CHAPTER TWELVE

July 18th, 1812

Exeter, Devonshire

THEY REACHED EXETER before noon. Mordecai didn’t direct his coachman to the hotel he usually patronized; he wanted somewhere he wasn’t known, where he could keep a low profile. The inn he finally selected was a modest establishment more used to solicitors and country squires than the wealthy bastard sons of earls. “Remember: I’m plain Mr. Black from nowhere in particular,” he told his servants. “I am not related to the late Lord Dereham.”

“Yes, sir.”

After a light luncheon, he and Miss Wrotham set out to visit churches. Exeter was as oppressively hot as London had been. Mordecai’s shirt-points drooped. He sweated beneath his layers of clothing and envied the half-naked urchins begging for coins. They drew a blank at the first three churches, but at the fourth the churchwarden said, “A godly woman who takes in fallen women? That’d be Miss Pender.”

“Can you give us her direction?”

“Why, she’s just around the corner, sir.”

Miss Pender did indeed live just around the corner, in a dour street that had the church at one end and a tavern at the other. Mordecai glanced at Miss Wrotham. A stranger would think her calm, but he saw suppressed excitement in the way she clutched her reticule and dampened urgency in her stride. She wanted to run, but was forcing herself to walk.

But where her steps quickened, his slowed. He wanted to stop the clock, halt time itself. He had a strong sense of doom approaching. She will have no further use for me after this.

Miss Pender’s house was halfway down the street, tall and narrow and thoroughly respectable, its front step scoured clean, its door knocker polished until it shone.

They halted at the scrubbed doorstep. Mordecai unwillingly glanced at Miss Wrotham. Behind the spectacle lenses her eyes were bright with hope.

Frustration surged in his chest. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her and say, Marry me, damn it. Can’t you see we would suit?

Mordecai blew out his breath. He rapped on the door.

The maid who answered was as neat as the house, her starched apron crisp despite the heat. She bobbed a curtsy and didn’t meet their eyes.

“My name is Black,” Mordecai said. “May we see Miss Pender, please?”

The maid bade them enter. The vestibule was warm and narrow and dark and scrupulously clean. The floor gleamed. Mordecai smelled camphor, polishing wax, and a sharp note of vinegar.

They followed the maid to a back parlor. As she turned to go, he saw that her hands were red and work-worn.

Mordecai and Miss Wrotham waited. The parlor was suffocatingly warm. It had the same camphor, polishing wax, and vinegar smell as the vestibule. It was also the most precise room Mordecai had ever seen in his life. The chairs and the little tables, the candlesticks on the mantelpiece and the religious prints upon the wall were all rigidly aligned and perfectly spaced, as if someone had determined their placement with a ruler. The grate gleamed, the fender gleamed, the candlesticks gleamed. He would have been willing to bet his entire fortune that there was not one speck of dust in the room.

Around them, the house was silent. He listened for murmured voices, for a baby’s crying, and heard absolutely nothing. Then his ears caught the sound of footsteps. Miss Wrotham heard it, too. She took a step towards the door. Her face was pale, taut with hope. Mordecai found himself fervently wishing that her sister and child were here—but he doubted they were. This didn’t feel like a house with a baby in it.

The woman who entered the room was in her late fifties, tall and large-boned. Her face was square, her mouth wide, her lips thin. She couldn’t help that gin trap mouth any more than he could help his beak of a nose or Miss Wrotham her haughty eyelids, but Mordecai took an instant dislike to her. He summoned a polite smile and a bow. “Miss Pender?”

“Yes.” Miss Pender’s graying hair was drawn back tightly from her forehead. Her eyes were blue. Not the deep navy blue of Miss Wrotham’s, but a pale, icy color. Her appearance was as precise as the parlor, as if her hair didn’t dare stray from its bun, her gown crease itself, or her starched cap wilt in the heat. She smelled strongly of vinegar.

“We’re looking for my sister,” Miss Wrotham said, with polite urgency. “Sophia. Did she come here?”

Miss Pender stiffened. Her resemblance to a gin trap became more pronounced. “There is no one named Sophia in my house.”

There was a moment of stricken silence. Mordecai didn’t look at Miss Wrotham’s face. He couldn’t. “Has she been here?’ he asked. “We believe she was with a girl named Lizzie.”

The thin lips compressed. “They left two months ago.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No.”

“Why did they leave?”

