Page 12 of The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin (The Ill-Mannered Ladies #2)

12

I took a steadying breath and raised my hand. He lifted his in quick response and I crossed the road to join him.

“How is my sister?” he asked in greeting, his anxiety plain upon his face. He had still not shaved—the stubble thicker than when I had last seen him—and had donned an old, patched greatcoat and a frayed hat. Even with such a shabby appearance, the very fact of his presence intensified the disquiet still surging through me.

“She has rallied a little,” I said, forcing myself to focus. “Dr. McLeod is taking good care of her, as is Miss Grant.”

“We must find them a safe haven,” he said.

“I have written to Lady Davenport,” I said, and told him my plan to take them to Charlotte’s estate. “It is, I think, the best way forward for the moment, and she is the model of discretion.”

“Thank you for taking so much care of Hester and hiding her from our brother. I cannot tell you…” He ducked his head, the relief, I think, overcoming him for a moment. When he looked up, he was smiling again. “Well, I can tell you it is greatly appreciated.” He took in my disguise. “So, I take it you are not Mr. Anderson this time.”

I had been Mr. Anderson on one of our other adventures, but he had been a man of means, unlike my current pretense. “Jessup, at your service,” I said, bowing. “And you?”

“I like to stay with the classics—Lennox.”

I touched the side-whiskers I had glued upon my face. Still intact. We were a suitably scruffy pair for the task ahead.

He cocked his head. “You seem a little perturbed.”

“Just the excitement of it.” I was not about to explain what I had just seen, or the unseemly agitation it had prompted. “What is the plan?”

“We are to be foxed fellows tonight, sharing a quart,” he said, giving the cheap earthenware flagon a shake. “I hope you do not mind sharing?”

“Not at all,” I said, although the only shared vessel I ever drank from was the Holy Communion chalice. An experience that, for me, no longer held any intimacy with community or God. This sharing, however, already felt intimate: to be drinking from the same vessel, my lips touching the place where his had been. My lips pressed upon his: I blinked at the sudden memory of our kiss outside the asylum after we had rescued his sister.

“Here.” He offered the flagon.

I grasped the handle. Our fingertips touched, the connection jolting through me as if electrified. He must have experienced the same, for he snatched back his hand with a low, surprised laugh that made me want to take a step closer.

Dear God. Was this going to happen every time we touched?

He clenched the offending hand as if trying to stop the sensation. We both stood, motionless, still caught in that heart-stopping moment.

Finally he drew in a breath and said softly, “I would very much like to kiss you now.”

I swayed closer, my eyes upon his lips. But no. I pulled back. “Probably not the best time for Mr. Jessup and Mr. Lennox to be kissing,” I said. “In the street.”

“No.” Our eyes met in regret, the kiss still within them.

He cleared his throat. “My thought is to blend in with the gin shop across the road.” He lifted his chin in the direction of Maiden Lane. The shop indicated was packed with patrons, some of whom staggered in a drunken dance or lolled upon the pavement drinking from flagons like the one I held. A few men and women were even locked in louche embraces.

“We will be just another couple of loose fish out to get foxed,” he added.

“I have never tried gin,” I said, and lifted the heavy flagon, glad to have something to focus on other than his lips and the strong traceable line of his stubbled jaw. “I have heard it is quite rough.”

“They call it blue ruin for a reason,” Evan said. “But do not worry. I filled that with lemonade. We need all our faculties and focus.”

Indeed.

He gestured to the recessed doorway of a bookseller, dried brown leaves banked up against the entrance and the display windows on either side shuttered. “Our lookout for the night.”

I sat down on the tiled entrance—the blue and terra-cotta design cracked and worn by decades of foot traffic—and leaned my back against the locked door. Evan sat beside me, our long legs crooked at the same angle.

So close together.

Part of me wanted to press my thigh against his and feel the warmth and solid muscle of his body. A question—an invitation, in truth—I never thought I would ask a man. Yet in my mind I saw the stark image of that couple against the wall. So naked, so primal. Could I ever expose myself in such a way? This forty-two-year-old body with its ungainly limbs, and flesh no longer plump and firm with youth. What if it was too old, too ungainly? What if it was too late? I slid my leg down, stretching it out straight. No, I could not ask the question. Not yet, anyway. Besides, we were not Gus and Evan, but two fellows sharing a quart of gin.

