“I didn’t expect to be seein’ your ladyship agin,” said Molly, reaching out to pluck Hero off the small stoop. “Come in, come in.”
“I’m not a ladyship and you know it, Molly,” said Hero, pressing into Molly’s hands the basket of fine bread and fresh farm cheeses she had brought. “My father is a baron, not an earl.”
Molly laughed, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Sure. But you’re a lady, no gettin’ around that. Besides, you could be a ladyship if’n you wanted it. All you’d need do is marry one o’ them lords I’ve no doubt are courtin’ you.”
“Now why would I want to do that?”
Molly laughed again. “Damned if I know.”
Trailed by her sour-faced maid, Hero followed the landlady down the shabby hall and into the kitchen, which served as the lodging house’s common room. The center of the kitchen was taken up by an old and battered scrubbed table around which grouped the house’s various lodgers. Clothed in shabby dressing gowns and slippers, a dozen or so women chattered with brutal frankness about men and clothes and their own wildly improbable schemes for the future. The close air smelled of beer and gin and onions faintly underlain by another scent Hero had come to associate with such places, although its exact nature continued to elude her.
Molly O’Keefe’s lodging house was not a brothel, although most of her lodgers were prostitutes. These were free-ranging prostitutes who preferred to keep their private lives separate from their trade. Scorning both the residential-style brothels and the lodging-house brothels, they lived here, in Molly O’Keefe’s house, and took their pickups to an accommodation house to rent a room.
Hero had never been to a residential brothel or a lodging-house brothel, or to an accommodation house. It frustrated her, but because she was a young unmarried gentlewoman, there were still certain boundaries she did not dare cross, however impatient with convention she might be. Her contact with the women of the street she studied had therefore been limited to neutral territory such as this, or refuges such as the Magdalene House. But she’d learned enough about them to understand the ties that bound one segment of the underworld to the next. Through the residents of Molly O’Keefe’s house, Hero would have access to virtually every prostitute in London.
“I would like to address your boarders, if I may,” she said to Molly, and pushed back her veil.
Molly clapped her hands together. “Right then,” she said loudly. “Listen up, ye drunken lot of worthless tarts. The lady here wants to talk to you.”
Someone snickered, while perhaps half of the women around the table continued to talk. A woman with short blond hair and massive breasts visible at the gaping neck of her gown said, “And why the ’ell should we listen to ’er?”
“Because what I have to say could earn you twenty pounds,” said Hero, stepping to the head of the table.
Twenty pounds were considerably more than a good house-maid could earn in a year. An immediate hush fell over the room. Now that she had their attention, Hero said, “Last Wednesday, two women fled a residential brothel near Portman Square. One called herself Rose. The other was named Hannah. Rose was one of the women killed at the Magdalene House last night. But Hannah left the refuge several days before the attack. She may be in danger, or she may know something about why the attack took place. I would like to speak to her.”
A murmur of whispers and desultory comments swelled around the room. Hero raised her voice and continued speaking. “If you or one of your acquaintances provides me with information that enables me to find Hannah, that person will receive a reward of twenty pounds.”
“Why, you must be lookin’ fer me,” said a tall, skeletally thin woman with long brown hair. “I’m Hannah. How’d you know I was here?”
The other women around the table laughed, while Molly growled and said, “Like hell. That’s Jenna Kincaid.”
“Please do not think,” said Hero, letting her gaze travel around the assembled women, “that I will be so foolish as to pay for false information. I will know the woman I seek when I find her. Anyone stepping forward will receive a reward only if the information she provides proves accurate.”
“How do we know you don’t mean this Hannah no harm?” shouted one of the women at the far end of the table.
“I am not here as an instrument of the law,” said Hero, again having to raise her voice above an undercurrent of murmurs. “The women at the Magdalene House were murdered. The authorities have shown no interest in discovering who was responsible. No one knows why these women were killed, which means that Hannah may not be the only one who is in danger. Whoever killed those women could do it again. You are all potentially in danger.”
This statement provoked a predictable uproar. Hero waited a few moments, then said, “Anyone with the information I seek may meet me tomorrow morning at Bullock’s Museum. I will be in the exhibition halls from ten to eleven a.m. I’ll be wearing a navy blue walking dress and a hat with two ostrich plumes. But be warned: Anyone wasting my time with false information will have reason to regret their perfidy.”
The women fell suddenly silent. Hero had a knack for sounding very much like her father when she wanted to.
Molly’s face was unusually grim as she walked with Hero to the lodging house’s front entrance. “I’ve heard talk them women at the Magdalene House was murdered, but didn’t credit it.”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” said Hero. She turned on the house’s narrow stoop to take Molly’s hand. “Thank you for your assistance.”
Molly’s sagging cheeks took on a reddish hue. She jerked her head toward the kitchen. “You think them strumpets really is in danger?”
“They could be. I honestly don’t know.”
Molly studied her with narrowed, unblinking eyes. “Most of the fine gentlemen and -women we see around here want to punish the whores—put them through a living hell so’s they’ll come out all pious and submissive. But you’re not like that.”
Hero gave a soft laugh. “Perhaps because I don’t like pious, submissive women.”
