Thirteen
SUSSEX SQUARE
Before the team of horses came to a full stop, Brodie was already out of the coach and halfway up the steps to the main entrance.
“Munro?” he asked Mr. Symons, barely breaking stride.
“Yessir, he's here. The cellar, I believe …”
There was more than one startled exclamation from among the servants as he made his way past the formal hall and the kitchens, then found Munro near the stairs that led to the cellar.
“I need to know,” he told him. “Tell me! All of it!”
“I tried to persuade her against it, particularly when she shared what she and Mr. Dooley found at Kew,” Munro explained after he had told him everything about her visit to Sussex Square.
“I went to the office afterward, but she was already gone. She must have taken herself off straightaway. She was worrit for the other women that disappeared. Ye know how she can be.”
Brodie nodded. “What does Lady Antonia know of this?”
“I’ve not shared about Miss Mikaela’s disappearance, or the telegram that I sent ye. Given what Miss Mikaela means to her and her age, I thought it best to keep it to myself until ye returned.”
“I’ll tell her. She needs to know,” Brodie replied. “And it’s possible Mikaela might have told her something that will help us find her.”
“Missing?” Lady Montgomery’s exclaimed sharply, the only outward sign of any emotion as Brodie told what had happened, and what they knew.
“She said nothing of this to me,” she added. “If she had …” She paused. “That is of no consequence now, is it? What else do you know?”
He told her what Munro had learned about Mikaela’s visit to Kew Mortuary, and about the inquiries she was making.
“Of course, she would not turn away from such a thing,” Lady Antonia commented. “It is not in her, as you well know.”
“Did she say anything when she was here?” he asked. “Anything about what she intended to do next?”
“She was only here briefly, then gone before I knew of it.”
She took a deep breath.
“She is important to us both, Mr. Brodie. You will find her. Nothing else is acceptable.”
“Has something happened?” Lily stood at the opening to the parlor. “Tell me,” she demanded, then listened as Brodie explained what he had told Lady Antonia.
“I can help. I want to go with you.”
Brodie exchanged a look with Lady Antonia. He knew the girl’s attachment to Mikaela was strong. Still with one young woman dead and others missing …
She was too much like Mikaela, and might very well take herself off to make her own inquiries. It was too dangerous, and there were too many things that were unknown. This was not for her, no matter her feelings in the matter
“Ye need to be here if she should contact her ladyship,” he told her, instead of telling her ‘no’ outright. “That will be most helpful.”
She gave him a long look that was too familiar in another. How was it, he thought, there was no blood relation between the two, yet in that moment she looked very much like Mikaela Forsythe.
“I know wot yer doin’,” she replied, the Scots accent slipping around the words. “Ye think I canna help, that I’ll just be in the way.”
“I think she would not want ye goin’ off into something that could be dangerous,” Brodie told her. “And I’d not want to have to explain it to her afterward.”
He didn’t add his concerns about finding Mikaela, that he had no idea where she had gone, or who was behind the one girl’s brutal murder.
She appeared to consider that.
“Ye will send word as soon as ye have found her?”
“Aye.”
She slowly nodded. “I hold ye to that, Mr. Brodie.”
“And I trust that you will bring her back safely,” Lady Antonia added, much as she had told him in parting once before when she sent him off that first time.
“And you must take Mr. Munro with you. Two sets of hands are far better than one, as they say.”
Brodie nodded. “I will find her.”
As he turned to leave with Munro, he caught a glimpse of the two portraits of Mikaela and her sister on the wall above a side table.
According to Lady Antonia, the portraits were painted years before, when both young women had returned from school in Paris.
Mikaela’s sister was younger, with a shy smile in the one portrait, while Mikaela, with her hair down around her shoulders, had a faraway look in the expression on her face.
He had never been one to pay attention to works of art, but here the artist had captured the fire in her eyes as she stared at some distant point. Her next adventure perhaps.
He waited as Munro retrieved a weapon from his room, along with the knife that he always carried since they were lads on the street.
“We will find her,” his friend assured him.
