Chapter 16
The following afternoon, as Caroline and Mrs. Easton applied a paste of lemon juice and baking soda to the brass sconces in the first-floor hallway, a knock sounded on the front door.
It was a tentative sound: knuckles against wood, not the bold ring of the knocker. Mrs. Easton cocked her head like a dog.
“Are you expecting someone?” Caroline asked when the landlady made no move to answer it.
Mrs. Easton did not reply as she stalked to the landing, her shoulders hardened beneath her apron straps.
It struck Caroline, as she followed, why her own body was coiled tight as a spring: Not once, in the nearly two months she had spent at the Full Moon, had anyone ever knocked.
Even at Audley House, remote though it was, peddlers and tinkers had occasionally presented themselves at the kitchen gate.
But not here. And every guest had his own wide iron key that opened the front door.
The knock rang out again, louder.
“Do you want me to answer it?” Caroline asked.
Mrs. Easton shook her head, eyes narrowing. “Some costermonger, no doubt. I’ll send him off.” She handed Caroline her rag and stamped down the stairs. “Finish up, would you?”
Only two sconces remained. As Caroline started back down the hallway toward her interrupted work, the front door opened with a metallic squeal.
“Officer.” Mrs. Easton’s voice. Surprised, tight. “How can I help you?”
“Good day, madam.” Caroline’s knees turned to gelatin. She recognized the voice: mellow. Masculine. “I need to speak with Miss Foster.”
Caroline was stepping noiselessly along the oriental runner before she could think.
“Sorry, sir,” the landlady was saying. “No one here by that name.”
“Are you quite sure?”
Caroline had reached the landing. She peered down through the bars of the banister, her heart leaping like a frog. Through the narrow window of light a man stood, silhouetted.
“I met a Miss Foster some weeks ago—” said Sergeant Corbet.
She crept around the banister on her tiptoes. Down the first step.
“And she gave me this address—”
Down the second, the third. The landlady’s back was turned to her. When her feet hit the fifth step, the policeman’s blue eyes flicked up over Mrs. Easton’s shoulder and met hers.
Caroline shook her head.
He was a professional, she would give him that. No sooner had he glimpsed her, received her silent message, than his eyes ricocheted back to Mrs. Easton’s.
“No one here by that name,” the landlady was saying again.
Sergeant Corbet fished the notebook from his breast pocket in the way he had done when he first saved Caroline from the men in the alley. He flipped through till he found the page he was looking for and frowned down at it.
“Forgive me,” he said after a moment. “It’s a Miss Forester. Can’t read my own writing.”
“No one here by that name either, I’m afraid.”
“But this is two-three-two Old Montague Street?”
Caroline exhaled.
“No, sir. This is two-one-two. Two-three-two is down at the end of the block. Just before Baker’s Row.”
“My mistake,” said the sergeant, tipping his cap. “Sorry for the interruption, ma’am.”
Caroline was back up the stairs before the door closed.
She retraced her steps, pulse hammering with the effort of moving swiftly and silently. Sergeant Corbet had come here to tell her something. It could only be something having to do with Charlie.
The thought was both a balloon and an anchor inside her.
The wallpaper birds watched her with their winking foil eyes. Caroline stuck her tongue out at the closest, a jay with its wings half-open, then raised a rag to the wall sconce and began to scrub.
When Mrs. Easton emerged on the landing, Caroline had slowed her breathing to a natural rate. “Who was at the door?” she asked without turning.
“A police officer.” The landlady took up her own rag and applied it to the final sconce with a sigh. “Looking for some poor woman at the doss house on the corner. Had the wrong name and the wrong address. London’s best and brightest, eh? No wonder they haven’t caught the Ripper.”
They finished the first-floor hallway in silence.
Caroline’s cuticles were pink and burning from the lemon juice, and her shoulders ached from scrubbing, but so lost was she in the possibilities of Sergeant Corbet’s message that she barely felt them.
As the two women climbed the stairs to the second floor, a door closed in the house above them.
It was such a common, everyday sound that the importance of it did not occur to Caroline for several seconds.
“Who…is there someone else here?”
She had been in every room that morning apart from Rab’s; emptied every chamber pot.
All the guests, save John, were out: Mr. Tythe to a botany lecture, Monsieur Rodart to the Merchant Navy offices; Senhor Perreira and Messrs.
