Ghost of the Thames (27 page)

One of his men held a small lantern.
Its dim light danced in the whipping wind and then suddenly
sputtered, nearly snuffed out by a splash of watery spray. The
footman covered it more carefully with his cloak to keep the flame
burning.

The riverman didn’t need the light. He
had spent his life on this stretch of water, and he could navigate
it in the blackest of nights.

As the man rowed, Edward considered
how exposed Sophy was out in the night. At this end of London,
anyone who intended to bring her harm would be right at home. But
he forced back his fears, reminding himself that no one knew where
they were. No one had followed them from his house.

There was a greater chance of them
drowning in weather like this, he thought, shaking his
head.

He looked over to check on her again
and saw Sophy pull the hood of her cloak tighter about her face.
She was shivering.

“We can still turn around.”

She shook her head. “I was just
thinking of the last time that I was out on this river. It was a
night very much like this.”

He reached for her hand. Her fingers
were ice cold. “This is too soon for you to be facing
this.”

“But this is
not
too soon for Amelia.
She has waited long enough.”

The cold was brutal. Sophy wasn’t the
only one shivering. Only the riverman appeared impervious to the
weather. And just as Edward thought conditions couldn’t get worse,
patches of sleet, black and wet, started pelting them from the
sky.

Edward kept his eyes on the shoreline.
The dark buildings lining the riverbanks appeared to be shrunken
with the cold, cowering behind the masts of ships tied to their
wharves. No life was in evidence on either bank. Windows and doors
were shut against the night.

As they glided quickly along the
surface, Edward thought about what he had to do once they reached
their destination. He doubted there would be any activity in the
dockyard at this ungodly hour of the night. The ship Henry Robinson
had sailed in on had gone back out to sea a month ago. And the crew
had either shipped back out or dispersed to other pursuits. Edward
thought he might, in time, be able to find a few of those men still
ashore.

He glanced over to see Sophy staring
ahead at a pair of hulking black barges tied athwart a warehouse
dock. She turned and looked into his face.

“There,” she told him, pointing. “We
need to go there.”

“The Naval Dockyard is around the
bend. We are not there, yet.”

She shook her head, continuing to
point. He fixed his gaze on the warehouse and the shadowy buildings
around it. They were barely visible in the darkness and the storm.
The neighborhood would be a rough one, to be sure.

“The barges?”

“She is standing on the dock beyond
them. She’s like a beacon, a point of light at the edge of the
dock, above the barges.”

Edward looked again but saw no light.
Without hesitating, he told the riverman where to go. Minutes
later, the man was guiding his craft to a ladder at one of the
dock’s pilings.

Everything was cloaked in darkness.
He’d seen no evidence of life as they approached. The barges had no
one living aboard them, as far as he could tell.

Sophy was anxious to get off the boat
as soon as they reached the shore. Putting a hand on her arm,
Edward sent his footmen up the ladder first, and when he received a
wave from them, he then turned to her.

“You must be careful going up. You can
see how slippery these wooden rungs are. I’ll be behind you if you
have trouble.”

She nodded and scurried up the ladder
with the agility of a seasoned jack tar.

As he reached the top, Edward saw that
a sign on the wall of the warehouse had fallen, probably years ago,
and sat among some rubbish at the foot of the building. From this
distance in the dark, he couldn’t read the name. The dock was
cluttered with broken crates and barrels, piles of rope and tackle.
The wide, battered doors of the warehouse were shut.

Sophy was standing near a gangway
leading onto the closest barge. One of his footmen stood by her,
holding the lantern. She was peering down into the darkness between
the pilings and the barge. The wind whipped the hood of the cloak
off her head, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her attention was
fixed on something below.

Edward took her arm. “Do you see her?”
he whispered.

She looked up. “Yes.”

“Where?”

Sophy nodded toward the gangway.
“There.”

Edward turned. He could see nothing,
but went willingly as Sophy drew him to the next piling.

“This one,” she said, gazing at him.
He could see the sadness in her face. She touched the mooring
cables that ran out to the barge, and then stared for a long moment
into the black water of river slapping against the barge’s hull
below them.

In the light of the lantern, Sophy’s
face glistened with rain when she finally looked up at
Edward.

“He is here. This is where Henry
Robinson’s body went into the river. He is still trapped here, at
the base of this piling.”

CHAPTER 32

If there was one time in her life that
Sophy wanted to be proven wrong, that night was it. But it was not
to be.

Edward told her the next day that
Henry Robinson’s body had been recovered from the precise spot
where she had directed them. His belt and clothing had caught on
the massive piling, and the tide had securely wedged him in place.
It was clear that the corpse had been in the water for
months.

The grim discovery spurred
new interest in Amelia’s disappearance. Everyone now knew that the
midshipman had been murdered. The police investigators,
London’s
bon ton
,
and everyone who read the newspapers immediately became experts on
the subject. And while the search for the sixteen year old Seymour
girl was renewed, public opinion sided overwhelmingly with the
tragic view that Amelia was already dead.

Sophy’s heart ached for Edward, and
the way he had to shoulder the responsibility of everything. Once
again, he kept her name away from police and newspapermen. There
were rumors reported in the tawdrier rags, though, that an
unidentified riverman had referred to a woman who could resurrect
the dead.

In speaking to the police, Edward
would provide nothing on that subject, except that his months of
searching had finally given him enough clues as to where the
midshipman’s body might be found. In due course, Henry’s family
needed to be notified and funeral arrangements made. Edward had to
see to all of that.

