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Chapter Twenty-Seven
James squinted, confident he couldn’t have heard Chavers correctly.
The other managers looked at each other in shock as they waited for Isaac Chavers to continue his report on the second emergency meeting of the London Warehouse Council.
It wasn’t for dramatic effect that the man had paused.
Outside James’s study, the mob’s steady chant ofmur-der-erwas interrupted by a loud, continued ratcheting noise—a police rattle—signaling the arrival of a horseback brigade.
Returning from the fire a week ago, James had barely made it into the house safely. Night and day since, crowds of furious men surrounded his property, chanting and yelling, threatening to burn the house down. The police dispersed them regularly, only for them to coalesce and rise again.
When it quieted for the moment, Chavers enunciated slowly, “After White spoke out, Irons took the floor and denounced White’s accusations.”
“What did he say?” Garrett Thomson asked in a higher than usual voice, rubbing a newly scarred hand through his carrot-colored locks.
Chavers turned to look at James. “That you’re a man who builds rather than tears down.” He nodded to the disbelievers around the room. “That’s right. He argued that the accusations didn’t hold water. That you wouldn’t benefit from losing your entire warehouse, only to collect an insurance settlement for what’s inside.”
“Now, why would Nicholas Irons step in front of the Council and speak on our behalf?” wondered one of James’s highest clerks.
“Why, indeed?” James mused quietly to himself.
Did Clara intervene with her brother? Did she believe him innocent?
“There’s more. Irons asked Bourne to take the floor and address the allegations.”
James raised his head, even more alert now. Bourne didn’t bend rules, and he’d been dead set on refusing commentary on the investigation until it was complete.
“Bourne publicly exonerated you.” Chavers spoke directly to James.
“Were the newspaper men there?” Thomson asked over the din of exclamations.
It was all well and good for the Council to be aware, but that was cold comfort until the men outside received word.
“Not in the meeting, of course, but they were circling outside—and hoping for blood. Plenty of witnesses to Irons’s statement flocked out to tell the tale. I personally saw IronsandBourne speaking to Everett Dayton,” Chavers reported. Dayton was an important reporter fromThe Times.
James was silent as the rest of the room erupted. His throat tight, he didn’t speak as his managers took turns shaking his hand exuberantly.
He understood their relief, even if he was too numb to share it.
After their meeting, Chavers was the last to depart. “This is just the thing, James. Just the thing we needed.”
James nodded and patted him heartily on the back. “You’ve taken the firm on your shoulders this past week, including the spirits of the men. Well done, Isaac, well done.”
As soon as the study door closed and he was alone, he collapsed shakily onto the leather sofa. He was grateful for his employees’ sake that the nightmare of the mob was hopefully coming to a close. Each one had given their utmost at the site of the fire, only to be subjected to public outcry this past week.
For his closest employees, the ordeal of the accusations was over once he was publicly vindicated.
The mob might forget James, but would he ever forget their condemnation? The sleepless nights listening to them calling for his head?
For James, the experience of being imprisoned in his own home changed over the days. Initially, coming straight from the horror of the fire—the city’s most extensive and tragic since the Great Fire of 1666—he couldn’t blame the crowd for their anger. He fell into bed the first night, covered in bandages, and slept soundly.
He stubbornly resisted his guards’ advice to leave town, unwilling to leave his employees during a crisis.
When the illustration of him appeared inThe Timesa few days later, the mob’s incessant pressure became more personal.
Each passing day, his lungs cleared the soot, and his skin was healing from the burns and scrapes—but the accusations were a corrosive acid eating at his mind.
Mur-der-er!
