Secrets in Scarlet

by Erica Monroe

  Workers labored at looms that spanned the full length of the room, stationed not more than a few paces apart. The looms formed three rows, with approximately ten in each row from front to back. The building had unusually high ceilings to accommodate for the sheer height of the looms, which reached far above his head. Children picked through the scraps of silk to sell in the market on Crispin Street.

  He scanned the room for Mrs. Corrigan, eventually locating her toward the front. Mrs. Corrigan’s loom was positioned two to the left of the blond girl he remembered her exiting with the other day.

  If he’d thought Mrs. Corrigan beautiful the day before in the light of the sun streaming through the library windows, here she was in her element. Perched on a tall stool, she leaned over the loom, her hands in constant motion. She’d bound her red hair in a tight top knot, and she wore no apron.

  His mouth went dry as his eyes roamed down her frame. Her green dress was fitted so that she ran no risk of getting caught in the machinery, but it had the added appeal of displaying her luscious hips to full advantage. She moved with finesse and speed, each slide of the shuttle and weft an intricate dance. This was her world, the constant advancement of the punch cards, the click and clack of many looms employed in tandem.

  As he walked past her station, their eyes locked. His breath caught in his throat. First, there was a flash of curiosity in her eyes, then fear. She missed a beat in the weaving.

  Thaddeus couldn’t tarry to watch her. The guards had already progressed three looms past him. He hurried to catch up, following the guards into the office holed in the center of the right back wall.

  The older guard shut the door after them. It was then that Thaddeus started to feel apprehensive. If the men were to attack him, no one would hear his screams over the rattle of the machinery.

  His grip tightened against the truncheon. He lifted his chin, eying the man behind the desk with an expression of disdain that would have made his mother proud. He had learned few things from his mother, but the ability to deliver a proper cut direct was one of them.

  Boz Larker was intimidation incarnate at approximately forty-five years of age, short yet stocky and powerfully built. His hair was ash, yet his beard and the tips of his muttonchops tinged with silver.

  “Yes, Jennings?” Larker’s gruff voice reminded Thaddeus of a wire dishcloth scraping against china.

  “The Peeler wanted to see you,” Jennings explained.

  Thaddeus noticed that Jennings didn’t look Larker in the eye, but his younger companion displayed no such compunction.

  “What do you think, Clowes?” Larker stroked a hand through his bushy beard, his dark eyes fastened upon Thaddeus instead of his younger guard.

  Before, Thaddeus had been concerned with Jennings, assuming because he was the seasoned one of the two guards, he’d hold a higher place in Larker’s esteem. Yet the eagerness in Clowes’s eyes disturbed him. Clowes’s short nose bore a scar, from a bar fight, Thaddeus guessed. His face was heavier than Jennings, his body thickset but squatter. With sandy brown hair and a smirk plastered firmly in place, he radiated that egomania women usually mistook as confidence.

  Yes, Thaddeus could understand why a young girl such as Miss Moseley might find Clowes appealing.

  “Shall I tell the—” Larker stopped, looking Thaddeus up and down to ascertain his rank. “The sergeant to come back with his inspector?”

  Clowes guffawed. “Naw, Mr. Larker, we ain’t got nothin’ to hide.”

  Larker smiled, as a doting father might upon his son, if said doting father was a murderer and the son wanted to learn how to kill without discovery. With his lips pulled back, Larker’s crooked teeth were exposed. Thaddeus could have sworn his front two teeth were pointed.

  After this visit, he’d never read a gothic novel before bed again.

  “Well, you heard the boy,” Larker said, gesturing fondly to Clowes. “Boz Larker, at your service. I assure you everything is done in legitimate fashion in our factory. What can I do for you, Sergeant?”

  “Knight,” Thaddeus supplied, though in truth he wished he could have made it through this visit without ever telling Larker who he was. “I’m here about the murder of Anna Moseley.”

  He let that thought hang in the air, observing the three men. Jennings’s sallow complexion drained of color, while Clowes’s chest puffed up. Larker, on the other hand, maintained a blank visage.

