The River Knows (6 page)

“I warned you, Joanna.” His voice is filled with a chilling lust. “Did you really think you could defy me? You are nothing but a foolish little shopkeeper. A nobody who must be taught her place in the world.”

With the next step his voice sharpens, rage surfacing. “You should have been grateful that a gentleman of my rank was willing to give you so much as a second glance. Grateful, do you hear me, you stupid bitch? You should have begged me to take you.”

The bedroom has no door. There is only a heavy curtain to block the intruder’s path. It is closed.

She realizes that the window is uncovered and that she is silhouetted against the slant of light cast by the fog-drenched moon. Hastily she draws the drapes, plunging the small room into inky darkness.

She knows this cramped space well. The monster has never seen it, though. With luck, he will fumble about when he moves into the deep shadows, allowing her an opportunity to escape through the doorway behind him.

He is in the sitting room now, coming toward the curtained bedroom. She can hear the soft thud of his boots on the thin carpet.

“Women like you need to be taught their place. I’m going to show you what happens to females who don’t display the proper degree of respect for their betters.”

She picks up the heavy poker that she had placed on the floor beside the bed. The length of iron is heavy. She holds it with both hands and prays.

There is a faint scraping sound on the other side of the curtain. At the edges of the hanging fabric a wavering glow appears. The monster has struck a light.

So much for her plan to temporarily blind him with the darkness of the bedroom. Her nerve nearly fails. The hilt of the poker suddenly feels slippery in her fingers. She flattens herself against the wall beside the curtained doorway.

“It’s time, Joanna. You have kept me waiting long enough. Now you will pay for your insolence.”

The curtain opens abruptly. The beast’s face is illuminated by the light he holds. His handsome features are twisted into a mask of demonic desire.

The flame dances evilly on the edge of the knife he grips in one hand.

He moves into the room and starts toward the bed…

Louisa came awake suddenly, breathless with fear. Her nightgown was damp from perspiration.

Had she cried out this time? She hoped not. She did not want to alarm Emma again. In recent months the nightmares had been far less frequent. She had even begun to hope that they were behind her forever.

She should have known better.

She shoved aside the covers and began to pace the room, trying to work off the unnatural energy that caused her heart to pound and made breathing difficult.

After a while she calmed somewhat. She went to the window and looked out, searching the shadows for the prostitute in black.

The streetwalker was not in the park tonight. Perhaps she had come earlier in the evening. More likely the poor creature had given up trying to attract a client and gone back to wherever it was that she slept. Arden Square was a quiet, extremely respectable neighborhood. This was not one of the places where men came in search of prostitutes.

She had noticed the woman in black for the first time a few nights ago. The stranger had worn a black velvet cloak and a black veiled hat that concealed her features, a widow who had most likely been forced onto the streets by the death of her husband. It was a common enough story. She had stood in the deep shadows of a tree for a time, evidently waiting for some gentleman seeking the services of a prostitute to come by in a carriage.

Perhaps she had abandoned this neighborhood and moved to another street. Or perhaps the widow had given up all hope and cast herself into the river like so many other desperate females had done.

The world was so cruel to women in the prostitute’s situation, Louisa thought. Ladies driven into acute

poverty by the death of a husband had very few alternatives. On the one hand Society condemned them, but at the same time it made it almost impossible for them to find respectable employment.

I was so lucky, Louisa thought. There but for the grace of God…

Filled with sadness and a deep sense of outrage, she left the window, went to the desk, and turned up the lamp. She knew she would not sleep now. She might as well take another look at the notes she had made earlier.

She opened her little journal and began to read, but after a while she closed the notebook. She could not concentrate. For some reason all she could think about was the way it had felt to be held in Anthony’s arms, crushed against his chest while he kissed her.

When she finally went back to bed, she took the memory with her and hugged it close as a talisman against the nightmare.

