Secrets in Scarlet

by Erica Monroe

  Secrets In Scarlet

  Erica Monroe

  Contents

  Blurb

  A Thank You Gift

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  The Rookery Rogues

  An excerpt from Erica Monroe’s Beauty and the Rake

  Books by Erica Monroe

  About the Author

  Blurb

  His business is discovering secrets…

  * * *

  When a girl is murdered at a factory in London, Sergeant Thaddeus Knight of the Metropolitan Police comes in to investigate. But it’s not just the factory owners that Thaddeus wants information on–the devilishly intriguing Poppy O’Reilly is a puzzle he’d like nothing more than to solve.

  * * *

  Her life depends on keeping her past hidden….

  * * *

  All it took was one mistake for Poppy to lose her good reputation. Shunned by polite society, she’s retreated to the one place no one from her old life would look for her: the rookeries. Protecting her young daughter is the most important thing to Poppy, and Thaddeus threatens the false identity she’s carefully constructed. The last thing she should do is allow Thaddeus close to her family, yet she can’t stay away from him.

  A Thank You Gift

  Subscribe to Erica Monroe's newsletter and receive a free short story! Also, join Erica Monroe's free Daring Dames Reader Group!

  * * *

  SERIES BY ERICA MONROE

  * * *

  The Rookery Rogues:

  Romantic Era working class romantic suspense

  Gothic Brides:

  Regency Era Gothic romance

  Covert Heiresses:

  Regency Era Spies

  FOLLOW ERICA MONROE

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  * * *

  SECRETS IN SCARLET

  Copyright © 2014 by Erica Monroe

  Excerpt from Beauty and the Rake copyright © 2015 by Erica Monroe

  Cover design by Teresa Spreckelmeyer by the Midnight Muse

  Quillfire Publishing

  * * *

  All rights reserved. The author has provided this book for personal use only. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  ISBN: 978-0-990-02294-7

  * * *

  For information, address Erica Monroe at ericamonroe.com.

  Created with Vellum

  Dedication

  To my father, who taught me never to apologize for the things I love.

  Prologue

  Spitalfields, London

  April 1832

  The last time Sergeant Thaddeus Knight had encountered so much blood, he’d been seventeen. That death had shaken him to his core, setting him on a path to join the Metropolitan Police.

  But in his three years with the Met, he’d been lulled into a false sense of security by arrests of pickpockets and mendicants. He wasn’t prepared for this violence.

  He found the bruised, bleeding girl outside of a factory on White Lion Street. His body went cold, starting in his spine and settling deep into his tailbone. For a second, he was transfixed, staring at the crimson that stained her tattered wool gown and clotted in her russet curls. Her hands were scraped, the knuckles chafed.

  Was she still alive? The cut on her forehead had streamed so profusely, he couldn’t imagine she maintained consciousness.

  He yanked off his gloves and stuffed them in his pocket. Kneeling down beside her, Thaddeus placed two fingers to her neck to check for a pulse. Her eyes flittered open. Catching sight of his blue uniform, she attempted to move away from him. But she was too weak.

  “Peeler,” she croaked, her bottom lip split. “Don’t ’urt me.”

  “I’ve no intention of the sort.” Sitting on his haunches, Thaddeus’s tall frame towered over the girl’s huddled body. He rested his elbows on his knees, trying to keep his expression bland. Unassuming. All he wanted to do was turn his head to the side and vomit, for the saccharine stench of blood drenched her entirely.

  Don’t give any indication that you believe she cannot survive.

  The girl whimpered. If he didn’t get her help soon, she'd die.

  Thaddeus reached for her, expecting that he’d have to carry her slung over his back. He didn’t trust that she’d be able to stand on her own.

  From this new angle, he saw a gaping wound in her back, right underneath her shoulder blade. Her dress was split, the tears confirming his initial theory that she’d been stabbed. The knife had been dragged down a few more centimeters and twisted, for the bottom of the wound was far larger.

  Christ.

  Her head lolled back against the factory wall.

  “Stay with me now,” he urged. “I’ll get you to safety.”

  Still stooped, he gathered her up in his arms, careful not to hit the wound on her back. Her legs dangled in the air and one shoe fell from her foot. Cascading to the ground, the tiny slipper barely made a sound as it hit the dirt. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. A sense of helplessness surged through him. She was too damn young for this.

  Too damn young to die.

  Not again, please, not again. He’d already been through this, with another girl around her age. That girl had been found seven years ago in a different alley, south of Spitalfields and into Whitechapel.

  Thaddeus hadn’t been able to save Elizabeth Stewart, but damn it, he’d save this girl.

