsenal, see—and the place was a-buzz, riled like it was a hornets’ nest, rather than a lark’s. Was a press gang going through the neighborhood, they said; took up two men was regulars, and there was talk about would they maybe go and try to get them back—but you could see there wasn’t nothing in it but talk. They warned me to go careful when I left, though.”

The young valet hesitated, looking from one gentleman to another.

“I think they maybe got him, this Gormley.”

“A press gang?” Jones said, his scowl diminishing only slightly. “Well, it’s a thought, but—”

“Begging your pardon, sir, it’s maybe summat more than a thought. I saw them.”

Grey’s heart began to beat faster.

“The press gang?”

Tom turned a freckled, earnest face in his employer’s direction.

“Yes, sir. ’Twas a heavy fog comin’ in from the river, and so I heard them coming down the street afore they saw me, and ducked rabbity into an alleyway and hid behind a pile of rubbish. But they passed me by close, sir, and I did see ’em; six sailors and four men they’d seized, all roped together.”

He hesitated, frowning.

“It
was
foggy, sir. And I ain’t—haven’t—seen him before. But it was right near the Arsenal, and that what you called him—Gormless. It’s only—would he maybe be a dark, small, clever-looking cove, with a pretty face like a girl’s and dressed like a clerk?”

“He would,” Grey said, ignoring Jones, who had made a sound like a stuck pig. “Could you see anything to tell which ship they came from?”

Tom Byrd shook his head.

“No, sir. They was real sailors, though, the way they talked.”

Jones stared at him.

“Why wouldn’t they be real sailors? What do you mean, boy?”

“Mr. Byrd has a somewhat suspicious mind,” Grey intervened tactfully, seeing Tom flush with indignation. “A most valuable attribute, on occasion. On the present occasion, I presume that he means only that your initial supposition was that Mr. Gormley had been abducted by the person or persons responsible for the removal of copper from the foundry, but apparently that is not the case. By the way,” he added, struck by a thought, “have you any indication that copper
is
missing from the foundry? That would be evidence in support of your theory.”

“Yes,” Jones said, a small measure of satisfaction lightening the anxiety in his face. “We have got that, by God. When I reported our suspicions about the copper, Mr. Bowles undertook to introduce another of his subordinates, a man named Stapleton, into the foundry in the capacity of clerk and set him to inspect the accounts and inventory on the quiet. A good man, Stapleton,” he added with approval. “Got the information in less than a week.”

“Splendid,” Grey said, and took a searingly large swallow of brandy. The hairs rose on his body at the mention of Neil Stapleton. Neil of the hot blue eyes…and even more incendiary attributes. Known to his intimates—if not necessarily his friends—as Neil the Cunt.