7

The following morning dawned crisp and sunny. She dressed in a thin chemise, drawers, and a single petticoat. There were many who would have been horrified by the minimal amount of undergarments, to say nothing of the lack of a corset. Fashionable women often wore as much as fourteen pounds of underclothes beneath their even heavier gowns. But she and Emma were both staunch advocates of the rational dress movement, which held that ladies should wear no more than seven pounds of underwear. As for corsets, the movement had wisely declared them to be injurious to women’s health.

The dark blue gown she chose was also designed in accordance with the commonsense principles of the movement. The bodice was snug-fitting in the current style, but it lacked stays and was only lightly laced. The bustle was small and minimally padded for shape. The skirts contained considerably less fabric than was normally found in more stylish, elaborately draped gowns.

The reduced amount of material in the skirts was a crucial factor: By reducing the overall weight of the dress, it made walking much easier. The voluminous folds of the majority of fashionable gowns combined with the many layers of petticoats worn underneath made it impossible for a woman to take an invigorating stroll in the park. She was reduced to slow, mincing steps. If she tried to move at a brisker pace, her legs became hopelessly entangled in her skirts.

Louisa picked up the small notebook lying on the bedside table and went down the hall to the stairs. Emma’s door, she noticed, was still closed.

In the kitchen she found the housekeeper, Mrs. Galt, with her husband, Hugh, and her niece, Bess. Hugh, a burly man in his mid-forties, took care of the garden and Emma’s beloved conservatory. Bess served as the maid-of-all-work. The three were having their tea when Louisa walked into the room. They all rose quickly.

“Good morning,” Louisa said. “I just came for a cup of tea.”

“Good morning, ma’am.” Mrs. Galt smiled. “You’re up early. Would you like some toast to go with your tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

“I’ll bring a tray into the study in a moment.” Mrs. Galt turned to the stove and picked up the kettle.

“I’ll go see to the fire, ma’am.” Bess bobbed a quick curtsy and hurried down the hall.

“Thank you,” Louisa said.

She gave Mr. and Mrs. Galt another smile and started down the hall to the study.

She had not gone far when she heard the low murmur of Mrs. Galt’s voice behind her.

“Well, now, I’m surprised to see her up and about at this hour. She came in very late last night. She cannot have got much sleep, and that’s a fact.”

“Sleep’s the least of it, if you ask me.” Mr. Galt’s voice was a soft rumble. “It’s that business of coming home in a gentleman’s carriage that makes one wonder. First time that’s happened since we came to work here.”

“Hush, now,” Mrs. Galt said quickly. “We’ve known from the start that this is an odd household. It was no secret that Lady Ashton is a noted eccentric, but the wages are excellent. Don’t you dare do or say anything that might cause all of us to lose our posts.”

Louisa sighed and continued down the hall. It wasn’t easy keeping secrets around servants. One had to constantly bear in mind that there were always other people in the house aside from herself and Emma.

Not that Mr. Galt had spoken anything less than the truth. She had come home quite late last night, and she could not deny that arriving back here at Number Twelve in a carriage other than the one in which she had departed was certainly a first. So was being walked to the door by a gentleman.

In the study she found a cheery blaze crackling on the hearth.

“There you are, ma’am,” Bess said, getting to her feet. “It will be nice and cozy in here soon enough.”

“Thank you,” Louisa said.

“Here’s your tea, ma’am,” Mrs. Galt said from the doorway. She set a tray on a table. “Let it steep a bit.”

“I will,” Louisa promised. She needed her tea to be strong this morning. There was a great deal of thinking to be done.

She waited until she was alone before she sat on the chair behind her desk. Clasping her hands on the blotter, she surveyed the small room. The bookshelves were gradually filling up with volumes, among them a wide assortment of sensation novels. She had developed a passion for them in the past year because they generally featured stories of illicit love affairs. It had become clear to her that, given her

secret past, an illicit love affair was the only sort she could ever hope to have.

Each new book increased her sense of security. It was as if every addition to her small library was a brick in the fortress wall that she was constructing around herself.

