Not dissimilar to the Bridewell Prison, the Magdalen comprised four brick buildings forming a square, with a quadrangle in the middle. Yet compassion, not condemnation, was the prevailing principle here: the inmates enrolled of their own volition, the high brick walls designed to keep undesirable elements out. Child spied a few undesirables waiting around outside the gates: pimps and bawds hoping to catch a glimpse of their former charges and entice or bully them back to life on the street.
The heavyset porters on the door examined Child sceptically, probably taking him for a pimp. Judging that they would be impervious to bribery, he presented his card, saying that he was looking into the murder of Lucy Loveless.
‘Poor girl,’ one of the porters said, with a little more warmth.
‘I think she might have come here recently.’ Child showed him Agnetti’s drawing.
The porter nodded slowly. ‘I remember her. What man would forget? She came here about a month ago. I forget the name she used, but it wasn’t Lucy Loveless. She looked and sounded every inch the respectable lady. She talked to Mrs Rainwood, our matron.’
‘Can I talk to Mrs Rainwood? I’m sure she’d want to see this animal caught.’
The porter gave a decisive nod. ‘So would I.’
Child waited in the lobby. When the porter returned, he invited Child to follow him. They walked out into the quadrangle, where several women were taking exercise, strolling arm in arm around a pond. Wearing gowns of sky-blue wool, and small-brimmed hats shielding their faces, their eyes were cast demurely down, and they talked in whispers. Child glimpsed other women at work in the surrounding buildings: sewing or washing laundry, skills to equip them for lives as respectable servants. They walked past a large octagonal chapel, through a door, and up a flight of stairs. The porter knocked at another door on the landing, and received a soft command to enter.
A plump, smiling woman of about thirty rose behind a desk to greet him, extending her gloved hand. ‘My name is Hester Rainwood, matron of the Magdalen. Please, Mr Child, take a seat.’
She had a soft, well-spoken voice, and a round face thickly plastered in white lead paint, with two little circles of rouge painted high on her cheeks. Judging by her sober attire – a high-necked grey gown with a cameo at the throat and a cream house-bonnet – she didn’t seem like the sort of woman who would trick herself out for attention’s sake. He presumed her skin was scarred by pimples or the pox.
The room was small, but comfortably furnished: lace curtains, a bookcase, and a biblical scene over the mantelpiece: Mary Magdalen washing the feet of Christ. A teapot sat next to a fruitcake on the desk. ‘I am afraid you catch me at the guilty hour, sir. Would you care for a slice?’
Child declined, but accepted a cup of tea. While she poured, he repeated the reason for his visit.
‘As my porter told you,’ she said, studying the drawing he’d placed on the desk, ‘this woman did come here about a month ago, but she called herself Mrs Pearson, not Lucy Loveless.’ She sighed, lips downturned in distress. ‘I read about the murder in the newspapers. Such a terrible thing.’
‘Did Lucy come here looking for a prostitute named Kitty Carefree?’
‘Yes. That’s right. How did you know?’
‘I found one of your cards in Lucy’s rooms.’ He pointed to a small stack of identical cards on Mrs Rainwood’s desk. ‘Kitty had talked about giving up her trade, and had lately embraced religion. I knew Lucy was looking for her, and I put two and two together.’
‘Mrs Pearson claimed to be trying to find her estranged sister. Their father had lately died, she said, and she hoped to reconcile with Kitty. Especially as she’d been told that Kitty had recently turned her back on prostitution. I told her we had no inmate here registered under that name, and none who answered her description. Strictly speaking, I should not have provided Mrs Pearson with any information at all, but she was extremely convincing in her distress.’
‘She did not deceive you lightly,’ Child said. ‘Lucy thought Kitty had information about another murder, the victim a young prostitute, just fifteen years old. Now Lucy too is dead, and I fear that Kitty might be next.’
Mrs Rainwood’s eyes widened with concern. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘People are looking for her, and I’m not at all sure they wish her well. But I’ll keep looking too, and I hope to find her first. Can I ask you one other question?’
‘Of course.’
