When David arrived home after reporting to Lady Georgiana, he was alarmed by their close encounter.
Charity was so panicked, however, that he kept his concerns to himself, instead setting himself to support Prue’s efforts to calm her.
“Do you think he really did not recognise her?” he asked Prue, once they had finally convinced Charity to go to bed. They had, with difficulty, talked her out of leaving for Bedfordshire immediately, and then only by sending an urgent message to commission a post chaise to be at David’s door at first light.
“I cannot be certain, David. Lady Sutton and Lady Georgiana rose admirably to the occasion, and we were hustled out one door while he was hurried out the other.”
“I cannot like it. Prue, let me send a couple of outriders with you. You will need help with the move anyway, and I will feel better if your helpers are men I can trust to protect you. Better yet, let me come.”
She shook her head. “You have work to do here. But your outriders are a good idea.”
Was she refusing because she was hiding the child? He should tell her he had met Antonia.
“Your sister will not be pleased with the delay,” he said instead. “It will not take long if the men I want are available, but you will not be away much before noon.”
Prue shrugged. “We can make the trip before dark, even so, I should think. And it is for her safety.”
“And yours, Prue.”
She shrugged. “I can take care of myself, David.” She changed the subject. “How did your enquiries go? Did you find out where any of our suspects were at the time of the murders?”
“Ah, now that is interesting. While you were visiting Lady Georgiana, I had a note from a witness who heard I wanted to know about the Carrington masquerade. I went to see her, and she was there the whole evening. She recognised Talbot, Selby, Annesley, Barnstable, and Tiverton, and also Aldridge and Elfingham.”
“As paying customers, I take it?” Prue suggested, clearly guessing the profession of the witness.
“Fraser was there too, Dorothea said.”
“So are they all out of it, David? The murder, I mean?”
David shook his head. “Not at all. These events—very few people come for the whole party, and those who do seldom stay in plain view the whole time. Only the rankest of exhibitionists. Richmond always supplies a number of private alcoves, even bedrooms. Dorothea was able to give me a reasonable idea of who was there, but that was all she had time to tell me. I am visiting again later today, but I expect I’ll need to talk to a lot more people before I know when they were out of sight, and for how long.”
“Have you known Dorothea long?” Prue coloured and ducked her head. “I mean, do you know her well enough to believe what she says?”
Was Prue jealous? David managed to suppress a smile. “I have only met her once before, but she seems to feel she owes me a debt,” he said.
“You did her a service?”
“She seems to think so.” Some imp prompted him to say, “She works in the brothel Talbot took me to. She says I gave her the best half hour she has had in that place.”
“I see.” Prue turned away, but not before David saw the flash of pain in her eyes. “Well, we should get some sleep, if we are to be up early.”
“Prue…” He put a hand on her arm to stop her. “I was very tired that night. I paid her to claim we had made the beast with two backs, and then I slept in her bed. She was grateful for the rest, I think.”
She smiled, but her lips trembled. “It is not my business, David. I have no rights over you, and I daresay it was before we were together.”
He held out his arms to her, and she moulded herself against him, so his next words were spoken against her hair. “We were together in my mind, Prue. Since the night on the island, there has been no one but you.”
Jake and Bert had been due to begin watching Selby and Annesley again, but were happy to change jobs and take a ride to Bedfordshire. Before noon, the cavalcade set off—the sisters in a hired post chaise with two postilions, both armed, and Jake and Bert, well mounted and likewise armed, riding before and behind.
David set out for the Dancing Dove, where the tough man on the door said it was too early to visit. “Them girls are all asleep. Work late, they do.”
“Will you check, please? Miss Dorothea asked me to call at this time. Miss Fanny, I mean.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, and he tipped his head to one side. “You was here once before. Walker. Right?”
David nodded. No reason to confuse anyone by using a different name.
“She likes you. Said you was a real gent.” He made up his mind. “I’ll ask. Stay here.”
The door shut in David’s face, but opened within minutes and the girl herself came out. In the light of day, with her face not made up and her hair neatly pinned under a demure bonnet, she looked much younger. She was dressed demurely too, in a fashionable, but not low-cut, moss-green dress she covered with a darker green redingote. “Good day, Mr. Walker. I thought we might take a stroll. If… would that be acceptable?”
He offered his arm. “The pleasure would be mine, Miss Dorothea.”
“Be back by three, now,” the doorman growled, “or I’ll ’ave to come looking.”
“I will, Mike. You do not need to worry.”
She patted the thug on the side of the face, and to David’s amazement, he blushed.
