by C. S. Harris
Miss Jarvis leaned forward to pat his hand, where it lay on the chair’s arm. “Yes. I’m so sorry.”
“Any idea where the brothel may have been located?” Sebastian asked.
Walden cleared his throat. “The one girl—Hannah—was very talkative. I believe she mentioned Portman Square.”
Sebastian nodded. Closed, stay-in brothels were rare in London. More common were lodging-house brothels, where the girls were—nominally, at least—independent. Picking up their customers from the pleasure gardens or the theater or even the streets of the city, they then brought them back to the lodging house where they kept a room. Other girls took their men to “accommodation houses” where they didn’t actually live; they simply hired one of its rooms for the requisite number of hours—or minutes. Others made use of the numerous chop houses, cigar rooms, and coffeehouses that also had bedrooms available for use—their exclusively male clientele making them good hunting grounds, as well.
“I’m afraid there’s really not much else I can tell you about Rose Jones,” Walden was saying. “Many of the girls chafe at the restrictions we impose upon them, but Rose never did. She never left the house.”
“Because she was still afraid?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Did she ever say anything about her life before she . . .” Miss Jarvis hesitated.
Walden shook his head. “No. Although it was obvious she was gently born. We don’t often see women quite like her. For some reason, many of the women who come to us claim to be clergymen’s daughters, although I suspect few actually are. But I’ve no doubt Rose was very wellborn. Very wellborn indeed.” He looked from Miss Jarvis to Sebastian. “This has something to do with the fire, doesn’t it? Dost thou think it’s possible the fire was not an accident?”
“I think so, yes.”
Joshua Walden nodded, his lips pressed together tightly.
It was when he was escorting them to the door that he said suddenly, “There is one more thing that might help. We had a young girl in the house who called herself Rachel. I don’t think she could have been more than thirteen—a lovely fair-haired child. One evening—just by chance—I overheard Rose say to the child, ‘I was once called Rachel.’ It stuck in my head because Rachel laughed merrily and said, ‘I was once called Rose.’ ”
He smiled gently at the memory, the smile rapidly fading. “But it may mean nothing. Some girls change their names frequently.”
“Perhaps,” said Sebastian, pausing in the Quaker’s simple entrance hall. “But it could also be Rose’s real name. Thank you.”
“That was fortuitous,” said Miss Jarvis as Sebastian handed her up into her waiting carriage. “I hadn’t expected to learn so much.”
“You think we learned a great deal, do you?”
“You don’t?” She turned to look at him in surprise. “How many brothels can there be near Portman Square?”
He took a step back. “Believe it or not, Miss Jarvis, I haven’t the slightest idea. But I know someone who will.”
Chapter 8
In addition to the modest estate in Hampshire bequeathed to him by a maiden great-aunt, Sebastian also kept a bow-fronted house in Brook Street. The establishment at Number 41 Brook Street was considerably smaller and less imposing than the Grosvenor Square townhouse of his father, Alistair St. Cyr, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Fifth Earl of Hendon. But Sebastian had not visited either his father’s Grosvenor Square house or his ancestral estates in Cornwall since September of the previous year.
A distant rumble of thunder shook the cloudy afternoon as Sebastian took the short flight of stairs to his own front door. He handed his hat to his majordomo, Morey, and said, “Where is Calhoun?”
Jules Calhoun was Sebastian’s valet. The less than orthodox nature of some of Sebastian’s activities had in the past made it difficult for him to retain the services of a gentleman’s gentleman. But it had been eight months now since Calhoun had joined the Brook Street household, and he’d never shown the least tendency to leave in horror or a fit of pique.
The majordomo, however, was not one of Calhoun’s fans. He sniffed. “Some valets might have more sense than to invade the kitchen this close to the dinner hour,” said Morey in sepulchral tones. “Unfortunately, Calhoun is not of their company.”
Sebastian hid a smile. “Brewing boot polish, is he?”
A muscle bunched along Morey’s tight jaw. “If Madame LeClerc should quit over this—”
“Madame LeClerc quit because Calhoun has chosen to spend some time in the kitchen?” Sebastian jerked off his gloves. “Not likely.”
Madame LeClerc would have banished any other valet with a pot of boot polish to the stables. But the cook was called “Madame” solely out of courtesy; she was actually a young French-woman in her late twenties, a softly rounded woman with black hair and laughing eyes and a short upper lip. And Jules Calhoun was a very dashing gentleman’s gentleman.
Morey sniffed again. “Would you like me to have him wait upon you, my lord?”
Sebastian swung off his driving coat. “Good God, no.” Boot polish was serious business. “I’ll go to him.”
Morey bowed in majestic silence and withdrew.
The descent of the Viscount into his own kitchens caused something of a flutter. The kitchen maid dropped a pot of half-shelled peas, while Madame LeClerc gasped and said, “Ees something wrong, my lord? You deed not like the sole I fixed for last night’s dinner, perhaps?”
