done,” he said quietly.
Jago nodded. “That case, me an’ ’is lordship here need a bit of privacy, which means we’re commandeerin’ the table. Del, you, Ned and Jasper take a look around. See if any more Shaughnessys are loiterin’ with intent. Don’t want to be caught with our pants down again, do we?”
A pointed look towards Jasper prompted a quick emptying of glasses while three pairs of eyes swivelled in Hawkwood’s direction. Del, somewhat inevitably, was the first to speak, though his face was unexpectedly serious.
“Any friend of Nathaniel’s is a friend of ours. What you did tonight … you’ll always be welcome here …” And then the irrepressible grin returned. “… Officer.”
Jago shook his head. “God save us. All right, bugger off. I’ll see you at the Ark.”
The three men turned away.
“Oi!”
They looked back.
“You can take those with you. Don’t want ’em givin’ the place a bad name.” Jago indicated the Barbars, but then turned to Hawkwood. “Unless you want a souvenir?”
The offer was tempting. They were fine weapons; man stoppers.
“They’re all yours,” Hawkwood said.
The guns were collected and the trio headed towards the exit. Jago addressed Micah: “No more excitement tonight, all right?”
Micah nodded.
Jago winked. “Best reload, though, just in case.”
Micah’s mouth twitched. He looked off as Del, Jasper and Ned left by the back stairs and then his eyes returned to Jago and he nodded once more. Returning to his table, he took his seat, moved his discarded book to one side, and began to clean the pistol.
Jago turned to Hawkwood. “He scares me sometimes, too.”
Hawkwood took a sip of brandy, savouring the taste. He suspected it was from Jago’s private stock that the landlord kept under the counter, which meant it was French, not Spanish. He wondered if Jago’s trip to the coast had anything to do with his supply routes. Best not to enquire too deeply into that.
“Right,” Jago said. “Where were we?”
Hawkwood placed his glass on the table. “There’s been a murder.”
“In this town? There’s a novelty.”
“Any other night and I’d think it was funny, too.”
“But it ain’t?”
“Not by a long shot.”
“Which’d also be funny by itself, right?”
“Not this time,” Hawkwood said. “This one’s different.”
It occurred to Hawkwood, as he stared down at the body, that the last grave he’d looked into had been his own.
That had been in a forest clearing on the far side of the world. There had been snow on the ground and frost on the trees and the chilled night air had been made rank by the sour smell of a latrine ditch because that was what lye smelled like when used to render down bodies. The bodies in question should have been his and that of Major Douglas Lawrence, courtesy of an American execution detail. In the end, it had been Hawkwood and Lawrence who’d stumbled away, leaving four dead Yankee troopers in their wake and an American army in hot pursuit. It was strange how things worked out and how a vivid memory could be triggered by the sight of a corpse in a pit.
This particular pit occupied the south-west corner of St George the Martyr’s burying ground. Situated in the parish of St Pancras, the burying ground was unusual in that it was nowhere near the church to which it was dedicated. That lay a third of a mile away to the south, on the other side of Queen Square; not a huge distance but markedly inconvenient when it came to conducting funeral and burial services.
Also unique was the fact that, along its northern aspect, the graveyard shared a dividing wall with a neighbouring cemetery, that of St George’s Church, Bloomsbury, which made Hawkwood wonder, in a moment of inappropriate whimsy, if any funeral processions had inadvertently found themselves on the wrong side of the wall. There were no convenient gates linking the two burial grounds, meaning that any funeral party which turned left instead of right would have to reverse all the way back to the entrances on Grays Inn Lane and start all over again.
The burying ground’s southern perimeter was also determined by a wall, though of a greater height than the dividing one for it had been built to separate the cemetery from the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, a vast, grey building which dwarfed its surroundings like a man-o’-war towering above a fleet of rowboats. The rear of the chapel roof was just visible above the ivy-covered parapet, as were the chimneys and upper storeys of the hospital’s forbidding west wing.
The grave had been dug close to the wall, in the lee of a pointed stone obelisk, one of many memorials that had been erected among the trees. An inscription, weathered by rain and frost, was barely legible, save for the surname of the deceased – Falconer – but even those letters had begun to fade, a state which mirrored the burying ground’s general air of decay.
The overcast sky did little to enhance the wintry setting. It had been raining hard all morning and while the rain had eased to a thin, misty drizzle, leaving the grass and what remained of the winter foliage to shine and glisten; the same could not be said for the pathways and the rectangular patches of earth which showed where fresh plots had been excavated and the soil recently filled in. They had all turned to cloying mud, though, if it hadn’t been for the rain, it was doubtful the body would have been discovered.
The grave was the intended resting place of one Isaiah Ballard, a local drayman who’d had the misfortune to have been trampled to death by one of his own mules. The funeral service had been scheduled for late morning, after which the body was to be transported in dignified procession from church to burial plot, making use, somewhat ironically, of his soon-to-be equally redundant wagon.
It was a sexton’s responsibility to supervise the maintenance of the burying ground, including the digging of the graves; this particular one having been prepared the previous afternoon. The sexton, whose small stone cottage was tucked into the corner of the graveyard, had risen earlier and, in the company of two gravediggers, been making his final inspection to ensure that the interment ran smoothly.
The three men had arrived at the site to find that the mound of excavated soil by the side of the pit had been transformed into a heavy sludge. The deluge had also eaten away the edge of the grave and formed runnels in the sod down which small rivulets of rainwater were still dribbling like miniature cataracts.
On the point of directing the gravediggers to shore up the sides of the hole, the sexton’s eyes had been drawn to the bottom of the pit and a disturbance in the soil caused by the run-off. It had taken several seconds for him to realize what he was looking at. When the truth dawned, he’d raised the alarm.
When Hawkwood arrived, his first thought had been to wonder