  The brute didn’t even flinch.

  “Ah, unfortunate, that killing,” Larker remarked, as though Thaddeus had informed him several yards of silk had been ruined by spilled tea. “We still haven’t managed to scrub all the blood from that wall. It’s a menace, really, scaring all the workers. Do you understand what scared workers means, Sergeant Knight? It means that they spend time less time weaving, and more time nattering.”

  Of all the things Thaddeus might have expected Larker to say, that was not included. He swallowed an exclamation of disgust, disguising it in a badly formed cough.

  Larker shrugged. “Aside from her unfortunate choice of places to die, I can’t see what any of this has to do with us.”

  “A girl is dead.” Thaddeus’s fingers clenched tightly around the truncheon. “You might show some compassion, Larker. She was one of your employees, for God’s sake.”

  “God has nothing to do with this, Sergeant.” From the top drawer of his desk, Larker selected a deck of cards. He began to shuffle the deck methodically, without once looking down. “If I shed a tear for every whore that died in Spitalfields, I’d never have time to run a business. Life, you see, is much like these cards. Sometimes you draw an ace, and the other times, you are beaten by your opponent.”

  Thaddeus stepped forward, until he was in front of Larker’s desk. Standing, he towered over Larker, though the older man had more girth. “Is that what happened to Miss Moseley? Was she your opponent, Larker? She got in your way, didn’t she, and that’s why you had to kill her.”

  Larker chuckled, a low, grating laugh from deep in his throat. “So many suppositions. Do you actually think anyone will believe you?”

  Ice seized Thaddeus’s body. In his life, he’d met many criminals. Some had reacted with the same cavalier disregard for other humans. No matter how many times he encountered it, Thaddeus found that behavior to be disturbing.

  Larker wanted him to be intimidated. To get flustered, to reveal what he’d already uncovered in his investigation.

  Thaddeus met Larker’s challenge with his own. “It matters not whether the people believe me. Only that the magistrate believes the evidence. I want to see the locked room upstairs, Larker. If you won’t show it to me, I’ll come back with four more officers and we’ll shut this whole damn factory down. How would that look to your scared employees?”

  Larker’s bottom lip twitched slightly, so slightly it was almost imperceptible. If Thaddeus hadn’t been watching for a reaction, he may never have noted it. But it was there—he’d affected Larker.

  “Jennings, take Sergeant Knight upstairs. Clowes, tell Mrs. Larker I’d like some tea now.” Larker waved toward the door in a motion meant to dismiss both Thaddeus and his guards.

  Jennings hesitated, as if he was going to protest, but he swallowed those words. He guided Thaddeus out of the office and through the factory again until they came to a staircase. Jennings ascended first, with Thaddeus following close behind. At the top of the steps, Jennings pulled out a key ring, selected a small brass key, and inserted into the door.

  “We keep the silk in here.” Jennings nodded at the yards and yards of finished silk, stacked up against the wall.

  The room was small, probably not much larger than Thaddeus’s dressing room. It must have stretched over a fourth of the lower level. Silk covered every available surface in a whirlwind of color. Yards as vibrantly red as Mrs. Corrigan’s hair atop others as brilliantly emerald as her eyes.

  Thaddeus moved on from inspecting the silk to the workbench positioned in the far-right corner. To the casual ob
server, nothing looked out of place. A hammer and awl rested on one end of the bench, next to a stack of cloth bags—purportedly for stuffing silk into that had not met the standards of the factory’s clients and would later be sold in the market.

  But cloth bags could also be used to sweat coins. The forger placed the coins in a bag and shook vigorously, until bits of metal would flake off the money. Those bits would be collected and stored until enough metal had been scraped off to use for creating the forged coins.

  The awl and hammer could be elements of coin clipping. A hole would be punched in the middle of a coin and the metal removed. Counterfeiters hammered the coin face until the hole closed again. If the hole could not be easily disguised, it could be filled with cheaper metal that replicated the effects of the original.

