“I am sorry for your loss.”
The child shrugged. “Mum just keeps crying and crying. Buckets full of tears.” He frowned, then sighed. “Didn’t know that a body had that many tears. Wanna see her?”
“Your mother? No, I believe I’ll wait here. Better still, I’ll wait in my carriage. Kindly tell Lady Mer—ah, the lady I came with where I am.”
“I wasn’t asking you to see Mum,” the child said in an exasperated voice. “I was asking if you wanted to see Betsy. She’s laid out in the drawing room in her best dress, the one she and Mum made last year with the pink flowers embroidered all over it.”
The marquess had difficulty hiding his shock. The body. The lad was asking if he wanted to view the deceased. What he initially thought was going to be a brief stop now had the mark of a prolonged visit. “I am not sure it is proper. Perhaps we should wait for your mother.”
“All she’ll do is start crying again. Come on.”
The lad grabbed Trevor’s hand and tugged. Reluctantly the marquess ascended the stairs to the drawing room. The parlor faced the street, and even the heavy drapes could not completely muffle the bustling sounds of activity outside.
The sofa had been pushed to one side to make room for the trestles that held the coffin. It was a simple pine box, flanked on each side by unlit candles.
“She looks like she’s sleeping,” the child whispered. He scrambled up on a chair and leaned over the open coffin.“But Mum says she’ll never wake up again.” Curious, the marquess approached. He gave a cursory glance inside, only enough to catch a fleeting impression of pale white skin and golden hair. Though the look had been brief, Trevor was struck by how young and frail Betsy appeared, hardly older than the boy who gazed at her with such rapt fascination.
“She was very pretty,” Trevor commented.
The child nodded. “Mum tied the scarf around her neck real careful. To hide the ugliness.”
Puzzled, Trevor looked again inside the coffin and noticed a white scarf wrapped around the young woman’s neck. For modesty’s sake? But the rounded neckline of the gown she wore rode high on the collarbone. The boy reached down and gently tugged at the carefully wound fabric.
“See,” he whispered solemnly. “It’s ugly.”
Trevor gasped. Vivid marks of deep blue and purple marred the fragile paleness of Betsy’s lovely long neck.
The air tightened around the marquess’s lungs. He had seen bruises almost identical to these—on Lavinia the day of her burial. Had this poor young girl also met with a terrible accident?
“What happened to Betsy?” he asked.
“I’m not supposed to know,” the boy confided. “But I heard Da talking this morning. Betsy didn’t come home from work yesterday. We waited and waited until supper got cold. Da got mad and said he never should have allowed her to work in the glove shop in the first place and he was going to make her quit. Then he told us to eat our dinner.
“But even after we were done and the dishes were put away she still didn’t come home. It was real dark outside and Mum said she was scared, so Da went to look for Betsy. He came home crying. There were a bunch of men with him. They were carrying her body. They didn’t have a cart with them and Da wouldn’t leave Betsy, not even for a minute.
“They found her in the alley, right near the shop where she worked. One of the men said she had been strangled. And another man said they had found two other girls last month the same way as Betsy, only outside of different shops. Guess strangled means you hurt your neck real bad, right?”
Every nerve in Trevor’s body began to quiver. Strangled? He looked again at the marks on Betsy’s neck, then forced his mind to remember Lavinia. Time, shock, and sorrow had dulled much in his brain, but the memory of his beloved in death was a sight he saw as clearly as though it were yesterday.
Vivid lines of dark purple streaking across the creamy whiteness of Lavinia’s elegant female neck that rested at an unnatural angle: the result of a broken neck. Deliberately done? By whom?
“Harold? Harold? Where are you? Come down at once and say hello to your auntie.”
Harold raised his head in alarm. “My Mum’s calling me.”
“Then we had best go downstairs and see her,” Trevor said calmly.
Thoughts of the pitiful corpse resting in the drawing room began to fade slowly from his mind as the marquess descended the staircase. He gave the appropriate condolences to the grieving family, which now included Betsy’s father, then escorted Meredith out to their coach.
The ride began in a strained quiet, broken only by the crunching of the carriage wheels.
“Did Mrs. Pritcher or her sister say anything about how Betsy died?” Trevor asked.
“No. Considering how young she was, I merely assumed it was an illness. Consumption, most likely. Why do you ask?”
“No particular reason.”
Yet Trevor’s mind could not relinquish the picture it carried of Betsy’s bruised neck. The stunning reality of violence that had been visited upon her person was a brutal reminder of the fragility of human life. Had she indeed been murdered—strangled, as young Harold suggested?
