“I’m looking for a house where one could hire an attractive, gently bred woman of some eighteen to twenty years of age. Dark hair. Slim. Educated.”
Calhoun returned his concentration to the bubbling concoction on the stove. “Such a barque of frailty has caught your fancy, my lord?”
“Not exactly. Her name is Rose—or maybe Rachel—Jones and she was killed last night when someone attacked the Friends’ Magdalene House in Covent Garden. I have reason to believe she fled a house near Portman Square.”
“Ah. I see. Well, there are only three stay-in brothels in the Portman Square area.” Calhoun poured a black mixture from a vial into his pot. Sebastian watched with interest. Like most valets, Calhoun kept his boot polish recipe a dark secret. “If your girl was slim and well-bred,” said the valet, “then I doubt she’d have been at the Golden Calf. They go for the buxom milkmaid type. There’s a house in Chalon Lane that sometimes has more refined girls, but they cater to those who like them young.” A quiver of distaste passed over his features. “Very young. They’re not all girls, either.”
“And the third house?”
“I’d say it’s probably your best bet. They call it the Orchard Street Academy. Most of the girls there are simply pretending to be ladies, but a few are the real thing. The abbess is a skinny, grasping harridan who was on the stage in her prime. Calls herself Miss Lil.”
“She owns the place?”
“No. The actual owner is Ian Kane.” Calhoun reached for a small bottle. “Now there’s a crafty fellow.”
Sebastian leaned forward. “Tell me about him.”
Calhoun added a small measure of what looked like neat’s-foot oil. “I’ve heard his father was a miner from Lincolnshire. Our Ian came up to London when he was but seventeen and married a widow who owned a grog shop on Newgate. Now he owns at least a dozen different establishments—everything from grog shops to pubs to places like the Orchard Street Academy. He’s smart, and he’s ruthless.”
“Ruthless enough to kill a woman who fled his house?”
Calhoun raised his spoon to test the consistency of his mixture. “His wife died a year after the marriage. Fell down the stairs and broke her neck. There are those who claim Kane pushed her. But then, it could just be rumor.”
Sebastian studied the valet’s half-averted face. “What do you think?”
Calhoun moved the pot of boot polish off the fire. “I think people Ian Kane finds a danger or even just a nuisance seem to have a higher-than-average chance of ending up dead.” He glanced around, his blue eyes somber. “You’d do well to remember that, my lord.”
Chapter 9
Hero Jarvis considered herself a sensible woman not given to willfulness or foolish stubbornness. She came from an ancient, powerful family and understood well the obligations such a heritage entailed. Nevertheless, she did not subscribe to the oft-expressed belief that a woman’s virtues were limited to chastity, humility, and obedience. She did strive for humility, although it was at times difficult. She was also a chaste woman and, at the age twenty-five, had resigned herself to a virginal old age. But that state of affairs came more from an unwillingness to submit herself to a husband’s power than from anything else. And as for mindless obedience—well, in Hero’s opinion, that was for children, servants, and dogs.
Her father tended to lump her in his mind with either the sentimentalists or the radicals, but in that, he erred. She was neither. She considered fervent democrats dangerously delusional, and while she supported charity work, she had no personal inclination to ladle porridge at a soup kitchen or volunteer in an orphanage. Her dedication to change and reform was more intellectual than emotional, and more legal than personal. She simply subscribed to a vastly different moral code from the one that governed her father—which did much to explain why he couldn’t understand her.
Her decision to take it upon herself not to allow the Magdalene House murders to be forgotten had not been reached lightly. But once she had resolved not to fail the woman who had died in her arms, Hero pursued her goal with the same single-minded drive that characterized her father. Because she knew herself deficient in the experience and skills necessary to deal adequately with the task at hand, it was a logical step to solicit the assistance of someone such as Viscount Devlin. But Hero knew it would be both disingenuous and cowardly for her to convince herself that her obligation ended there. And Hero Jarvis was neither disingenuous nor cowardly.
Returning to the Jarvis townhouse on Berkeley Square, she exchanged her gown and matching pelisse of moss green for a more somber gray walking dress of fine alpaca and a small veiled hat. Then, accompanied reluctantly by her maid, she set forth in her carriage for Covent Garden.
Hero’s research into the causes of the recent proliferation in the number of prostitutes in the metropolis had given her a familiarity with people and places unknown to most women of her station. She thought it made sense to use those contacts now, in an attempt to find the woman who had originally arrived at the Magdalene House with Rose Jones. Lord Devlin might be skilled in the arts of detection, but the fact remained that he was a man, and Hero knew well the attitudes toward men that characterized the fallen women of the demirep. They would be far more likely to open up to Hero, a woman, than to a member of a sex they both hated and scorned.
At this hour of the afternoon, the main square of Covent Garden was still given over to its market, the surrounding streets echoing with the shouts of fisherwives and the hawkers’ cries of “fresh hot tea” and “fine ripe oranges sweet as sugar.” The rouged and willing women who would emerge later to prowl the darkening colonnades and the theaters could still be found huddled in desultory conversation in the kitchens of their lodging houses.
Hero directed her coachman to a discreet lodging house in King Street run by an aged Irishwoman named Molly O’Keefe. A large woman with an ample girth and improbable red hair, Molly greeted her with hands on hips, a broad smile crinkling the flesh beside her watery gray eyes. Once, Molly had been a prostitute herself. But she’d been shrewd enough to pull herself out of the downward spiral that ended for most in disease and an early death.
“I didn’t expect to be seein’ your ladyship agin,” said Molly, reaching out to pluck Hero off the small stoop. “Come in, come in.”
“I’m not a ladyship and you know it, Molly,” said Hero, pressing into Molly’s hands the basket of fine bread and fresh farm cheeses she had brought. “My father is a baron, not an earl.”
Molly laughed, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Sure. But you’re a lady, no gettin’ around that. Besides, you could be a ladyship if’n you wanted it. All you’d need do is marry one o’ them lords I’ve no doubt are courtin’ you.”
“Now why would I want to do that?”
Molly laughed again. “Damned if I know.”
Trailed by her sour-faced maid, Hero followed the landlady down the shabby hall and into the kitchen, which served as the lodging house’s common room. The center of the kitchen was taken up by an old and battered scrubbed table around which grouped the house’s various lodgers. Clothed in shabby dressing gowns and slippers, a dozen or so women chattered with brutal frankness about men and clothes and their own wildly improbable schemes for the future. The close air smelled of beer and gin and onions faintly underlain by another scent Hero had come to associate with such places, although its exact nature continued to elude her.