Chapter 7
Nell couldn’t recall if she’d ever imagined her wedding day as a girl.
Marriage had, for so long, seemed an impossibility; so unlikely and unwanted as to make fantasizing about it an exercise in futility.
When the moment finally came, when she stood with Miles Quincey—a gentleman she’d known less than forty-eight hours—in the small North London church, hearing the aged vicar pronounce them man and wife, it seemed very much a dream.
And not for any romantical reasons.
The illusion of closeness they’d shared when Miles had taken her hand in the garden had ended as quickly as it had begun.
Indeed, to say that their wedding was a businesslike affair would be to vastly understate the matter.
Miles had been from the start as logical and unsentimental as Nell had observed him being in most every other respect.
When addressed by the vicar, he’d brusquely admitted to not having a ring, equally brusquely answered “I will” at the appropriate place, and then dashed off his name in the register with all the impatience of a man who was late to catch an omnibus.
Nell was relieved that the words from the Book of Common Prayer hadn’t instructed Miles to kiss his new bride. She’d undoubtedly have been subjected to the same variety of unwilling peck on the cheek that a reluctant guardian might bestow on a burdensome ward.
She didn’t let it affect her. She had larger concerns than the questionable sentimentality of her new husband. Even as she signed her maiden name for the final time—Penelope Trewlove—her thoughts were on Academy business.
For that was one thing that marriage could never change.
Whatever her new name, she was still an Academy girl.
Miss Corvus’s belief in her may have begun to waver, but Nell was determined that her own purpose never would.
She would be passing through the East End within the hour.
It was the ideal opportunity to pursue her mission.
She waited only as long as it took to board the next train to broach the subject.
“I have some business I must attend to in Whitechapel,” she said as she entered their first-class compartment. “I’d rather it were done in daylight. If you wouldn’t mind us parting at Shoreditch?”
Miles followed behind her. He had been unusually quiet since they’d left the church, saying hardly anything at all on the cab ride to the depot and during their short respite at the railway’s refreshment room.
Doubtless he was thinking of Mr. Cowgill, or some other pressing matter related to the Courant.
He’d stopped in at the telegraph office before they’d departed the station in order to send a wire to one of his staff.
She could only guess at what it might say.
“What business?” he asked.
Nell sat down in one of the cloth-upholstered seats, smoothing the skirts of her plain, dark brown traveling dress.
She’d never ridden in a first-class railway carriage before.
It was bordering on luxurious, with its wood-paneled walls, shuttered window, and gleaming brass parcel racks.
Up to now, she’d always been content with second class.
It was Miles who had booked the more expensive fare. She hadn’t questioned him as to why.
“For the Academy,” she answered.
Miles muttered something as he took a seat across from her. It sounded very much like “And here it begins.”
Nell paused in the act of tucking a loose strand of hair back into the confines of her fanchon bonnet. “Do you object?”
“I wouldn’t know what I was objecting to.”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters.” Frowning, he removed his hat, placing it on the seat beside him. “I’m sorry I didn’t have a ring for you.”
Nell blinked. “Oh,” she faltered. “Well, that wasn’t…That is, I didn’t expect…”
“I hadn’t time to go to the jewelers before this morning,” he said. “Trust that I will at the first opportunity.”
The conductor’s whistle sounded. It was followed by a lurching jolt and a great grinding of metal as the train heaved into motion.
Nell hardly noticed. She was staring at the man she’d just married, oddly flustered. A quiet, closed-off Miles she could handle, but not one promising to purchase her something from a jeweler’s shop. Not even if that something was a wedding ring.
Thus far, she’d survived the day by setting emotion aside.
She hadn’t concentrated on the restrained goodbyes she’d said to Miss Corvus and the other teachers, or the desolate feeling she’d had as she’d walked out the gates of the Academy for what might be the final time.
To look backward was to risk losing her hard-won composure.
To look forward was equally perilous. To think of where she was going to live now, and with whom.
“Er, how did you know the vicar?” she asked for lack of any better response.
Miles ran a hand over his rumpled black hair. “A story I wrote last year on a series of thefts in Enfield. His church was robbed.”
“How dreadful.”
“The goods were found during the course of my story. I had some small part in their recovery—a lead of mine into a gang operating in North London. The vicar was grateful. He invited me to attend services when next I was in the vicinity.”
“I’ll wager he didn’t mean a marriage service,” Nell said with a fleeting wry smile.
Miles’s mouth hitched briefly in return. “Probably not.”
“In any case—”
“Yes.”
“We are married now.”
“That we are,” Miles said gravely.
“And you did promise that I might dictate my own terms,” she reminded him.
His brows sank in another frown, but he didn’t dispute the fact. “What business does the Academy have in Whitechapel?” he asked.
“Why?” Nell asked in return. “Have you changed your mind about publishing a story about the school? Or is this simply more information you require to sate your boundless curiosity?”
His frown transformed into a swift scowl. “You do realize that I have a reporter’s murder to solve, a newspaper to run, and a staff to convince that I’m not a conscienceless ravisher? Whatever curiosity I had about the charity school yesterday has been amply exhausted in those regards.”
“Not all, obviously,” she said.
“I’m concerned about you,” he retorted. “We are married, as you said.”
“Yes, but—”
“I can’t have you traipsing aimlessly about the slum alone, prey for any villain who crosses your path. You’re too…too…”
Nell’s shoulders tensed, bracing for the inevitable masculine censure. “Helpless?” she supplied. “Na?ve? Incapable?”
