The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins - [42]

‘And do you have a cure for leprosy, Mr Felblade?’

He chuckled, then ran his tongue across his wooden dentures. They had a tendency to stick against the inside of his lips, and his mouth was in constant motion, licking and spitting to moisten them.

‘It’s not wise to walk with me, sir,’ I said, hoping he might leave me in peace. ‘Bad for business.’

‘What do I care if you killed Burden?’ he scoffed. ‘Couldn’t stand the man. No one could. Hypocrites!’ He wheeled about and waved his fist at the rest of the street.

He was not the most comfortable ally.

‘You’ll need a draught for your nerves,’ he declared, rummaging in his bag. ‘I have a packet.’

The thought of taking anything prepared by Felblade made my stomach turn. I wouldn’t use his powders to dust my wig. ‘I’m quite well, sir. But thank you.’

‘Sanguine nature,’ he said, crinkling his lips in disapproval. He halted outside Burden’s house, glancing at me in surprise when I joined him. ‘They won’t let you in the house, sir. Not in a thousand years.’

I tugged the Marshal’s order from my pocket. ‘Care to make a bet, Mr Felblade?’

Felblade’s eyes danced, anticipating trouble. He knocked on the door with his cane and shouted his name. After a long wait, Ned Weaver opened the door. When he saw me standing behind Felblade his jaw dropped.

‘Where is Miss Burden?’ Felblade elbowed his way into the hallway. ‘Lead me to her, sir.’

Ned hurried to close the door behind him. I stopped it with my foot and poked the note through the gap. ‘I’m ordered to speak with you, Ned.’

There was a short pause as he read the Marshal’s order, cursing as he began to understand its meaning.

‘Well, Ned?’ I’d given him quite enough time to read the order. ‘Let me in.’

He opened the door, the note dangling loose from his hand. But he didn’t move, and I couldn’t pass. He might as well be another door, he was so solid. ‘For pity’s sake. Judith and Stephen… we are all grieving, sir. Have the decency to leave us in peace at least until the morrow.’

I snatched the order from his hand, all patience gone. ‘I have just spent the day chained to a wall because of this damned family. I will speak with them now.’

Chapter Eleven

Ned refused to answer my questions, stamping down to his workshop and bolting the door behind him. There was a loud crash as a table was overturned, followed by something splintering hard against a wall. I left him to his rage and went in search of Burden’s children. Orphans, now. God forgive me, but I could not help but think they were better off. And wondered, indeed, if one of them had been harbouring the same thought.

The drawing room was empty, the grandfather clock tocking like a beating heart in one corner. It was a cheerless space with bare walls, lacking the trinkets and soft touches a wife might have brought to the home. The furniture was well made, but very plain – more suited to a Quakers’ meeting house than a family room. There was only one comfortable chair, matched with a plump footstool and drawn close to the hearth. I would have bet ten guineas this was Burden’s chair. I could just imagine the old sod stretched out by the fire with a pot of ale, while his children shivered together on the hard bench opposite, night after empty night.

And yet I was supposed to believe they were all in deep mourning. Deep shock, perhaps – I would grant them that much. But mourning? Stephen and Judith, trapped and bullied by their father all their lives; and Ned, betrayed after seven long years of service. Rebellious son, cowed daughter, and bitter apprentice. They all had good reason to plunge a knife in Burden’s heart.

A voice drifted through the ceiling, toneless as an old bagpipe. Felblade. As I ventured upstairs, my skin prickled with a kind of mournful dread. I had walked this floor only a few hours before, examining Burden’s corpse by candlelight while his family lay sleeping. I opened the door to Burden’s room and stepped inside. The curtains to the bed were drawn back, but the body had gone and the sheets had been stripped – burned, most likely. The mattress was propped against a wall, waiting to be thrown away. A dark stain had spread through it. Someone had endeavoured to clean the floor by the bed. Alice? If so, she had done a poor job of it, only half-finished. The blood had smeared into the grain of the wood, wiped carelessly. Burden’s heart blood.

Motes of dust danced in the late afternoon sun. I felt a moment’s pity for Burden, lumbering upstairs last night with no idea that he would never wake again. Then I remembered how he had forced himself upon Alice each night in that bed, and my pity vanished.

A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped back in alarm. ‘Damn it, boy!’ I snapped without thinking, to cover my surprise.

Stephen stood in the doorway, dressed in his father’s black coat. The cuffs covered his hands almost to his fingertips. It would have been comical at another time, but the boy’s face was marked with pain, eyes red and swollen. He was also holding a dagger: a six-inch steel blade with a gold and ivory handle. The same dagger I had seen a few hours ago, in Alice’s hand. The same dagger Sam had pushed back into Burden’s chest.