“She didn’t send us,” Charles said. “We’re trying to find her.”
Susan Trevennen gave a bark of dry laughter. “If you’re looking for Nell, I’m the last person you should be talking to.”
“You’re just about the last person we’ve tried.” Charles pulled out one of the rickety ladderback chairs at the table. “Won’t you sit down, Miss Trevennen?” The Scots accent had faded again. It was his drawing room voice, the sort of voice Susan Trevennen must have been accustomed to as a girl in her father’s vicarage.
Susan’s eyes widened. She looked from the chair to Charles. “I can’t talk long.” Her gaze slid sideways. “I have customers waiting.”
Melanie took a handful of coins from her reticule and laid them on the table. Charles flagged down the waiter and ordered Susan a glass of gin.
Susan dropped into the chair Charles was holding out. “What do you want with Nell?”
Melanie started to launch into the now-familiar story about the legacy, but thought better of it. Susan had no reason to want to help her sister to a fortune. Melanie looked into Susan’s blue-gray eyes. If she had seen an echo of herself in Helen Trevennen’s sister, perhaps she could make Susan see the same in her. “Our son is in danger,” she said. “And your sister may be able to help.”
Something flickered in Susan’s gaze. Surprise? Reassessment? Compassion, even? “In that case I’m sorry for you. Nell’s not likely to help unless there’s something in it for her.”
“That’s the least of our problems.” Charles returned to his chair. “When we find her we’ll make it more than worth her while.”
Susan’s gaze flickered between them, taking in Melanie’s ringless left hand. A gentleman and his whore, she’d think. So much the better. While Susan warmed to Charles’s courteous treatment, she’d be more likely to talk to Melanie if she thought they lived in the same world. “I haven’t seen Nell in years.”
Melanie tugged at the neck of her gown. The gin-soaked air cloyed at her senses and made her skin crawl. “You know your sister left London?”
“I heard she had.” Susan’s own voice had grown more refined, as though she was falling back into the accents of her girlhood. “I hadn’t seen her for some time before that. We quarreled.”
“Over what?” Melanie said.
“A man. What else? Nell always had her pick of men. She didn’t need mine, too. I swear she did it just to be spiteful. Anyway, she didn’t have him for long. He got a knife in his ribs in a brawl over a wager. Which cockroach could run across the table fastest. He always was a mad fool.” An edge of regret flashed beneath the mockery.
“I’m sorry,” Melanie said.
Susan hunched a shoulder. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. He wasn’t worth the heartache.”
Melanie rested her elbows on the table in an attitude that invited confidences. “When you first came to London you lived with your sister.”
“I was more naive then. About a lot of things.” Susan tugged her spangled scarf closer round her bare shoulders.
The waiter plunked the gin down on the table. Susan took a long swallow from the chipped glass.
“Your sister’s friend Violet Goddard told us Helen may have feared some sort of danger when she went away,” Charles said. “Do you have any idea what that might have been?”
“Not in the least. Nell wasn’t afraid of anything. I suspect she thought she was in trouble and she ran to get out of it. Or else she thought there was money to be made by disappearing.”
“Where do you think she went?” Charles asked.
Susan shrugged. The spangled scarf slipped loose, revealing the tattered, lace-edged neck of her gown. A blue-black bruise spread across her collarbone, mottled by a dusting of powder. “Somewhere better than this. Nell has a knack for landing on her feet. And she likes nice things.”
Charles sat watching her, intensity in his stillness. “Is that what she wanted most out of life? Nice things?”
“Yes. That is—” Susan picked at a grease spot on the table. Her voice and phrasing had echoes of the vicarage schoolroom. “In some ways I think what Nell wanted was respectability. Which is funny, because that’s what our father wanted for us, and Nell ran away from it. Only she didn’t want to be poor and respectable like Papa. She wanted people’s respect and all the elegancies of life in the bargain. If anyone could manage it, perhaps Nell could. I haven’t managed either one. It’s funny—”
A fit of coughing seized her, a deep racking sound that came from the chest. She tugged a handkerchief from her bodice and put it over her mouth. “I haven’t always been here, you know,” she said when the coughs subsided. “I was an opera dancer and then I worked at a house in Marylebone. Not one of the grandest in the city, but quite nice. Gilt mirrors and velvet sofas and gentlemen in proper coats and neckcloths.” She glanced about the room. A portly man was walking down the stairs, buttoning up his trousers. A couple were on their way upstairs, undressing each other as they went. “Not that it makes a lot of difference with the candle doused. Still, this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”
Melanie took a sip of the harsh brandy. In the past ten years she had known anger and fear and self-hatred. But since Raoul O’Roarke had taken her out of the door of the brothel in Leon she had rarely felt powerless. It was one of the reasons she would be forever grateful to him. “Did Helen ever talk about wanting to live anywhere besides London?” she said. “Did she ever mention starting over in America or the East Indies?”
“Nell in the wilds of the colonies? Oh no, that’s the last place my sister would go. Paris, perhaps, or Italy.”
A chorus of whistles carried across the room. A full-figured girl with dark ringlets was perched on the edge of a table, skirt drawn up well above her knees, making an elaborate show of unlacing the ribbons on her slippers. “Amy Graves,” Susan said. “A posture moll. Toast of the Gilded Lily. She makes more money with her performances down here than the rest of us do upstairs. She’s almost young enough to be my daughter.” She turned back to Melanie. “I wish I could help you. I’m sorry for whatever’s happened to your son. But I don’t have any idea where Nell might have gone.”
Melanie leaned forward. “You knew her once. Better than anyone. If she wrote to someone after she left, who might it have been?”
“Nell didn’t have a soft spot for anyone. She didn’t even tell our uncle she was leaving, and she wasn’t talking to me at all by that time.”
“Yes, but assuming she did write, to just one person, who might that have been?”
Susan frowned. The whistles from across the room grew louder. Amy Graves had removed her garters and was peeling off her stockings, sheer black silk embroidered in scarlet.
“I suppose—” Susan twisted the end of the scarf round her chapped fingers. “Jemmy. Jemmy Moore.”
“He was one of her lovers?” Melanie asked.
“He was her first lover. She ran off to London with him. She threw him over soon enough, but—” Susan turned her gaze toward the fireplace corner. The shadows were kind to her. Beneath the paint, her face had a delicate, heart-shaped sweetness. “Nell kept going back to Jemmy. Not for long, but consistently. If you were of a romantic turn, you’d call it love.”
“Where is he now?” Charles asked.
“Probably picking someone’s pocket or trying to break into a house, assuming he hasn’t managed to get himself hanged in the past few months.”
“He’s a thief?” Melanie said.
“Not a very good one, but he manages to scrape together a living.” Another cough seized her. She brought the crumpled handkerchief up to her mouth. “Most of which he loses at the gaming tables.”
“Where does he live?” Charles asked.
“I haven’t the least idea.” She folded the handkerchief. Bright red spots showed against the yellowed linen. “He changed lodgings half a dozen times in the years I knew him. But from sometime after midnight until the early hours of the morning, he can usually be found at Mannerling’s gaming hell. A friend of mine saw him there just this past year.”
Melanie looked from the handkerchief to Susan’s face. She should have read the signs in the fine-drawn translucence of Susan’s skin sooner. She’d grown all too familiar with the inexorable ravages of consumption during her time in the brothel. “What does Jemmy Moore look like?” she asked.
