And there it was again. The scream. Fainter, this time. A bit shorter in duration.
And this time she noticed that it somehow…. lacked conviction?
If such a thing could be said of a scream.
Her breathing began to ease a bit. She took in a deeper breath, feeling drained by fear.
Funny, but the sound in fact reminded her of the time she and her sisters had put on a play taken directly from a horrid novel she’d read aloud to them by the fire. Lucy, at first, had been elected to be the heroine, which would have required her to scream when she saw a ghost. But she’d been terrible at acting; she was unfortunately much too good at simply being herself, and struggled to be anything but.
Jenny, however, was very good at screaming, as she was the loudest.
But this sounded more like a Lucy scream. Not precisely terrified or accomplished or as a result of any particular trauma. Quite odd, really.
She had no choice but to take her cues from Chase’s reaction. He wasn’t charging toward the sound, pistol drawn.
Then, of course, he would never dream of endangering her, regardless of who else was being endangered at the moment.
God help them.
She’d never been suspended in a nightmare quite like this one. But if one needed to have a nightmare, she thought, it was lovely to share it with Charles Eversea.
On they walked, hands entwined, utterly silent. Forty steps into their journey the silence gradually took on texture: rather than intermittent ghostly bursts of sound, a distinct hum of masculine voices came toward them. The sort of hum that only a group of voices could make.
How on earth would she and Chase confront an entire group of men? What on earth would they find?
Chase pulled her to a halt. “Watch your step. Lift your feet up carefully,” he murmured into her ear.
She knew why in a moment: the dirt beneath their feet had given way to hard floor. Marble, from the sound of it against her slippers.
Ten more steps she counted, and during those steps the dull red glow of the torchlit tunnel slowly gave way to a different sort of light: the warm pervasive light of a chandelier and fire and candle. Unwavering.
The hum was no longer a hum: distinct and separate conversations, loud though they were, could now be picked out.
“…what a splendid idea! I could barely scrape together the subscription, but I’m beyond delighted that I did.”
The tunnel had been chilled and somehow filled with cool air, and now the familiar heat of a fire-heated room swept over her, and she knew the tunnel was behind them and whatever they were about to face was quite officially ahead of them.
Chapter 21
Two corded velvet curtains had opened directly onto a small domed, marble-floored foyer from which several hallways branched. A heavy crystal chandelier, tiered like a reverse pyramid to a single, long narrow drop, dangled over it, like a fancy Sword of Damocles.
Chase was bemused to find a man presiding over what appeared to be a reception desk, much like Sergeant MacGregor did at the Montmorency. He was young and still coltish of limb, but very briskly official looking and dressed in a uniform that elevated him above footman but not quite to gentleman: a long dark blue coat with gold braiding, pale blue stockings, and buttons that winked a little too brightly to be truly tasteful.
“Your first time, sir, isn’t it?” he said pleasantly. With no apparent surprise.
The first time creeping through a tunnel from a museum to what might very well be a brothel? That would be a yes.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” Chase matched the jovial tone.
“Hmm. I wasn’t told to expect anyone new this evening, but on occasion this has been the case. Would you mind sharing the name of your sponsor?”
This was brightly asked.
Bloody hell.
Chase thought quickly. The toga-wearing man in the tunnel had referred to Ireton as “Woodcock,” another juvenile appellation in a series of juvenile appellations characterizing this entire misbegotten enterprise. The success of a clandestine operation such as this would utterly depend on anonymity, considering what was at stake. Mentioning Kinkade’s name would likely be certain disaster and reveal him as an interloper.
“Mr. Welland-Dowd,” he guessed.
Heart thumping hard, fingers gripped tightly in Rosalind’s, getting and giving reassurance. Her soft hand was damp. He could feel the rapid tick of her pulse, too.
“I’ll have a page fetch Mr. Welland-Dowd for you,” he said, and Chase knew a surge of triumph.
The man paused to have a good look Rosalind. He frowned a little uncertainly. “I see you’ve brought a woman, and she looks to be the appropriate sort, but perhaps no one told you that a client bringing in their own woman is slightly irregular practice.”
Irregular practice, indeed.
