Where Serpents Sleep sscm-4

by C. S. Harris

  Taking a deep breath, and then another, he forced himself to uncurl his fists and walk away.

  Pleading a headache she didn’t have, Hero begged off from accompanying her mother to Lady Melbourne’s picnic and spent the afternoon curled up on the window seat in her room with a book open on her lap.

  The irony of Hero Jarvis, determined spinster, succumbing to the lures of the flesh in a moment of frightened weakness was not lost on her. She kept telling herself that, with time, she would come to terms with the cascade of embarrassment and consternation in which she now floundered. Resolutely putting all thought of the incident out of her head, she’d just picked up her book again for perhaps the tenth time when the butler, Grisham, appeared to scratch at her door. “There is a personage here to see you, miss.”

  Hero looked around. “A personage?”

  “Yes, miss. I hope I haven’t done wrong to admit her, but I know your . . . er . . . activities do sometimes bring you into contact with a certain class of female which you would otherwise be—”

  Hero cut him off. “Where is she?”

  “I left her in the entrance hall with one of the footmen watching her.”

  “Watching her? What do you think she’s going to do? Make off with the silver?”

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  Hero closed her book and hurried downstairs.

  James the footman stood at the base of the steps, his back pressed against the paneled wall, his arms crossed at his chest, his gaze never wavering from the auburn-haired woman who sat perched on the edge of one of the Queen Anne chairs lined up along the hall. She wore a spangled pink dress striped à la Polonaise, with a blatantly low décolletage decorated with burgundy-colored ribbons. A saucy hat sporting three burgundy plumes completed the stunning ensemble. Once, the effect might have been jaunty. But the plumes drooped, the Cyprian’s shoulders slumped, and she had one hand up to her mouth so that she could gnaw nervously on her thumbnail. Hero had never seen her before in her life.

  “I understand you wished to see me?” said Hero.

  The woman leapt up, her eyes wide. Now that Hero was closer, she realized that beneath the plumes and rouge, the Cyprian was no more than a girl. Sixteen, perhaps, seventeen at the most. She was so small she barely came up to Hero’s shoulder. She was visibly shaking with fear, but she notched her chin up, determined to brazen it out. “You’re Miss Jarvis?”

  “That’s right,” said Hero.

  The girl cast a scornful glance at the footman. “I ain’t here to prig yer bloody silver.”

  “Then why precisely are you here, Miss—?”

  “I’m Hannah,” said the girl. “Hannah Green.”

  Chapter 46

  “Indeed?” said Hero, lifting one eyebrow. She’d wondered how long it would be before hordes of tawdry “Hannahs” started showing up at her door.

  The girl frowned in confusion. “Aye,” she said slowly.

  Hero crossed her arms. “Prove it.”

  The girl’s mouth sagged. “What? Ye don’t believe me? Ye can ask anybody. They’ll tell ye.”

  “Anybody such as . . . whom?”

  The girl put her hand to her forehead. “Aw,” she wailed, half turning away. “Now what the bloody ’ell am I supposed to do?”

  “You could go back where you came from,” suggested Hero, torn between annoyance and amusement.

  “What? An’ get me neck snapped like poor Tasmin?”

  Amusement and annoyance both fled, chased by a cold chill. “Come in here.” Hero put her hand on the girl’s arm, plucked her into the morning room, and closed the door on the interested footman.

  “Where precisely have you been?” Hero demanded.

  The girl’s eyes slid away, going round as they assessed the room with its yellow silk hangings and damask chairs, its gilt framed paintings and tall mirrors. “Gor,” she breathed. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this. It makes the Academy’s parlor look downright shabby, it does.”

  Hero spared a thought for her grandmother’s reaction, were she to be told that her morning room compared favorably to a brothel. “After you left the Academy,” said Hero, still unconvinced this ingenue really was Hannah Green, “what did you do?”

  Hannah wandered the room. Hero kept an eye on Hannah’s hands. Hannah said, “Rose drug me to that bloody Magdalene ’Ouse. She said we’d be safe there, that no one would think t’look for us there.” Hannah’s lips thinned with remembered outrage. “Six o’clock in the bloody morning!”

  Understanding dawned. “They made you get up at six?”

  “Not just get up. Get up and pray. For a whole bloody hour!”

  “Every day?” said Hero.

  “Aye! The first time, I thought it was just some mean trick they was playin’ on us, but when they done it again the next day, I knew we were in for it.”

  “Rose didn’t mind?”

  “No,” said Hannah in a voice tinged with mingled awe and exasperation. “I think she actually liked it. It was scary.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I left. I was afraid they might try to stop me, but if truth were told, I think them Quakers was glad to see the back of me.”

  “You weren’t afraid to leave?”

  “Nah. I mean, I was scared when we left the Academy, but after a couple of days, I started thinking it was all a hum, that Rose had made it all up.” She reconsidered. “Well, most of it.”

  “Surely you didn’t go back to the Academy?” Hero asked, stunned.

