Instead, I located Wentworth Street, a road that bypassed many of the larger factories now gone quiet save for the boiling cloud of smoke and soot that some still spewed into the night. Voices and figures were more plentiful here, although none bore the distinctive mark of Society. Not here. Them that wanted company would choose the stews or Limehouse, not the often pox-riddled flesh of the Spitalfields doxies.
By the time I found Mr. Chattersham’s given address, I was unsurprised to learn it led to a dark textile factory, its windows blackened and only a single light burning above a wide wooden door across a gaping courtyard stripped of anything aesthetically pleasing. Broken stone and discarded rubble told a tale of landscaping gone utterly ignored, and the dilapidated facings engendered some doubt as to the ability of Mr. Chattersham to pay such a large purse.
Although I stepped into the open gate easily enough, I hesitated just inside, suddenly loathe to reveal myself to the struggling lamplight over the stained door.
This was most assuredly a place of work. If this were true, then Mr. Chattersham would like as not be home, abed, like any other working man not currently involved with a dollymop’s charms.
Doubt assailed me.
What would I do? I could leave and return by day, but this seemed a dangerous prospect at best, and more likely to turn my newfound profession less a secret. Yet I could not guess where Mr. Chattersham made his home, and so I could not go to speak to him direct.
Hawke had made clear that he would not help me, and Mr. Strangeway seemed less than inclined to save his own skin—or turn it in.
I huffed out a dry, scratchy breath, then cleared my throat again when it only made the tickle at the back worse.
The stench was stronger here, thick with coal drift and the remnant pong of the nearby tanneries. My journey had been pleasant enough, as opium made most things bearable that might otherwise be considered a chore, but I was becoming increasingly aware of the pain in my side, and the stiffness of my toes in my boots. I was cold, beginning to ache from head to heel and more than a little frustrated with the nature of this collection.
Ready to give up, I took a deep breath.
Only to exhale it on a hard cough, partially a scream, as a gloved hand slipped over my mouth. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” muttered a voice I recognized.
It was this that saved him a bolloxing—or myself the discomfort of attempting one—for as he allowed me to turn, disengaging from his grasp, I scowled my outrage at Mr. Strangeway.
I found him made of metal.
It should not have surprised me. In a way, it did not. The knowledge of all that I’d missed clicked into place like a cog whose teeth finally merged with that of its working brothers. Yet that very fact I’d been the one to assume galled. “You,” I hissed, because everything else seemed too complicated to voice.
Although the bucket-like helmet was tucked under one arm, the rest of his apparel was so odd as to be nearly impossible to pick out. Where I expected a finished edge, there was only a solid piece of worked brass, etched with the scars of previous troubles. The dingy color did nothing to help my gaze take in detail, but I identified elements of resin across the shoulders, worked into plating on the arms.
Once more, I recognized the creak of leather as he shifted his weight, and I remembered the bit of leather at Mr. Strangeway’s throat earlier today.
I could have spit nails, I was that frustrated with my own blindness. “You should have told me,” I all but snarled.
“My dear lass, why ever for?” His features had lost their laconic ease, his eyes now fully open and all but black in the shadows. The pale edges of his features looked sharp as I’d never seen them, even when he’d give me his earlier attention. “The question I retain, now, is what in the devil’s hairy tits are you doing here?”
I planted my fisted hands upon my hips, thrusting out my chin. Hirsute bosom or no, the devil would have more than this to answer for, if I had any say. “I’d told you I planned to collect you.”
“Weren’t you told to leave it?”
“Not by anyone that has a say.”
His mouth quirked into a slant that was almost sympathetic. “You’re an odd bird, lass. And too bloody stubborn.” He turned a bit, just enough to glance back the way he’d come—the same way I’d come, to be sure, and that was enough to give me a bit of a shudder. Had he been behind me the whole time, then?
As he turned back, the faint light from the struggling lamp caught on the golden handle of a firearm that had not been there when first we’d met—collector to what I’d assumed was collector.