“Mister…”
“Wrexion,” Chase supplied with great dignity. “Mr. Hugh G. Wrexion.”
It took the man a moment.
“Oh, very good one, sir!” His face lit with delight.
“Thank you,” Chase said somberly.
Rosalind squeezed his hand twice, which he liked to imagine was her way of indicating incredulous hilarity.
“I agreed to pay a slightly higher subscription rate. Mr. Welland-Dowd will tell you as such. It strikes me as something you ought to have known. He did tell me he would share this information with you.”
The sentence was etched in aristocratic condescension and accompanied by an obsidianlike stare.
The man looked up at him. Drummed his fingers once. Twice.
“Of course, sir,” the man soothed crisply. “I’ll just send a page for Mr. Welland-Dowd now. If you would sign our book…”
Chase bent and scratched out Hugh G. Wrexion in the guest book
“Very good, sir. If you’d kindly wait right here, Mr. Welland-Dowd will arrive shortly and he’ll show you around. There’s a gaming room ahead of you—through the curtain—you can probably hear the gentlemen in there having a wonderful time, but from the looks of things”—by “things” he apparently meant Rosalind—“you’d like to get started straight away. If this is true, you’ll find the Pleasure Rooms off to the left.”
Chase followed the man’s gesturing arm with his eyes. Black-and-white-checked marble hall lined with dark wood doors, rather like a hotel.
Or, of course, like a brothel.
Some of the doors were standing open. And from one of them, the closest, came the noncommittal scream.
The page was retrieved via a bellpull, much the way a servant was summoned.
The man at the reception desk regarded Chase and Rosalind with bright hospitable eyes. He began to tap his quill and whistle soundlessly.
They heard footsteps on the marble and looked up as the voice preceded the appearance of the man.
“Mr. Twigenberry, what’s this I hear about—”
He stopped cold when he saw them. As well he might.
For Mr. Welland-Dowd, as it turned out, was Sergeant MacGregor.
He reached for his pistol, but Chase and Rosalind were faster, and of course their pistols were already unlocked. Rosalind yanked off her blindfold.
“If you touch your pistol, MacGregor, I’m pulling the trigger,” Chase said. “And what kind of soldier would I be if I didn’t have more powder and shot? I could shoot all night.”
It was an exaggeration, but it worked to blanch MacGregor.
Rosalind trained her pistol on Mr. Twiggenberry, who began to smirk. He refused to drop his pistol.
Chase whirled and drove his walking stick down into the man’s foot. Mr. Twiggenberry howled in surprise, and Chase twisted the pistol from his hand with a snort of disdain.
And then he reached behind Twiggenberry and yanked the gold cord holding back the draperies.
“Rosalind, tie his hands behind his back and gag him with my cravat. And you’d best put your hands behind your back, sir, or I promise I shall hurt you if she doesn’t do it
first. She’s quick on the trigger, this one, and unpredictable. You know how women can be.” He winked at Rosalind.
He turned back to MacGregor.
“Why, MacGregor?” He meant…all of this.
The soldier was wavering. “McCaucus-Bigg needed my help. He paid me, and he threatened me. I’ve a family to feed.”
“My heart weeps for your tribulations, truly. I wish I found them interesting. Where the hell is McCaucus-Bigg?”
MacGregor was silent.
“Where is Lucy Locke?”
MacGregor remained silent.
“Where is Meggie Plum?”
MacGregor remained silent.
“Where is Cora Myrtleberry?”
MacGregor remained silent.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, MacGregor, I will give you to the count of three to tell me, then I will shoot you and search for them myself.”
“Shooting will make too much noise,” he said hopefully.
Chase sighed. And from his sleeve slowly slid the knife into his palm. Those knives had been quite useful since he’d acquired them from his attackers.
MacGregor’s bulging, watery blue eyes fixed upon it, mesmerized. They could all see MacGregor, quite terrified, reflected upside down in the blade. As though the knife had his name on it all along.
“Knives,” Chase clarified evenly, “kill much, much more quietly than pistols.”