“They didn’t want to be saved.”

Mordecai doubted that he’d want to be saved by Miss Pender, either.

“The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them,” Miss Pender said forcefully, her esses hissing.

Mordecai felt a strong desire to step away from her. “Quite so,” he said. “Ah, is there anyone in your household who might know where they went?”

Miss Pender’s mouth tightened still further. Now she had no lips at all.

Mordecai took her silence for a Yes. “May we speak with them, please?”

MISS PENDER HAD six reformed prostitutes in her household. The maid who’d answered the door was one of them. They were all dressed in starched aprons, they all had red, work-worn hands—and they all disliked Miss Pender. Mordecai saw it clearly in the way they averted their eyes from her.

He interviewed them one by one in the stuffy parlor, with Miss Wrotham standing silently at his side.

“Speak with righteous lips,” Miss Pender commanded each girl, and they obeyed, whispering their answers, their eyes fixed on the floor.

Mordecai saw the second girl shrink back when Miss Pender stepped close, saw the fourth one flinch when Miss Pender raised her hand to open the door. He knew what those instinctive cringes meant; he’d shied away from blows often enough as a child. The muscles in his jaw tightened until he had a gin trap mouth, too.

None of the girls knew where Lizzie and Sophia had gone, although one of them said hesitantly that Lizzie had grown up in Stepcote Hill, so perhaps she’d gone there.

“Did Lizzie ever mention any names?” Mordecai asked. “People she knew in Stepcote Hill?”

The girl hesitated, and darted him a scared glance.

“Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord,” Miss Pender said fiercely.

The girl fixed her gaze on the floor again. “Billy English,” she whispered.

“Billy English?”

The girl shivered, and nodded.

“Who is he?”

“You don’t want to go near ’im, sir. He’s a bad ’un, is Billy.”

After the final girl left the parlor, there was nothing to do but thank Miss Pender and leave. Mordecai did so with relief. He inhaled a deep breath as they stepped out into the street; the stink of an overwarm city was a thousand times better than the smell of camphor and vinegar and piety. He turned to Miss Wrotham. “We’ll find your sister. I swear to you, we will find her.”

“I know we will.” Her voice was firm, but her eyes shone with unshed tears.

Mordecai’s heart seemed to squeeze in his chest. He wanted to put his arms around her and hold her very tightly.

Miss Wrotham set out for the end of the street. Mordecai matched his step to hers. “Where is Stepcote Hill?” she asked.

“Here in Exeter. It’s one of the poorest neighborhoods.”

“Like Seven Dials?”

“Yes.”

Miss Wrotham halted.

Mordecai braced himself for an argument. Even if she cried he was not taking her to Stepcote Hill. But instead, she turned and looked back at Miss Pender’s. “I know I should admire her, but I don’t.” Her voice was troubled.

Mordecai turned, too, and looked at the grim, narrow house. “Miss Pender may be godly, but she hasn’t an ounce of kindness in her.”

“Then why does she help the fallen?”

Mordecai shrugged. “Duty?”

Miss Wrotham grimaced, as if duty was a word she disliked. “She reminds me of my Great Aunt Wrotham.”

Mordecai gave a humorless grunt of laughter. “She reminds me of my mother.”

Miss Wrotham glanced at him, her eyebrows lifting in surprise. “Your mother was very moral?”

“No,” Mordecai said.

“She looked like Miss Pender?”

“No.”

“Then in what way was she like Miss Pender?”

Mordecai hesitated, and then said, “Did you notice how those girls flinched from her? She hits them. I’d say that’s why your sister and Lizzie left.”

“Your mother hit you?”

“Frequently.” Mordecai began walking again, an attempt to halt the conversation. It didn’t work.

“Father never hit us.” Miss Wrotham’s tone was sympathetic. “He just sent us to our bedrooms. I spent a large part of my childhood in my room.”

Mordecai didn’t tell her that he’d spent a large part of his childhood in the scullery because his mother couldn’t bear the sight of him; instead he said, “I’ll look for Billy English in Stepcote Hill this afternoon. And no, you may not come with me.”

To his relief, this dictatorial statement distracted Miss Wrotham from further discussion of their childhoods. “But I came to Seven Dials with you.”

“Didn’t you hear what that girl said? Billy English is dangerous.”

“But—”

“No,” Mordecai said, in a tone that brooked no argument.