Chapter 34
The girl sat in a straight-backed chair, her hands folded in the lap of her plain stuff gown, her neat, light brown hair wrapped around her head in plats. Her name was Mary Paige, and she was currently apprenticed to a haberdasher in Long Acre, after having been beaten and starved by her previous mistress. It was Laura McInnis who had saved the child and who had arranged for Hero to interview her, so Hero supposed it was inevitable that she found herself thinking about her dead friend now as she settled in an armchair across from Mary in the parlor of the girl’s new mistress, an older woman named Mrs. Ingles. Mrs. Ingles had fussed around them long enough to vaguely annoy Hero, but had finally retreated with her sewing to a chair in a far corner.
“How old were you when you were apprenticed to”—Hero glanced at her notes—“Mrs. Keeble, wasn’t it?”
The girl nodded. She was fifteen now, small and fine-boned, with large brown eyes and a pointed chin. “I was eleven, ma’am.” The haberdasher looked up from settling herself in the distant corner and hissed, and the girl quickly corrected herself. “I mean, my lady.”
“That’s quite all right, Mary,” Hero said quietly with a smile. “You were apprenticed by one of the workhouses?”
“Yes, my lady. M’ father was killed in the fighting in Spain the summer before, you see. Me and my mother and my brother, Wills, we did all right as long as it was still warm, selling nuts and apples and such in the streets. But then it got cold, and Wills died, and m’ mother got sick and couldn’t go out selling anymore. Mama tried to put it off as long as she could, but in the end there was nothing we could do but go into the workhouse.”
“And which workhouse was that?”
“St. Martin’s, my lady.”
“They’re the ones who apprenticed you to Mrs. Keeble?”
Mary hung her head. “Yes, ma’am—I mean, my lady. The girl they’d given her before had run away, so she needed somebody new.”
“How long were you with her?”
A haunted look came into the girl’s eyes, and she began to unconsciously rock back and forth. “Two years, my lady.”
“Lady McInnis told me Mrs. Keeble used to beat you.”
Mary dropped her gaze to her clenched hands, and her voice became a whisper. “Yes, my lady.”
“You don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
The girl peeped up at her. “I . . .” She paused, then swallowed. “To be honest, I don’t like even thinking about that time. She used to beat me something awful, and then she’d lock me up with the rats in the coal room for days without anything to eat or drink. At first I used to think I’d die, from the pain and the hunger and the fear. But then . . . then I got to where I’d beg God to please take me and make it all end. Only, he never listened.”
Hero reached out to rest her hand over the girl’s now-clenched fists. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Tell me this: Are you happy now with Mrs. Ingles?”
The girl took a deep breath that shuddered her thin frame, then nodded. “Oh, yes, my lady. She’s ever so kind. I always get enough to eat, and I have my own bed in the attic, and while she’ll rap my knuckles when I do something wrong, she never beats me.”
“It was Lady McInnis who took you away from the Keebles?”
Mary nodded. “She was in the shop one rainy day buying socks while I was workin’ at scrubbing up some mud that’d been tracked onto the shop floor. I was so hungry, and Mrs. Keeble’d beat me something fierce that morning, and I . . . I guess I fainted. Lady McInnis rushed over to help me, and when she did, she saw all the bruises and sores on me. She picked me up in her arms and took me with her right then and there, with Mrs. Keeble’s husband screechin’ about how he was gonna call the constables on her for theft. But Lady McInnis, she told him to go right on ahead because she’d like to see him taken up for attempted murder. So then Mr. Keeble, he got so mad, he was all red in the face and shakin’, saying if she didn’t shut up and leave he was gonna kill her.”
Hero looked up from scribbling her notes, her heart beginning to beat faster. “Where did you say the Keebles live?”
“They were on Castle Street, my lady. But they don’t live there no more.”
“No?”
“They had a fire something like six months ago, and Mrs. Keeble was burnt so bad she didn’t live more’n a day or two. Then Mr. Keeble, he was taken up for deliberately startin’ the fire, but he died of fever in Newgate before he could be brought to trial.” Mary cast a quick look at her new mistress, who was busy sewing a shirt beside the open front window and was now paying them no heed. Then the girl leaned forward to whisper, “Mrs. Ingles says it’s sinful, me being glad they’re dead. But I am, and I won’t say I’m sorry for it because I’m not.”
Hero met the girl’s anxious brown eyes and said, her own voice equally quiet, “I don’t blame you in the slightest.”
