Never Dare a Wicked Earl

by Renee Ann Miller

  She stepped out of the room and moved down the long corridor. The aroma of baking bread drifted from the kitchen, along with the voices of the cook and her assistant squabbling over the din of clanking pots and pans. Sophia’s stomach growled. She’d eaten a light breakfast consisting of dried biscuits and tea, hoping to avoid the retching that had plagued her five days ago.

  Nearing the alley door, she sidestepped the prodigious number of crates and railroad barrels bearing the name J. H. Mason. As she moved past a crate, she ran her fingers over the burnished marking of a Hereford bull that branded the wooden slats. She didn’t care what Westfield said about the wholesaler. Here, in this place, Mason was a godsend.

  She swung the door open. Angus, who leaned against Thomas’s carriage, jerked his head up from the newspaper he read. He tipped his hat off his brow and gave her a broad smile. His warm breath sent puffs of white into the chilly air. “Ready to leave, miss?”

  “Do forgive me, Angus, but it’s taking a bit longer without Dr. Trimble.”

  “’Tis no problem,” he responded with his unfaltering smile.

  She pulled out several coins from her skirt pocket and pressed them into his hand. “You must be famished.” She gestured up the alley to Whitechapel Road. “There are several taverns to the west. Why don’t you get yourself something to eat? I shan’t need you for at least another hour. Possibly two.”

  The coachman glanced at the coins.

  “If you don’t go, I shall feel dreadful,” she added.

  He slipped the money into his coat pocket. “If ye insist, miss.”

  “I do,” she said, ignoring the low rumble of her own indignant stomach.

  An hour later, Sophia sighed as the last patient, the woman she’d seen talking with Mrs. Hamblin, exited the examining room. The poor, malnourished creature had taken to visiting the gin palaces and drinking her meals instead of eating them.

  Sophia picked up the weekly report book and jotted some additional notes regarding two little boys, brothers who’d come to the mission yesterday with what appeared to be a case of croup. She’d instructed Mrs. Hamblin to separate them from the other children and to place several pots of steaming water in their room. However, she wanted it noted that if either boy’s breathing became distressed or if the coloring around their noses, mouths, or fingernails turned bluish, they were to be conveyed to Royal Hospital, posthaste.

  The matron entered the room. Sophia handed her the report and buckled her medical bag closed. “Mrs. Hamblin, have you ever met J. H. Mason?”

  The woman glanced up from the report she perused and shook her head.

  “So he has never visited the mission?” Sophia slipped her wool cape from the wall hook and draped it over her shoulders.

  “No, Lady Prescott serves as intermediary.”

  How interesting.

  Sophia acknowledged Mrs. Hamblin’s words of thanks and left the room. As she once again passed the alms from J. H. Mason, her mind reverted to the papers she’d seen on Westfield’s desk, the ones with the grocer’s marking printed on them. Was Westfield responsible for Mason’s donations? Did he pay the man to donate them? Doubtful, given his complete disinterest in the mission. She opened the side door to stare into the murky alley now cast in shadows. Angus had yet to return.

  “Penny for the poor, mum?”

  Startled, Sophia stepped back. A man dressed in tattered clothes, a ragged derby atop his downcast head, moved out of the shadows, his open palm extended. The bedraggled soul appeared crippled. His left foot dragged behind him as though weighted by chains.

  She set her medical bag down and hesitantly stepped toward him—fearful of the rats that lingered in the alley. “Sir,” she said, reaching into her pocket for some coins, “there is a Benevolent Friends Society—”

  Her voice froze as the man wrenched her arm behind her back and placed a knife to her neck.

  “Scream an’ I’ll slit yer gullet,” he rasped, straightening, exposing his full height.

  Heart thundering in her chest, Sophia placed a hand to her abdomen. “I shan’t scream. I’ve only a few coins, but you are welcome to them.”

  He gave a low, bitter laugh. She couldn’t see his face, but the smell of decay drifted from his mouth. “Yer worth more than a few paltry coins.”