“He’ll hurt me. He’ll hurt my family,” the sergeant said in a choked rush. “I don’t want to help him. Mrs. March, he made me write threatening letters. And I’m absolutely terrible at writing threatening letters!”
“I noticed,” Rosalind sympathized.
“He won’t hurt you or your family. I’ll make very damn certain of it.” This was Chase.
MacGregor hesitated, on the brink of decision.
“You want to help, don’t you, MacGregor?”
The odor of the man’s terror sweat rose up. His face was shiny and white and his pointy nose pink, and his Adam’s apple rolled in his throat when he swallowed. He closed his eyes. And then opened them and sighed. “Yes, sir. I truly do.”
“Good. Now tell me what the devil is going on here.”
“The girls…well, they’re arrested and the pretty ones are brought blindfolded through the tun—”
“I know how they get here,” Chase interrupted curtly.
MacGregor didn’t even blink. “This is how it works…They can buy their freedom faster on their backs. After a certain number of…assignations…they are allowed to leave.” He darted a pained, imploring look at Rosalind, whose eyes were nearly black with temper. “Mr. McCaucus-Bigg is rather strict about that rule. There are rooms upstairs for that. The Pleasure Rooms. All the girls are locked into their rooms at night and when they are not administering to a fantasy. But Miss Locke and Miss Plum are locked in rooms on the floors above that. They’ve been given a week to decide whether they wish to…participate. Which is the usual way of things when girls are brought in. Miss Myrtleberry has at last agreed to be a mermaid, but she cannot seem to stop giggling. Mr. Kirkham has found it interferes with his fantasy,” he added superfluously.
So it was indeed Cora Myrtleberry giggling all along, Rosalind realized. An awful thought, knowing her father could hear her and not be able to find her.
“Take us to Lucy and Meggie. I’ll take care of Cora now,” Chase said restlessly, having the same thought.
“Only Mr. McCaucus-Bigg has the keys to the upper rooms.”
Chase thought a moment.
“Perfect. I should very much like to speak to Mr. McCaucus-Bigg. Fetch him, and tell him that Lucy Locke has decided to earn her way out of here on her back, and she’d like him to be her very first.”
“Chase!” Rosalind said softly. A warning. She wasn’t certain he could trust MacGregor.
“I want to see him pay, too, Mrs. March,” MacGregor said simply. “It’s despicable, and I don’t want to be a part of it any longer. You can trust me, sir.”
While they waited for McCaucus-Bigg, they peered into the room where the desultory screams originated. A tableau had been set up: a lovingly crafted pirate ship, Mr. Myrtleberry’s handiwork—complete with sails and a mast, to which was lashed a girl whose dress was torn at the shoulder.
A pirate—or rather, a man dressed as a pirate—was holding a sword to her throat. A fake one, as it turned out, carved from wood and painted to shine in the lamplight.
“Aaaaaah!” she screamed halfheartedly.
“I’ll have you walk the plank for your insubordination, you filthy wench!”
“Aaaaah! Aaaaaah!” She thrashed her head to and fro. In truth, she looked rather bored. She brightened when she saw the little group standing in the doorway.
There was indeed a plank, Chase noted. Beneath it was a bed. Perhaps he did eventually force her to walk a plank.
The atmosphere in the room wasn’t one of danger. It was, in fact, very nearly desultory.
“Are you lost, luv?” she called out. “I’ll be free at quarter past. For you I’ll take the upstairs rooms and work it all off in one night.”
“Cora?” he said softly, hoping for the puppeteer’s sake that it wasn’t. Testing. “Meggie?”
“It’s Cassandra,” she spat. “We’re all alike to you gents, I ken,” she said bitterly.
“If you’re planning to buy your freedom faster on your back, luv, I’m first in line!” said the faux pirate indignantly.
“Bugger off, Cox. There are rules and you know them.”
Apparently everyone there had been apprised of the rules.
“One more ‘Bugger off, Cox’ out of you and I’ll report you to McCaucus-Bigg.” The words were fraught with menace.
There was a pause.
“You know you’re supposed to say, ‘Bugger off, Captain Cook!’” he growled.
“Right!” the woman said resignedly. “Bugger off, Captain Cook!”
