Love Between the Lines (25 page)

In other words, he
’d been torturing the madwoman. She wondered how he’d howl if she poured tea into his lap.

He grinned, showing cake between his teeth.
“I see you think I’m a bastard, but likely it’s good for her, aye? We say your name, the world don’t come to an end and after a time she’s bound to see her fear is just a load of nonsense.”

“
You needn’t enjoy it so much.”

“
I love me work,” he said simply and drained his tea.

Lizzy silently thanked God she was of reasonably sound mind
and prayed she’d never end up in the care of someone like Clark. Rather than make another remark that annoyed her informant, she picked up the dark, lukewarm tea and sipped the horrible stuff.

He ate two more pieces of cake and eyed her as he ate.

Sir Gideon would probably have something to say about the way Clark looked at her. She wished Langham was the one interviewing the attendant. He’d be good, perhaps using a combination of man-to-man remarks and lofty manners Clark would respect. Perhaps he’d been even better at the job during his reporter days. She thought of his endless store of energy and curiosity without the constraints of high society. What a reporter he must have been. Her heart grew heavy.

“
Anything else you can report?” she asked as Clark brushed crumbs from his front.

“
Nothing at the moment.” He rested his hands on the table and leaned forward. “Tell me, miss, why do you think she hates your name?”

“
I have no idea.” She glanced at the watch pinned to her gown and rose to her feet. “I must go,” she lied. “Do drop me another note if you find out anything else about Miss Miles, anything at all. I shall pay handsomely.”

She took several shillings from the bag and
left them on the table. “Keep whatever is left after you pay for the tea, Mr. Clark. Thank you for your time and information. Do send word to the paper.”

She managed a pleasant smile and left quickly.
Lizzy had walked several yards before Oyster caught up.

She told him what Clark had said and Oyster wrinkled his large nose as if he smelled something foul.

“What do you make of that?” she asked.

He stopped dead.
“The keepers of that place will tell the police about you and me.”

She understood
his fear then. “I know that Miss Miles was attacked after we landed here, but I don’t believe for a moment that anyone could suspect you had anything to do with the attack.”

“
Huh.”

“
Your days and nights are accounted for, after all. You work for Langham House full-time and you live in the boardinghouse.”

He shuffled his feet
and stared off at something over her shoulder.

“
Oh no, Oyster. Where are you living?”

He shrugged.
“Here and there.”

She walked a little faster.
“The best answer to these worries is to find the brute who hurt Miss Miles. She won’t or can’t say, so we’ll have to find out on our own.”

He buried his hands in his pockets and followed. As they made
their way toward Maida Vale, he didn’t whistle once.

She wished she could speak
to Sir Gideon, to see if he laughed at her ideas or gave that serious concentrated frown of agreement. The way that scowl made the corners of his eyes show the lines of laughter, echoes of his humor even when he was most serious—

“
Stop it,” she said aloud.

Oyster just looked at her.

She decided they’d take two days of taking turns watching and following one man. On the third day, Lizzy studied her list of Lord Ernest’s activities. She sat at her desk, head resting in her palm, flipping a pencil between her fingers as she considered what leads to follow.

“
He didn’t seize any blue-eyed women, but he visited the brothel for several hours.” She stared down at the list of activities. Petersly had visited the brothel as well and as she’d watched, she’d considered leaving her cozy hiding spot and telling him what she thought of him.

“
I watched Lord Ernest deliver a package to Banks, the lawyer,” she told Oyster. “We shall see how easy it is to corrupt Banks’s clerk.” She tapped the list of activities. “I’ll discover who lives at the address Ernie visited last night, if you would do the honors at Mr. Banks’s office.”

Oyster grumbled a little
. She knew he didn’t like interacting with strangers—though he seemed to have some success when it came to extracting material from witnesses.

Lizzy
discovered the person Lord Ernest had visited was a wealthy old relative. She made a note, though she suspected the visit was nothing more than an attempt to sweeten the old lady to extract some money from her.

She
had nothing more to do at the moment, so she wrote a story about a woman who’d been the victim of a scheming lothario. The poor lady had loaned the scoundrel money. The lady had a very thorough description of the man and Lizzy promised to make sure that the whole description made it into the paper. Damn men and their schemes.

She didn
’t hear Oyster until he stood at her desk, holding out a parcel of papers. “This is what Lord Ernie dropped at the lawyer’s office. The clerk guessed these are records of some sort, just stashed for storage.”