“The sole was wonderful,” said Sebastian, carefully avoiding the cascade of rolling peas. “I’ve come to discuss boot polish with Calhoun. If you’ll excuse us?”
Madame LeClerc threw a soulful glance at the small, lithe man stirring the contents of a heavy pot on the stove, and withdrew.
The air in the kitchen was redolent with the scent of hot beeswax and resin. In deference to the stove’s heat, Jules Calhoun had removed his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves, yet he still managed to convey a sense of punctilious neatness. Nothing about either his demeanor or his impressive skills as a gentleman’s gentleman betrayed the fact that he had grown up in the most notorious flash house in London.
“As keen as your lordship is about the shine on his boots,” said Calhoun, not looking around, “I can’t see it luring you down into the kitchens.”
Sebastian went to sprawl in one of the straight-backed chairs beside the scrubbed kitchen table. “I want to know what you can tell me about the residential brothels near Portman Square.”
Calhoun glanced around, a lock of his straight flaxen hair falling across his high forehead. “Were you looking for anything in particular, my lord?”
“I’m looking for a house where one could hire an attractive, gently bred woman of some eighteen to twenty years of age. Dark hair. Slim. Educated.”
Calhoun returned his concentration to the bubbling concoction on the stove. “Such a barque of frailty has caught your fancy, my lord?”
“Not exactly. Her name is Rose—or maybe Rachel—Jones and she was killed last night when someone attacked the Friends’ Magdalene House in Covent Garden. I have reason to believe she fled a house near Portman Square.”
“Ah. I see. Well, there are only three stay-in brothels in the Portman Square area.” Calhoun poured a black mixture from a vial into his pot. Sebastian watched with interest. Like most valets, Calhoun kept his boot polish recipe a dark secret. “If your girl was slim and well-bred,” said the valet, “then I doubt she’d have been at the Golden Calf. They go for the buxom milkmaid type. There’s a house in Chalon Lane that sometimes has more refined girls, but they cater to those who like them young.” A quiver of distaste passed over his features. “Very young. They’re not all girls, either.”
“And the third house?”
“I’d say it’s probably your best bet. They call it the Orchard Street Academy. Most of the girls there are simply pretending to be ladies, but a few are the real thing. The abbess is a skinny, grasping harridan who was on the stage
in her prime. Calls herself Miss Lil.”
“She owns the place?”
“No. The actual owner is Ian Kane.” Calhoun reached for a small bottle. “Now there’s a crafty fellow.”
Sebastian leaned forward. “Tell me about him.”
Calhoun added a small measure of what looked like neat’s-foot oil. “I’ve heard his father was a miner from Lincolnshire. Our Ian came up to London when he was but seventeen and married a widow who owned a grog shop on Newgate. Now he owns at least a dozen different establishments—everything from grog shops to pubs to places like the Orchard Street Academy. He’s smart, and he’s ruthless.”
“Ruthless enough to kill a woman who fled his house?”
Calhoun raised his spoon to test the consistency of his mixture. “His wife died a year after the marriage. Fell down the stairs and broke her neck. There are those who claim Kane pushed her. But then, it could just be rumor.”
Sebastian studied the valet’s half-averted face. “What do you think?”
Calhoun moved the pot of boot polish off the fire. “I think people Ian Kane finds a danger or even just a nuisance seem to have a higher-than-average chance of ending up dead.” He glanced around, his blue eyes somber. “You’d do well to remember that, my lord.”
Chapter 9
Hero Jarvis considered herself a sensible woman not given to willfulness or foolish stubbornness. She came from an ancient, powerful family and understood well the obligations such a heritage entailed. Nevertheless, she did not subscribe to the oft-expressed belief that a woman’s virtues were limited to chastity, humility, and obedience. She did strive for humility, although it was at times difficult. She was also a chaste woman and, at the age twenty-five, had resigned herself to a virginal old age. But that state of affairs came more from an unwillingness to submit herself to a husband’s power than from anything else. And as for mindless obedience—well, in Hero’s opinion, that was for children, servants, and dogs.
Her father tended to lump her in his mind with either the sentimentalists or the radicals, but in that, he erred. She was neither. She considered fervent democrats dangerously delusional, and while she supported charity work, she had no personal inclination to ladle porridge at a soup kitchen or volunteer in an orphanage. Her dedication to change and reform was more intellectual than emotional, and more legal than personal. She simply subscribed to a vastly different moral code from the one that governed her father—which did much to explain why he couldn’t understand her.
Her decision to take it upon herself not to allow the Magdalene House murders to be forgotten had not been reached lightly. But once she had resolved not to fail the woman who had died in her arms, Hero pursued her goal with the same single-minded drive that characterized her father. Because she knew herself deficient in the experience and skills necessary to deal adequately with the task at hand, it was a logical step to solicit the assistance of someone such as Viscount Devlin. But Hero knew it would be both disingenuous and cowardly for her to convince herself that her obligation ended there. And Hero Jarvis was neither disingenuous nor cowardly.
