Chapter 13 #2
“I don’t know,” Miles replied. “I can’t prove anything, other than the fact that Cowgill was at the brothel for a time.
And for that, we have only the word of an inebriated prostitute who works there.
Given the risk to her livelihood, I fully expect her to recant her account if confronted by the police. ”
Nell threaded her needle as she listened to the gentlemen’s discussion.
The pattern of her sampler had already been set—a stone house and garden, a jumbled alphabet, and a raven with a white-tipped wing.
All that remained was to complete the necessary bit of numerical code that, when solved, would spell out her message to Miss Corvus:
brOTHEL WHITECHAPEL PRITCHARD
SHE ESCAPED
WILL FIND HER
It was Nell who had formulated the idea for using samplers for the Academy’s confidential communications.
Effie had often ridiculed her for it, calling her a modern-day Madame Defarge.
But there was no denying that a woman’s post could easily be read, her letters stolen, her secrets unearthed.
With a coded sampler, at least, there was little chance of anyone deciphering the message.
That is, if they suspected there was a message at all.
“Where are you on the entries in Cowgill’s notebook?” Miles asked Mr. Higgins.
“Still trying to place those names, sir,” Mr. Higgins answered. “There are any number of people called Innes in London. No Fawn-Purvises, however. But I do have a contact at the post office who—”
“Have you tried Debrett’s Peerage?” Miles asked. The blank looks on both the men’s faces provided his answer. “Fetch me a copy, Flack. I believe there’s one in Cowgill’s office.”
Mr. Flack raced off to do Miles’s bidding.
Mr. Higgins remained. “Are you sure Mrs. Quincey wouldn’t prefer to wait in my office, sir?” he inquired of Miles. “I would be happy to bring her a cup of tea.”
“Would you prefer it?” Miles asked Nell.
She continued sewing. “I’m perfectly contented as I am, my love. But I do thank Mr. Higgins for his consideration.”
My love.
The words hung in the air for a fraction of a second.
Miles had obviously heard them, and marked them, too. Just as she’d marked his endearment in the hall. His pointed lack of reaction was reaction enough. “My wife is fine where she is,” he informed Mr. Higgins. “You may put her and her sensibilities out of your head.”
The office door opened again with a clatter. A breathless Mr. Flack entered with a large, leather-bound volume held out in front of him. “Debrett’s Peerage, sir.”
Miles took it. He retreated to the great leather chair behind his desk. Placing the book down in front of him, he purposefully turned through its pages.
Nell’s needle stilled on her sampler. She watched Miles in silent expectation.
“Fawn-Purvis,” he said at last, with a distinct sound of satisfaction. “Family name of Baron Amstead, age three-and-seventy, of Northwick Hall, Moor Cross, Hertfordshire.”
Mr. Higgins and Mr. Flack drew closer to examine the entry. “It mayn’t be the same Fawn-Purvis that Mr. Cowgill had in his notebook,” Mr. Higgins said.
“It’s the only one in the Peerage,” Miles returned. “And it’s in Hertfordshire. If Cowgill wasn’t referencing Baron Amstead himself, it might well have been one of his relations.”
Nell couldn’t imagine what an aged Hertfordshire baron would have to do with the murder of a newspaper reporter in a Whitechapel slum. Then again, if she’d learned anything at the Academy, it was that men were capable of anything. And that went double for men of means and position.
“What else does it say?” she asked.
“His first two wives are deceased,” Miles replied, still reading.
“But he has issue. A son and heir—Christian—born of his first wife in 1829. And a daughter—Jane—born of his second wife in 1843.” He looked up from the book.
“Cowgill was known to attend fashionable house parties. Did he ever attend one at Northwick Hall?”
Mr. Higgins and Mr. Flack murmured their uncertainty.
“He’ll have heard something somewhere that set him down this path,” Miles said.
“We can send a reporter to Moor Cross,” Mr. Higgins suggested. “Ask some questions about the baron and his family.”
“No,” Miles said. “We remain in London until we know what we’re dealing with.
Flack, pull all of Cowgill’s columns from March.
I want to see if anything correlates to the dates he wrote in his notebook.
And Higgins, search the newspaper records for mentions of Fawn-Purvis and Innes with those dates in mind—the nineteenth and twenty-eighth of March and the third of September. ”
“What about the police, sir?” Mr. Flack asked.
“I’ll speak with them today,” Miles said.
Nell couldn’t conceal her surprise. “And tell them everything?”
“No, not everything,” Miles said. “But it won’t hurt to share some of what we discovered about the events at the brothel.
They needn’t know how we learned it. As for the Hertfordshire connection…
We keep it between ourselves for now. No police.
No other members of staff. I’ll have none of the younger reporters putting themselves at risk in hopes of breaking the story. You saw where that landed Cowgill.”
Mr. Higgins and Mr. Flack nodded in solemn agreement.
“I’ll pull those columns,” Mr. Flack replied.
“I’ll search the newspaper records,” Mr. Higgins said. “And I can reach out to our contacts at the clubs, and anywhere else the baron or his son might be known.”
“Do,” Miles said. “And for God’s sake, be discreet.” With a jerk of his head, he sent the two men on their way.
