The man who stood in the entry was clearly the butler but could just as easily have been making a living breaking knees in the East End. He was enormous, his arms like ham-hocks under the well-tailored black of his suit. His head was bald and as well-polished as the brass knocker.
Strangford plucked a card from his pocket.
“Lord Strangford and Miss Lily Albright to see Lord Deveral.”
“I’m afraid Lord Deveral is not in.”
Lily highly doubted her half-brother would have braved his club today. “Not in” was also what well-trained servants said when their master or mistress was not up to receiving callers.
Lily could hardly blame Lord Deveral for closing up the house. Any visitors he received today would almost certainly be intent on collecting gossip, which would then be mercilessly distributed around the ton.
They needed a way to get past that blanket prohibition, to surprise the butler into at least informing Lord Deveral that they were there.
Lily knew one way to do that.
She had only a moment to consider it. The notion sent a bolt of fear and shame through her, but so much was at stake. Could she really let their efforts dead-end on this step simply to preserve some illusion of her own respectability?
It wouldn’t matter. Every eye that currently tracked her movements would have sussed out the truth by suppertime regardless of what she did or didn’t say now.
She lifted her chin, channeling all the hauteur she carried in her half-blue blood.
“Please inform Lord Deveral that his sister would like to speak with him.”
The butler did not show his surprise, but Lily sensed it in his silence. She watched his eyes flash from the suitably fine quality of her gown to her finishing school carriage. They stopped at her eyes, with their distinctive steel gray that undeniably matched that of his employer.
“If you’ll excuse me for a moment.”
He did not invite them in, but he did not close the door. She watched as he walked down the checkered marble tiles, then disappeared around the corner.
“Sister?” Strangford asked quietly from beside her.
“Half-sister,” she corrected.
“Lord Deveral is the Earl of Torrington’s son.”
Lily was tense as a bowstring.
“You are correct.”
“I was not aware that the countess had been married before.”
“I am not related to the countess.”
“You’re Lord Torrington’s daughter.”
“I’m Lord Torrington’s bastard,” Lily corrected him.
“Ah.”
Lily felt the shame rage through her. She sensed every one of those eyes from the park at her back, measuring her, assessing her. Once they knew who she was, they would find her wanting. They always had.
She might be able to act the part, but she was not a lady. She never would be. She did not belong here and in that moment, she was certain that everyone around her knew it.
The silence stretched for an eternity. Then, at last, the looming form of the butler appeared at the end of the hall. He approached them, his steps maddeningly regular, until his enormous frame filled the doorway once more.
“I am afraid that Lord Deveral is not in.”
The phrase was delivered with precisely the same inflection as before—a cool and impersonal courtesy.
It was nothing more than she had expected, Lily told herself.
“Very well,” she said evenly.
The butler cleared his throat, halting her before she could turn to go.
“Yes?”
“I should inform you that I am instructed to offer a more forcible response if you call here again.”
The words struck with all the impact of a slap to the face.
“I see.”
“M’lord,” the butler said, bowing politely to Strangford. Then he closed the door.
The sound of the latch falling into place reverberated through her.
“Well,” she said, forcing a false cheer into her tone. “That was a waste of time.”
She turned and descended the stairs, focusing every scrap of her energy on keeping her back straight, her hands from shaking.
Strangford lengthened his stride to catch her. A black gloved hand slipped under her arm. She stopped in surprise at that unexpected touch.
“Let’s take a turn.”
His tone was neutral, but the pressure of his hand was steady as he steered her toward the gates of the park.
The urge to run was overwhelming. She could not give in to it, not with those eyes still watching them, more openly and attentively now that they had been turned away from Lord Deveral’s door. Instead, she walked beside Strangford like some courting couple out for an afternoon stroll as he led her across the rolling green lawns to the flat, gray expanse of the lake.
The day was cold, the air biting. The raw wind tugged at her hat. It meant the park was less crowded than usual, only a scattered few making their way along the paved pathways.
He stopped at the edge of the lake in the middle of a broad, open space, releasing her arm but staying close by her side. It would have been impossible for anyone to approach them or come within hearing distance without being observed. They stood in plain sight, but Lily knew the situation was as private as her own drawing room might have been.
The water reflected the dull steel hue of the sky. The winter wind stirred little waves on its surface.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it wasn’t important,” Lily replied flatly. “I don’t know him. You can see what good it did.”
The wind whipped at her skirts, chilling her. She ignored it.
She didn’t want to ask the next question, but it refused to be pushed back, spilling from her lips.
“Does it matter?” she demanded.
“That you’re Lord Deveral’s sister?”
“That I’m a bastard.”
She waited for some sign of what she knew must be there. He was a nobleman. His type was trained to judge people by the circumstances of their birth. The circumstances of hers put her utterly beyond the pale for someone of his class. He might pretend otherwise out of courtesy, but that was the truth of it.
