Eighteen
Nathaniel commandeered Reuben Darling and another footman to accompany them to Lackaday Lane.
Darling would form their rear guard, and the other fellow could help the driver protect the carriage while they were gone from it.
Georgette had pleaded that she needed her maid to come as well, but Nate put his foot down about bringing Mercy.
One out-of-place female to protect was already one too many.
Unlike the well-lit St. James’s neighborhood where Georgette lived, there were no streetlamps in Covent Garden.
Lackaday Lane would be black as Satan’s heart.
As they rumbled through Piccadilly, Nate managed to snag a linkboy.
The lad scrambled up to sit next to the driver, his pitch-daubed torch waiting to be lit when they reached their destination.
Georgette had been uncharacteristically quiet on the journey. Some women became chatty when they were upset or nervous, but she seemed to fold in on herself. It was a calm quiet, a restful quiet. A quiet that said, “I trust you to have the matter well in hand.”
Nathaniel was relieved. Even though he didn’t deserve it, he wanted her trust very much indeed.
When the carriage stopped at the mouth of the narrow lane, Georgette finally broke the silence. “I’m proud of you for doing this, Nate. Not many men would have.”
“Let’s see if I actually accomplish anything before you hang a medal on my chest.” He climbed from the carriage and handed her out.
The linkboy had already swung down from his perch and was fumbling with a sulfur match. The torch caught and flared with a yellowish light as the lad started down Lackaday Lane.
“Stay close,” Nate said softly.
He didn’t have to tell Georgette twice. She latched onto his left arm so his pistol hand would be free.
She was less than successful at matching his stride since her narrow skirt restricted her gait.
Still she trotted gamely beside him, skittering along taking two steps to his one as they entered the lane.
Reuben Darling followed close on their heels, carrying the only weapon he’d had at hand: a cricket bat.
Nate hoped they’d present a formidable enough front to discourage anyone with nefarious intent.
Footpads were out, slinking from one shadow to the next, but they didn’t approach Nate’s little party.
Music and laughter spilled out of several open doors onto the lane, but only occasional narrow shafts of light.
Beyond the flickering circle of yellowish light thrown by the linkboy’s torch, the way was a veritable abyss.
Murder could be easily done in the blackness of Lackaday Lane with no one the wiser.
When they reached the House of Sirens, they found all the windows dark. Nate tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. He rapped smartly on the thick oak.
“Open up!”
A curtain in the window next to the door fluttered briefly and they heard a scraping sound. Finally, the portal opened wide enough for Mrs. Throckmorten to peer through the crack.
“Oh, Lord Nathaniel, it’s you. Thank you for coming. One moment, if you please.” The door closed again and they heard more scraping and scrabbling. Finally, it reopened.
“We had no lock, so we had to make do,” the matron said, waving them in past the oversized chifforobe that had been wedged against the door.
Reuben Darling shoved it back into position once they were all in.
Then Mrs. Throckmorten led the way through the dark house to the kitchen in the rear, which was lit by several tallow candles.
Vesta was laid out on the long table, her hands folded serenely over her breasts. The rest of the residents of the House of Sirens were gathered round, weeping or merely staring in shock.
Probably reckoning it could have just as easily been them stretched out on the table, Nate thought.
“We did the best we could for her till morning comes,” Mrs. Throckmorten said.
After this night’s simple wake, Vesta would be stitched into a sheet.
Then with the dawn, she’d be loaded onto the wagon that picked up the poor who had the misfortune to die without benefit of the Church.
Her body would be taken to the Potter’s Field outside the city and dumped into the unmarked mass grave reserved for the penniless.
“Where’s Mr. Bagley?” Nate demanded.
“We don’t know.” Mrs. Throckmorten smoothed her iron gray hair back. “He left this afternoon to go to the market for me, but he never returned.”
Nate’s fingers balled into fists. Bagley had admitted to having a gin habit in the past, but he’d assured Nate that he was sober now and swore to remain so.
It was the only reason Nate agreed to hire him.
If that hulk had taken the money meant to feed the girls at the House of Sirens and drank it away when he was supposed to be protecting them, Nate would take it out of his miserable hide.
Especially since one of the young women had died on Bagley’s watch.
Georgette stepped a little closer to the table and peered down at the body. She worried her lower lip and looked so stricken, Nate wished he could wrap his arms around her and whisk her away from this squalid scene.
“Vesta was only nineteen,” she said softly. “She hadn’t taken sick, had she?”
“No. She was perfectly healthy,” Mrs. Throckmorten said. “So far as anyone could tell.”
