“You’re certain it’s malaria. It couldn’t be something else?”
“I know it as well as I know you’ve a ring of bruises on your neck under the collar of that dress,” the doctor replied quietly. “Best loosen that if it starts to feel tight, by the way. Swelling after strangulation can be delayed and you don’t want it to constrict your airway.”
Lily’s mind flew back to Abney Park, to his hand on her elbow as he helped her from the carriage—followed by his casual reference to the wound on her leg, an injury he couldn’t possibly have seen.
That itch isn’t anything to worry about. Just the wound healing.
The same hand had taken her arm in the hall a few minutes before, steering her out of the way of the whirling activity of the hospital.
“Are you like Strangford?” she demanded softly.
“No,” he replied in the same low tone. “I’m not like his lordship. I just have a way of knowing how a body has gone wrong.”
Her thoughts tumbled, a cacophony of questions fighting to be first to her lips. All the while the truth rang through her.
She had found another charismatic.
Just as the first query was about to spill from her lips, he cut in. “Another time and place, Miss Albright.”
She looked to the nurse’s desk where the orderly was hurrying from the room, the matron snapping her fingers at a young nurse with a mop in her hands.
She forced her focus to return to the matter at hand.
Malaria was a disease of tropical climates, carried in the bite of the mosquito. The disease might linger after its first appearance, going quiet for years only to emerge again with a vengeance. Those who had it were usually veterans of colonial wars or adventurers who found more than fortune and glory on their endeavors.
Not Borough whores.
“The malaria. If she didn’t travel, could she have . . . caught it from someone?”
“It isn’t sexually transmitted. The only way to get it is from the bite of an infected mosquito or some other form of blood-to-blood contact.”
“It was that lying devil’s blood.”
The voice of the woman in the bed startled her.
“What lying devil, Mrs. MacAlister?”
“The one what took my baby girl.” The whore’s face crumpled, a still-raw grief distorting it for a moment. “Can’t you think of any other name but ‘Baby’ . . .” she sang weakly. “It was his bad blood made us sick. Them it didn’t kill dead. Florrie. Beth. Rita. The butcher’s widow. That wee slip of a thing from Croydon, who run off after her father did worse than belt her. All dead. I was lucky. It’s up and down in life, boys, in and out of luck. Too-ral-lay . . .”
The tune cut off with a cough, the sound tearing up from inside of her, racking her hollow frame.
“How did his blood make you sick?” Lily asked.
The whore slumped back on the bed, her frame seeming to sink deeper into the thin mattress.
“They run it into us with tubes and pins. Tied you to the table so you couldn’t get away. Worse than an alley swive, that. There’s no washing it out. Can’t soap under your skin.”
Lily’s thoughts flashed back to the operating tables in the basement of the clinic, accented with thick leather straps and buckles.
“Are you saying that someone put human blood into your body?”
Gardner’s voice rumbled from behind her shoulder, where he had come to stand.
“Some got it. Some lost it. He stole it out of them to run it into the lying devil. The blood ran out, the blood ran in—and he stayed hale through all of it while we women died or got the fever. But that’s always the way of it, innit? They live high while we rot.”
Lily rose to stand beside the doctor.
“Do you understand what she’s describing?”
“It doesn’t resemble any medical procedure that I know,” he replied. “But she is not in the clearest state of mind. She needs to be treated for the malaria—she needs quinine.”
Lily could see the tension in his posture, the frustration under the surface of his expression.
She understood. She knew how much easier it would be simply . . . not to know.
How likely was it that Dr. Burton, great-grandson of the Duke of Argyle, would allow his diagnosis to be corrected by the upstart son of a Belfast tailor? And yet how could Gardner not try to get the woman the treatment she needed?
Knowledge required action, action that entailed risk and difficulty and would most likely lead to naught.
When we are asked for aid, we give it . . . because we’re the only ones who understand what it’s like to know the impossible things.
“Go,” Lily said. “Tell them.”
He turned, then paused. “This may mean that your interview will be cut short. I would get to the meat of it now, if you can.”
He crossed the ward, reaching the desk just as the matron returned to the room. Gardner’s voice was a low, gentle rumble, words indiscernible from this distance, but the matron’s reply rang out clear as a siren across the rows of beds.
“You must realize this is highly irregular.”
Lily tried to ignore the confrontation at the front of the ward, turning her full attention to the woman in the hospital bed.
“Mrs. MacAlister, can you tell me more about the doctor who treated you?”
“Which doctor?” she replied dreamily. “The officer or the toff?”
The toff . . . the prestigious man who had his name in brass by the door. Lily didn’t need the woman in the hospital bed to tell her who that had been.
“The officer,” she replied. “Tell me about him.”
At the front of the ward, Gardner spoke to the matron in urgent tones. The woman’s face was growing harder.
“He fought the Boers in Africa. The toff said he was special, but we knew better. Just a lying devil with poison in his blood. He’d have poisoned every one of us if the Jew hadn’t come.”
