LITMIR.BIZ

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don’t drop dead in brothels.”

      “This one did.”

      “Who was the lord with, do you know?” The Baroness trembles. “Please tell me it wasn’t Mallory!”

      “No, madam,” Julian says. “It wasn’t Mallory.”

      “How do you know? How do you know for certain?”

      Julian knows because Mallory was with him last night. He can’t admit it to the Baroness. He goes on the attack instead. “Baroness, who did you assign Lord Fabian to?” he asks, turning Tilly’s own words against her, since the woman is constantly bragging about how no man can walk up the stairs without her knowledge.

      The whoremonger grows reticent. “I may have overlooked writing his name in my book,” she confesses. And then, “Truth is, I didn’t see him come in.” She hesitates. “It’s not unusual. He often enters the back way, to avoid being seen. He’s too recognizable. But enough claptrap,” she says with a forceful air. “He’s not getting any fresher while we stand here shooting our mouths off. What does it matter who was with him and which way he came?”

      “You asked me who was with him, madam.”

      “The man is dead! Isn’t that what’s most important? We must get him out of here before anyone else wakes up. Isn’t that what’s most important?”

      Julian is tasked with removing Fabian’s corpse from the premises, dumping it in a nearby canal, and cleaning up the room as if the death never happened. It’s a stifling end-summer morning in Westminster, where no smell, no matter how faint, cannot be made worse by the wretched heat. A man dead and decomposing in the swelter of August is not what Julian would call a faint smell. The Baroness insists Ilbert help Julian. She calls the eel-like servant a humpbacked tomb of discretion. “Oh, and Julian,” the Baroness says before she leaves, “have Carling and Ivy wash down the room. Keep my niece out of it. She and Lord Fabian were close. I don’t want her getting upset. As soon as you’ve cleared him out, let me know, and I’ll take Mal to the market while the other girls mop up.”

      Julian and Ilbert wrap Fabian’s body in burlap and tie him up with twine. A quick-thinking Ilbert first cleans up the mess around Fabian so they can work without getting soiled themselves. He then suggests lining the burlap with pieces of flagstone from the basement to help weigh the body down during final disposal.

      It takes hours, but fortunately the girls work late and sleep past noon, so the house stays quiet. Just in case, the Baroness stands guard up in the attic with a tray of biscuits and marmalade to stop the girls from wandering downstairs.

      Julian and Ilbert drag the heavy, unwieldy sack down the narrow back stairs into the alley, and heave the body into a cart, the very same pushcart Julian and Mallory line with flowers each morning. Julian orders Ilbert to take the cart to a canal or an estuary as far away as possible from Whitehall and the Silver Cross. Anywhere Ilbert wishes. But far from here. Ilbert nods as if he understands things.

      “What do you think happened to him, Ilbert?”

      “I know nothing about nothing, sire,” the tomb of discretion replies. “He could’ve died from many things.”

      “Like what?”

      “I have one eye and my hump prevents me from looking anywhere but down.” Ilbert’s cunning expression reads as if down is where it’s all at. It reminds Julian of what Mallory had once said in passing, why her gaze was always to the ground. Because that’s where the pennies and the berries were, she said.

      After Ilbert leaves, Julian vomits in the alley that centuries later will become Craig’s Court.

      He cleans himself up in the downstairs slop sink and, carrying buckets filled with vinegar and lye, goes upstairs to collect the last of the man’s belongings for burning before Carling and Ivy arrive to clean. The room reeks. It will take the maids hours to rid it of the smell of human waste and death. But they must do it, the room must be ready for business by nightfall. What a great room it was, Julian laments, now ruined.

      After collecting Fabian’s clothes and righting the table, Julian surveys the floor for anything suspicious in case Constable Parker comes to call. Near the open window, where Fabian fell, Julian notices that one of the floorboards isn’t level. A short plank seems to have gotten loose. He pops it out, aligns it straight, and is about to bang it into place with his fist when underneath, resting on the subflooring, he sees a dark brown satchel.

      Alarm pounds through Julian’s body.

      The purse is brown leather with red velvet ribbons, stitched with gold and silver. As he lifts it out, he hears the sound of dull rolling marbles. Pulling open the strings, Julian finds inside not marbles but gold coin.

      There are female voices in the corridor. Awkwardly, he stuffs the satchel down his belted breeches, a kangaroo pouch with a golden joey in it. He must calm down or he’ll have a heart attack himself, drop dead with a bag of gold in his pants. He replaces the short board, bangs it in until it lies evenly with the rest of the floor and takes one last glance around to make sure nothing else looks disturbed.

      His bedroom door has no lock, as most rooms do not in a brothel. He drags an oak table to barricade the door and sits down on the bed with his back to the entrance as a precaution.

      Trying to be as quiet as possible, Julian pours out the clanging gold onto his bedspread. Each the size of a half-dollar, the coins are gleaming, hefty, pristine. He’s never seen anything like them.

      Except …

      He’s seen something a little bit like them. The head of the coin is the imperious, fully robed body of a queen. He recognizes the queen because in 1603, her face was on all the silver shillings and farthings and pennies he took with him to Smythe Field market to buy flowers for Mary’s wedding. It’s Elizabeth I. Elizabeth Regina is stamped on the face. On the obverse side is the royal coat of arms.

      Julian is confounded and troubled. Why is there a bag of freshly minted historic coin? Why was it hidden in the floorboards at the Silver Cross? Is it Fabian’s? Was he hiding sovereigns in a brothel and dropped dead? Was that why his face was on the floor, was that why he fell? Did he know he was dying and was trying to get to his money?

      Julian counts it. There are 49 gold coins. He estimates each weighs about half an ounce. That’s about 25 ounces of gold he’s got on his bed. Breathing heavily, he sits, his hands running over the bullion. Why would a lord hide a treasure in the Silver Cross of all places? Didn’t he have a home where he could stash his ill-gotten gains? Was it blackmail money on the way to another destination? Or was Fabian the destination? Was it in transit or being delivered? Did Fabian steal the money and was killed for it, or was it his money and he was killed for it? Was it even his money? Is it even real gold? The weight of his intuition heavy in his hand tells him that it is.

      Julian has a million questions and zero answers.

      He also has zero time to reflect and ruminate. Coincidence or not, an esteemed member of the House of Lords was killed literally over gold. Before Julian can find out if it was by chance or design, he must get the treasure out of the brothel.

      But get it out to where? He has no friends in London in 1666. No Devi to consult, no Ashton to help him. He’s friendly with the girls but knows no one else except Mallory, and until he finds out more, she can’t be endangered in any way. If it’s real gold as Julian suspects, she can’t be an accomplice to a theft of this magnitude. They cut you in half for stealing pewter bowls. She can’t help him anyway, she has no room of her own to hide the money. She keeps her dead mother’s Bill of Mortality in his desk for safety. Can Julian hide the money in his unlocked cupboard? What about in his floorboards? He investigates, but his floor is assiduously nailed down.

      Afraid, exhilarated, his heart thumping, Julian returns the coins to their pouch, except for two. After he changes into fresh clothes, he binds the purse inside his trunk hose, pulling a pair of belted breeches over them. He tightens another belt around all three—the hose, the breeches and the purse—to

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