investigation. She wants to help as well.'
Nancy grinned. 'Well, then, perhaps I'll look her up, and we'll talk all about it.'
I imagined an encounter between Lady Breckenridge and Black Nancy. 'Perhaps you will not.'
'Maybe not. But I like to tease yer.' She glanced up. 'I think that's your sailor, Captain.'
A short, rather square man had come into the tavern and stood looking around uncertainly. I rose and beckoned, and he, seeing me, made his way to the inglenook. He was bowlegged and walked like a man expecting a ship to roll under him at any moment.
I realized when he neared us that he was not very old, perhaps in his midtwenties, although his weather- beaten face made him look older. His blue eyes held an air of worry, and he greeted me with an awkward bow.
'Mr. Thompson tol' me I should speak to yer, sir.'
I signaled Anne to bring another ale. I bade the man sit down, then Nancy and I took the bench across from him. He watched us with a blank expression until Anne set a tankard in front of him. He lifted the tankard, set the rim to his lips, and poured at least a third of its contents down his throat.
'Thank ye,' he said, wiping his mouth. ''Twas a thirsty journey from Wapping Stairs.'
'I thank you for making it,' I began. 'Mr. Thompson said you were very worried about your young lady. Tell me why you should be so.'
'Because it ain't like her.' He shot me a belligerent look, as though daring me to disbelieve him. 'She wouldn't walk out and not tell me or me landlady. She'd 'uv sent some word to me.'
'When did anyone last see her?' I asked.
'Week ago come tomorrow. She were there when I woke up in the morning. Went out at four. Never seen her since.'
'She came to Covent Garden, to meet someone, Thompson tells me,' I said.
The man nodded. 'Said she had something special. Said she'd make a few guineas from it. Said she'd bring them back to me.' He swallowed. 'But she ain't come back.'
Nancy leaned forward, her bosom resting on the table. 'What do you do with the money she usually brings you?'
The sailor glanced at me, blue eyes troubled. He had a blue-black tattoo on the inside of his arm, an intricate pattern that looked oriental. I nodded at him to answer the question.
'Goes to housekeeping, don't it? Me wages and hers, we buy the bread and our bed. Our landlady ain't much, but she leaves us be.'
'But she's a game girl, you know that,' Nancy went on. 'Means she goes with blokes what fancy her for an hour.'
'Only thing my Mary knows how to do,' the sailor said reasonably. 'But she always comes home to me.'
Nancy nodded as though satisfied. 'I don't think he did her in, Captain. And maybe she liked him well enough.'
Chester scowled at her. ''Course she did. My Mary, she's always waiting for me when I sail in, and there to send me off again.'
I held up my hand. 'We believe you, sir. What is her name? Mary-'
'Chester, sir. I'm Sam Chester.'
'She is married to you?'
'In a manner of speaking. That's the name we give the landlady, and I don't know no other. She were with another sailor when I came home three year ago, and she didn't like him. But he wouldn't let her go. So I said, if I win at dice, she's mine. And I won. She been with me since. I only ever knew her as Mary.'
'Very well. What does she look like?'
Hope sparkled in his eyes. 'You'll look for her?'
I nodded. 'I will try. She is not the only girl who's gone missing.'
'That's what Mr. Thompson said. Magistrate didn't believe there were anything wrong in Mary's going, but Mr. Thompson said he knew a chap what could find her if anyone could.'
I pushed my ale glass aside. 'I am pleased he has such faith in me.'
'Mary's a bit of a thing, on the plump side,' Sam said. 'Has yellow hair, but she dyes it and it don't look very good. I like it brown, like natural, but she says it has to be yellow.' He thought a moment. 'Brown eyes, big smile.' He stopped, his voice faltering. 'Such a pretty thing.'
I glanced at Nancy to let the man recover himself. She shook her head. 'I don't know her, but I never get to Wapping. But one of the girls at Covent Garden might 'a seen her. I can ask.'
'Why should you want to help?' Chester looked at me in sudden worry. 'You ain't the Watch, are you? Wanting to haul Mary off for trying to make a bit o' coin?'
'I am not the Watch, Mr. Chester. I simply don't like to see girls hurt.'
Nancy ran her hand up my blue-coated biceps. 'He looks after us.'
I slanted her a look, and she grinned back at me. Chester obviously didn't know what to make of this teasing, and he sagged against the bench. 'Thank ye, sir. I've been so worried.'
I asked for another ale for Chester, which he drank gratefully. I pressed him with questions, but he did not have much more to tell us. Mary Chester's habit was to leave the house at five or six in the evening, prowl around Wapping getting what customers she could, and return home around midnight to share a meal and a bed with Sam.
The only thing Mary had done differently the day she'd disappeared was to leave earlier than usual to make her way to Covent Garden. Sam did not know the name of the man she'd gone there to meet, or what he looked like, or when she'd met him. Sam had questioned her friends in Wapping but found no answers. The girls had not known; Mary had not told them much except that she'd met a gentleman who could give her a pile of money.
I asked Sam where I could send word to him, and he gave me a direction of a boardinghouse near Wapping Stairs, not far from the magistrate's house where Thompson did his work. Sam said he would be staying in London for now, though he might be shipping out on a merchantman in two weeks' time. I told him I hoped I would know something by then.
The three of us left the tavern together. I sent Sam off a good deal more hopeful than when he'd come, though I was not sanguine myself. Finding a lost girl in London was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. I did have several ideas about where to start looking, however, and having Black Nancy here would be a help, as well.
'Poor gent,' Nancy said as we watched him weave his way along Maiden Lane toward Southampton Street, which would take him to the Strand. 'I did meet up with a girl last night who might can help us. The hackney driver didn't want to stop, but I made him. You take your time walking home, and I'll run fetch her.'
Before I could object, Nancy ran away down Maiden Lane toward Bedford Street, the opposite direction from Chester. I saw her black head bobbing along through the crowd, and then she was gone.
I made my way after her slowly, turning north when I reached Bedford Street and then walked the length of Henrietta Street back toward Covent Garden. I was very much aware that on the other side of the church lay the house in King Street where Gabriella stayed. I made my feet continue to Covent Garden to find Black Nancy.
When I reached the square, it was at the height of its activity. A mass of humanity thronged the market stalls to buy fruit or flowers, hens or milk, gewgaws or whatever else the vendors were selling. The shops ringing the square were likewise full: middleclass young ladies and their mothers shopping shoulder-to-shoulder with unwashed working-class women with coarse hands and weathered faces. Young male servants swarmed about trying to purchase their masters' dinners, hucksters sidled to passersby trying to entice coins from them, and vendors called out, desperately trying to pitch their voices above those of their rivals.
The sun shone hot and sweat dripped freely from faces young and old, thin and round, ruddy and pale. A water seller did a fair business letting passersby refresh themselves with a dipper of well water from his bucket. A man selling cool ale in the shade of a brick building also plied a good trade.
I searched the crowd for Nancy, wishing she'd waited for me. She was nimble and young and I had no wish to tramp all over Covent Garden searching for her. I smiled a gentle refusal at an orange seller, then made my way across the south side of the square, heading for Russel Street.
I spied Nancy in the shadows of the back of a stall halfway along the square. She waved when I saw her, and I made my way to her, dodging a maid carrying two squawking ducks by their feet.
