“I have something for you,” I said.
“Truly?” Lady Breckenridge forgot all about Sir Neville and turned her full attention to me.
I slipped a small parcel from my pocket and handed it to her. Lady Breckenridge peeled back the cloth in which I’d wrapped the gift, and gazed in some surprise at the gold chain with its tiny bell that lay on the piece of blue velvet.
I leaned down and murmured into her ear. “For your ankle.”
The look Donata Breckenridge gave me said that she did not find me as old or weary as I felt. She turned and strolled away from me, giving me a little smile over her shoulder.
I caught up to her under the shadows of the ivy, where she stopped and raised her lips to mine.
End
The Disappearance of
Miss Sarah Oswald
London, 1817
London swallowed people whole. It had swallowed me. It had swallowed Thaddeus Oswald, MP. It had swallowed Thaddeus Oswald’s daughter, and now he expected me to find her.
Oswald told me about his daughter in a coffee house in Pall Mall late one afternoon, in a room that reeked of scalded coffee and cheroot smoke. His daughter, sent to London to live with her aunt, was now lost, gone, vanished into the city.
There wasn’t much hope, he said. Either she was dead or beyond redemption.
“My sister searched and gave up,” Oswald told me, looking tired and ashamed. “My son even posted a reward, but nothing came of it.”
“That was eight months ago,” I said. “Why approach me now?”
Oswald twisted his coffee cup on its saucer as he invented an explanation for why he’d waited so long. “I met Brandon over cards last night,” he said. “Hadn’t seen him in a donkey’s age. Brandon said that if anyone could find out the truth, it would be you.”
Brandon had been my colonel during the Peninsular War. He was the man responsible for my career in the army, for saving my life, and for the destruction of my leg that had forced me to resign. Our current relations had become more cordial of late but remained stiff. Brandon did not much approve of my habit of running all over London hunting criminals, but he conceded that I’d had success in the past.
Oswald had given up finding his daughter, I surmised, but Colonel Brandon, who could rally the most dejected of men, had persuaded him to try one final time. So he’d sent Oswald to me, but I could see that Oswald had already tired of hope.
“How old is you daughter, Mr. Oswald?”
“She would have been eighteen in April,” Oswald said and started to cry.
***
In my rooms above the pastry shop near Covent Garden, I stripped to my skin and stood before the fire, letting it bake the chill from my bones. I studied the drawing of Sarah Oswald her father had given me before we parted—one of the reward notices his son had posted. It showed a smiling girl with dark curls wearing a close-fitting white cap. She looked the same as many other girls of her age, rich or poor, gentry or working class.
What had happened was probably very simple. Procuresses met coaches from the country and enticed away lone girls with promises of honest employment or places to stay. The girls ended up in nunneries or walking the streets or as the private playthings of upper-class gentlemen. Some were lucky and thrived, but many, many more found their way to the workhouses and death.
Whorehouse or workhouse, I did not think Sarah’s family wanted her back. They were upright, middleclass people who would view shame as a fate worse than death—best to sweep it far away and out of sight. But Brandon had shown Oswald a way to put his mind at rest—let Captain Lacey find out whether she’s alive or dead. Captain Lacey was good at finding things out.
Things I’d found out in the army had cost me my health, my career, and most of my sanity, and had cast me onto the uncaring shores of London—a worn out, forty-odd, ex-captain of King George’s cavalry who now had to hobble about with a walking stick. A hero from the Peninsular Wars against Boney the Bastard.
I extinguished my candles, pulled my linen nightshirt over my head, and crawled into bed. What lay before me was an impossible task, and I was curious enough and stupid enough to attempt it.
***
Miss Clothilde Oswald, Sarah’s aunt, lived in a house near Portman Square. The drawing room I found myself in at ten the next morning was neither ostentatious nor spare, but a balance that saidI have money but spend it wisely.
Miss Oswald gave the same impression. Her neat, rather plain costume of lilac gown, gray jacket, and silk cap spoke of both modesty and expense.
She’d brought a companion with her, a woman in the dull clothes of a lady’s drudge. The companion darted nervous glances at me then went to the corner by the fire and took up some needlework. A woman unused to men, I decided.
