Death in the Devil's Acre

by Anne Perry

  The footman left her. Several minutes later, he returned and conducted her to the library. Thank heaven Christina had already gone, perhaps finding even the thought of Charlotte and her letters too tedious to bother with.

  General Balantyne was standing with his back to the fire. He was tense, his eyes on the doorway, waiting for her.

  The footman disappeared discreetly, leaving them alone.

  “Charlotte—” He was unsure whether to step toward her or not. Suddenly he was awkward, his feelings so close to the surface that they were embarrassing, even frightening.

  She had prepared some scrambled comment about the letters. Now they were not necessary; she had no excuse to prevaricate. Her mouth was dry, her throat tight.

  “The footman said something about the letters.” He was trying to help her. “Have you discovered something?”

  She avoided his eyes and looked at the fire.

  Then he realized that she was cold and wet, and that he was taking all the heat. He moved away quickly, his face softening. “Come, warm yourself.”

  She smiled. At any other time, such an act would have mattered. All her life she had been accustomed to having a man automatically assume the place nearest the fire.

  “Thank you.” She walked over and felt the heat tingle pleasantly on her skin. In a moment it would penetrate through her wet skirt and boots to her numbed feet.

  There was no point in putting it off any longer. “I didn’t come about the letters.” She stayed facing the flames, watching them, avoiding his eyes. He was close behind her, and at all costs she did not want to look at him. “I came about the murders in the Devil’s Acre.”

  There was a moment’s silence. For an instant her anxiety had made her forget Pitt. Balantyne had assumed, because Emily had introduced her as Miss Ellison, that her marriage had failed—and she had never disillusioned him. Now she thought of it with a flood of shame. She turned.

  He was still looking at her, the bright, desperate softness in his face unmistakable and wide open to every wound. And yet not to tell him now would be inexcusable. Every time she came here, she made it worse. There was nothing she could do to soften the injury. Everything—attempts at gentleness, shame, pity—would either humiliate or embarrass him.

  She began quickly, before she had time to draw back. “I have no excuse to offer, except that I care very much about finding who killed those men in the Devil’s Acre, and the whole system of prostitution and—”

  “So do I!” he said fervently, then realized the agony in her face. “Charlotte? What is it?” He stood still, but she felt as if he had come closer, so intense was his concentration, his awareness of her.

  “I have been lying to you.” She used the harshest, most abrasive word. It was cowardly to look away. She also needed to hurt herself. She met his eyes. “Emily introduced me as Miss Ellison because she wished you to think of me as a private person. And I allowed her to, since Max used to work in this house and we thought we might learn something here.” Still she left out their suspicions of Christina.

  Slowly the dawn of a new pain came over him, then a scalding embarrassment. He had pushed Pitt, the whole episode of her marriage, out of his mind. He had wished something—or dreamed something? Now it all shattered around him.

  “I am still married to Thomas Pitt,” she whispered. “And I am happy.”

  His face burned hot. He turned away from her for a moment, wanting to hide.

  She had used him. Now she felt a bitter shame, and pain, because she cared for him. It mattered intensely to her what he thought of her. If he despised her for it, she would feel the mark as long as she could imagine.

  “I’m very ashamed,” she said quietly. Should she pretend she did not know he loved her? Would that save his pride by allowing him to withdraw it as if it had not existed? Or would it only further insult him by devaluing what was the greatest gift he had to offer?

  She tried to read his face, but all she could see was the softness in his eyes, hot confusion, blurred. The light of the lamp on the wall reflected on the bones of his cheek. She wanted to touch him, to put her arms around him—but that was ridiculous! He would be offended, perhaps even repelled. He would not understand that although she loved Pitt, she also felt for him something individual and profound. He might even take it for pity, and that would be the most dreadful of all.

  “I lied by omission,” she went on, to break the silence. “I said nothing untrue!” It sounded like an attempt at excuse.

