Chapter 4 - The House in Belgrave Square
The library of No. 14 Belgrave Square was a room built for a silence that never changed. The walls were lined with four thousand volumes of leather-bound maritime law, the air always smelled of beeswax and cold tea, and the heavy dark-red velvet curtains were drawn tight against the grey light of the London afternoon.
Arthur Vance sat behind his desk, his long, pale fingers interlaced over a map of the shipping lanes of the Bristol Channel. He hadn't looked up when Evelyn entered the room, nor when she had dropped her stained trench coat onto the Persian rug by the door. His face was the same face he had carried since the morning of the accident—a mask of grey granite, lined by the quiet, systematic work of a senior clerk who spent twelve hours a day calculating the loss-margins of the queen’s merchant fleet.
"Arthur, look at me," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into the low, desperate register she hadn't used since the day they had sold Julian’s nursery furniture to the brokers in Oxford Street.
"I saw him. In the alley behind the Criterion. He has the crescent scar. He has your father’s chin. He called me 'Mom.' Arthur, he called me 'Mom' before that horrible man took him into the cellars."
Arthur slowly let his hands unravel. He lifted his head, his eyes dark, deep-set, and filled with an exhaustion that was older than the city itself.
"The river was running six knots on the night of the seventh of November, Evelyn," he said, his voice level, flat, and completely devoid of the hope she was begging for.
"The lightermen searched the pilings from London Bridge to the Isle of Dogs for fourteen days. They found his velvet cap near the Tower stairs. They found the carriage horse three miles downriver. A four-year-old child does not survive forty-eight hours in the winter reach. We had a service, Evelyn. The bishop spoke. We laid his small trunk in the vault at Highgate. It is finished."
"It is not finished!" Evelyn slammed her hand onto the mahogany desk, rattling the silver inkstand and spilling a black pool across the maritime map.
"Stephen saw the man! Ask him! Stephen went into the alley after they ran. He found the door. It leads to the old tallow vaults under the malt-houses. He saw the tracks in the coal dust, Arthur!"
Stephen Vance stepped out from the shadow of the window-alcove, his black silk top hat held between his hands, his fingers nervous against the brim. He looked like his brother, but his features were softer, weaker, the face of a younger son who spent his days in the clubs of Pall Mall and his nights waiting for his allowance from the family trust.
"I saw a fellow, yes," Stephen said, his voice cautious, choosing his words as if walking through a marsh. "A rough sort of creature—a cellarman, most likely. He had a boy with him, Arthur, but the light was very poor. The boy was covered in soot from the chimneys. Hundreds of them look like that in the East End. If we go to the police, if we make a stir in the papers, the Admiralty will look askance at the department. A senior clerk cannot have his family name dragged through the lime-kilns and the gin-shops for the sake of a mudlark’s resemblance."
Evelyn turned on him, her blue eyes flashing with a fury that made Stephen take a step backward into the velvet curtains.
"He is your nephew, Stephen!" she hissed. "The boy who used to sit on your knee and pull your silver buttons! You know his face as well as I do. Or is it that you don't want him to be alive? Is it that you prefer the inheritance to stay divided between Clara and your own debts?"
"Evelyn!" Arthur’s voice boomed through the quiet room, the granite mask cracking for the first time in five years. He rose from his chair, his tall frame cast in shadow against the small green desk-lamp. "That is enough. Stephen has spent the last three winters managing the estate’s properties in Wapping without a single complaint. He has been a good brother to me, and a good uncle to Clara. We will not have the madness of the past return to this house."
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He walked around the desk, his hand reaching out to touch Evelyn’s shoulder, but she pulled away, her body stiff as a frozen reed.
"I am going back to the river, Arthur," she said, her voice dropping into a cold, quiet certainty that was more terrifying than her screams had been. "With or without your gendarmes. With or without your name. If you will not help me find my son, I will buy the information from the sewer-men with my own diamonds."