We had a good view of number 2 Bedford Street. It was at the start of the narrower end of the street, which a town carriage could not fit through; anyone arriving would either do so on foot or be dropped at the corner of Maiden Lane, or Chandos Street at the other end.

I lifted the flagon and took a swig of lemonade. Surprisingly good: tart and sweet at the same time.

“Has anyone entered the house yet?” I asked, passing the flagon to Evan.

“Not so far.” He took a mouthful, wincing at the sour aftertaste.

And so began our watch.

As time and people passed by, we talked. I spoke about our mother’s death when Julia and I were thirteen, my fear about my sister’s illness—so like our mother’s—and my intention, my hope, to take her on a grand tour when the Continent was no longer locked down by war. He told me how he had worked his way back to England on cargo ships and the wonders he had seen: gigantic whales jumping from the sea, squid as big as men, and majestic sea turtles. And also, a little bit about his time in the prison colony in New South Wales assisting the prison surgeon: a Dr. William McLeod.

Now, there was a familiar name.

“Is he, by chance, any relation to our own Dr. Robert McLeod?” I asked.

Evan nodded. “His uncle. William McLeod gave me a letter to carry to his nephew in the event of my return to England—an introduction, if you like. I believe he wrote about a time I saved his life from an attack by a demented prisoner. That is why, I think, the young Dr. McLeod is helping us so discreetly.”

“It sounds as if you have completed an entire medical apprenticeship under the instruction of the elder McLeod.”

An unusual accomplishment for the son of a marquess.

“No, far from it. As you can imagine, I have not had much experience with women’s ailments.” He gave a wry smile. “Your sister’s illness, alas, is not within my knowledge, so I cannot offer much in the way of advice.” He looked down at the flagon in his hands, his thumb tracing the stamped letters of the maker, Cunningham and Co. “I would say my specialties are flogging wounds, stabbings, dislocations, strangulations, and broken bones. Not really a full medical education.”

There was something in his eyes—an inward, endless quality—that spoke of unimaginable suffering. There would always be so much I could never truly understand. Even, I think, if he wished to tell me.

“Well, I am heartily glad of your stabbing specialty.” I touched my shoulder where the stiletto knife had done its damage a few months earlier. “Without you, my wound would have been a great deal more dangerous.”

He looked up at me again, the abyss gone from his eyes. At least for now. “Is it still healing? Do you have pain?”

“It is little more than a scar now, thank you, Dr. Belford,” I said, and bumped his shoulder with mine, to prove the point.

He swayed theatrically under the soft blow, then said rather more seriously, “Still, you must take care of it. Stiletto wounds are narrow but notoriously deep.” His mock-stern expression shifted into sudden focus beyond me. “Look. The door is open.”

Number 2 Bedford Street had come alive.

The two windows on the ground floor of the club showed cracks of light between the curtains, and the barred outer door stood ajar, the lamp above it lit. I pulled out my watch, hidden on its chain under my shirt, and squinted at the face in the dim light. Half past eleven.

“I believe the members are arriving,” Evan said.

Two men in evening breeches and jackets had entered Bedford Street at the far end, from Chandos Street: one compact, with a smooth, athletic gait, the other built more on the stocky side. As they passed by a residence, the light from the windows momentarily caught their faces. Or what should have been their faces; they wore old-style mummer’s masks. The devil. And the king.

Of course, Dorothy had mentioned they wore masks.

“They are keen to keep their identities hidden,” I said.

“Indeed, and wearing them on the street before they even go inside,” Evan said. “Although that fellow is still putting his on.”

I peered at a third man, hurrying to catch up to the other two, trying to untangle the ribbons of his mask. Small and wiry. He seemed familiar. As he passed the glow of the house light, that familiarity hardened into recognition.

“Good God, that is George Whitmore. He is an undersecretary at the Alien Office.”

“You know him?”

“I have met him at routs and salons before, but we are not really acquainted. More importantly, do you know him?”

Evan shook his head. “He’s a good ten years younger than me. He’d have been a child when I was sent to Botany Bay.”

True, there could be no direct association there. Yet our meeting at the Berry sisters’ salon and his arrival at the Exalted Brethren of Rack and Ruin felt somehow connected.

Perhaps it was coincidence.

Then again, we were seeking a man of high rank affiliated with the Magistrates’ Court or Home Office, and here was one before us. But if he was somehow involved, surely he would have known our connection to Lord Evan when we met him at the Berrys’ circle. I had certainly seen no evidence of that knowledge, although, admittedly, I had not been searching for it—my run-in with Mulholland had been after the circle. Still, if he had known of our connection, he must be highly skilled in deception. An entirely possible proposition: he was, after all, serving in the Alien Office, and deceit was their business.

“What about the other two, anything about them that you recognize?” I asked.

Evan watched the three men climb the steps up to the front door. “No. Although I would say that the other two are noblemen by the quality of their clothes and the way they walk.”

“The way they walk?”

“Do you not see? They own the world, Gus.”

Another echo of Long Sal’s wisdom.

“They expect everyone and everything to shift around them,” he continued. “They always get what they want—no thought to the cost to those around them. You have a little of it yourself.” He glanced at me, softening the statement with a small smile. “I used to walk like that too—a long time ago—until the other prisoners reminded me I owned nothing. I was nothing.”

Although I wanted to know what had happened to him—I wanted to know everything about him—I did not ask how he had been “reminded.” Painfully, I suspected.

And I? As an earl’s daughter, I did expect the world to bend my way, although of course on many occasions it did not because of my sex. Now that I thought about it, I certainly held an expectation that my wishes and wants held intrinsic importance. Yet here sat Evan, living proof that it was all arbitrary. He had held such a belief, too, and lived that belief, until he had been forcibly reminded that it was built from hierarchies, traditions and laws that were designed to keep people in their place. A place in life that was believed to be God-given and therefore immutable: Long Sal had certainly believed that. And yet it was another pillar of society that my newfound apostasy could not help but question. If there was no God, then rank could not be God-given. It was not immutable.

Lud, if I was not careful, I would be joining a Thomas Paine society soon and risking life and limb for reform.

I looked back at the three men as they entered the club, the athletic man first, then the stout one, and finally Whitmore behind them. No doubt that order was also governed by status. England was, if anything, an island of rank. So who were the athletic devil and the mid-rank king?

It transpired that half past eleven was the arrival time for the club. More masked men arrived in evening clothes, with one group escorting five women. They were, it seemed, of Harris’s higher order of demimonde, for they all wore clean gowns, prettily styled hair, and reasonable slippers. One even had the trappings of gentility—she wore a plainer, respectable gown with her hair arranged in a neat middling braided style and no rouge or lip color.

“She does not look like a Covent Garden girl,” I said. Was this one of Long Sal’s cits or genteel girls? “She looks as if she belongs in a drawing room.”

“She is probably just dressed up to look genteel. There are men who like to pretend to rape respectable girls. A specialty.”

“Really?” I shook my head; I could not fathom such a debased predilection.

All five women were clearly inebriated, for they were stumbling and lurching upon the arms of their masked escorts. One was also singing a rather bawdy shanty in a tuneless voice, which the others were trying, unsuccessfully, to hush.

They all climbed the steps, amid some missteps and laughter, and entered the building.

“The evening’s entertainment,” Evan murmured.

“I wonder if they know how they are about to earn their coin,” I said, unease settling in the pit of my innards.

Evan passed me the flagon. “I know a few of the Covent Garden girls—”

I stiffened at this casual admission—I could not help it. He eyed my reaction, then gave a crooked smile: You must remember, I am living in the criminal world.

I sent my own crooked smile back: I know.

Even so, had he lain with any of them? The unbidden thought brought a stab of wild jealousy. Ridiculous. I had to remember he was a man, untethered by marital bonds or family, and, unlike a woman, he did not need to contend with the possibility of bearing an illegitimate child or being cast out of society. Besides, to be jealous of his past was to walk a road to madness.

“From what the girls have told me, every encounter is a gamble,” he said. “Will they get paid? Will they get hurt? Will they get the pox? Will they get with child? And sometimes all for just a few pennies.”

I looked back at the club door, now closed, and took a swig of lemonade in an attempt to wash the unease from my mouth. Five women had gone in and, if Dorothy was telling the truth, five were not guaranteed to come out. A gamble, indeed.

Although I no longer believed in the grace of God, I sent a prayer up into the heavens. Or perhaps it was more a plea to the criminal world of good and bad fortune: let all of these five women be lucky.