Elyse Mady (16 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Robert spent three days in the stocks for his impertinence in the keeper’s home.

By the third day, he’d barely cared that he was the recipient of the prisoners’ abusive scorn as he’d stood his punishment. His arms had burned unceasingly and his neck, bent at an unnatural angle to fit between the heavy boards, spasmed, sending pain throughout his entire body. But after a day or so, the numbness had set in and it was only when he moved that the agonizing discomfort had been renewed.

He had tried to move as little as possible but sometimes, when exhaustion had finally overcome him, he would nod off, only to wake in agony.

At last, the turnkeys had freed him. He staggered down the stone steps, his swollen feet barely supporting him. Dizzy, his hands and feet tingling with the renewed movement, he sank down only to be roused by his name.

“We meet at last, Mr. Aspinall.”

The gentleman before him carried a small satchel and wore a surprisingly well-cut suit. Robert knew his trade and recognised the consummate skill with which it had been made and the equally careful skill which disguised its expense: the sober fabric, the unadorned waistcoat.

“Mr. Wooley?” The man’s face swum before him, wavering in front of his weary eyes.

All of his lawyers, real and imaginary, looked at him with distaste. “The very same,” he acknowledged. He held out his hand and Robert grasped it. He was hauled to his feet ignominiously. “Let us take a turn together, and we will begin to discuss your case.”

“Might I not rest? We could talk as well near the benches.”

Wooley shook his head. “What we are to discuss is for your ears alone. Besides, antagonizing the guards will not help your case, Mr. Aspinall. Mr. Cook tells me you were brawling.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Wooley sighed. “Mr. Aspinall, you are setting a poor example. Your sister will not be pleased if she has retained me to your defence for naught.”

“She came to see you?” The news surprised him. “She has retained you?” Although she had told him of her plans, he had not expected her to still act on his behalf. Their schism had been severe.

“Yes, Mr. Aspinall. Your sister has hired me,” Wooley said. “Did you know she was living in Bruton Street? Seems a prosperous address for one whose brother has been taken up. Perhaps your fortunes are changing for the better. If she can afford such accommodations, I am sure she will have no problem paying my fees.” He smiled and Robert wondered why the sight of his solicitor’s affable face discomfited him.

“I will not discuss my sister’s living arrangements with all and sundry,” he stated. “I must think of her reputation, even if she will not.”

“I am your solicitor,” Wooley argued. “I am bound by my oath not to reveal anything you might tell me but to hold it in greatest confidence. Miss Aspinall is living in Bruton Street. Do you know with whom?”

Robert’s head throbbed. It was difficult to think clearly. “She is living with a man.”

“A man? Indeed. I must say I had not thought it of her. She seemed a quiet sort, not at all the kind of young lady who would attract such unwholesome attention.” Wooley looked at him with what Robert could only describe as a speculative gleam in his eye. “Does this man have a name?”

“I thought you wanted to discuss my case.”

Wooley frowned. “Everything may be relevant. What is his name?”

“Ramsay. Thomas Ramsay.”

The lawyer’s good humour was instantly restored. He handed Robert a tarnished flask. He drank greedily, as he shuffled alongside Wooley. “I daresay the man is wealthy. It is the most genteel facades that hide the greatest dissipation.”

“Wealthy enough. Son of a baronet.” Robert wiped his sleeve across his face and handed the drained flask back to its owner.

“A baronet?” Calculating interest spread across Wooley’s face as he tucked it back beneath his coat. “Does he pay your way here?”

“Yes.” Robert snapped the word out sharply. Now that his punishment was concluded, he’d be moving to the master’s side today. Ramsay’s money made that, and so much more, possible. He hated it. Every morsel he choked down tasted like ash.

Wooley raised a brow at the harsh tone. Then his face lightened with comprehension. “Ah, of course. Pride, Mr. Aspinall, it is a burden I myself labour under. Many a time I have thought my course would be easier if only my pride would not prevent me from stooping to those evils which most men accept as inevitable. Do you not agree?”

Robert thought of the basket that George had delivered without fail every day. Of the laundered shirts and thick bedding that were his portion. Yet it galled him to think that they had been purchased through his sister’s acquiescence. Ramsay had dishonoured her, but Hester seemed blind to the risk or the shame of her behaviour. “You said that everything is relevant. Does that mean you have news? What progress have you to report?”