  The girl looked at her as if she were daft. “Ye take me fer a flat or something? No. I got me a room off the Haymarket.” She paused. “ ’Course, when I heard what happened at the Magdalene ‘Ouse last Monday, I got scared all over again. I tried to lay low but, well, a body’s got t’eat.”

  Hero studied the girl’s animated face. If she really was Hannah Green, the girl was living proof that God takes care of idiots. “Tell me about Tasmin,” said Hero.

  The girl sniffed. “I was working the stretch between Norris Street and the George when she found me. She said there was a gentry mort willin’ to pay ten pounds t’talk to me, but if’n we was smart, we could maybe figure out a way to get more.”

  Hero had actually offered twenty pounds to anyone who could put her in touch with Hannah Green. But Tasmin Poole had obviously been less than honest with her former coworker. “Go on.”

  The girl’s eyes slid away. “Tasmin was gonna write ye—Tasmin was clever, ye know. She could read and write like nothin’ you ever saw. She came up to m’room to work on writin’ the note while I went to get us some sausage rolls. It’s when I was comin’ back that I saw that cove going into the lodging house.”

  “A man?” said Hero. “What man?”

  “What do you mean, what man?” said Hannah scornfully. “Don’t you know nothin’? The same man what killed Hessy.”

  Lady Jarvis’s querulous voice could be heard raised in annoyance somewhere above stairs. Hero looked at Hannah’s burgundy-plumed hat, the plunging décolletage, the glory of spangles and pink-and-white Polonaise stripes and said, “Wait here.”

  Yanking open the door, she found James standing patiently in the hall. “Watch her,” Hero told him, then hurried upstairs to furnish herself with the reticule, hat, gloves, and parasol without which no respectable lady would be seen out of doors in London—no matter how nefarious her errand.

  Hannah Green sat in the hackney pulled up across from Paul Gibson’s surgery, her body rigid with mulish obstinacy. “I ain’t goin’ in there,” she said with all a prostitute’s loathing of the medical profession. “I don’t need no doctor.”

  With difficulty, Hero resisted the urge to shake the girl. “That’s not why we’re here. You need someplace safe to stay. There isn’t anyplace else.” Not that Paul Gibson’s surgery was exactly safe either, Hero thought, remembering the fate of the wounded assailant she’d brought here. But she kept that information to herself.

  Hannah Green cast
her a doubtful glance. “No medical exam?”

  “No exam,” promised Hero.

  The girl consented to get out of the hackney. Hero paid off the driver, then had to practically pull the girl across the road.

  “Good God,” said Paul Gibson, his eyes widening when he opened the door to Hero’s knock.

  “Dr. Gibson, meet Hannah Green. I think,” she added as Hannah glared at the surgeon and Gibson continued to stare in awe at the lady’s burgundy plumed hat and spangled pink-and-white stripes. “I’m sorry, but I had no place else to take her,” said Hero, putting her hand in the small of the girl’s back and giving her a push that propelled her over the threshold and into the hall.

  Chapter 47

  Sebastian arrived back at his house in Brook Street to find a note from Paul Gibson awaiting him. The Irishman had written cryptically:

  I have an interesting guest I’m convinced you’ll want to meet. Do come. Quickly.

  The word “quickly” was heavily underscored three times.

  “Why all the mystery?” Sebastian demanded when Gibson opened the door to him.

  “I was concerned my message might fall into the wrong hands,” said Gibson, turning to lead the way back down the hall.

  “So who’s your guest?”

  “I have two, actually.”

  Sebastian stopped on the threshold of Gibson’s parlor. Miss Jarvis stood beside the empty hearth, her gaze on the pickled pig’s fetus on the mantel. She was turned half away from him, her spine as rigid and uncompromising as ever, her brown hair once again pulled back as neatly as a schoolteacher’s, her forehead faintly crinkling as she stared with apparent fascination at the blob of purple-pink flesh in the jar. She looked as she had always looked and he wondered why that surprised him. As if that brief, desperate coupling in the dark should have transformed her and made her—what? Soft and winsome? Hero Jarvis? What an absurd conceit.

  She turned then and he had the satisfaction of seeing her lips part on a quickly indrawn breath. And he knew in that moment she, too, was remembering the touch of flesh against flesh, the taste of salt on a questing tongue. Then a woman’s voice said, “Bloody ’ell. You gonna make me say it all again?”

  Looking around, he beheld a vision in spangled pink-and-white stripes that made him blink.

  He was aware of Miss Jarvis’s lips curling into that malicious smile that was so much like her father’s. She said, “Lord Devlin, meet Hannah Green.”

  Sebastian studied the girl’s button nose and scattering of freckles. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t this—this exuberant bundle of irreverence. “Are you certain she really is Hannah Green?”

  “Are you bamming me?” said the girl. “I’d have to be daft to be claimin’ t’be me if’n I wasn’t me. I don’t want to be me right now.”

  “According to Hannah here, Tasmin Poole is dead,” said Miss Jarvis by way of explanation. “Someone snapped her neck two nights ago.”

