Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
The River’s Edge
By the time I arrived back at Grosvenor Square, the light had settled into that flat, late afternoon brightness that seemed neither day nor evening. I stepped down with more impatience than grace.
Rather than accept my escort back home, Rosalynd opted for a hackney.
She wished to avoid the gossip that would erupt from her alighting from my carriage.
And then there was the investigation. Although what we’d discovered had shed light on the matter, we were still no closer to finding out where the young women had been taken.
As Milford opened the door, he held himself a fraction more stiffly than usual. That was never a good sign.
“Your Grace. A packet arrived from Scotland Yard not half an hour past.” He lifted a brown envelope from the table in the hall. “From the Commissioner’s office.”
I took it from him. The weight felt wrong. Too light for what it ought to contain. After I made my way to my study, I slit the envelope open and drew out the contents.
Copies of reports lay inside. Thin sheets. Too few.
I spread them across the blotter. The smell of old ink and cheap paper followed. The sheets spoke of missing girls, one after another. Names, ages, meagre details of employment. Marie Gibbons, laundry maid. Alice Brent, seamstress. Two from St Agnes. Others from mission houses.
Each report shared the same conclusion in a different hand. “Likely left service of her own accord.” “No further action taken.” “Presumed to have gone elsewhere for work.”
I read them all. Then read them again. With each reading, my anger grew greater.
There had been no interviews with family. No return visits to employers. No effort to trace them beyond the first enquiry. Girls slipped out of their lives as neatly as if someone had opened a drawer and swept them away.
At the bottom of the stack lay the report I had most wanted. The coroner’s summary for the girl pulled from the Thames in late March.
Female. Approximate age seventeen to twenty. Clothing worn and plain. No papers.
“Body recovered near Stangate Wharf,” the police constable had written. “Brought to mortuary. No marks of violence observed at first inspection.”
The coroner’s surgeon had been more exacting.
“Linear abrasions present at both wrists. Bilateral. Cause uncertain. Bruising to inner thighs and upper arms, of indeterminate age. Lungs show the presence of river water, though not to the extent commonly observed in active drowning. No knife wounds. No fractures. No obvious contusions to head or neck. Signs consistent with recent sexual intercourse, timing undetermined. General condition undernourished.”
I sat back. The words blurred for a moment. Not from fatigue. From anger.
The surgeon had seen enough to feel uneasy. That much lay between the lines. Yet at the end of his neat script stood the verdict that allowed everyone else to shrug.
“Cause of death. Drowning. Verdict. Found drowned.”
No mention of restraint as anything more than “abrasions.” No suggestion that the bruising might speak of force rather than chance contact with the river. No thought that a girl underfed and marked in such a fashion might be more than an unfortunate prostitute who misjudged a night by the water.
I gathered the sheets into a rough order, matching dates in the margin to the timeline I had already begun in my own notebook.
Late March. The body in the river.
Two weeks before that, a knot of disappearances. A laundress sent on an errand who never returned. A girl who went to fetch linen and vanished. The seamstress from Mme Delacroix’s establishment. Another from a house in Bloomsbury.
Then a quieter interval. A long breath drawn before the pattern began again.
They had snatched the girls at regular intervals. Months now. Each cluster lined up with too much precision to be accidental. Whoever ran this machine did not act on impulse. He worked to a rhythm.
Someone ought to have seen it. Someone at the Yard ought to have cared enough to look past the assumption that poor women who vanished deserved their fate.
I pressed two fingers against my temple. That urge to drive back to Whitehall and drag the Commissioner from his office rose with a familiar sharpness. It would serve nothing. I had the reports now. Such as they were. If the Yard would not do its duty, I would.
Rosalynd would want to see these. I pulled a clean sheet toward me and took up my pen.
R,
The Commissioner has provided what he promised. The reports on the missing women. The coroner’s summary of the body recovered from the Thames. You will, I think, wish to read them for yourself.
If you are willing to do so, come to Steele House this evening. We can go through them together.
Yours,
—S
I sanded the note, folded it, and rang the bell. Milford appeared with his usual speed.
“Have this taken to Rosehaven House at once,” I said. “Into Lady Rosalynd’s hand, if possible. If not, into Honeycutt’s.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Tell the footman he is to wait for a reply.”