They strolled down the street. To anyone watching, they would seem like nothing more than a clerk and a shop girl from one of the more respectable establishments, out for a quiet walk while courting.
“If you turn to the left, Mr. Walker, there is a small park. We could sit there for a while.”
He followed her instruction, and they found a seat somewhat sheltered from the wind. “What did you want to tell me that you could not say inside the house, Miss Dorothea?” he asked.
“In the house… I might not know all the peep holes. They watch all the time. They listen too. You must not let them know I told you anything, Mr. Walker. I told them you want to marry me.” She coloured. “I hope you do not mind, but I needed to tell them something so they would let me walk with you.”
He reassured her. “It was a clever idea, and I will keep your involvement secret. You have my word.”
Dorothea looked around to make sure they were alone.
“No one followed us, Miss Dorothea. I would know if they had.”
She nodded then, and pulled a handful of folded papers from her reticule. “I wrote it down. All the names I could remember, and the ones the other girls gave me. Whores and marks both, just like you told me.” She handed him a second wad of paper. “And I did this too.”
He looked up from the list of names: two columns, the one on the left containing the names of men—and some women, too—he might meet in any beau monde ballroom, the one on the right far less illustrious. In a surprisingly neat hand, she had written a note beside most of the names of women—and some men—for hire. Sally Finch (The Sultan’s Palace); Jen O’Grady (works out of Cock and Team); Maggie Williams (Covent Garden Opera—Elfingham’s mistress).
He unfolded the second list. It also contained two columns, with rows marked by lines. He whistled softly. Miss Dorothea was full of surprises.
“The musical programme for the evening?”
“As well as I could remember it. I made a game of it with the other girls, and some of the fellows who were there last night. Look,” she pointed to the left column. “That’s what the orchestra was playing.” Her finger moved to the right, “And that is who we remember being there at the time. Does it help?”
“Miss Dorothea, you are a marvel.” A clearly educated marvel who had no more wish to be in a brothel than most prostitutes David had met. The usual story, probably. Prue’s family had not been welcoming, he gathered. But neither had they thrown her out to sell herself or starve. One day he would call Aldridge to account for it.
“Do you want to go back there, Miss Dorothea? I could help you. Give you a place to stay, help you find another way to make a living.”
For a moment, hope flared in her eyes, then she shook her head.
“I said I needed to know how much my debt was, so you could buy me out. I owe more than one hundred pounds, Mr. Walker. I will never get out of that place. They make you pay for everything, you know. All the clothes I wear—more for this,” she indicated her current walking costume, “because it is not for working. The food I eat. The drink I serve customers in my room. The room itself and everything in it, washing the sheets, and on and on.”
It was a familiar story. A few women were canny enough and ruthless enough to make money at the trade. Most plunged into an endless circle of debt to an abbess or a pimp, servicing long lines of customers, buying drugs and alcohol with the little they kept after paying their keepers.
“You said you would pay, Mr. Walker. What are they worth, these lists? Ten pounds?” She caught back her breath at the enormity of the sum she was asking.
“More. I will pay you fifty pounds for what you have done. Do you have somewhere safe to keep the money?”
She hesitated, her face falling, then looked up hopefully. “Would you keep it for me? And would you pay the same again if I can talk to girls from the other houses that supplied the duke’s party? Find out more about where everyone was?”
Now it was David’s turn to hesitate. “It could be dangerous,” he warned.
She shook her head. “No one will think anything of it. The marks don’t take any notice of us, and even the old hag doesn’t believe we have brains in our heads. And the other girls are out of their minds, most of them, with one thing and another.”
He made up his mind. “I’ll take these and copy them, and bring you back your own tomorrow so you can keep adding to these notes. Tell them at the brothel I’m trying to raise the money to buy you out. Find out what you can, without putting yourself in danger. I will come and pay your debt in a few days. And I think I may have a job for you.”
She shifted then, thrusting her shoulders back to raise her breasts, ducking her head to peer seductively from under her lashes. Her voice dropped to a husky murmur as she leant towards him. “I will do anything you want, Mr. Walker.”
“I want the information, Dorothea. Nothing else.”
She relaxed, but frowned, puzzled. “Then what…? I do not want to change one bawd for another, Mr. Walker. If it is all the same to you, I’ll choose my own protector from now on.”
“I had in mind a different sort of job. You write a neat hand. You can think clearly and act on your own initiative. Would you consider a job as a clerk?”
She laughed. “Women cannot be clerks. And certainly a woman like me cannot be a clerk.”
David just smiled.
