Beau frowned. “The what?”
“Isolation rooms. Pip emptied them out. She says the other women are locked in their rooms. The doors with the red cards are at most danger. Please. Hurry.”
Kit stepped out of the sweet shop. “Thrasher!!”
Immediately a familiar teen clad in the most reprehensible of garments came trotting across the street. “Yeah, your worshipfulness?”
Now Beau recognized him. He was an unofficial page and spy for Lady Kate Lidge, who had long had a habit of taking in strays. Thrasher was also invaluable in ferreting out information in low places. Now he was grinning and bowing to Miss Schroeder.
“Reinforcements, Thrasher,” Kit snapped. “Now. Here.”
Without another word, Thrasher set off down the street to hop on the back of a beer wagon that was heading towards Mayfair.
“I don’t think I can wait,” Beau protested. “How about I go in looking to tour a place for my sister.”
“Wife,” Schroeder said. “They like wives. Tell them she never got over losing the babe. And that you have an obscene amount of money. Oh. And here. I’m warm inside. I think you’ll need the guns in these pockets.”
Beau took her up on her offer.
“Go out the back,” Braxton said, “and around the mews.”
So, he did, picking up a hackney a few blocks over that could drop him off at the asylum gates.
Except that there was no one guarding the asylum gates to see him. He wasn’t certain if that made him feel better or worse. It would be easier for him just to walk into the facility, but it also might mean they had already begun to carry out their plan inside.
Only one way to find out and calm his frantic heart.Please let Pip be in there. Let her be safe.
He at least got the answer to one of those questions when he blithely walked through the two separate doors that should have been locked and all the way into the patient area.
“Hello!” he called as he assessed the hallway beyond. It looked like a beehive had overturned in there. Staff were bouncing about in seemingly random ways. What he didn’t see, was patients. “I rang, but nobody answered!”
The person who turned his way was a stern, gray-haired woman in a dress and apron so starched he could hear her rustling.
“Keep your voice down, sir,” she said, striding up. “This is not Astley’s. How did you get in here?
Beau pointed. “Door was open. Pardon me sayin’, doesn’t seem all that secure that way.”
She stopped a few feet away and glowered. “What do you need, please?”
He looked around as if assessing the lay-out, when he was really looking for Pip. Hoping to draw her out, he spoke in a loud north-county voice.
“Well,” he said, slipping his hands into his coat pockets to find the reassuring bulk of two pistols. “I come to see whether your place would be a good fit for my wife. Respectable, you know. Safe. Settled. ’As a very nervous disposition, she does, and needs quiet. Tried care at home, but she kept slippin’ out, and what with me bein’ at my mills all hours…”
The woman’s posture didn’t change as Beau thought it should. She should have looked far more interested. All those mills. All that money to spend on an inconvenient wife.
As if on cue, there was a monstrous crash toward the back of the building, and a too-familiar voice crying, “Oh, St. Simon’s spectacles, look what I’ve done! I’m so sorry. Shall I mop it up?”
Of course, everyone turned that way to see a river of what looked like very strong tea flooding from an urn that had shattered all across the floor.
“You numbskull!” his greeter howled, spinning in that direction.
“I’m that sorry, ma’am,” his Pip apologized, twisting her hands in her skirts like a prized ninny. “I’ll clean it right up.”
Beau wasn’t certain whether he felt better or worse that when she caught sight of him her expression didn’t change by an iota.
“Is this how this place is always run?” he demanded.
The matron turned on him as a middle-aged man in a suit skidded to a halt before Pip.