The dark-haired man beside her in his sober black suit bent down and after careful consideration, selected a pebble from the ground by the shore. He stood, eyeing the wide expanse of the lake. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he sent the stone skimming across the water.
“I was less cautious of it when I was young—what I could do,” he clarified without looking at her. “It was a game. Shaking hands and delving into everybody’s secrets, uncovering scandals from a forgotten set of spectacles or a handkerchief.” He hesitated. Lily felt certain he was thinking of the time where his power had ceased to be a game and had instead become a vulnerability.
He plucked another stone from the ground and weighed it in his hand, testing.
“I learned very quickly that the circumstances of someone’s birth are a poor indicator of their quality.”
He threw the stone. Lily counted the number of times it bounced—six, seven, eight—before succumbing to gravity.
She remembered how Mordecai Roth had described him back in the gallery.
One of those rarest of beasts, despite appearances: a true bohemian.
“I should have told you to go alone,” she concluded.
“I doubt it would have made any difference. I’m not exactly a person of influence. We’ll try something else.”
“We,” she echoed, unable to keep a hint of skepticism from her tone.
He skipped another stone.
“You don’t have to. If it seems like too much. I wouldn’t blame you for it.”
“That isn’t what I meant.” The words stumbled out, pushed by her surprise at how he had misinterpreted her.
He paused, looking over at her.
“I told you that I would support you in this.”
“That was when you
thought I was respectable.”
There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“Miss Albright. I found you sprawled across the road in trousers. I was never in danger of assuming you to be something so mundane as respectable.”
Another gust whipped at her, snapping her green silk skirts and tossing the dark curls of Strangford’s hair.
It pulled against her velvet hat again. She reached up, grasping the brim, and deliberately yanked out her pins.
She felt the wind tug at the tendrils of her hair, liberating them to dance around her face.
She plucked her own stone from the lake shore, snapping it at the water.
It sank.
“It’s all in the wrist. You’re teaching it to fly, not pitching it like a cricket ball.”
“I don’t see what our options are,” she retorted, her frustration rising. “The obvious course of action would be to find people who knew the other victims. Learn more about what they were doing, who they were seeing, before they died. Look for themes or commonalities.”
“That sounds quite sensible.”
“Except that the police must have already done the same and with far more experience and greater resources than we have. I am not an investigator. Are you?”
“I am afraid that line is not part of my curriculum vitae.”
“We don’t have any time. We can’t muddle about speaking to people who may or may not know anything about the murders. We need to cut right to the heart of it.”
Then it came to her, a notion so audacious and yet so plausible that it stopped her flat. She turned to the man beside her, wide-eyed.
“But we can cut to the heart of it. Can’t we?”
Something shifted in his expression, becoming guarded.
“What do you mean?”
It was terrible. It was beyond horrific.
And it would work.
“You could read one of the victims.”
He went still. The impact of it was greater than a shout of protest or outrage would have been. Lily’s instincts flared, warning her that something had gone awry.
The wind gusted across the lake, stirring dark ripples on its surface.
“I don’t mean Annalise Boyden. It would have to be Mrs. Durst, the second-most-recent victim. They’ve only just buried her, in Abney Park.”
“I’m not sure you understand what you’re asking of me.”
“We would be breaking the law. I know that. The penalties for grave robbing can be severe.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Tension snapped in his voice, finally cutting through the rushing excitement of the idea.
“What is it?” she asked quietly.
“What I do—it isn’t like standing back and looking at a bunch of actors on a stage. It’s . . . immersive. Smells, textures, emotions—I’m there inside of it. I feel the experiences as though they were my own. What do you imagine I would feel if I put my hands on a corpse?”
Horror rose in her, filling in the details he left out of his words—the suffocating cold and the darkness, the slow descent into rot. The feeling of flesh bloating and then crumbling in on itself.
And before that, violence. Terror and pain.
It was a nightmare, and she had just suggested he walk into it.
Of all people, she should have understood that.
She felt the hot shame of it as a few drops of water pinged against her neck, harbingers of a raw winter rain.
“I’m sorry. Forget I suggested it.”
Silence stretched as the rain turned to drizzle, obscuring the gray surface of the lake.
“Shall I walk you back to the road?” he said at last.
“Thank you,” Lily replied. She replaced her hat, pinning it back into place.
He did not offer his arm again. She didn’t ask for it.
He led them down a different path out of the park, away from Lord Deveral’s pristine residence. When they reached the street, he flagged down a passing hackney.
It rolled to a stop. He opened the door for Lily. She moved to climb inside.
His hand flash out, stopping her, black-gloved fingers gripping her arm.
She held there, halfway up the step, as scattered drops pinged against the pavement around them.
His eyes were darker, more hollow.
“I’ll do it.”
“You can’t possibly be serious.”
