Chapter 7 #2
“I don’t know.” At their mutual looks of disbelief, she leaned forward and more vehemently said, “I don’t. It is secret. It’s hidden and known only to members. Bethie didn’t even know, but I expected her to tell me all about it the next day.”
A streak of alarm tempered his annoyance with Gwendolyn. “You mean to say she did not plan to stay away?”
Comstock’s letter, delivered to Mr. Silas, had arrived the day following Bethany’s outing to Vauxhall. What had changed in those twelve hours or so?
“No, she said she would tell me everything over tea the next afternoon.”
And yet, she had not returned. It was possible she had changed her mind and decided to elope with Comstock when he proposed the idea, but Hugh’s instinct—the thing he had always trusted, his inner compass—told him that she had met with trouble.
“I need to know absolutely everything you do about the Sanctuary, Miss Bertram. I believe your friend is in danger.”
His curt order was met with twin looks of alarm. Gwendolyn’s was touched with fright, Audrey’s, with understanding.
“She…she said she would need to be blindfolded for the ride there.”
Hugh’s gut clenched. “What do they do at this society?”
Pink suffused the apples of her cheeks, and she dropped her gaze from his. It confirmed his guess.
“I don’t know for certain,” she began. “Bethie only said it was akin to one of the gentlemen’s clubs, but that it was happy to admit women too. After an initiation.”
Grasping her meaning, fury rippled through him.
“Initiation of what sort?” Audrey asked.
He stayed quiet, allowing Gwendolyn to speak, even though he was already certain of the answer.
She finally did, though blushing fiercely. “They…they must permit...” She shook her head, unable to finish her sentence.
“She had to submit,” Hugh said, gritting his molars.
Audrey gaped at him, then at Gwendolyn as she comprehended. Blindfolded and led to a secret location, Bethany had been willing to pay the initiation fee into this society. A price only women were taxed with. Had she needed to submit to one man, or many? Hellfire. Was she still there?
“Why would she wish to be a part of such a vulgar thing?” Audrey asked.
Gwendolyn broke from her timidity to chuff a mocking laugh.
“Tedium. Boredom. Why shouldn’t she want a bit of excitement before she is tied to a husband who will become her ruler?
You’ve been in society, Your Grace, you know the rules, all the restrictions.
We are treated as if we are at first dolls for our mothers, and then broodmares for our husbands. ”
“And how has Mr. Comstock treated Bethany any better?” Audrey replied.
“If what you say is true, he has used her most grievously. Mothers act out of love and care…most of the time,” she put in, likely thinking of her own mother, who had never acted toward her out of anything close to love or care.
“Mr. Comstock and his fellow Sanctuary members hide behind secret locations with only their own pleasure in mind. They don’t care about Bethany at all. ”
Gwendolyn, properly chastised, sealed her lips thinly.
“Where did she meet Mr. Comstock?” Hugh asked. When she did not reply or even look his way, he pressed on. “The sooner you answer our questions, the sooner we may be able to find your friend. A friend who has been missing for nearly one week in part due to your silence.”
Contrition undermined her stony expression. “They met at Vauxhall.”
“He doesn’t reside at The Chesterfield at Portman Square. Where does he live?”
“I don’t know. Truly, I do not. I wasn’t with Bethie when she met him for the first time at the pleasure gardens. But she told me that he next invited her to a gambling hell. One where the women needed to wear dominos. For anonymity.”
“And she went?” Audrey asked.
Gwendolyn nodded, pallid again. Worried. As if this conversation had awoken her to the true danger her friend was in.
There were many gambling hells in London, and many that permitted women wearing masks to conceal their identities.
Not that the concealment worked half the time.
Audrey herself had once worn a domino to the Seven Sins, when she’d been on her quest to prove Philip innocent of murder.
Hugh easily recalled seeing her across the gaming floor, her body encased in a form-revealing gown, her domino unable to trick him into confusion.
His reaction then had been a heady cross between wrath and desire.
However, the mention of Vauxhall and then of a gambling hell had put him in mind of something else.
Of someone else. His pulse quickened. He’d been puzzling over what Harlan Givens had been doing at the pleasure gardens, or how his body had come to be there.
His flask had given Audrey a vision of him with two threatening men, and behind them, their conveyance—the door stamped with an inverted white cross.
“Sanctuary,” Hugh murmured. Churches were often treated as sanctuaries. The universal emblem of a church was the Cross of Christ, and though the one on the carriage door had been flipped upside down, perhaps it was a commentary on the sinful behavior taking place in this sanctuary.
“Pardon, my lord?” Gwendolyn said, peering at him. Audrey was as well, but with a clever spark in her eye. She understood where his mind had led him.
He shook his head. “It’s nothing. This gaming hell you mentioned. It wouldn’t happen to have been the Seven Sins?”
Gwendolyn’s quizzical brow smoothed. “Why, yes. How did you know?”