  “Please don’t explain.” He found words at last, his voice a little husky. He breathed deeply in and out. “I care about the murders also—and the Devil’s Acre. I imagined you had not come about the letters. What did you come for?”

  “But I do care about the letters!” Now she was sounding like a child, and the tears were spilling over. She sniffed and reached for her handkerchief. She blew her nose and looked away from him. “There is some very disturbing information. I—I thought you would wish to know immediately.”

  “I—?” Already he understood that there was something else that would hurt him, something further. An instinctive sense of it made him move a little away from her, allowing her to sit down without seeming to rebuff him. It was a delicacy of emotion he had not known before. “What have you discovered?” he asked quickly.

  “Max was keeping two houses.” She hesitated to use the word “whore.” It was too ugly, too close just now.

  He did not seem to grasp the meaning of it. “Indeed?” The confusion showed in his voice. They were being formal, as if the past moment’s intimacy had not happened. It was easier for both of them.

  She rushed on before there was time to think of emotions. “One was ordinary, like any in the Devil’s Acre. The other was for very high-class customers.” She smiled bitterly, although her face was toward the fire. “Carriage trade. He even provided women of good birth, very good indeed, on occasion.”

  He was silent. She tried to imagine what was in his mind: incredulity, horror—knowledge? Pain.

  She breathed out slowly. “Adela Pomeroy was one of them.”

  Still he said nothing.

  “Pomeroy was a pederast. I expect—” She stopped. She was trying to excuse the woman. Why? To excuse Christina also, for him? He did not deserve patronage. Again, almost overwhelmingly, she wanted to hold him tightly in her arms, to touch softly the unreachable wound—as if anything she could do would ease it! It was idiotic. She would only intrude on his embarrassment and hurt, preposterously overrating the affection he had felt for her, which was perhaps already destroyed by her duplicity—and by this much closer threat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, still facing the fire.

  “What about the others?” he asked. She could not read his voice.

  “Dr. Pinchin performed abortions on prostitutes, not always successfully. He took his payment in kind. Mrs. Pinchin was very grim and very respectable.”

  “And Bertie Astley?” he persisted. He was being very objective, covering his feeling for her ... or Christina, or anyone, by seeking to understand the facts.

  “He owned a row of houses in the Acre—tenements, sweatshops, a gin mill. Of course, Beau Astley might have killed him for the money. They bring in a lot.” She looked at him.

  “Do you believe that?” He appeared perfectly calm, except that his facial muscles were tight and his left hand was clenched by his side. For an instant, she caught the brightness in his eyes before he looked away.

  “No,” she said with an effort.

  The door burst open and Christina came in, her face white, her eyes brilliant. She was wearing an outdoor cloak and carried a large, handsome reticule.

  “Why, Miss Ellison, how delightful to see you again!” she said a little loudly. “I declare, you are the most studious person I have ever known. You will be able to deliver lectures upon the life of a soldier in the Peninsular War to learned societies. That is what you are discussing again, is it not?”

  The prefabricate
d lie came to Charlotte’s lips instantly. “My knowledge is very slight, Mrs. Ross. But I have a relation who is most interested. I wished to show him the general’s letters, but before doing so, I came to request his permission.”

  “How diligent of you to come in person.” Christina moved over to the desk and, her eyes still on Charlotte, opened one of the drawers. “A lesser woman would have resorted to the penny post! Especially on such a dreadful day. The streets are white with snow already, and it is growing heavier by the moment. You will become quite frozen going home!” Her face twisted a little. She took something from the drawer and put it into her reticule, closing the catch with a snap.

  The general was too angry at the slight to Charlotte to bother to inquire what she had taken. “I shall send Miss Ellison home in the carriage, naturally,” he snapped. “No doubt you brought your own and will not need one of mine?”

  “Of course, Papa! Did you imagine I came in a public omnibus?” She walked to the door and opened it. “Good day, Miss Ellison. I hope your—relation—enjoys the Peninsular War as much as you appear to do.” And she went out, closing the door behind her. A moment later they heard hooves on the pavement outside and the slam of a carriage door.

