Her Husband's Harlot (20 page)

"But
wouldn't you say that all people, given food in their bellies and schooling for
their minds, might be strengthened against vice?"

Taking
pity on Kent, Nicholas said lightly, "One might say that point of view
smacks of democratic fervor, my lady."

"I
do not strive to be political," Helena insisted. "My only point is
that children ought to be protected from, not punished for, their unfortunate
circumstances of birth."

To
that, Nicholas could think of no response. His wife was full of surprises
today. He stared at her, wondering if she knew just how close she had come to
describing her own husband's origins.

Silence
weighed heavily for a moment. Helena got to her feet. "I am afraid I have
taken too much of your time as it is. As I am sure you gentlemen have important
matters to discuss, I will excuse myself."

Both
he and Kent had risen immediately.

At
the door, she stopped and turned. "My lord?"

"Yes?"
Nicholas asked warily.

She
blushed prettily, her lashes lowering. "I wanted to thank you for having
tea with me today. I most enjoyed it."

With
a swish of skirts, she was gone. A trace of her perfume lingered in the air.

Nicholas
felt himself getting hard again.

"If
you do not mind my saying, my lord, your wife is a fascinating woman."

"Yes,
she is," Nicholas muttered.

Running
his hands through his hair, he sat and tried to clear his head. He couldn't
believe what he had let happen just now. How he had lost control with his own
wife. But he couldn't bring himself to regret it either, not with the taste and
feel of her still sparkling over his senses.

"Thank
you for agreeing to meet with me at your residence, my lord." Kent took
the adjacent chair and stretched his legs in front. "Given the state of
the warehouse, this seemed a more private and safer place to discuss my recent
findings."

That
succeeded in securing Nicholas' attention. He focused on the other man and saw
smug lines fanning from the investigator's pale eyes. "What news do you bring?"

"I
have finished questioning the porters on guard duty the night of the theft—one
of the two, at least. It seems Patrick Riley had drunk enough blue ruin to sink
a ship and was three sheets to the wind while the thieves emptied the place."
Kent shook his head in disgust. "The man could barely recall his mother's
name, let alone any details of what happened."

"And
the second porter?"

"James
Gordon has disappeared and is nowhere to be found."

The
picture of a timid, red-haired man came to Nicholas' mind. Crippled, with the
manner of a mouse, Gordon seemed incapable of walking without tripping over his
own two feet, let alone plotting a crime. "Do you think the villains got
to him that night?" Nicholas asked tersely.

"I
detected no signs of foul play at the warehouse," Kent replied, "so
if they did Gordon in, they did it elsewhere. And there were no new floaters on
the Thames matching his description. So either the fish got to him or he's
rotting someplace else—or he was somehow involved."

Nicholas
frowned. "I take it you have conducted a search."

"Gordon's
home, the taverns and brothels he frequented. His wife and friends say they
have not seen hide or hair of him since the night of the robbery."

"It
is a bloody hell of a coincidence that the man's gone missing," Nicholas
admitted.

"I
do not believe in coincidences," Kent replied. "Which is why I spent
the earlier half of this afternoon at one of the brothels."

Nicholas
refrained from making a joking rejoinder. In his past dealings with Kent, the
man had shown himself to be singularly lacking in humor. "What did you
discover?"

"I
am always amazed at how much better informed the molls are than the wives. Or
perhaps their selling price is simply cheaper. Gordon thought himself in love
with a pretty piece named Sally Loverling. Convenient name for a whore, is it
not? For the price of a shilling, Ms. Loverling rattled off an entire list of
Gordon's known associates."

"Any
names ring a bell?"

"Only
one," Kent said. "It seems our friend Gordon has come up a ways from
his origins. He grew up in the stews of St. Giles. His father died when Gordon
was ten, and the family had a rough time of it. The mother remarried. A tough
bastard by the name of Gerald Bragg. Bragg already had a son, ten years Gordon's
senior—"

"Named
Isaac." Nicholas felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. "Goddamn
it. Isaac Bragg is Gordon's
step-brother
?"

