The Sixth Conspirator by Max Byrd

Author:Max Byrd [Byrd, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Permuted
Published: 2019-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

WHETHER OR NOT SHE HAD HELPED kill Abraham Lincoln was of no serious consequence to Thomas Courtenay. He poured himself a second glass of Scotch whiskey at the side table and waved the cut-glass decanter vaguely in the direction of his guests. Colin McRae held out his own empty glass. Sarah Slater smiled and shook her head.

“I have always thought it a nice irony,” Courtenay said. He came over and sat down in what seemed to be his usual spot on a long, red velvet-covered sofa. “A nice irony,” he said, “that John Wilkes Booth’s father was named Junius Brutus Booth, for the assassin of Julius Caesar.”

“Another tyrant,” McRae said automatically. “Like Lincoln.”

“Like father, like son,” Courtenay agreed with a little barking laugh at his wit. “Now you knew our Booth pretty well, I think”—he hesitated long enough to make plain that Sarah’s status as a gentlewoman was not quite settled—“Miss Slater.”

“Sarah doesn’t like to talk about that,” McRae interjected. The “Sarah” to establish his proprietary interest, the interruption because, Sarah thought, the whole question of her relationship to Booth made Colin McRae uneasy.

He shifted his legs in the leather chair by the window, which was oversized enough to make him look small. Courtenay’s butler had installed him there, doubtless on Courtenay’s orders, doubtless for that reason. “What’d I like to know,” McRae said, “is how their faces looked this morning when this General Sharpe person came trooping through Lambeth. I wasn’t there, of course”—he grinned without quite baring his teeth at Courtenay—“but neither was Sarah!”

Courtenay grinned back. They looked like a pair of old alligators, Sarah thought.

“I understand from this Huggins”—McRae nodded at Sarah for confirmation—“this English laborer she uses—he says that three or four of them came to the door. This was about six-thirty last night. One of them, tall fellow, long hair, knocked and went in while the rest of them waited in the street. Then he comes out, shaking his head, and they trooped out again, egg on their faces.”

“He was supposed to identify our friend here,” Courtenay said. “He’s an ex-soldier named Oakes, some kind of relative of their idiot ambassador. He lives in New York and his father was governor of Connecticut.”

“How would you know all that?” McRae was skeptical and impressed.

“How would he know to identify you, Miss Slater?”

Sarah had gotten up from her chair during this and gone to the window behind McRae. There was no sign at all now of the furious rainstorm that had swept across London yesterday. From Courtenay’s window you could see through the trees straight down Cheyne Walk, almost to the Thames. She imagined that she could see the racing water of the river, flowing east toward the Channel, toward the Continent. She imagined she could see the little fleet of tidy white houseboats the hansom cab had passed as they turned off the riverfront. She imagined she could see Quint Oakes walking into the shabby little anteroom on Belvedere Road, and Mrs. Owen squawking in indignant, unintelligible Lambethese, wringing her apron in protest.

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