  “It seems she has borrowed something of yours,” Charlotte remarked, more to break the silence than because it mattered at all.

  Balantyne went to the desk and opened the drawer she had taken the object from. For a moment his face was puzzled. There were lines of pain in it, a new and delicate vulnerability to his mouth.

  Christina had been one of Max’s women. Charlotte knew now that Balantyne either knew it or guessed it. What about Alan Ross?

  Balantyne stood perfectly straight, his eyes wide, his skin drained of blood. “She’s taken my gun.”

  For an instant Charlotte was paralyzed. Then she leaped to her feet. “We must go after her,” she commanded. “Find a hansom. She has only just left. There will be marks in the snow—we can follow her. Whatever she means to do, we may be in time to stop her—or—or if it is good, then to help her!”

  He strode to the door and shouted for the footman. He snatched from the man’s hands Charlotte’s coat, ignoring his own. He grasped her arm and pushed her to the door. The next moment they were outside in the whirling snow, blinded by the dusk and the dim lamps, stung by the slithering snowflakes turning to ice.

  Balantyne ran across the road onto the snow-covered grass under the trees. Christina’s carriage was still in sight on the far side of the square, slowing to turn the corner. There was a hansom moving from pool to pool of light along the west side.

  “Cabbie!” Balantyne shouted, waving his arms. “Cabbie!”

  Charlotte scrambled through shrubs and grass, soaked to her ankles, trying to keep up with him. Her face was wet and numb with cold, and though her gloves were locked in her reticule, her fingers were too frozen even to fish for them. All her efforts were concentrated on keeping up with him.

  Sir Robert Carlton was already in the cab.

  Balantyne pulled the door open. “Emergency!” he shouted above the wind. “Sorry, Robert! I need this!” And, relying on long friendship and a generous nature, he held out his hand and almost hauled Carlton out, then grabbed Charlotte by the waist and lifted her in. He then ordered the cabbie to follow down the far street where Christina’s carriage had disappeared. He thrust a handful of coins at the startled man, and was almost thrown to the floor as the driver was transformed into a Jehu at the flash of gold.

  Charlotte sat herself up in the seat where she had landed and clung to the handhold. There was no time or purpose in trying to rearrange her skirts to any sense of decorum. The cab was hurtling around the corner from the square, and Balantyne had his head out the window, trying to see if Christina was still ahead of them, or if in the maelstrom of the storm they had lost her.

  The horses’ hooves were curiously silent on the soft padding of snow. The carriage lurched from side to side as the wheels slid, caught again, and then swerved. At any other time Charlotte would have been terrified, but all she could think of now was Christina somewhere ahead of them, holding the general’s gun. Fear sickened her, excluding all thought of her own safety as her body was flung from side to side while the cab careened through the white wilderness. Was it Alan Ross she was going to kill? Was it he, after all, who had murdered first Max, and then the others—and at last Christina knew it? Was she going to shoot him? Or offer him suicide?

  Balantyne brought his head in from the window. His skin was whipped raw from the wind, snow crusted his hair.

  “They’re still ahead of us. God knows where she’s going!” His face was so cold that his mouth was stiff and his words blurred.

  She was thrown against him as the cab wheeled around another corner. He caught her, held her for a moment, then eased her upright again.

  “I don’t know where we are,” he went on. “I can’t see anything but snow and gas lamps now and again. I don’t recognize anything.”

  “She’s not going home?” Charlotte asked. Then instantly wished she had not said it.

  “No, we seem to have turned toward the river.” Had he also been thinking of Alan Ross?

  They were lurching through a muted world with muffled hoofbeats and no hiss of wheels. There sounded only the crack of the whip and the cabbie’s shout. Vision was limited to the whirl of white flakes in the islands of the lamps, followed by raging, freezing darkness again till the next brief moon on its iron stand. They were slowed to a trot now, turning more often. Apparently they had not lost her, because the cabbie never asked for further instructions.