“I like it when you talk that way to me, wench! What else would you like me to do to myself? You’re not thrashing enough.”
She thrashed her head obligingly, her red hair flying out moplike against the mast of the ship. “I’d like ye to take that sword and shove it up yer—”
Chase backed away from the door.
Cox. It seemed so strikingly obvious. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it.
They blazed down the hall a few more doors, following the giggling. She was wearing a mermaid tail and a long dark wig that covered the front of her. An irritated Kirkham was dressed as what appeared to be King Neptune. He was holding a trident.
“I don’t know why it’s so funny,” he was saying to the girl.
“Cora?” Chase said carefully.
The mermaid looked up. She had her father’s large round eyes, and a pleasant round face, and her face was pale with fear.
“Eversea!” Kirkham was startled. Even more so when he saw the pointed pistol. He looked at it, then back up at Chase in question.
Chase threw his coat over Cora. “Have you a room here?”
She nodded, puzzled.
“Go up to it and change and get into your clothes. We’ll be leaving. And Kirkham—if I were you, I’d leave very, very quickly. The way you came in.”
“Are we in danger of being discovered?”
“Yes, indeed,” Chase agreed solemnly.
Kirkham fled out the door with his trident.
Rosalind and Chase turned, guns pointed upward, when they heard brisk footsteps coming toward them over the marble. They turned to see a familiar tall, elegant figure.
O. McCaucus-Bigg, as it turned out, was Kinkade.
He slowed when he saw them, his face gone hard and blank, inscrutable. He stopped. And Kinkade turned slowly to look at MacGregor with amused venom.
“Oh, well done, MacGregor,” he said with soft, deadly irony. “Et tu, Brute, and all that.”
Kinkade’s hand made a move for his coat, so subtly one would have missed it. The butt end of the pistol in
his hand came into view.
Chase aimed his own pistol between Kinkade’s eyes. “Drop the pistol.”
Silvery eyes, hot and enigmatic, fixed on Chase for long moments.
Then, with a disgusted oath, he dropped the pistol.
Chase kicked it over to Rosalind, who picked it up.
“Mr. McCaucus-Bigg. Such a pleasure to meet you. You’ll take us to Lucy and Meggie now.”
Kinkade led them up a flight of marble stairs. Three weapons and six pairs of eyes followed his every move.
“Now, Chase,” Kinkade said conversationally over his shoulder, “what can you possibly find to object to in this endeavor? I mean, truly?”
“Kidnapping? Imprisonment? Prostitution?” Chase suggested with black irony.
Kinkade snorted. “Most of the girls are perfectly willing to participate once they learn what’s involved. Those that can’t decide to cooperate within two weeks—which is as long as I’m willing to feed and house a petty criminal—go right back into prison through the same Charley that arrested them in the first place. And those that talk about it…well, there was only the one. And she unfortunately hung straight away, didn’t she, MacGregor? Was found guilty of her crime.”
MacGregor looked ill. He declined to answer.
“I believe she did say a thing or two about a brothel, and captivity, and the like, to prison officials,” Kinkade went on. “It was put down to ravings. She had no one—no family, no husband—and certainly no authorities believed her. She never once heard any of our real names, of course. She couldn’t possibly know the location of his place, as all the girls are brought in blindfolded and kept here. She rather sealed her own fate.”
“Why the devil do this at all?”
“Boredom, Eversea! It costs me very little, all in all. The men are carefully chosen, all known to me. They have a good deal to lose if word gets out, so they’re all scrupulously discreet—and they pay an exorbitant subscription fee, which entitles them to unlimited fantasy enactments with the girl of their choice, and the girl has no choice but to act them out lest we cast her right back into the hands of the magistrate. They generally take on a sort of sexual nature, the fantasies. Only to be expected, mind you. But no servicing is required. The girls who wish to be released sooner must truly earn it. And there are plenty of pretty, petty criminals, Captain, who don’t even blink at the thought of earning their freedom on their backs with their legs in the air, or wherever a gentleman might wish them to put their legs. The rules of conduct are clear, and I’m quite strict and fair, both with the gentlemen and the…ladies.”
Since the Surrender Page 27