  With her arm still twisted behind her back, he propelled her into the depth of the alley. At the end of the constricted space, they stepped into one of the narrow routes that weaved behind the buildings. Her panic soared—pinnacled. The farther the man forced her into the rookery’s belly, the more difficult it would be to extract herself. Almost paralyzing fear welled up inside her. Yet the knife at her throat kept her moving. Whenever they passed another pedestrian in the stygian path, he slipped the knife under her cape and pressed it against the nubs of her spine.

  Twice she tried to speak to him, and twice he applied more pressure to her arm until she feared he’d dislocate her shoulder. They turned so many times she became disoriented, but then she saw the spire of Christ Church Spitalfields under the rising moon. They were near where her sister had lived. They finally emerged onto a lane lined with tenements more dilapidated than Maria’s had been.

  Something brushed against her feet and squeaked. Rats! The hammering in her chest filled her ears with a steady swish, swish, swish. “How much money do you want to let me go?”

  “Quiet,” he hissed, pressing the blade closer to her throat as they stepped under an arch into a dark warren.

  A sharp, intense pain lanced her skin and a trickle of blood wove a path down her neck. She fought the urge to scream.

  The clanking of keys resonated in the thick, dull air, only a moment before the man thrust her against the surface of a wooden door covered with blistered green paint. With his body pressed to her back, he lowered the knife and slipped a key into the lock.

  Fearful this might be her last chance to escape, she jabbed her elbow backward and into the man’s rounded belly.

  Air exploded from his lungs. He folded in two.

  As she dashed by him, the brute’s large hand clamped around her throat like a vice. She tried to scream, but she couldn’t even breathe as darkness swallowed her.

  * * *

  Hayden leaned back in his chair and propped his booted feet on the corner of his desk. He tossed a financial report on his blotter and closed his eyes. Sophia’s delicate face floated in his mind’s eye. Thoughts of her had plagued him throughout the day, and now they appeared determined to haunt his evening. He could almost smell her alluring lavender scent, lingering in his house.

  With a disgruntled snort, he surveyed the stack of unfinished work before him. Once again, he’d sat at his desk all day and accomplished little.

  Footfalls neared his study, along with Hawthorne’s indignant protestations and a man’s raised voice. Hayden swung his feet to the floor, leaned forward, and unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk. He extracted his pistol. He’d just cocked the hammer when the door burst open to reveal Thomas Trimble.

  With a curse, Hayden lowered the gun pointed at the doctor looming in the doorway.

  A flustered Hawthorne stood behind him. The butler ran his fingers over his brow. “My Lord, Dr.—”

  Raising his hand, Hayden silenced him. “That will be all, Hawthorne. Thank you.”

  Trimble stepped into the room and slammed the door closed. He moved to the desk.

  “You trying to get your bloody bollocks shot off, man?” Hayden returned the gun to the drawer before propping his feet back on the desk.

  The doctor braced his hands on the mahogany surface and leaned forward. “Where is she?”

  Did he mean Sophia? Christ, did he truly think if she were here, he’d be sitting at his desk? “To whom do you refer?”

  Trimble lifted his right hand and pounded it on the blotter. The swift shot of air sent several sheets of paper skittering to the floor. “You wretch! You damn well know I’m referring to Sophia! Where is she?”

  Hayden g
lanced at the papers on the rug and restrained his rising ire. “If you have lost your pretty little assistant, you won’t find her here.”

  The red color singeing Trimble’s cheeks drained away leaving a sallow cast to his skin. “God, as much as I despise you and what you’ve done, I bloody well wish she was.”

  “Perhaps she’s cried off.” The possibility lightened Hayden’s mood.

  “She’s gone missing.” Trimble raked a hand through his hair. “Went to Whitechapel—”

  Hayden sprung to his feet and wrapped his fingers around Trimble’s lapels, cutting off the doctor’s words. “Tell me you weren’t fool enough to let her go to the Chapel alone?”

  Trimble flung Hayden’s grasp off, but the indignation etched upon the doctor’s face faded. “My coachman accompanied her, but she’s vanished.”

