Alice Quicke, tired, sore-knuckled, world-weary, was standing in the white sunlight outside the ruined warehouse in Natchez, glaring up the steep street as her partner, Coulton, ambled toward her. Four nights earlier, in a wharf-side eatery in New Orleans, she had found it necessary to acquaint a man’s nose with the brass railing of the bar, and only Coulton’s revolver and a hasty exit had prevented real bloodshed. Sometimes men made themselves at home in women’s clothing in a way she had less and less patience for as she got older. She was over thirty now and she’d never been married and never wanted to be. She’d lived by violence and her own wits since she was a girl and that seemed good enough to her. She preferred trousers to bustles and corsets, and wore over her wide shoulders a long oilskin coat, cut for a night watchman, with the sleeves folded back off her wrists. It’d been black once, faded now almost to gray in places, with tarnished silver buttons. Her yellow hair was greasy and tangled, cut to a manageable length by her own hand. She was almost pretty, maybe, with a heart-shaped face and fine features, but her eyes were hard, and her nose had been broken years ago and badly set, and she did not smile enough for the attentions of men to linger. That was fine by her. She was a female detective and it was hard enough to get taken seriously without having her goddamn hand kissed at every turn.
Coulton, up the street, was in no hurry. She watched him drift casually under the leafy green poplars, fanning his bowler hat as he went, one thumb hooked in his waistcoat. All around her lay the shabby riverside stillness of a city still pretty in all its architecture, all of it built on the backs of slaves, pretty like a poisonous flower. Coulton was coming from the sheriff’s house, from the little brick jail beside it.
She was beginning to hate this job.
She had located her first orphan, a girl named Mary, in a rooming house in Sheffield, England, last March. The second one went missing before they even got to Cape Town, South Africa. Alice found his grave newly dug, red gravel, no grass, a little wooden marker. Dead of a fever, the burial paid for by a Ladies’ Aid society. Coulton told her about others who’d come from Oxford, Belfast, Whitechapel itself. In June she and Coulton had sailed for Baltimore and collected a girl from a workhouse there and later sailed south for New Orleans and booked passage on a riverboat steamer upriver and now they were here, in Mississippi, looking for one Charles Ovid, whoever that was.
She didn’t know more than that because she’d been given nothing but the kid’s name and the address of the Natchez city courthouse. That was how it worked. She didn’t ask questions, she just got on with it. Sometimes she was only given a street, or a neighborhood, or the city itself. It didn’t matter. She always found them.
Coulton was wearing a yellow-checkered suit despite the heat and his whiskers stood out in a frazzle at his jaw. He was as good as bald but he combed what hair he had left across his scalp and was always reaching up, smoothing it into place. He was maybe the most reliable man she’d ever known, stout and polite like a good Englishman, straight out of the middle classes. But Alice had also seen him move with a fury through a smoky pub in Deptford leaving bodies in his wake and she knew not to underestimate him.
“He’s not here,” Coulton said now, coming up. “They’re holding him in a warehouse.” He waved his bowler slowly by its brim, mopped his face with a handkerchief. “Sheriff’s wife didn’t want his like in with the others, it seems.”
“Because he’s black?”
“Not that. I expect they have plenty of his kind in the jug.”
She waited.
“I’ll have to sit down with the local judge, hear what he has to say,” he went on. “The sheriff’s arranged it for later this evening. Legally speaking, the lad ain’t property, but I get the impression he’s the next best thing to it. Near as I can figure, depot sort of owns him.”
“What’d he do?”
“Killed a white man.”
Alice looked up.
“Aye. Some sort of accident at the dockyards where he was working. A confrontation with an overseer and the man fell off the platform and hit his head. Dead, just like that. No great loss to the world maybe. Sheriff doesn’t believe it was done on purpose, but he also says it doesn’t matter to him, what happened happened, you can’t have it happening again. Now here’s the thing. Lad’s already been tried and found guilty. His sentence was carried out.”
“Carried out—?”
Coulton opened his hands wide. “They shot him. Six days ago. It didn’t take.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t take?”
Coulton peered calmly back at the jail, his eyes shadowed. “Well, lad’s still breathing. I reckon that’s their meaning. Sheriff’s wife says the lad can’t be hurt.”
“I bet he’d say different.”
“Aye.”
“And that’s why he’s locked up in a warehouse. Because they don’t want the good folk getting all worked up.”
“Miss Quicke, they don’t want the good folk even to know. Far as the town of Natchez is concerned, Charles Ovid was shot dead in the jail six days ago. The lad’s already buried.”
Can’t be hurt. Alice blew out her cheeks. She loathed the small-minded superstitions of little towns, had done so all her life. She knew these people wanted a reason, any reason, to hit and keep on hitting a black kid who’d killed a white man. Bullshit about it not leaving a mark was as good as any.
“So what’re they going to do now?” she said. “I mean, if we didn’t show up offering to take him off their hands, what would they do with him?”
“I reckon they’d go ahead and bury him.”
She paused. “But if they can’t kill him—”
Coulton held her eye.
And then she understood. They would bury him alive. She let her gaze drift off over his shoulder. “This fucking place,” she said.
“Aye.” Coulton squinted out at whatever it was she was watching, saw nothing, looked up at the cloudless sky.
There were two men approaching now from up the street, silhouetted and rippling in the heat. They came on foot without horses, both wearing suits, the taller man cradling a rifle crosswise in front of him. The sheriff and his deputy, she supposed. “What would you like to do to them?” she said softly.
Coulton put his bowler back on, turned. “The very same as you, Miss Quicke,” he said. “But our employers would not approve. Justice is just a bucket with a hole in the bottom, as my father used to say. You ready?”
Alice rubbed her knuckles.
She’d worked with Frank Coulton for thirteen months and had come nearly to trust him, as much as she trusted anyone at least. He’d found her through an advertisement she had posted in the Times. He’d climbed the water-buckled stairs of her tenement in Deptford, clutching the clipping in the pocket of his chesterfield, his breath standing out like smoke in the cold. He wished to inquire, he’d explained in a quiet voice, after her credentials. A yellow fog rolled past in the dripping alley outside. He’d heard things, he went on, had heard she’d been trained by the Pinkertons in Chicago, that she’d beaten a man unconscious with her bare fists on the East India Docks. Was there any truth to such reports?