Chapter 11
Nell sat back in the seat of the hired hackney as she and Miles traveled west along the river, leaving the East End firmly behind them.
Having shared all of the information she’d learned with him, she no longer had the thrill of the hunt to buoy her battered spirits, nor the joy of discovery, nor even the threat of danger.
All that remained was a growing pit of bleak melancholy sunk deep into her stomach, and another feeling—a worse feeling—that was something very like the fear she’d experienced as a little girl when those two elderly servants had left her at the gates of the Academy so long ago.
Outside the window of the cab, the sun was slowly setting over the city. With every second that elapsed, they drew closer to Miles’s house in St. James’s Square.
If Miles sensed Nell’s growing apprehension, he didn’t show it. He’d fallen into a meditative silence of his own after she had related what she’d learned from Verity. It wasn’t until the hackney was passing along the embankment that he finally spoke. “It’s illogical,” he said.
Nell had spent the past twenty minutes trying and failing to calm her racing pulse. Logic had ceased to matter somewhere between collecting her luggage from the railway porter’s office at Shoreditch and sitting down across from Miles in the cab. “What is?” she asked.
“What danger could Cowgill have posed to Mrs. Pritchard?” Miles asked in return.
“Brothel keepers are already known to procure girls. It’s common enough knowledge to have brought you to the East End in search of Flora Brent.
The practice isn’t strictly legal, but neither is it a secret. Not one worth killing over.”
“Your point?”
“Why did she lock up Cowgill? What could he possibly have known that would have done a woman like that any actual harm?”
“I don’t know,” Nell said. “Perhaps there’s no reason. Mrs. Pritchard and her bully boy didn’t strike me as very reasonable people. I thank God Miss Brent is no longer with them.”
“She made a brazen escape for one so young and inexperienced,” Miles observed with suspicious nonchalance.
Nell was at once on her guard. “She’s a resourceful girl. I only hope her wits enable her to survive the city long enough for me to find her.”
“Is that why she was recruited to Miss Corvus’s Academy?” he inquired. “Because she’s resourceful?”
Nell narrowed her eyes at him. For a man so fond of cats, he did sometimes bear a striking similarity to a dog with a bone. Would he never give up on solving the mysteries of the Academy? Not even now, with Mr. Cowgill presumed dead, Miss Brent missing, and Nell newly his wife?
“Don’t be absurd,” she replied. “I’ve never even met Miss Brent.”
“Then how is it that she came to be traveling to the Academy?”
Nell lifted one shoulder. “The matron of the workhouse wrote to me.”
That much was true. She’d told Nell that Flora Brent was bold, clever, and possessed of a formidable talent for mimicry. A girl with keen intelligence who might benefit from further education.
“I see,” Miles said.
Nell ignored his skepticism. “Workhouses provide no opportunities for advancement, but the Academy does. When we hear of promising prospects, as we often do from matrons we’re in contact with or from gentlewomen benefactors who minister to the poor, we seek to intervene.
That’s why the matron in Surrey wrote to us.
She hoped we would take Miss Brent in and train her up to be a governess, schoolteacher, or something else of value. ”
“Something else of value,” Miles repeated, lending a wealth of ominous meaning to the statement.
“Indeed,” Nell said, growing impatient. “When a person is possessed of natural talent, their prospects necessarily broaden.”
“In other words,” Miles concluded, “Miss Brent is not like other girls.”
“No girls are like other girls,” Nell informed him. “We are all of us individuals with our own unique sets of gifts. Sometimes, those gifts are in harmony with the goals of the Academy. Sometimes not.” She paused. “Which has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re dealing with at present.”
“Except that Cowgill and Miss Brent’s paths intersected—to Cowgill’s detriment.”
“That’s not Miss Brent’s fault. To be sure, it doesn’t appear that Mr. Cowgill was there on her behalf at all. Rather, it was she who liberated him. Perchance, in doing so, she made him an unwitting witness?”
“And they silenced him for it? After she’d already escaped?” Miles shook his head. “Doubtful.”
“What else could it be, then? If procuring a defenseless girl isn’t crime enough—”
“Something worse. Something that would drive someone to kill a reporter, to ransack his rooms, and to send his tongue to the editor of one of London’s most prominent newspapers as a warning.”
Nell shivered at the reminder. She’d been surprised with many a lizard, spider, or other creepy crawly hidden in her desk during her tenure at the Academy, but she had never yet seen anything so gruesome as a severed tongue. Not until yesterday.