‘It will sound foolish, but do these words and numbers mean anything to you at all? 50–60 pineapples, 2s 1d. It was a note written on the back of Lucy’s Magdalen card. I wondered if it could be connected to her visit here.’
She looked bemused. ‘No, sir. I’m sorry. They do not.’
‘Never mind,’ Child said, a little dejectedly. He’d truly hoped he’d find Kitty here, but it was another dead end. ‘I’m sorry for taking up your time unnecessarily.’ He rose, hand outstretched, but she didn’t take it.
‘Please, sir. Sit down. I have something else to tell you.’
Intrigued, he did so. ‘Madam?’
‘Do you give me your word that you will do nothing to compound the danger for this young woman, Kitty Carefree?’
‘Of course. If I find her, I’ll try to help.’
She took another sip of tea, and set it down, rattling the china. ‘When I told Mrs Pearson – I still struggle to think of her as Lucy Loveless – that her sister wasn’t an inmate here, she asked me if I’d speak to those who were – to see if any of the girls might know Kitty or have an idea where she might be. I was reluctant to do so. We are not supposed to remind our inmates of their former lives, you see. The lure of Mammon and the bottle and the flesh are too near in their minds. We give them counsel, wean them from drink, but the smallest disturbance to their serenity can set them off course. Yet I was moved by Mrs Pearson’s compassion and determination.’ She regarded him seriously. ‘I did not tell you this at first, because I have only been in my post a few months, and I feared my actions could get me in trouble with the governors. But, given what you have told me about the danger this poor girl, Kitty, might face, I cannot in all good conscience remain silent about the little I learned.’
‘Anything you tell me will be in the strictest confidence,’ Child said. ‘I promise you the governors will not hear of it.’
She inclined her head.‘As it transpired, some of the girls here were acquainted with Kitty, though none of them could tell me where she was living now. I wrote and told Mrs Pearson, but I also told her I wouldn’t give up. She had left quite an impression, as you can probably tell. I questioned every new inmate as they came in, with little success until last week, when I spoke to a girl who claimed to have seen Kitty very recently. She was riding in a fine carriage upon the Strand, in the company of an older gentleman. According to the girl’s account, the pair were kissing.’
Child frowned. ‘Then Lucy was wrong? Kitty never reformed at all?’
‘She may have tried,’ Mrs Rainwood said. ‘But change is hard, and poverty grinding, and temptation lies everywhere. My inmate did not get a good look at the gentleman, but she did provide me with a description of the carriage. It was distinctive, she said, lacquered with red, white and blue diamonds, like a harlequin, or a playing card. I thought if Mrs Pearson could find the owner of the carriage, he might be able to provide her with information that would help find her sister. She never replied to my letter, and now I know why. Lucy Loveless would have been dead by the time it arrived.’
Did this mean Kitty was still in London, plying her old trade? If so, it was odd that none of her other friends and acquaintances had seen her. Perhaps, as Mrs Rainwood suggested, she had moved out of Soho with every intention to reform, but had subsequently met a gentleman who’d made her a handsome offer. If her new keeper was a jealous man, the sort who didn’t like his mistress frolicking in the taverns, then it might explain why she hadn’t been seen out on the town. He decided to ask around Soho and Covent Garden, to see if anyon
e remembered seeing this carriage. Given the man was a likely whoremonger, he might be a regular visitor to those parts.
‘Thank you, Mrs Rainwood,’ he said.
‘I pray that you find her.’ She walked out from behind the desk to shake his hand again. ‘If you meet with success, and Kitty hasn’t entirely closed her mind to reform, please tell her that I would happily welcome her to the Magdalen. You said she is a religious woman?’
‘Her servant said she prayed. And she’d been going to church, over at St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe.’
‘The preacher there is a great evangelist,’ Mrs Rainwood said. ‘Do you know what they say? That a person can be cleansed of sin. Born again.’
Child gave a crooked smile. ‘I wish I believed that.’ He paused by the window on his way to the door, gazing down at the women in the yard. A waft of his own brandy-sweat greeted his nostrils. ‘How do you do it?’ he asked. ‘Wean them from drink?’
