Clerkenwell, London: Thursday, 27 January 1814
A howling wind flung icy snow crystals into Hero Devlin’s face, stinging her cold cheeks and stealing her breath. She kept her head bowed, her fists clenched in the fine cloth of her merino carriage gown as she struggled to drag its sodden weight through the knee-deep drifts clogging the ancient winding lane. A footman with a lantern staggered ahead of her to light the darkness, for Clerkenwell was a wretched, dangerous area on the outskirts of the City, and night had fallen long ago.
She was here, alone except for the footman and a petite French midwife who floundered through the snow in her wake, because of an article she was writing on the hardships faced by the families of men snatched off the streets by the Royal Navy’s infamous press gangs. The midwife, Alexi Sauvage, had offered to introduce Hero to the desperate eight-months-pregnant wife of a recently impressed cooper. No one had expected the woman to go into labor just as a fierce snowstorm swept in to render the narrow lanes of the district impassable to a gentlewoman’s carriage. Thanks to their presence, mother and child both survived the long, hard birth. But the snow just kept getting deeper.
“Do you see it yet?” Alexi called, peering through the whirl of white toward where Hero’s carriage awaited them at the base of Shepherds’ Lane.
Hero brought up a cold-numbed hand to shield her eyes. “It should be j—”
She broke off as her foot caught on something half-buried in the snow and she pitched forward to land in a deep drift on quickly outflung hands. She started to push up again, then froze as she realized she was staring at the tousled dark hair of a body that lay facedown beside her.
The footman swung about in alarm, the light from his lantern swaying wildly. “My lady!”
“Mon Dieu,” whispered Alexi, coming to crouch next to her. “It’s a woman. Help me turn her, quickly.”
Together they heaved the stiffening woman onto her back. The winter had been so wretchedly cold, with endless weeks of freezing temperatures and soaring food and coal prices, that more and more of the city’s poor were being found dead in the streets. But this was no ragged pauper woman. Her fine black pelisse was lined with fur, and the dusky curls framing her pale face were fashionably cut. Hero stared into those open sightless eyes and had no need to see the bloody gash on the side of the woman’s head to know that she was dead.
“She must have slipped and hit something,” said Hero.
“I don’t think so.” Alexi Sauvage studied the ugly wound with professional interest. As a female, she could be licensed in England to practice only as a midwife. But Alexi had trained as a physician in Italy, where such things were allowed. “She couldn’t have died here. A wound like this bleeds profusely—look at all the blood in her hair and on her pelisse. Yet there’s hardly any blood in the snow around her.” With tender hands, she brushed away the rapidly falling flakes that half obscured the dead woman’s face. “I wonder who she is.”
Hero watched the snow fall away from those still features and felt her chest give an odd lurch. “I know her. She’s a musician named Jane Ambrose. She teaches piano to”—she paused as Alexi swung her head to stare at her—“to Princess Charlotte. The Regent’s daughter.”