“Do you want to tell me where you found it?” I suggested.
“Well, Miss Nightingale, I don’t want no one in trouble…” I wondered what he knew, for his gaze traveled nervously around the room.
“The only person who could possibly be in trouble is whoever stole her necklace. You do want to catch a thief, if not an outright murderer, don’t you?”
This seemed to confuse and agitate the boy even more. “I wouldn’t want anyone to know I told you. I mean, what if the thief were to come after me for being a tittle-tattle? Maybe you should keep it, Miss.” He presented his neck to me so that I could remove the chain.
Did John Wesley have more information than simply where he’d found the locket? “I promise I won’t tell anyone where you found it, and I will keep it safe for you,” I said, lifting it over his head. “How is that?”
He seemed satisfied with my assurance. “I found it in the secret room,” he told me.
“The secret room? What is that? Where is that?” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Downstairs, ma’am. Behind the linen room. Jasmine showed it to me.”
I looked at him quizzically. “The cat showed you to a room?”
He grinned. “I was helping her chase a rat through the kitchen. It were a big one, it were. The rat went through a little hole in the bottom of the wall, and Jasmine tried to follow. She could only get her paw in at first. Then she took her paw out and put her face in to look for him. She got stuck that way. I helped pull her away from the wall, and as I pulled, well, half the wall moved a bit, didn’t it? I got poor Jasmine out, and she saw that the wall had moved, too. She went behind it and I followed her again. Next thing I know, I’m in a little room ’tween the kitchen and the linen room.”
“And the locket was in this room?” I asked.
“Yes, maum. It was on the floor, right in front of me.”
So somehow Nurse Bellamy had known about this secret room. Was this where she was meeting her inamorato? I wished to see this room, although John Wesley would be in no condition to show it to me anytime soon. I also didn’t want the little scamp blabbing to anyone about having shown it to me as part of a murder investigation. Moreover, I didn’t want any of the staff to witness me searching for it. I needed to have a look at Persimmon Jarrett’s sketch again. That way I could determine if she had discovered the room without directly asking her about it and invoking her considerable curiosity.
“How clever of you to have found it. Is there anything about the room you can tell me?”
He bit his lip and looked down. “You can hear a lot when you’re inside it.”
“A lot? Of noises?” An old home like this was bound to creak and scrape with regularity. “Or do you mean voices?”
“People talking.” John Wesley winced, and I wasn’t sure if it was pain in his knee or from what he was revealing.
“John Wesley,” I said. “You must tell me the truth. Did you overhear something that I should know about?” I stroked his hair once more to comfort him. Or perhaps it was to comfort me, as I had the feeling he was going to reveal something particularly unpleasant.
“Maybe, Miss. I’m not sure. I saw a leather strap that would pull the wall closed from the inside. I knew that if I closed it, it would help Jasmine trap her rat. It were easy to pull, even for me. When I closed it, I saw that the ceiling was way up above me. Very far. There was a little window way up there, so I had a little bit of light.”
An old laundry chute or dumbwaiter converted into a hiding place, I was betting. Surely it had been done prior to the home being turned into a hospital. The basement hadn’t seen much renovation, so the secret room was probably easily missed. Now I wished I had paid attention to the history of the property, which hadn’t mattered a whit to me in becoming superintendent. I strained to remember what Lady Canning had told me—something about an aristocratic family owning most of the area. It came back to me slowly. Harley Street had been named for Edward Harley, the Earl of Oxford, who had acquired the area in the early eighteenth century. The estate had passed on to his daughter, who married the Duke of Portland, hence the nearby Portland Street and Portland Place. It was still in the Portland family, wasn’t it? Yes, yes, the area was in the possession of the fifth duke, and hadn’t Lady Canning once told me he was a veritable lunatic? Building underground tunnels and odd, unused buildings on his property and such things that only someone inordinately wealthy could afford to do?
It made me wonder if he hadn’t personally owned No. 1 Upper Harley Street and had the room built for some bizarre purpose. But no, my memory dimly recalled that some other lord had built the house much earlier in the century.