  Rubbing his hands together, Thaddeus eyed the tools with barely suppressed delight. He had the Larkers. He simply needed to bring Whiting up to this room, show him the tools, and explain the connections he’d made.

  With the right push, they’d arrest the Larkers within the week, and Miss Moseley’s family would have the justice that the Stewarts had never received.

  “Thank you, that’s what I needed,” he told Jennings, exiting the room and heading down the stairs.

  He caught Mrs. Corrigan’s eye again as he left. Inclining his head ever so slowly, he nodded. Solving the case would leave him quite free to pursue whatever this attraction was between them.

  All in all, a good day’s work.

  By the time the bell tolled, Poppy was exhausted. Although working at the loom for eleven hours always left her fatigued, today she had other matters to be concerned with. On top of Sergeant Knight’s odd visit to the factory, she’d received a letter from Atlas earlier that morning before she’d left for work.

  Poppy waved goodbye to Frank Clowes as she exited the building, following behind Abigail and Bess.

  Her hand closed around Atlas’s letter, secreted away in the pocket of her apron. Atlas had brought good news: Edward wouldn’t return to London for the Season. While Poppy sincerely doubted that she would have run into him, the mere idea of sharing a town with him—even a town as big as London—made her skin crawl. She didn’t fear that he’d exert a claim to Moira, for as far as Edward knew, Moira didn’t exist. Since the day Moira was born, Atlas had employed men to keep watch on Edward.

  Most of the time, Edward stayed at his family estate in Derbyshire. When he did venture to London, he spent most of his time with a fast set that gambled more in a night than Poppy made in a year. He held no occupation. As the first son of a marquess, he’d eventually inherit the title and the land that came with it.

  The blackguard.

  While she slaved away to simply put food on the table, Edward gallivanted from social event to social event. Yet that was the way of the world, wasn’t it? The rich got richer, shoving the poor further back into the rookeries.

  It was not that Poppy wanted a life like Edward’s—she’d long ago disabused herself of the notion that she could change her social class, and the few fast gatherings she’d attended with Edward in the week he’d been in Surrey were too rowdy for her liking now.

  Those wild days were behind her.

  Instead, it was the freedom money provided she longed for. The knowledge that she could send Moira to a good school without having to scrunch and save. Being able to spend more time with Moira, Edna, and the rest of her family. These were her dreams now, so disparate from what she’d thought she wanted two years ago.

  There was little that could be done. Especially since she didn’t intend to inform Edward that he had a child. Moira would grow up thinking her father had wanted to be with her but was taken too soon by the Lord. Moira didn’t need to know the man who’d never look past her being his bastard.

  I wish you could have seen yourself, Edward had said. Holding onto my every word, panting for me to take your virtue. You remember that when I’m gone, how easily you caved to my will.

  The memory of his words twisted her stomach. Poppy could hear his voice as if it were yesterday.

  Beside her on the street, Abigail and Bess recited a counting rhythm designed to teach Bess basic arithmetic. Poppy barely registered their game, her thoughts stuck on the letter.

  Abigail tapped her arm. “Poppy, are you listening to me?”

  “Hmm?” Poppy murmured.

  Abigail rolled her eyes. “I said I found Lovelace to be absolutely despicable.”

  Poppy blinked. “I don’t follow you.”

  “In Clarissa,” Abigail clarified, linking her arm in Poppy’s. “I was telling you how my neighbor lent it to me. She bought it from a secondhand shop, and would you know, it had five pages missing from it. Much better than the copy of Evangelina with forty gone!” Abigail paused to take a breath. “You said you read Clarissa before. Don’t you think Lovelace is disgusting?”

  Poppy grimaced. Trust Abigail to want to discuss the one book she’d rather forget. “He’s vile. But it’s been a long time since I read it.” Hopefully, that would dissuade Abigail.

  “I find it hard to believe people so singularly evil exist,” Abigail mused. “Of course, people can be malevolent. Look at the people who murdered Anna. But Lovelace’s entire purpose is to possess Clarissa. Going to such extents to pursue her, abducting and raping her…”

  “Awful,” Poppy agreed.