‘It depends on the woman. For some the bottle is a hedonistic pleasure, and giving them fresh occupation is enough. But for others, girls who have suffered – often unspeakable cruelties – or who are consumed with guilt about all the things they’ve done, the drink serves to deaden the pain of their existence. If they are to fall out of love with liquor, they need first to love themselves.’
Child grimaced. ‘You say it as if it was easy.’
‘I tell them to imagine their life as if it belonged to another. Were they to hear the tale of their own sins, would they condemn, or would they forgive? So often we are kinder to a stranger than we are to ourselves.’
‘And if they heard the sins of that stranger and still felt inclined to condemn? What then?’
Mrs Rainwood smiled at him sadly. ‘I wish I knew.’
CHAPTER FORTY
ON THE GOOD days, Caro’s nausea was less pronounced, her tiredness lifting a little, her spirits livelier. Taking advantage of just such a day, she had spent the morning attending to some household matters that could not wait, and had then taken Gabriel to the park. After lunch, she visited her lawyer, and finding that everything was in order with Mr Agnetti’s contract, she called in at the Craven Bank to withdraw his forty-guinea deposit. Sam then drove her to Agnetti’s house in Leicester Fields. She was hoping to use her visit to Agnetti’s as an excuse to talk to him again, but his manservant informed her that both his master and Miss Willoughby were at Vauxhall Gardens.
‘Then please tell him that I look forward to our first sitting tomorrow.’
Chafing at the delay, seeking another line of inquiry to pursue, she recalled the allegation against Simon Dodd-Bellingham that she’d heard at the duchess’s garden party. Theft was a far cry from murder, but it did speak to character – further suggestion that Simon wasn’t the earnest innocent he appeared.
Other possibilities occurred to her too. The duchess had said that Ansell Ward, Simon’s alleged victim, hadn’t possessed enough evidence to have him charged with any crime. Caro didn’t discount the possibility that this was because Simon was innocent. Yet if he was guilty of this theft, then perhaps Jonathan Stone had found proof of his culpability – evidence that could see him hanging from a rope? Perhaps Simon had been threatened into silence upon the subject of Pamela’s murder, just as Stone had threatened Caro herself the other night. Understanding the ties that bound her suspects together was, to Caro’s mind, imperative if they were ever to snip them loose.
Providentially, Alderman Ward was both a client of the Craven Bank and an old friend of her late father. ‘Lyme Street,’ she told Sam, and as he whipped the horses to a trot, she settled to the jolting tempo of the carriage.
The streets of the City of London swarmed with stockjobbers and clerks, and Company men coming and going from East India House. Caro’s grandfather had once sold groceries from a shop in Lyme Street, and her father had established his first counting house not a stone’s throw from here. ‘City people,’ Louisa’s mother had said with a sniff, when Mordechai had first paid his addresses to her daughter. Yet she’d given her blessing eventually, as Papa had known she would. In London, increasingly, money held court.
Ansell Ward lived in a large half-timbered, leaded-windowed survivor of the Great Fire. A progression of jettying storeys, each larger than the one below, gave the house the appearance of a giant merchant ship – much like the ones that carried Ward’s clocks and pocket watches to China and the Japans. Caro was greeted by a tall bewigged footman with large flared nostrils and an insolent smile. She waited in the hall while he conveyed her request, and then escorted her in to see his master.
Inside, the house was rambling and low-ceilinged, the floors all angles askew, the boards creaking. Caro was shown into Ward’s study, which had so many pictures hanging or pasted to the panelling that barely an inch of oak could be glimpsed between them: maps of the world and the American colonies; plans of battlefields clipped from magazines; a pair of oil paintings depicting patriotic scenes – the death of Major Peirson and the repulse of the Spanish at Gibraltar. Ceramic busts of Admiral Keppel and General Clinton flanked an automaton clock on the mantelpiece.
Beaming, Ansell Ward rose to shake her hand. ‘I remember when your father brought you to the Mansion House for the Farewell Dinner – when was it? ’68? ’69? You told us all you were going to sit in Parliament one day.’ He chuckled.