“What did you do in the room by yourself?” I said.
“I wasn’t scared at all!” John Wesley exclaimed to a question I hadn’t asked. “I watched Jasmine eat the rat. She tore its head off, she did. She—”
“But then you heard something.” I didn’t want John Wesley wandering off into details about the cat’s dining habits.
“Yes, maum. I heard Charlie first, and then that nurse come into the kitchen.”
“That nurse? Which one?”
“The one what were taking care of me today.”
Why would Nurse Harris privately meet with our manservant?
“You are absolutely sure of this, John Wesley?”
He nodded and winced again. “They talked in low tones, but I could hear some of it. I heard Charlie tell her that he would protect her from harm. Then I heard a disgusting noise. Miss Nightingale, I think he might have kissed her.” His expression was one of utter revulsion.
I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so appalled by what he was telling me. I simply couldn’t believe that Harris would engage in an affair with Charlie Lewis. She was so reserved and standoffish, and Charlie was so, so—Charlie.
“Is that all you’ve witnessed from the secret room, John Wesley?” I asked, putting a finger under his chin and chucking him gently. I hoped the labored smile on my face was putting him at ease.
His breathing relaxed, but his expression was wary. “What do you mean?”
What I meant was that if he hadn’t been seen by Charlie and Nurse Harris, then surely he had been caught as a witness to some other event, a deed odious enough that someone might have wanted to see the boy dead. Or badly injured.
But I simply shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Like maybe you saw some of the other nurses having a talk.”
He considered my question, and I didn’t like how long it took him to answer me. He responded with a shrug of his own. “Not that I ’member,” John Wesley said.
I sighed inwardly. Perhaps he hadn’t witnessed something but had done something that he thought might make me angry. Something as silly as taking some food without permission. But the firm set of his lips told me I’d get nothing further from him on it.
I had one final question for John Wesley. “I want to ask you one more thing. And I want you to be as truthful in your answer as you have been about the secret room.” I raised an eyebrow in a silent request for his honesty.
“Yes, maum,” he replied solemnly.
“Did you really fall down the steps on your own? Or were you … helped?”
John Wesley shook his head firmly. “I didn’t see no one behind me, Miss, I swear.”
I hoped his response hadn’t been too confident. I hadn’t seen anyone behind me, either.
In that moment, Harris returned with Mary right behind her. Harris carried fresh bedcoverings, and set right away to remaking John Wesley’s bed. She was as gentle as possible in working around the boy, but it was no use.
“Ahhhhhh,” John Wesley cried, leaning over and gripping his leg below the knee. “Oh, Miss, ohhhhhhh, it hurts.”
The morphine had worn off. “Nurse Harris,” I said. “Go to the medicine case and retrieve—”
Harris stopped me, once more reading my thoughts. “I checked there while I was away, knowing that the boy would need more p
ain relief eventually. There is none in the case.”
How could that be? Laudanum was a staple. Of course, all the nurses had keys. That would change immediately. My thoughts flew to Margery Frye, but there was no time for it now. “Go to the chemist and purchase more.”
She flew from the room without question. I now addressed Mary. “Goose, please take this tray down to Mrs. Roper.” I wanted no congealed or limp food to remain in front of a patient. So many doctors thought that food should remain a constant at the bedside. I thought that to wake up hours from now to gelatinous gruel would make John Wesley even sicker. He could have a fresh tray later.
Mary, too, obeyed without question, but in her case she was probably relieved to flee from the boy’s suffering and moaning.
Now I just had to keep John Wesley calm until Harris returned. Between his injury and my own, as well as the onslaught of distinct and unrelated revelations I was receiving, I was suddenly very fatigued.
* * *
I spent some more time with John Wesley, ensuring he got a dose of laudanum and giving Nurse Harris care instructions for the boy. He didn’t seem afraid of her, and I was too exhausted to confront her yet again. Mary helped me to my bedchamber once more, and this time I insisted that she return to her lodgings for the evening.
