He knocked on the first door to his right and waited, still vaguely smiling.
No one answered.
Tipping back his head, he peered up at the cracked, grimy windows of the overhanging second story. He could feel the inhabitants inside, hear their soft whispers and furtive movements. But the door remained closed.
He moved on to the next house and rapped loudly on the worn, weathered door.
Silence.
“Hey!” he hollered. “Anybody home?”
Farther down the lane, a door opened and an old man came out leaning on a cane, a cap pulled low over his ears and a tattered scarf wrapped thick about his neck.
“Excuse me,” called Silas Nelson, hurrying toward him. “Can I talk to you?”
The man glanced once at Sebastian, then turned to walk in the opposite direction, his cane gripped tightly in his fist.
“Hey! I’m lookin’ for Mr. Stanley Preston; you know him?”
The man kept walking.
Silas Nelson drew up, his shoulders slumping more than ever. “Why won’t anybody talk to me?” he asked of the now empty street. Even the children had disappeared.
“Who’re you?” demanded a voice behind him.
Sebastian spun around.
A woman stood in the center of the muddy, refuse-strewn lane, her arms crossed at her chest, her head thrown back as she stared at him with narrowed, startlingly turquoise eyes. She looked to be somewhere in her thirties and was stunningly beautiful, with smooth café au lait skin and rich dark hair that peeked from beneath the red kerchief she wore around her head. She was built tall and slender, with a graceful long neck and high cheekbones and full lips.
“You deaf or somethin’?” she asked when he didn’t answer. “I said, who are you?”
“Silas Nelson, ma’am,” said Sebastian, snatching off his moth-eaten cap and executing a jerky bow.
The woman sniffed. “Ne’er seen you before. What you doin’ here?”
“Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but I’m lookin’ for Mr. Preston-Mr. Stanley Preston. Would you know him, by chance?”
“Ain’t no one by that name lives round ’ere.”
“I’m told he was here last Sunday.”
“Who told you that?”
It had occurred to Sebastian that Lovejoy’s constable had probably agitated the neighborhood to the extent that any stranger suddenly appearing in their midst that day would be immediately suspect. So he twisted his cap in his hands and said, “Constable, ma’am. Well, I s’pose I should say, the innkeeper of the Red Fox, what had it from the constable. That’s where I’m stayin’, you see-at the Red Fox, on Fish Street Hill. When the innkeeper heard I’d come t’ town lookin’ for Mr. Preston, he said, ‘That’s right queer, for we had a constable here just this mornin’ askin’ about him. Said he’d been in Bucket Lane.’” Sebastian’s Silas Nelson leaned forward eagerly. “Have you seen him, then? Oh, please say you have.”
Her expression turned from one of suspicion to mild disgust. “Who are you?”
“I’m Silas Nelson, ma’am.”
“You already told me that. What I mean is, where you come from? What you want with Preston?”
“I’m from Dymchurch, ma’am, down in Kent. I come up to London because my sister’s been takin’ care of me. But she done gone and died, and now what’m I to do? I remembered her husband had some dealin’s once with Mr. Preston, so I come to town, hopin’ maybe he could find somethin’ for me to do. I hear he’s powerful rich. Only, I don’t know his direction and London is ever so big. I’d no notion; it’s nothing like Dymchurch, you know. I was puzzlin’ on how to even begin lookin’ for him when the innkeeper tells me about Bucket Lane.” Sebastian gave a broad grin. “So here I am.”
“You’re an idiot.” It was said more as a statement of fact than as an insult.
Sebastian widened his grin. “Yes, ma’am.”
She pushed out her breath between her teeth and shook her head. “Your Mr. Preston don’t live ’ere. He lives in a grand house out Knightsbridge way. Or I suppose I should say, he did. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Sebastian let his face fall ludicrously.
“That’s right.”
“But. . what’m I to do?”
“Go back to Kent?” she suggested.
“But. . you did know Mr. Preston, yes?”
She didn’t deny it, but simply stared at him, waiting for him to finish.
He leaned forward. “Maybe. . maybe you know somebody could find me work? I may not be smart, but I am strong. Sorta.”
“Sorry.” She threw an expressive glace at the surrounding squalor. “Take a look around. People here have a hard enough time feedin’ themselves, let alone findin’ work for others. And you’re wrong; I didn’t know Preston.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “The only people like me that man ever knew was workin’ in his sugarcane fields and callin’ him massa.”
Sebastian looked confused. “Ma’am?”
“Never mind.” She jerked her head toward the passage leading back to Fish Street Hill. “Just. . get out of here before somethin’ happens to you. This ain’t no place for the likes of you.”
“Ma’am?”
“You heard me. Take yourself off. Now.”
Sebastian pulled his cap down on his head with both hands and allowed his whole being to sag with dejection and despair as he turned back toward Fish Street Hill.
He paused at the dark mouth of the passage to look back.
She still stood in the middle of the muddy lane, her arms crossed at her chest, her gaze narrowed as she watched him. Although whether she watched to keep him from harm or to make certain he actually did leave, he couldn’t have said.
Sebastian settled against the worn squabs of the hackney carrying him back to Brook Street, his gaze on the tumbledown buildings and ragged, desperate people that flashed past on the far side of the carriage window. The farther west they traveled, the finer the shops and houses became, the wider and better paved the streets, the better dressed-and better fed-the people, until it seemed to him that he might have entered a different land.
Their society was one of infinitesimally exact gradations, with each individual acutely aware of his or her own place in relation to all others. Grand nobles such as Sebastian’s aunt Henrietta were casually contemptuous of mere landed gentry such as Stanley Preston. Yet Preston had considered himself fully justified in despising-and protecting his daughter from-the likes of Captain Hugh Wyeth, who might be gently born but was nevertheless woefully impoverished.
Intelligence, moral fiber, education, talent-all counted for little without birth and wealth. What mattered in their world was a carefully calibrated interplay of those two vital attributes. It was a delicate equation that would no doubt baffle an outsider, but never those who lived within it, who grew up instinctively attuned to the implications of their subtlest gradations.
And then there were those without either birth or land, those engaged in that shameful thing called trade. Make enough money and a man could buy an estate and in a few short generations convince his peers to forget his plebian origins, his ties to that great horde who actually worked for a living. Yet even the common multitude had their own distinct gradations in rank. Merchants, craftsmen, innkeepers, laborers, costermongers, prostitutes-all knew their exact place in society and considered themselves superior to those ranked below them. Even the thieves had their elites and their dregs, with highwaymen looking down on the housebreakers, who in turn despised the mere cutpurses and pickpockets.
By all reports, Stanley Preston had been both painfully aware and deeply resentful of what he saw as his own inadequate position in the grand scheme of things. Desperate to claw his way higher up the social ladder, he had married a lord’s daughter and fought hard to secure advantageous marriages for his children, all the while surrounding himself with artifacts of the great nobles and kings and queens of the past. And yet fewer than twelve hours before someone cut off his head and set it up on the parapet of Bloody Bridge, he’d traveled across London to a mean lane off Fish Street Hill to interact in some unknown way with a tall, dusky-skinned woman with turquoise eyes who despised him.