He assisted her into the coach. Once the ‘cargo’ was secure, somewhat reluctantly, Mr. Hastings maneuvered the coach into traffic toward Sussex Square.
Mr. Munro glanced up at the landing as he assisted Lily into one side of the motor carriage. I nodded in acknowledgment.
I did so appreciate his care and protection when it came to my great-aunt, and now Lily. He then rounded the motor carriage and climbed inside.
That was something new, I thought and watched with some trepidation as he started the motor carriage, then set it in motion and maneuvered the chugging beast into the line of carts, cabs, and trams on the street.
I pitied anyone they encountered.
Brodie returned sometime later, ‘dark as thunder’ my great-aunt had once said of someone. It was a description that perfectly described him now. His attempt to meet with Judge Cameron had obviously not gone well.
I was learning how to navigate these moments with a bit of Old Lodge whisky and silence. Until that dark gaze found me along with the frown.
“I left several messages with the judge’s clerk,” he finally explained. “Without a response. Then, as the hour grew late, I was informed by the same scrawny clerk that the judge had left for the day.” He looked past me to the chalkboard.
“Wot is it ye have there? More notes?”
What I had there was the information from my meeting with Mrs. Mallory and then the visit from Lily and my great-aunt.
I explained each of the notes that I’d made.
“Burke?” he commented. “Wot the devil would the man be bothering Charlotte Mallory about?”
That was what I intended to find out. And then I thought a trip to Guildford might be necessary. However, that was for the following day, after my visit to the newspaper archive. It did seem that there was much Mr. Burke had failed to mention about what he knew.
This wasn’t a race. It was about finding and stopping a murderer. It did appear that Mr. Burke had not yet found that information.
“Aye, it could be useful, most particularly with that letter Charlotte Mallory intended to send.”
He was thoughtful, in that way that I liked to watch—the frown surrounded by the beard, that dark gaze staring off with thoughts churning behind them, then finding me, and the way it softened.
“Mrs. Ryan will be waiting supper for us at the town house,” I casually mentioned. Food to soothe the savage beast?
“Ye could tempt a dying man.”
Fourteen
THE OLD BAILEY, LONDON
Brodie leftthe town house early for the ride across the city to that notorious prison, the Old Bailey, adjacent to the Criminal Courts.
It was a massive, monstrous series of buildings adjacent on Bailey Street, hence the name, and very near the old Roman Wall, as Mikaela had once explained.
The prison of that name had been built over three hundred years earlier in what she had described as an amalgam of massive cut-stone walls in the Gothic style.
She knew a lot about that sort of thing, although she dismissed it as meaningless flotsam. Still, he admired that about her, the education she’d acquired, while he had his education mostly from the streets.
He knew other things about the Old Bailey: The reputation for those poor souls incarcerated within those walls, no matter the path in life that had brought them there. The public hangings that had ended only a few years earlier. Then there was the walkway from one’s cell to those gallows, the skeletons of those who had gone before buried beneath it.
He had seen it all, much different from her knowledge of the place, in an effort to save a man that had failed. And he might have once ended there as well.
She never held the difference between them over him, something else he admired in addition to her keen intelligence and that woman’s sense that she claimed to have. Something that he had never experienced in the women he’d known.
There were other things too, and taken on the whole, there were times when he just wanted to watch her, watch that keen mind as it worked, then see that smile when she arrived at some answer.
Women were not supposed to be logical. She was that, and more. And in those moments, he felt both pride and something verra near surprise to have her in his life. Not that it was always easy. There was that stubbornness, and she would never hesitate to speak her mind.
Then there was the other part of it, of course, he thought on that long coach ride. The softness of her, the way she breathed in sleep at night beside him…
