Chapter 7
Fear blazed hot and white through Caroline’s head, extinguishing all reason.
She screamed into the palm over her mouth, twisted her body like a hooked fish. She caught a sour finger between her teeth, bit down until she tasted blood.
The hand pulled back with a curse. Caroline lunged forward, but the arms around her waist threw her against the wall and her head hit so hard she saw stars.
“Help!” she shrieked as thick fingers fastened around her throat. “HELP!”
She would die here. She would be raped and murdered, and no one would know, no one would care; she would be erased from the world like her mother was, as though she had never been. She clawed at the hands around her neck. Black spots appeared at the edges of her vision.
No. Her only thought.
No. The world reduced to one word.
No—
Then the grip loosened. Caroline collapsed to the ground as the men released her, cursing. A rush of air like wings as they left her, ran deeper into the alley.
“Miss?” A man stood above her, his face a blur. “Miss? Are you all right?”
“I…” Caroline gasped, raising tentative fingers to her neck. “I…”
The man knelt beside her. “They’re gone,” he said. “Are you injured?”
“I’m all right,” she croaked.
She wasn’t. She was shaking like a reed in the wind, and her body felt queerly distant. But she was alive.
Her vision swam back into tentative clarity.
The man was dressed in the black cap and uniform of a police officer. The embroidered white letters on his jacket writhed unpleasantly when Caroline attempted to read them. So she focused, instead, on his face.
It was a nice face, about Charlie’s age. His nose was long and pointed, his sandy brows straight and serious, and beneath a neat mustache, his lips were pressed together in an expression of concern.
“My name is Sergeant Corbet,” he said. “I’m an officer of the Metropolitan Police. Do you require medical attention?”
Caroline took a long, shuddering breath. She shook her head and immediately regretted the movement. “I’m all right.”
Sergeant Corbet nodded sympathetically. “Take as long as you need. You’ve had quite a fright.
” He glared at the twisting alley into which the two men had disappeared.
“I know the two who attacked you. Blight of the East End, that lot. After I get your statement, I’ll take some men and knock their door down. You have my word.”
“Thank God you came,” Caroline blurted. She thought, for a terrible moment, that she would cry. But Sergeant Corbet gave her privacy, taking his time to pull notebook and pencil from his pocket as she gained control of her emotions.
“Now,” he said, flipping to a blank page. “Tell me, please, exactly what happened.”
She lied flimsily, told him she thought she had seen someone she knew and followed them into the alley.
There was an inherent shame in eavesdropping, but more than that, some deep part of her had filled with a creeping certainty that Charlie had gotten mixed up with something sinister before he left the Full Moon.
And she followed the impulse to protect him.
Sergeant Corbet glanced up at her then. She felt her lie laid bare in his eyes, which were blue with scribbles of green and reminded Caroline of poems she had read about the ocean.
But he said nothing, so she continued. Her voice grew stronger when she reached the truth: the men blocking her way, their hands hard on her body.
When she described being held against the wall, a flush crept up Sergeant Corbet’s neck.
She was grateful for it, grateful for his discomfort at the terrible truth of what had nearly happened.
By the time she’d finished, the adrenaline had drained from her bloodstream like a swarm of wasps.
In its wake, she became aware, suddenly, that she was sitting on the filthy cobblestones, her dress wet and reeking, her head hammering against her skull with every heartbeat.
She was overcome with a desperate need to leave this place, set this nightmare far behind her.
Sergeant Corbet put away his notebook and helped her to her feet.
“May I escort you home, Miss…?”
“Foster,” she offered. “Caroline Foster.”
Too late, she remembered the alias.
“And where do you live, Miss Foster?”
Audley House, she almost answered. But Audley House was half a country away. It no longer belonged to her. And she belonged nowhere.
“Two-one-two Old Montague Street,” she said.
It was to Sergeant Corbet’s credit that he kept his face blank. “The men’s boardinghouse?”
“I’m the kitchen maid.”
He gave her another long, searching look, then offered his arm.
The light in the high street was blinding after so long in the dark.
Caroline clutched Sergeant Corbet’s coat sleeve over the uneven cobblestones as they retraced the steps she had taken with Monsieur Rodart.
It felt like another life, walking down the street with the Frenchman, thinking that Whitechapel was not the hell she had first thought.