  He jogged toward the hack stand. Every step he took jarred her body a little, sending a spasm of pain across her round cheeks. She had the face of a child, her lithe frame on the edge of blossoming. She was tall for her age, thin and willowy. Yet her hands bore the blisters of an older woman.

  He tightened his grip around her body, shouldering her weight. Moving carefully down the street, he dodged jagged bottles and piles of rubbish that lined the alleyway. A soiled broadsheet floated past on a spring breeze.

  They were getting closer to the hack stand. From there, he’d get the driver to take them to the London Hospital in Whitechapel. He knew a nurse there who wouldn’t blink at her lack of funds.

  Hell, he’d pay for her treatment himself, if needed.

  “A little farther,” he told her when she shivered. “We’re almost there. The hospital will take care of you.”

  Her eyes had closed again.

  “Come on, come on,” he pleaded, running his thumb across her cheek. “Don’t die on me, lass!”

  He ran the last few steps to the hack stand. There were no carriages waiting. A curse fell from his lips as he held her close to him. His arms were leaden after the trip, but he would not drop her.

  She drew in a shaky breath, her bleary eyes focusing on him. Underneath the lamp light of the hack stand, her face was as
hen. She would not be long for this world.

  If he could not get her help in the time, the best thing he could do was find out who had done this to her and bring them to justice.

  “Who hurt you, lass?” he asked.

  “Can’t tell ye,” she murmured.

  “Whoever hurt you, I’ll find them. You don’t have to be scared of repercussions. I’m going to protect you.”

  With what strength she had left, she lifted her head to look him directly in the eye. “Ye can’t keep me safe. They got people the likes of ye Bobbies can’t imagine.” Nervously, her fingers kept sketching the same ‘L’ across her skirt.

  He kept half of his attention on her, half on the street, searching the horizon for a hack. “Did the name of the person who hurt you start with an L?”

  She didn’t reply, but neither did her fingers cease.

  “The police can do a lot more than you think, miss,” he told her. “If you believe in nothing else, believe in the power of the Met. I’ll catch whoever did this to you. I swear it on my life.”

  The clomp of hooves upon cobblestone echoed, a hack appearing further down the street. Thaddeus came forward, so that they were directly underneath the lamp light. The driver pulled the hack up in front of them, jumping down from his seat.

  The coachman looked at him askew, his eyes drifting from Thaddeus’s black regulation top hat to the solid black boots on his feet. He did not move to open the door. “What ye got ’ere?”

  Thaddeus readjusted the girl in his arms, fumbling in his pocket for the fare. “She’s been attacked. We must get her to the hospital.” He handed the fare over to the driver.

  The coachman regarded the fare, then the girl. “I don’t be wantin’ any trouble.”

  “You’ll get trouble if you don’t open the damn door now,” Thaddeus barked.

  “Don’t get yer breeches in a twist, lad,” the coachman grumbled, but he opened the door.

  Thaddeus scooted her limp form into the carriage before him. As he was about to climb in after her, his hand brushed against her ankle. Her skin was cold to the touch, colder than it had been moments before. Her chest did not rise and fall any longer.

  Raising his thumb to her neck, he felt no pulse.

  The girl was dead.

  1

  “You’re meant for great things, my boy.” Leaning back in his claw-footed chair, Inspector Jonah Whiting smoked a cheroot and regarded Thaddeus with barely veiled impatience. “That business with the resurrectionist’s ring was the luckiest break you’re liable to get in this business.”

  Three months prior, Thaddeus had apprehended Jasper Finn in a workhouse cemetery in East Smithfield. While the arrest had led to the captures of most of Finn’s grave robbing ring, the real bounty had been in tying Finn to several other unsolved murders in London.

  Whiting wouldn’t let Thaddeus forget this grand success for the rest of his whole damn life.

  The inspector smiled one of those simpering smirks meant to ingratiate Thaddeus to him. “Superintendent Bicknell has taken notice. If you play your cards right, you too could have one of these offices. Inspector Doughty is set to retire in a month.”

  “Aye, it’d be an honor to be considered, sir.” Nervousness quivered in his stomach at thought of taking Doughty’s place. To be an Inspector at twenty-four years of age was unheard of in the Met, but Thaddeus had worked harder than anyone else on their route. Certainly, harder than the other contender for the job, Michael Strickland.

  As an inspector, Thaddeus would be able to make a real difference in the Spitalfields rookery. But he wasn’t sure he was willing to give up investigating cases like Anna Moseley’s for a chance at a loftier position. The trail of Miss Stewart’s murder was long cold, but he could find out who had killed Miss Moseley. Her family deserved answers.

