Part 20 (1/2)

She stopped. It had taken a great deal of strength to say those few stark words. Her loss hung between us, unspoken. After a moment, she continued.

'I am thirteen and alone in London. Pretty. No one to care for me. I have only a few words of English. What do you think happens to such a girl?' She shrugged at the ways of the world. 'I am starving and afraid. A kind woman take me in. ”Poor little Gabby. Call me Auntie”. She gives me clothes and food, a bed. And then she make me work for them.'

'Aunt Doxie.'

She poured us both another gla.s.s of hot wine, blood-red liquid splas.h.i.+ng from the jug. 'You hear of Joseph Burden, I think?'

So much venom in her voice when she spoke his name. 'Ned Weaver told me . . .'

A sharp tilt of the chin. 'His son. Yes. I know this.'

'He said Burden worked at a brothel in Seven Dials. Charles Howard told me the same story last night.' I frowned at the memory, and reached for my pipe.

'I remember him. He used to visit.'

'He said it was different from other brothels. Nothing was forbidden.'

She curled her lip, mimicked her old bawd. 'Whatever you want, sir. If you can pay. Whatever you want. And Mr Burden standing out on the front step, so tall, his arms like this.' She clutched her own slim arm and gripped hard, as if it were solid oak. 'A bully should protect the wh.o.r.es, you understand? He is paid to stop the customers when they grow too wild. Mr Burden, though he takes money from the customers and he lets them do whatever they wish. Sometimes he watches. Sometimes he joins them.'

'He cut you.'

'This?' Gabriela touched her scar again. 'No, sir let me tell you what Mr Burden did.'

But then she stopped and said nothing for a long while. Her breath was shallow and very fast. A slick of sweat shone on her face, though it was still snowing. She pressed her palms together and held her hands to her face as if in prayer. When she looked up once more, she had returned to herself. Calma. 'There was a man. I will not say his name; he does not deserve to be remembered. He was old, very ugly. Very cruel. All the girls are afraid of him. He likes to frighten them, you understand?

'One day he ask for me for the first time. Points at me as if I am some animal at Smithfield. That one. Aunt Doxie does not want to sell her little Gabby some time he leaves marks and I am so pretty, worth so much to her. But . . . Whatever you want, sir. If you can pay. She names a fee enough to buy every wh.o.r.e in the brothel. He laughs and pays double. It is a game to him. He likes to play games.' She closes her eyes for a second. 'He takes my hand. He feels that I am shaking all over and he laughs again. He likes that I am afraid. He knows I have heard the stories.

'Aunt Doxie leads us to this man's favourite room. It is high up, very high at the back of the brothel, very quiet. She tells to Mr Burden stand outside the door and call if there is trouble. Then she leaves and we are alone. The man gives Mr Burden half a guinea. He says, keep your mouth shut.'

She picked up the poker and pushed it deep into the fire, turning over the coals and building the flames higher. She did not turn back to look at me, but kept her eyes always on the light. 'This man. He ties my hands. He ties a cloth over my eyes. I stand like this for a long time, so afraid, waiting in the darkness. Then I feel a blade, here.' She touched her throat. 'He whispers in my ear, tells me all the things he will do with it. I start to cry. He strikes me so hard I fall to my knees.

'I shall not tell you, sir, what he did to me then. Only . . . Before him, I would fly from my body, you see? Always. Like a bird, until it was done. But I cannot escape him. The pain and the fear, I think he will kill me. I dare not fly away. I am trapped. And I begin to think no, Gabriela, no. You are strong. You are not a child. Your family drown but you survive. You live. And I take my fists like this, still bound, and I push him away. I kick and shove until I am free. I pull off the blindfold and I run to the door, screaming, screaming.

'Mr Burden stands there. He looks angry. He tells me I am a stupid wh.o.r.e, that I must not make trouble. I run past him towards the stairs, towards life. I am bleeding but I am free. Then I feel his arms about my waist, pulling me back. I try to fight, but he is too strong, like a nightmare. He carries me back up the stairs to the room. He throws me down on the bed. He puts his weight upon my back, pushes my head into the pillow and I can barely breathe. He says, ”Be quiet, s.l.u.t. Earn your keep.”

The other man thanks him. He points to his face there is a small cut on his brow, just a light scratch. He takes his knife and says, ”Hold her down. The b.i.t.c.h will pay for this.”'

Gabriela pulled her knees up beneath her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs.

'When it was done they left me to bleed. I was too weak to move, too shocked. One of the maids found me. When Aunt Doxie saw, she cursed me. Cursed me. I was ruined, close to death. Worthless. She pushed me out on to the street. I don't remember no more. I must have staggered into St Giles I don't know how. I should have died in the gutter. I think I wanted this. But see, here I am.' She turned to me at last. 'I survive.'

'How?'

She smiled, like an angel her eyes s.h.i.+ning. 'James. He found me. He carried me to his brother's friend, Dr Sparks. He saved my life.'