“Good progress, although everything does take time. The sheriff has come to believe there might be more men who have slipped through the net. How many men were there, with you, the night of the raid?”

Robert shook his head. “I don’t know. It was all confusion and noise—”

“Before. How many men were there before the raid? Or on other occasions? Surely you had an opportunity to observe them then?”

Something about this line of questioning bothered Robert. “I do not understand the point of your questions, Mr. Wooley.”

“The point is that it may be to your benefit if you can provide the Secretary of States with names.”

“Give evidence?”

Wooley tutted. “In open court? Of course not. Doing so would be disastrous. As good as admitting your guilt. But offering assistance to the authorities as they pursue dangerous deviants?” The solicitor smiled again, peering down at him as though they were in the midst of a terribly humorous conversation. “That is another matter entirely.”

Robert’s head throbbed. “Names were not exchanged. I do not know any of the men who frequented the Swan. It was not such a thing as mattered.” He thought of the rotund grocer from Essex, who’d travelled thirty miles to join in the festivities. He’d called himself Miss Sweet Lips. How hard would it be for the police to distinguish his real identity? Or any of the other men who’d arrived in their carriages, their crests disguised, their servants’ livery removed. Just a simple thing to let slip…

“Do not be a fool.” Wooley stooped down before him and frowned, as though Robert’s hesitation angered him. “You need only ask yourself how a man of fortune and fashion came to such a house. I, therefore, shall repeat the question. What possible business could a man of rank or respectable merchant or clergyman or any other man in the character of a gentleman, have for such frequent attendance at a low, dirty public house in the filthy avenues of Clare Market? Their business is undoubted. All that remains to be discovered then is how much they will advance in the interests of keeping their visits there unknown.”

Robert was in trouble enough with the law. All he would need was for one of the men to cry out a prosecution against him and he’d be shipped to New Holland to live out his natural days. “I will not extort—”

“Extortion? You misapprehend me entirely. Extortion is against the law. We are merely applying strong means against an otherwise intractable problem.”

“It does not sound that to me.”

Wooley’s eyes were implacable. “And it does not sound to me as though you have any idea of the obstacles you are against.” He bared his teeth in a strange rictus of a smile. He scrabbled in his satchel for a moment and emerged with a small roll of paper and a stoppered bottle of ink. “I will leave you to meditate on the matter. I am sure, when you are recovered from your punishment, that you will see the strategy you must employ if you are to overcome your present difficulties. Write down the names and descriptions of all those you met at the White Swan. When we meet next, I will collect it from you.”

Robert watched him go with a feeling of deep foreboding. Wooley’s behaviour struck him as peculiar. Yet to whom else could he turn? He knew no other lawyer, and from Wooley’s own admission, they had already paid him a sizeable sum. Robert licked at his lips, peeling the dead skin from them as he worried them with his teeth.

“Is that your lawyer?” Timothy crouched down beside him, offering up a tankard of ale identical to his own.

Robert sighed, setting the paper aside, and took the drink. The bitter taste of rancid hops filled his mouth on the first sip but he was parched. The water from Wooley’s flask had only been enough to whet his thirst, not quench it. “Yes, he is.”

“A canny fellow, but I have to say I wouldn’t trust him.”

“It is no matter to you whether you trust him or not. He is not your solicitor.”

“No. A fact for which I am suddenly glad, having seen him at work here today. He attended Cook whilst the latter met with Alderman Plomer.” Timothy seemed remarkably well-informed of the Vere Street men’s actions inside the prison walls. He must have seen the look of doubt on Robert’s face. “Cook hopes to barter his freedom in exchange for delivering the names of those clients who have the most to lose. Men with connections. Men whose names have thus far been excluded from the investigation by virtue of those connections.”

Timothy’s report concurred exactly with the scheme Wooley had proposed to Robert. It could hardly be coincidence. Worry sat heavy on his shoulders. “Who told you this? Cook?”

