“Something new is afoot. Not pitched battles by soldiers but a stealthy campaign of terror.”
“A war from the shadows?”
“Precisely. The targets will be high and low. A police station or a train station bombed. As for your royals …” Chabert held Tennant’s eye. “Queen Victoria has survived—what is it—five, six attempts on her life?”
“Are you saying—”
“We have no specific intelligence that points to the queen. Still, such a horror would be a coup.”
“But one difficult to pull off,” Tennant said. “Since Victoria’s widowhood, she rarely appears in public.”
“Ah, she must emerge sometime,” Chabert said. “One cannotgrieve in private for a lifetime. Not when one is the queen. And from what I’ve read, criticism of Her Majesty’s isolation is growing.”
“True enough,” the inspector said. “When is this ‘campaign of terror’ to begin?”
Chabert looked at him, surprised. “You have not heard about Friday’s bombing? It has begun.”
Julia had left early for the clinic on Friday morning. Her coachman threaded the carriage through Bishopsgate’s morning crowds, slowing the horses to a stop on Duke Street. Mr. Ogilvie waited for a funeral procession of black-hatted men to exit the Great Synagogue and turn off the road before flicking the reins. Julia opened a medical journal, resigning herself to one of those endless drives to Whitechapel.
She was wrong. When they turned left at Whitechapel High Street, it felt like they’d traveled from a circus into a tomb.
Julia counted on one hand the carriages and carts that passed in the opposite direction. It was midmorning, yet there was little foot traffic along the usually crowded pavements between Irish Court and Half Moon Passage. They rolled past the White Swan public house, its shutters down. Most mornings, Julia would see early drinkers queuing up for their first pints. She spotted a woman clutching a net sack in her left fist and a child’s hand in her right. She hurried, head down, keeping close to the buildings’ walls, vanishing into Plough Court.
It was a mixed neighborhood of English Protestants and Irish Catholics.Perhaps they sense trouble, she thought.They took the prime minister’s ban on crowds to heart and are staying indoors.
Traffic on foot and by wheel picked up after Commercial Street. Julia’s coachman had to wait for a break in the stream of pedestrians to turn right onto Fieldgate Street. He stopped the carriage on the other side of Plummer’s Row, where the roadwas wide enough to turn the carriage. The coachman jumped down to open the carriage door.
Julia said, “All seems as usual here, Mister Ogilvie.”
“Aye, but it was a strange ride. You’ll be all right?”
“Of course.”
But her coachman looked doubtful as he glanced back and drove away. Julia paused before walking on, listening to deep, resonating bongs as someone sounded a newly cast bell at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
At first, Julia had found most of the neighborhood’s sounds, sights, and scents alien. A clanging ironmonger occupied a soot-stained building with peeling paint. Next to him, a carcass butcher’s headless pigs hung from a line like pink washing. But five years after Julia signed her lease, her neighbors were like old wallpaper in an often-used hallway. Julia walked past the shops without a glance.
The doctor crossed the street and entered her clinic through its front door. She stood and listened. The quiet told a story: the night had been peaceful. A woman with dark, graying hair as streaked as the wings of a black-and-white magpie emerged from the men’s ward with a basin of soiled bandages in her hands. Somehow, Nurse Clemmie’s white cap always looked as clean and starched at the end of the day as it did in the morning.
“You’re early, Doctor,” the head nurse said.
“No private patients on my books today.”
So Julia inventoried the drugs cabinet instead. She’d shelved the last bottles of carbolic solution when Kate Connelly knocked on the door and entered the office.
Her maid held up two letters and passed them to Julia. “They came in the morning post. Doctor Andrew sent me along, thinking you’d want to read them straightaway.”
“Bless him. And you, Kate.”
The top one was postmarkedBERLIN. Cancellation stamps tattooed the envelope, telling a story of delay. Tennant had sentthe second from Paris a week earlier. The misdirected Berlin letter explained the long silence, but it would tell her nothing about his present circumstances. She hoped the Paris note would be more informative.
“You’ll be getting on with your reading,” Julia’s maid said, backing away.
“Stay a minute, Kate, and I’ll send a brief reply. You can drop it in the pillar box on Whitechapel Road.”
Julia fished around in her top drawer for a letter opener, her head snapping up when the clinic’s front door banged, and shouts erupted.
Nurse Clemmie opened the office door. “It’s Sergeant O’Malley with two ambulance wagons of patients injured in a prison explosion.”
