Octavia returned north of the river, where she could at least make use of certain trusted lines of inquiry, and by midday she had discounted the most obvious possibilities. Lord Strythe was not a member of All Souls or the Conservative club, or indeed of any of the better clubs in St James’s. Nor did he frequent any of the lesser-known establishments where gentlemen of means might play at cards and keep company with women. Octavia knew of a number of such places, and knew that they kept no rolls of membership, but she was acquainted with a private detective in Smithfield – he had built his practice on the engineering of profitable divorces – who could recite the name of every man who passed through their doors and the sum, down to the last penny, of the debt that each had run up at the whist table. He had never heard of the Earl of Maundley.
When all else had failed, Octavia resorted to the method she knew best. She would encourage the right sort of people to say the wrong sort of thing. She set out first for the home of Lord Hartington in Grosvenor-crescent. Elf had often been of use in such cases, and his intelligence might prove especially valuable today. She was curious, too, having rejoined the party the night before to find that he had disappeared. This was not altogether unusual, since he often had several engagements in the same evening, and she could hardly complain, having left without an explanation herself. Still, she was keen to find out if he had learned anything useful from Lady Ashenden. But Macken, his valet, seemed amused by the very idea that his master might have been at home.
‘Why, Miss Hillingdon,’ he said. ‘It is hardly lunchtime, and he was abroad last evening. You know his habits. We’ll not see hide nor hair of him before six o’clock.’
She left a calling card – with nothing on it but the vexed scribble of a question mark – and as she bicycled away she contemplated the options that remained. On a fine afternoon in spring, she might have counted on any number of casual encounters, but in this weather no one of consequence would dream of promenading in the parks. Still, one was often obliged to make do.
In the two or three hours that followed, Octavia visited a number of houses, choosing with care among the dozen or so ladies who entertained at this time of day. During each of these visits, she took care to conduct herself with lightness and gaiety, joining the company without a fuss and taking up whatever subject it was occupied with. When the course of the conversation prompted it, she might dispense some harmless morsel of gossip, giving no sign that she wished for any particular confidence in return, least of all the one she hoped for. She did not once introduce the subject of Lord Strythe, much less the question of his mysterious disappearance. She did not even mention that she had been a guest at Lady Ashenden’s ball. There was no need, if one was patient.
For all her patience, though, she learned almost nothing of worth. There was talk of the gala ball, of course, and of Lord Strythe’s abrupt departure. Lady Ashenden was spoken of in sympathetic terms, and while judgement was otherwise reserved for now, there was agreement that His Lordship must put about some satisfactory account the same day if the affair was not to become an outright scandal. As to what this explanation might be, she met no one who even ventured to speculate. Lord Strythe was a man of considerable standing and powerful connections, yet there seemed to be almost no one who knew him directly. It was a singular thing, in Octavia’s experience, and it left her feeling oddly defeated. Uncovering secrets had always come easily to her, however boring or distasteful she might find it, and she took a certain furtive pride in her skill, yet now – when it seemed at last that the outcome might matter – all her ingenuity had come to nothing.
It was after four o’clock when she bicycled wearily home, and the sky above Smith-square was darkening. There would be more snow, she felt sure. There was that peculiar lull that comes before it, that sense that the air is silently encumbered. She let herself in by the back gate, as always, stowing her bicycle in the woodshed to keep it out of the weather. Finding the kitchen pleasantly deserted, it occurred to her that she had taken nothing but tea since breakfast time. She looked into the pantry, and after a few minutes of idle rummaging, she had assembled a serviceable meal.
Shoving her sleeves to her elbows, she settled in a chair – disturbing Juno, the household’s elderly cat – and set out her food. She had found a monolithic heel of bread, a pot of crabmeat and a fine pair of Cox’s Pippins. It was nothing that might be called a luncheon or a tea, but she tucked into it with quiet delight. She cherished these secret, childish feasts, and never more so than when she had returned from long hours in refined company.
Juno pawed at her skirts, having scented the crabmeat, and looked up at her in jaded supplication. Her appetite had begun to fail, and she did not much bother with mewing any more, but some small scrap was still expected by way of tribute.
‘How did you pass the day, Juno?’ Octavia tossed her a pink shred of meat. ‘I hope you caught something, at least. I did myself no credit at all.’
The morning’s newspapers had returned, still folded, from her grandfather’s rooms. He scarcely recognised his Gazette or his Times these days, but the ritual was never overlooked. Octavia spread them out before her as she wolfed down her sandwich, and spent perhaps a quarter of an hour in the utmost contentment.
She hardly minded when Georgie came in, since it was his habit to seat himself quietly and wait to be spoken to. He took up a crust that she had neglected and poured himself a mug of tea, helping Juno into his lap and scratching her absently behind the ears.
‘Now, here is a thing,’ she said, when they had sat for a time in companionable silence. ‘A fellow is accused of stealing a noted stallion, and the whole of the case seems to turn on whether a horse might be concealed on a barge.’
It was a moment before he replied, and when she looked up he seemed unusually preoccupied. He had taken a chair by the range and was staring into the banked embers.
‘Well now, sister,’ he said at length. ‘I fancy it would be a tricky business even to get him aboard in the first place.’
