I let it go. 'Take her to a guest chamber. I'll fetch Bremer.'
I left him lifting the girl in his beefy arms, looking down at her in undisguised awe. I found Bremer in the kitchen. He sat at a table, his head in his hands, the other staff gathered around him. They looked up at me, white- faced and anxious, while Grace's wails echoed from the dark doorway beyond.
A tall and bony woman, with an alert, almost handsome face, her apron dusted with flour, stepped in front of me. 'Who are you?'
I ignored her and went to Bremer. 'I need your keys.'
He unhooked them from his belt and handed them to me in silence, the keys jangling as his fingers shook.
I pointed at a boy who leaned against a wall. 'You. Run and get a constable. Then go to Bow Street and ask for Pomeroy. Tell him Captain Lacey sent you.'
They all stared at me, and I clapped my hand around the keys. 'Now.'
The boy turned and banged his way out the scullery door into the rain. His thin legs flashed by the high window as he ran up the outside stairs.
The servants continued to stare at me as I turned my back and tramped away. Behind me, Bremer began to weep.
I found the footman waiting before a door in the upper hall. The young woman lay insensibly in his arms, her hair tangled on his chest. His wig had been knocked askew, which made him look still younger than his thick arms suggested-a child's frightened face on a man's body. The footman seemed unsurprised that I'd assumed command, and waited patiently for his next order.
The room I unlocked was neat and cheerful, the first one with those qualities I'd seen in this house. I told the footman to lay the girl on the bed's embroidered white counterpane and to start the fire.
I shook out the quilt that lay at the bottom of the bed and draped it over the girl. She lay in a swoon, but her breathing was better, her chest rising and falling evenly, as though she were simply asleep. The footman watched her, a mixture of pity and fascination in his eyes.
'Stoke the fire well,' I told him. 'And tell the other maid to come up and sit here with her. Not Grace.'
The footman dragged his gaze from Aimee. 'You want Hetty, sir? I'll fetch her.'
'In a moment.'
I limped out of the room and back to the study. I closed the door on the grisly scene and locked it with Bremer's keys. When I returned to the bedroom, the footman was tossing heaping shovelfuls of coal onto the grate one-handed. He'd built the fire to roaring, and heat seeped into the room.
For a moment, I wanted to sink to my knees and, like Bremer, press my hands to my head. I had come here to get the truth from Horne, by violence if necessary, but someone had beaten me to it. Someone had stabbed him through the heart, cheerfully perhaps. And then, not satisfied with that, the killer had mutilated him.
I could almost understand the murder. Horne was disgusting and self-satisfied, and by all evidence, he'd beaten this young woman and kept her tied and locked in a wardrobe. But what the murderer had done afterward lodged bile in my throat. That had been an act of anger, of vengeance, an act as disgusting as Horne had been himself.
Behind my disgust, my clear thoughts kept working to piece together what had happened. I felt a sudden need to order everything in my mind before Pomeroy arrived, though I couldn't have told myself why. It was Pomeroy's job to discover the culprit and arrest him, not mine.
I looked at the footman. 'What is your name?'
He turned from the fireplace, still on his knees. 'John, sir. I was christened Daniel, but gents mostly want a John or a Henry on their doors.'
'If your master told Bremer he was not to be disturbed, why was Grace there?'
John thought a moment. 'Sometimes he had Grace wait on him. When he wouldn't have us.'
I remembered Grace kneeling in the doorway, staring in anguish at Horne's body in the stain of brown blood. 'Was she there before or after Bremer opened the door?'
He looked confused. 'I don't know, sir. I was with you.'
I let that drop. 'What is your job here? To stand by the front door?'
'Aye, sir. From the morning until I locks it last thing of the day. If a gent comes to the door what has business with the master, I put him in the reception room and give his card to Mr. Bremer. If it's someone as has no right to be here, I chuck him out.'
'But you are not on the door all the time, are you?'
He looked confused. 'Yes, I am.'
'When I arrived yesterday, Mr. Bremer let me in. Not you.'
'Oh. Well, I'm really the only man here, ain't I? Except Mr. Bremer, and he's too old. I help Hetty and Gracie carry the coal buckets up and down the stairs. Or a load of wood, or a tub of water to the scullery. No one else is big enough.'
'So all day you or Mr. Bremer opens the door to visitors. No one comes in without you knowing it.'
'No, sir.'
'Who came today?'
His eyes widened. 'Do you mean someone who came today might have stuck the master?'
'It is possible. Think back. Who came to visit?'
John's face screwed up with effort. 'Well, there was one gent, thin, dark haired. You'll have to ask Mr. Bremer who he was. I was helping cook lug in the potatoes for dinner. I let the gent out.'
'When was that?'
John wiped his sweating forehead on his arm, dislodging his footman's white wig and revealing cropped dark hair beneath. 'Oh, maybe half past two.'
'Was he the only visitor the entire day?'
'Excepting yourself, sir.'
'What about the girl, Aimee? You said you'd thought she'd gone.'
His gaze strayed to the bed. 'Aye, sir. Weeks ago now. Her and Lily, they went.'
'You saw them go?'
He thought. 'No. The master said they were gone. Gracie was that glad. She had to wait on them. She didn't like them.'
'The girl, Lily. Are you certain that was her name?'
'The master said it was.'
'What did she say it was?'
He looked worried. 'She never said. I never went nigh her. Wasn't allowed, was I?'
'Did he tell you why they went away?'
John shook his head. 'They just went.'
I leaned on my walking stick. John watched me with an anxious expression on his shiny face. I didn't know if his worry meant that he was lying or whether he simply waited for another difficult question.
'Go fetch Hetty. If you remember anything else, please tell me.'
'Yes, sir.'
John rose to his towering height and lumbered from the room.
The air had warmed, and the cold tension eased from my muscles a bit. I pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. I itched to rouse the girl to ask her questions, but she was breathing evenly, sleeping well. Had Horne tied her and put her in the wardrobe before the murderer came, or had the murderer done that? Either way, Aimee might have seen something, heard something, enough to tell us who had killed the man in the library.
Pity moved me to let her rest. I had found at least one of the girls, and she still lived. Bruises, dark and angry, threaded the translucent skin on her face, throat, and chest. Fury beat through me at the sight of them, fury at Horne and the murderer both. Dead, Horne could made no recompense for what he'd done, and I had a deep and aching need to make him pay. The murder had robbed me of that satisfaction.
The door opened and a maid I had seen in the servants' hall came in. Dark hair showed through the white cotton of her cap, but her face was not young. It was an intelligent face, with a sharp nose and rather narrow eyes.
She looked at the pale, sleeping girl on the bed, and her nostrils pinched.
