CHAPTER 1 #2
Mary dropped her skates and sat. She looked across the lake, distracted by the winter landscape.
She was a painter and had an artist’s eye for nature’s beauties.
Mary’s fingers itched for a pencil to sketch a birch tree’s curling white bark and capture winter-bare branches like black lace against the sky.
Louisa eyed her sister-in-law. “Have you changed your mind?”
Mary smiled at her hopeful tone. “Not at all.” She bent and fiddled with her skates.
“My dear, suppose you fall?”
“I wore my best lace petticoat just in case my skirts fly.” She scanned the skaters. “I don’t see Charles. Has he grown bored already and given up?”
Her brother’s recent enthusiasm for the sport surprised Mary. He’d rarely done anything more strenuous than amble through a picture gallery. But Charles, being Charles, had no objection to her company that afternoon.
Mary spotted her tall brother etching lazy figure eights into the ice.
Charles looked up and waved. Then, in a burst of energy, he tossed the end of his scarlet scarf over his shoulder and skated to the lake’s edge, turning the inside of his blade into the ice, sending flakes flying.
He doffed his fawn houndstooth cap in a sweeping bow.
“Ladies, no applause, please.”
“You’ve been practicing,” Mary said.
“And you’re late—but what else is new?”
“Does your business partner know you’re playing truant?”
“Allingham and Allen can do without me for a day.” Charles turned to Louisa. “My dear, I hope you’re not dissuading Mary from skating today.”
Louisa swept her muff across the lake. “I don’t see a single lady out on the ice.”
“Lady?” Charles stretched out the word, raising his voice in a comical question.
“You expect our Mary to do the ladylike thing?” A grin split the fair hairs of his trim beard and mustache.
“I have the answer.” He edged up the incline sideways and grabbed his wife’s hand.
“Come, my dear, you must set the precedent. Slide along with me. Never mind your boots. I’ll hold you up. ”
“No, Charles. Certainly not.” Louisa tried to back away.
He laughed and pulled her to him, holding her for a moment. Then he kissed her, released her, and regained the ice, skating away. Louisa looked pink, but a smile played on her lips, and her dark eyes shone.
Charles called to his sister over his shoulder, “Don’t be all day.”
Mary fitted her skates over her boots and adjusted the straps. Then she pulled on her mittens, stood, and swayed. She clutched at Louisa’s arm for temporary support, took a step, and her right skate fell off. She refastened it. It slipped off a second time, followed by the left.
“My dear, they simply don’t fit.” Louisa looked over her shoulder at the rental kiosk. “Can you exchange them for another pair?”
Mary gathered them up and dumped them on the bench. “They were the smallest size they had. That prig of a clerk will be happy to see me back, tail between my legs. ‘We don’t carry skates for ladies, madam.’ I wanted to throw them at him.”
Mary looked out at the crowd on the lake. Then she dropped on the bench in defeat and leaned over to retie a bootlace that had come undone.
“Don’t you get sick of it, Lou?” Mary said, tugging at the lace. “Everything women can’t do—the blank busyness of our days. We’re never allowed to stretch or look around. The world slaps blinders on us and sends us down a narrow path.”
“You manage to go your way well enough,” Louisa said.
Mary looked up, surprised, feeling the sting in the remark.
Louisa moved Mary’s skates and sat next to her. More mildly, she said, “Besides, once you’re married, and you have your own house and a husband to look after—”
“And become nothing but a broodmare. Good for spawning his heirs.”
Too late, Mary wanted to bite back her words. For ten years, her sister-in-law had tried and failed to carry a pregnancy to term. Her third miscarriage in the fall had brought Mary home from Paris. She wondered if Louisa’s heart would always beat for a child or if the yearning would die away.
Mary contemplated her sister-in-law behind lowered lids. It had been more than ten years since Charles had fiddled with the focus of his opera glasses and brought dark-eyed, flame-haired Louisa Upton into view. He claimed he never heard another note of the performance.
Is Charles happy with his prize? Mary wondered.
Louisa didn’t share the family passion for art and had little to add when the conversation turned to painting.
As the years passed, her brother had less and less to say to his wife.
Yet Louisa was an intelligent woman who was widely read and fluent in French.
Mary envied her skill while she was living in Paris.
Her sister-in-law should have married into a family of novelists, not painters.
Louisa’s great tragedy was the empty nursery, but Mary didn’t think it mattered much to Charles. None, one, or a brood of ten, it was all the same to her amiable brother. He was impossible to disappoint or provoke.
