Authors: C. S. Harris

Where Serpents Sleep (37 page)

BOOK: Where Serpents Sleep

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Sebastian considered how a young woman like Rachel Fairchild, already traumatized by years of her father’s unwanted attentions, must have reacted to a speech such as that. “And so she ran away,” he said softly.

Ramsey bit his lip and nodded. “I went back the next day to try to reason with her—maybe moderate some of the things I’d said. But she was gone.”

“When you saw her later, in Orchard Street, did she tell you how she had ended up there?”

Ramsey swallowed hard enough to bob his Adam’s apple up and down. “She said she met an old woman who was kind to her—or at least that’s what she thought at first. Turned out the old hag was a procuress.”

It was an all too familiar story. Young women fallen on hard times or newly arrived from the country, befriended by helpful old women whose business it was to keep the brothels and whoremasters of the city supplied with fresh goods. Sebastian said, “But she had family—friends. She could have escaped.”

Ramsey sniffed. “I asked her why she didn’t leave.”

“And?”

“She said the strangest thing. She said she’d spent the last ten years of her life fighting it, only now she realized there was no use. I didn’t understand. It made no sense. But when I asked what she meant . . . that’s when she told me I only had three minutes left.”

His body swept by raw fury, Sebastian felt his hands curl into fists at his sides.

Tristan Ramsey’s eyes widened and he took a prudent step back, his arms thrust out in front as if to ward off a malevolent spirit. “I told you everything. You’ve no call to hit me again!”

It wasn’t the fear in Ramsey’s eyes that gave Sebastian pause. What stopped him was the sweetness of that rush of anger, the ease with which the old familiar bloodlust of the battlefield could return to beguile a man. He’d seen where the seductive power of violence could lead a man.

Taking a deep breath, and then another, he forced himself to uncurl his fists and walk away.

Pleading a headache she didn’t have, Hero begged off from accompanying her mother to Lady Melbourne’s picnic and spent the afternoon curled up on the window seat in her room with a book open on her lap.

The irony of Hero Jarvis, determined spinster, succumbing to the lures of the flesh in a moment of frightened weakness was not lost on her. She kept telling herself that, with time, she would come to terms with the cascade of embarrassment and consternation in which she now floundered. Resolutely putting all thought of the incident out of her head, she’d just picked up her book again for perhaps the tenth time when the butler, Grisham, appeared to scratch at her door. “There is a personage here to see you, miss.”

Hero looked around. “A
personage
?”

“Yes, miss. I hope I haven’t done wrong to admit her, but I know your . . . er . . . activities do sometimes bring you into contact with a certain class of female which you would otherwise be—”

Hero cut him off. “Where is she?”

“I left her in the entrance hall with one of the footmen watching her.”

“Watching her? What do you think she’s going to do? Make off with the silver?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

Hero closed her book and hurried downstairs.

James the footman stood at the base of the steps, his back pressed against the paneled wall, his arms crossed at his chest, his gaze never wavering from the auburn-haired woman who sat perched on the edge of one of the Queen Anne chairs lined up along the hall. She wore a spangled pink dress striped à la Polonaise, with a blatantly low décolletage decorated with burgundy-colored ribbons. A saucy hat sporting three burgundy plumes completed the stunning ensemble. Once, the effect might have been jaunty. But the plumes drooped, the Cyprian’s shoulders slumped, and she had one hand up to her mouth so that she could gnaw nervously on her thumbnail. Hero had never seen her before in her life.

“I understand you wished to see me?” said Hero.

The woman leapt up, her eyes wide. Now that Hero was closer, she realized that beneath the plumes and rouge, the Cyprian was no more than a girl. Sixteen, perhaps, seventeen at the most. She was so small she barely came up to Hero’s shoulder. She was visibly shaking with fear, but she notched her chin up, determined to brazen it out. “You’re Miss Jarvis?”

“That’s right,” said Hero.

The girl cast a scornful glance at the footman. “I ain’t here to prig yer bloody silver.”

“Then why precisely are you here, Miss—?”

“I’m Hannah,” said the girl. “Hannah Green.”

Chapter 46

“Indeed?” said Hero, lifting one eyebrow. She’d wondered how long it would be before hordes of tawdry “Hannahs” started showing up at her door.

The girl frowned in confusion. “Aye,” she said slowly.

Hero crossed her arms. “Prove it.”

The girl’s mouth sagged. “What? Ye don’t believe me? Ye can ask anybody. They’ll tell ye.”

“Anybody such as . . . whom?”

The girl put her hand to her forehead. “Aw,” she wailed, half turning away. “Now what the bloody ’ell am I supposed to do?”

“You could go back where you came from,” suggested Hero, torn between annoyance and amusement.

“What? An’ get me neck snapped like poor Tasmin?”

Amusement and annoyance both fled, chased by a cold chill. “Come in here.” Hero put her hand on the girl’s arm, plucked her into the morning room, and closed the door on the interested footman.