Jew? Lily could feel the weight of the charm had found in the attic in her pocket, where she had slipped it that morning—the strange pendant marked with Hebrew characters.
“We were all fulfilling a great purpose,” the whore said vaguely. “To cure man’s ills and better the human race.”
The voice, the tone, were not her own, like a phonograph scraping out an old recording. They were an echo of something else, something she had heard.
From a distinguished physician, perhaps, justifying the horrors he inflicted on a group of patients powerless to protest.
“Tell me more about the Jew.”
“They kept coming back for her, again and again, taking her blood and giving it to the lying devil.”
“They gave the officer her blood? What did he do with it?”
“Put it in his arm,” the woman replied, as though Lily’s question bordered on nonsensical. “But she weren’t having none of their purpose. Said she’d put a stop to it. And she did. Poured the lamp oil over her hair, lit the match and burned up bright and pretty.”
The horror ran through her, rippling down her arms. She remembered Sam looking up at the charred gap in the floor, frowning.
Something odd about that fire . . . Didn’t start in the hearth.
Berta’s story came back to her, a fairy tale of burning witches.
Mrs. MacAlister was singing again.
“I dreamed last night that my true love came in . . .”
“I want you out of this ward.” The strident tones of the matron cut through the blur of Lily’s thoughts.
“Just tell him to examine her blood,” Gardner barked in response, his voice uncharacteristically sharp.
“Leanan sidhe,” the woman murmured. “That’s what Gran calls them. The blood-drinkers. You watch out for them. They’ll drain you till there ain’t nothing left.”
Gardner came to Lily’s side.
“We have to go.”
She hesitated. There were too many questions she still needed to ask, too many things unknown.
“Everybody. No one.”
“What about his name?”
“Waddington,” she replied, her voice and look as clear, in that moment, as they had been since Lily came in. “His name was Waddington.”
“Miss Albright . . .” Gardner cautioned.
Lily paused only to squeeze the dying woman’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she wasn’t certain why she was apologizing. Was it for what Hartwell and his officer had done to her? Or for what Lily herself was powerless to change?
She rose, following the doctor out of the room.
She let him guide her back to the ground floor. He stopped at a small door set in the rear of the building, far from the busy admissions entrance.
He paused before opening it.
“When you asked if I understood what that patient was describing . . . I told you it did not sound like any legitimate medical procedure.”
Lily caught the nuance in his tone.
“But it did sound like something.”
“Do you remember in the carriage on the way back from Abney Park, you asked me what someone might do with human blood?”
She recalled vividly Gardner’s description of the dangers and challenges of trying to transfuse blood from a human donor to a recipient. How even experimenting with the procedure had been abandoned by the medical community, since those experiments so often ended in death.
Florrie. Beth. Rita . . .
“You think they were experimenting with transfusion.”
“I do not know what to think, Miss Albright. There are challenges to relying on the word of a delusional witness. But were I to hazard a guess, I might conclude that whatever you have gotten yourself into, it speaks of men of my profession who ought to be dragged through the streets and hung for what they’ve done.”
Lily thought of the horror of that cold tiled operating room—and of the black holes by the door where an illustrious name had once hung, emblazoned in brass.
“If you could put blood from one person into another . . . it would make a great deal of difference in many medical situations. Wouldn’t it?” she asked.
“It would be of earth-shattering consequence,” he confirmed quietly.
“So how likely do you think it is that these men of your profession would be brought to account for trading the lives of a few whores to advance such an achievement?”
“There is more than one power that calls us to account,” he replied. He bowed. “Good afternoon, Miss Albright. Please remember what I said about your collar. And The Refuge.”
He turned, his big, heavy feet treading silently across the tiles.
It was cold outside.
The sky had turned a pale, uniform gray overhead, the air carrying the sharp promise of snow.
She was running out of time.
Much of the story of what had happened in Southwark was beginning to take shape in her mind. If Hartwell had been experimenting with blood transfusion, using an army doctor with dormant malaria in his veins, it explained how a Borough whore had managed to contract a tropical disease. It also explained why his followers still monitored the burned-out shell of that building, watching for anyone expressing undue interest in what had taken place there.
What it did not do was tell her why the illustrious physician might then move on to stealing the blood of sleeping mediums.
Something was still missing, the piece of this puzzle that would give her a clear image of how Hartwell’s activities were connected to the murders. Until she had it, she could not hope to move against him. She could not even be sure he was the source of the threat to Estelle or a distraction that would let the real enemy slip past her.
It was all gossamer, threads of guesswork and intuition.
She needed certainty and she had no more time to waste in finding it.
Which left her only one place to go.
TWENTY-FIVE
BAYSWATER WAS QUIET, HUDDLED into itself in preparation for the promised storm. Carriages slid down the icy streets. Pairs of women or lone gentlemen, wrapped in wool, moved purposefully by, hurrying to complete their calls before the skies opened.
