Secrets in Scarlet

by Erica Monroe

  “One of us needs to alert the police.” His voice held hesitancy she didn’t recognize, so used to his certainty. “Are you feeling better, love?”

  She nodded. Of the two tasks, she’d much prefer fetching the Met. She’d do almost anything if it meant she didn’t have to go into that house again.

  “The station house is on Wood Street. Go there and ask for Sergeant Strickland. Make sure he is the one who comes here with you.” He slipped a coin in her hand. “Take the hack.”

  Normally, she would have protested this extravagance, but at this point she couldn’t fathom crossing any sort of distance on foot. In the carriage, at least, she could rest. She’d keep her eyes open because in the darkness, she’d see Effie’s prone body again.

  She had to keep reminding herself it had been an accident.

  Once, she’d been innocent. Now, she didn’t know what she was. She was not the same woman she’d been before she stepped across that threshold tonight. But she had the love of a good man, a precocious daughter, and her family. While her problems wouldn’t immediately disappear, it was a start.

  She strode toward the hack stand. Blood moved in her veins, and her feet pounded the ground. Anna’s family would get justice. No one in London would know of Moira’s true parentage.

  Poppy rubbed at the spot on her head where Effie’s fingers had dug in. She was alive. Despite many attempts to end her, she had survived.

  She’d emerge brand new from this trauma, as a phoenix did from the ashes. She’d known pain, fear, and sadness, for they’d been her constant companions since that night two years ago. And in the last weeks she’d come to know violence and greed, their claws sinking deep into the depths of her soul.

  But now, she knew love and she knew laughter. She’d hold onto the quiet moments with Moira and Thaddeus, and that happiness would be enough to banish the darkness.

  She’d found a lantern to light her way.

  A week later, Thaddeus was surprised at the knock on the front door of Poppy’s cottage. He wasn’t expecting anyone. Poppy was in the bedroom, placing fresh linens on the bed. Edna was visiting a neighbor—she’d been spending a lot of time with the elderly bachelor two doors down.

  “Shall we see who it is?” he asked Moira, looking down at her. Bouncing on his hip, she peered up at him with wide green eyes, so like her mother’s.

  He stepped to the window and pulled back the shade. There was Strickland, dressed in his blues, checking his pocket watch as he waited. Thaddeus readjusted his hold on Moira, opening the door with his free hand.

  Strickland entered, his smirk fading as he glanced about the room. “Bloody hell, you’ve gone domestic.”

  Thaddeus followed Strickland’s gaze. The living room was in a state of absolute disarray. Moira’s toys were scattered across the floor: blocks, a rag ball, the clothespin doll, and a few new stuffed animals Thaddeus had procured from various secondhand shops.

  It was a bloody, bloody mess without any order.

  And Thaddeus loved every single part of it.

  Moira’s fists grasped his coat, taking in handfuls of cloth. She let out a piercing shriek, wiggling in his arms.

  Strickland covered his ears, grimacing.

  Thaddeus chuckled, setting Moira down in the tent he’d created for her from two old sheets and a few sticks from the courtyard. It was Moira’s new favorite place to play, now that he’d convinced Poppy to get rid of that damned blanket with the paint stain.

  Strickland hurried to the other corner of the room, as far away from the babe as he could get. Only when Moira was fully occupied with her blocks did Strickland unclasp his ears. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat, still eyeing Moira suspiciously.

  “You, getting married,” Strickland marveled with a low whistle. “Never thought I’d see that day. I was convinced your books would be your bedfellows forever.”

  “What do you think is in all those boxes?” Thaddeus pointed to the wall that bordered the bedroom, where the crates were stacked four wide and up to the ceiling. “There’s more back at my townhouse, of course. These were what I couldn’t live without.”