Milford nodded and withdrew with the note.
I turned back to the papers. As the light outside the window began to thin, lamps pricked to life along the square. I left my own unlit a little longer and read by what remained of the day.
The mortuary ledger entry for the drowned girl was worse than the coroner’s report in its way.
“Female. Unknown. Taken from river. Transferred for burial after inquest. No claimant.”
No description beyond the barest facts. No note of hair or eyes. No distinguishing marks. Nothing that might one day help someone match a memory to a lost face.
She had ceased to exist the moment the jury pronounced its formula, and the clerk wrote those words. Found drowned.
What seemed like moments later, the door opened again. Milford stepped in, a folded note upon a tray.
“From Rosehaven House, Your Grace.”
I took it. The script on the outside already familiar.
S,
Eleven. I will come by the back door.
—R
Eleven o’clock would keep us out of sight of most of London. It also cut things close to the border of scandal. The thought brushed against another I refused to examine closely. I slipped the note into my waistcoat.
“See that the back door is unbolted shortly before eleven. When Lady Rosalynd arrives, bring her straight here. No one else needs to attend us.”
“Very good, Your Grace.” Milford hesitated. “Shall I see that the household retires early?”
“Yes. There is no need for anyone to be underfoot.”
“May I bring you something to eat, Your Grace?”
It would not do to go without sustenance, not with so much yet to be done. “Bread and beef will suffice. Some cheese as well. And ale.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
Once he had gone, I lit a lamp. Too many hours remained before eleven. I used them as best I could, tracing the lines the reports suggested and following each implication to its end.
Milford returned with a plate and a tankard. He set them before me without comment and withdrew, leaving me alone once more with my thoughts.
Once I dealt with the food and drink, I marked on a map the last known locations of each girl.
A laundry in Lambeth. A dressmaker in New Bond Street.
A house in Bloomsbury. St Agnes in Clerkenwell.
The city scattered them like pins on a gaming board.
When I added the place where the body had risen from the river and the rough line of the current, a different shape emerged.
They vanished within reach of the Thames, or of easy roadways that fed into it. The young woman had reappeared in the water. Whoever took her relied upon the river both as a roadway and her grave.
I drew a slow breath. Laid the pencil down. If I was right about the house in Chelsea, then the pattern narrowed further. There was a place somewhere downstream where men of rank did their worst behind respectable walls.
The clock on the mantel chimed ten. I pushed back from the desk and crossed to the grate, though the fire had burned to low coals.
There was nothing more I could do. I would need to wait for Rosalynd to proceed.
A little before eleven, soft footsteps moved along the passage.
Then a quiet tap sounded at the study door. Milford opened it from the outside.
“Lady Rosalynd, Your Grace.”
She slipped in past him. A dark cloak wrapped her from throat to hem. The hood shadowed her face, but copper glinted beneath its edge where a few curls had escaped. The air from the corridor carried a breath of night, cool and faintly scented with the city.
“Thank you, Milford,” I said. “That will be all. No one is to disturb us unless the house catches fire.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” He retrieved the plate and glass and withdrew, closing the door behind him with a soft click.
Rosalynd pushed the hood back. Lines of weariness showed about her eyes, but they held their usual clear intent.
“You gave Honeycutt quite a puzzle,” she said. “He dislikes secrets he cannot catalogue. Fortunately, he personally delivered the note to me. So no one in the household knew about your missive.”
“That is more generous than I deserve,” I said. “Would you like some brandy or whiskey? I’m afraid tea is beyond me.”
“No, thank you. I’ll need a clear head.”
“Of course.” I gestured toward the table. “Come and sit. The reports are here.”
She crossed to the table where I had arranged the papers and settled into the chair beside mine without ceremony. The distance between us was small by necessity. The table in that corner of the room was not large.
“These are from the Commissioner?” she asked.
“Such as he was willing to provide.” I tapped the nearest sheet. “Missing persons. Six from the list Sister Margaret gave you. Additional names that match those Martha Larkin shared with you. And then there are the ones reported to the Yard that we knew nothing about.”
Her mouth tightened. “How many?”
“Thirty-two in all.”