‘Why, Georgie,’ she said. ‘How hopeless I am. I had quite forgotten about your expedition to Whitechapel. Did you turn up anything at all? Can I tell Mr Healy to set aside this ridiculous obsession of his?’
Georgie examined the back of one broad hand. Discovering a nick, he raised it thoughtfully to his lips. ‘Why, as to that,’ he said, ‘the truth of it is that I hardly know. I mean to say, I know what I was told, but I hardly know what to make of it.’
Octavia folded her newspaper and put it aside. ‘What is it? What did you learn?’
‘Well, I hadn’t much of a notion how to go about it, not being in that line, but it seemed to me I would do best by speaking to all sorts. When you speak to all sorts, you hear all sorts.’
‘And?’
‘Well, I went into some rough places, and there was a deal of drunken talk, as you might expect. I paid little mind to most of it. It is all the same the world over, even if there is some gossip stirred into it that a fellow has heard third-hand. But it was not all of that kind.’
Georgie frowned and passed a hand through his untended hair. There was a plainness in his nature, and he had no great gift for dissimulation. Something had unsettled him. She said nothing, only moving her chair nearer to his. He would come to it in his own time.
‘I met a woman,’ he said, ‘in one of the gin shops. She was the worse for drink, to be sure, but not as bad as some I saw. She had not been at it for long, she said, and I was inclined to believe her. She was well enough kept still, and did not have that look about her. Worked hard all her life, by her own account. But then her niece was taken, she said, a niece she had reared as her own, for her mother went when the girl was a babe in arms. Cholera, she said it was. Her niece was taken, and she hasn’t been right since then.’
‘Taken,’ Octavia said. ‘What did she mean by “taken”?’
Again Georgie hesitated. ‘That’s where her talk took a peculiar turn,’ he said. ‘Now, you may make of it what you w
ill or think me foolish, but there was something in it. She may have been addled from the gin, but in her mind what she was telling me was gospel. The girl worked in a laundry, she said, and in such places the hours are cruel and the heat is worse. She wasn’t made for it – there is no one made for it, to hear the stories this woman told me – and she took sick last summer. It was her breathing that went, and in the end she came down with something very like consumption. As good as bedridden, she was.
‘Now, this the woman took very hard indeed, since she had not only the worry of it, but a wage gone from the house, and before long she was working nearly twenty hours in the day, so she said. It got that bad she was seeing things, by her own account, but she swears to what she told me next. They were being watched, she said, or the girl was. Being watched by these Spiriters – she said the word before I ever uttered it, mind. A priest warned her, she said. Some reverend. They looked for a special kind, he said – and remember, sister, I am only giving you the woman’s own words – a special kind whose souls were very bright. What she meant by that I cannot tell you. Maybe it was only that they had a goodness in them beyond the ordinary. Not all could see it, he said, but they could and so could he. And the more she sickened, the brighter it became until …’
Georgie grasped at the air, as if it held the word he wanted. Octavia waited, her breathing quiet and careful.
‘Until the end, I suppose. And that is how she came to the queerest part of her story. The woman came home one night, half-dead from tiredness, and looked in as she always did to the back room, where a bed had been made up for the girl. She found them standing over her. Two men, she said, all in black. There was not a light burning in the place, so she could see nothing of their faces. Well, I say no light – the girl herself was laid out, the woman said, in a dress she had never seen. A fine white gown, she said, fit for a princess to marry in. And a light was coming from her – do not look at me so, sister – a light was coming from within her.’
Octavia pressed her hands flat in her lap, not speaking until she could be sure of doing so calmly. This, exactly this. It was what she saw when the visions came.
‘Go on, Georgie,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know how I looked, but it wasn’t what you thought. I don’t doubt you at all. What else? What else did she say?’
‘Well, sister, she was knocked to the ground, or so I understood, and put out completely. They were gone when she woke, and the girl gone with them. Gone, and never seen again. The thing was very raw with her still, and worked her up a good deal. She took to shrieking – which is all you can call it, not to slight the woman – about how they came and went as they wanted, how they took these girls, body and soul. The company in the place took no notice, being used to her ways, but it was more than I could sit still for, I’m afraid to say.’
‘Her name, Georgie. Did she tell you the girl’s name?’
‘Aye, she did. Felicity Hardwick. Eighteen years of age was all she was. And before you ask, I went straight to the peelers with it – to Leman-street, where the woman had gone herself – and spoke to a sergeant at the counter there. Blake was his name, a straight, civil kind of man who had a bit of time for me once I told him I was in the Service – a fellow officer, as you might say. In any case, he had heard it all, this Blake. It had been looked into, he said, and had come to nothing. The case is open still, and he keeps an eye out, on account of he has daughters of his own.
‘Now, I did not like to ply this Sergeant Blake too hard, when he had already said more than he might, but I was mindful of your Mr Healy and the girl who was supposed have gone missing from the boarding house. So, I asked the sergeant was there anything to it, and now he closed up a bit and looked at me askance. There had been a report, he said, but it had come in only this morning. How had I got word of it, he wanted to know, when the ink was hardly dry in the crime book?