As Georgette slowly circled the table, Nathaniel couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Most ladies of quality would be useless in this situation, flapping their hands like broken wings and succumbing to an attack of the vapors, but Georgette merely became more quietly determined to uncover the truth of the matter.
“There doesn’t seem to be any visible wound,” she finally said. “Why do you suspect foul play?”
Mrs. Throckmorten opened Vesta’s high collar to reveal an angry red weal across her throat. “She was strangled.”
“Whoever did it didn’t break the skin.” Nate leaned over to take a closer look, edging Georgette out of the way.
He picked up one of Vesta’s cold hands to examine it more closely.
Rigor mortis had set in, so her fingers were stiff.
She’d been dead a few hours. “She didn’t fight. No bruising on her knuckles.”
“True.” Mrs. Throckmorten nodded. “But her neck has been broken as well. Snapped like a dry twig.”
One of the girls whimpered, but Mrs. Throckmorten shushed her.
“If the break was done quickly,” Nathaniel said, “that explains why she didn’t fight or cry out.”
Given the skillful efficiency of the kill, Nate had to wonder if the murderer had military training.
But why strangle her too? It seemed unnecessarily vicious to do both.
“If it’s any consolation,” Mrs. Throckmorten said, “she probably didn’t suffer long.”
“No, it’s no consolation at all,” Georgette said, her tone flat.
Nate looked around the room at the huddled clumps of young women, two or three in each bunch of sniffling mourners. “Are all the other girls present and accounted for?”
Mrs. Throckmorten sighed. “They are, but Meg Pritchard wants to leave at first light.”
The girl in question rose to her feet and bobbed a shallow curtsy. With a smattering of freckles across her pert nose and a thick head of auburn hair, she was pretty in a speckled pup sort of way. “If it so pleases you, my lord.”
“It doesn’t so please me,” Nate said. “This world is a hard place for a young woman on her own. Where will you go, Miss Pritchard?”
“My family’s gone, but I’ll take my chances in the shire where I was born.”
“You’re the vicar’s daughter, aren’t you?
” When she nodded, Nate fished a sovereign from his pocket.
“Take a coach. If you find your welcome in your home shire is less warm than you hope, present yourself to the steward at Colton Hall in Wiltshire. Tell him I said he was to find a position for you there till we can sort you out with something more suitable.”
Meg Pritchard dropped to her knees and pressed a kiss on the back of his hand. “God bless you, my lord. You’ll be in my prayers every day for as long as I live.”
Privately, Nate thought the prayers of a reformed whore were more than he deserved, but he thanked her in any case. Then he asked the rest of the girls what they intended to do.
“Gorblimey, I h’ain’t never set foot outside o’ London town and, please God, I don’t rightly want to,” one of them declared, voicing the sentiments of the others. “All that empty sky and cows munchin’ and crickets chirpin’…it’d be the death of me. Better the devil ye know.”
“Very well,” Nate said. “You’ll all continue here with Mrs. Throckmorten, following your chosen fields of study. I’ll send a locksmith to fix the front door and find a replacement for Mr. Bagley first thing in the morning.”
He did a slow turn around the room, meeting each pair of eyes that were fastened on him. “It won’t be easy, but I mean to get to the bottom of this. Vesta will have justice, I promise you. But in the meantime, Lady Georgette, I wonder if you’d loan me your footman.”
“My footman?” She snapped out of her quiet brooding and finally looked away from Vesta’s body. “What do you want with Mr. Darling?”
“I can think o’ any number of things I’d want with ’im, ducks,” the little cockney whore said with a toothsome grin at the tall footman. “Mr. Darling, eh? ’E certainly is, h’ain’t he, girls?”
Reuben blushed deeper than a debutant who’d stumbled at her “come out.”
“Bedelia, mind your manners. I suspect Lord Nathaniel wants Mr. Darling to stay with us for your safety, not your entertainment,” Mrs. Throckmorten snapped, then turned to Georgette with a softer tone. “Provided my lady agrees, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” Georgette seemed to emerge from the morbid spell Vesta’s death had cast over her and turned to her footman. “I’ll explain to Mr. Humphrey that you’ll be staying in Covent Garden for the night and can’t be expected to help serve at breakfast.”
“That’s fine, milady. I’m happy to help,” Reuben said, hooking a finger under his collar as if his cravat had been done up too tight. “Only, I’m thinking you’ll have to explain what I’m doing here at the House of Sirens to Mercy, too. And she might not be as understanding as Mr. Humphrey.”