“If it works, we will discover the identity of the killer in a single move.”
“But what you would be putting yourself through . . .”
“You said there were other lives at stake. Was that an exaggeration?”
She searched for some argument that would convince him there was a better option.
She found nothing.
“No,” she replied. “It was not.”
“It will have to be tonight,” he muttered. “Before things have . . . progressed . . .”
Progressed. The word sent a shudder through her.
“I’m coming with you.”
His attention returned, sharpened.
“No.”
“It was my idea.”
“There are others who can assist me.”
She stepped down, coming even with him, and put steel into her words.
“I am coming with you.”
She met his stare, daring him to find any fracture in her resolve.
“We’ll collect you at one.” He released his grip on her arm and tossed a coin neatly to the driver perched atop the hackney. “March Place, Bloomsbury,” he ordered, then stepped back.
“You aren’t riding?”
“I need to walk. Good afternoon, Miss Albright.”
Lily watched him go, rooted to the pavement, until a cough from the driver reminded her of his presence.
She climbed into the hackney and closed the door.
It jolted into motion, bouncing over a pothole. Her heart lurched into her throat.
She forced it back into place as the park slipped by outside the window and fat drops of rain began to pelt against the carriage roof. She pressed against the glass, looking back, but Strangford’s form was already lost around a bend.
Something else caught her eye.
It was the tall figure of a thin man with a fair mustache, dressed in a black bowler hat and a green paisley waistcoat.
He strolled along the pavement. She was close enough to have reached out through the cold drizzle to touch him, close enough to note the unusual symbol on the brass pin on his lapel.
It was the hero rune, the sigil of The Society for the Betterment of the British Race . . . Dr. Joseph Hartwell’s eugenics club.
Was it the same man she had seen on March Place? She struggled to be sure but could not. If it was, then it seemed a far coincidence that he would appear both outside her flat and at the very corner of the park where she had been talking with Strangford.
The rain fell as the carriage turned and the figure in green paisley disappeared from view.
TEN
SHE HOVERED IN THE shadows of the stairwell, clad in a secondhand tweed skirt and jacket, relics of her theatre days that ought to have found their way to the rag man but had instead been stashed in the back of her wardrobe. They were covered with a dark cloak. The light but sturdy boots she usually wore for motorcycling completed the ensemble.
She had been listening to the sounds of Estelle’s séance. They echoed up through her parlor floor, gasps and sobs and the occasional scream. It reminded her of the noises of the crowd at an illusionist’s show, when rabbits emerged from hats and smiling girls were sawn in two. It was likely because Estelle put on a similar performance.
The noise was different now, the rumble of low and steady conversation as Estelle’s guests prepared to depart.
The door opened. Lily waited. The crowd began to filter out, an assortment of men and women of all ages and classes, from washerwomen in threadbare calico to a prosperous banker with a diamond ring on his finger.
Lily descended the stairs and slipped in among them. No one paid her any notice.
The séance-goers spilled out the front door, some milling on the step, the rest dividing to meander toward either Bloomsbury Street or Tottenham Court Road. Lily moved with them, hanging just behind a group of girls whose high voices rattled off the bricks of the surrounding houses.
Halfway down the lane, she took a quick step to the side, slipping into the narrow space between two houses and ducking back into the darkness.
She waited.
The last of Estelle’s guests turned the corner, the echoes of their voices fading. March Place was silent and still.
There was no sign of the man in the green waistcoat, nor anyone else for that matter. She felt a bit foolish. The escapade she had engaged in so that she might slip out of the house without being noticed had apparently been for naught. Joseph Hartwell hadn’t sent some minion to watch her. Lily might just as well have been waiting in the comfort of her room for a civilized knock at the door. Instead, she stood in the chill darkness of the alley, her breath fogging in the air.
The street smelled of rain, fresh and crisp.
It would be fresher still in Abney Park, where paving stones were replaced by lush grass growing over the graves of the dead.
This was madness. She was dragging Strangford out into a cemetery in the middle of the night to dig up the grave of a murdered woman. It was a move that would subject him to unimaginable horror and could easily get both of them tossed into Newgate, not to mention the others he said would be joining them.
She wondered who they were and what Strangford had told them to convince them to lend their assistance.
A street over, someone slammed a door. The sharp rapport of it echoed down March Place, resounding off the dark, silent buildings.
It would all be worth it, she reminded herself, if tonight’s errand gave them a glimpse of the murderer, the monster who was draining these women of blood in their beds. And it could. Strangford had admitted that himself.
The thought did not make her feel any more easy about what they were about to do.
She scratched at her leg through her heavy skirt, then stopped herself. The wound had begun itching earlier that afternoon, a sensation that had only grown worse through the evening. It nagged at the back of her awareness, making it difficult to concentrate.
The Fire in the Glass Page 14