  Thaddeus had begun to move his things into Poppy’s cottage, in preparation for their upcoming marriage at the end of the month. Though there’d been more space, the townhouse had become irrevocably associated with Effie Larker’s death. He’d hated seeing Poppy wince when she’d brought Strickland back to the house to arrest Clowes. And if he was going to be completely truthful, he hated every night he spent in that godforsaken place away from her.

  Strickland wandered over to the boxes, crouching to read the labels. “Shakespeare, gothics, behavioral studies…” He straightened, his nose wrinkling. “What kind of man doesn’t own a single adventure novel? Bloody hell, with books like these, I’m surprised you survived the Larkers.”

  “I’ll have you know Shakespeare wrote many thrilling scenes,” Thaddeus objected. “How much more exciting can you get than the execution of Julius Caesar?”

  Strickland considered this for a moment. “Not exactly what I had in mind, but it’ll restore some of my faith in you.”

  “God knows that was going to keep me awake at night,” Thaddeus laughed. He walked to the table, gesturing for Strickland to take a seat across from him. The table and chairs were one of the few surfaces in the room not covered by his things. “As much as I enjoy watching you be bested by a babe, I take it this isn’t a social call?”

  Strickland sat down at the table. He leaned forward, elbows resting on the table. “I’ve caught Larker.”

  Poppy came forth from the bedroom, dirty sheets bundled up in her arms. “Sergeant Strickland, I thought I heard you,” she said warmly, setting the sheets down on the settee. In a few seconds she had reached their gathering at the table.

  Taking the seat next to Thaddeus, Poppy reached for his hand, her fingers tightening around his.

  Strickland stood and doffed his top hat; sketching such an elaborate bow one would have thought he was meeting Queen Adelaide. “Ah, the famous redhead. We meet again.”

  “Enough of that,” Poppy replied. “I am no grand lady, thankfully. We’re a simpler sort here.”

  “Very well,” Strickland agreed. “I was telling Thaddy that we found Larker. Caught him today in a brothel in Seven Dials. After a bit of, shall we say, persuasive questioning, the abbess said he’d been there since he found out about his wife’s death.”

  Poppy swallowed. Thaddeus squeezed her hand. In the past week, she’d woken up three times with nightmares. But as each day passed, she’d become stronger, more like herself again.

  “The magistrate has already signed off on his arrest,” Strickland continued. “The trial date has been expedited, due to Whiting’s involvement. The superintendents are hoping that if we can get this done and over with soon, the newspapers will forget that the Met ever had a corrupt inspector.”

  “Good luck with that,” Thaddeus replied. “The people already have no love for Peelers. This is another spark to an already burning fire.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” Strickland sighed. “But that’s another matter I wanted to discuss with you. Don’t suppose you’d come back to your old job?”

  Thaddeus blinked. He hadn’t expected an offer from Strickland.

  Strickland squirmed in his chair, no longer looking so comfortable. “The thing is, I’ve been promoted to inspector. After Whiting’s guilt was discovered, they needed someone to take his place immediately. Well, you were already dismissed, and I was the next in line.”

  “I see,” Thaddeus said, sensing that Strickland wanted some sort of reply.

  “But there’s still Doughty’s job to think of in the future. It won’t be long until he retires.” Strickland looked from him to Poppy and back again. “It’d be a better salary, Thaddy. You could move somewhere nice.” He wet his lips with his tongue. “Er, not that this place isn’t nice…”

  Poppy smiled at that, unabashed by his reaction. “No of
fense taken, Inspector. The rookeries are not for everyone.”

  The acceptance that had been on the tip of Thaddeus’s tongue tasted false. When he’d taken up with the Met three years prior, it had been because he’d wanted to change the world. He’d thought then that the best way to do it was with the police. In the past few weeks, he’d watched as power was wielded to extend corruption and punish the innocent.

  As an inspector, he’d have some chance to right those wrongs. But he’d be investigating the same people that Poppy associated with daily. Her family would be at risk from him. How could he expect to be accepted as a part of Poppy’s life—in Moira’s life—if he put them all in danger?

