The question obviously struck Mattie as rather daft, but she answered readily enough. “Bread and butter, same as everybody else. A few herrings now and then. Course, if we’ve had too many days of wet weather, we don’t eat nothin’. Can’t eat up our stock money, now, can we? Then what would we do?”
Hero focused on recording the woman’s answer, being careful not to allow any emotion to show on her face. She’d thought, when she first began this series of articles, that she understood the plight of the city’s poor. But she knew now that she had never appreciated just how thin the line between survival and starvation was for a vast segment of London’s population. A few pence a day could make the difference between supper and a place to sleep, and a cold, hungry night spent huddled beneath the arches of the Adelphi.
Mattie said, “The nice thing about hunger is that while ye feel it at first, it goes off after a while if ye’ve nothin’ t’ eat. Don’t know why, but I ain’t one t’ question the goodness of God.”
“Do you go hungry often?”
“Mostly in the winter, when we’ve had a long spell of wet weather. And of course, in winter ye needs fire and candles, and they’re so dear. There’s many a night Gretta and I jist go t’ bed. But I ain’t complainin’. There’s plenty worse off than us. Least we ain’t got no little ones t’ worry about.”
Hero stared off down the street, to where a wagon loaded with lumber jolted heavily over the wet paving. There were more questions she’d intended to ask the old woman. But sometimes, the frank recitals of bad luck and loss and endless struggle threatened to overwhelm her.
“Thank you,” she said, and gave Mattie another shilling before walking away.
After the squalor and desperation of St. Martin’s Lane, there was something vaguely obscene about the opulence of the Prince of Wales’s London residence on Pall Mall.
As Hero followed a liveried and powdered footman through the silk-hung marble corridors of Carlton House, she found she couldn’t stop thinking about Mattie Robinson and Gretta and the boy, Jack, dragged away from his family to fight in one of His Majesty’s wars so long ago.
The chambers set aside for the exclusive use of her father, Charles, Lord Jarvis, lay at the top of a sweeping grand staircase ornamented with exquisite plasterwork and copious gilding. She found him seated at a delicate French desk that, like so much else in the palace, had been supplied to the Prince of Wales by the same Parisian marchand-mercier who’d served as interior decorator to the ill-fated Marie Antoinette.
Jarvis looked up at her entrance and dismissed the footman with a curt nod, his eyes narrowing as his gaze traveled over her. “You’re looking surprisingly well—despite Devlin’s insistence on using you as a milk cow for his son.”
“The decision was mine and you know it,” she said, slipping off her pelisse.
Jarvis simply grunted and set aside his quill. “I had hoped motherhood would have a domesticating effect on you. But I’m told you’ve undertaken to write a new article, this one on that blackguard tribe of costers infesting our streets.”
“And who told you that, Papa?” she asked with a silken assumption of ignorance that brought an answering gleam of amusement to his intense gray eyes. Everyone in England knew Jarvis directed a vast network of spies and informants who reported not to the Prince or Downing Street, but to Jarvis alone.
The smile faded. He said, “No good can come of this project of yours, you know.”
“I disagree.” She unwrapped the brown paper parcel she had brought with her to reveal the thin strip of old inscribed lead. “I was wondering if you know what this is?”
He stood, taking the old metal band in his hands and carrying it to the window.
She watched him turn the upper surface to the light, his lips pursing as he ran his thumb over the scrollwork. Jarvis’s face never betrayed his thoughts or emotions. But she knew him well, so that very lack of any of the traces of surprise or interest one would expect told her she’d come to the right place.
He said, “Where did you get this?”
“It was found last night at Bloody Bridge, near where Mr. Stanley Preston was murdered. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”
He fingered one sliced end of the strap, then set it aside and reached for his handkerchief to carefully wipe his hands. “Devlin’s involved you in this murder, has he?”
“I involved myself.”
He tucked away his handkerchief.
She said, “It’s always been my understanding that the final resting place of Charles I is unknown.”
“It was—up until a week or so ago.”