Ghost of the Thames (30 page)

One servant girl and two footmen were
waiting to escort her when she left the sitting room. Sophy
directed her steps toward the front foyer. She would walk right out
of this house with only the clothes she was wearing, if she
could.

“Not that way, miss,” one of the
footmen called after her.

She ignored the warning and reached
the front entrance. Two large men stood by the door, ready to block
the exit. She was certainly outnumbered.

“The stairs is that way, miss,” the
servant girl at her elbow whispered.

Sophy considered dashing for the door
and testing their quickness. The problem was that even if she were
able to escape right now, her situation was really unchanged. Priya
was still in their grasp. And if she tried to force her way out and
failed, there was nothing to say that her uncle wouldn’t treat
Sophy the same way, drugging her with an opiate until this accursed
marriage took place.

“I will see the house now,” she said
in her haughtiest tone. “You can go and get permission from my
uncle, but I doubt he would object to it.”

None of them moved, not knowing how to
respond. Every servant in the house knew he was forcing her to stay
here. Still, she was his niece; it made sense that she should know
the layout of the house. For her part, she had no doubt that Edward
would arrive tomorrow, demanding her release. When that happened,
she had to be ready. She would know not only the location of every
window and door, but also how many servants John Warren
employed.

Sophy wandered off ahead of the three
escorts. One of the footmen carried an oil lamp, but he was hardly
interested in serving as her guide. He obviously did not want to
encourage this tour. So Sophy took her time, meandering about,
poring over every painting and every fixture and every detail, from
the design of the molding to the size and shape of each doorway.
She asked what each room was used for and then walked inside,
taking her time to study the furniture and fireplaces and
everything else that took time and bored her escorts.

“Wouldn’t ye be better able to see the
house in daylight, miss?” the servant girl asked.

Sophy just glared at her with an air
of superiority and continued on.

In a hallway past the dining room, she
stopped short. Amelia was standing in front of them. She smiled at
Sophy and then disappeared.

Sophy felt a rush of energy course
through her veins. She preferred this new leaf in their book of
friendship. Just like the night that they’d discovered Henry’s
body, Sophy thought of an idea and the ghost confirmed
it.

Outside of a ballroom, she noticed her
escorts had grown tired enough of the tour to remain by the door.
At the next room and the next, they did the same thing, allowing
Sophy to venture farther on her own. In the library, she took an
excruciatingly long time. Using the dim light coming in the door,
she perused the titles, finally choosing two large books containing
maps and drawings of India to take with her. The three servants
stood outside the door grumbling to each other.

Then, she saw Amelia again, next to
another door at the far end of the library. Sophy watched the ghost
turn and walk straight through the wooden door, disappearing into
the next room.

Taking her books, she quietly
followed. The door was slightly ajar and she entered. On the
opposite wall, a tall door of glass faced the garden, and the
winter moon was shining through a half-circle fan at the top. A
large table with a map on it stood in the center of the room.
Against the wall, a wide case containing what looked like rolls of
more maps faced the table. The air was stuffy and smelled of
cigars.

Amelia was standing next to an
ornately carved desk and pointing to a drawer.

Sophy hurried to where the young woman
was waiting. The spirit moved to the side. Opening the drawer,
Sophy reached in and withdrew a large ledger book. When she glanced
up at the apparition questioningly, Amelia simply faded
away.

“Miss? Miss?” The cry came from the
library.

Around the partially open door, she
saw the room brighten.

“Lor, she’s in ’is private office!” a
footman exclaimed.

“Ye can’t go in there, miss.” The
girl’s voice was panicked. “Quick, now! That’s her uncle’s office.
We’ll be sacked, for sure.”

Before they yanked the door open,
Sophy slid the ledger book between the two other volumes and moved
to the table bearing a map of the world. Small carved models of
ships were spread over it.

“Ain’t the master always kept this
door locked?” one of the footman asked the other in a hushed
tone.

“I ain’t ever seen the inside of this
room before.”

Sophy moved to the glass door and
looked out into the garden. This could provide a possible way out.
Through the glass door, she could escape into the garden and scale
a wall if she needed to. She tested the handle. It was
locked.

“Watchmen walks the grounds, miss. Ye
won’t get far, if that’s what yer thinkin’.”

Again, she treated the three to a
haughty sneer and walked out of the room. All of them were out of
the office in an instant, with the door pulled shut behind them.
She noticed one of the servants test the handle; it was
locked.

Sophy was anxious to see whatever it
was that Amelia wished her to see. The three volumes in her arm
were heavy, and one of the men offered to carry them for her. She
refused and started for the stairway leading to the upper
floors.

She was half way up the stairs when
John Warren and Peter Hodgson came out of the sitting room into the
foyer. They both looked up, apparently surprised to see
her.

“What were you doing still down here?”
Warren growled.

“I borrowed some books from your
library to read. Do you mind?” she said testily, never slowing
down.

Moments later, once again locked in
her rooms, she pulled up a chair next to Priya’s bed and lit an oil
lamp. The older woman’s breathing continued to be labored. It
seemed that she was fighting demons in her sleep.

Sophy put the book she’d taken from
her uncle’s desk on her lap. The volume was a large, old-fashioned
ledger. She opened to the first page.

“Shipping records,” she murmured under
her breath.

The script was done in a tight,
masculine hand. Dates of ship’s voyages, names of passengers,
descriptions of cargo, statements of profit and loss. Except for
some of the abbreviations, Sophy found that she had no trouble
understanding the contents of the carefully lined columns. Another
part of her education, she thought gratefully. The ledger contained
reports of everything transported on the company’s
ships.

