CHAPTER FOUR

      Back home in my room at Abel Yard, I opened the window to let in what passes for fresh air in London. It came in with the familiar smells of sun-warmed grass from the park, of the cow byre where the yard’s resident herd of four Guernseys was kept, of hot iron from the carriage mender’s workshop, with the usual faint whiff of cesspit underlying them. Still, it was sweeter than the memory of that smell from the crate. I mixed some fresh ink and wrote a note to Jimmy Cuffs at the Cheshire Cheese, Fleet Street, asking him to find out when and where the inquest into a servant named Handy would take place and let me know by return. When I went back down to the yard, the boy who blew the bellows for the carriage mender’s forge was willing to carry out the errand for sixpence.

      Jimmy Cuffs was a man I’d met in one of my investigations. I suppose he might be described as a journalist of a kind, though that was rather a grand title for his trade of picking up snippets from the coroners’ courts that might make a paragraph or two in the newspapers. He was no taller than a twelve-year-old child and lurched along at a fast limp because of a club foot. He must have had a lodging somewhere, but his seat in the corner of the Cheshire Cheese was his true residence and he was always to be found there in the evenings. It was hard to tell his age and nobody knew his surname. Jimmy Cuffs was the name given to him by the other scribblers who were his drinking companions, because once, when the coroners’ courts had been unusually dull, he couldn’t afford to have his shirts washed, so took to wearing his rusty black jacket buttoned right to the neck, with a pair of respectable white cuffs sticking out from the sleeves. Only the cuffs, with no shirt attached to them.

      Jimmy Cuffs was a cultivated man. I’d seen him in St Martin’s Lane with his nose pressed to a bookshop window like a starving boy at a pie shop. He claimed to know all the Odes of Horace by heart. Late one night, when business had taken me to Fleet Street, I’d heard him trying to prove it by reciting one of them to a crowd of drunken friends. He was just as drunk himself and had to cling to a lamp post to stay upright, but his Latin sounded as clear as Cicero’s. He and I were occasionally able to do each other professional favours. Although I’d never betray a client’s confidence, I could sometimes put a story Jimmy’s way that did him good and nobody else any harm.

      In not much more than an hour, the bellows boy returned with his reply, written on the back of a few inches of newspaper proof in his fine Italic hand: Day after tomorrow, Thursday, 10 a.m. at Marylebone. Would have been tomorrow, but they have to wait for a witness to come up from the country.

      While I was reading this, Mrs Martley returned from her daily visit to Jenny and Daniel, with two warm pies for our supper in her basket because she hadn’t had time to cook. I’d opened a bottle from our small store of claret in celebration of having a case that might pay well and poured two glasses to go with the pie. As we ate and drank I asked her how Jenny was.

      ‘I’ve never known a woman so happy. Mr Suter fusses over her that much, he’ll hardly let her lift a finger. I told him not to worry. She may be only a little scrap of a thing, but she’s strong as oak.’

      ‘The baby’s due soon, isn’t it?’

      She gave me a reproachful look for not knowing.

      ‘Four weeks this Sunday. It’s often late with the first, especially if it’s going to be a boy. She’s carrying it high, so …’

      Tides of midwife’s technicalities drifted over my head. Mrs Martley had got over her reluctance to talk about such matters, with me in my unmarried state. There were times when I wished she hadn’t. I thought about the Brinkburn family, and how the death of Handy might affect my investigations.

      ‘…so I told her if she did it again I’d pitch her down the stairs and watch while she bounced.’

      ‘What?’

      It took me a while to realise that she’d changed the subject. While I was away, she’d caught the waif Tabby inside our part of the house.

      ‘Right up here in the parlour, looking round like somebody at the zoo. The girl’s so alive with lice and fleas it makes my flesh creep to look at her.’

      It made my flesh creep too. Still, I felt an interest in the girl.

      ‘Did she say what she was doing here?’

      ‘She said she wanted to know how people lived. Can you imagine the insolence of it? I told her I had a good mind to call the beadle and have her put in the poorhouse.’

      ‘Oh, don’t do that.’

      I didn’t want Tabby in the house uninvited either, but it sounded as if the girl had been guilty of nothing but curiosity. Since that’s a sin of mine as well, it gave me something of a fellow feeling for her. I decided not to tell Mrs Martley about the day’s events. She thoroughly disapproved of my way of earning a living, even though it did pay our rent and put food on the table. A few months before, I’d lost patience and told her roundly that she must either accept it or go. To my surprise, she stayed. To my even greater surprise, I was glad that she’d stayed. So we’d come to a truce on the subject. I tried not to intrude my professional concerns on her, while she tried hard not to nag about my irregular comings and goings. When, after the meal, I fetched my old black bonnet down from my room and asked her help in steaming it back into shape, she didn’t even ask why I needed it at the height of summer.

      Anybody may attend an inquest. It’s a public event like any other court case. Still, a woman among the spectators tends to be conspicuous and I didn’t want to attract attention. I wore the re-shaped bonnet tilted well down to shade my face and a black cloak, hoping to pass for some obscure mourning relative. The usher didn’t give me a second glance as I took my place at the end of the back row in the stuffy courtroom. The windows were set so high that the dusty sunlight coming through them made little difference to the dimness of the place. When Jimmy Cuffs limped in, I kept my head down. He walked past to a seat at the front without noticing me. From the sideways glance I had of him, he looked to be the only cheerful person present. The oddity of the body’s discovery combined with the current jousting mania should pay his wine and laundry bills for another week. The coroner arrived and we all stood up. The jurors were sworn in and immediately sent out again for the formality of viewing the body in a room next door. After a two-day delay in this heat, I didn’t envy them. Several were holding handkerchiefs to their noses as they came back.

      While most of the attention was on them, two men walked in and sat down on the end of my row, with eight chairs between us. The elder one looked to be in his early fifties and had an air of distinction that set him apart from anybody else in the room. He was slim and upright, with a firm profile, iron-grey hair and clean-shaven face. His black jacket and trousers were finely tailored, his shoes crafted by a master boot-maker to flatter long and narrow feet. The younger man was Miles Brinkburn. He too was carefully dressed in black, but in contrast to his companion he looked uncertain and ill at ease, all his vitality and confidence gone. The coroner told the jury that the first business of the court was to establish the identity of the deceased.

      ‘Mr Brinkburn, please,’ the coroner said.

      Miles glanced at the grey-haired man and got a nod from him, as if his orders mattered more than the coroner’s. He got to his feet steadily enough and walked to the front of the court.

      ‘Mr Brinkburn, have you viewed the body of the deceased?’ the coroner said.