The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins - [43]

I took a careful step away from it. ‘Stephen. I’m glad to have found you. I have been asked to investigate your father’s death.’ I drew out the note and held it out to him.

He didn’t look at it. ‘Mr Burden.’

‘I’m sorry…?’

‘My father is dead. You must call me MrBurden now.’ He squared his shoulders, puffing out his chest in a weak imitation of his father.

‘Of course.’ I smiled politely, eyeing the blade.

‘You will leave my house at once.’

I tilted my head in agreement. I doubted he had the nerve to use a dagger, but someone had thrust a blade in Burden’s chest last night. I had no desire to be gutted by a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. ‘Very well.’

Stephen was pleased with himself. He moved aside to let me pass, lowering the blade. A mistake. I launched into him, slamming him so hard against the wall the air was punched from his lungs. It was easy enough; the boy was little more than clothes and bones. Before he could rally, I ripped the dagger from his hand and spun him around, pushing his face against the wall and dragging his arm behind his back. He yelped in pain – then fell silent as I placed the blade against his throat.

‘Did you kill your father?’

‘No!’

I twisted his arm higher.

‘No! I swear!’

‘You’ll inherit a fortune now he’s dead. Now he can’t marry Alice Dunn.’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ he sobbed into the wall. ‘Please, sir! Don’t hurt me.’ His narrow shoulders trembled beneath his father’s coat.

I sighed and stepped back. Damn it – what was wrong with me, torturing a grieving boy? And yes – despite expectation, I could see a deep and honest grief in Stephen’s eyes. But that did not preclude his guilt. ‘I’ve no wish to harm you, Stephen. I am not your father.’

He cringed, ducking his head away.

‘He beat you quite savagely, did he not?’

‘I deserved it,’ he whispered, miserable. He would not meet my eye.

‘That is not what I heard.’

Ned had told me the story the night before, over those two bowls of punch. So much had happened since then I had near forgotten it. He told me that Stephen had been desperate to leave Covent Garden. His father was building three houses near Grosvenor Square. Why not settle the family there? It was a fashionable and respectable part of town, and Burden was always grumbling about the decline of Russell Street: the brothels, the gin shops… the disreputable bookshops. There would be no need to lock and bar the house so early in a better neighbourhood. Judith would be able to walk the streets in safety.

Burden had refused – he claimed it was more Christian to stay in the Garden and work to restore its reputation. The Society for the Reformation of Manners relied upon decent citizens to live amidst all this vice, and inform on those breaking the law.

Stephen had persisted. He was a gentleman and this was not a gentleman’s address. His school friends mocked him for living amidst the lowest wretches on earth. They made lewd comments about his sister and the experience she must have gained just from looking out of her window each day. For the sake of the family’s reputation – could his father not see that they must leave?

Burden had grown angry. He would not be lectured to by a mewling child. He knew what was best for this family. He seized the terrified boy by the neck and pushed him downstairs into the workshop – threw him across the bench and ordered Ned to hold him down. Then he’d taken a leather belt and thrashed his son without mercy. When it was over, and Stephen crawled weeping across the floor, Burden grabbed him and pushed his face into a pile of sawdust.

‘This is what pays for your schooling,’ he snarled, as his son choked in the dust. ‘My hard sweat. All those years and what do they send back to me? A primping fop with porridge for brains. Well that’s an end to it. I shan’t pay another farthing. You will stay here and learn how to be a man, like Ned.’

That night Stephen had lain awake whimpering on his bed, battered and bruised, unable to sleep from the pain. And so he had been the first to hear Alice scream thief. The first to hobble out on to the landing. The first to enter his father’s room and discover Burden in bed with Alice. The hypocrisy. The injustice. No wonder he’d taken his revenge the next day in front of Gonson. ‘Are you sure I should tell them what I saw, Father? What I truly saw last night?’

And now I wondered: why had Joseph Burden been so determined to stay on Russell Street? There was something disproportionate in Stephen’s punishment – even for a father as stern as Burden. Ned had told me that Burden had never beaten his son so cruelly before. And for what? Asking for something perfectly natural – a decent home for himself and his sister. A chance for improvement.

Why had the thought of leaving Russell Street provoked such fury in Burden? Had he feared they would mock him – his new neighbours on Grosvenor Square? While his son had been transformed into a gentleman, Burden was still a craftsman, with battered hands and a rough demeanour. Was it that simple? Was he afraid of being humiliated by his betters? Here on Russell Street he was free to look down upon his neighbours. Out west they would look down upon him.