Chapter 8
Miles set a protective hand at the small of Nell’s back as they departed the front steps of Mrs. Early’s Pleasure Palace in Brick Lane.
An oversized brute of a man stood outside the house’s sagging door watching them go, his coarse features shadowed in the late-afternoon sunlight.
He was flanked by a vulgar woman in a shockingly low-cut satin dress.
“Do come again, dearie!” she called to Nell with a mocking laugh. “We’ll find work for you!”
Nell faltered a step, her fingers tightening on the carved handle of her cane. She hadn’t had it with her when Miles had found her at the Academy, but she had retrieved it before they’d left and had been using it ever since.
“I prefer not to rely on it too heavily when I’m at home,” she’d told him.
And this wasn’t home. Not here. Not with him. And certainly not in the worst part of one of London’s most infamous neighborhoods.
Miles curved his hand around Nell’s corseted waist, urging her back down the squalid alleyway from whence they’d come.
She didn’t flinch at his touch. Perhaps she was becoming used to it?
He couldn’t begin to count the number of times he’d taken her arm or placed a hand on her back since that fateful moment the vicar had pronounced them husband and wife.
As permission went, Miles’s right to render her such assistance had been quite literally witnessed and formalized by law.
Nell was his now. And he took care of what was his.
“Another dead end,” she muttered crossly. “I can’t say I’m surprised. When I asked Miss Jean for names, Mrs. Silkweed and Mrs. Early were only afterthoughts. She specifically said to start with Mrs. Pritchard’s Gentlemen’s Establishment near Lost Hope Yard.”
A drunken fellow staggered past them at the intersection of the next street, face ruddy, and trousers poorly fastened. He leered at Nell.
Miles’s jaw tightened as he steered her past. Every fiber of his being revolted at escorting his new bride on what amounted to a tour of the slum.
It was a gentlemanly response distinctly at war with that other part of him—the barely restrained, bloodhound-like instinct that drove him whenever he was in pursuit of a story.
It was the latter impulse that had compelled him to approach Nell’s list in as orderly a fashion as possible. If they were going to do this, and it seemed inevitable that they were, then they may as well do it right.
“Lost Hope Yard is furthest away,” he said. “It only made sense to prioritize the names according to location. Otherwise, we’d be doubling back over ourselves.”
Nell made a soft sound of disappointment. “Yes, yes, order and method. Yet, where have they got us? All we’ve learned is that, among the people willing to speak up—or more precisely, willing to accept your coin—no one will admit to having encountered either Miss Brent or Mr. Cowgill.”
Miles wasn’t unsympathetic to her frustration. Investigative dead ends were a common occurrence when pursuing a story. It made them no less exasperating. “Don’t let it discourage you,” he said. “Not every interview provides answers. It won’t stop us asking questions.”
Nell’s cane clacked sharply along the refuse-strewn ground as they traversed the dark, narrow lanes that intersected the East End.
It was hours yet until sunset. The worst of the slum’s residents hadn’t yet emerged.
Among the drunkards staggering the alleyways and prostitutes lurking in the doorways were the hardworking people who called the East End home.
Costermongers, washerwomen, and peddlers hawking their wares.
Ragged street children ran among them, laughing and shouting, just as Miles had done with his childhood friends in the Rookery.
“I suppose they could have been lying to us,” Nell remarked.
“I don’t think so,” Miles said.
They’d spoken with a handful of bully boys and working girls at the first two brothels.
As for the madams, Mrs. Early had been unavailable to them, but Mrs. Silkweed had deigned to come down from her boudoir to answer some of their questions—for a fee.
Among them all, most had been suspicious, and many of them sly, but when it came to the point, Miles detected the ring of truth in their words.
“Their establishments are fairly unambitious,” he said. “The madams are weary, the premises run-down, and the women faded and—” He stopped short of calling them well used. “Generally older,” he supplied instead. “We’re looking for someone cold and calculating. Possibly murderous.”
Nell cast him an alarmed glance. “You don’t suggest that this person might have killed Mr. Cowgill? Or Miss Brent?”
Miles frowned. “I don’t know what they might be capable of. Or even if they’re the one we’re looking for. We haven’t much to go on other than a few lines from Cowgill’s notes.”
