Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
The single window in Cassie’s office let in the bleak gray light of an early December snow fall. The small flakes were changing over to rain, and if the temperature dropped any further, the streets would be slick by the time she left for home.
When she and her partner, Miss Elyse Khan, had purchased the lease for the three-story building on Crispin Street, it had been nothing more than a collection of shabby rooms and landings covered in peeling wallpaper, water stains, and rubbish left by the previous tenants.
In some places, holes had been knocked through the walls, exposing timber beams and plaster.
Fixing it up and furnishing it had taken nearly two months and had cost more than she’d budgeted for, but at last, the rooms had been ready for the young women both Cassie and Elyse knew would come.
They had met at a Lyceum lecture the previous year.
Cassie’s former sister-in-law, Audrey had often attended the lectures before she’d married Hugh and started their family, and she’d convinced Cassie that some were much more interesting than one might expect.
The topic that afternoon had been a discourse of social reforms for the city’s laboring class.
Cassie had been close to nodding off in her seat when she’d felt a little nudge against her shoulder.
Coming to attention, she’d turned and found a woman of about thirty seated behind her, smirking.
After the lecture, Cassie thanked her for saving her from the humiliation of drooling in public.
“It was a terribly boring sermon,” the woman had replied, “and his ideas for reform are flawed. He champions the banning of children under age ten from working in factories but insists an increase in wages for adult workers is too radical. Children wouldn’t be in the factories at all if their parents could earn a decent wage on their own. ”
At her clear and confident opinion, Cassie had felt woefully lacking.
In fact, she could hardly recall anything the man had said.
They’d exchanged introductions, and Cassie had invited her to a nearby coffeehouse.
Over the next hour, she’d learned that Elyse had been trained as a midwife by her own mother, an Englishwoman who had gone to India as a missionary.
She had returned to England ten years later with Elyse, whose father had been a soldier in India.
He’d contracted a fever and died, leaving Elyse and her mother on their own.
Eventually, Elyse’s mother proved to be a much-trusted midwife in the East End.
After her death, Elyse confidently stepped into her shoes.
“Doctors are already few and far between here,” she’d explained when Cassie had been stunned by how many births Elyse had presided over. “They often choose not to attend unmarried women, or women who look like me. Or anyone else with darker skin.”
“Oh,” Cassie replied, rather lamely.
She knew so little of the world beyond her Mayfair life.
Over the next few lectures, which she and Elyse attended together, she started paying attention to a common thread in the stories of births the midwife would tell her.
Many of the women were young, under the age of twenty, and nearly half of them were not married.
The unmarried ones, Elyse said, usually had no support at all from their families.
They were often cast out if they dared to keep their child rather than send it to an orphanage or shuffle it off to an older relative.
“Is there no safe place for them?” Cassie had asked, thinking of her own safe place when she’d found herself in the same dire circumstances: unmarried, with child, and terrified.
A middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Olsson, who had been her late brother Philip’s old friends, had welcomed her into their small but caring home in Stockholm.
At the time, Cassie had felt like a prisoner, separated from everyone and everything she knew, facing a moment that she dreaded with all her heart.
But looking back, she realized that the Olsson’s home had been a blessing.
“Not yet,” Elyse had answered.
By the following week, Cassie had formed an idea. When she presented it to her new friend, Elyse had accepted on the spot.
Now, the clock on Cassie’s desk ticked softly toward two in the afternoon as she read a medical treatise Elyse had given her.
It went in depth on childbirth and the unnecessary use of forceps, and to be honest, much of it turned Cassie’s stomach.
She rubbed her eyes, the tips of her fingers chilled.
Her toes were beginning to grow uncomfortably cold too.
The coal delivery had been delayed several days now, and she’d forgone a fire in her own office grate in favor of making sure their current residents had plenty to keep warm.
For Elyse, too. She lived at Hope House, after all, and even though the rooms were updated and comfortable, the windows still let in drafts and poor insulation kept the walls cold.