But the reality was that she would never be truly safe. Emma had done her best to make her feel welcome, but the small flame of hope that burned within her, refusing to be entirely extinguished, was enveloped in an icy dread. She felt this same gloom almost every morning when she woke up, and it was usually the last sensation she experienced every night before she went to sleep.

The emotion had a depressing effect on her spirits at times. Even on the sunniest days, the knowledge that someday she might be discovered and arrested on a charge of murder was always there, hanging over her head like an ominous thundercloud.

Meeting Emma had been a stroke of the most incredible good fortune. But she was only too well aware that the new life she had found for herself could be destroyed in an instant if her dark secret were ever revealed to the world.

Don’t think about the past or the future and, most of all, don’t think about Anthony Stalbridge. Concentrate on your work.

Her new career as a secret correspondent for the Flying Intelligencer was the one bright star in her life. It provided distraction from the melancholia and fear and gave her a strong sense of motivation and purpose. She had determined to dedicate her life to journalism.

She opened the leather-bound notebook she had brought downstairs. In her short career as a reporter she had learned the value of keeping good notes. For the sake of speed and out of concern that her notebook might be found and read by one of the servants or some other prying eye, she used a private code. She was always careful to spell out proper names, however. It would not do to get those wrong.

She picked up a pen and went to work, reviewing and elaborating on the brief, cryptic notes she had made.

There seemed to be little doubt that Hastings was engaged in blackmail, a criminal enterprise that meant he was even more vile than she had first thought. Unfortunately, she could see no way to expose him without also exposing the identities of his victims, which would not be right.

Of course, there was still the evidence linking him to Phoenix House, she reminded herself. The papers Anthony had retrieved from the safe confirmed Hastings’s involvement as an investor in the brothel. That news alone would be sensational enough to satisfy Mr. Spraggett, the publisher of the Flying Intelligencer. Spraggett prided himself on presenting only the most lurid and riveting news to the reading public. The announcement that a high-flying gentleman in Society was part owner of a whorehouse would sell a lot of newspapers.

But what if Anthony was right about Hastings also being a murderer? Now there was a piece of journalism that would send shock waves through the Polite World, not to mention the rest of the country. Her pulse kicked up at the prospect of bringing a killer to justice.

AN HOUR LATER FAMILIAR, brisk footsteps sounded in the hall, then a short, forceful knock on the library door.

“Come in, Emma,” she called.

The door opened. Emma, Lady Ashton, strode into the room. Emma never simply walked or strolled; she was a strider. A large, no-nonsense woman fashioned like a Grecian statue, she possessed a unique view of the world.

Today she wore a comfortably styled bronze gown. Her silver-gray hair was knotted in a tight twist at the back of her head. At sixty-three she was still a handsome woman. She was also an extremely formidable one. After losing her husband at an early age, Emma had defied convention and set out to see the world. When she eventually returned to England, her wealth, combined with her breeding and social connections, had enabled her to resume her natural place in the Polite World.

A little over a year ago she had consulted with an agency that supplied paid companions and governesses. Emma planned to write her memoirs. She wanted to employ a lady of good character and sound education who possessed modern opinions to assist her in the project.

She had gone through half a dozen ladies of good character and sound education who claimed to possess modern opinions before, in absolute desperation, the agency had sent over their newest applicant. Louisa and Emma had hit it off from their very first meeting.

“We shall put it about that you are a distant relative,” Emma decreed over tea. “That way you will be treated with more respect than if it were known that you were my paid companion and secretary.”

By the time Emma discovered that Louisa met only two of the three requirements that had been stipulated to the agency she was quite prepared to overlook the missing qualifications.

Louisa would never forget Emma’s verdict. It had come in the wake of a particularly bad nightmare, one that had left Louisa shattered and vulnerable. When Emma had offered comfort, Louisa had broken down, weeping, and related what happened the night she brained Lord Gavin with a poker.