Evans folded his arms and looked at Julia. “Well, Doctor?”
“Well, Inspector . . . I’ve just examined London’s only virgin prostitute.” Julia turned her back and finished rolling a set of instruments into a linen cloth.
Evans swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed over his stiff collar. “You’re sure?”
“Quite sure. Annie O’Neill is virgo intacta and certainly free of venereal disease.” Julia stowed the bundle in her medical bag and snapped it shut. “Annie O’Neill is no more a streetwalker than I.”
“Given the circumstances, we—”
“She said she’d been sitting for an artist. An inquiry at the studio would have spared her this ordeal.”
The ruddy-faced duty sergeant snorted from behind his desk. “What would that have told us? Dropping her knickers for art? Bollocks. These models are no better than—”
“Better than what, Sergeant?”
“Everyone knows what they get up to, and that’s a fact.”
Julia’s hand itched to slap the sneer off his face. “Annie O’Neill hasn’t ‘gotten up to’ much. That’s a fact, too.”
At least Inspector Evans looked chastened. “The entrance to the Cockpit Steps leads to an alley that’s notorious for . . . fleeting encounters.”
“Just what the soldiers had in mind, no doubt,” Julia said. “But Annie was simply exercising her right as a British subject to walk along a pavement.”
“Rights,” the sergeant spat out the word. “She knows the law,” he snapped. “Or she should.”
“Annie informed the policeman that the soldiers harassed her. She told them to ‘hop it,’ but the constable arrestedher,not them.”
The sergeant crossed his arms. “Lady, do you think we believe every fairy tale floated by a tart?”
“It’sDoctor, and Annie O’Neill isn’t a tart, is she,Sergeant?”
Tennant followed a fuming Julia out the door to King Street and waited with her for a cab. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Julia. I wouldn’t tolerate such impudence from my subordinate.”
“The girl deserves an apology, not me. I doubt one will be forthcoming.”
“I’ll stay until they release Miss O’Neill and see that she gets home safely to her flat in Aldgate.”
A cab slowed at the inspector’s signal and stopped. Tennant opened the hansom’s doors and stood back for Julia. He said to the cabbie, “Sussex Terrace, number . . .” Tennant looked at Julia. “What is Lady Aldridge’s street number?”
“Twenty-four,” she said, taking her seat.
Tennant closed the doors, and the hansom jerked forward.
* * *
Pandemonium had shattered the placid afternoon at Regent’s Park.
It rose in a tumult of terror and despair: the screams of onlookers at the water’s edge, the desperate cries for help from the lake, the rescuers’ commands to “give way, let us through,” and the shouted names of loved ones sinking beneath the surface.
Within minutes, the skaters near the shore had made it to safety, but over a hundred souls farther out had plunged into the water. Then the rush of skaters from the center pitched scores of additional people into the lake. Desperate victims clung to the edges of ice floes. Others threw themselves flat onto larger sections and waved frantically for rescue.
The Humane Society’s icemen went to work immediately. They flung ropes to desperate men bobbing in the water. They rammed wheeled ladders between the chunks of ice and rolled them in as far as they could. Several icemen braved the water, pulling skaters to safety, buoyed by their cork life belts. Othersrecruited bystanders to help carry skiffs from the boathouse by the lake’s western shore. They launched them with difficulty, oarlocks clanking, bows dinging ice blocks, progress blocked by the jagged floes.
Within twenty minutes, many had saved themselves. Bystanders had pulled out the skaters within easy reach, but scores still struggled in the water.
Knots of onlookers kept watch from the shore over selected victims. From time to time, a moaning wail went up as the skater in their sights slipped from a floe and vanished. When a top-hatted gentleman sank under the water, someone cried, “Look, he’s gone, poor soul.” Only his hat remained floating on the surface.
An old barrow-woman wrapped in tattered shawls rocked on the ground, keening, her basket of bright oranges at her side. “Jack, Jack,” she moaned. “Dear God, will no one save him?” Her husband was beyond help. The onlookers watched the old chestnut seller slip off the edge of a floe. His wheeled, coal-fired brazier tumbled in after him, sinking amid the hissing steam.