  “It was the same cove,” said Hannah. “The one what come to the Academy and done for Hessy.”

  Sebastian went to pour himself a brandy. “Do you know who this cove is?” he asked, reaching for Gibson’s decanter.

  “Not exactly.” She threw a questioning glance toward Miss Jarvis.

  “Tell Lord Devlin what you told me. About the three men who hired you out of the house last week.”

  Sebastian looked up. “When was this?”

  “Tuesday,” said Hannah. “They was havin’ a party, you see. It was one of the coves’ birthday, and they hired Hessy, Rose, and me fer the whole night.”

  “Go on,” said Sebastian, splashing brandy into a glass. He silently offered some to Miss Jarvis and Gibson, but only Gibson took him up on it.

  “We’d done it before. I don’t mean fer them three,” Hannah hastened to add, her gaze on the brandy. “But fer other coves.” Her face shone with saucy glee. “It can get a bit naughty, if you know what I mean. But it’s a lot less work than spending the night traipsing up and down the stairs at the Academy.”

  Sebastian glanced at Miss Jarvis, with her primly knotted spinster’s hair and rigidly held spine. Did she have any inkling of the wild Dionysian scene conjured by Hannah Green’s words? Of the kinds of things three young men could demand of the compliant women they’d bought for the night? And then it occurred to him that she probably had a better idea now than she would have twenty-four hours ago.

  “What manner of men were they?” he asked.

  “Gentlemen,” said Hannah Green, as if that said it all.

  “Old? Young? Fat? Thin?”

  “Pretty old,” she said. Sebastian was picturing ponderous men with graying pates and drooping bellies until she added, “ ’Bout yer age.”

  “I’m twenty-nine.” He glanced over at Miss Jarvis in time to see her bring up her hand to hide a smile. He said, “Did they take you to a house, or to rooms?”

  “Rooms. Right fancy they were, too.” She cast a disparaging glance around Gibson’s unpretentious parlor. “More swell than this.”

  “Where were these rooms?”

  Hannah frowned in thought. “I don’t rightly know. They took us there in a carriage.”

  “A gentleman’s carriage?”

  “No. A hackney.” Then she frowned and added, “I think.”

  Sebastian blew out his breath in a long sigh. “Do you remember anything from that night at all?”

  She grinned. “Not much. I was that foxed, I was.”

  “But you say you saw one of them again?”

  “All three of ’em. They come to the Academy the very next night. Asked fer Rose, Hessy, and me again. Only, this time they weren’t hirin’ us off the floor. Just fer an hour.”

  “So what happened?”

  Hannah Green’s gaze returned again to Sebastian’s brandy. She licked her lips. “Can I ’ave one of them?”

  “When you’ve remembered everything. I want you clear-headed. Tell me what happened Wednesday night. Exactly.”

  “Exactly?” She screwed up her face with the effort of memory. “Well . . . I was takin’ off me dress when Rose comes bangin’ on me door, sayin’ she needs to talk to me. So I goes out into the hall to tell her to go away, and she grabs me arm and says them three gentlemen had come to kill us. At first I thought she was bamming me, but then she drags me down the hall and shows me poor Hessy layin’ there with her eyes wide-open and her neck bent all funny. And she tells me that she’s done gone and stabbed the gent what had paid fer her. I can tell you, we was that spooked. Rose give Tasmin Poole her bracelet to distract Thackery while we nipped down the back stairs and took off.”

  Sebastian studied the girl’s animated face, unsure how much—if any—of this wild tale to believe. “The man you say you saw going into your lodging house in Haymarket right before Tasmin Poole was killed—was he the man you were with Wednesday night?”

  Hannah shook her head, her eyes wide. “He’s the one went with Hessy.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I told you, he was a gentleman! Now can I have that drink?”

  Sebastian poured her a brandy and held it out. “Dark hair, or light?”

  She took the brandy in both hands and gulped it. “Dark. I think. At least, pretty dark.”

  Paul Gibson made an incoherent sound, while Sebastian asked, “Tall or short?”

  Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “Neither.”

  “You don’t remember anything about him at all, do you?”

  “ ’Course I do. What I’m sayin’ is, he were an ordinary-lookin’ cove. I’d recognize ’im in a minute if’n I was to see ’im again. I recognized ’im when I seen ’im in the Haymarket, didn’t I?”

  “What about the gentleman you were with that Wednesday night. What did he look like?”

  “He were the same. Just an ordinary-lookin’ gentleman.” She twisted her mouth sideways in a thoughtful frown. “Though I think maybe he weren’t as dark. He was the birthday cove.”

  Sebastian mo
ved to refill her glass. “Do you remember any of their names?”

  “I don’t pay no attention to names. In my experience, most men just make up the names they give me anyway.”

  “Yet that night of the birthday party, surely the men called one another by name?”

  She frowned. “Maybe. I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t pay no attention to names.”

  “Was one of them named Max?”