Execution Dock - Anne Perry [151]
Snoot barked.
Sutton grasped his collar but the dog was excited, and he squirmed out of Sutton's grasp, yelping.
Sutton bent forward and Hester was right behind him. Looking more closely at the floor, she saw that the lines of the boards were not quite even.
“It's a trapdoor!” she said, hardly daring to believe it.
“To the bilges. Mind your hands, there'll be rats. Always is,” Sutton warned her, his voice breaking with tension. He reached for the knife at his belt, flicked open the blade, and used it as a handle to ease the trap open and pull it up.
Below them Scuffs ashen face looked up, eyes wide with terror, skin bruised and smeared with blood and filth.
Hester forgot all the decorum she had promised herself and reached down to pull him up and hold him so tightly in her arms she might easily have hurt him. She pressed her face into his neck, ignoring the stench of rot on his skin and hair and clothes, thinking only that she had him at last, and he was alive.
He clung to her, shuddering uncontrollably, sobs racking his thin chest.
It was Sutton's voice that brought her back to the present, and the danger she had momentarily forgotten.
“There's rats down ‘ere all right,” he said quietly. “It's straight to the bilges, an’ there's been another boy down ‘ere, poor little thing, but there in't much left of ‘im now, just bones an’ a bit o’ flesh. Don't look, Miss ‘Ester. Take the boy out of ‘ere. Enough to drive ‘im out of ‘is ‘ead, stuffed in ‘ere with rats and the ‘alf-rotted corpse of another child. I'll tell you this, if Mr. Monk don't get that son of the devil ‘anged this time, I'll do it with me own ‘ands …” His voice trailed off, suffocated by emotion.
Reluctantly Hester let go of Scuff, but he couldn't let go of her. He whispered softly, just a little cry, and fastened on to her more tightly. She would have had to break his fingers to loosen his hold. She staggered to the door, arms around him, keeping her head low beneath the boarded ceiling, and met Orme at the top of the steps, his face shining with relief.
“I'll tell Mr. Monk,” he said simply, swiveling to go back up again. “I'll … I'll tell ‘im.” He stood still for a moment, as if imprinting the scene on his eyes, then grinning even more widely he swung around and made his way rapidly back to the main saloon.
Hester lost count of how long she sat on the floor cradling Scuff in her arms before Monk came down, just to look at the boy for himself. The other boys explained that the corpse below the trapdoor was that of Reilly, the other missing boy who had tried to rebel. He had been almost old enough to sell to one of the ships leaving London, but he had tried to rescue some of the younger boys and had been locked in the bilges for his rebellion, as an example. He could be identified by the small charm around what was left of his neck.
“We can hang Phillips for that,” Rathbone said hoarsely, his eyes dark with horror and that terrible grief she had seen in him before.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Really sure, Oliver? Please don't promise something you only believe. I don't want comforting. I need the truth.”
“It's the truth,” he replied.
At last she let go of Scuff and reached out to touch Rathbone's arm, very gently. Even though her hand was cold and filthy, warmth shot between them like the force of life, and passion, and gentleness.
“Then what is the truth?” she asked.
He did not evade her. “You asked me before who it was that paid me to defend Phillips,” he replied. “I thought I could not tell you, but now I know it was also he who set Phillips up in business in the beginning, knowing the weakness of men like Sullivan, and feeding it until it became consuming.”
She waited, understanding something of his horror, imagining his guilt.
“Yes, I know.” His voice was so low she could barely hear it.
Margaret's father! No, she was wrong, she had barely touched the magnitude of the horror he felt. This drowned anything else she had conceived of. It touched the very core of his own life. She struggled for words, but what