  Where was she going? To warn Adela Pomeroy? Of what? Had she hired some lunatic to kill her husband?

  Answers crowded into Charlotte’s head, and none of them could be right. She put off again and again the one she knew in her heart was the truth. Christina was going back to the Devil’s Acre! To one of the whorehouses ... and murder.

  Beside her, Balantyne said nothing. Whatever nightmare was in his mind he struggled with it alone.

  One more corner, another snow-blanketed street, a crossroad, and then at last they stopped. The cabbie’s head appeared.

  “Your party’s gone in there!” He waved his arm and Balantyne forced open the door and jumped out, leaving Charlotte to fend for herself after him. “Over there.” The cabbie waved again. “Dalton sisters’ whorehouse. Don’t know what she’s doin’, if n yer ask me. If ’er ’us-band’s gorn in there, she’d best pretend she don’t know—not goin’ a-chasing after ’im like a madwoman! ’T’ain’t decent.’T’ain’t sense neither! Still—never could tell most women nothin’ fer their own good! ’Ere! Best leave the lady in the cab! Gawd! Yer can’t take ’er in there, guv!”

  But Balantyne was not listening. He strode across the glimmering road and up the steps of the house where Christina’s footsteps still showed in the virgin snow.

  “’Ere!” The cabbie tried once more. “Miss!”

  But Charlotte was after him, running with her skirts trailing wet and heavy, catching Balantyne on the step. There was no one to bar their entrance. The door was on the latch and they threw it open together.

  The scene inside was the same large hall, with its red plush furnishings, gay gaslights, and warm pinks, that Pitt had seen. It was too early in the evening; there were no customers here yet, no lush, soft-eyed maids. Only Victoria Dalton in her brown tea gown and her sister Mary in a dress of blue with a wide lace trim. And in front of them stood Christina with the gun in her hands.

  “You’re madwomen!” Christina’s voice choked, her hands shook. But the barrel of the gun still pointed at Victoria’s bosom. “It wasn’t enough to kill Max, you had to mutilate him—then you killed all the others! Why? Why? Why did you kill the others? I never wanted that—I never told you to!”

  Victoria’s face was curiously expressionless, ironed out like a child’s. Only her eyes showed emotion, blazing with hate. “If you’d been sold into prostitution when you were
nine years old, you wouldn’t need to ask me that! You whore around for fun—you let animals like Max use your body. But if men had relieved themselves in you since you were a child on your mother’s lap—if you’d lain in your bed and heard through the cardboard walls your seven-year-old sister scream when they thrust into her with their great naked, obscene bodies—swollen, panting and sweating, their hands all over you—you’d take joy in stabbing them, too, and tearing off their—”

  Christina’s hands tightened and the gun barrel came higher. Charlotte lunged forward, kicking. She was too far away to reach the gun, but she knocked Christina off her feet and the gun fell, unexploded, onto the floor.

  There was a scream of rage, and Charlotte felt strong, clawlike hands tearing at her. The floor hit her hard on the thigh, skirts smothered her. She reached for anything to strike or to pull. Her hands found hair, twisted into it, and jerked. There was a scream of pain. Another body landed heavily on top of her, more skirts, boots in her thigh, kicking hard.

  There was more shrieking and Christina’s voice swearing. Charlotte was pinned to the ground, half suffocated by mountains of fabric and the weight of bodies. Her hair was undone, streaming down her back, over her face. A hand grasped at it and pulled. Pain ripped through her head. She punched back, her fists closed. Where was the gun!

  “Stop it!” Balantyne’s voice thundered above the din. No one took any notice.

  Christina, on hands and knees on the floor, was screaming at Victoria Dalton, her face contorted with rage. Mary Dalton swung her hand back and slapped Christina as hard as she could, the ring of it singing in the air. Christina scrambled to her feet and aimed a kick. It caught Mary on the shoulder, and she fell over onto her back, moaning.