Seven Dials

Now her face was shadowed. She went on kneading automatically. “He was valet to Stephen Garrick, in Torrington Square. A very respectable family, although Aunt Vespasia doesn’t care for the father at all-General Garrick, a-” She stopped, her hands motionless. “What is it?”

“General Garrick?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you know him?” At the moment she was no more than curious.

“He was commanding officer in Alexandria when Lovat was invalided out of the army,” he replied.

Her hands stopped kneading the dough and she looked up at him. “Does that mean anything?” she said slowly, turning over the idea in her mind. “It’s just coincidence… isn’t it?” But even as she spoke, other thoughts gathered in her mind-doubts, shadows, memories of things Sandeman had said.

“What is it?” Pitt prompted, and she knew he had seen it in her face.

She wiped her hands on her apron. “I really fear something could have happened to Martin Garvie,” she replied gravely. “And perhaps even Stephen Garrick as well. I found the priest that Martin went to in the Seven Dials area just before he disappeared. He works especially with soldiers who have fallen on hard times.” She saw the anxiety in his face and hurried on before he could give expression to it. “I went in daylight. It was all perfectly all right! Thomas, he was very upset indeed.” She remembered it with a shiver, not for the dirt or the despair, but for the pain that she had seen rack Sandeman so deeply.

Pitt was waiting, stiff, his tea forgotten and going cold in the cup.

“A priest?” he said curiously. “Why? Could he tell you anything?”

“No… not in words.”

“What do you mean? If not in words, how? How?” he demanded.

“By his reaction,” she replied. She sat down opposite him, ignoring the bread. It would come to no harm for a while. “Thomas, when I mentioned Martin’s name he was filled with a horror so great that for several moments he barely recovered his composure enough to be able to speak to me.” She knew her voice was thick with the emotion that came back to her in a rush-welling up inside her. “He knows something terrible,” she said quietly. “But because it came to him in a confession, he ca

“In danger from whom?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. She told him very briefly what little she had been able to learn, and from it what she had deduced. “But whatever Martin said to him, Mr. Sandeman would not-” She stopped. Pitt’s eyes were wide, his face pale and his body suddenly rigid as if caught in a moment of fear. “Thomas- What? What is it?”

“Did you say Sandeman?” he asked, his voice catching in his throat.

“Yes. Why? Do you know of him?” Without any clear thought, she felt his alarm as if she understood. “Who is he?” She did not want to learn something ugly of the priest. He had seemed to her a man of intense and genuine compassion, but she could not afford less than the truth, and to turn from it now would avail nothing. The fear would be just as lacerating as anything he could tell her. “Do you?” she said again.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But in the army, Lovat had three friends with whom he spent most of his off-duty time: Garrick, Sandeman, and Yeats. You mentioned both Garrick and Sandeman as being in possible danger, or in distress. It is hard to believe that is coincidence.”

“What about Yeats?”

“I don’t know, but I think I need to find out.”

“So Lovat’s death did have something to do with Egypt and not necessarily with Ryerson?” she said, but surprisingly there was none of the lift of hope she would have expected only an hour ago.

“Possibly,” he agreed. “But it still doesn’t make any sense. Why now, years after leaving Alexandria? And what has Ayesha Zakhari to do with it? Lovat didn’t want to marry her, it was just an infatuation. And from all I could learn, she wasn’t in love with him either.”

“Wasn’t she?” she said skeptically.

He smiled. “No. She had really loved one man. He was utterly different from Lovat, a man of her own people, older, a patriot who was fatally flawed, and who betrayed her and everything they both believed in.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, and she meant it. She had never met Ayesha Zakhari, and she knew very little about her, but she tried to imagine the bitterness of disillusion, and the magnitude of her pain. “But surely the fact that Lovat was shot in her garden can’t be coincidence?” She looked at him steadily, seeing pity and reluctance in him, and a new, raw edge of feeling about the whole tragedy. She reached across and slid her hand over his.

He turned his over, palm up, and closed his fingers gently.

“I don’t suppose it can,” he agreed. “But I have to find Yeats, and if he is dead, then how it happened, and why.”

“Ryerson’s trial begins tomorrow,” she said, watching his face.

“Yes, I know. I’ll try to find Yeats today.” He hesitated only a moment, then, letting go of her hand, pushed his chair back and stood up.

PITT STOOD on the steps in the sun, blinking, not so much at the soft, autumn sunlight as at what the stiff, sad-faced officer had told him.

Arnold Yeats was dead. It had happened less than four years after he left Egypt. He had been posted to India, his health apparently completely recovered. He was a talented officer remarkable for his extraordinary courage. He seemed to know no fear, and his men saw him as a hero they would follow anywhere.

“Brave,” the officer said, looking at Pitt with pain in his eyes. “Even reckless. Took one risk too many. Decorated posthumously. Too bad… we can’t afford to lose men like that.”

“Reckless, you said?” Pitt questioned.

The officer’s face tightened and something inside him closed. “Wrong word,” he said tartly, and Pitt could not draw him to say anything further. He thanked him and left.

So of the four friends in Alexandria two were dead, one on the field of battle, one murdered, one was apparently missing, and the fourth was a priest in Seven Dials who had been stu

He turned on his heel and walked straight to the curb, then out into the first couple of yards of the street, his arm waving to attract the next hansom that passed.

The Old Bailey was crowded with people, pressing forward, calling out to each other, complaining and jostling for a place. With difficulty, Pitt elbowed his way towards the front and finally was stopped by a constable who placed himself squarely in his path.

“Sorry, sir. Can’t go in there. If you wanted a seat you should’ve come sooner. First come, first in, that’s the rule. Fair enough?”

Pitt drew in his breath to argue, and realized it was pointless. He had no authority to show that would allow him preference. To the constable he would seem to be just another curious spectator, come to watch the fall of a powerful man and gaze at an exotic woman accused of murder. And there were certainly enough of them. He was pressed from behind, his feet trodden on, his back bumped and poked. The constable was keeping his temper with difficulty, his face overpink and gleaming with sweat.

“I’ll wait out here,” Pitt said.

“In’t no use, sir. There isn’t going to be no room in there today.” The constable shook his head, indicating the courtroom.

“I need to speak to someone who is inside,” Pitt replied.

The constable looked disbelieving, but he said nothing.

Pitt went past the court where Ryerson and Ayesha Zakhari were being tried, and stood impatiently in the hallway outside the next one along.

It was an hour before anyone emerged, and he had begun to wonder if he was wasting his time. Perhaps Narraway was not in there anyway. Yet the compulsion remained to wait until the adjournment and watch every person who emerged. Finally the doors opened and a small, thin man with brown hair came out. He looked left and right, then took a step forward. Pitt approached him. “Excuse me. You were in the Ryerson trial.” It was more a statement than a question, but the words were out before he considered them.