Page 60 of Who Cries for the Lost

He could see the pulse that beat at the base of her long white throat. “I care.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

“I can’t.”

“Bloody hell,” he swore, and turned toward the passage again.

He was halfway out the front door when she said, “Bow Street identified the body of the young man pulled from the river. Did you know?”

He looked back at her. “No. Who is he?”

“Some lord’s cousin. He worked at the Foreign Office.”

“His name was Hamilton Evans,” said Lovejoy when Sebastian drove up to Bloomsbury to see him.

He’d found the magistrate seated in his parlor with a cup of tea on the table beside him and some improving tome open on his lap. But he readily set aside his book at Sebastian’s entrance. “The kinship with Lord Oakley is somewhat distant—second cousin once or twice removed, or some such thing. But his parents died in India when he was a young lad, and Oakley stepped in to pay his school fees, then secured him a position at the Foreign Office when he came down from Cambridge.”

“How did you manage to identify him?”

“His tailor. The young man was supposed to be on his way down to Kent to stay with friends, which is why it was several days before anyone realized he was missing. But there is no doubt about the identification. Seems Evans broke his left forearm as a child and it healed a bit crooked. Paul Gibson had noted it in the report on his postmortem examination.”

Sebastian found himself wondering if the break was actually discovered by Gibson or by Alexi Sauvage, although he kept the thought to himself. “His association with the Foreign Office is disturbing.”

“It is, rather. Are you quite certain I can’t offer you a cup of tea?”

“Thank you, but no,” said Sebastian, going to stand at the window, his gaze thoughtful as he stared at the gray clouds beginning to gather overhead. After a moment, he said, “It could be irrelevant, but there’s a reverend by the name of Sinclair Palmer it might be worth having the constables look into. He has the living up at Marylebone.”

“We can do that. Incidentally,” said Lovejoy, taking off his spectacles and rubbing his eyes with a splayed thumb and forefinger, “we located that woman you were inquiring about.”

Sebastian turned. “Phoebe Cox? So she is in prison?”

Lovejoy nodded. “Her landlady reported her for disposing of her child, but it seems there is more to the story. According to the landlady, Phoebe had an emotional encounter last week with a man she kept calling ‘Mr. Sedgewick.’ ”

“When was this?”

“Saturday afternoon. The landlady claims to have heard her threaten to kill not only Sedgewick but her baby and herself, as well.”

Sebastian drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “She told me the babe starved to death. What did she do? Smother it?”

“No one knows; it’s disappeared.” Lovejoy let out his breath in a long, sad sigh of resignation. “In all likelihood she dropped it in the river or down a privy somewhere. It happens all the time, I’m afraid.”

“What prison is she in?”

“Coldbath Fields.”

Coldbath Fields Prison lay in Clerkenwell, on the north side of London. It was a miserable place, built back in the seventeenth century, freezing in winter and stifling and airless in summer, with cramped, overcrowded cells that were prone to flooding when it rained. Its prisoners were fed a meager ration of stinking water and stale bread and beaten with sticks or knotted ropes if they dared complain. Its death rate was shocking even by the dismal standards of London’s other prisons.

A beefy, unshaven gaoler with massive hamlike arms and legs, a bald head, and a mouthful of rotten teeth escorted Sebastian to a room with bare stone walls, a high barred window, several crude wooden benches, and nothing else. He waited there for some time, the cold and misery of the place seeping into his bones as he breathed through his mouth in a futile attempt to keep from smelling the reek of overflowing slop buckets, unwashed bodies, damp, and decay. He was beginning to wonder if the gaoler had forgotten him when he heard footsteps coming back and the tearful, pleading voice of a woman.

“Where are you taking me? What have I done? Oh, please, why won’t you tell me?”

Sebastian could see her now, one thin arm held fast in the gaoler’s meaty fist. She looked as if at some point she had fallen—or been pushed—into mud and been unable to clean herself up: Her ragged dress was torn and stained, her cheap shoes gone, her hair matted and filthy, and her face streaked with dirt. She had her head bowed, her stringy hair hanging over her face as the gaoler shoved her into the room and then let her go so fast she stumbled and almost fell.

“Git in there,” he told her roughly. “And mind you show his lordship the proper respect, ye hear?”

“That will be all for now, thank you,” Sebastian told the man.

Phoebe had been standing with her shoulders slumped, her gaze fixed on the stone floor. But at the sound of Sebastian’s voice, her head snapped up, her eyes widening with what looked like fear.

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