  “If you’d stop insisting upon investigating cases like this one...” Whiting scooped up the folder, dropping it unceremoniously back down. The papers scattered every which way, lost in the sea of Whiting’s untidy desk.

  Thaddeus grimaced, and then promptly tried to hide that grimace with a not-so-well-placed cough. Whiting’s brassy glance fixed upon him.

  “Sir, if you’d take a moment and look through the papers...” Thaddeus resisted the urge to grab the file and start rearranging it. It had taken him three hours to put together that file for Whiting, and now it would take him three more hours to put it back into proper order.

  Whiting snorted, resembling more of a pig than a commanding officer. He had an up-turned long nose, short ears, and copper eyes the color of clock gears. At fifty years of age, he’d been a member of the old Watch until the Met was formed. Whiting never hesitated to inform his officers—mostly, Thaddeus—of what working with the Met meant.

  “It’s a simple case of rookery violence, Knight,” Whiting said. “We’re Peel’s men and Peel’s men don’t spend their time on this rigmarole. We prevent crimes from happening in the first place.”

  Their work was noble. Triumphant, even. They were a solution before there was ever a problem. Of course, a certain leniency could be granted. Arrests had to be made, and thus, cases had to be looked into when the culprit wasn’t found on the scene. The Bow Street Runners wanted little to do with the East End.

  “Investigating the deaths of every lowdown bunter who crosses your path will get you nowhere,” Whiting lectured. “You’ve got a quick mind, Knight, and the boys in Westminster like you.”

  Thaddeus shifted in his chair. “Sir, the logic is sound here. If you’d just give me some time, I think I’ll find out that the Larkers are involved in far more.”

  If Whiting didn’t assign Thaddeus leave to investigate the Moseley death, he’d have no other recourse. Whiting was his superior by assignment. If Thaddeus went over Whiting’s head, he could say goodbye to the inspector job. And Whiting would make damn sure he didn’t have a job to come back to, prior brilliant arrest of Jasper Finn or not.

  Whiting’s cheroot dangled from his fingers, above the file. “Apparently, you helped out some countess?”

  “Sir, if you’d be a bit more careful with that file…” Thaddeus began, biting back a groan as Whiting blinked at him.

  Whiting set down the loosely rolled cheroot. It spilled upon impact, the uncut ends leaving foul traces all over the parchment. There’d be no hope of reading the paperwork again.

  Why, oh, why did people treat his efforts at organization with such blatant disregard? Thaddeus would never understand this. Order brought the needed clarity to discover solutions in the most disjointed of fragments. What was so wrong with a little clarity?

  “Tell me about this countess,” Whiting demanded, ignoring Thaddeus’s pained stare at the cheroot.

  “I found the countess’ jewels for her,” Thaddeus explicated. “My brother brought the case to my attention. The countess was one of his client’s at Barclay’s.”

  That had been a slow week. Any more cases like that one, and his brains might dribble out of his ears from boredom.

  “That is the type of outside work you take, my boy,” Whiting praised. “You ought to be doing your route, not sitting across from your superior whining about why you can’t investigate a random whore’s murder.”

  Thaddeus was most assuredly not whining. “If you had seen her—”

  “I would be saying the exact same thing.”

  “She died in my arms.” Thaddeus couldn’t shake the memory of her once-warm flesh against his blue coat. “She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. A young girl.”

  “Terrible incident,” Whiting hedged. “But it’s Spitalfields and it’s to be expected. Those weavers are a sordid sort, turning to brew and promiscuity to while away the hours between shifts at the factory. She was probably beaten by some bullyback.”

  “This was more than some brothel scuttle,” Thaddeus insisted.

  Murder was foul in all forms, no matter who had been murdered. Wasn’t it their job to stop it? They were supposed to protect these pe
ople.

  Whiting wouldn’t understand. He was not a sentimental man. But Whiting might grasp hard facts, so Thaddeus led with that.

  “Miss Moseley said we couldn’t protect her. That ‘they’ have people working for them we don’t know about. I think it’s the Larkers, sir. They own the factory where she was found. When she died, her fingers were sketching the letter ‘L.’”

  “It’s not enough to go on,” Whiting said. “Besides, the Larkers have never caused trouble before. Boz Larker is a respected man of business. If you falsely accuse him, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “I can get more information,” Thaddeus insisted. “I’ve compiled a list of everyone the Larkers have associations with.”

  In the file that Whiting’s cheroot had destroyed. Damnation.

  “Considering most textile factories are moving to Manchester or Lancashire, dismissals should have happened in spades. It’s not a union factory. There’s nothing stopping them from dismissing,” Thaddeus said. “Still, they retain a full staff of thirty weavers, most working at Jacquard looms.”