“Your publican friend enjoys a stage. He’s proclaimed to all and sundry the heights of his knowledge. Claims to have a list of names.” He looked at the blank paper sitting between them. “Mr. Wooley was there, no doubt to encourage an abatement of the charges in return for Mr. Cook turning evidence,” Timothy said, pointing up towards Newman’s home at the far side of the yard. “I saw Wooley being led through the yard by Suter himself, Cook trailing after like a dog on a lead, day before last whilst you were otherwise detained. If I were in your shoes, I do not think I would advertise my connection to such a man very loudly.”

Robert’s uneasiness increased but he tried to dismiss it. “I can hardly fault a man for trying to secure his release,” he said bitterly. “I know for a fact that there were men detained with me who did not face the magistrate’s wrath. Their speedy exoneration was doubtless facilitated by an exchange of coin. If they can be brought to justice—”

“Justice?” Timothy gave a hard bark of laughter. “It’s not justice that’s done between these walls or the walls of a courthouse, either. Where would you get a mad idea like that?”

“An injustice then. You may call it what you will but I judge it best that I continue with my lawyer. After all, who else is to come to my aid? My sister’s too busy making doe eyes at a man who is at this moment leading her down the garden path.”

“Your judgment is impaired.”

“Impaired?”

Timothy started to rub Robert’s swollen feet. There was nothing alluring about his touch. Without asking permission, he massaged Robert’s legs and ankles briskly. He seemed absorbed in the task until he spoke again. “You know you’re full of shit, don’t you? You were found in a molly house yet your sister—the one you can’t bear to speak of—still arranges for a basket to be sent you. I’ve seen the servant who brings it. Seems an odd sort of thing for a woman who’s forsaken you to do.”

Robert’s stomach clenched. George had indeed brought him food every day. He’d wanted to refuse the basket the first day, unwilling to accept charity beyond the bed and garnish the merchant was providing. But the footman had come regardless. Robert knew by what means his sister had persuaded Ramsay to sustain him and the reality still angered him beyond reason.

“It’s his servant. She’s living with him.”

“Has to live somewhere,” Timothy replied. “I know a half dozen who live as man and wife without the benefit of clergy. Would you condemn them out of hand too?”

“I don’t care for your half dozen. What are they to me? Hester is my sister. She should not be with him.”

“Then with who?”

He remembered how Ramsay had looked at her—the caress of his eyes that had revealed the truth of their relationship. He’d tried to hide it, but Robert had known as soon as he’d seen them, that something had altered in their relationship.

“Anyone but him.” Anyone else. Anyone who wouldn’t look at Hester with those soft, tender eyes. Anyone who wouldn’t watch his sister’s every movement, or follow her about the room or smile at her as though she were a precious thing. Anyone who didn’t fill his heart with jealousy and envy and loathing.

“What do you want from me?” His gut still churning, Robert’s words were harsher than he intended but the ostler didn’t seemed off-put.

“I know what I want from you,” Timothy said, and it took all of Robert’s energies not to ask what those things were. Was he talking of their surreptitious kiss? Of a chance encounter? The need to know burned inside him. If he guessed any of Robert’s torments, Timothy didn’t reveal it. “The question should be what do you want for yourself?”

He spoke in a low voice that delivered the question to Robert’s ears alone. Timothy’s grey eyes were steady, watching Robert with a frank interest that discomfited him. He didn’t avoid his gaze or avert his regard. He hadn’t whispered or used any crude language to invite a come on. He simply asked what Robert wanted for himself and it set him on fire.

Robert had never been looked at thus, at least not by another man. His encounters were always anonymous, snatched in a dark privy or against an alley wall. Even at the Swan, the men he had lain with had rarely shared their true identities. It was all a fantastical creation, rouge and sweat and Kitty Cambric and Miss Selina and Black-eyed Leonora disguising their true selves in favour of pleasure.

Timothy didn’t simper or flirt, he simply watched him until Robert shifted uneasily. He tried to move away, but Timothy’s grip on his leg was resolute and he was so weak from his punishment that he could not extricate himself.

“I want to be free.”

Timothy smiled, his thin face lightening with humour. He was an attractive man, Robert realized, with a strong, determined countenance. Deep groves gouged his cheeks, a signal that he smiled often, his good humour worn into his face. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, of course, or softly effeminate like Amos and Philip Hett, but he had an appeal that Robert found hard to deny.