  Hayden barely heard Trimble’s words as he grabbed his pistol and headed out his residence, into the doctor’s waiting carriage.

  As Hayden and Trimble made their way to Whitechapel, a haunting tension cloaked them. It didn’t help that the farther they delved into the East End, London’s perpetual fog thickened into a dark, almost reddish winter blanket of grime and cloying stench. Hayden stared at Sophia’s intended.

  “Though you have not asked,” Trimble said, breaking the quiet void, “I feel honor bound to inform you I have told Sophia that if we marry I will raise the child with as much devotion as I would my own flesh and blood.”

  “Damnation, Trimble, what are you prattling about, I . . .” Hayden’s words trailed off. For several seconds, he believed he’d not be able to speak above the roaring in his head or see past the black marring his vision. “Sophia is with child?” He heard the question spoken aloud, and though it was his voice, it sounded soft, like an echo from his past—the voice of a naïve twenty-one-year-old scholar who had favored quiet nights reading The Bard and soft-spoken conversations on philosophy. A man who’d believed love conquered all—a fool’s voice.

  When the blackness faded from his vision, he was pleased to notice the color in Trimble’s face had drained away. He didn’t wish to be the only one too exposed.

  “I thought she’d told you. She said you had no interest in the child.”

  Sophia carries my baby. A mixture of elation and anger rushed through him. How could she not tell him? He knew the answer: his wicked reputation, along with the man sitting across from him. Why marry a rogue when you can marry a saint, and Sophia had admitted her love for the physician.

  Leaning forward, he forced his clenching fist to relax. “You understand what this means, Trimble?” His tone, once again, sounded firm and unwavering. The voice of a man who brooked no opposition—a man few trifled with. “No man, no matter how saintly, will raise my child as his own, unless he’s willing to put me six feet under.”

  A nerve ticked at Trimble’s jaw. “What will you do, Westfield? Set her up in some pretty house where she can raise your bastard while scorned by society?”

  “I advise you to use the word bastard with prudence.”

  “You’ll marry her?” Trimble’s voice betrayed disbelief.

  “As soon as we find her.”

  The brakes ground against the wheels and the equipage stuttered to a stop before the mission. Hayden flung the door open and jumped to the pavement. He scowled at the coachman descending his perch. “Where did you wait for her?”

  “Here, me laird,” the man said, motioning to the alley as he unfastened the lamps off the conveyance.

  Hayden and Trimble both took a lantern, and the three men moved down the dark passage.

  Angus pointed to the side door. “Aye, she was to come out here, but all I found was her bag.”

  Hayden scanned the draped windows of the brick mission. He turned and studied the adjacent building. Its dark, uncloaked windows looked like black, lifeless eyes staring down upon them, except for one window above the ground floor where the subtle glow of light emanated. He turned to Trimble. “What’s this building used for?”

  “A warehouse, but it’s been empty these last five months.”

  “Someone’s up there.” Hayden pointed at the window.

  Trimble looked up. “A squatter most likely.”

  All three men moved to the warehouse’s chained and padlocked side door. For once, Trimble and he were of a like mind, for they simultaneously slammed a booted foot into the wood. It splintered like the hull of a rotted ship, sending shards of beetle-eaten wood into the air.

  As they slipped into the dark and dank warehouse, Hayden pulled out his pistol. He glanced at Trimble. The man extracted a knife from his right boot. The knife possessed a jagged, lethal edge, more suited for a fishmonger or cutthroat than a revered physician and surgeon.

  They crossed the uneven floor—made of nothing more than rough-hewn planks set atop dirt. Hayden held the lantern aloft. A back window stood ajar, and several rats scurried for the shadows. Damnation, if Sophia were here, she would be terrified.

  The floorboards above them squeaked, and all three men strode to the narrow stairs that ran along the back of the building. They crept up the rickety treads to a long corridor with a handful of rooms to the left. Holding his lantern high, Hayden nodded to the doorway where they’d seen the light. They entered the room to find a woman cowering in the corner. She held an infant wrapped in a ragged quilt.