Given his passion for la guerre, a less martial man than Ward it was hard to imagine. Small, soft and smiling, with a white, pitted face like bread dough, he wore a pastel-blue suit like a little boy dressed up for church. Caro fielded his inquiries about Ambrose with practised dexterity, and when he asked after Mordechai, she seized the opening it offered.
‘As it happens, I am here on my brother’s account. Mordechai wishes to expand his library and is thinking of engaging Simon Dodd-Bellingham for the task. I believe he worked on your own library?’
Immediately she sensed his unease. The fingers of one hand tapped on the table in double time to the clock, while the other slid back and forth between his chins and his cravat. ‘Dodd-Bellingham, yes. I would counsel against it.’
She blinked, as if in surprise. ‘Can I ask why?’
‘You may, though it’s not a pleasing tale. About eighteen months ago, I purchased a large lot of rare books at auction, which needed cataloguing. I hired Dodd-Bellingham for the task, and for three months he fulfilled his duties quite satisfactorily. Then I discovered that a pair of jade figurines had gone missing from my library. It soon became obvious to me who was responsible.’
‘Not Mr Dodd-Bellingham? Good heavens.’
‘I couldn’t prove it, or I’d have involved the law. But I know it was him. He was one of only two people who had the opportunity, the other being a servant who has been with me for years. And it is well known the boy has debts. My wife was convinced of his guilt, and she is an excellent judge of character. He’d been at the sherry decanter too, we think.’
‘I must say, you surprise me,’ Caro said. ‘Simon always struck me as a trustworthy, if rather pitiful, creature. And he is so very passionate about his work.’
‘Oh, he puts on a good show, but that’s all it is – a wicked masquerade intended to deceive the unwary. I suppose it’s hardly surprising. His mother was little better than a common harlot. Thievery and drunkenness must flow through his veins.’ He shook his head. ‘But I don’t mind admitting that it upset me greatly at the time. I admire the name Dodd-Bellingham, you see. That’s why I chose Simon in the first place. His father, the late colonel, fought alongside Clive at Plassey. And his brother, Edward, further adorns the family tree. Did you know the King is to award him the Order of the Bath?’
Caro smiled politely. ‘The lieutenant saved a starving camp, isn’t that right?’
‘In the winter of ’76 to ’77, a few months after the recapture of New York.’ He jumped up to point to one of his maps. ‘General Howe had established a string of outposts across New Jersey, from the Hudson here to the Delaware there. Dodd-Bellingham
was stationed at a godforsaken little hole named Van der Linden’s Mill, along with three hundred British regulars. All around was neutral ground and a bitter winter ensued, rebel militia scouring the countryside looking for British foraging parties to pick off. Our troops were receiving the worst of it, and so Howe ordered the northern outposts to fall back to the Hudson River. But Van der Linden’s Mill was cut off by the snow, in a dire situation.
‘All through January, into February, those brave men held out, harried by enemy militia whenever they ventured forth. Food dwindled and disease was rife, men dying in their beds or at their station. But their commander refused to surrender, which would have meant losing six valuable cannons to the enemy. They would stand their ground or die trying – as English lions. The end seemed all but certain, when Lieutenant Dodd-Bellingham took it upon himself to act. He took six of the strongest, bravest men, and they crept out, under cover of darkness, through enemy lines. They captured a supply train against overwhelming odds, and rode the wagons back disguised as rebel militia. That food kept the company alive until the thaw. They say His Majesty himself likes to recount the story.’
So too, it seemed, did Ansell Ward. Catching himself, he smiled, cheeks dimpling. ‘Do forgive me, Mrs Corsham. My wife says I love a battle more than pound cake.’ He sighed. ‘And now the fruits of that sacrifice are to be bartered and sold at Versailles like so many trade beads. Menorca for Grenada, and so forth. Oh, I don’t blame men like your husband. They are merely cleaning up the mess the Cabinet made. Those gentlemen aren’t fit to lick the boots of Captain Corsham and Lieutenant Dodd-Bellingham.’
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