“You weren’t afraid to leave?”
“Nah. I mean, I was scared when we left the Academy, but after a couple of days, I started thinking it was all a hum, that Rose had made it all up.” She reconsidered. “Well, most of it.”
“Surely you didn’t go back to the Academy?” Hero asked, stunned.
The girl looked at her as if she were daft. “Ye take me fer a flat or something? No. I got me a room off the Haymarket.” She paused. “ ’Course, when I heard what happened at the Magdalene ‘Ouse last Monday, I got scared all over again. I tried to lay low but, well, a body’s got t’eat.”
Hero studied the girl’s animated face. If she really was Hannah Green, the girl was living proof that God takes care of idiots. “Tell me about Tasmin,” said Hero.
The girl sniffed. “I was working the stretch between Norris Street and the George when she found me. She said there was a gentry mort willin’ to pay ten pounds t’talk to me, but if’n we was smart, we could maybe figure out a way to get more.”
Hero had actually offered twenty pounds to anyone who could put her in touch with Hannah Green. But Tasmin Poole had obviously been less than honest with her former coworker. “Go on.”
The girl’s eyes slid away. “Tasmin was gonna write ye—Tasmin was clever, ye know. She could read and write like nothin’ you ever saw. She came up to m’room to work on writin’ the note while I went to get us some sausage rolls. It’s when I was comin’ back that I saw that cove going into the lodging house.”
“A man?” said Hero. “What man?”
“What do you mean, what man?” said Hannah scornfully. “Don’t you know nothin’? The same man what killed Hessy.”
Lady Jarvis’s querulous voice could be heard raised in annoyance somewhere above stairs. Hero looked at Hannah’s burgundy-plumed hat, the plunging decolletage, the glory of spangles and pink-and-white Polonaise stripes and said, “Wait here.”
Yanking open the door, she found James standing patiently in the hall. “Watch her,” Hero told him, then hurried upstairs to furnish herself with the reticule, hat, gloves, and parasol without which no respectable lady would be seen out of doors in London—no matter how nefarious her errand.
Hannah Green sat in the hackney pulled up across from Paul Gibson’s surgery, her body rigid with mulish obstinacy. “I ain’t goin’ in there,” she said with all a prostitute’s loathing of the medical profession. “I don’t need no doctor.”
With difficulty, Hero resisted the urge to shake the girl. “That’s not why we’re here. You need someplace safe to stay. There isn’t anyplace else.” Not that Paul Gibson’s surgery was exactly safe either, Hero thought, remembering the fate of the wounded assailant she’d brought here. But she kept that information to herself.
Hannah Green cast her a doubtful glance. “No medical exam?”
“No exam,” promised Hero.
The girl consented to get out of the hackney. Hero paid off the driver, then had to practically pull the girl across the road.
“Good God,” said Paul Gibson, his eyes widening when he opened the door to Hero’s knock.
“Dr. Gibson, meet Hannah Green. I think,” she added as Hannah glared at the surgeon and Gibson continued to stare in awe at the lady’s burgundy plumed hat and spangled pink-and-white stripes. “I’m sorry, but I had no place else to take her,” said Hero, putting her hand in the small of the girl’s back and giving her a push that propelled her over the threshold and into the hall.
Chapter 47
Sebastian arrived back at his house in Brook Street to find a note from Paul Gibson awaiting him. The Irishman had written cryptically:
The word “quickly” was heavily underscored three times.
“Why all the mystery?” Sebastian demanded when Gibson opened the door to him.
“I was concerned my message might fall into the wrong hands,” said Gibson, turning to lead the way back down the hall.
“So who’s your guest?”
“I have two, actually.”
Sebastian stopped on the threshold of Gibson’s parlor. Miss Jarvis stood beside the empty hearth, her gaze on the pickled pig’s fetus on the mantel. She was turned half away from him, her spine as rigid and uncompromising as ever, her brown hair once again pulled back as neatly as a schoolteacher’s, her forehead faintly crinkling as she stared with apparent fascination at the blob of purple-pink flesh in the jar. She looked as she had always looked and he wondered why that surprised him. As if that brief, desperate coupling in the dark should have transformed her and made her—what? Soft and winsome?
She turned then and he had the satisfaction of seeing her lips part on a quickly indrawn breath. And he knew in that moment she, too, was remembering the touch of flesh against flesh, the taste of salt on a questing tongue. Then a woman’s voice said, “Bloody ’ell. You gonna make me say it all
