Hero’s voice came out in a broken, raspy croak. “When she ran away, where did you think she’d gone?”
“I thought she’d gone to Ramsey. Secretly, to get away from Father. I just—” She broke off, swallowed, and began again. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t she come to me? Why didn’t she tell me what he’d been doing to her?”
“Perhaps she thought you wouldn’t believe her,” Hero said softly.
Lady Sewell gave a strange laugh that raised the hairs on the back of Hero’s neck. “I went there to kill him, you know. This morning.”
Hero shook her head, not understanding. “Kill whom?”
“Father. I should have done it all those years ago.” Yanking open her tapestry reticule, Lady Sewell drew forth a heavy carriage pistol. Hero stepped back, her gaze darting to the road, where her father’s watchdog lounged at his ease.
“I held the gun right in his face. But then I thought, if I shoot him, they’ll hang me. And then what will become of Alice?”
“Alice?”
“My little sister. He swears he’s never touched her. But I don’t believe him. Not this time.”
Hero felt a cool gust of wind caress her cheek, breathed in the familiar scents of long, wet grass and damp earth, and felt so fundamentally altered by what she was hearing that she wondered if she’d ever quite right herself again. In the last two weeks, she’d been touched by violence on a shocking scale; she’d killed, and very nearly been killed herself. And then there was that other incident—the one she was endeavoring to forget. Yet this . . . this was somehow worse. She’d known about violence and death and, vaguely, about what happened between a man and a woman. She hadn’t known about . . . this. How could any man be so depraved as to do such a thing to his own child? How could any child ever come to terms with such a monstrous betrayal?
“So we made another bargain,” Lady Sewell was saying. “Father and I. I let him live, and he will send Alice to live with me.” She gave another of those wild laughs. “He worries people will think it strange. Can you imagine?” The laughter suddenly died, leaving her expression pinched. “I wish I could have killed him,” she whispered.
“No,” said Hero, reaching out to take the gun from Lady Sewell’s hand. She expected the woman to resist, but she did not. “No. Your younger sister needs your comfort and support, and he’s not worth hanging for.”
“Yet if I’d killed him before, Rachel wouldn’t be here.”
Hero stared down at the row of unmarked graves. “Don’t blame yourself. You can’t be certain of that.”
“You know it’s true,” said Rachel’s sister.
Hero’s fist tightened around the gun in her hand. “You can’t blame yourself,” she said again, even though she knew there was nothing she could say, nothing anyone could do that would ever take away the crushing burden of this woman’s guilt.
It was several hours later that a lad playing catch with his dog on Bethnal Green stumbled across the decomposing remains of another body.
“Is it a woman?” asked Sir Henry Lovejoy, holding his folded handkerchief to his nose as he peered into the weed-filled ditch.
“Looks like it, sir,” said one of the constables, standing ankle deep in the murky water, his hat pulled low against the drizzle. “What you want we should do with ’er?”
“Take the body to the surgery of Paul Gibson, near Tower Hill,” said Lovejoy, his eyes watering from the stench. “And you—” He beckoned to the lad still hovering nearby with his dog. “I’ve a crown for you, if you’ll take a message to Brook Street.”
Chapter 56
When Sebastian arrived at Tower Hill, Paul Gibson was downing a tankard of ale in his kitchen. The surgeon had stripped down to his breeches and shirtsleeves, and even from across the room, Sebastian could smell the stench of rotting flesh that clung to him. Mrs. Federico was nowhere in sight.
“Is it Hessy Abrahams?” Sebastian asked.
“Could be,” said Gibson, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “She’s the right age. But she’s beyond identification, I’m afraid.”
Sebastian knew a spurt of disappointment. “How did she die?”
“Her neck’s broken. But it’s the way it’s broken that’s interesting. Come, I’ll show you.”
Suppressing a groan, Sebastian followed the Irishman down to the end of the garden, through a swarm of buzzing flies, and into a room so thick with the reek of death it made his eyes water. “Good God,” said Sebastian, holding his handkerchief to his nose. “How do you stand it?”
“You get used to it,” said Gibson, tying a stained apron over his clothes.
After nearly two weeks, Hessy Abrahams’s body—if this was indeed Hessy Abrahams—was in an advanced state of decomposition, the flesh blistered and suppurating and hideously discolored. It took all of Sebastian’s concentration to keep from losing what little he’d eaten of Madame LeClerc’s delicate nuncheon.
“Do you know what happens when someone dies of a broken neck?” Gibson asked, picking up a scalpel and what looked like a pair of pincers.
“Not exactly, no.”
Standing at the corpse’s throat, Gibson peeled back some of the decaying flesh to reveal the bone beneath. “The top seven bones in your spine form your neck. Basically, they’re part of your backbone, but they also serve to protect the spinal cord that runs through here—” He broke off, pointing. “You can break your neck and be all right as