She took the package
and thanked him. “It’s probably nothing interesting but I suppose it’s worth seeing what Lord Ernest wants to put into a lawyer’s hands. How much did you have to pay?”

“
Twenty pounds. Return it in two days.”

“
That’s plenty of time to read and take notes.” She grinned as she counted out the money to repay him.

She thought about opening the
stack of ledgers and notebooks at her desk but decided to take them home. A newsboy’s canvas sack did the trick of carrying the pile.

She paused on the stairs, fighting the urge to run upstairs and show
Sir Gideon. If she’d just paid twenty pounds for a long dull list of household accounts, he’d mock her mercilessly. It occurred to her she might enjoy that.

Then she remembered: she held the private papers o
f Lord Ernest, the man who could well be Sir Gideon’s brother-in-law someday. Add to that—any decent, normal person would object to her poking her nose into private business. Sir Gideon seemed to strive for such a decent, normal life, during the moments when his eyes didn’t glow with the light of a good story.

He already had trouble with Lady Edith because of the society articles he
’d thought up with Lizzy. Any hint of a scandal about her brother published in his paper would certainly finish the engagement.

She ran down the steps
, the bag slung over her shoulder, fleeing from her guilt and the chance of running into Gideon. She’d go back to Mrs. Pruitt’s house and work there.

Oyster insisted on escorting her. Lizzy followed him, thinking of Smith’s message again. The brother-in-law. Gideon’s brother-in-law. Who was the secret person who wanted her to know all about Lord Ernest and that house? A man had contacted him, Smith had said. Perhaps it could be a relation of Miss Miles, wanting the world to know the truth of her attack.

Could the man who
’d contacted Smith be Sir Gideon? He played odd games… No. The anger he’d shown toward Smith had almost frightened her.

And
he’d hit Petersly. Lizzy loathed violence but, days after the event, she found she smiled when she thought of that blow.

S
he didn’t have the sensibilities of most women, yet the way Petersly had attempted to hire her as his mistress would have insulted even a woman in that trade. He’d refused to listen.

In her room, Lizzy
fished out the banded packs of paper and the ledgers and spread them out on her bed.

She began the tedious task of reading the bank records from Lord Ernest
’s account and saw that he was getting money every month and that the address on the account was the house in Maida Vale.

Several names appeared on the account list, including Lord Petersly
’s.

There was a description of the women who worked in the houses and their first names.
“Ellen” was one and her brief physical description matched Miss Miles. “Lydia,” and that was the first name of the murdered girl. The two were available and eager for hard work, the description said. Hard work. That was an innocuous enough euphemism for what had happened to the poor girls.

The
more she read, the more convinced she became that the house was behind it all. The murdered woman and Ellen Miles who’d been beaten and found in such a pitiful state.

Nausea filled her as she grew convinced that
Lord Ernest and Lord Petersly were among the names of the men who financed and then profited from the houses.

The silly ass
Lord Ernest. Unbelievable.

She worked through the evening and then fell into
a long, restless sleep, haunted by the angry faces of the women. Sir Gideon and the banker, Harrington, fought a duel, only then one of them turned into Petersly.

The next morning she went to the house in Maida Vale one last time to see if she could talk to someone there.

Oyster stood next to her, but his protection was unnecessary. The lady of the house refused to speak to Lizzy even as she called some of the questions through the closed door. She made a spectacle of herself by trying each of the doors with the primary colors. No one would speak to her, even when she slipped a note under the door saying she would like to confirm a story about their finances. The door opened, and the guard handed back the note, torn into dozens of pieces.

Then she went to the lawyer
’s office. Banks’s clerk, a tall, thin young man with a receding hairline, saw Oyster, and he hurried the two of them out of the office.

He put a bowler hat on over his stringy yellow hair and grabbed an umbrella before he led them to a small public garden near Lincoln
’s Inn. It was a fairly useless visit because he only chewed his nails and smirked as Lizzy tried to ask him questions.

“
I have no idea, my dear young lady,” he said over and over.

He didn
’t want to give his own name. The only bit of information she could wheedle from him was that, yes, a man sounding much like Lord Ernest had dropped off the bundle of papers. An older man had been with the man in question but he hadn’t seemed particularly interested in the whole proceedings.

The description of that person, most definitely not a gentleman, made him
sound as if he could be Smith.

“
I’ll want those papers back, thank you. Bring them to me when Mr. Banks isn’t in the office. You know how it is.”