  Let Abigail believe that evil was limited to criminals and murderers. What had Thaddeus said? That he believed certain motivations could be ascribed to each case? If living in Spitalfields hadn’t convinced Abigail that the world was full of abhorrent people, then Poppy wasn’t going to shatter her illusions.

  “Poppy, look.” Abigail pointed to the alleyway to the right of the road.

  In the doorway of a tenement house, Thaddeus Knight waited, half-shrouded in shadows. He was already a tall man—the top hat made him appear like a giant from fairytales. In his right hand, he held a truncheon.

  It’s this case, he’d said. I cannot think about anything else when I'm on a case.

  His appearance at the factory today proved that. He was going to find out who killed Anna Moseley if it was the last thing he did, and she’d be smart to stay clear of him.

  Their association should have ended when she’d gone to thank him for saving Daniel.

  All of this registered in the back of her mind, in the same way that she knew what a Bolus hook was and how to use it. Yet there was no convenient punch card to dictate her emotional response, so instead her heart rebelled against her rational mind.

  Seeing him standing in that doorway, her breath hitched. Not in fear, not in the desire to run as fast as she could from him, but instead in eager anticipation. Was he waiting for her? Had he felt that spark too when they’d locked eyes across the factory room? It shouldn’t matter.

  None of it should matter.

  “Mrs. Corrigan.” He stepped out of the doorway, into the dying natural light of this alley.

  “How does he know your name?” Abigail whispered. She grabbed for Bess’ hand, shoving her little sister behind her.

  “He’s, ah...” Poppy struggled to find the right words to label her acquaintanceship with Knight.

  He’s…abnormally handsome? Awkwardly endearing? Kind, sweet, and funny?

  She settled on the most obvious of their connections. “He’s the man that saved my brother.”

  “I understand,” Abigail said, but her wrinkled nose indicated she didn’t understand in the least.

  Knight watched them both silently. His lip curled, ever so faintly, in the hint of a smile. As if he could hear her thoughts, and he’d found them particularly amusing.

  Her cheeks burned. Damn him. She glanced up the path. Several other workers from the factory headed down the main street, and they would intersect with this gathering unless Sergeant Knight moved away from the central route. In the alley, he had at least been somewhat shaded.

  “Would you excuse me?” Poppy slipped past Abigail, igno
ring her gaped jaw.

  Poppy stepped off the main road, into the alley. “Get back,” she hissed at Knight, giving him a little shove under the cover of the doorway. “I can’t be seen with you.”

  Her fellow workers passed by a second later. The oldest of the group, a portly man known for his love of mead ale and baked apples, turned his head in their direction. He started to go off toward their alley, but then Abigail darted up to him, tugging Bess along with her.

  Poppy breathed a sigh of relief as the group headed down the street, out of earshot.

  “Good evening to you too,” Knight said, with that slow, shy smile that shouldn’t have sent a hot swell through her body but did. “How is Moira?”

  Whenever people asked about Moira, Poppy always wondered what they really knew about her daughter. Yet with Knight, the enquiry sounded almost…innocent. Like he genuinely cared.

  “Moira is fine,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  He blinked, apparently taken aback by her brusque tone. “I wanted to see you.”

  Poppy narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

  She was too smart for this.

  Men had one reason for wanting to spend time with her. Knight couldn’t be any different from the rest.

  He delved into the pockets of his blue jacket, pulling out a brown paper parcel. Unwrapping it, he handed it to her.

  She didn’t know what impressed her more: the gift itself or his delight in giving it. Such rare, altruistic glee. Poppy had seen similar innocent joy on Moira’s face, when she presented Poppy with one of her toys so that “Mama play” could occur.

  Running her fingers over the binding, Poppy held the book in her outstretched palms. King Lear, and from the looks of it, an antique edition. She flipped the book open, running her finger down the old page. The paper was thin and opaque, reminding her of a spider’s web.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. She was hesitant to raise her voice higher, for if she did, she might splinter this light, returning to the squalor and despair of a world that had torn her apart.