Deep into his thoughts and hurrying along to get the unpleasant meeting over, he nearly missed the street. He’d never forget the night he’d run all the way there from the house nearly a mile away where he’d been staying with Maria while she waited to give birth to their unwanted child. When she’d first begun increasing, her husband had banished her from their exclusive Mayfair townhome in Grosvenor Square. He’d told their acquaintances she was visiting family in Edinburgh.
While awaiting Dee’s birth, he’d been nothing more than a boy, wracked with guilt at having put the woman he thought he loved in such a predicament. In the midst of grieving Maria after her death, though, the midwife had put Dee into his arms and just like that, his life had changed forever. He’d carefully trailed his fingers over the silky gold strands of fine hair atop her tiny head, almost like a duckling. He’d breathed in the baby smell that was Dee’s alone, and then he’d forced himself to take her to the foster family Mrs. Bertram had arranged for him. She’d said it was important that he not take her to anyone else claiming to care for babies.
Two years before, he’d worked with another Bow Street investigator on one of the most hideous crimes imaginable. Baby farms. Several women and one man had built a business of taking money to shelter babies…and then murdering them.
After that case, nightmares had haunted him nightly. When he’d finally found his daughter, he’d crouched down to see her better and Dee had toddled right into his arms, as if she knew what he’d known all along. They belonged together. Although he hadn’t warned his valet in advance, when Col had walked into their modest two-room quarters with Dee’s arms around his neck, George had taken one look at Dee and said, “We’re going to need more room.”
Re-tracing his steps, Col finally found the number - Fifty-Five Prince Street. When he dropped the brass door knocker with a loud bang, a woman leaned out of a second-floor window. “Who be you and wot be your business?” she demanded.
“I’m looking for the midwife, Mrs. Bertram.”
“Got your girl in the family way, eh?”
“No. I need to discuss some private business with her.”
“Well, that’ll be harder than you think.”
“Where is she?”
“In the graveyard, over at St. Michael’s on the square.”
Col’s stomach dropped, and he struggled to breathe for a moment. “What happened?”
“Dunno. They found ‘er floatin’ in the river.” With that macabre pronouncement, she threw a pail of slop into the street gutter below, narrowly missing Col’s head, before slamming shut the window shutters.
He swore a colorful oath and left in search of another hack to take him to the nearest magistrate.
* * *
Charlotte’s moodreflected the fast-moving clouds outside: gray and dirty and looking for a walloping bout.
Margot had collapsed onto the retiring chaise in the sitting room, a wet cloth pressed to her eyes. Gabrielle alone seemed alert to Charlotte’s woes. She sat at the edge of a cheerful chintz rose-covered chair, her spectacles perched atop her head.
“What happened? I assume the seduction did not go as well as you might have expected?” Her soft brown eyes brimmed with sympathy, and her lush mouth was puckered into moue.
“Men,” Margot intoned from the chaise. Charlotte was relieved to finally hear her other house companion speak. For the last hour she’d barely moved. Absinthe, her friend’s favored instrument of destruction, had been known to kill those addicted to the green-tinged drink. “I don’t know why any woman would want one. They’re none of them worth two fiddles.”
Gabrielle fluttered her eyes a bit, and Charlotte could never figure out whether it was because of her sight impairment, or merely affectation. “But Margot, some men can be infinitely delicious, like Prince Jarowski last night. You remember him. Perfect body, very agile…and oh so generous.”
“Yes, yes, the man is beyond decadently rich.” Margot raised her head slightly from a pillow she’d taken from their bedchamber but then sank back down with a pitiful moan.
Charlotte suddenly laughed, a deep, throaty laugh, at her companions’ nonsensical exchanges. At least the two of them had cheered her considerably. She’d ceased considering the possibility of becoming a nun after the complete debacle of her attempted seduction of Col the night before.
Gabrielle placed her glasses on her face again and peered closely at Charlotte. “Do you think she’s perhaps hysterical? Should we have Lilith prepare a tisane?”
“No. Charlotte has simply come to realize men are too abominably difficult to be worth crying over.” Margot moaned again and turned her head toward the wall. “There’s too damned much light in here,” she muttered, and sank back into silence.
12
Col headed back toward the office of the river police after a short, unenlightening talk with Clerkenwell’s magistrate. Why in the name of St. James’s bones he’d thought anyone would care about a widowed, middle-aged midwife, he couldn’t say.
The Honorable Richard Bromwell had stared at him as if he were dealing with an escapee from an asylum and then carefully read every word on the card that identified Col as a Bow Street investigator. He looked up every few seconds as if he found it hard to believe the incensed man in front of him could indeed be employed at Bow Street.
Bromwell had confided he’d assumed the woman had probably jumped into the river because her mental constitution was impaired from living alone for so long. He’d also assumed that she’d died from drowning and had not thought it necessary to have a surgeon examine the body.
Col had finally given up trying to talk to the man and had hailed a hack for the ride back to the office of the river police. Since the body had been found floating in the Thames, maybe they knew something more about the circumstances surrounding the woman’s death.
The commotion at the river police station nearly made him forget the dead midwife. Overnight, there had been a fourth chess murder victim. When Col went to the surgeon to discover the details of the death, he received a rude shock. The body on the stone slab was that of the older gentleman who had given him a chess lesson a few nights earlier.