I gasped. “What are you carrying?”
The question seemed to disconcert him somewhat. “What?”
“There.” I pointed to his hip, and the wide-mouthed holster affixed to his leg. “That was empty when first we met.”
Reflexively, or so it seemed to me, he covered the grip with one hand. “She’s just here for a bit of reassurance.”
It looked wickedly heavy, and more than a little dangerous. From the leather straps holding it in place, I saw bits of copper piping, polished wood and what seemed like wires running along the haft.
My eyes widened. I took a hasty step back, which placed me perilously close to the edge of our shadowed nook, even as I struggled to keep my expression away from the shaft of fear suddenly spiraling inside my belly.
Had he come to kill Mr. Chattersham? Was this my doing?
He must have understood more than I let on, for the look he gave me was pained. “I assure you, I did not come here to murder you in the dark.” Not quite what I’d been thinking, but as he added, “I’d no idea you’d be here, else I might have been better equipped,” my temper bent.
“Now you look here,” I said hotly, this time taking a step forward—an awkward dance in the fog-choked depths of Spitalfields. “You are the quarry who chose to make things difficult. ’Tis not my fault that you’re the fool in debt.” In a role real or imagined, debt was debt, and must be paid.
Obligation was the sort of thing that greased the gears of street society, and it could kill a body as easy as help him. One did not allow one’s debts to languish.
His head tipped back, free hand going to cup his own forehead as if it ached. “God save me from stubborn lasses.” The tone suggested he’d met more than a few. Finally, he lowered his hands—but kept them away from his weapon as I jumped, wary as a rabbit. “Listen to me,” he said softly, moderating his voice to a gentle note. “I am here to right a wrong.”
I glared at him, mouth sealed tightly. He’d have to do better than that to convince me to let him go. I was not so far gone that I’d simply waltz into any man’s ream of thin excuses.
He must have sensed it, for Mr. Strangeway pointed beyond me, to the looming factory. “That is a textile mill, owned by one man, but maintained by its foreman, Barnaby Chattersham. A foreman that has been acquiring young girls for its manufacturing. Girls not unlike you.”
“Bollocks,” I replied—with, I might add, no small amount of relish. He winced. “’Twould be a pox on any toff fool enough to sign off on a foreman’s requests without knowing the thing.”
“The thing,” he replied, mimicking my haughty tone with emphasis, “is much more complex than you aspire to think it. Until you are in possession of a business, you cannot know.”
“Enlighten me,” I challenged.
“Saints take you,” he growled. “Fine, but pay close attention.”
Chapter Eleven
Strangeway gestured, once more taking in the black about us. “This is one of many founts of commerce for the lord, and one of many foremen to do the work. Foremen are chosen to maintain each factory and send the coin on after his share, and so a man of business puts his trust in his men. Pox it may be, but he’s floating in wealth while you and I are left to reason why.”
I narrowed my stinging eyes. “What does this have to do with your girls?”
“Stolen labor is akin to slave labor,�
�� he said succinctly. “Parliament may have abolished slavery on paper, but it has not lessened the need. Girls stolen and unaccounted work for less than the workers now clamoring across the empire for union.”
I studied him. “You are making this up, sir.”
“I am not.” He gestured round the darkened courtyard with the helmet, faceplates glinting. “Look around you. Does this look like the sort of property a lord with a rich purse would maintain? That bounty is beyond a foreman’s means, it’s a mere trap. I am telling you the truth in the hopes that you, thickheaded thing that you are, might actually give a toss for your own well-being.”
I would, if I believed it. I didn’t. Men like Mr. Strangeway often fibbed for whatever devious purposes they maintained. “You have no evidence.”
“I don’t—!” Abruptly, he cut off his pitched snarl, scrubbing his hand down his face as if suddenly exhausted.
I folded my arms over my chest, feeling both awkward and righteous. After all, he was the quarry. He would say anything to save his skin.
Except...