In the moments before their train had arrived at the station, Miles had shared those lines with Nell. She wasn’t one of his reporters, or even a reporter at all, but she was thoughtful and intelligent. More than that, he had the sense he could trust her.
“Hertfordshire to brothels,” she mused. “Presumably meaning country girls come from Hertfordshire? But Miss Brent came from Surrey.”
“There mightn’t be any connection between the two.”
“In which case, we’re grasping at straws.”
“My instinct tells me no,” Miles said.
“Your instinct as a reporter?” Nell replied dubiously.
They turned down an even narrower lane. Cramped buildings teetered in on each other, so close as to temporarily block out the sun.
Miles’s already heightened senses sharpened with renewed alertness.
It was in darkness that the slums of London became truly dangerous.
As he escorted Nell through, he didn’t let his guard down for a moment.
“I wouldn’t dismiss it,” he said. “In this business, instinct counts for a lot.”
“But it’s not fact. It’s only hunches and guessing. Even a capable newspaperman—”
“Brilliant, someone called me recently,” he reminded her, guiding her into the next street where the sunlight once again shone through. “And fearless. And a champion of truth, and justice, and…cats.”
Nell flashed him a repressive look. Her heart-shaped face was framed by the fetching tilt of her brown bonnet, its wide black ribbons tied loosely beneath her chin. “This someone sounds like a blithering idiot.”
Miles’s blood warmed inexplicably as her eyes met his.
How romantic, she’d muttered on the train.
It had been the first she’d mentioned of romance.
The first Miles had even thought of it. He’d been struck, in that moment, by what it meant—truly meant—to be married to her.
She was no longer a problem to be solved, or an adversary to be bested. She was his wife.
“Actually,” he said, “I believe she’s rather a clever girl.”
Nell didn’t appear at all flattered by the compliment. “Rather a clever girl?” she repeated. “You are aware I’m not a child to be patted on the head and placated?”
His hand remained at the curve of her waist. Her incredibly shapely waist. Along with the delicate brush of her skirts on his leg and the faint fragrance of her perfume, it was a constant, aggravating reminder of just how womanly she was.
“You may rest assured,” he said, “that the last thing I would ever mistake you for, Mrs. Quincey, is a child.”
A strange expression crossed Nell’s face.
Miles belatedly realized that it was the first time he’d addressed her by her married name. His name. The warmth in his veins ignited to a disconcerting simmer.
Judging by the color deepening in Nell’s cheeks, she felt it, too.
She slowed to a halt at the corner. They stood for a moment, eyes locked, before she finally spoke.
“If we’re to do this together,” she told him, “we must be equals.”
This.
She didn’t specify what. It could be their marriage. The search for Flora Brent. The investigation into Cowgill’s murder. Or possibly all three.
“But we’re not equals,” Miles pointed out. “Not in experience.”
“You have your experiences and I have mine,” she said. “Surely, we can defer to each other’s strengths without resorting to condescension.”
Miles hadn’t been aware that he had condescended to her.
If so, he certainly hadn’t meant to. She was vexing, to be sure, and secretive, and inarguably inconvenient to his life, but he had no doubt that she had other qualities.
Finer ones—and fiercer, too. He wasn’t repelled by her contradictory distinctions.
It was the very quality he admired in cats.
Their ferociousness, their daring, and their indomitable independence, all wrapped up with loyalty and affection bestowed on their chosen few.
As he gazed down at Nell, Miles wondered what it might be like to be one of her chosen few.
Or possibly her only.
“Partners, then,” he said gruffly.
Nell’s eyes brightened at the word. She smiled at him, revealing both her crooked tooth and her beguiling dimples. A brief, but achingly genuine expression, just as she’d given to Shadow in Miles’s office in those suspended moments before it had all turned to chaos. “Partners,” she agreed.
· · · · ·
Nell took Miles’s arm for the remaining walk to Lost Hope Yard.
This time, it wasn’t because she was unsteady on her leg, but because their acquaintance had progressed to a more equitable level.
Indeed, as they navigated the narrow alleyways, sinking deeper into the dangerous heart of the slum, she felt rather in harmony with her new husband.
And it had nothing to do with any attraction she might feel for him.
It was because, she realized, she was beginning to like the dratted man.
Infuriatingly rational as he insisted on being, he wasn’t without sparks of kindness and humor. It was just that those characteristics rarely revealed themselves, competing as they did with all that grumpiness.