Page 25 of What Cannot Be Said

“But Gilly told you afterward what they talked about?”

“Well, Lady McInnis herself told me she wanted to ask Gilly about doing the interview. And afterward, Gilly said as how she was fine with that.”

“Did she say anything else about their meeting?”

“Well, let’s see... I know Lady McInnis asked Gilly how she was getting on. She was like that, you know. She was such a fine, grand lady, and yet she somehow made Gilly feel that she was special, if you know what I mean?”

“I think I do, yes,” said Sebastian, trying not to watch the men from the deadhouse lift the shell to their shoulders.

“There was one other thing,” said Mrs.Monroe suddenly, her fist tightening around Sebastian’s handkerchief. “I don’t recall precisely how it came up, but I remember Lady McInnis saying something about how she was going to take her daughters and their cousins to Richmond Park on Sunday. Gilly said it sounded like a wonderful place, and I told her I’d see if I could get my brother Ned to drive us out there one day in his gig.”

The woman’s use of the word “daughters,” plural, caught Sebastian’s attention. If Laura McInnis had been originally intending to take both Emma and her younger sister, Thisbe, on the picnic with their cousins, then why had Thisbe stayed home? Because she was ill? No one had ever said.

“Was there anyone else in the shop at the time who might have overheard the conversation?”

“Not so’s I recall, my lord. But there might have been.”

“Could Gilly have told someone about it?”

“Well, I suppose she could’ve, my lord, but not that I know of.” Her brows drew together in an uneasy frown. “You’re thinking that’s why Gilly was killed, my lord? That it’s got something to do with what happened out at Richmond Park yesterday?”

“It might not,” said Sebastian.

But he wasn’t sure he believed it.

Chapter 16

Tuesday, 25 July

Early the next morning, Sebastian entered a mean, decaying court off St. Martin’s Lane to find three filthy, ragged, barefoot little boys loading piles of empty soot sacks, cloths, brushes, and poles into their master’s handcart.

“If’n you pack of lazy thatch-gallows don’t want t’ feel the weight of me hand on the back of yer heads, you’ll step on it,” said the chimney sweep, still buttoning his rough coat against the morning chill as he came through an open doorway in one corner of the court. He was a short, thickset man with a bony face, protruding ears, and skin so coated with soot and grime as to appear black. At the sight of Sebastian he drew up sharp, his nostrils flaring on a quickly indrawn breath.

“You’re Hiram Dobbs?” said Sebastian.

“Aye,” said the sweep warily. “Wot you want wit me?”

“I understand you knew Lady McInnis.”

“Knew her?” Dobbs gave a harsh, ringing laugh. “That’s rich. And how would the likes o’ me come t’ know a fine lady like herself?”

“Oh, you knew her, all right. You swept the chimneys of her town house in Grosvenor Square. And when she saw you lighting a fire under the feet of one of your apprentices to force him up a chimney and realized how bruised and battered he was, she tried to have the child taken away from you.”

Dobbs’s lips twisted into a sneer. “You think she’s the first o’ her kind I’ve had to deal with?” He turned his head to spit a mouthful of phlegm at a rat creeping through the rubbish at their feet. “They’re all the same, them softhearted, sentimental ladies, bleating endlessly about the ‘poor, poor little climbing boys.’ ” As he said it, his voice rose in a vicious parody of a gentlewoman’s tones, then dropped again. “But I’ll tell you a secret: Them kind, they’re always the first to call us when the soot builds up in their flues and their fireplaces start fillin’ their rooms with smoke and nasty fumes. Once they start worryin’ their chimneys might catch fire and burn down their houses, it’s amazin’ how somehow they no longer give a tinker’s damn about the poor climbing boys. Not then. They’re all the same.”

Sebastian glanced at the three children, who now stood shivering, silent, and watchful beside their master’s cart, their faces blank with numb acceptance, their eyes red and swollen, and every visible inch of their skin black with soot. In age, they probably ranged from five or six to nine or ten. They didn’t live long, climbing boys. If they weren’t burned alive in a chimney fire, they often fell to their deaths or got stuck in a narrow flue and suffocated, or succumbed to a lung infection caused by constantly inhaling soot. Those who didn’t die often went blind thanks to their endlessly inflamed eyes. And if by chance they survived to reach puberty, they invariably fell victim to what they called “soot warts,” a cancer that began by eating at their genitals before spreading out to consume their entire deformed, wasted bodies.

It was one of the reasons climbing boys and girls were always young—that, and because they needed to be small to fit through the labyrinth flues of London’s chimneys, which were often as narrow as nine by nine inches. The boys climbed the flues by shimmying up like caterpillars, using their backs and knees and elbows. To toughen up the skin on a new boy’s knees and elbows, the sweeps would rub brine into the child’s flesh every night with a brush until it ceased to bleed and hardened up.

“They’re all the same,” Dobbs muttered again.

Sebastian set his jaw against the upswelling of rage that threatened to consume him. “Not quite all. Lady McInnis tried to get your boys taken away from you. That’s when you started harassing her and threatening her—threatening to make her ‘regret it’, was one of the expressions I believe you used. And threatening to make her pay.”

An angry light blazed in the man’s beady gray eyes, and Sebastian noticed the three boys take a wary step back. “Jist givin’ her her own back again, I was. Figured she deserved it. But I didn’t do her no real harm. And as God is me witness, I didn’t kill her.”

The phrase struck Sebastian as both telling and chilling, given the way this murderer liked to pose his victims’ bodies. He said, “Do I take it you’re a religious man, Mr.Dobbs?”

“ ’Course I am. Me parents raised me to fear the Lord and keep to His path. As the Bible says, ‘Gather the people together so’s they can learn to fear me all the days of their lives, and teach their children, too.’ ”

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