Chapter 16 #2
Four days had passed since Sergeant Corbet’s visit to the boardinghouse.
Four nights of barely sleeping, of picturing Rab in the room across the landing, fitting together the pieces of her lie like a puzzle.
When unconsciousness did, finally, close over her, she returned to the same dream.
Running across the fallow field after Charlie, with something horrid behind.
Each time, at the edge of the forest, she turned to face what was chasing her.
And each time she awoke with a gasp, the knowledge of what—of who—pursued her on the tip of her tongue like a forgotten word.
“Miss Foster,” said a familiar voice. Caroline wheeled. “I’m so pleased to see you.”
Sergeant Corbet was dressed in his uniform, the brass buttons gleaming, the belt with its truncheon fitted tightly around his neat waist. He wore no hat; his sandy hair was parted to the side; his blue-green eyes large as guineas with concern.
“Please,” he said, raising a counter hatch and ushering her through. “There’s a vacant office where we can speak privately.”
Caroline stepped self-consciously past him, feeling her skirts catch on his boots, feeling the heat of his body through the thick wool of his jacket. Over the building’s odor of mildew, she caught the pleasant, familiar scent of Pears soap.
He led her into a large, windowless room full of desks at which a dozen or more policemen sat writing, reading, talking, and drinking tea out of stoneware mugs.
They all looked up as she entered; one or two elbowed their companions with a wry sneer.
But Caroline kept her head up and did not allow herself a glance their way.
She pretended she was at a ball, gliding on slippered feet toward the punch table.
“Just through here,” Sergeant Corbet said, holding open a door at the far end of the room. Gray light poured in from a small, high window; the desk was covered in neat stacks of paper. “Have a seat.”
Caroline sank into a scuffed but comfortable leather chair as he settled himself behind the desk.
For a long moment, neither spoke. Sergeant Corbet interlaced his hands on the wood before him and looked at Caroline. No, that wasn’t right. He was examining her, taking note of the tension in her shoulders, the dark skin beneath her eyes. She had the childish urge to cry.
“I’m so pleased to see you,” he said again. “Are you well? I’ve been round and round in my head about what to do, after I saw you at the boardinghouse—”
“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Caroline said. “I’m fine, really. Only I don’t have much time.”
She was supposed to be buying sugar and butter for the cakes. After her two-hour disappearance the day she had spoken to Mary Jane, Mrs. Easton had wanted to do the shopping herself. But the rain made her knees ache, and Caroline had promised to be efficient.
“Of course,” said Sergeant Corbet. “Right. Well. I came to the address you gave me—forgive me if I put you in danger, it was not my intention to—”
“Sergeant,” Caroline said. “Please.”
“Right. Forgive me. I came because I found news of your brother.”
All the blood in Caroline’s body drained into her boots.
The policeman shuffled through the papers on his desk, pulled out a typed document with an official-looking stamp on the top right corner. “On March twelfth, he bought a one-way ticket to New York City.”
No. No, it could not be.
Caroline took the paper with shaking hands.
“I can’t claim credit, I’m afraid,” Sergeant Corbet was saying. “It was found by another officer, who has been tasked with investigating a group of criminals running a smuggling ring out of New York. But I put your brother’s name about, after you…after we met. Back in September.”
It was a receipt dated March 12, 1888.
SS Oceanic, she read. Liverpool to New York City. Steerage class ticket (1). Charles Wallace Foster.
“This cannot be,” Caroline heard herself say.
“I can understand what a shock this must be, Miss Foster. I’m so sorry to—”
“No. No, you don’t understand. He would have bought two tickets.”
“A second for you? Had he spoken to you about traveling to America?”
“No.” Charlie had never mentioned America, as far as she could remember.
But if he was in trouble, if something concerning the Full Moon Society, or Rab, had made him fear for his life, he would have taken Mary Jane with him.
The proof of his love for her was everywhere.
In the pages of his sketchbook. The Blevins family crest on her ring finger. He would have taken her.
“Not for me,” Caroline said, swallowing the barbed hurt of the words. “For his fiancée. She was expecting, you see. When he disappeared.”
Sergeant Corbet inhaled. “How do you know this?”
“I found her. In Miller’s Court.”
“In Spitalfields?”
Caroline nodded.
The policeman pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and second finger.
“Miss Foster,” he said in a long-suffering tone, “I beg you: Do not go wandering the streets of the East End. We are trying—and failing miserably, I might add—to catch a man who kills single women in just the neighborhood where you went unaccompanied, searching for—”
“I found her,” Caroline repeated. “And she told me she was expecting when Charlie disappeared. He would never leave her.”