Sophy looked at the pages carefully,
trying to decipher the script, column by column and line by line,
for each specific voyage. Dates at sea. Ports of call. Harbor
costs. Cargo. Cotton. Silk. Silk goods. Wool. Sugar cane. Molasses.
Opium. Tobacco. Coffee. Tea. Indigo. Jute. She skipped through a
few pages. The salaries of the crew. Marginal notes in the same
hand, conveying information provided by a ship’s captain. At the
end of each voyage’s entries, she found the names of warehouses the
shipments were dispersed to and the final sale. Total profit lines
for the closure of each voyage.

Sophy assumed the ledger was a copy of
the books kept by her uncle at the shipping office. She fanned
quickly through the ledger, comparing the handwriting, and found it
to be all done in the same hand.

Priya sighed in her sleep, as if she
were in pain, and Sophy watched the older woman for few moments.
She was determined to put an end to the drugs being administered to
her friend. Whoever returned in the morning with more of the
supposed medicine would be facing a battle.

Sophy buried herself in the ledger
again, paging through, trying to find something that would stand
out. There had to be a reason that Amelia wanted her to have this
ledger.

She peered at a clock on the mantel.
Time was passing. What had felt like moments turned out to be
several hours. Sophy stretched and looked around the room, hoping
Amelia would return to her. The volume of information in the ledger
was overwhelming. She wished she knew where exactly she should look
and what she should look for.

Sophy also feared the next time John
Warren went into his office, he’d notice the ledger was missing,
and she’d be found out. At the moment, with his plans of marrying
her off, she surely must seem harmless enough to him. But if he was
trying to hide something in these pages and she were able to find
it, she could be much more dangerous.

Suddenly, an idea struck her. She
couldn’t remember the name of the ship she’d been on for the
crossing or the exact date that they had departed, but she knew
when it had arrived in Gravesend. Sophy wondered if this ledger was
current enough to include that journey.

She opened the book to the last
entries. They were four recent arrivals. Paging backward, she
matched the dates and then found the specific entry she was looking
for. She found her name listed among the passengers.

As before, the totals showed a very
profitable crossing. Starting on the first page with the cargo
manifest, she moved down line by line.

Nothing stood out.

Something must be here, she thought,
going through the columns again.

Nothing.

Frustrated, she tossed the ledger onto
the bed. As she did, additional, unbound sheets slipped
out.

Sophy stared for a moment and snatched
them up. The same carefully ruled lines and columns were there. The
same tight script. A score of pages, folded and tucked into the
back of the ledger.

Sophy’s eyes ran up and down the
pages. She matched the dates of voyages with the bound pages of the
ledger. This addendum had goods and profits not included in the
master list. As she read through, she understood why.

Sixty women under age
twenty . . . .Ten boys age six to eight . . . .Fifty eight women
sold . . . .Ten boys sold . . . .

The names of warehouses where they
were unloaded. Names of buyers. Payments received. No different
than if these human beings were bales of cotton, or hogsheads of
sugar, or any other commodity.

She stared at the names of the buyers.
One name, Shill, was mentioned in some capacity of distributing the
human cargo of every shipment.

Sophy went hurriedly through the loose
sheets, cross-referencing with the bound pages. They were there, on
most of the crossings. Women. Children. Not all of them survived.
Those who did were brought to London and sold.

Tears blurred her vision. This was her
business. Her ships. This was what her inheritance was built on.
And now she understood why Amelia reached into that river and saved
her. Now she understood the reason for being led to Hammersmith
Village or to the warehouse on the Isle of Dogs. She was
responsible for those people’s misery.

Sophy recalled the vision Amelia had
forced her to see on one of their first nights in the
city.

Women and children dressed
in rags, chained together in a belly of a ship, crying out for
help. She was looking down at them through an open hatch. Their
heads had been shaven of every last strand of hair. Sophy tried to
go to them, but a cloak thrown over her shoulders was too heavy.
She tried to take a step forward, but the weight was crushing her,
body and soul. She looked down at the garment. It was made of gold.
Pure gold . . . and woven from hair of the victims.

She recalled Amelia’s
words.

“Nothing you do is
irrelevant. It is your responsibility to stop the evil that
afflicts them.”

A sob escaped her. A rush of tears
followed. Shame, unlike anything she’d experienced before,
overwhelmed her.

The ledger slipped off her lap to the
floor with a loud bang. Sophy dropped to her knees next to Priya’s
bed, burying her face in the bedclothes next to the old woman’s
body. Priya knew, too. That was why she encouraged Sophy to come to
London. Not to marry, but to right what was wrong.

Sophy understood why she had tried to
forget her past. She was never told of this vile side of their
business, but there had to be signs that she’d ignored.

Snatches of memories from this ocean
crossing came back to her. She was not supposed to leave her cabin
unescorted, and there were specific times of the day she was
permitted to go on deck. Sophy had ignored the rules.

A week into their crossing, she’d gone
to the upper deck unexpectedly, only to find the group huddled
together. Women and children, frightened, some crying, a few sick.
She’d asked the captain about them, but she’d been denied an answer
and asked to return to her cabin.

Sophy was not satisfied, and she’d
used Priya as her eyes and ears, for the Bengali servant had the
freedom to roam the ship with no one taking notice. She’d found out
for her where all these people were kept and who they
were.

They were the ship’s human cargo. And
they were kept in a special storage area of only three feet in
height running fore and aft in the ship. Sophy was sick at the
news, but until now, she’d thought that this was a business
conducted by and for the profit of the ship’s crew. Her family
would certainly not have any knowing role in this. Once, she had
even escaped her cabin and crawled below to visit with those
prisoners.