The Strand was well lit as it usually was until well into the evening, with the glow in the night sky from the nearby theater district, restaurants that remained open, pubs, and the smoke-shop next over for gentlemen who might stop by.
But the office at #204 at the top of the stairs was dark.
Mr. Cavendish was there.
Brodie shook his head. A small thing that none might have given second thought, yet among things that had changed since Mikaela Forsythe had entered his life, she had insisted on calling the man by his name.
“It is Cavendish,” she had informed Brodie, something he had not known.
For him and most others on the street, the man was known as the ‘Mudger,’ a name the man had given when they first met a handful of years before when Brodie was still inspector with the MET.
And then there was the hound who came along later, usually filthy with a smell that often told where he’d been—the cattle yards, the docks, and places in between.
She named him Rupert for an animal she had as a child. A side of her Brodie would not have expected.
As for himself?
That had been open to some speculation considerin’ when they first met, he was in the process of retrievin’ her at the request of Lady Montgomery from an island where Mikaela had taken herself off with her guide.
She had looked him in a manner that had a way of putting people in their place and said, “I think I shall not go with you.”
There had been several colorful words along with that, that he thought no proper English lady would know, much less use.
She had also called him a bloody bugger and something no doubt far more colorful in French by the sound of it. Then, she had attempted to escape with the guide, and had almost succeeded.
He had made inquiries about her before leaving London.
“All of that is exaggeration,” Lady Montgomery had assured him at the time. “She is her own self, of course, a bit strong-minded to be certain, but not foolish or reckless.” And then that smile on the older woman’s face.
“I daresay very much like myself … But I digress.”
The fee for retrieving Lady Mikaela Forsythe was substantial and he had accepted the task, yet kept in mind the rumors and Lady Antonia’s explanation.
He had followed information, not unlike his other inquiry cases, across the Greek islands, to the beach where he found her scantily dressed, and then escorted her to the boat provided by her ladyship for the return trip to the port on the coast of Italy.
Along the way she had attempted to escape.
Looking back on that first meeting he realized that neither of them had escaped. That spirit, her stubbornness, and the way she challenged him had slipped inside him, with her red hair and those eyes that were somewhere between shades of brown, then green when she had her red up.
Or it might have been when she appeared at the office quite by surprise on the recommendation of Lady Montgomery when her sister had disappeared a handful of years later.
“Lady Montgomery, my great-aunt, has said that you are someone who can be trusted, Mr. Brodie,” she stated at the time, with a look that he would never forget. A challenge to be certain.
She was a lady, he told himself, although that might be somewhat in doubt by her actions.
He was not of her class. Nor was he anyone she might have otherwise encountered if not for her great-aunt’s recommendation. And there was that previous, somewhat difficult situation when he had fetched her back to London.
And then there was her temper, the stubbornness, that single-mindedness, along with her insistence that she would find her sister, no matter where it took her and no matter if he was willing to help her or not.
That same stubbornness and loyalty that had taken her to Edinburgh to help him find someone, in spite of the fact that he refused to let her go with him?
It was all of it, he supposed, their partnership in his inquiry cases, friendship he had never known with a woman, that fire in her eyes when she was angry, and saints help him, he had asked her to marry him.
She had possibly surprised the both of them when she accepted.
And now? Bloody hell!
He should have been there, should have listened to her, how important the case was.
“What can ye tell me?” he asked Mr. Cavendish.
“She was stirred up about the inquiries she’d been makin’ in the disappearance of me friend’s daughter.” He shook his head.
“There was somethin’ she learned that sent her to the newspaper office and that fellow that writes for them. Burke is the man’s name. I know she went there, but she didn’t share what she discovered. And she kept asking for the daily afterward.”
Theodolphus Burke. Not someone she cared for, in fact had called the man some colorful names in the past.
“And just three days ago, she had me take two messages to the courier’s office.
One was for you at the Agency, the other was to a woman by the name of Davies with an address in Marylebone.
She spent hours up at the office, then left to meet the woman late that same afternoon.
It was after that meetin’ that she had a message from Mr. Dooley. ”
And as Brodie now knew, had accompanied him to Kew Mortuary when the one girl's body was found.