The Devil's Breath (10 page)

G
azing into the fire at Boughton Hall later that evening, Thomas imagined he saw the Reverend George Lightfoot. Flames licked at his anguished face, and his mouth was wide open in a scream. He’d seen that tormented expression so many times after a bereavement and yet never on a person of such great faith. Such people had always displayed an inner calm, their belief in God and the promise of eternal life appearing to offer them comfort. The Reverend Lightfoot’s despair at the loss of his wife was so tangible that he seemed beyond consolation.

Sitting in the drawing room, thoughtfully cradling the large glass of brandy that Howard had poured for him, Thomas felt a deep sense of foreboding. Lydia sat on the opposite side of the fireplace, working on some embroidery. The traumatic events of the afternoon meant neither of them was in a mood for light conversation, yet they could not bear the thought of being alone. They took mutual solace from each other.

Over the years, Thomas had tried to desensitize himself to death. He had seen so much of it and in so many guises: in disease and in injury, in suicide and even in murder, and yet dealing with it still affected him. He might feel sadness, or sorrow, or sometimes, when the victim’s pain was unbearable, relief, but more often he felt a sense of inadequacy. Such feelings were certainly to the fore that evening as his mind replayed the terrified expressions on the faces of both Mistress Lightfoot and Amos Kidd. What agonies must they both have suffered as the acid gnawed away at the lining of their lungs? He gulped down his brandy and shuddered as he felt the liquid burn his own throat.

Glancing over at Lydia, he could see she had retreated into her own world again, as she so often did. The difference now was that he could read her thoughts. Now he knew why, at times, she seemed so melancholy. Now he understood why her eyes would sometimes mist at the sight of a babe or a young child at play. She was in mourning for lost memories, lost embraces, lost time that should have been spent with her son.

“I have not forgotten our search,” he said suddenly, his gaze fixed on her face.

She looked up from her sewing, paused, then smiled wistfully. “I know you would not do that,” she replied softly.

“ ’Twould take us half a day to reach Oxford in this fog, but I’ve heard it is clear a little way south of the city.” His voice carried a timbre of hope. Lydia nodded, but said no more, returning to the gauze wrap she was embroidering.

Left to his own thoughts once more, Thomas turned to Kidd’s wife and the memory of her standing frightened and helpless as she watched her husband in his death throes. What would become of her?

“Did Kidd have any children?” he asked a few moments later.

Lydia put down her needle and thread. “No. I don’t believe he and his wife could,” she replied thoughtfully. “He used to say his roses were his children.”

“And what of his wife?” he asked. “Will she have to leave the cottage?”

A look of disapproval crossed Lydia’s face. “Michael would have made her go, but I will not,” she said firmly. “I shall not be in the business of turning widows out of their homes.”

Thomas was assured. “If only all landowners thought like you, there would be fewer souls in the workhouses.”

He rose and walked over to the sideboard to help himself to another glass of brandy from the decanter. On his way back he walked over to Lydia and laid his palm gently on her shoulder. She put her own hand on top of his and tilted her head toward him, so that he kissed the top of her hair gently.

Their moment of intimacy was short-lived. Howard’s entrance into the room brought them both back to the present. “I have a message for Dr. Silkstone,” he announced formally, holding a silver tray on which lay a letter. He proffered it to Thomas, who glanced at it quickly.

“That will be all, Howard,” he said, dismissing the butler and opening the letter.

Lydia was looking at him anxiously. “Not more bad news?”

Thomas shook his head. “No. It is more positive,” he replied. Earlier that afternoon, shortly after Kidd’s death, Thomas had decided that in order to find out exactly how the noxious fog was killing its victims, he needed to carry out a postmortem on the gardener. He had therefore dispatched a messenger to Oxford with a letter to the coroner, Sir Theodisius Pettigrew. The reply had been immediately forthcoming. Permission was granted.

“Tomorrow I shall be examining Amos Kidd’s body,” he told her. “It may well hold the key to so many questions about this fog.”