What if he were right?
It seemed to me that any man who dressed in such outlandish gear might know a thing or two more than I did. Dressed like that, he expected trouble—and to have the tools to make armor of brass and resin indicated a certain amount of intelligence otherwise lacking from what I assumed a run-of-the-mill quarry might possess.
Did Mr. Chattersham know of Mr. Strangeway’s interest?
Perhaps, now that I looked about more thoroughly, it made a certain sense that a man who allowed his premises to fall to such disrepair could not afford the bounty posted.
Perhaps it was all a trap after all. If that were the case, then I had been lied to—yes, again—and this was a mantle I tired of bearing. “Are you even J. F. Strangeway?” I demanded. “Is that truly your name?”
His gaze held mine, now more imploring than exasperated—and filled with more than a hint of steel. “My Christian name is John, but I’m no relation to the family I’d claimed. There are many Johns and enough Strangeways of Irish descent to fill the role. It was an excellent mask, wouldn’t you say?”
I would, and was rather impressed by the courage it took to maintain such a charade. It certainly proved that Society would bend trust to the point of foolishness if it were for the right appearances. A disgraced heir returned to the site of his family’s falling was too delicious a rumor to pass up.
“Why are you involved?” I asked, frowning. “Are you even a collector?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I’d heard the phrase and realized using it would absolve all manner of sins.”
Tricky, that. And dangerous, if another collector got ahold of him for it. “What does the Fenian Brotherhood care for all this?”
“They don’t, obviously,” came his surprising reply, and this with a hard note of anger to it. “I had hoped to use their connections to help me locate the trail, but they...had other plans. I admit that I knew of their intent to set the dynamite, but I swear to you that I had gone to that train to end the threat.”
“Are you a Fenian by choice?” I demanded.
“Not as such. My ties to the Brotherhood are slim, at best, and mostly by heritage.”
“Then if they don’t care, and you aren’t tied to their cause, why would you care about a passel of taken girls?” I was proud of myself for that bit of deduction. If he were simply here to murder a man, surely he would not have thought of that little gap in reasoning.
He met my eyes with a rare forthrightness I found astonishing. “Chattersham’s men took my sister’s daughter.”
Oh. Oh, bollocks. That was something different altogether. I steeled myself, faced him down and asked, “But you did not know ’twas Chattersham?”
“No.” He glanced up at the sky, the faint light picking out his trimmed beard in glints of red. “After I received my sister’s frantic letter, I returned to Ireland to help her and her man search. For months, we searched for my niece’s trail.”
“What of your friend?”
“Smoot?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Unbeknownst to us both, we were on the same search, though for different reasons. His began in America, while mine took me from Ireland and led me across the ocean, here to London.”
Each word plucked a chord of sympathy within me, but I gritted my teeth. “Why now?” I asked. “Why only move against Chattersham now?”
Mr. Strangeway looked away. “It took me a long time to trace the matter to London low, and with the trail cold, I’d all but given up on the whole. That is, until Smoot’s contacts brought him word of a likely culprit.”
Was Mr. Smoot an American authority of some kind? Or simply a privateer on his own? I resolved to ask, but later. “Who was your suspect?”
Now, he shook his head. “I will not drag a good man’s name down to the muck.”
That was less than helpful.
“Leave it by saying that he is a lord to whom I spent a great deal of time indebting myself,” he continued, “only to find that he was utterly innocent of wrongdoing.”
“Bosh,” I said, repeating Mr. Smoot’s dry disbelief in the same tone he’d used on me. This time, Strangeway’s teeth flashed in what could have been a grimace, but might have been a grin. “No lord is free of wrongdoing.”