Nathaniel Sparks Samuel Fleet's great friend. Kitty's father had saved Gabriela. 'Gabriela . . . you know that Kitty . . .'

'His daughter. Of course! I know Kitty, when she was very tiny. My G.o.d the noise. She cry, cry, cry. I think I go deaf. That's why we save you last night. For Kitty. What you think I fall in love with your legs?' She smiled again. A light had returned to her face, now the worst of her story was over.

If I were a wise man, I would have left her then. Everything I had feared was true. So leave, now and quickly. Run from this world of butchery, murder and revenge. Grab Kitty's hand and flee the city and let this tragedy play to its end without you. But I didn't move. I stayed quite still, pressed into the chair. I must know it all.

'The brothel burned down.'

Gabriela's eyelids grew heavy. 'Yes.'

'Two people, burned alive.' Aunt Doxie, and the man she would not name. Who did not deserve a name. Lost and unmourned for ever. 'James did this for you?'

'Yes.' And there was love in her voice.

'But he spared Joseph Burden.'

'No, sir. We did not spare him.' She hugged her knees to her chest. 'I still dream of that night. So many times. I had escaped that room, you understand? But he dragged me back there. He held me down. You think to kill him was enough? A few moments of pain?

'The night James burned down the brothel we could not find him. He'd f.u.c.ked one of the new country girls. A fresh maid. Worth good money. Aunt Doxie found out and she have him kicked from the door. James and Samuel, they search the town and at last they find him. On his knees in church, sobbing like a child. He knows why the brothel burns down. He knows that now is his turn. James was going to slit his throat, but Samuel . . . Well. You knew Samuel, sir.'

Oh, yes. I knew Samuel Fleet. Never once chose a straight path if a crooked one were on offer. Or better yet, a maze of his own devising, full of twists and turns and general confusion.

'Samuel said, ”Think, Brother, is it not better to let the man live and suffer? Why should he escape the miseries of existence?” You remember, this is how he talks?'

'I remember.'

'He says, ”Mr Burden you train as a carpenter, yes? So you will take up your trade once more. You will become a respectable citizen, go to church, read the Bible. You will marry and have children. All that you earn, you will pay to us. And one day we will come back and we will finish what was begun today. We will take your life. But not today. And perhaps not tomorrow. If you run, we will find you. If you try to speak of this, we take you and we kill you slowly. So you think that burning alive is a mercy.” '

Only Samuel Fleet could have dreamed up such a plan. It was so elegant, so cruel. So profitable. How he must have enjoyed watching Burden, trapped all those years in a dull, virtuous life. I doubted Fleet could imagine a worse torture for any man.

'Twenty years, we let him live. He works like a dog and we take his money. Twenty years always afraid one night my husband will come for him. I wonder sometimes if his heart burst from fear. But he lives. He marries and has children.'

'Ned said his mother was a wh.o.r.e.'

'His mother was a young girl. The country girl that Joseph Burden took for himself. Aunt Doxie threw her out too. She have nothing, so she steals. And she is caught.'

I sighed at the thought of another broken life. Ned's mother had pled her belly at Newgate. Her son had saved her for that short while, but then she had died on her way to the colonies. 'You made Burden take Ned in.'

Gabriela drained her gla.s.s. She was tired, of a sudden. 'So. There is my story.'

'But it is not finished.'

'No.' A long pause. 'Samuel was killed in gaol. Of course he had lived next door to Burden for several years. He found it amusing. He would say, ”Good morrow, neighbour, what has my brother not killed you yet?” He said to Burden, ”you must thank me”. That he was the only one who could persuade James to spare his life. And this was true. Samuel said to James, let the children grow up first. I agreed with this; they are innocent. When Samuel died, Burden knew his own death was coming.'

And now I understood Burden's strange behaviour in the weeks preceding his murder. He knew he could be killed at any moment. He brought his son home from school to be close to him in his last days. He refused to move house, knowing that all the profits from his business had drained into James Fleet's pocket. He refused to give Ned a position for the same reason. And my G.o.d, of course. He forced himself on Alice. Ned couldn't understand Burden's behaviour in the last weeks of his life it had seemed so out of character. The truth was quite the reverse. It was the previous twenty years that had been out of character for Burden. He may have gained some bullying satisfaction from his work with Gonson and the Society, but his natural inclination was very different. Why not f.u.c.k his maid, when Death lurked around every corner? When Gabriela's son moved in next door, silent and watchful?

Sam Fleet, with his mother's curls, his father's black-eyed stare, and his uncle's name. Sam Fleet, who crept into Burden's house in the middle of the night. Practising.

Sam had grown up looking into his mother's scarred face every day. He must have heard her screaming at night, when the dreams came. I had rejected him as the killer because he had no reason for it and because of the ferocity of the attack. In fact he had the strongest motive to kill Joseph Burden. Beneath that still surface he must have been in turmoil for weeks.

I must accept the truth, much as it pained me. Sam was Burden's killer. Hadn't I asked the boy that night, when we stood over the butchered, b.l.o.o.d.y corpse?