 

The cloud of poison had not yet reached London, but the usual pall of foundry smoke combined with the detritus of humans and animals living cheek by jowl still hung over the capital. The miasma of rotting meat and human waste stewed gently in the summer heat, causing many to gag and retch as they ventured out.

The notary found the whole ambience most unpleasant. His stomach was not used to being assailed in this vile way and he purchased a nosegay from a street seller in an attempt to ward off the stink. He was on his way to an address in the west of the capital, in Seymour Street. It was not a bad area, not for London at any rate. There were many tall, elegant town houses here, newly built in the last decade he would guess. They stood in neat rows with freshly painted doors and windows. The mud on the roads had been hard-baked by several days of sun, making it easier underfoot.

He stopped at a house that looked exactly the same as every other house in the street, tall and thin with long casements. He mounted the steps up to the door and pulled the bell. A neat-looking, plump-faced woman answered, her cap completely obscuring any hair she might have had. Her apron was starched and pristine and she had a matronly air of authority about her that said she would not stand any nonsense.

“Good day to you, ma’am,” greeted the notary, raising his tricorn.

“Good day, sir,” she replied guardedly.

“I was hoping you could help me,” he began, and he produced a sheet of paper and showed it to her. “I am at the right place?”

“Yes, sir, you are,” she confirmed.

“Good,” nodded the notary. “Then this must be the former abode of the Right Honorable Francis Crick.”

For a moment the woman froze, then grabbed the door and started to shut it. “You have the wrong house, sir,” she cried. But the notary was too quick for her and put his foot over the threshold, jamming the door open. He fixed her in the eye and saw that she was afraid. “I want no trouble, sir. I keep a clean house.”

The notary could tell by her demeanor she was a simple woman who, through no fault of her own, had happened to take a lodger who turned out to be a murderer. Of course at the time she had no way of knowing his vile inclinations. Francis Crick had presented himself as a student of anatomy at St. George’s Hospital, not half a mile away. He seemed a sensible, clean young man of noble birth. He always paid his rent on time and kept civil hours, but, according to his landlady, he had a sorry tale to tell.

“He was a widower, sir,” recalled the woman, seated in her spotless parlor. “Lost his young wife in childbirth.” She had relented and let the notary into her home. She had even offered him tea, although he declined. “That was why ’twas such a shock when the constables knocked on my door one day and told me Mr. Crick was to be hanged at Tyburn the next day.” She slapped her palms on her skirts. “Near fainted away with the shock of it, I did,” she huffed.

The notary listened sympathetically. “I can imagine,” he said. Yet while he was grateful that she had recounted her own feelings of disbelief and outrage, the information that he really sought had not been forthcoming, so he tried a different tack.

“You said that Mr. Crick was a widower,” he began. “But did you ever see him with anyone else? A child, perhaps?”

The landlady’s face immediately creased into a frown. “Yes, indeed, sir,” she said, nodding her head. “His son looked just like him, he did. Came to visit with his nursemaid on the floor above for a few days. So clean they were.” She pointed upward with her plump finger.

The notary leaned forward, his eyes wide. “And do you know what happened to them?”

The landlady’s back stiffened. “I couldn’t have them staying here no more after that business.” She drew her finger across her throat to signify a noose. “I keep a clean house, I do.” She clasped her hands on her lap.

“Do you know where they went?” The notary tried to hide his disappointment.

The woman shook her head slowly, as if she was not entirely certain of her answer.

“There is no more you can tell me?” He knew he was onto something. Delving into his topcoat pocket, he produced his purse and laid it on the little side table next to him. The dame’s eyes darted to the bag.

“Mr. Crick did leave something in his room.” The landlady had suddenly remembered the small packet she had found in a drawer in the dead man’s desk. There had been a few guineas inside and she had taken the liberty of pocketing them, as down payment, or surety against future rent owed, she had told herself. There had been a short note, too. It mentioned words like “upkeep” and “provision” and “allowance,” but she had destroyed it, of course. She did not want to incriminate herself, did not want to be accused of pilfering from her lodger. So she put the money in the ginger jar in her parlor. After all, she knew there was no possibility of the young man’s return.