More important to him, though, Edward
was determined to know who operated the warehouse and what would
have drawn Henry there. The police decided, curiously, that there
was no proof that the midshipman had died there and not somewhere
else. Bodies floated for miles in the shifting currents and tides
of the Thames before either washing up on the shore or becoming
entangled somewhere.

Amelia did not appear to Sophy in the
nights that followed. At first, the ghost’s presence had been
directed to saving strangers. Recently, Sophy realized, the focus
turned to revealing the truth about her disappearance. She feared
that with Henry’s body recovered, the only thing remaining was to
be directed to where Amelia’s body lay. She dreaded the thought of
having to bear that news.

Back at Berkeley Square, the servants
were not unaware of the rumors. Sophy noticed the look of
wonderment directed at her. They knew she was responsible for the
discovery of Henry’s body, but none knew how she was able to do
it.

Sophy’s stay at Edward’s home was cut
short, though, for Miss Burdett-Coutts thought it essential that
she already be established as a guest in her house before Lord
Beauchamp’s ball, where she was to be introduced to the
world.

Edward was away in Portsmouth
attending to the official record of Henry Robinson’s demise when
the heiress’s carriage arrived to move Sophy. He was expected back
the following day.

“Please tell us that
you
will
be
back.” Mrs. Perkins and Mr. Reeves acted as if they were parting
with a member of the family.

“I am planning on it,” she assured
both of them.

“The Captain won’t be pleased to find
you gone. His instructions were for you to stay here and that he
would arrange for your move to Holly Lodge tomorrow.”

“A carriage with a driver and grooms
to escort a person is considered sufficient for the queen,” she
reminded the butler. “I believe Captain Seymour will approve of the
arrangement.”

Talking reassuringly to those two
gentle souls was an entirely different matter than feeling
reassured. Once she left Berkeley Square, a dozen doubts bombarded
her. She questioned everything—from her safety to her uncle’s
reaction after meeting her to the possibility that perhaps she was
not the Warren heir, after all. As unlikely as that was,
considering all that Dickens and Edward had learned, there was a
great deal that she could not remember of her past, including the
last meeting with her uncle. The possibility that her lack of
memory was due to her absence on that boat gnawed at her
mind.

Suddenly, the carriage came to an
unexpected stop. She could not see anything from the window, but
she listened to the driver and the grooms speaking to someone ahead
of them. The tones remained civil, but there was a note of wariness
in the driver’s voice. She pushed back the curtain and looked out
at the shop-lined street. Two of the grooms had already positioned
themselves by the door, guarding her. It was daylight and plenty of
pedestrians were about, looking at the exchange with curiosity.
Still, she couldn’t imagine any danger befalling her in a situation
like this.

Curious but cautious after all the
lectures she’d been given by Edward in the past, she remained
inside, allowing her escorts to resolve the conflict
outside.

In a moment, a groom approached,
tapped on the carriage window, and waited for Sophy to open
it.

“I am sorry, miss, but
there is a carriage blocking us, and the gentleman refuses to have
his driver move. He says you know him, and you would
want
to speak to
him.”

Suspicions flashed through her.
Regardless of the handful of parties she’d attended, she was
acquainted with very few people. More to the point, how would
anyone know she was traveling in Miss Burdett-Coutts
carriage?

She wasn’t given a chance to ask any
questions.

“Here he comes, miss. The gentleman is
walking this way.”

Sophy moved to the edge of the seat to
see. Medium height, a lean build, gray cloak and a top hat worn at
a conservative angle on his head. She looked into his face; she
didn’t think she knew him. But he looked harmless enough. She
nodded to the groom to let him approach.

“Miss Warren,” the man
said with enthusiasm, bowing graciously. “I cannot believe my good
fortune at having guessed correctly that it was
you
traveling in Miss Burdett-Coutts
carriage.”

Miss Warren.
Sophy moved back in the seat and remained silent.
Less than handful of people knew her identity. She knew that Angela
would never have revealed her name to anyone in advance of Lord
Beauchamp’s ball. There was nothing familiar about this
stranger.

“Pray tell, I hope you haven’t
forgotten me,” he continued.

She said nothing.

“Peter Hodgson!” he said, bowing
again. “I am an official in your shipping company. Your father, I
am honored to say, considered me one of his most devoted servants.
You and I met on the ship bringing you from Calcutta, after I
boarded the vessel with your uncle at Gravesend. I had the
privilege of dining with you, your uncle, and the captain of your
father’s ship on your first night in England.”

Peter Hodgson reported to her uncle.
That was enough to raise her suspicions. She glanced past him at
the two grooms looking on.

She didn’t remember him, and she
wondered how he knew she was alive and well and traveling in this
carriage.

Sophy tried to keep a civil tone in
her voice. “My friend, Miss Burdett-Coutts, is expecting me, Mr.
Hodgson. Would you be kind enough to have your driver move your
carriage?”

“Certainly. I must apologize for the
inconvenience,” he said in a flattering tone. “But I have with me
an old servant of yours, and she is unwell.”

“A servant of mine?”

“A Bengali woman. She made the
crossing from India in your company.”

“Is she here? In your
carriage?”

“She is.” He stepped back and gestured
toward his carriage.

Sophy opened the door and leaned out
cautiously. A groom standing by Hodgson’s carriage opened the door
and helped a frail looking, dark-skinned woman out onto the cobbled
pavement.