‘Well, I am no hand at any kind of ruse, as you know, so I did not risk spinning a yarn. I said only that I had spent half the day in Whitechapel, and that such stories were the talk of the place, which was true enough. I said I had been straight with him, and had made no false representations. I said that the woman’s story had moved me, and that she had made me promise not to forget it, and to do all I could to uncover whatever wickedness was at the heart of it all. I said nothing false, mark you, though I left out a good deal, and maybe that was what set him at his ease again.
‘Whether or no, he told me a little of the latest case, if that is what it is. The girl is a flower-maker, and she was reported missing by the mistress of a boarding house for orphan work girls up Finch-street way. A Mrs Campion, her name is.’
Octavia had found a pencil and was jotting notes in the cramped margins of The Times. She looked up. ‘Was there anything else?’
Georgie reached for his mug, pushing it away when he found that it had gone cold. ‘There was,’ he said after a moment. ‘There was, sister, though perhaps you will think it is nothing – and if it is not nothing, perhaps you will not thank me for it. Sergeant Blake looked about the place and leaned across the counter, so as not to be overheard. There were certain elements, he said, who had seen to it that the case of the Hardwick girl kept no one up at night. It was done in a careful way, he said, and no marks had been left, but it was plain that the thing had been put on short rations and left to die. He would say no more than that, but I could see it had left him wary.
‘As to the new case, he said, he could not be too free with the particulars, which were scarce in any case, but already there were things he did not like. The new girl was of near enough the same age as the last. She was an orphan, too, but with no kin she might turn to like the other girl had. She had sickened from her work, though she was not as bad. That much is common enough, you might say, but the last thing struck him more particular. The girl had been brought to the boarding house by a clergyman. There had been unwanted interest, he said, that he had wished to keep her from. He said no more than that – which, perhaps it was in his mind that if he said too much, this Mrs Campion might turn her away altogether – but it was Sergeant Blake’s view that he said just enough, and I am inclined to agree with him, for what little that is worth.’
Georgie yawned and leaned back in his chair, working his thick fingers through Juno’s shabby and greying fur. ‘Well,’ Octavia said, straining for lightness in her tone. ‘For a man who is not in this line of work, you have a good deal to show for your first day’s efforts. If Mr Healy discovers your talents, he will dispense with me altogether.’
Georgie gave her a cautious look. ‘You do not mean to say that you will tell him? There is not enough in it for an article, surely?’
‘Not yet, perhaps,’ Octavia said. ‘It’s just that – some of what you told me, Georgie – there is something I—’
He leaned towards her, laying a hand gently on her forearm. ‘What is it, sister? Are you all right?’
She patted his hand briefly, but pushed her chair out and stood without replying. ‘We must go back there, Georgie. We must see what else we can discover. We can begin with the boarding house near Finch-street, which can surely be found. We can speak to this Mrs Campion.’
Georgie looked up. ‘What, now?’
‘Well, of course. A girl is missing, at the very least, and I have accomplished nothing else today. What is her name, Georgie? Did you think to ask?’
‘Why, certainly, sister. I put it all in a notebook, since I knew you’d ask, but that much I remember. Tatton, her name is. Angela Tatton.’
IX
Angela Tatton. Gideon smoothed out the letter on the counterpane. Scarcely touching the page, he traced the shape of her name. Miss Angela Tatton, his uncle had written, with whom you became acquainted at my former rooms.
He was perched on a narrow and creaking cot in the mean storeroom where he had woken shortly before. Its window offered a curtailed view of Frith-street, which he took to mean that he had been brought to the inspector’s own lodgings, yet he had no memor
y of arriving there. He had called out, on first waking, but no answer had come. He had tried the door but found it locked, and hammering at it did no good. The rest of the house, as far as he could tell, was deserted and silent.
Having nothing else to occupy him, Gideon had turned his attention once more to his uncle’s letter. He was preoccupied still with Miss Tatton’s insistence that she and Neuilly had fallen victim to the same villainy, and it had occurred to him too that something in her account might shed light on his guardian’s own words. He hoped to find in them some clue, obscure to him until now, to the nature of the menace they had faced.
He returned to the beginning of the paragraph.
You will recall the nature of my ministry, nephew.
Gideon frowned at this. When he had seen him last at St Magnus-the-Martyr, his uncle had said something to the same effect, and on that occasion too it had struck him as puzzling. If Neuilly had indeed confided in Gideon about his work, or indeed about anything of consequence, he was quite sure that he would not have forgotten it. Nor would his uncle, surely, having taken pains for so long to reveal almost nothing. He put the thought aside. His uncle had been greatly troubled when he composed his letter. The strain might have taken a toll on his clarity of mind.
You will recall that those I cared for were susceptible to certain dangers, and that I strove to place them beyond the reach of harm. For some of my wards, I hope, I accomplished that much, but I fear I did not serve them all well. Miss Angela Tatton, with whom you became acquainted at my former rooms, was one such. I have hopes for her still, and have taken great pains to improve her prospects, but I fear it will not be enough. She is marked out, so to speak, in a way that the others were not. It may be more than I can do to alter her fate.
The House on Vesper Sands Page 10