“Where precisely have you been?” Hero demanded.

The girl’s eyes slid away, going round as they assessed the room with its yellow silk hangings and damask chairs, its gilt framed paintings and tall mirrors. “Gor,” she breathed. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this. It makes the Academy’s parlor look downright shabby, it does.”

Hero spared a thought for her grandmother’s reaction, were she to be told that her morning room compared favorably to a brothel. “After you left the Academy,” said Hero, still unconvinced this ingenue really was Hannah Green, “what did you do?”

Hannah wandered the room. Hero kept an eye on Hannah’s hands. Hannah said, “Rose drug me to that bloody Magdalene ’Ouse. She said we’d be safe there, that no one would think t’look for us there.” Hannah’s lips thinned with remembered outrage. “Six o’clock in the bloody morning!”

Understanding dawned. “They made you get up at six?”

“Not just get up. Get up and
pray
. For a whole bloody hour!”

“Every day?” said Hero.

“Aye! The first time, I thought it was just some mean trick they was playin’ on us, but when they done it again the next day, I knew we were in for it.”

“Rose didn’t mind?”

“No,” said Hannah in a voice tinged with mingled awe and exasperation. “I think she actually liked it. It was scary.”

“So what did you do?”

“I left. I was afraid they might try to stop me, but if truth were told, I think them Quakers was glad to see the back of me.”

“You weren’t afraid to leave?”

“Nah. I mean, I was scared when we left the Academy, but after a couple of days, I started thinking it was all a hum, that Rose had made it all up.” She reconsidered. “Well, most of it.”

“Surely you didn’t go back to the Academy?” Hero asked, stunned.

The girl looked at her as if she were daft. “Ye take me fer a flat or something? No. I got me a room off the Haymarket.” She paused. “ ’Course, when I heard what happened at the Magdalene ‘Ouse last Monday, I got scared all over again. I tried to lay low but, well, a body’s got t’eat.”

Hero studied the girl’s animated face. If she really was Hannah Green, the girl was living proof that God takes care of idiots. “Tell me about Tasmin,” said Hero.

The girl sniffed. “I was working the stretch between Norris Street and the George when she found me. She said there was a gentry mort willin’ to pay ten pounds t’talk to me, but if’n we was smart, we could maybe figure out a way to get more.”

Hero had actually offered twenty pounds to anyone who could put her in touch with Hannah Green. But Tasmin Poole had obviously been less than honest with her former coworker. “Go on.”

The girl’s eyes slid away. “Tasmin was gonna write ye—Tasmin was clever, ye know. She could read and write like nothin’ you ever saw. She came up to m’room to work on writin’ the note while I went to get us some sausage rolls. It’s when I was comin’ back that I saw that cove going into the lodging house.”

“A man?” said Hero. “What man?”

“What do you mean, what man?” said Hannah scornfully. “Don’t you know nothin’? The same man what killed Hessy.”

Lady Jarvis’s querulous voice could be heard raised in annoyance somewhere above stairs. Hero looked at Hannah’s burgundy-plumed hat, the plunging décolletage, the glory of spangles and pink-and-white Polonaise stripes and said, “Wait here.”

Yanking open the door, she found James standing patiently in the hall. “Watch her,” Hero told him, then hurried upstairs to furnish herself with the reticule, hat, gloves, and parasol without which no respectable lady would be seen out of doors in London—no matter how nefarious her errand.

Hannah Green sat in the hackney pulled up across from Paul Gibson’s surgery, her body rigid with mulish obstinacy. “I ain’t goin’ in there,” she said with all a prostitute’s loathing of the medical profession. “I don’t need no doctor.”

With difficulty, Hero resisted the urge to shake the girl. “That’s not why we’re here. You need someplace safe to stay. There isn’t anyplace else.” Not that Paul Gibson’s surgery was exactly safe either, Hero thought, remembering the fate of the wounded assailant she’d brought here. But she kept that information to herself.

Hannah Green cast her a doubtful glance. “No medical exam?”

“No exam,” promised Hero.

The girl consented to get out of the hackney. Hero paid off the driver, then had to practically pull the girl across the road.

“Good God,” said Paul Gibson, his eyes widening when he opened the door to Hero’s knock.

“Dr. Gibson, meet Hannah Green. I think,” she added as Hannah glared at the surgeon and Gibson continued to stare in awe at the lady’s burgundy plumed hat and spangled pink-and-white stripes. “I’m sorry, but I had no place else to take her,” said Hero, putting her hand in the small of the girl’s back and giving her a push that propelled her over the threshold and into the hall.

Chapter 47

Sebastian arrived back at his house in Brook Street to find a note from Paul Gibson awaiting him. The Irishman had written cryptically:

I have an interesting guest I’m convinced you’ll want to meet. Do come. Quickly.

The word “quickly” was heavily underscored three times.

BOOK: Where Serpents Sleep

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