“Ask the roughs who decided to chase me,” she said.

He didn’t look around. “Where?”

She was gathering her breath now. “Back on the street,” she said. “They were waiting around outside the Portman Rooms. I was at a meeting there. I made the mistake of coming out alone.”

Now he looked around. But pointedly. Suddenly she didn’t like the way that this was going. He was a big man, as all of London’s policemen tended to be. And he had a country accent, as so many of them seemed to have. There were very few sharp-witted cockneys walking the streets for the Metropolitan Police, but there were a great number of these slow-moving, blue-caped and helmeted oxen.

He said, “Where are they, then?”

A glance, and then she said, “Gone.”

“Gone, are they?”

“They chased me from Baker Street.”

“If they ever existed.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no man safe from your kind,” he said. “Is there?”

She was shocked.

She said, “Is this how you respond to every woman who asks for your help?”

“There’s women and there’s women,” he said, glancing down at her coat. “I know where you’ve come from. And I know what you are. So move on. Go home to your husband. If a woman like you can get one.” He leaned forward slightly. “Whore.”

He said this last word low, and between his teeth, so that even if anyone had been standing close, they’d be likely to miss it.

As fast as the relief had run through her, she was now flushed through with ice.

“What did you call me?”

“I called you nothing,” the policeman said, straightening up again. “You must be hearing things.”

She glanced down and realized what he’d been looking at. Her suffragette pin with its green, white, and violet colors. Some wore amethyst and pearls. Hers were paste.

She walked, unsteadily, the rest of the way to the Underground station, knowing that the constable was following and watching her from a distance, but taking little comfort from the fact. His presence might deter anyone from approaching her with ill intent; but were they to do so, he’d probably turn away.

Her train carriage on the return journey smelled of sweat and leather, like cooking bones. She caught herself shaking, and made herself stop. The short walk home was a new trial.

Safe in her rooms, she did not burst into tears as she was thinking she might, but was violently sick into the basin from under the washstand. Her landlady was partially deaf and unlikely to hear. Evangeline sank to the floor by her bed, hugging the basin, teary and miserable with the vomit searing her sinuses, and sat there without any sense of the passage of time. It might have been for minutes, it might have been an hour.

Eventually she rose, and cleaned everything up, and washed her face in cold water.

With her self-control regained, Evangeline looked to her future. Fear would turn to anger. Perhaps not tonight, but in time. She would take care not to be caught so again. She would continue to wear the badge of her belief, though not, out of prudence, at her place of work; if its significance were to be understood, her dismissal would probably follow.

She undressed and put on her nightgown, and then quickly climbed into her cold bed and shivered under the layers of heavy blankets until her own body heat warmed the space she lay in and made it into a nest. She told herself she was safe. She’d felt threatened, but she had not been hurt. She tried to compel herself to appreciate the difference.

Eventually, Evangeline slept. Inevitably, it was troubled sleep.

She had a nightmare of her childhood, the first in a very long time.

Grace was screaming, and Evangeline could not bring herself to turn around and see why.

That was all.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Lying in their bed and watching the lace patterns cast across the ceiling from the streetlamp outside, Sebastian sensed that Elisabeth had an inclination to talk. So he stirred a little, to signal that he was wasn’t asleep.

“Are you awake?” she said.

“I suppose,” he said.

“Frances tells me that Robert’s teacher has been talking about finding him employment again.”

The last time he’d raised the subject, she’d had no enthusiasm for it. But now her tone was optimistic.

“That’s encouraging.”

“Yes. It is.”

Sebastian said, “I wish someone could say where he’d fit in. I know he’s good for something. If I didn’t know the boy was troubled, sometimes I would think him a genius.”

“He’s no longer a boy.”

“If he were merely slow, employment would be no problem. There’s many make a living with a shovel or a broom that can barely speak their own names.”

“He isn’t slow.”

“Anything but,” Sebastian agreed.

After a moment, Elisabeth said, “I do have a strange feeling that all’s going to be well.”

Given her recent moods, Sebastian was surprised to hear this. “What’s caused that?” he said.

“Nothing I can begin to explain.”

Then she began to explain.

“I went up to see the little girl. The one I told you about? The one whose drunken father came in and threatened the nurses. She’s a beautiful child, the way so many consumptives are. Large eyes and a lovely transparent complexion. She said that she hoped her sisters won’t cry too much when she’s gone.”

“Who told her she’s dying?”

“No one’s had to. She just knows. We understand nothing, Sebastian. We don’t know where we’re going or why. We think that what we know is all there is. But sometimes you just get a sense of what’s beyond it. And that can take your breath away.”

They lay there in silence for a while. And then he felt her leg against his own. He laid his hand on her stomach, and she rose to press against it; and from there the journey of intimacy took its familiar, though of late less frequent, course.

Afterward, they said nothing. Within minutes, she was breathing deeply and he knew she was asleep.

Sebastian could not sleep. Normally his work did not prey on his thoughts. But this case was different.

He found himself constructing a rough sequence in his mind. How old was Grace Eccles now? Twenty-six, twenty-seven? Evangeline would be the same. Their ordeal had taken place two years after Sir Owain’s return from his South American expedition. Then a gap of years in which deaths and disappearances had certainly occurred, but none that drew so much notice as these present murders.

Something troubled him. He could construct a narrative in which Sir Owain roamed his estate in search of the beasts that lived on in his mind. But try as he might, Sebastian could not reconcile this narrative with the indecencies that had been practiced upon the victims.

Perhaps he simply lacked the necessary education in man’s psychological complexity. He certainly knew of man’s capacity for harm, and he’d heard rumors of soldiers abroad whose actions beyond the sight of God and country were a disgrace to their flag and their uniform. But try as he might, he could not quite believe it of the man he had met.

Evangeline had returned to London, and was somewhere close. One way or another, he would find her.

After that afternoon’s visit, he even had an idea for how he might go about it.

Вы читаете The Bedlam Detective
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату