Page 62 of Who Cries for the Lost

Phoebe wiped her running nose on the back of her wrist and nodded.

“How do you know her?”

“Alexi? She delivered Amelia.”

“But how did she know Sedgewick had the baby?”

“I’d told her Amelia was sick, so she came that evening to take a look at her. But by the time Alexi got there, Miles had already taken her.”

“She knew who the baby’s father was?”

Phoebe Cox stared up at him, her forehead puckered with confusion, as if she couldn’t understand why such a thing would matter. “Yes, of course. I told her.”

Chapter 36

Alexi Sauvage was at a street market near St. Katharine’s when Sebastian found her. The sunshine was growing fitful, with gathering clouds that scuttled across the sky to send shifting patterns of light and shadow over the city. She had the handle of a market basket looped over one arm and was inspecting a pyramid of melons when he walked up to her.

“I’ve just seen Phoebe Cox,” he said bluntly. “She tells me you knew Sedgewick had taken her baby.”

Alexi turned her head to look at him, her dark eyes hooded, her features tense and wary.

He said, “That’s why you confronted him in Charing Cross, isn’t it? And what the quarrel was about.”

Alexi hesitated a moment, then nodded. “All I wanted was for him to tell me what he’d done with the child. But he denied even taking it.”

“Are you quite certain that he did take it? Phoebe could have abandoned the child herself and then lied about it.”

“No. She’d spent weeks frantically trying to keep that child alive. She never would have abandoned her.”

“Perhaps she simply gave up.”

“No. I can’t believe that.”

Sebastian wasn’t so sure. He said, “Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me this before?”

“How could I? To do so would only cast suspicion on Phoebe.”

Sebastian looked away, to where a dirty little boy was playing with a kitten beside one of the stalls. “If Sedgewick did take the baby, what would he have done with her?”

Alexi let out her breath in a heavy sigh. “I don’t want to even think. It isn’t as if he’d had time to arrange for a wet nurse, and I can’t see him walking around London with a ragged babe in his arms, can you? I wouldn’t put it past him to have simply dropped the child in the river or down a well. I was hoping he’d given her to some gypsy woman to beg with, but I haven’t been able to find any sign of one.”

“You’ve been looking?”

“I have, yes. It’s been over a week now, so unless he gave the baby to a woman who had breast milk, it’s surely dead. But I’m still looking, because if I can’t find out what he did with it, they’re going to hang Phoebe for murdering her child.”

“You think they will?”

“They hang women all the time when their babies are stillborn or simply die in their sleep. Of course they’ll hang Phoebe.” She gave a faint shake of her head. “Although the truth is, I’m not convinced she’s going to survive in that prison long enough to even stand trial.”

Sebastian squinted thoughtfully up at the thickening clouds. “You say you saw him shortly before nine? At Charing Cross?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything at all to you about where he’d been or where he was going?”

“No. But wherever he was going, it couldn’t have been far. Otherwise, why did he abandon his hackney?”

Why indeed? thought Sebastian.