Mr. Higgins and Mr. Flack promptly obeyed, stopping only long enough to bow to Nell and once again murmur their congratulations, before departing the office and shutting the door behind them.
Miles stood from behind his desk. “You don’t approve?”
“I thought we weren’t going to tip our hand,” Nell said.
“We can’t go back to the well with Mrs. Pritchard.”
Nell understood that much. People in the slum knew their faces now, and knew who it was they were looking for. “No, but—”
“Let the police find the evidence against her,” Miles said. “The Courant’s efforts are better spent chasing down the society gossip that precipitated the crime. For that, we must focus our investigations on the beau monde.”
“In the form of the Fawn-Purvis family?”
“For a start.”
“What about Flora Brent?”
“What about her?”
“She’s still missing,” Nell reminded him. “She may still be somewhere in the East End.”
“I advise you to leave it to the police,” Miles said.
Nell traced a pensive pattern over the embroidered raven on her sampler with the pad of her thumb. Naturally, she wasn’t going to leave it to the police. What did Scotland Yard care for a penniless orphan girl gone missing in a slum? Miss Brent was no one to them.
But not to Nell.
“In other words,” she said, “you suggest I sit back and let the men take charge?”
“I suggest you let the professionals take charge. They can do what we can’t for now, at least insofar as the East End is concerned.”
“I see. And what will you be doing while the police are investigating Mrs. Pritchard and searching for Miss Brent, and while your employees are scouring the archives for tittle-tattle about the Fawn-Purvis family?”
“Going to Hertfordshire,” Miles said as if it were obvious.
Nell set down her sewing with an exasperated breath. She didn’t know what irritated her more, the reality of him excluding her or the prospect of him getting himself killed. “How is that any less dangerous for you than it would be for them?”
The corner of Miles’s mouth lifted in a brief semblance of a smile. “Fear not, Mrs. Quincey,” he said. “Despite appearances, I’m not unaccustomed to a bit of danger.”
· · · · ·
Miles strolled across his office to join Nell. The closer he came, the less rational he felt. Which was saying something. Rationality had been in short supply since the kiss they’d shared last night. He’d been struggling to regain it all morning. He’d begun to believe he had when—
My love, she’d called him.
He had immediately recognized the endearment for the wifely pantomime that it was. It hadn’t stopped his heart from pounding on a throb of longing so intense it had nearly stolen his breath.
And she was the cause of it.
She sat there in her modest blue dress, a scrap of needlework in her hands, as well-mannered as you please, when all the while, she was tormenting him to his core.
He’d scarcely slept last night because of her.
He’d been…Bloody hell. There were no two ways about it.
He had been wretched. And he had no one but himself to blame.
It had been his reckless decision to kiss her.
Having done so, it was taking every ounce of his not-insubstantial self-control to keep from doing it again.
“More than a bit of danger, I should think,” she said with a touch of asperity. “Unless you consider abduction, murder, and mutilation to be nothing very perilous.”
“I haven’t spent the whole of my life behind that desk,” Miles replied. “Lest you forget, I was raised in the Rookery.” He stopped in front of her. “What’s this you’ve been working on so diligently?”
“A sewing sampler,” she said.
He paused to examine it. He had a vague idea of how a sampler should look.
It was usually the alphabet, wasn’t it, with A commencing sensibly to Zed?
And numbers, as well, stitched in logical order?
But there was nothing terribly orderly about Nell’s version.
Both the letters and numbers were out of sequence, some of them appearing more than once.
And embroidered behind it all, a stone house and garden that bore a suspicious resemblance to Miss Corvus’s Academy.
Miles lifted his gaze to Nell’s. “Something for the Academy?”
She shrugged one shoulder with studied nonchalance. “An exemplar, merely.”
“What does it mean? These numbers and letters, and this raven?” The small black bird was perched atop the gray-thread tower, a single stitch of white on its wing.
“What should it mean?” Nell asked in return. “It’s for instructional purposes, that’s all. I taught sewing classes at the school—did I not mention it?”
Miles sensed she wasn’t being entirely honest with him. Not lying precisely, but keeping her secrets close. Or rather, the Academy’s secrets.
It was the latter he’d been determined to uncover at the start of this.
But now, as he frowned down at his wife of less than four-and-twenty hours, he felt the disconcerting desire to learn her secrets, too.
To find out who she truly was, and what she truly wanted.
To discover the things that would make her smile her dimpled smile. That would make her happy with him.
An impossible impulse.
Nothing would make her happy with him. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be anywhere but at her blasted charity school.
But here she was just the same.
Her face was tilted up to him, her rolled coiffure shimmering like fairest gold in the sunlight that filtered through his office window.
A strand had come loose to curve about her cheek—the same rogue curl that Miles had observed working free on previous occasions.
Without thinking, he reached to tuck it back behind her ear.
It was silky soft under his fingers just as he’d imagined it would be.
Nell went still under his touch. She took a tremulous breath. “Miles,” she began. “About last night…”
The door opened again before she could finish.
Higgins popped his head in. “Mr. Quincey?”
Miles turned on his assistant. It took everything within him to keep from biting the man’s head off. “What is it this time, Higgins?” he asked tightly.
Higgins gulped. “I’m sorry, sir, but…there’s a police inspector to see you.”