At the lower end of the street, he entered a stark, squat building of brown stone. Cleo had never had a cause to go there, but she knew the place, the Bow Street police office. She entered with a rough crowd in all states of drunkenness and violent annoyance, keeping her gaze on Xander as he worked his way into the packed, high-ceilinged room where the magistrate held sway. Her rich evening clothes drew stares and comments from those around her. Hands tugged at her cloak, holding her back.
A redheaded behemoth with an unshaven jaw blocked her way. “Here now, missy, wot’s a fine dove like you doing in this lot?”
“Mebbe she’s lost, Joe,” said another male voice.
“Then I’m the one to help ’er,” said big Joe, putting a heavy arm around Cleo’s shoulders.
Cleo touched her pig-sticking knife to Joe’s wide ribs. “Thank you, sir, for your kindness, but I have all the assistance I need.”
Joe backed off, lifting his arm from her shoulders.
“Pardon me, ma’am.”
Cleo pushed and squeezed her way through ragged women with squalid babes in their arms. It was past midnight. Constables led London’s wrongdoers before the magistrate to determine whether they would stand trial in the morning when the court opened. Xander Jones was near the front, his gaze fixed on the proceedings.
Cleo felt silly and confused. It made sense for him to seek a bawdy house of some sort, but what message made her husband leave his wife’s side to come here for a low spectacle?
The crowd was laughing at the interrogation of an old woman with a pox-pitted face under a large black bonnet.
“Now, Mother Greenslade, explain yourself,” the magistrate demanded.
The woman drew her russet shawl about her thin shoulders. “Why, Yer Worship, I collect my rents same as always and takes the money straight to the bank.”
“What’s the complaint then, Constable?”
“She tried to pass a five-pound note from the Bank of Scotland, sir.”
The crowd roared with laughter. A man called out, “Collecting rent with a tap on the bloke’s head, was ye, Mother Greenslade?”
The crowd hooted its derision again. In their midst, Xander Jones was a still point, neither amused nor distracted by the show. Cleo had managed to squirm her way a foot closer when she stopped. Her uncle entered the court, said a word to the magistrate with obvious familiarity, took a seat, and cast his bland gaze right at Xander Jones. Cleo shrank back behind a beefy man in a leather apron. She felt numb with betrayal. All along her husband had a connection to her uncle. It made no sense.
A fist of iron closed around her arm and a rough voice hissed in her ear, “Lady Jones, what the devil are you doing here?”
Cleo turned and found her brother-in-law beside her. “He left me at the Opera House. I had to see where he ...”
“You thought he had a ladybird tucked somewhere?”
Realization struck her. “This is where he goes at night? To meet my uncle?”
“Don’t be daft. Did your uncle see you?”
“No. Why is my uncle here?”
“Because he’s a maw worm that preys on London. Let’s get you out of here.” He stepped between her and the front of the crowd.
“What about Xander?”
“He needs to talk to Mother Greenslade.”
“That old woman? Who is she?”
There was no answer. Will Jones split a path through the crowd like Cook slit a fish. Outside he still gripped her arm, jerking her after him up the dark street. He whistled, and Isaiah pulled up, apologizing for letting Cleo go, more words than she had ever heard him speak.
Will silenced the apologies. “Home, Isaiah.”
In the carriage, he told Cleo, “You scared the vinegar out of Isaiah.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Just so you know, Isaiah would pay first if you disappeared.”
“Disappeared? I went armed into a police station full of officers of the law. Surely, there was some safety in that.”
Will hauled her roughly from her seat. Her knees collided painfully with his. His dark eyes blazed into hers. “I’m a blasted officer of the law. Do you think you’re safe with me?”
She could smell the usual spirits on his breath and see a dark scratch on his stubble-covered right cheek. For a moment she thought he meant to kiss her. She refused to flinch. He wouldn’t. He might not respect her, but he respected his brother. He shoved her back onto her bench. Cleo bounced and righted herself.
“My brother’s a bleeding saint. You think you have a rival? London’s your rival, a pox-ridden old tart of a city that lifts her skirts when a man presses a coin in her filthy hand and kicks him in the teeth when he has nothing.”
Cleo held herself perfectly still, waiting for the anger in him to subside. Dangerous as it was, it had nothing to do with her. After a moment he spoke in a calmer voice.
“A stupid dream is your rival.”
“What dream?”
“Ask him, and get him to bed you if you want to beat your uncle.”
“Do I have to dance naked for him?”
“That might do it.”
At Hill Street, Will Jones hustled her out of the carriage. Amos, unruffled as ever, led her inside, and the vehicle was gone before the door closed behind them.
Cleo studied her husband’s butler. He seemed like a man under a wicked spell, compelled to serve in silence in an enchanted castle where doors were locked and secrets kept. Cleo wondered what would break the enchantment.
“You would not be surprised if a dragon knocked, would you, Amos?” He took her cloak without a word, just a jingle of his keys as he moved.
“I’ll take those keys, thank you.”
He looked just the least bit uncertain then, but Cleo did not back down. “If I’m to be Lady Jones, I need those keys.”
Amos would not do anything so open as to plead. A fierce battle seemed to rage behind his unchanging face before, his reluctance plain, he handed over the ring of keys. Cleo watched him go. She would start with her husband’s study and uncover his secrets, one by one.
His desk was orderly, her scraps of receipts cleared away. A ledger of gasworks accounts lay atop plans, drawings, and maps. She stopped at a large pile of weekly Bills of Mortality for London. There were years of them. She lifted the most recent number. Here one could read the names, ages, and addresses of the deceased of every parish in London. Her uncle’s macabre practice of reading them had shocked her when he came to live with them after her father’s death. How could anyone read about dozens of deaths every week? One death had undone her world. One death was an inescapable fact in her life.