  And as a member of the Met, he’d be forced to go after the cases the department wanted him to, not the cases that he wanted to solve. He couldn’t choose to help more Anna Moseleys. Was that what he wanted from his life? To be bound by someone else’s dictates?

  “No,” he said, as much in answer to his own questions as Strickland’s proposal. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can come back to the Met. Thank you for the offer, but it’s complicated.”

  Strickland’s jaw had dropped slightly. “All you ever wanted, Thaddy, was to be an inspector.”

  Thaddeus exchanged a glance with Poppy, her eyes offering him silent support. “I want different things now.”

  “Women,” Strickland retorted, with a shake of his head. “Never met a lad who didn’t end up turned around by a dimber chit.” He stood, going to the door.

  Thaddeus shook his hand. “If you end up with cases you’re stuck on, give me a call. I’ll help you out. But that’s all.”

  Strickland nodded. “Goodbye, soon-to-be Mrs. Knight,” he called.

  As the door shut behind Strickland, Poppy came to stand next to Thaddeus. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she laid her head on his back. “I’m proud of you. And I’ve been thinking.”

  He tilted his head to look down at her. “About what?”

  She smiled coyly. “How you might continue to investigate.”

  “If I work for the Met, then I’m more than likely going to end up on a case that involves someone you know.”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “Why do you have to work for the Met to investigate? Why can’t you hire yourself out privately? I have heard that aristocrats hire the Runners. Why couldn’t they hire you instead?”

  He considered this for a moment. “And that would leave me room to take cases not for profit from people in the rookeries.”

  “Precisely,” she agreed. “You’d set your own hours, which would be quite a bonus if we want to add another addition to our family…”

  He spun her around, so she faced him. “Are you saying what I think you are saying?”

  Her smile fell slightly. “No. I’m not with child, at this moment, at least.”

  Bringing her closer to him, he planted a kiss on her forehead. “Disappointing, yes, but perhaps it was not the right time.”

  Grabbing his hand, she brought him over to Moira’s tent. She reached down, lifting Moira up.

  “But the right time will come.” Poppy caught Moira’s hand in her own, waving the babe’s chubby arm at Thaddeus. “And it’ll be wonderful, Thaddeus. Because we’ll have each other, always.”

  As he stood there, next to the two people who had come to mean more to him than anyone else in the world, it hit him that he’d finally found the family he’d been looking for all his life. Here, in this cottage, with his books scattered about in complete disarray and crates crammed into every available space, he’d found home.

  A home he never wanted to leave, for it was no longer just a sanctuary away from the deafening outside, but a hearth. Here, he could be imperfect. They’d have battles and they’d have the blissful mornings of apologies and devotion. This was not a love of the poets, but a love that would transcend and become stronger from those struggles.

  He’d learned that home was wherever Poppy was.

  “Tell me, Poppy,” he said, sliding behind her to rub her shoulders. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

  Epilogue

  They married in the small chapel on Red Lion Street. Despite the protests of Thaddeus’s parents, who claimed every Knight for the past two hundred years had been married in the same Anglican church in London proper, the ceremony was everything Poppy had ever wanted in a wedding.

  Poppy no longer feared the future but looked forward to it with wide eyes and open arms. She’d pledged her troth to the one man she was certain understood her.

  Together, they’d be unstoppable. Thaddeus’s investigative business had started a few days prior, and he already had several cases. At night, she wove on the small hand loom Thaddeus had purchased for her, this time for the sheer joy of creating something beautiful from nothing. Though the factory had passed into new ownership, Thaddeus had insisted it was more important that she get to spend as much time with Moira as possible.

  As they walked out of the church hand in hand, the guests flooded the street behind them, thieves and Peelers. For one day, the two sides of the law declared a truce to celebrate the nuptials of their past sergeant and the scarlet woman who no longer had so many secrets to hide.

  And it was glorious, every last minute of it, but nothing was as beautiful as coming home to their cottage on Finch Street as husband and wife.

