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In Which John Pickett Discovers
an Old Acquaintance in Dire Straits
Buck up, old boy, Pickett told himself, stopping to study his surroundings as his heavy breathing and pounding heart slowly returned to normal. It can’t be as bad as all that.
After all, there had been a time, not so very long ago, when he’d known the back alleys of London like the back of his hand. He had only to walk in any direction long enough, and he would eventually come to some landmark he recognized.
Eventually.
If he didn’t walk straight into the arms of a hungry mob first.
The only question remaining was deciding which direction to go. The fetid smell of stagnant water suggested that he wasn’t far from one of the inlets formed by either nature or human hands along the banks of the Thames. If he could locate it, he could follow the river westward to more familiar parts of Town. If he could determine which direction was west. Even the direction of the river’s flow wouldn’t necessarily serve as a guide; if the tide was coming in, the water would flow inland, away from the sea.
“Care for some company?”
The low, feminine voice sounded a bit too refined for his present surroundings, and held a hint of the Midlands that seemed out of place here in London’s slums. Pickett turned toward the speaker, and found himself confronting a slender, dark-haired young woman whose extremely low-cut gown (to say nothing of the apparent lack of any stays underneath it) left no doubt as to the sort of companionship she offered.
“Er, no, thank you.” Pickett fixed his eyes firmly on her face, a pale oval in the moonlight, and was assailed with the impression that he had done this same thing with this same young woman before. On that earlier occasion, however, it had not been her exposed bosom that he had been trying not to notice, but her belly, round with child...
“Miss Braunton?” He stared at her in astonishment. “How did—why—what are you doing here?”
“I don’t know any Miss Braunton,” she insisted a bit too emphatically. “I’m just Cat. Pussycat, in fact,” she added, and he had no difficulty in recognizing her Christian name, Catherine, beneath the suggestive sobriquet.
She shivered, and he realized that the arms she kept wrapped around herself (a gesture which he had assumed was intended to push her... assets... into prominence) were in fact her only protection against the cold wind coming off the water. He would have offered her his own coat, but the last time he’d seen that garment, the night watchman was throwing it to the pavement, where it had no doubt been trampled underfoot by every rogue and whore in Seven Dials, unless someone had possessed the forethought to claim it to sell to one of the secondhand clothing shops in Petticoat Lane. Either way, it was lost to him. His waistcoat was the only thing he could offer.
“Here,” he said, and began to unbutton it.
“Here?” she asked in alarm, glancing about for some less public place in which to conduct the transaction.
“No, no,” he assured her hastily, belatedly realizing how she must have interpreted his apparent determination to disrobe on the spot. “I only meant—here, take this. You must be cold.”
“Thank you,” she said, apparently much moved by this simple gesture. She slipped her bare arms through the armholes and buttoned the garment closed over her scanty bodice, then drew her arms back inside it to take advantage of what little warmth it offered. “I had a very fine Norwich shawl, but it was stolen from me the very first week,” she recalled sadly.
“Miss Braunton—yes, you may call yourself Cat if you wish, but I know it’s you—what are you doing here? I thought you were to marry Martin Kenney.”
She looked up at him in utter bewilderment. “The Irishman who was imprisoned for debt? What would he have to do with me?”
“You danced with him once,” he reminded her. “You said you liked him.”
She shook her head. “Perhaps, but that was a very long time ago.”
“Only a year,” Pickett protested.
“Has it really been no longer than that?” she marveled. “It seems so much longer. I was a different person then,” she added, as if she were a very old woman recalling the carefree days of her youth, when he knew her to be only nineteen—hardly more than a child herself. And on that subject ...
“You were going to have a child, weren’t you? What happened to it?”
She was silent for such a long moment that Pickett wondered if she was going to answer at all. When she spoke at last, her voice was dull, devoid of all emotion. “I don’t know. They told me it died.” Her voice shook on the last word, and she added briskly, “Look here, I don’t know who you are, or how you know about me, but I don’t walk these streets for the sake of my health. Do you want company, or don’t you?”
“All I want is a roof over my head for the night,” Pickett said, thinking quickly. “If you can give me that, I’ll ask nothing else from you.”
“You mean it?” she asked hopefully, her dark eyes great inky pools in the moonlight.
“I’ll not lay a hand on you,” he promised.
She withdrew one of her hands from his waistcoat, and laid it on his arm with great formality, as if she were still a lady, accepting the escort of a suitor. “In that case, whoever you are, you just won yourself a roof over your head for the night.”
He was obliged to let her lead the way, since she was the only one who knew where they were going, and although he was shocked by the discovery that she, the niece of a duke, now sold her favors on London’s waterfront, he could not deny feeling a sense of relief when she did not lead him back in the direction of Seven Dials. As they walked, he put forward a few delicately worded queries, and she, finding him possessed of a sympathetic ear, allowed herself to be coaxed into divulging the sequence of events that had led to her present situation.