“Beautiful,” he said. “You’re too damned beautiful.”
The growing indignation in Nell’s breast fizzled away like a deflated balloon.
He wasn’t the first to call her beautiful. As compliments went, it was the least original she’d encountered. And yet she’d never been called beautiful by him. Other than the arrested stare he’d given her when she’d lifted her veil in his office, he hadn’t acknowledged her looks at all.
“Oh,” she replied. “That.”
“Yes, that,” he said.
Nell smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle in the fabric of her skirt. “Being beautiful isn’t a liability. Not even in the East End.”
“No? What would you call it?”
“A weapon,” she said.
Miles fixed her with his enigmatic gaze. “So, I was right. You were the heavy artillery.”
Nell’s mouth quirked. She’d forgotten he’d said that. “Not where you were concerned, clearly. My charms—ample as they are—had no apparent effect on you.”
“We met for the first time yesterday morning,” he said.
“Your point being?”
His expression was dour. “Today we’re married.”
He was so solemn and grumpy, Nell was tempted to laugh. “That had less to do with my charms and more to do with your cat,” she said. “As you’re well aware.”
“Yet here we are.”
“Exactly so.” She grew serious again. “And as our train will be stopping in the vicinity, and as I’m more than capable of taking care of myself—”
“If you tell me what it is you’re trying to accomplish,” he interrupted, “perchance I can assist you.”
“Why would you?” she wondered. “The Academy’s problems aren’t your problems.”
“You’re my problem,” he said.
“How romantic,” she remarked under her breath.
The two words were an inaudible murmur, lost amid the roaring clang of metal as the train rattled loudly down the track. And yet—
Miles managed to hear them. He gave her a scorching look in reply.
A rush of heat flooded through her in its wake, making her cheeks warm and her toes curl in her sensible half boots.
She’d been stared at before. Ogled and admired by everyone from the local village lads to the aged members of the parish council.
But no gentleman yet had ever regarded her with such blazing, single-minded intensity.
And Miles wasn’t just any man. Not anymore. He was her husband, by heaven.
Her husband.
It didn’t mean he was deserving of all of her secrets, but it surely allowed for her to confide in him a little. He had, after all, already proven himself to be an honorable gentleman. One who, in the past, hadn’t hesitated to hold another powerful man to account.
She quickly recovered her self-possession, ignoring the lingering effects of the look he’d given her. “Very well,” she said. “If you must know, a girl has gone missing and I’ve been tasked with finding her.”
“What girl?” he asked.
“An orphan named Flora Brent. She was en route to the Academy from a workhouse in Surrey. We’ve traced her as far as Shoreditch. It’s one of the reasons I came to London yesterday, and why I booked a room at Mrs. Marigold’s.”
“You have reason to believe the girl is in Whitechapel?”
Nell nodded. “We suspect she might have fallen victim to one of those unscrupulous madams one reads about. You know the breed—procurers who lure country girls from railway stations with promises of reputable work, only to spirit them to a brothel somewhere where they drug them with adulterated tea and—”
Miles’s brows snapped together. His gaze was no longer scorching. It was as sharp as a hunting hawk’s. “Brothels?” he repeated, cutting off her speech. “That’s where you want to go?”
Nell couldn’t tell if he was outraged or intrigued.
“Not for my own amusement,” she said. “It’s purely to find out if one of them has taken her.
And I won’t be ‘traipsing aimlessly about the slum’ as you so delightfully put it.
I have a list of brothels, given to me by a reliable source.
I mean to visit each name on it in a perfectly orderly fashion. ”
“A list of brothels,” he repeated without inflection.
Nell recited the names Miss Jean had given her from memory. “Mrs. Pritchard’s Gentlemen’s Establishment, Mrs. Early’s Pleasure Palace, and Mrs. Silkweed’s House of Sin.”
Miles’s eyes narrowed. “And what’s this about tea?”
Nell paused to consider. “I suppose it isn’t always tea. The madams may drug some other drink. The point is, the girl falls asleep, and once she wakes, she finds herself in a sad state—ruined, alone, virtually a prisoner. Given the choices available…” She trailed off.
As she’d been speaking, Miles hadn’t been idle. She’d not uttered two sentences before he’d extracted a small notebook and tiny pencil from the inner pocket of his coat and begun scratching away.
“I’m sorry, are you taking notes?” she asked him.
“No.” His pencil moved rapidly over the page in short strokes. “I’m sketching a portrait.”
Nell stared at him, nonplussed. “Of me?”
He turned the notebook in her direction for a moment, revealing the rudimentary image of a thin, bushy-haired man with mutton-chop side-whiskers.
Nell leaned forward to see, fascinated in spite of herself. “Who on earth is that?”
“Lawrence Cowgill,” Miles said, resuming his drawing.
“And you’ve chosen this moment to render his likeness because…?”
“I’m going to show it to the employees at the brothels we visit.”
We?
“I don’t understand,” Nell said. “What would be the point—”
“Two points,” Miles said. He snapped shut his notebook. “One, Cowgill’s death may have had something to do with a story he was writing related to brothels, and this adulterated tea you mention.”
Nell let the information sink in, all the possible scenarios racing through her mind at once. She was almost afraid to ask. “And point two?”
Miles held her gaze. “When you disembark at Shoreditch, I’m coming with you.”