“What about the other entries Mr. Cowgill had in his notebook?” she asked. “The dates and the names, and something to do with Hertfordshire. It must mean something.”
“Exactly so,” Miles said. “This encompasses more than an East End brothel. It must. Cowgill didn’t report on the poor and downtrodden. He wrote about the upper classes. Lords, ladies, people with money, influence, and pedigree.”
“And yet it appears he met his end at a brothel.”
“Perhaps that’s just it. Perhaps we’re viewing this backward. We’ve begun at the end. But that isn’t where this started. Something else happened to set it in motion. Pritchard and Silas are no criminal masterminds. They were an expedient solution to a problem.”
“They should be in prison,” Nell said.
“They will be,” Miles assured her. “Eventually.”
She raised her brows. “You’re not going to inform the police?”
“I’m not going to tip our hand.”
“I suspect we’ve already tipped it, visiting Mrs. Pritchard’s as we did.”
“Possibly. However, they didn’t ask my name. They didn’t seem to know me by sight, either. It was only you who sparked their interest.” He smiled slightly. “Penelope Trewlove, renegade schoolteacher.”
“Schoolteacher no longer,” she reminded him. “I don’t know what I am now.”
Miles’s gaze came to rest on her face. For the first time since they’d departed the railway station, he gave her his complete and undivided attention. “My wife, obviously.”
Nell lowered her eyes from his. She didn’t want to think about being his wife. Not when she was already near to panicking at the prospect of being married to him. Of taking up residence in his home. Losing her rights, her status, her very purpose in life.
“Nell,” he said.
“Tell me about your house,” she said abruptly.
Miles was silent for the space of a heartbeat. And then: “There are cats. Four of them—five if you include Shadow. I brought her home last night. She wasn’t entirely prepared for it, but it seemed the best thing for her after everything that’s happened.”
“Five cats,” Nell said. “I can little imagine so many.”
“I’ve a housekeeper, too—Mrs. Bright. There are other servants as well, sufficient to keep things in order. Most came with the house.”
She glanced up at him in reluctant interest. “The house isn’t yours?”
“It belonged to my predecessor, Charles Pelham, the former editor of the Courant. He left England two years ago for America. He aims to write a book on their civil war. I took on the lease in his absence.”
“What will you do when he comes back?”
“Find somewhere else, I suppose, if Pelham still wants the place. I doubt he will. He’s like most inveterate newspapermen. We have no deep attachments.”
Nell smoothed a crease in her skirt with unnecessary attention. “Your housekeeper will be shocked that you’ve come home with a wife.”
“It will be no surprise. I wired her from the railway station after we wed. I told her to have all in readiness.”
Nell gave him a startled look. “But I thought…” She trailed off, realizing her error.
At the time, he’d said he was wiring one of his staff. She’d assumed he meant at the newspaper, not at his home. And certainly not in relation to her or her comfort.
But he’d organized it all, hadn’t he? From the special license he’d brought this morning to his visit to the telegraph office, all the way to this moment.
He regarded her steadily from across the hackney.
His own thoughts were as unreadable as ever, yet he seemed to fathom hers easily enough.
“I won’t tell you that you needn’t be nervous,” he said.
“It won’t do any good. But trust me a little, won’t you?
Trust that I’m not careless with the things that are important to me. ”
Her bruised heart latched on to his gruffly spoken words. Was she important to him now? Simply by virtue of being his wife? Was that how all this worked?
And yet, only a moment ago, he’d owned to having no deep attachments.
It was confusing. Disconcerting. She had no idea of where she stood in this new life of hers. The ground was every second shifting beneath her feet.
“I am nervous,” she admitted.
“You’re tired. And you’ve scarcely eaten all day, except for that stale Bath bun you had in the refreshment room at the railway station.”
Nell hadn’t been aware he’d noticed what she’d eaten. She’d barely noticed it herself. They’d been married but fifteen minutes before, and her mind had been in chaos. She vaguely recalled the bun tasting like sawdust.
Miles’s mouth ticked up briefly at one corner in wry acknowledgment of the attention he’d been paying, even when she hadn’t been aware of it.
“I’m not romantic, as you so aptly noted earlier.
But I can see to practical matters. There’ll be dinner when we arrive, and Mrs. Bright will have made up a room for you. ”
Nell gripped her hands together in her lap, suddenly afraid she might cry. “I’ve lost everything,” she whispered.