People looked at her as they had not when she had been alone, eyes flicking swiftly from her face to her sodden dress to the policeman’s uniform, then away.
She resisted the urge to cover her throat with her free hand, certain the marks of the man’s hands were somehow visible already on her skin.
“Forgive me for saying, Miss Foster,” Sergeant Corbet said, “but you do not have the appearance of a kitchen maid. And your accent is from the Midlands, is it not?”
His own accent was like Charlie’s, like Rab’s. Beneath the overemphasized h’s and hard t’s, she caught a whiff of cockney. An East End boy with an education.
“I’ve only just arrived in London.” Her voice was hoarse and painful, but she clutched the normalcy of the conversation like a lifeline. “From Staffordshire. I came to find my brother. Last I heard, he was staying at the boardinghouse.”
Sergeant Corbet’s eyes moved over her professionally, pausing on the fine but scuffed leather of her boots, the elegant stitching of a dress made for sitting in a parlor, not scrubbing floors.
He read her story as clearly as though it had been set down in black ink: She was highborn but penniless. Utterly alone.
“And did you?” he asked.
Caroline had lost the thread of the conversation and blinked stupidly. “Did I what?”
“Find your brother?”
“Not yet.”
The words she had overheard between Rab and Mary Jane, which had nearly cost Caroline her life, surfaced again, like a precious object revealed by the tide.
Wherever Charlie Foster is, he does not want to be found.
“What’s his name?”
Caroline contracted.
There was so much she did not know about the version of Charlie she had encountered in Whitechapel.
The Charlie who lived in a men’s boardinghouse—an irreputable one, judging from the policeman’s reaction.
The Charlie who had been entangled with—she could not yet believe he was engaged to be married to—a prostitute.
But, if Rab and this Mary Jane woman could be believed, her brother had disappeared without a word to either of them.
If he was in trouble, she must protect him.
“I grew up here,” Sergeant Corbet said gently, sensing her hesitation. “I might be able to help you find him.”
A second, more reasonable voice spoke in Caroline’s head. This policeman had the full force of the law on his side. He might succeed where Rab and Mary Jane had failed.
“Charlie,” she conceded. “Charlie Foster.”
Sergeant Corbet’s sandy eyebrows drew together. “I don’t know the name. But I will make inquiries. Don’t worry, Miss Foster. If he is in the borough, we will find him.”
They took ten steps in silence.
If he is in the borough.
If Charlie had been to Staffordshire, found her missing and the estate sold, surely he would know to look for her here.
Perhaps he went first to Carys, in Wales.
She pictured the two of them worrying over her, trying to puzzle out where she might have gone.
The thought soothed her. If Charlie was in Wales, he would return to London soon, pull her free from the strange rabbit hole she had tumbled into.
Caroline noticed, belatedly, that Sergeant Corbet was limping subtly, favoring his right leg by a half second. “Did the men hurt you?” she asked, glancing down at his left foot as it briefly struck the ground.
“What? Oh, no. It’s an old wound. A musket ball in Burma.”
Caroline flushed. “Forgive me,” she said, “how impolite.”
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Sergeant Corbet said quickly, quenching her embarrassment. “Except when it rains. Or if it’s very cold. Or very hot. It’s worst in the mornings, and often the evenings. And, come to think of it, now.”
Caroline’s eyes widened in alarm, but he was smiling.
They were nearly back to the Full Moon.
“You may leave me here,” Caroline said. She could not bear to answer the questions she would face should any of the boarders see her arrive arm in arm with a policeman. A policeman who knew her true name.
“It’s no problem. Just another block.”
“I insist. I’ve already taken enough of your time.”
He shrugged politely and released her arm. “As you wish. Should you need anything—anything at all—ask for me at the station down on Leman Street. Or perhaps I will see you at St. Mary’s. I never miss Sunday service, if I can help it.”
Caroline dropped into a shallow curtsy. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
The policeman bowed but did not turn away. His eyes held hers, blazing, urgent. “Take care of yourself, Miss Foster. Were you my sister, I would not allow you within shooting distance of the Full Moon.”
—
Caroline let herself through the garden gate by reaching up on her tiptoes and feeling blindly for the latch.
She climbed the servants’ stair to her gable room, left the ruined dress in a pile in the armoire, and chose an evergreen gown with a high, ruffled neck to hide the blossoming bruises.
She splashed water on her face, repinned her hair, and stared at herself for a long moment.