  In the story of her life, Poppy had opened a new chapter, better than anything she’d ever expected.

  Author’s Note

  The 1830’s are a fascinating decade for English history for many, many reasons. The country hadn’t shifted fully toward the morals of the later Victorian era, but the people started to separate from the Regency mindset as well. Particularly of note is the view of bastard children in England. What Poppy experienced is similar to many different accounts of women who had children out of wedlock, though of course I have dramatized it and changed it to fit the confines of my story. To be a ruined woman in England was a dismaying place in society to inhabit.

  While I can’t find record of a particular Magdalen asylum in Surrey, these institutions existed in both Ireland and England at this time. They began originally as homes for prostitutes, but eventually expanded toward all fallen women and women who’d hit upon hard times. The asylums provided food and shelter, yes, but the women were often made to labor without little—or any—payment. The Magdalen laundries existed well into the twentieth century.

  Further evidence of change in society can be attributed to the Industrial Revolution. This brought a migration to the cities and new advances in machinery. I touch on a few inventions in this book, but there’s so much more to this period that I couldn’t fit within the framework of Secrets in Scarlet.

  Poppy and Thaddeus live in Spitalfields, London. This little pocket of the East End was at this period in time considered a rookery, for great economic downturn had passed through the area. Once, Spitalfields was a teeming community of Huguenot weavers, who had emigrated from the great weaving cities in France of Lyons and Tours. Those weavers benefited from London’s desire for lustrings, velvets, brocades, satins, paduasoys, mantuas, and of course silk. A series of acts throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries made it harder to import fabrics from France, and so the weavers became more in demand.

  The repeal of the Spitalfields Weaving Acts in the 1820’s struck the small weaving community hard. Coming upon the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the weavers no longer had the financial control they’d maintained over England’s silk industry for centuries. The call for mechanization took hold, and these hand loom weavers who had grown up perfecting this one tedious, delicate way of weaving were left unable to match the easier, less taxing efforts of the mechanized looms. The need for so many weavers was gone. Families were left without incomes, forced to find new jobs in an already highly overpopulated city. Some families, like the Vautilles, went to work in the factories, while others turned to different trades.

  Previously, weaving had be
en a family vocation, with each member of the family involved. The children served as a draw boys for the hand looms, while the adults worked the shuttles, etc. One type of mechanized loom that I mention throughout Secrets in Scarlet, the Jacquard loom, required no draw boy. Though it’s often referred to as a “Jacquard loom,” it’s actually an attachment that can be used with many mechanical looms. It could be operated by one person, and because of its punch card system, suddenly it was possible to work complex patterns into the silk without having to reset the loom each time. The Jacquard loom, invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, is one of the most fascinating pieces of machinery out there and the basic structure of it is still in use in today’s fabric industry. In fact, the Jacquard loom has been cited as having a great impact on the development of computers.

  While the structure of a factory like the Larkers’s could have existed in London, most textile manufacturing moved out to Manchester and Lancashire. There, large cotton and weaving factories were run, utilizing steam power. In Secrets in Scarlet, because the Larker factory is set in Spitalfields, steam power isn’t used.

  And one last note: until the creation of Scotland Yard later in the nineteenth century, London had no real detective force. The Metropolitan Police, created in 1828, were put into place to prevent crime. The belief behind their establishment was that increased patrolling of the streets, organization between districts, etc. would effectively eradicate crime before it could ever happen. They may not have been entirely successful in accomplishing these goals, but the crime rate did decrease after the founding of the Met.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a second book is an odd experience, one I approached half in excitement and half in gut-wrenching fear that I only had one story to tell ever.

  Yet, somehow, I found people who believed in my writing enough to keep hounding me until the book was done. Thank you, thank you, to every single person who contacted me at some point and said they wanted to read Thaddeus and Poppy’s story. You’re what kept me going (because let’s face it, narcissistic I am).