O’Riley, Toussaint, and Bajwa (unlikely foursome though they were) to see the Italian Exhibition at Earl’s Court.
“Eh?” Mrs. Easton replied, following Caroline’s eyes up the empty air to the floors above. “Oh. That must have been Rab. Shut the chemistry early today. Wasn’t feeling well.”
Caroline’s insides turned to ice water.
“Popped in when you were up emptying the chamber pots. A sore throat, he said. Poor dear. Not like him to be under the weather. Strong as a bull. I’ll bring him up some broth and bread…”
Caroline stopped listening. Sergeant Corbet had come here to tell her something important. She was certain of it. And Rab was onto her. He had already questioned her relationship to Charlie; he disbelieved her story. Perhaps, now, her name.
And, with a sensation in her belly like a stone dropping through water, she remembered that, before she slept last night, she had taken one of Charlie’s notebooks from its drawer and laid it open to examine, for the hundredth time, the portraits of Rab and Mary Jane.
But she had put it away. Hadn’t she? She had. Certainly, she had—
“I’ll take up the soup,” Caroline blurted, interrupting whatever Mrs. Easton had been saying. “To Mr. Ripley.”
“Oh, that’s good of you,” the landlady replied genially. She hadn’t noticed the sudden stiffness in Caroline’s shoulders. “I’ll do the windows, and we can meet downstairs to start on the—”
But whatever task lay ahead of her, Caroline didn’t hear. She had already thrown open the door of the servants’ staircase. It shut behind her, extinguishing Mrs. Easton’s voice along with the light.
—
She took the stairs two at a time.
When she arrived on the garret landing, she was red-cheeked and huffing. Rab’s door was closed, and no sound met her ears but her own strident breath. She stepped across the rag rug silently, glancing over her shoulder every few steps as though Rab would materialize in his doorway.
Her handle sighed as she turned it, and she said a prayer as she crossed the threshold. Perhaps she was wrong. She was always so careful. Perhaps she had tucked the notebook away, under the books in the bottom drawer, as she always did—
But no. Charlie’s notebook was splayed on her desk, open to the final portrait of Mary Jane. Even from this distance, the subject was unmistakable; her wide eyes gazed out from the plain paper, her lips parted, as though she were about to speak.
Caroline pressed her hands against her mouth and tried to corral her thundering thoughts. Rab had never, to her knowledge, entered her room. Why should he today? Unless he had heard Sergeant Corbet asking for a Miss Foster and had put the pieces together…
No, she admonished herself. You’re letting your fears run away with you.
But when she dropped her hands and forced herself to inhale slowly, a masculine perfume of cedar and musk filled her nose.
“Good day, miss. How can I help ’ee?” asked the pockmarked boy at the entry desk of the Leman Street police station.
He was a boy, despite the dark, itchy wool of his uniform, the white letters of which proclaimed him Constable Norton.
His voice was high and uneven, his cheeks still round with baby fat.
It was cold in the station, as cold as the miserable day outside, and he kept rubbing his palms together to warm them.
“Good day. Is…” Caroline began uncertainly. For she did not know, exactly, how to proceed. “Is Sergeant Corbet here? I must speak with him.”
The boy smiled earnestly. “You’re in luck, miss. He’s usually on patrol just now. But he’s in the back filling out a report.”
Relief washed over Caroline.
“Who should I tell him is asking?”
“Miss Caroline Foster.”
The boy gave a little bow and disappeared through the door behind the desk.
Caroline exhaled a long breath. Sergeant Corbet was here. He could have so easily been on patrol, or off duty. But he was somewhere in this building. He would see her, she was certain of it. Perhaps her luck was finally changing.
Caroline turned to the row of hard wooden benches lining the front wall.
Her fellow occupants were a wretched lot indeed.
There was a woman in a gray dress holding a bundle of rags, which must have been a sleeping infant, so tenderly did she embrace it; a man asleep, longways, on one of the benches, his shoes split at the soles to expose his bare toes; and another man, seated alone, with his collar turned up and his hat pulled down, clearly wishing to remain anonymous.
Caroline decided to remain standing.
The police station entrance was on the ground floor of an unassuming building that smelled of damp rot and sour sweat. The ceilings were low and ominous; the barred windows brought in little light. She hoped the offices in the floors above were more pleasant.