She held the pamphlet, trying to understand the facts in front of her. It made no sense that her uncle and Xander Jones had the same odd habits. Was Xander her partner in the fight against her uncle, or was he her uncle’s ally?
She took a calming breath. Archibald March and Xander Jones weren’t the same sort of man at all. If she looked, she would find an explanation for the odd coincidence. She made herself open the pamphlet in her hand, for the second week of November 1818, and thumbed through it, finding an item marked
Timothy Harris, plasterer, aged thirty-five years, 40 Bread Street, an apoplexy
.
She paused for a moment, sitting in Xander’s chair. This man’s death could have nothing to do with her or with their partnership. But he had mentioned just this entry to his brother at breakfast days ago, and the death happened where Xander meant to put his gaslights. She took up others and flipped the pages, looking for entries he had marked. A chilling pattern emerged. He marked children’s deaths, the deaths of boys.
An odd shiver shook her. He was searching for someone, a child, in all the graves of London. And her uncle was somehow involved. She couldn’t sit any longer with such a pile of losses.
She started up through the house, unlocking all the closet doors as she went. She had to laugh at herself. It turned out that her husband possessed a remarkable collection of dainty dressing tables and damask-covered chairs and gilt looking glasses. One closet was stuffed with perfumed silk gowns in dazzling colors. But there were no beheaded brides. He was hardly Bluebeard.
O
RDINARILY, Xander supposed, a man would be delighted to find his wife kneeling on the floor of his bedroom in silks with her hair down. Unless, of course, she was examining the contents of his private drawers, a knife on the carpet beside her.
She looked up at him, a sober curiosity in those remarkably frank green eyes of hers. Amos’s ring of keys lay like a fan of iron at the edge of her emerald skirts.
“You have stacks of Bills of Mortality that you do read and a drawer full of perfumed letters that you don’t. They are all unopened.” She let them fall from her hands into her lap.
“There you go, finding all my secrets.”
“Even those locked in the closets, though why you are concealing a warehouse of over-dainty furniture from me remains a mystery.”
“You have been thorough.”
“You’ve been out most of the night.” Her gaze held his.
He leaned against the doorframe. “At the Bow Street police office, as you discovered.”
“Well, you could have told me. A wife wonders when her husband leaves her every evening at bedtime.”
“True, but your idea of going to bed is more suited to an afternoon appointment at the offices of a tooth-drawer than a night of unbridled passion.”
She looked at letters in her lap. “You know I have no objections to conventional wifely acts even with spies peering in at our windows.”
“You’ve seen one of March’s boys?” He had reason to press her. Tonight Mother Greenslade had confirmed Will’s suspicion that March owned the property on Bread Street where Harris had died. Apparently he owned Number Forty, a neighboring tenement, and the brothel on Half Moon Street, hardly the investments of a noble benefactor of the poor. That was the only information they had wrung from the wily old woman before she made her escape into the night. Not even ready coin had made her willing to say more.
“I can’t be sure. I may have imagined. Why do you say March’s boys?” She looked up again.
“Will thinks March uses boys from a school on Bread Street to spy on prominent people.”
“My uncle? Why?”
“To find their weaknesses, vices, sins—whatever high-placed men don’t want exposed to the world. March lets them know he can expose them. The threat of exposure gives him influence over them.”
An arrested look came into her eyes, as if she had just made sense of a puzzle that had teased her mind for some time. “He knew about my father’s gaming debts.”
“Were they bad?” Xander kept the question light, but a disturbing notion crossed his mind at this second conversation of the evening about Archibald March.
“I never suspected my father owed such sums until he died. It was naïve of me not to suspect that he would gamble or seek a brothel. He was a single man. My mother was long dead, and he loved company, loved play of all sorts. He took part in our games. He used to ride Charlie on his shoulders around the house.”
“Not the same thing as faro.” Xander came into the room and lowered himself to the floor across from her, leaning back against the wall. He stretched his legs out, one booted foot over the other. He never shared confidences with anyone, but this sharing with her felt comfortable.
“Uncle March helped me see that all my father’s debts of honor were paid at once.”
“Did he force you out of your father’s house?” His feelings for Archibald March shifted again from mild contempt to savage hostility.
“You heard the story of my deranged actions, turning on him with a poker?”
“Yes. I suspected that your uncle inspired your reliance on weapons in dealing with men.”
“I woke to find him arranging my hair against the pillows. It gave me a shock. I could have done a dozen more sensible things, I suppose, but I picked up the poker and threatened him with it.”
He was definitely coming to share Will’s opinion of March. The thought of March’s hands on her woke something violent in him, but he had to hide a grin. What else would she do but pick up a poker? “And left your home?”
“As soon as I could arrange it. Our old nurse, Miss Hester Britt, inherited Fernhill Farm from her brother. By the time I left, the mad-girl-with-the-poker story was in wide circulation. Everyone who knew me was relieved, I think, that I was gone. No one tried to find us. Even Uncle left us alone for three years.”
She scooped the letters from her lap and let them slip through her fingers back into the drawer. As she came to her knees, Xander came to his, too, and helped her up from the floor.
She offered him a rueful half smile, slipping her hand from his. He felt instantly deprived. He gathered up Amos’s keys and handed her the knife.
“Tonight I set out to find out about you, to unlock your secrets, and here I am telling you my sad history.” She squared her shoulders and lifted her head. “You mustn’t pity me for it. Really, Charlie and I were quite happy, just a little hard-pressed for coin, for his schooling, more than anything. I’m grateful for our bargain. It gives me a way to fight Uncle March. I must not lose Charlie to him, you understand?”