Chapter 41
T he Dove slipped into the temporary chambers of Parliament as if she were a shadow. After the great fire had destroyed the Palace of Westminster in 1834, Parliament had been moved to temporary accommodations while the palace was rebuilt. Security was embarrassingly lax, and she had had no trouble finding her way into the chambers and committee rooms. Her source had given her a map with a location for the records closet. Tonight, she was going to pull on the loose threads the Scott Silver scam had exposed.
Her feet were soundless on the corridor floor. When she reached the room where the records were being stored, she used several small tools to quickly and effortlessly disengage the lock. She would never assign one of her governesses a mission like this—but the Dove had a specific skill set. Breaking into Parliament was child’s play.
Although she did not train her governesses in the art of lock-picking, she did train them in espionage. She had handpicked each of the women at Perdita’s. Their reasons for accepting varied: some wanted revenge against the ton or felt a sense of duty to right the wrongs of the world, while others needed a second chance. She had built her organization with an eye toward creating the single largest network of informants within the homes of the ton , where transgressions almost always went unpunished. She had done so by paying her governesses well, training them well, and keeping them as safe as she could. That meant she never sent them on missions that could ruin their reputations, like this one tonight.
And yet somewhere along the line, she had failed.
Frankie Turner was a brilliant mathematician the likes of which the Dove had never seen—and in her previous life the Dove had worked with some of the kingdom’s finest. Frankie was piercingly smart, and her motivations for working for the Dove were pure. She had also made apparent a glaring hole in the Dove’s curriculum.
The Dove had eyes and ears everywhere, and she’d recently heard of a curious scene that taken place behind the Coswold town house. An eyewitness had seen Jasper Jones drag out a bloodied Mr. Farthins and sit him among the waste. According to her informant, Jones had then leaned down and said something into the man’s broken and swollen face that had made Farthins turn to the side and retch. Only a stupid man would have tangled with Jasper Jones, but no one had ever accused Farthins of possessing an abundance of intelligence.
The Dove found Jones to be a fascinating enigma. His reputation was fearsome, and he operated within his own gray boundaries of the law, but then so did she. He seemed to have taken his unexpected role of protecting Frankie to heart, and she wondered how her governess had managed to engage the fealty of a man like Jones, who did not align himself with anyone or anything that was not to his benefit.
The Dove did not doubt that the violent altercation with Farthins had involved her governess, and that gnawed at her conscience. Frankie had not graduated from Perdita’s, but still, the failure was the Dove’s. She had sent Frankie in unprepared. She had given Frankie’s bait scheme her blessing, and it seemed the governess had already required Jones’s intervention.
The Dove quietly pushed open the door to the records room and returned the tools to her pocket. Her former governess, Emily Leverton—now Emily Denholm—had come face-to-face with a deranged killer, but Emily had grown up on the streets, and she’d known how to defend herself. Could all of her governesses do the same?
The answer had been a spear through her chest. Most of the women she recruited were genteelly bred and from families that teetered on destitution. They had been taught needlework and how to play the piano and how to paint—all skills that were necessary for educating their young ton pupils. At Perdita’s they learned additional skills: how to listen, how to question, and how to report. Most importantly, they were taught how to make a quick exit. The Dove had strict rules for her governesses: Never accuse. Only report. Do not interfere.
But it was not enough. In fact, it was downright naive. No matter how often she hammered those rules into her girls’ heads, she could not control chance, and chances were that some of them would become embroiled in situations that could not easily be escaped. If she did not teach them how to defend themselves, then she was doing them a severe disservice.
She had recently learned of a governess named Miss Ivy Bennett, who was teaching secret self-defense classes over a modiste shop in the country. Apparently, the Dove’s secretary’s sister was a devoted attendee. The Dove had asked her secretary to discover the location and time of the next class, as she was very keen to meet Miss Ivy Bennett and see what the other woman was made of. The Dove’s governesses were lacking in basic self-protection skills that she did not have the time to teach them. Perhaps Miss Bennett was her answer.
The Dove was supposed to be at Miss Bennett’s class that very moment, but the opportunity to search Parliament had presented itself when she’d been alerted that several of the guards had contracted cholera, and exposing the Dowry Thieves took precedence over her desire to hire Miss Bennett, or her interest in learning more about a disturbing pattern emerging that involved Miss Bennett’s employer, Viscount Brackley.
The Dove lit a candle and pulled out a wooden drawer filled with papers, pushing her concerns about self-defense to the back of her mind. She got a whiff of ink, tobacco, and the horridly pungent musk of the records keeper. The public and private bills had been organized by year and included the vote tally of each.
The Dove glanced at her pocket watch and lifted out a stack of bills from 1836, the year Scott Silver had been revealed to be a scam. She had only four hours until daylight, and she had mountains of paperwork to sort through. She had a hunch that Frankie’s suggestion that the ringleader might be a politician was right. The Dove had also begun to question if the fee she’d assumed the ringleader charged for his services was in fact a cash transaction, or something more insidious.
Her fingers were black with ink by the time she finished going through the records, but she had her confirmation: The Dowry Thieves’ ringleader wasn’t after money. He was after votes.
There had been a number of private and extraordinarily conservative bills submitted over the past two years that had been too radical for most of the Lords, made obvious by the fact that only twenty-one men had voted for each bill. Her eyes had bugged out at the insanity of the bills; it was as if the bill author had wanted to repeal all social progress made over the past century. As she’d thumbed through each proposal, she’d counted twenty-one tallies for each one. Always twenty-one. The twenty Scott Silver investors, and the ringleader.
She’d cursed that the Lords did not keep track of who cast what vote, but she’d narrowed down her suspect pool considerably. The ringleader was male, titled, and an active participant in the House of Lords. He would have conservative values, although that was not entirely helpful, since the House of Lords was notoriously conservative as a group. The ringleader would have to be active in society, and he would have to regularly attend social functions in order to know which women were being vocal, and how to best trap them. He might even have an accomplice.
The Dove blew out the candle and exited the room, locking the door behind her. It was time she visited a few old friends who sat in the House of Lords. Some of them had terribly sharp memories and might recall who had voted for the extreme bills. And she was certain they would remember that they owed her.