"I
spoke to your steward. Jibotts did not know anything of it, but he did recall
hiring Bragg partly on Gordon's recommendation. He also mentioned that Bragg
has caused some trouble among the workers?"

"Bragg
has been up to no good since the day he arrived." The two notes flashed in
Nicholas' head, and he told himself to tread carefully. After a brief
hesitation, he added, "Perhaps a fortnight ago, I saw him lurking with
another fellow in an alley by the warehouse. They looked suspicious—like they
were doing something that couldn't see the light of day. They scurried off when
I approached."

 "Well,
Bragg certainly was brazen as anything at work today, wasn't he? Raised quite a
fuss about having to participate in the clean up." Kent's eyes grew
crafty. "My men are monitoring his whereabouts as we speak. If he is our
fiend, we will trail him to his lair and ambush him there tonight."

"I
am coming," Nicholas said.

Kent's
brows reached his hairline. "You, my lord? I do not think that wise. St.
Giles is no place for a gentleman."

"Trust
me, I can take care of myself," Nicholas said with grim certainty. "It
is Bragg who has something to worry about."

St.
Giles was just as he remembered, and the familiarity of it chilled him to the
marrow. It seemed he had never left this place, this nightmarish maze of
crooked streets and dark alleyways, where the air was thick with urine, vomit,
and other remnants of human misery. He stood in the shadows, watching the
drunks stumble out of the gin houses positioned at every corner of the square.
They were met by a parade of whores, brightly painted to obscure the signs of
disease. After bargaining for their pleasure, they headed in pairs or larger
groups to the narrow gaps of alleys, where the fucking was cheap and quick,
with no bed but the rough stone wall against your back.

Nicholas
shook his head to clear it. He was here for a reason, and he had to stay focused.
Beside him, Kent watched and waited with the patience of a saint. He seemed
undisturbed by the surroundings, his police man's eyes taking in all with cool
detachment. His attention was focused on the flash-house across the street, the
den of vice that supported all manner of criminal activity. Nicholas knew
inside the fire was warm, the gin even warmer; inside, thieves, murderers, and
whores played after a long day's work.

He
did not have to enter the premises to see the interior. All flash-houses were
the same. The scarred tables would offer cards, tin platters of hot, greasy
food and tankards of soul-obliterating drink. Underneath the boisterous roar of
the crowd, the rhythm of depravity continued: thieves haggled with their
fences, pick pockets plied their trade, and gin-bloated cutthroats started
brawls that ended bloody. If you had the coin to escape upstairs, you might
have a moment of peace between the well-traveled thighs of a wench, at fifteen
or sixteen already past her prime. She might tell you she loved you, and you
might believe it, if you were desperate enough.

Kent
was saying something to him, and the words brought
him back to the task at hand. He nodded at Kent's instructions to stay put and
watched as the other man slipped away into the shadows. Likely Kent was checking
on the other entrances—a flash-house always had multiple escape routes.
Nicholas felt grudging admiration for the man's thoroughness. For a copper, Kent seemed decent enough, not like the thief takers who would bend the law for a shilling
or two. Or for other forms of payment, performed in fear and darkness.

He
shook away the memories. There were too many of them tonight, crowding in on
him like hungry ghosts. Maybe he should not have come. He dispelled that
thought immediately. He was not a man to rest on his laurels while some bastard
stole from him. While some coward toyed with him and penned threatening notes
about the past.

At
that moment, he saw a lone figure emerge from the front entrance of the
flash-house. He had his collar pulled high and his hat pulled low. Nothing
unusual about that in the stews. But there was something about the man's
swagger that made Nicholas look closer. Sure enough, when the man stopped to
light his tobacco, the spark of the flint revealed beady eyes and a bearded
face.

Bragg.

Nicholas
felt his fists curl in their gloves.