  “I ’aven’t taken nofin,” she said, pressing the child to her bosom.

  Tucking his pistol into the waist of his trousers, Hayden glanced about. Bloody hell, there was nothing to take. The room stood barren, except for a pallet, some tattered bedding, and a candle that sent as much smoke into the room as light.

  “Are you alone?” Hayden asked. The woman nodded, and his glimmer of hope faded.

  “Me husband was ’ere, but ’e left several days ago and ’asn’t come back.”

  Westfield pointed to the window. “Did you hear anything out there today?”

  “Nofin. I swear I didn’t see nofin.”

  An interesting and telling reply, since he hadn’t asked what she’d seen. He stepped closer to her. “I think you did.”

  “No,” she replied, staring at her feet while she shuffled them.

  He withdrew his billfold and removed several banknotes. “Are you sure?”

  She wet her dry, cracked lips. “I did see sumpin.”

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  “I seen a lady come out of that buildin’.” She turned toward the window and pointed at the mission. “There was a man in the alley and when she went to give ’im sumpin, ’e grabbed ’er.”

  Hayden cursed.

  The baby in the woman’s arms fussed, and she patted the child’s back. “If she’s dead it isn’t me fault. For wot could I do?”

  “Did you know the man?” he asked anxiously, trying not to ponder her words or the helplessness tightening his stomach into knots.

  She shook her head and shuffled her feet again.

  Hayden withdrew several more banknotes. “Think.”

  “I may ’ave seen him before.”

  “Where?” Both he and Trimble asked simultaneously.

  She eyed the money. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Just tell me where he lives,” Hayden said. “That’s all.”

  “Nasty piece o’work. No better than a cutthroat.” She glanced at the money again. “’e lives on Little Marlie Row. Number Five. Right ’cross from McCarthy’s lodging house.”

  “Christ,” Trimble muttered.

  Hayden turned to him. “You know the street?”

  The doctor nodded. “Not fit for the devil.”

  Hayden thrust the banknotes into the woman’s hand. “I suggest, madam, you use this to find you and your child suitable lodging and food.”

  “I gots to wait for me Billy. ’e’ll be back soon.”

  He and Trimble glanced at each other as they sped to the door. He didn’t have time to argue with the woman, but he doubted Billy intended on returning, especially if he
’d left both her and the child unattended in such a wretched place.

  * * *

  When Sophia came to, she found herself in complete darkness, lying on a mattress infused with the stench of sweat and urine. Her jaw tensed, and her abdomen constricted. Sitting up, she pressed a fisted hand to her mouth and willed herself not to toss up what little vestige of food her stomach contained.

  Nearly unbearable fear clutched at her as she patted the mattress and searched for its edge. Her hand glided over the frayed cording that bordered the top of the pallet and traveled down. The tick lay directly on the planks of the floor. She scrambled to her feet.

  The room appeared devoid of windows. With her hands outstretched, she moved in the darkness until her fingers touched a cold wall. An unbidden thought drifted into her mind. There were probably rats burrowing in the walls searching for warmth. She snatched her hands back and frantically wiped them against her skirts. She took several slow breaths, forced her fear not to overtake her. Tentatively she lifted her fingers back to the surface and made her way around the perimeter, searching for a means of escape.

  The thin layer of grime that covered the walls slid against her fingertips. She ran her hands farther to the right and touched the casings of a doorway. Relief washed over her as she grasped a cold metal knob. She turned the door handle.

  Locked. Her elation faded.

  Why had the man taken her? There were villains who abducted women and children and took them to brothels that catered to men with a taste for depravity. A chill ran down her spine. She pulled her cape tightly about her. She hiked up her skirts, squatted, and then got on her hands and knees to crawl around. Perhaps there was something lying on the floor she could use as a weapon.

  Her fingers had just touched the edge of the mattress when footsteps sounded someone’s approach. A yellow shaft of light seeped under the door, lifting the pall that cloaked the room in total darkness.