Two hours later, Hero was seated at the library table in Brook Street, writing up her notes from that afternoon’s interview, when her cousin Victoria paid her an unexpected visit.
Small and petite and classically beautiful, with soft blue eyes, golden hair, and an exquisitely fair complexion, Victoria was Hero’s second cousin on her mother’s side and resembled the late Lady Jarvis—physically—in many ways. But whereas Hero’s mother had been gentle, sweet, and loving, Victoria was shrewd and calculating and cunning. She was without a doubt the most brilliant woman Hero had ever met, although she effectively hid her intelligence—along with her strength and her canniness—behind a gauzy, deceptive cloud of gay frivolity and insouciance. She had married Jarvis the previous October, which meant she was now Hero’s stepmother. She was also the mother of Hero’s new little half brother, so Hero had spent the last nine months working to overcome her instinctive dislike of the woman.
So far, Hero was not succeeding.
“Cousin Victoria,” she said now, plastering on a smile as she pushed to her feet and stepped forward to greet her stepmother. “What a pleasant surprise. Shall we go upstairs to the drawing room where we can be more comfortable?”
“Oh, no, this is fine,” said Victoria, standing on tiptoe to kiss Hero’s cheek in a way that always made Hero feel like a hulking, overgrown giant. She cast a telling glance at the notes spread across the library table’s surface. “I can see you’re working, so I don’t want to disturb you too much. Are you writing a new article?”
“I am, on the widespread mistreatment of apprentices tolerated under our current laws. But I’ve almost finished with what I was doing,” said Hero, drawing her father’s young wife over to sit in the leather chairs beside the empty fireplace. “Shall I order some tea?”
“Oh, no; please don’t bother.” Victoria looked thoughtful. “Lady McInnis made the reformation of the laws on apprenticeships one of her projects, didn’t she?”
“She did, yes,” said Hero, wondering where Victoria was going with this.
The new Lady Jarvis gave an exaggerated shudder that was all, Hero knew, for effect. This was a woman who had lived through deadly sieges in India and hurricanes in the New World and buried two husbands in distant lands; she was not the type to be easily frightened. “These murders are beyond ghastly. I trust Devlin is close to discovering whoever was responsible?”
“He’s making progress, yes.”
Victoria settled back in her chair. “Oh, thank goodness for that. Hopefully, this means he’s moved on from the ridiculous notion that Basil Rhodes might somehow be involved?”
Hero was silent for a moment, her gaze on her cousin’s beautiful, deceptive face. But, as always, Victoria had her features under perfect control; like Jarvis, she never gave anything away. “I didn’t realize you knew Rhodes.”
Victoria’s pretty blue eyes crinkled with her smile. “Not extraordinarily well, of course. But well enough to know he’s no murderer.”
“Oh?”
Victoria nodded. “Needless to say, Jarvis is beyond livid at the idea that someone might try to implicate one of the Regent’s natural sons in something so utterly repulsive.”
Hero had to work to keep her voice calm and level. “Are you here as Jarvis’s emissary, then? Whose idea was this? Yours, or his? Because believe me, even if Devlin were inclined to allow me to persuade him in such a matter—which, let me hasten to assure you, he most definitely is not!—do you seriously think I would urge him to allow a murderer to go free simply because he’s the Regent’s favorite by-blow?”
“Except that Basil Rhodes is no murderer.”
“Then he—and Jarvis—should have nothing to worry about, wouldn’t you say?”
Victoria leaned forward to touch Hero’s hand where it rested on the arm of her chair. “And now I’ve offended you,” she said sweetly. “I do beg your pardon; it was not my intention. But I thought I should warn you that Jarvis will not allow anything or anyone to harm the monarchy—especially not at such a critical moment in our history. The transition from war footing to a peacetime economy over the next few years is going to put a tremendous strain on the nation. We’ve already seen riots in response to the new Corn Laws, and it’s inevitable that things will get worse before they get better.”
“Yes,” said Hero, “starvation does have a tendency to make people cranky.” She rose to her feet. “Well, thank you for bringing me your concerns, Cousin. And do be sure to give Jarvis my love. Shall I ring for Morey to see you out?”
Hero gave the bellpull a sharper tug than she’d intended. She pressed Victoria’s hands again, smiled sweetly as she mouthed all the polite platitudes, and waited until she heard the front door close behind her cousin. Then she slammed her fist, hard, into the back of the leather chair beside her.