My sleep was mercifully uninterrupted until I was awakened by bullfinches chirping outside my window and sunlight flooding my room. A quick check of my watch told me it was nearly ten o’clock in the morning. I felt inordinately better, with only a few bruises as reminders of what had happened to me.
After relieving myself and getting dressed, I was eager to get to work in many ways. Although Nurse Bellamy was always at the forefront of my mind, I wanted to spend time developing some of my nursing plans as well as to visit the inmates.
As far as my investigation was concerned, though, Persimmon Jarrett was at the top of my list.
She sat at her desk in the library, her nose buried in Charlotte Brontë’s latest novel, Villette. Pastry crumbs littered the desk next to an empty plate, and she held a cup of tea in her hand as she read.
I was doubting the wisdom of paying Jarrett to do as little as she did.
She greeted me politely, and I responded, “You showed me a diagram of the building layout yesterday. I would like to see it again.”
“Yes, Miss Nightingale, right away.” Jarrett closed the book and stood up, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a ring with several keys dangling from it. She selected one, nodded to me, and bent over the same desk drawer where I had seen her place the sketch yesterday. The lock moved with a soft thud and Jarrett pulled the drawer open.
It was empty.
She jerked her head up at me. “I don’t understand. Where is my drawing? I locked it up here after showing it to you, Miss Nightingale.”
“I remember. Who else has access to your keys?”
She held up the ring and looked at it disbelief, as if it had intentionally betrayed her. “No one, Miss. I mean, I do not wear my keys at all times. I suppose, well, I leave them in my top drawer here if I leave to visit the toilet or run an errand.”
By errand she undoubtedly meant a trip to the kitchens.
“Who was in the library yesterday?”
Jarrett considered this. “Let me see … Nurse Harris brought Mrs. Moore in and read to her for a while. Oh, and Charlie Lewis came by to repair a broken windowpane. I don’t recall much of anyone else. There was so much to-do about John Wesley, of course.”
“Did you leave to visit him?” I asked. I had a sneaking suspicion that her keys had been available for the taking for much of the day.
“I, well…” She shoved the key ring down into her dress pocket. “John Wesley is such a dear boy, so I had Mrs. Roper give me a couple of tarts to take to him. We ate them together. It was after you had gone off to bed, and he was all alone. I felt sorry for him, what with such a terrible fall he took. But—but—I see you are unhappy with me, and I am ever so sorry, Miss Nightingale.” Repentant tears welled up in her eyes.
“That’s enough, Miss Jarrett. I’ll not have you blubbering about. We have enough troubles. So you know for certain that Nurse Harris and Charlie Lewis were here. For how long were you away in John Wesley’s room?”
“Probably about an hour. No, wait.” She pursed her lips in concentration. “After seeing Mrs. Roper, I arrived in his room around seven thirty, and he said his dinner tray had just been cleared away. We had our tarts, and then I remember the clock striking nine, and then Nurse Harris came in and told me I had to let John Wesley sleep. So I was there around ninety minutes.”
Enough time for half of Marylebone to have wandered in, lifted the key, and stolen the floor layout.
The real question was, why had it been stolen, unless for nefarious purposes? Did someone want to know of a good escape route … or did they want to cover up any seeming evidence of their escape route?
“Who knew that you had made that drawing, Miss Jarrett?”
“No one,” she replied, too defensively.
I arched an eyebrow at her.
“Well, I may have had to ask Mrs. Roper where some of the basement doors lead. It can be quite dark and scary down there. Oh, and that kind doctor saw me working on it one day and offered to help me step out rooms. He said his foot was exactly twelve inches long, so he could accurately measure rooms and corridors for me. He told me the most humorous joke, Miss Nightingale. Why is a hen on the fence like a penny? The answer is, head on one side, tail on the other.”
Jarrett tittered, but I remained stone-faced. I didn’t think Dr. Killigrew had any earthly reason to steal the diagram, but it was obvious that anyone could have done so. Once more I regretted not keeping it when I had held it in my hands.