And yet . . .
Since Mary’s return from Paris, she’d sensed something amiss with her brother.
She looked up and sought his figure on the lake.
Charles circled, retracing the same small loop, his hands clasped in the small of his back.
Even from a distance, Mary saw his change in mood.
It was as if the noonday sun had vanished in an eclipse.
She read dejection in the slope of his shoulders, his bowed head, his gaze fixed on the ice.
“Lou . . . is something wrong with Charles?”
Louisa gripped her hand. “You’ve noticed it, too?”
“What’s troubling him?”
“I wish I knew. Charles is away most evenings, dining at that club of his. And it’s been months since he—” Louisa flushed and looked away.
Oh dear, Mary thought. She was trying to think of something to say when a splintering crack shot across the park.
Louisa gasped. “What was that?”
The sun-splashed afternoon collapsed in a confusion of shouts and screams.
* * *
Tennant held the door, and Julia entered the police station ahead of him.
She felt as if a photographer had set off his flash powder, freezing an image in place.
A pair of constables fell silent and stared.
The sergeant perched on a high stool behind the duty desk halted over his ledger, pen poised.
Julia straightened her spine and approached a wiry, hatchet-faced man in a police inspector’s tunic. He frowned at his open pocket watch.
Tennant said, “Inspector Evans, this is Doctor Lewis.”
He snapped the case shut and nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”
Thirty minutes later, Evans stood aside as a constable led the teary Annie O’Neill back to a holding cell. Tennant closed an oak door marked PRISONERS ONLY behind her.
Evans folded his arms and looked at Julia. “Well, Doctor?”
“Well, Inspector . . . I’ve just examined London’s only virgin prostitute.” Julia turned her back and finished rolling a set of instruments into a linen cloth.
Evans swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed over his stiff collar. “You’re sure?”
“Quite sure. Annie O’Neill is virgo intacta and certainly free of venereal disease.” Julia stowed the bundle in her medical bag and snapped it shut. “Annie O’Neill is no more a streetwalker than I.”
“Given the circumstances, we—”
“She said she’d been sitting for an artist. An inquiry at the studio would have spared her this ordeal.”
The ruddy-faced duty sergeant snorted from behind his desk. “What would that have told us? Dropping her knickers for art? Bollocks. These models are no better than—”
“Better than what, Sergeant?”
“Everyone knows what they get up to, and that’s a fact.”
Julia’s hand itched to slap the sneer off his face. “Annie O’Neill hasn’t ‘gotten up to’ much. That’s a fact, too.”
At least Inspector Evans looked chastened. “The entrance to the Cockpit Steps leads to an alley that’s notorious for . . . fleeting encounters.”
“Just what the soldiers had in mind, no doubt,” Julia said. “But Annie was simply exercising her right as a British subject to walk along a pavement.”
“Rights,” the sergeant spat out the word. “She knows the law,” he snapped. “Or she should.”
“Annie informed the policeman that the soldiers harassed her. She told them to ‘hop it,’ but the constable arrested her, not them.”
The sergeant crossed his arms. “Lady, do you think we believe every fairy tale floated by a tart?”
“It’s Doctor, and Annie O’Neill isn’t a tart, is she, Sergeant?”
Tennant followed a fuming Julia out the door to King Street and waited with her for a cab. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Julia. I wouldn’t tolerate such impudence from my subordinate.”
“The girl deserves an apology, not me. I doubt one will be forthcoming.”
“I’ll stay until they release Miss O’Neill and see that she gets home safely to her flat in Aldgate.”
A cab slowed at the inspector’s signal and stopped. Tennant opened the hansom’s doors and stood back for Julia. He said to the cabbie, “Sussex Terrace, number . . .” Tennant looked at Julia. “What is Lady Aldridge’s street number?”
“Twenty-four,” she said, taking her seat.
Tennant closed the doors, and the hansom jerked forward.
* * *
Pandemonium had shattered the placid afternoon at Regent’s Park.
It rose in a tumult of terror and despair: the screams of onlookers at the water’s edge, the desperate cries for help from the lake, the rescuers’ commands to “give way, let us through,” and the shouted names of loved ones sinking beneath the surface.
Within minutes, the skaters near the shore had made it to safety, but over a hundred souls farther out had plunged into the water.
Then the rush of skaters from the center pitched scores of additional people into the lake.
Desperate victims clung to the edges of ice floes.
Others threw themselves flat onto larger sections and waved frantically for rescue.