“You’ve a mouth that will earn you a drubbing, girl,” he said, but without heat. “Aye, I admit to thinking the same as you. I set about turning myself into the type of man a lord up to his fine mustache in slavery might have a use for. I began as a disgraced heir, the better to have access to the clubs and dens he attended, and I proceeded to lose all but my shirt in the same dens. The stews came to know me by name, and the lord came to know the sound of my purse emptying night after night. It was my hope that he would ask from me in service what I could not pay in coin or property.” He grunted, half impatience and half something that seemed rather like amusement. “Then you showed your filthy face, and I realized that my debts had caught up in ways I had not accounted for.”
“That’s what you deserve,” I replied primly, hands on my hips. “Only a fool plays with debt.”
“Aye, well, while I played the fool, I had him investigated thoroughly.” If Strangeway felt at all reproached, he did not allow me to see the mark. “The lord is a gambler and a bit of a reprobate, but he is innocent. His business ventures, however...”
When he let that trail, my chin dropped. I could follow his thought easily, for it would have been the same thoughts I would entertain, were I in his shoes. I closed my eyes. A minor relief from the ongoing sting. “Of all his ventures, you could not be sure which was the culprit without a clue to follow,” I filled in for him.
“A clue you provided,” he allowed. “For which I owe some gratitude, at least. There is no reason in this world for Barnaby Chattersham to want me dead. Even were it for debts, he would get no coin from a corpse.”
A lesson I would take to heart. When all else failed, I learned that night to follow the coin.
His tone flattened, gone tight with an intensity I could not imagine feigning. “Now do you understand? Somehow, by own folly or Chattersham’s allies, my hand was tipped and you were tricked into doing his dirty work for him. Good Irish girls are missing, lass. Scared, alone, and a long way from home.”
I felt the urge to hit something. A wall, a tree. Mr. Strangeway’s metal-covered chest. I settled for pushing my fist into my own palm. “Bloody bells and damn.”
The relief upon his features as I looked up nearly undid me there and then.
If the bit about his niece was simple Irish blarney, he was a deucedly good actor. I sighed. “Very well.”
“You will let me go?”
“No.”
Like magic, the exasperation was back, etched in aggrieved lines around his whisker-bracketed mouth.
“But,” I continued, smiling because I could not help the little thrill of satisfaction his reaction gave me, “I will help you.”
What emotions warred in his face shuttered. “No.”
“You lack the choice,” I assured him, ignoring him as he folded his arms over his chest like some forbidding father. “I will go with you, and we shall cover more territory together than if I were working against you, don’t you think?”
A tic in his jaw, just under his eye, told me I’d scored a hit he didn’t like. “It’s not safe.”
“Yes, which is why you should not go alone.” I paused, frowning. “Where is Mr. Smoot?”
“Captain Smoot,” he replied, stressing the title I’d refused to afford, “is at Chattersham’s home. I have it on good authority that the man himself has been delivered an invite to the Menagerie this very night.” Clever, clever Hawke. I admired that much. “Smoot will be searching for evidence at Chattersham’s home, while I attend to this mill.”
I nodded, as if this were perfectly reasonable, and ignored the stress he placed upon the individual goal. “Then it is you and I. Shall we?”
“How many times—”
“You go knowing that I am beside you,” I said, thrusting out my jaw and folding my arms over my chest, “or you go knowing that I will not be far behind you. The choice is yours, sir.”
He wasted no more time arguing. Instead, as he turned the helmet over in his hands, he muttered, “Bloody difficult females. Saints preserve me from the lot.” It went on like this, his voice changing as he pulled the helmet tight over his head. Suddenly, I was looking not at Mr. Strangeway, but a faceless, expressionless mask whose very arrangement afforded more intimidation than Strangeway’s own visage.
He tapped the side of the bucket-like covering. “If you’re so bloody-minded about this, you ought to consider protection of a kind,” he told me.
“Perhaps I should.” I would, inspired by this man, but it would take me some time to work out what would become my collecting corset. “First, let us concentrate on our task at hand.”
“I shall go in via the door,” he told me. “You, find a window.”
I could not argue with that. Clad as he was, it was simply good thinking that placed him square in view, while allowing me to circle about and come in undetected.
The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway Page 8