Bragg
finished his smoke and started off into the night. There was no sign of Kent,
or any of Kent's three men. Bragg must have slipped beneath their noses.
Nicholas briefly considered alerting them, but he would alert Bragg as well,
and he could not risk that. At large in the rookery, Bragg would be harder to
find than a fish let loose in the Thames. Besides, it might be better to go
this alone; if Bragg turned out to be the blackmailer, Nicholas wanted to
settle the business far from the eyes of the law.

Nicholas
moved stealthily, keeping to the shadows. Some habits never died, and he knew
well enough how to stay out of sight. He kept to Bragg's blind spot, stopping
now and again to fake interest in the barrows of fenced goods. The fog had
turned to drizzle now, and the slickened streets began to empty of the hawkers
and whores. Bragg continued to strut along as if he owned the streets, a bottle
of gin fueling his journey.

They
were heading east, into the heart of the slums. Nicholas knew these parts as
surely as he knew his own face. After all, he had grown up in his aunt's house
in Bottom's End, a row aptly named for the place its inhabitants occupied in
the world.
Aunt Amy
. Her image ambushed him: the puffed face and greasy
lank hair, the satisfied gleam in her small eyes as she'd counted the bag of
coins—shillings, she'd sold him for. Shillings for a life of indentured hell.
But he had escaped that life and would never have seen her again, had it not
been at the insistence of Jeremiah Fines.

"You
must make peace with your past, if there is to be a future, my boy,"
Jeremiah had said.

Accompanied
by his new mentor, he had returned to that house, found it as rotted and foul
as ever. Nothing had changed. Rats had played with the screaming babes as Aunt
Amy looked Jeremiah up and down. She'd made a pretense of listening to Jeremiah's
praise of him, of his potential to become a worthy merchant; all along,
Nicholas had seen her sizing up his mentor's fine clothes, the gold watch fob
dangling from the waistcoat. When she had finally spoken, her accusation had
been so abhorrent that Jeremiah had actually paled. But it was with her next
words that his aunt revealed her true character.

"I
don't care as 'ow you want to use the boy, guv'nor. Just so's I get me fair
share fer puttin' 'im up all 'em years."

Jeremiah
had hauled him out of the house, Aunt Amy's curses ringing behind them.

Those
curses echoed now, as two drunks brawled in the street. The houses grew more
decrepit, the road more narrow, at some parts barely wide enough for two men to
pass without bumping shoulders. Nicholas stayed a safe distance behind, aware
that there would be no place to hide should he be spotted. He kept his hand in
his pocket, next to the solid handle of the pistol he carried. There was the
knife, too, concealed in his boot. Habit, again. He had lived in the stews long
enough to know that a man foolhardy enough to wander the streets unarmed was
inviting trouble.

Bragg
turned a corner, and Nicholas counted to ten before following. Several steps
along, a ruckus erupted from one of the houses. A body propelled out of a
doorway, slamming into him. Nicholas held onto his balance, stumbling backward
as another body followed the first. He stepped out of harm's way as the fists
began to fly. There was shouting and the crack of glass against stone. The men
circled each other, broken bottles in hand. A crowd gathered round to cheer on
the violence.

Nicholas
craned his neck to look past the growing mob. His eyes collided with small ones
which widened like those of a cornered rat. Bragg dropped his bottle and broke
into a run. Swearing, Nicholas made after him, slowed by the bodies jostling
against one another for the best view of the bloodshed. When he finally made it
past the throng, he glimpsed Bragg rounding a corner up ahead. He raced after
him, his boots slippery in the mud.

He
turned left and saw immediately that it was a dead end. There were a handful of
buildings on both sides, all of them nothing but rotted frames and gutted-out
insides, waiting to be felled by a strong gust. Nevertheless, a faint glow
emanated from some of the broken windows; the desperate could not afford to be
choosy. Taking a few cautious steps forward, Nicholas took measure of the
darkness. There were many places for a man to hide. A sudden shuffle to his
left had the hairs rising on his neck. Even as he turned toward the house, his
hand tightening on the pistol, he knew it was too late.