All fixable, of course, but after going through their accounts, they’d agreed not until the spring.
Cassie had just five hundred a year from her inheritance, and she needed to reserve what little was left of it, at least for the next five months.
The thought of money reminded her of the previous week, when Lord Thornton had so casually implied that she was nothing more than a pampered female, frittering away pin money.
She gnashed her teeth. The bigheaded boor!
She still simmered over his ludicrous claim that he’d been checking Lady Brookfield for a mole.
Utter nonsense. The widow’s hem had practically been up around her waist!
Her heart still stuttered when thinking of the several minutes she’d endured in the closet, pressed against him, as they hid from discovery.
The moment she’d put her hands against Lord Thornton’s chest, she’d regretted it.
The hard muscle underneath his evening clothes had made her feel too hot.
His scent—a rich amalgam of cinnamon and sandalwood—made her head swimmy.
Cassie had been painstakingly aware of her bosom against him, and of his bare hands drifting down the backs of her arms. And then, worst of all, of the rock of his thighs as her leg stumbled between his, during their tussling.
Her breathing had grown stilted when the bully had covered her mouth with his palm.
And then he’d had the audacity to be furious with her!
A single pert knock on her office door was all the warning Elyse gave before coming in. Cassie was too slow to wipe away her grimace.
“Are you thinking about that horrible man again?” she asked.
The office was small and cold, but it was still cozy. On numerous occasions, Cassie had considered sleeping on the couch instead of returning to her home on Grosvenor Square. However, her staff would undoubtedly report her absence to the duke. Michael was the one who employed them after all.
Cassie closed the treatise and stood, regretful that she’d told Elyse about the encounter.
But she’d still been beside herself the morning after the ball, and her friend had noticed.
Elyse was aware that she was a lady of the peerage and that she was keeping her work at Hope House a secret.
She’d been skeptical at first, uncertain if Cassie could maintain a double life, but here they were, one year later, and the rhythm of Cassie’s two lives had settled in rather well.
“Any thought of Lord Thornton is firmly in the darkest recesses of my mind,” she fibbed.
“Exactly where he should be. Men like him are the very reason this house exists.”
The urge to deny the accusation leaped to her tongue, but Cassie swallowed it.
Why should she defend him? For all she knew, the man had sired a dozen by-blows.
His reputation was cemented in the ton as a good physician but a scalawag who frequented the haunts of the demimonde rather than the typical social outlets of the peerage.
“Take Lila, for example,” Elyse continued in the rising tone that usually signaled a brief ticking-off.
“What about her?” The young woman had arrived a few weeks ago, her abdomen just barely round enough to be noticeable.
A fresh purpling bruise on the side of her mouth, and an older one yellowing the fair skin at her temple, had not shocked Cassie when she’d entered the mock office in the front of the building.
Many of the women and girls who arrived sported such marks, compliments of the men they were usually taking refuge from.
“I am looking for my friend, Hope,” the young woman had said, repeating the code that had been confided in her by one of the nuns or midwives in the area whom Elyse trusted implicitly.
It hadn’t taken more than a single conversation with Lila for Cassie to realize she wasn’t from the East End.
She was educated, most likely finished at a respectable school.
Her clothing didn’t look to be from any of the high-end shops on Bond or Oxford Streets, but they weren’t cast offs either.
They’d probably been purchased readymade at a clothier.
“She was probably compromised by someone just like your blackguard.”
“He’s not my blackguard,” Cassie snapped. Elyse rolled her dark brown eyes.
“You know what I mean. An upper-class rake who didn’t think twice before leading a young, impressionable girl to reach just above her station,” she said. “I’m almost positive she is gentry.”
She and Elyse had been trying to piece together Lila’s story on their own based on what little the young woman had offered. She’d only given her first name and that she was around four months gone. Nothing more.
Cassie reached for the shawl on the back of her chair and stepped out from behind her desk. “Whoever compromised Lila, there is at least one thing that sets Lord Thornton apart from him.”
“What is that?”