Lily hesitated at the foot of Strangford’s steps.
The vision forced itself back into her mind—not the burnt shell of the clinic, but the foresight that had preceded it of bare hands sliding over her skin.
She did not want to go inside. It was dangerous here in a way that ran deeper than the threat posed by Hartwell’s thugs, but she had pursued this thread of inquiry as far as she could. This was her last option for answering the questions that plagued her about Hartwell, the clinic, and a possible connection to Estelle. Too much depended on this for Lily to walk away without answers and only the man on the other side of that door could provide them.
Her ruminations were brought to an abrupt end as the door in front of her opened.
A woman glided out. She was small and elegant, wrapped in a froth of very tasteful emerald silk. Her dark hair was spun into an airy coiffure, topped by a gravity-defying green hat. A fat, elderly pug tumbled out of the doorway behind her, lumping down the first three steps before stopping, presumably to take a rest.
“I’ll be by again next week. Don’t forget to restock the sherry. Your economical ways are admirable and all that, but there are limits. Oh!” Her dark eyes lit on Lily, then moved thoughtfully to Strangford, who had appeared behind her on the threshold.
Who was she? Not a wife. He could not have hidden a wife from her through all this. A fiancée? She wore a wedding ring on her finger. A lover? Lily felt stabbed with ice. It was an entirely useless reaction. She forced it down mercilessly.
The pug snorted, round eyes blinking lazily. It had positioned itself directly above the sculpted iron dog Lily had previously noted decorating Strangford’s steps.
The two were nearly identical.
“Are you here for a charity?” the woman asked.
“No, she is not,” Strangford replied.
The emerald woman considered this. “How very intriguing.”
“Virginia, this is Miss Albright. Miss Albright, allow me to introduce my sister, Mrs. Eversleigh.”
Yes, the pugs matched. So did the two pairs of dark eyes that looked down at her from the top of the steps. He had mentioned a sister before, the one who gave his horse that ridiculous name Strangford had never seen fit to alter.
“Do you need me to stay and play chaperon, Anthony?” she asked Strangford, not entirely under her breath.
“That won’t be necessary.”
Mrs. Eversleigh smiled. “Even more interesting. Well. I do have that hair appointment to keep, else I would certainly turn right back around and impose myself for a bit longer. Alas, one does not keep Jorge waiting, and it took me over a month to book him. But I do look forward to encountering you again, Miss Albright. Strangford,” she said, nodding to her brother. “Come, Horatio,” she ordered as she descended the steps, followed by a cloud of perfume and the waddling pug.
Her departure left a wake of silence that stretched just long enough to be awkward. Lily finally broke it.
“Can I speak with you?”
“Of course. Should we go in?”
There was just a hair of hesitation before he made the offer. Combined with the appearance of his fashionable, tonnish sister on the steps a moment before, it brought home to Lily the potential impropriety of the situation.
When she had been alone with him in his home before, the urgency of the circumstances had required it. She had no such excuse now.
“Perhaps we could walk.”
“I’ll get my coat,” he replied.
They went to the park.
Strangford did not offer to take her arm, nor did Lily ask. They moved in parallel silence down the path. The normally busy way was all but empty, their only company a few harried-looking travelers who rushed along, their scarves wrapped tig
htly around their faces.
Even those passers-by were still more company than Lily felt comfortable with. When a narrow trail broke off from the paved way, Lily took it. Strangford followed her until they reached a quiet grove.
The lime trees that encircled them were bare, branches forming a crown that framed the pewter gray of the sky.
“What can I do for you, Miss Albright?”
His tone was formal. It was an unfamiliar sound. She realized what it implied—that she had succeeded in her attempt to push him away from her. She supposed she ought to be happy.
“I wondered if I might impose upon you to use your talents for me once again.”
“Certainly,” he replied, as though the last time she had asked that of him, he had not ended up enveloped in walking death for near fourteen hours.
That grated her.
“Aren’t you even going to ask what it is?”
“Does it matter?”
“I should think it would, to you.”
There was a quick flash of irritation in his dark gaze.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, a gust of wind unsettling the dark curls of hair.
“Conducting a few inquiries.”
“Sam Wu took a beating last night. Were you with him?”
“I don’t see how that—”
“Damn you, Lily.” The formal mask was gone now, his anger quick and apparent. “Where?”
“Following a very thin lead at an old hospital in Southwark.”
“Southwark?”
“Near the old Mint,” she clarified purposefully. There was little point in evading that she had been in the vicinity of one of London’s most notorious old slums. After all, he would likely discern it in a few moments when she handed him the object in her pocket.
“Why didn’t you come to me for help?”
“I didn’t think your help would be necessary.”
“But Sam Wu’s was.”
“He can pick locks.”
Strangford absorbed this with an unsettling stillness.
“Were you hurt?”
“No,” she lied, feeling the soreness of the bruises around her throat. She straightened her back. “I rather think I have imposed on you enough in this matter.”
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