“Really? No more…?” She made an extremely suggestive gesture.
“Not for money. Not unless you choose.”
She shook her head. “Not likely. And you will come back?”
“We have a deal, Miss Dorothea. And you have my word.”
For the next several days, David worked his way through the left-hand column of names, talking to those who were at Richport’s party, tailoring his approach to the target. Admiring, wheedling, teasing, bullying—bit by bit he filled in the right-hand column in the evening’s order. Dorothea did her bit too. He visited every day, and twice escorted her to call on other houses, where he watched as she played her ‘Remember the Richport masquerade’ game.
She was a find, this Dorothea. David spoke to his financial genius Milford about her, and Milford was predictably dubious. “She has a good brain, though, Shadow,” he agreed, having looked through her lists. “And a neat hand.”
Dorothea opened up a little as she began to relax with David. She was from Kent. Her family had kept a shop, but the wife and daughters of the house did not work there, so it must have been substantial. She had been to school, but that finished when she left home at seventeen. Though she did not mention circumstances, he could guess a man had been involved. Asked if she would like to return home, she shook her head. “They would not have me,” she said.
David kept busy. This separation was even harder than when he was in Liverpool and Prue in London. Here, he faced the lonely house each night, with memories of Prue in every room. The bed had not felt empty when he slept in it alone before he brought her home from Newgate. Now, though, it was a vacant wasteland in which he tossed and turned and fell into dreams where she was in danger and he could not reach her.
And so he stayed out until the early hours of the morning, or even the first light of dawn, searching out the men who had been at the Duke of Richport’s masquerade on the night Elise Palmer and the maid met their deaths. Aldridge was out of town, of course. Some of the others, too, including Richport himself.
One evening, or rather early morning, he fell in with Selby and Annesley at a gambling den. Barnstable was there, too, returned from the country and dealing cards to his friends and several other people, including, to David’s interest, Captain Talbot. “Young Walker,” Talbot greeted him, expansively. “How are your explorations of London going?” He nudged David and winked. “Down from York,” he explained to the others. “His uncle is a dry old stick. But I showed him a good time. I showed you a good time, didn’t I, Walker, eh?”
“I was very grateful, sir,” David said, donning the adoring disciple persona.
Selby regarded David with disinterest and no recognition. “Are you playing? Walker, was it?”
David disclaimed. “I will just watch, sir, if I may.”
Selby frowned. “‘My lord’, not ‘sir.’ Watch, then, but only if you can keep your mouth shut.”
“Yes, s… my lord.” David bowed humbly, and took a position behind Talbot.
The stricture on conversation applied at the table too. These were serious players, speaking only as needed for the game. Large sums of money were changing hands, mostly flowing towards Barnstable. David amused himself by figuring out the series of signals Selby and Annesley were using to let their friend know what cards they held.
It took David a while to notice the second odd thing about the game. Every now and again, Barnstable made a foolish call, discarding cards that would have won him the hand if he’d kept them. He always did so in Talbot’s favour. On the third occasion, he discarded good cards and picked up better ones, but tossed his cards face down to Talbot in disgust. “Your hand again, Talbot. I swear, you have the luck of the devil tonight. Deal me out, gentlemen, eh?”
It was a good strategy for making a payment in plain sight. But for what? Services rendered? Goods? If Talbot were the ‘T’ of the letter, had the others decided to meet his price?
Selby threw his own cards on the table. “I’m in too. Let’s have a drink and see what else the night can offer.”
With a few grumbles from one of the other players, who was sure his luck would turn if they just kept playing, Selby, Annesley, and Talbot followed Barnstable from the table to the room beyond, where a provocatively dressed woman took their drink orders plus a kiss from Annesley and a pinch from Selby. David tagged along. Apart from a scornful look from Selby, he was ignored.
“Sultan’s Palace?” Talbot suggested. “The Dancing Dove?”
“Both?” Selby said, licking his lips, then the tip of his index finger.
“Thought you’d be with the Bad Baroness, Sel,” Annesley mocked.
“Or tupping a certain opera dancer you met at Richport’s ball,” Talbot sniggered.
“She is with her protector tonight,” Selby said, loftily. “And Lady C. has another… engagement.”
“You were at the Richport ball? Wasn’t it licentious?” David imbued his question with wonder and salacious curiosity—an acolyte in debauchery—and Annesley took the bait.
“We all were. And Selby took Elfingham’s mistress right there in the dining room.”
“Elf was neglecting her,” Selby murmured. “Went off with that whore from the Sultan’s Palace, the double-jointed one. It was the part of a gentleman to console the girl.”