A
fter handing over another couple of guineas, she left, glad she wore gloves when they shook hands. The lemon-haired clerk struck her as the most unpleasant person she’d met since coming to England.

“I should contact the police,” she said to Oyster.

“After you write,” he reminded her. That was what Tooley had taught her. The police would spread any good story to the reporters who
’d tipped them well.

“Then I should get to work immediately.”

He left her at Mrs. Pruitt’s, and she got to work at once. She wrote about the horror in Ellen’s eyes as she described what the man in the dark mask had done to her. The details of the attack would have to be suppressed; no newspaper could print a story about the terrible things Miss Miles had lived through.

But the reflection
of horror, a terrible event seen in a distant mirror, she could let the audience see that. She wrote about the men she’d seen leaving the house, using only their initials.

And she wrote about the ownership of that house
of ill repute and how the profit was lining the pockets of the young men who were the country’s future leaders. Young men who used women cruelly and threw them away.

She
wrote through the afternoon, evening, and night, checking and rechecking the numbers, and finishing as the sun came up. The papers lay over the bed, ink drying. Once she had enough money she’d buy her own typewriting machine and learn to use it.

She stretched and gazed down at the untidy scatter of papers across her bed.
Would Sir Gideon print it? She knew it would be horrible for him. It would test his relationship with the very society he wanted to enter. And if he did use names instead of initials, it would be the end of his plans for marriage.

She
’d painstakingly hand-copied the information of the evidence she cited and put the copies of the documents into her valise. Then she shoved the real paperwork back into the newspaper satchel. Should she take it back to the lawyer’s office? Not yet. She felt protective of the evidence. She’d show it to the police after she delivered the story.

She gathered the sheets with the story she
’d written and walked all the way to the paper in the gray light of a dawn that promised a dull, rainy day. The triumph of a good story didn’t warm her. The truth was sometimes a very unpleasant creature, and even writing it out wasn’t enough to banish the details, especially when it came close to people she knew. Lord Petersly had seemed an appealing sort, though filled with that strange need to have her bow to him. Lord Ernest had struck her as an innocuous fool. Lizzy prided herself on her ability to read people. She’d been desperately wrong about them.

She
’d give a great deal to feel the rush of righteous outrage again but when she thought of Sir Gideon, it all turned to heavy sorrow.

She could tell h
e’d come into work early—the light from his inner office came from his partially open door. Jenks didn’t sit at the desk outside his office to announce her, so she just knocked and walked in.

Bent over something on his desk,
he looked almost as bleak as she felt. But then he saw her and smiled.

“
Lizzy.” He rose from his chair. “I wondered where you’d vanished to.”

She wanted to tell him not
to call her by her given name. It hurt too much.

“
I have a story for you,” she said and handed it over.

His grin widened
, and the teasing light came into his eyes. “I’m glad to see you, but haven’t you heard of editors?”

He sat down and motioned for her to take the chair across the desk. Good. They wouldn
’t be too near each other. “You needn’t bother the publisher with every little article,” he said.

“
This isn’t a little one. I need you to read it, sir. Please.”

Gideon dropped the papers and leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “Are you all right, Lizzy?”

“
No. Read the story.”

He picked it up and obeyed. Long minutes ticked by. He flipped to the start and read
it again.

At last he lowered the sheets.
“You have proof?”

She nodded.
“Some of it handed over to a lawyer by Lord Ernest himself. I watched him bring it to the barrister’s office.”

He actually smiled.
“That confirms the fact that the man is a fool. Such a terrible job of covering his tracks.” The thought of that article made the smile vanish at once. He leaned back in the chair. “I can’t do this.”

Lizzy
slumped against the back of her chair. He waited for her to argue. But she surprised him. She usually did. “I understand. Some stories rip at you even as you send them out into the world.”

She pulled off her gloves and
rubbed at her temples as if they throbbed. He wondered what she’d do if he got up and helped ease whatever ache she felt.

She looked at him again with a
steady gaze that seemed to accuse him of cowardice. This story was too big, too important to ignore.

“
I know what you’re thinking,” he said as if she had argued with him. “It’s my job to uncover corruption.”

She only raised her brows.

“But you must understand, if I run this, I can bid it all good-bye. All of my ambitions.” The truth hit him then. Lady Edith would definitely say good-bye, and the thought didn’t dismay him.

Lizzy. She
’d changed the course of his life. Time for him to return the favor.

She
lowered her hands and watched him, her mouth tight. “I understand it’s your choice. You will go down a path with no way to return. That’s why I brought it straight to you.”