To Seduce a Sinner (Legend of the Four Soldiers #2)(5)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

“Damn.” Dorning was his land steward and had written several appeals for his help with a land dispute. He’d already put the poor man off in order to get married and now . . . “Dorning’ll just have to wait another few days. I can’t leave without talking to Miss Fleming’s brother and Miss Fleming herself. Remind me again, please, when I return.”

Jasper shrugged on his coat, grabbed his hat, and was out of the room before Pynch could make another protest. Jasper clattered down the stairs, nodded to his butler, and strode out the door of his London town house. Outside, one of the stable lads was waiting with Belle, his big bay mare. Jasper thanked the boy and mounted the horse, steadying her as she sidled sideways, mouthing her bit. The streets were crowded, necessitating that he keep the mare to a walk. Jasper headed west, toward the dome of St. Paul’s, looming above the smaller buildings surrounding it.

The bustle of London was a far cry from the uncivilized woodland where this whole thing had started. He remembered well the tall trees and the falls, the sound of roaring water mixing with the screams of dying men. Nearly seven years before, he’d been a captain in His Majesty’s army, fighting the French in the Colonies. The 28th Regiment of Foot had been marching back from the victory at Quebec, the line of soldiers strung out along a narrow path, when they’d been attacked by Indians. They’d never had time to form a defensive position. Nearly the entire regiment had been massacred in less than half an hour and their colonel killed. Jasper and eight other men were captured, marched to a Wyandot Indian camp and . . .

Even now he had trouble thinking about it. Once in a while, shadows of that period appeared at the edge of his thoughts, like a fleeting glimpse of something out of the corner of one’s eye. He’d thought the whole thing over, the past dead and buried, if not forgotten. Then six months ago, he’d walked out the French doors of a ballroom and seen Samuel Hartley on the terrace outside.

Hartley had been a corporal in the army. One of the few men to survive the massacre of the 28th. He’d told Jasper that some traitor within the regiment had given their position to the French and their Indian allies. When Jasper had joined Hartley in searching for the traitor, they’d discovered a murderer who’d assumed the identity of one of the Spinner’s Falls fallen—Dick Thornton. Thornton—Jasper had trouble calling him anything else, though he knew it wasn’t his true name—was now in Newgate, charged with murder. But on the night they’d captured him, Thornton had claimed that he wasn’t the traitor.

Jasper nudged Belle’s flanks to guide her around a pushcart piled high with ripe fruit.

“Buy a sweet plum, sir?” the pretty dark-eyed girl next to the cart cried to him. She cocked her hip flirtatiously as she held out the fruit.

Jasper grinned appreciatively. “Not as sweet as your apples, I’ll wager.”

The fruit girl’s laughter followed him as he rode through the crowded street. Jasper’s thoughts returned to his mission. As Pynch had so rightly pointed out, Thornton was a man who told lies as a matter of habit. Hartley had certainly never voiced any doubt as to Thornton’s guilt. Jasper snorted. Then again, Hartley had been busy with a new wife, Lady Emeline Gordon—Jasper’s first fiancée.

Jasper looked up and realized that he’d come to Skinner Street, which led directly into Newgate Street. The imposing ornamental gate of the prison arched over the road. The prison had been rebuilt after the Great Fire and was suitably decorated with statues representing such fine sentiments as peace and mercy. But the closer one drew to the prison, the more ominous the stench became. The air seemed heavy, laden with the foul odors of human excrement, disease, rot, and despair.

One leg of the arch terminated in the keeper’s lodge. Jasper dismounted in the courtyard outside.

A guard lounging beside the door straightened. “Back are ye, milord?”

“Like a bad penny, McGinnis.”

McGinnis was a fellow veteran of His Majesty’s army and had lost an eye in some foreign place. A rag was wrapped about his head to hide the hole, but it’d slipped to reveal red scarring.

The man nodded and yelled into the lodge. “Oy, Bill! Lord Vale ’as come again.” He turned back to Jasper. “Bill’ll be ’ere in two ticks, milord.”

Jasper nodded and gave the guard a half crown, insurance that the mare would still be in the yard when he returned. He’d quickly figured out on his first visit to this dismal place that extravagantly bribing the guards made the entire experience much simpler.

Bill, a runty little man with a thick shock of iron-gray hair, soon came out of the lodge. He held the badge of his trade in his right hand: a large iron ring of keys. The little man hunched a shoulder at Jasper and crossed the yard to the prison’s main entrance. Here, a huge overhanging doorway was decorated with carved manacles and the biblical quote VENIO SICUT FUR—I come as a thief. Bill hunched his shoulder at the guards who stood about by the portal and led the way inside.

The smell was worse here, the air stale and unmoving. Bill trotted ahead of Jasper, through a long corridor and outside again. They crossed a large courtyard with prisoners milling around or huddled in clumps like refuse washed upon a particularly dismal shore. They passed through another, smaller building, and then Bill led the way to the stairs that emptied into the Condemned Hold. It was belowground, as if to give the prisoners a taste of the hell they would soon spend eternity in. The stairs were damp, the stone worn smooth by many despairing feet.

The subterranean corridor was dim—the prisoners paid for their own candles here, and the prices were inflated. A man was singing, a low, sweet dirge that every now and again rose on a high note. Someone coughed and low voices quarreled, but the place was mostly quiet. Bill stopped before a cell that held four occupants. One lay on a pallet in the corner, most likely asleep. Two men played cards by the light of a single flickering candle.

The fourth man leaned against the wall near the bars but straightened when he saw them.

“A lovely afternoon, isn’t it, Dick?” Jasper called out as he neared.

Dick Thornton cocked his head. “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

Jasper tsked softly. “Sorry, old man. Forgot you can’t see the sun much from in here, can you?”

“What do you want?”

Jasper regarded the man behind the bars. Thornton was an ordinary man of middling height with a pleasant, if forgettable, face. The only thing that made him stand out in the least was his flaming red hair. Thornton knew damn well what he wanted—Jasper had asked often enough in the past. “Want? Why, nothing. I’m merely passing the time, seeing the sweet sights of Newgate.”