“I saw the part you consoled her with, eh?” Talbot gave Annesley a nudge. “Saw the part. That’s a good one.” He and Annesley succumbed to a fit of chortles.
“I hear His Grace sets aside a number of private rooms—I can only imagine all the comings and goings,” David said.
Talbot made a rude gesture imitating a certain part coming and going, and he and Annesley laughed even more.
“Death gives a good party,” Selby said.
David said, his voice hushed, “That’s what they call the Duke of Richport, right?” When Annesley looked askance, he added, “Everyone knows that. He’s been in all the papers.”
“Too true,” Annesley boasted, “but never the worst of it.”
The four men began reminiscing about various incidents in their long history with Death. David, deep in character as the sycophant Walker, could still—in the furthest recesses of his mind—spare a compassionate thought for Dorothea and her friends. The masquerade had clearly been a bacchanal of the worst kind. Part of his mind was cataloguing the incidents, matching them up to what he had already heard, and mentally slotting them into Dorothea’s timeline.
Barnstable was expressing disappointment that a barque of frailty he had taken up with during the course of the evening proved somewhat older than advertised, once stripped. “I dragged her back into the main ballroom, just like she was,” he said, smugly. “Went looking for you, Sel. Thought you might like her. You weren’t there, though.”
Selby blew a cloud of smoke before saying, “Kind of you to think of me, Barney. It must have been while I was in the garden.”
“In that rain?” Annesley asked. “Better you than me, Sel.”
“The ladies and I found a sheltered spot,” Selby purred.
Talbot laughed again. “You’re a character, Selby,” he said. “You are, indeed, eh?”
“They kept you busy for a while,” Barney grumbled. “I know that. Didn’t see you for an hour or more.”
Selby did not reply, allowing his smug smile to answer for him.
So Selby left the party for an hour or more, did he? David had begun to suspect so from his absence in people’s memories, but this was the first positive evidence.
“So, what happened to the naked whore?” Talbot asked. “I would have had her, Barnstable, if I had seen her.”
“You’d gone home, Talbot,” Annesley explained. “Death took her himself. Took her off to one of the private rooms, cited noblesse oblige…” Annesley trailed off when Barnstable used a coarse word to describe their host.
“Death’s a pompous bastard,” he complained. “That’s when we left, isn’t it, Annie? She was only a whore. No need to be rude.”
At that moment, a stir at the door caught their attention. A tall, handsome man pushed his way through the other drinkers towards them. Barnstable and Annesley lurched to their feet, and even Selby sat forward, suddenly alert.
The man seemed familiar. David examined him carefully as he crossed the room. Chiselled features, dark, straight hair worn longer than fashionable, falling over one eye, impatiently brushed back. He was exquisitely dressed, with lace at his cuffs and on his cravat, and a richly embroidered waistcoat in pale powder blue under the tightly fitted black coat. The white skin suggested he seldom saw the sun, but he certainly practised some form of physical activity. He was strongly muscled and beautifully formed.
As he brushed past anyone in his way, he exuded arrogance—and something else. The pale blue eyes passed over David and dismissed him. David felt his skin crawl, as if the look had touched him with slug slime, and in that moment, he knew the man. Wharton, grown since the night David had visited his bedchamber at school, to suggest the Grenford brothers were off-limits to his bullying and torture.
Wharton had been a nasty boy, and had grown into an evil man. He would not be so easy to frighten now.
“Wharton, what’s wrong?” Selby asked, in an urgent whisper. A good question. Wharton seldom left the mansion he had taken over and restored, in the very heart of the Mint, one of the worst slums in London.
“Tiverton. I’ve just heard he plans to tell his colonel all. Well, not quite all. He will blame us, of course.” Wharton replied in the same low voice, and David gave thanks for excellent hearing.
“So that’s why he is doing it,” Barnstable exclaimed.
“Doing what?” Selby and Wharton demanded, Selby a beat behind Wharton.
“He has had the banns called and is marrying the colonel’s daughter,” Barnstable explained. “Not really, of course, I was to offici…”
“Enough!” Wharton cut in, glaring at David, who was examining his drink with interest, as if nothing were happening.
“You idiot, Barney. Why didn’t you tell us?” Selby’s hiss was furious.
“No time for that. You need to leave. I’ll try to sort it out.” Wharton was clearly the leader, because the other three turned, without further ado, and headed for the door.
“Here!” Talbot said. “What about the package you had for me?”
Wharton stopped in his tracks and glanced back. “Collect your package tomorrow. And look to your own skin, Talbot.”