It had been nearly ten years now since a much younger Kat had slipped through Mother Keyes’s door, and she hadn’t been wearing soft kid gloves or a chip hat with a delicately curled ostrich feather that cost enough to feed a family for months. But Kat knew the woman recognized her. Remembering faces and reading the subtle, telltale signs of character writ there had kept Mother Keyes out of Newgate for sixty years or more.
Holding the old woman’s gaze, Kat spread the green satin gown on the polished counter between them and said, “If I were abigail to a duke’s daughter-in-law and my lady gave me a gown such as this that she no longer wanted, I think I’d bring it to you to sell.”
Mother Keyes glanced down at the gown, her eyes narrowing, although her face gave nothing away. She was a tiny woman, her frame delicate, the features in her wrinkled face small and even. She looked back up at Kat. “Think me a flat, do you?”
Kat laughed. “I know very well you are not. And this maid I’m talking about—the one who sold you this dress? She spoke the truth. Lady Addison Peebles did give her the gown. Her mother-in-law said the color made her look like a sick frog.”
Mother Keyes blinked. “You have the dress, and you know who sold it. So why are you here?”
Kat laid a guinea on the expanse of shimmering satin. “I want to know who bought it.”
Mother Keyes hesitated a moment, then picked up the coin with quick, nimble fingers. “I don’t know their names, but I do remember them.”
It didn’t surprise Kat. People were Mother Keyes’s hobby. She amused herself by watching them, studying them, analyzing them. “They were a queer pair,” she said. “No doubt about it.” She paused expectantly.
Kat placed a second coin on the counter. “There were two of them?”
“That’s right. One of them was from the Colonies. The Southern Colonies, from the sound of him.” She leaned in close and dropped her voice. “An African, no less. Mind you, ’e was as pale skinned as a Portuguese, but ’e ’ad the features, if you know what I mean. That flat nose, and them full lips. Big, ’e was, too. And bald as a plucked goose.”
Kat dutifully deposited another coin. “And the other one? What was he like?”
“Not a man. A girl. A London girl. Young, she was. No more’n fifteen or sixteen, I’d say. Maybe less. Yellow-headed and tall, but otherwise ordinary lookin’. I don’t remember much else about her, ’cept for her eyes.”
“Her eyes?”
“They were so pale. Reminded me of rainwater on a cloudy day. Nothin’ there but a reflection.”
“You wouldn’t happen to remember anything they said, would you?”
Mother Keyes gazed out the shop’s window at the troop of soldiers marching past, her lips pursing with studied thought. “Well, let me see….”
Kat placed another coin on the table.
The coin disappeared beneath Mother Keyes’s tiny hand. “They argued a bit about the size of the dress. The girl, she kept insistin’ they needed something bigger, but the African, he said no, it’d do just fine. And then he said the queerest thing.”
The old woman paused expectantly. Suppressing a sigh of impatience, Kat produced another coin.
Mother Keyes drew back her lips in a smile that displayed a mouthful of unexpectedly sound teeth. “He said that dress, it was just the thing for a lady to wear to the Brighton Pavilion.”
Chapter 58
“I’d like you to spend some time hanging around Lady Quinlan’s house,” Sebastian told his tiger after they had returned the Chevalier to St. James’s Street. “See if you can find out what her ladyship was doing the day Guinevere Anglessey was killed.”
“You think Lady Quinlan offed ’er own sister?” squeaked Tom in surprise.
“I think I’d like to know what she was doing last Wednesday.”
“I’ll find out, ne’er you fear,” promised Tom.
Sebastian grunted. “And do endeavor not to get picked up by the watch this time, do you hear?”
“I never—” Tom began as they turned onto Brook Street, only to break off and say, “Gor! Look there. Ain’t that Miss Kat?”
She stood on the footpath before Sebastian’s house, the embroidered skirt of her poult-de-soie walking dress clutched in one hand as she prepared to mount his steps. Kat never came to his house. She said it wasn’t appropriate, that the time they shared together should be kept separate from the life he lived in Mayfair as the Earl of Hendon’s son and Lady Wilcox’s brother. She knew it infuriated him, but she wasn’t the kind of woman to be intimidated by a man’s anger. No matter how much he told her he didn’t give a damn about the conventions, that he had only one life and she was a vitally important part of it, she stubbornly stayed away. Only once before had she come here, and then she’d been both unconscious and bleeding.
At the sound of the curricle, her head turned, the brim of her chip hat casting the features of her face into shadow.
“Stable them,” he told Tom, handing the boy the reins and jumping lightly from the curricle’s high seat. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, his hands clasping Kat’s shoulders as she came up to him.
She shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong. I located the secondhand dealer who sold Lady Addison’s green satin evening gown.”
He knew better than to ask how out of all the secondhand clothing dealers in London she’d known which one to go to. “And?”
“She says she sold it to an African and a tall young girl with pale gray eyes.”
THE GIRL WAS EASY ENOUGH TO FIND.
According to one of the men Sebastian came upon sifting through the still-smoking rubble of the Norfolk Arms on Giltspur Street, her name was Amelia Brennan. The eldest of eight children, she lived with her mother and father in a ramshackle whitewashed cottage built into what had once been the garden of a bigger house facing Cock Lane. The larger houses themselves had long since been broken up into lodgings, their gardens disappearing beneath a warren of shanties and hovels threaded by a narrow byway half-filled with heaps of ashes and steaming rubbish piles.
As Sebastian’s carriage turned down the lane, ragged children stared from open doorways, their hair tangled and matted, their faces and arms as caked with dirt as newly dug potatoes. Most had probably never seen a lord’s carriage, with its well-fed, glossy-coated horses, its liveried and powdered footmen standing up behind. They had certainly never seen such a sight here in Ha’penny Court.
Sebastian waited in the carriage while one of the footmen hopped down and went to rap on the Brennans’ warped door. The show of ostentatious power and wealth was deliberate, and Sebastian meant to use it to his advantage.
The Brennans’ cottage was better tended than its neighbors, he noticed, its missing windows covered with oiled parchment rather than simply stuffed with rags, the front step freshly swept. But signs of encroaching decay were evident in the rotting eave at one corner, in the shutter that hung drunkenly from a broken hinge.
A woman answered the door, a boy of about two balanced on one hip. She had the worn face and graying hair of an old woman, although considering the age of her children, Sebastian suspected she was only in her midthirties. He watched her gaze travel from the powdered footman to the grand carriage filling the lane outside her cottage, and saw the terrible fear that flooded into her eyes. Her lips parted, her arm tightening around the child so that he let out a whimper of protest.
Sebastian swung open the carriage door and stepped down with an affected, languid pace, a scented handkerchief held to his nostrils. “Your daughter Amelia has been implicated in the murder of the Marchioness of Anglessey,” he said, his voice at its most patrician and condescending. “If she cooperates, I can help her. But only if she cooperates. If she doesn’t, it will go hard on her.” He let his gaze drift with unmistakable meaning over the humble cottage. “On her, and on you and your other children.”