“I was checking that Maddie, she’s my maid, had cleaned the room to my standards,” she told him, “when I came across a paper packet Mr. Crick had left.” She rose slowly, her knees creaking as she did so, and walked over to the bureau in the corner of the room. “Here it is,” she said, handing it to the notary. On it were written the words:
Miss Agnes Appleton, St. Giles, London
. Inside it was empty.

The notary eyed her knowingly and saw that she seemed flustered as her gaze slid away. “This is most helpful, madam. Most helpful indeed,” he said.

Opening the drawstring bag he took out a guinea coin.

“For your pains,” he told her.

She thanked him and took it without hesitation. And as soon as he was gone she added it to Mr. Crick’s money in the ginger jar. With it, she told herself, she would buy a new copper and her linens would be the cleanest in all London town.

 

Back at home in her cottage, Susannah Kidd found herself alone with her memories and her guilt. The roses in the jug on the table were already wilted, their petals scattered on the table. The water was smelling rank. Amos had been a good husband. He had always provided for her; he had seldom raised a hand to her and never gone carousing in the alehouses in Brandwick. She had been a good enough wife, too. She had made his meals and kept a clean house, darned his clothes and submitted to his fancies in the marriage bed, but everything she did, she did out of duty, not out of love. And she had longed for more. There had been a few times when other men had paid her compliments and she had enjoyed the feeling that had given her. Sometimes she had even flirted with them, although she had never bedded another, not since her marriage at any rate.

The parcel lay on the table. She took out her scissors to cut the string. They reminded her of the knife-grinder, the handsome traveler who had told her she was the fairest woman in the county. She snipped the twine and unfolded the paper. Inside was Amos’s clean smock. It was the one he was wearing when he died. It had been spattered in blood. Mistress Firebrace had seen to it that it had been boiled in the copper and now it was without stain. She laid it on the table and touched the stitching, her own fine stitching, and she began to weep.

She was so lost in her own tears that she did not hear the latch lift and the cottage door open.

“Mistress Kidd,” called a voice.

She looked up to see the figure of the Reverend Lightfoot. Under his wide-brimmed hat, most of his face was swathed in a scarf.

Wiping away her tears with the back of her hand, she quickly composed herself. “Come in, please,” she said, walking over to greet him.

“I am come to offer my condolences,” he told her, unfurling his scarf. “And to talk of the funeral arrangements.”

The thought of Amos lying in the ground chilled her and she shivered, even though the air was warm. Nor was she used to company. Since her husband’s death she had not swept the floor or beaten the hearth rug, and a thin film of dust from outside had settled on what little furniture she had. She showed her visitor a chair by the cold hearth and watched him sit down.

“I’m afraid I . . .”

The vicar, his own face tired and drawn and his hair now turned almost completely silver, shook his head and waved his cane. “I need nothing, Mistress Kidd,” he assured her.

She settled herself opposite. “I am sorry for your loss, sir,” she told him, sitting stiff-backed.

“Thank you, but I share my grief with many others,” he told her brusquely. Without making eye contact, he took out a notebook and pencil from his pocket in a businesslike manner, as if he were a merchant doing a deal, or a notary taking a brief. “Will tomorrow be amenable to you?”

“Tomorrow?”

“For the burial. Bodies are turning fast in this heat. Joseph Makepeace is working flat out.”

She nodded. She had not given much thought to Amos’s interment. But there would be roses. She hoped that some of them may have survived the fog, although she could not be sure.

“Lady Lydia has kindly consented to your husband being buried on the estate, in the chapel graveyard,” he informed her. Still he did not look at her.

“That is kind.”

“Excellent. So, noon on the morrow?”

There was an awkward pause before the vicar closed his notebook with a finality that indicated his work was done. He was a busy man. He needed to move on.

Again Susannah nodded, but as she watched him gathering up his scarf and his silver-topped cane, she wondered at his manner. He rose and she followed suit, both making their way to the cottage door.