The tale she recounted was not a pretty one. The infant she’d borne had been the product of rape—this much Pickett already knew from his investigation of Sir Reginald Montague’s murder—and her father, in spite of his best efforts, had failed to procure a husband to cover his daughter’s shame. As a last resort, Lord Edwin had confronted her debaucher and insisted that he make some provision for the bastard child he’d sired. When Sir Reginald had refused, Lord Edwin had demanded satisfaction, and the two men had exchanged pistol shots at dawn on Paddington Green. Only one of the two had walked away—and that one had not been Lord Edwin Braunton.
“Could your uncle the duke have done nothing for you?” Pickett asked. “I seem to recall that he was—is—fond of you, having no daughters of his own.”
“He tried,” she said, choosing her words with care. “He did his best to provide me with a dowry that would tempt even the most mercenary of potential husbands. But then Papa was killed in the duel, and there was no hushing up the scandal any longer. Then, too, his second son, my cousin Freddy—we have always been particularly close, Freddy and I, and when Freddy decided it might be his duty to marry me—well, my uncle could not take such a risk, not with his elder son and heir still unmarried and childless. And you can hardly blame him for balking at the possibility of Sir Reginald Montague’s bastard being third in line to inherit the dukedom.”
Pickett could not view the duke’s dilemma in quite so sympathetic a light. “And so he cast you off.”
“He did not mean to be cruel, nor did my aunt, the duchess. In fact, she arranged for me to be taken in by a lady who provides a home for fallen women.”
The last two words were spoken so bitterly that Pickett drew the obvious conclusion. “But you ran away?”
“No, I still live there.”
Comprehension began to dawn, and the explanation that followed confirmed his worst suspicions. “The ‘lady’ turned out to be a bawd, and the ‘home’ she offered was nothing less than a brothel.”
“Can you not write to your uncle?” Pickett asked, appalled. “Surely he would not leave you there if he knew the truth.”
“ ‘Write,’ sir? On what paper? With what ink, or what quill? If Mrs. Bleeker has such things in the house, you may be sure she keeps them well away from her ‘girls.’ ”
“I’ll tell him myself, then, tomorrow morning,” Pickett promised her. “I haven’t any money, but it’s the least I can do, what with you putting me up for the night.”
She stopped abruptly and stared up at him in dismay. “You haven’t any money?”
“No,” Pickett confessed. “It was—stolen.” It was true, in a way. His money had been stolen from him, along with his wife, and his brother, and his house, and everything else he’d once held dear.
Her hand slipped from his arm, and she began to back away. “I’m very sorry, sir, but I can’t—”
“I promise, I’ll not lay a hand on you,” Pickett reiterated frantically in a last-ditch effort to change her mind.
“It isn’t that.” She made a frantic shooing motion with her hands. “I wish I could help you, truly I do. But if I haven’t any coins to give her in the morning, Mrs. Bleeker will— She’s done so once before, you see. A few weeks after the birth, when I’d had a little time to recover—” She broke off, took a deep breath, and began again. “When I realized what was expected of me—I went out with the other girls, but instead of—of approaching men, as they did, I found a place to hide until morning. But then Mrs. Bleeker required us to turn over our—our earnings to her, and I hadn’t any. When she discovered what I’d done—” A shudder shook her, one that had nothing to do with the cold night air. “I’ll not endure that again, even for a man as kind as you are. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll still tell the duke what has happened to you,” Pickett promised. He didn’t ask what punishment the bawd had exacted; he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know. “Only tell me where this woman’s house is located, and I’ll make sure he gets you out of there.”
She shook her head sadly. “And what would he do with me if you did? If he couldn’t secure a husband for a niece who was debauched by a gentleman, what could he possibly find to do with one who has had carnal knowledge of half the longshoremen on the Thames?”
There was nothing he could say to that, nothing at all. There were no good options for young women who found themselves in Miss Braunton’s position, but he’d thought an arranged marriage with the impoverished Irishman Martin Kenney had solved both of their immediate problems, providing her with a husband and Mr. Kenney with the funds he so desperately needed. In fact, Pickett had seen the marriage announcement in an issue of the Morning Post left lying about the Bow Street Public Office. It appeared that this, too, had changed.
“I’m going to your uncle in the morning, nevertheless,” he insisted, wishing he could be confident that the duke would be moved to take some action on his twice-wronged niece’s behalf. “There is—something else—that I must do first”—he would not allow himself to think of Julia somewhere on the streets of London, forced into the same position as this wretched young woman—“but after I’ve taken care of that, I will see your uncle and tell him what’s happened to you.”
She shook her head. “I’m sure you mean well, but I beg you will not. Let the ton forget the unhappy Catherine Braunton ever existed.” She smiled sadly. “Perhaps it would have been better if she never had.”
“You mustn’t say such a thing,” he protested. And why not? an inner voice challenged. You did, and with far less cause.
And then, in spite of his promises to the contrary, he not only touched her, but drew her gently into his arms and held her close. There was nothing lascivious in the gesture, and after an initial start of surprise, she relaxed into his embrace. For a long moment they stood there together, two lost souls mourning the lives they had once known.