I left Jarrett to check in on some of the patients. My next-to-last stop was Hester Moore’s room. She was not as shy and was less agitated than normal, which I attributed to the absence of her overbearing brother.
However, even though we weren’t full at the moment and Dunstan Moore could afford the weekly fee, she could not remain here as though we were a hotel.
“You seem improved, Mrs. Moore,” I said.
She was sitting up in bed, a lace cap neatly arranged on her head. The bedcoverings were folded down to her lap in a precise manner, and a tray of paper, envelopes, pen, and ink jar were spread across her lap.
It wasn’t the picture of an invalid.
“I admit I am feeling a little more content in my mind, Miss Nightingale. I was just writing a letter to Dunstan. He’s with Mr. Brunel, you know. Such important work he’s doing. The Leviathan will be the life’s work for both of them, I think. And yet Dunstan takes time from his busy schedule to write to me. Isn’t he truly the most loving of brothers?” She waved an envelope at me that had a thickly stroked and slanted handwriting across it.
“Very loving,” I replied. “Perhaps you would like to write in the gardens and take in some fresh air?”
Hester frowned. “Oh, I don’t know if Dunstan would want that. It is so much safer inside, don’t you think?”
Was this a reference to Nurse Bellamy? If so, wouldn’t she consider the exterior of the premises to be safer?
“The courtyard is walled, Mrs. Moore. Other than being victimized by a low-flying pigeon’s droppings, I cannot see what harm could come to you.”
She still hesitated, and no amount of my cajoling would convince her to leave her room.
In fact, Hester changed the subject entirely. “Dunstan asks about you, you know.”
It was a disturbing thought. “How so?”
“He asks…” She lifted his letter from the tray. It was in the same heavy scrawl as the envelope. “Oh dear, my sight isn’t what it used to be, and sometimes it takes me a moment to focus on writing. Let me see … yes, he asks how you are faring in your investigation into that nurse’s death.”
It’s none of your affair, Dunstan Moore, I thought with a vitriol that surprised me. Why did the man b
other me so much?
I replied pleasantly to Hester, “I am happy to report that there have been no more deaths and I expect this was just a singularly unfortunate incident. The police do not even believe there is anything to worry over.”
Hester Moore jotted a few notes, then looked up and tilted her head at me. “Miss Nightingale, is that a bruise on your cheek?”
I self-consciously put a hand to my face. Did I think I could block her view of it that way and make her forget it? I lowered my hand and said brightly, “Yes, I was on my way to the kitchens to get some refreshments for an inmate and tripped on my skirts.”
An expression of concern spread across her face. “To think that I might have just been lying here, peacefully sleeping, while you were injured somewhere. How terrible. I am glad to know you were not seriously harmed.”
I suspected she was also glad for an additional juicy tidbit of gossip for her brother.
I left Hester Moore to her letter writing and went to John Wesley’s room for my final visit before setting out on my grandiose plan of accomplishments for the day.
He was sleeping, no doubt thanks to another dose of opiates, but even in his sleep he was doubled over, clasping his bandaged knee. I still wasn’t convinced he had merely had an accident.
* * *
Even without the missing floor layout, I decided that if a young boy and a cat could find the secret room, then so could I. I crept downstairs for the first time since my own attack, gripping the handrail fiercely to ensure nothing else would befall me. In my dress pockets were Harris’s knife, the note Mrs. Alban had given me, and Bellamy’s locket. After the theft of the first note, I felt a need to keep all of these clues on my person. Nevertheless, I felt like a superstitious old woman carrying talismans.
The basement was humming with activity. In the kitchen, pots and kettles burbled and whistled on the stove’s top, and the makings of pie crusts lay all over Mrs. Roper’s worktable. I could hear her arguing with someone at the rear entry door. The weekly laundress and her young assistant were dropping off bundles of sheets in the linen room. The assistant was a miniature replica of the laundress, presumably the woman’s daughter. Both were red-faced and huffing from their loads and merely nodded at me as I came into the kitchen.
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