Returning to the Jarvis townhouse on Berkeley Square, she exchanged her gown and matching pelisse of moss green for a more somber gray walking dress of fine alpaca and a small veiled hat. Then, accompanied reluctantly by her maid, she set forth in her carriage for Covent Garden.
Hero’s research into the causes of the recent proliferation in the number of prostitutes in the metropolis had given her a familiarity with people and places unknown to most women of her station. She thought it made sense to use those contacts now, in an attempt to find the woman who had originally arrived at the Magdalene House with Rose Jones. Lord Devlin might be skilled in the arts of detection, but the fact remained that he was a man, and Hero knew well the attitudes toward men that characterized the fallen women of the demirep. They would be far more likely to open up to Hero, a woman, than to a member of a sex they both hated and scorned.
At this hour of the afternoon, the main square of Covent Garden was still given over to its market, the surrounding streets echoing with the shouts of fisherwives and the hawkers’ cries of “fresh hot tea” and “fine ripe oranges sweet as sugar.” The rouged and willing women who would emerge later to prowl the darkening colonnades and the theaters could still be found huddled in desultory conversation in the kitchens of their lodging houses.
Hero directed her coachman to a discreet lodging house in King Street run by an aged Irishwoman named Molly O’Keefe. A large woman with an ample girth and improbable red hair, Molly greeted her with hands on hips, a broad smile crinkling the flesh beside her watery gray eyes. Once, Molly had been a prostitute herself. But she’d been shrewd enough to pull herself out of the downward spiral that ended for most in disease and an early death.
“I didn’t expect to be seein’ your ladyship agin,” said Molly, reaching out to pluck Hero off the small stoop. “Come in, come in.”
“I’m not a ladyship and you know it, Molly,” said Hero, pressing into Molly’s hands the basket of fine bread and fresh farm cheeses she had brought. “My father is a baron, not an earl.”
Molly laughed, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Sure. But you’re a lady, no gettin’ around that. Besides, you could be a ladyship if’n you wanted it. All you’d need do is marry one o’ them lords I’ve no doubt are courtin’ you.”
“Now why would I want to do that?”
Molly laughed again. “Damned if I know.”
Trailed by her sour-faced maid, Hero followed the landlady down the shabby hall and into the kitchen, which served as the lodging house’s common room. The center of the kitchen was taken up by an old and battered scrubbed table around which grouped the house’s various lodgers. Clothed in shabby dressing gowns and slippers, a dozen or so women chattered with brutal frankness about men and clothes and their own wildly improbable schemes for the future. The close air smelled of beer and gin and onions faintly underlain by another scent Hero had come to associate with such places, although its exact nature continued to elude her.
Molly O’Keefe’s lodging house was not a brothel, although most of her lodgers were prostitutes. These were free-ranging prostitutes who preferred to keep their private lives separate from their trade. Scorning both the residential-style brothels and the lodging-house brothels, they lived here, in Molly O’Keefe’s house, and took their pickups to an accommodation house to rent a room.
Hero had never been to a residential brothel or a lodging-house brothel, or to an accommodation house. It frustrated her, but because she was a young unmarried gentlewoman, there were still certain boundaries she did not dare cross, however impatient with convention she might be. Her contact with the women of the street she studied had therefore been limited to neutral territory such as this, or refuges such as the Magdalene House. But she’d learned enough about them to understand the ties that bound one segment of the underworld to the next. Through the residents of Molly O’Keefe’s house, Hero would have access to virtually every prostitute in London.
“I would like to address your boarders, if I may,” she said to Molly, and pushed back her veil.
Molly clapped her hands together. “Right then,” she said loudly. “Listen up, ye drunken lot of worthless tarts. The lady here wants to talk to you.”
Someone snickered, while perhaps half of the women around the table continued to talk. A woman with short blond hair and massive breasts visible at the gaping neck of her gown said, “And why the ’ell should we listen to ’er?”
“Because what I have to say could earn you twenty pounds,” said Hero, stepping to the head of the table.
Twenty pounds were considerably more than a good house-maid could earn in a year. An immediate hush fell over the room. Now that she had their attention, Hero said, “Last Wednesday, two women fled a residential brothel near Portman Square. One called herself Rose. The other was named Hannah. Rose was one of the women killed at the Magdalene House last night. But Hannah left the ref
uge several days before the attack. She may be in danger, or she may know something about why the attack took place. I would like to speak to her.”
A murmur of whispers and desultory comments swelled around the room. Hero raised her voice and continued speaking. “If you or one of your acquaintances provides me with information that enables me to find Hannah, that person will receive a reward of twenty pounds.”
“Why, you must be lookin’ fer me,” said a tall, skeletally thin woman with long brown hair. “I’m Hannah. How’d you know I was here?”
The other women around the table laughed, while Molly growled and said, “Like hell. That’s Jenna Kincaid.”
“Please do not think,” said Hero, letting her gaze travel around the assembled women, “that I will be so foolish as to pay for false information. I will know the woman I seek when I find her. Anyone stepping forward will receive a reward only if the information she provides proves accurate.”