Molly didn’t smile. She said, “This Hannah you’re tryin’ so hard to find . . . did it ever occur to you that if she’s in danger, then you’re putting yourself in danger, too, by lookin’ for her?”
“I am far better protected than she.”
“Maybe.” Molly nodded toward the waiting coach with its two liveried and powdered footmen. “But if’n you’re smart, the next time you come down here, you’ll make certain that coachman of yours is carrying a blunderbuss. Nobody’s completely safe.”
Chapter 10
Treading cautiously over charred fallen timbers, blackened furniture, and shattered bricks, Sebastian worked his way through scorched rooms standing open to the joyless light of the cloudy afternoon. From the street came the rattle of a wagon and the cry of a scissors sharpener shouting, “Knives or scissors to grind today?” But here, all was unnaturally silent, brooding.
It had occurred to him that a visit to the Orchard Street Academy would be most productive in the hours after dark. And so he had returned here, to what had once been the Magdalene House, looking for answers to questions that hadn’t yet occurred to him.
Pushing his way through a ruined doorway, he surveyed what had once been the kitchen. If Rose Jones had been shot in the alley as Miss Jarvis had said, then her killers must have dragged her body in here before setting the house aflame. They might even have kindled the blaze from the kitchen hearth.
A vague shuffling noise drew his gaze to the distant corner, where what he at first took for a dog rummaged for food. Only, this was no dog. At the sound of Sebastian’s footfalls, a child’s head reared up, his face darkened with dirt and soot, his hair matted. With a gasp, the ragged youngster bolted for the open doorway, bare feet kicking up little tufts of ash as he ran.
“Wait,” called Sebastian, but the boy had already bolted off the back stoop and up the alley.
Sebastian followed him into a narrow, shadowed alleyway reeking of garbage and urine. To his left, the cobbled lane ended in a soaring brick wall. He turned right, retracing the steps Miss Jarvis must have taken the night before. The jumble of footprints in the muck could have belonged to anyone. But there, near the mouth of the alley, he found what he was looking for: a pool of dried blood smeared over the cobbles as if by a body being dragged.
He crouched down, alert for anything out of place amidst the rotting cabbage leaves and offal. He found nothing.
His head falling back, he stared up at the buildings around him. Surely someone had seen something—or heard something.
Pushing to his feet, he started with the tea dealer who occupied the premises on the corner. The proprietor turned out to be a stout middle-aged widow with heavy jowls and an uncompromising gray stare who flapped her apron and blustered at the first mention of the Magdalene House.
“Good riddance, I say,” she grumbled. “This is a respectable street, it is. We didn’t need those tarts here. It’s the judgment of God, if you ask me, what happened.”
“You didn’t see anything suspicious? Before the fire, I mean. Some men watching the house, perhaps?”
The tea dealer swung away to lift a massive crate and shift it to one side with as much effort as if it had been a small sewing basket. “There were always men hanging around that place. It stands to reason, don’t it? I mean, considering what those women were.”
“Did you hear any gunshots last night?”
She swung to regard him with hard, unfriendly gray eyes. She had a large mole on the side of her nose from which protruded three hairs. The hairs quivered as she looked him up and down suspiciously, taking in the glory of Calhoun’s painstakingly polished boots, the flawless fit of Sebastian’s coat and the crisp white linen of his shirt and cravat. “What’s it to you, anyway? A fine gentleman like yourself?”
“I’m making inquiries for a friend. There are suggestions the fire wasn’t accidental. That it was murder.”
“Suggestions?” The woman’s meaty fists landed on her ample hips. “And who’s making these suggestions, hmm? Them Quakers, I suppose. A lot of heathens, if you ask me, with their strange ways and outlandish ideas. Impugning the integrity of God-fearing Christians.” She leaned forward. “It was a fire. Houses burn in London all the time. Especially the houses of the wicked.”
“God’s judgment?”
“Exactly.”
Leaving the musty, redolent atmosphere of the tea dealer, Sebastian ranged up and down the street, talking to a chandler’s apprentice and a haberdasher, a coal merchant and a woolen draper. It wasn’t until he stepped into the cheesemonger’s shop directly opposite the burned-out house that he found someone willing to admit to having seen or heard anything out of the ordinary the evening before.
The slim, brown-haired girl behind the simple wooden counter was young, no more than fourteen or fifteen, with the rosy cheeks and clear eyes of a country lass. “What you mean when you say did I notice anything out o’ the ordinary before the fire last night?” she asked as she wrapped up the slice of blue cheese he had selected.
The dim light of the dreary day filtered in through aged windows that distorted the vision of a passing carriage. Standing here, Sebastian realized he had an unobstructed view of the blackened brick walls and broken chimneys across the street. “Someone who might have seemed out of place in the neighborhood, perhaps?” he suggested.
She glanced up, an impish smile curving her lips. “You mean, like you?”
Sebastian laughed. “Am I so out of place?”
“Well, we don’t get the likes o’ you in here often—that’s for sure.” She paused to lean forward, her elbows propped on the wooden counter, her smile fading as she dipped her voice. “But, yeah, I did see something struck me as kinda queer. I mentioned it to me da, but he told me to mind me own business. Said we don’t need no more trouble.”