Chapter 48

Sebastian sprinted toward the back of the shop, the leather soles of his Hessians slipping on the highly polished wooden floorboards.

"Halt!" shouted Edward Maitland from behind him. "Halt in the King's name!"

A trestle table piled high with bolts of silks and satins reared up before them. Sebastian careened into it, the board flying from its trestles to knock both constables off their feet behind him.

"Stop him!" shouted Maitland, scrambling up onto his hands and knees in a shimmering sea of unfurling cloth.

Someone grabbed a handful of Sebastian's coat. Twisting around, Sebastian heaved a small case of notions into the ponderous gut of a middle-aged, red-faced man whose mouth opened, bleating air. He let go Sebastian's coat.

He could see the rear door through a workshop at the back. Praying the damn thing was unlocked, Sebastian raced toward it and smiled as he felt the latch give beneath his hand.

He cleared the small back stoop in one leap to land in a narrow alleyway, his boots sending up sprays of muddy water as he fled past a pile of smashed wooden crates and barrels rimmed with rusting iron. He rounded the corner onto Panton Street just as Edward Maitland erupted out of the shop's back door with a shout lost in a sudden, thundering downpour of rain.

Sebastian fled west through Leicester Square, dodging between a high-perch phaeton and a scarlet-bodied barouche. The thong of a whip 4snapped close; wood splintered as horses drew up to a snorting, head-tossing stand. A woman screamed.

Sebastian ran on, the wind whipping at his coat, the rain driving hard in his face. Shaking his head to clear the water from his eyes, he threw a quick glance over his shoulder to find Edward Maitland holding steady at about a hundred yards behind him, arms and knees pumping. The second constable had fallen away.

They were in that part of town where the fashionable streets of Piccadilly and Pall Mall fell away quickly to the narrow byways and seedy alleys of Covent Garden. The paving beneath Sebastian's boots grew rough, the streets increasingly crowded. A huddle of ragged urchins cheered as Maitland slipped on a pile of manure and almost went down; an old woman in a tattered shawl called out, "God save you, young man!" as Sebastian sprinted past.

Then he heard Maitland shout, "Stop that man! He's a murderer!" Looking up, Sebastian saw the top of the street blocked by a troop of Bow Street Horse Patrol on their way back from the city's outskirts: three men in blue and red, mounted astride big bay hacks.

They spurred their mounts forward, hooves thundering in the narrow space between the two rows of old half-timbered houses. A side street opened up beside him and Sebastian pelted down it, only to find himself caught up in an eddy of ragged paupers, bird-chested men with stooped shoulders, and dirty-faced women in tattered gowns, their bone-thin hands clutching squalling infants wrapped in shawls. There were children, too: mat-haired toddlers and half-grown youngsters dressed in rags, their bare arms and legs covered with running sores. Here were the poor and desperate of the city, who had descended on St. Martin's Workhouse in search of outdoor assistance and been turned away.

Sebastian fought to push his way through as the crowd swirled around the workhouse. Then a man at the end of the street seized an apple seller's barrel and tossed it through the window of a nearby bakery. Shattered glass flew, setting off a roar that wavered through that pushing, seething sea of pinched faces and sunken eyes. "Bread! Free bread!"

The mob surged forward, a starving tide that swelled around Sebastian, carrying him into Flemming's Row. And there at the top of the Row stood Edward Maitland, the three riders in the familiar blue and red of the Bow Street House Patrol ranged behind him. The horses stood with feet braced, heads jerking, nostrils flaring as the Bow Street men held their mounts steady, forming a virtual sieve of horseflesh through which the crowd streamed, surging ever forward, carrying Sebastian with them.

Twisting around, Sebastian fought to turn back, but the momentum of the mob was too great. He could see the flush of triumph in Maitland's fair, handsome face, the wild exultation in his eyes as he and the Bow Street men simply waited for the crowd to drag Sebastian to them.

He was reminded of the riptide in the cove where he often swam as a boy. It could be a deadly thing, that cold tide, pulling the unwary inexorably out to sea. They'd learned early, he and his brothers, that the only way to fight the tide was to go with it. And so Sebastian quit fighting now and simply allowed the mob to take him, only using his height and weight to inch his way deliberately to one side, first to the curb, then up onto the narrow footpath fronting the row of houses opposite St. Martin's.

Once the houses here had been grand, of three and more stories. But they had long since deteriorated into poor lodging houses, their sagging gutters sluicing rainwater, their broken windows stuffed with rags, their street doors either unlatched or missing entirely. He was careful to keep his gaze fixed on the men at the top of the street, lest some furtive glance betray his intent. And so Sebastian knew the instant it dawned upon Maitland what was about to happen.

With a quickly shouted warning to the Bow Street men, Maitland started forward, just as Sebastian ducked through the dark doorway that opened up beside him.

He found himself in a dimly lit hall stinking of urine and damp and rot. Once the walls had been covered in figured scarlet silk, which now hung in curling brown tatters from stained plaster fallen away in great patches to show the bare wood of the lath beneath. In an open doorway on his left stood a dark-haired little girl of about five, holding what looked like a newborn baby. The room behind her was empty.

She just stood there, silent and wide-eyed, and watched as Sebastian sprinted down the hall, past the broken banisters and bare, sagging steps of what had once been a grand sweeping staircase. The back door stood half ajar and Sebastian slammed through it on a run. Leaping off the broken stoop, he crossed a small yard bordered on two sides by looming, high brick walls and strewn with broken tiles and staved-in barrels and molding, stinking piles of refuse. What had once been a coach house lay at the bottom of the yard, but when Sebastian pushed against its ironbound oak door, he found it locked.

" Bloody hell ," he swore, pounding one fist against the stout panels. From the street on the far side of the house came shouts and the sudden, insistent ringing of the alarm bell. "Bloody hell," he said again, swinging around, his shoulders pressing back against the door.

Beside him, a set of outside steps curled up to the loft. Pushing off, he bolted up the stairs. The hutch door at the top was locked, too. Sebastian kicked out once, twice. Wood splintered beneath his boot and the door swung inward on creaking hinges.

The loft was a crudely partitioned space. He crossed the room. Moldering piles of old hay crunched beneath his boots and sent up dust clouds to dance in the dim shaft of light filtering through the grime-and-cobweb-choked casement opposite. Throwing open the window, Sebastian swung first one leg, then the other over the sill and eased himself through the narrow space. The rain was coming down harder again, striking his bare face with cold, needlelike stabs. Lowering the weight of his body on his stretched arms, Sebastian sucked in a deep breath and let himself drop.

He hit the slimy pavement below in a roll and came up at a run, his feet slipping and sliding on a sour-smelling sludge of rotten cabbage leaves and old straw and unidentifiable muck. Ahead, the broken arch of the old mews opened up onto a side lane, the crowd thin enough here that he could push his way through, heading away from the workhouse and Maitland and the Bow Street Horse Patrol. From somewhere behind him came a shout, then another, and the renewed ringing of the alarm bell. Sebastian ducked his head against the rain and walked on, just another ragged, wet, grime-smeared man, unremarkable except for his height and the lean good health of his frame.