The only one currently in well-tailored street clothes was obviously in command.
“Cox, have you ever let a horse to or stabled a horse for a Miss Margaret or Jane Gardner?” Tristan asked.
“Nay, sir. I swear on it. Ladies do not often come in here on their own, you see, for obvious reasons. Especially not in this part of London. Though it isn’t entirely out of the question.”
“Are you quite certain?”
He drew himself up to his full height. “Sometimes it gets busy, like, sir, and I cannot always see every person who enters or leaves. You may feel free to speak to the stable boys.” Tristan gestured with his chin, which sent three soldiers off to question the staff. “But I can tell you for certain I did not see a woman arriving or leaving.”
“Did the Earl of Derring keep a horse or a team here?”
“The Earl of Derring, sir, rest his soul, kept a team here. Well, two teams, in truth. Fine animals. Sold some time ago.”
“They’re better off,” Tristan said grimly.
Mr. Cox was left to wonder what that meant as Tristan and his men convened upon the now-empty set of stalls.
“My next question, Mr. Cox. Have you seen a man in here, burly, flat nose, small eyes, scar beneath his—”
“—ear? Oh, but of course. That be Mr. Garr. Worked for the Earl of Derring. Drove a cart in and out from Sussex. Changed their spent team and went out again. Helped transport his statues, like. Derring was a collector.”
Triumph and vindication was like a sunburst in Tristan’s chest.
“Hisstatues?”
“Great lot of naked people made of stone. I ask you! Who would want such a thing in their house? They delivered them to that building round the corner. Thought it had summat to do with the whorehouse. Who knows what the quality get up to.”
And like another burst of sunlight, Tristan recalled what the drunk man leaning against the building had said.Brought ’is friends, now and again so ’e did, in a cart. Theywashalf-naked and couldna walk on their own, I s’pose, and he had to drag them in.
Statues. Bloody stone statues.
Tristan knew, somehow, that the insides of all of those statues had reeked of cigars. Or perhaps the cigars had been stored in the bases.
“It’s a boardinghouse,” he said absently. “Not a whorehouse. The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
“If you say so, guv. All I know is that you oughtn’t go in there.”
Tristan’s men scoured the stables with their eyes, dragged their gloved fingers along the joins in the wood floor of the stalls where the earl had kept his team.
They nearly missed the handle. It was clever and unobtrusive; it was of carved, sanded wood, flush with the wood floor nearest the wall of the stable.
Once they found it, they could see the seams of what was likely a hatch of about three feet by three feet.
Tristan curled his fingers beneath it and pulled so that he could hook his fingers around the handle.
And then he yanked.
The hatch came up easily.
Exclamations and oaths from his men greeted this.
Cox was white. “I swear, sir, I’d no idea, sir...”
Tristan wasn’t sure whether he believed him, but they would certainly find out whether or not he was innocent.
“Lantern,” he called grimly.
One was passed to him.