Page 51 of Who Cries for the Lost

For a long moment, Eloisa simply stared at her, her face draining of all color, her chest jerking with her agitated breathing. “Who told you that?”

“Why? Is it true?”

“No! Of course not! The nasty little liar. She was desperate to stay—claimed she had no place else to go.”

“And yet you dismissed her anyway?”

“Why wouldn’t I? What do I care if she starves in the streets? Lying little strumpet, no better than she should be. She deserves everything that has happened to her.”

“Are you quite certain she made it up? That Miles wasn’t the father?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The widow gave a sharp, bitter laugh. “I heard just this morning that she’s been remanded into custody.”

It took Hero a moment to understand what Eloisa was saying. “Phoebe Cox is in prison? Why?”

“For murdering her own baby. And if there’s any justice in this world, she’ll hang.” The woman cast another quick glance up the path, then said, “And now you must excuse me.”

Signaling to her children and their governess, Eloisa turned away, her head held high, her eyes fixed straight ahead as she walked toward the fashionably dressed young gentleman Hero could now see waiting for them farther up the path.

It was the Reverend Sinclair Palmer.

“I don’t think dear Eloisa will agree to speak to me again,” said Hero, taking off her chip hat as she walked into the library on Brook Street an hour later.

Devlin looked up from where he sat at his desk, cleaning a small double-barreled pistol. “Why? What happened?”

She told him. “Do you think it’s true? That Phoebe Cox is in prison for killing her own baby?”

“Well, when I saw her, she did say the child was dead.”

Hero went to stand beside the window, her arms crossed at her chest, her gaze on the housemaid scrubbing the steps of the house across the street with a brush and a bucket of soapy water. “I can’t believe I actually felt sorry for Eloisa the last time I spoke to her. What a bitter, vile creature she is.”

“But you already knew that, didn’t you? You’re the one who saw the fires of Smithfield in her eyes.”

Hero turned her head to look back at him. “What prison would Phoebe be in?”

“I’ve no idea. But I can find out.”

Chapter 31

Someone less familiar with the ways of his world might have been inclined to view what was happening to Phoebe Cox as a tragic but isolated incident. Sebastian knew better.

Sometimes, like Phoebe, a woman in service allowed herself to be seduced by her employer. But more often than not she was simply forced, by either her master or one of his sons or even a passing houseguest. English gentlemen of means were rarely held accountable for raping servants. After all, who would believe such a woman over her “betters”?

The lucky ones cried themselves to sleep at night and somehow found a way to live with what had happened to them. The unlucky ones fell pregnant.

Once her belly began to show, an unmarried servant “in the family way” would inevitably be turned off without a character. And if she didn’t die of starvation or exposure but lived to birth her babe, she faced a new, even more terrifying danger, for a single woman who gave birth to a child only to have that child die could be accused of killing it.

And then hanged for murder.

Driven by a heavy sense of dread, Sebastian went first to the Haymarket, looking for Phoebe Cox. But her place across from the theater was empty, and none of the women he spoke with would admit to knowing where she lodged. He told himself that for someone who catered to the crowds of theatergoers, it was early yet; he would need to come back again later. But on the off chance that what Eloisa had told Hero was true, he set Tom to making inquiries at the city’s various prisons and sent a note to Sir Henry Lovejoy asking for his help in locating the woman. London had a lot of prisons.

He then spent several hours making discreet inquiries into the Reverend Sinclair Palmer.

Marylebone was a choice living, and it didn’t take Sebastian long to discover that Eloisa Sedgewick’s childhood friend was related to both the Duke of Newcastle and the Earl of Oxford. The Reverend hadn’t particularly distinguished himself at Cambridge, but he’d more than made up for that by his ostentatious religious zeal. A conservative Old High Churchman in the mold of the new Bishop of London, he was obviously an ambitious man. And it occurred to Sebastian as he turned his horses toward Marylebone that marriage to Edward Platt’s wealthy, recently widowed daughter would do much to advance such a man’s career.

The parish of Marylebone was an old one, once no more than a small rural village to the northwest of London. Its original church, dedicated to St. John the Evangelist in the twelfth century, was long gone, having been replaced in the fifteenth century by one built beside a “bourne,” or stream, and dedicated to Mary—Mary-by-the-Bourne. That church, too, was gone, and its replacement was about to be supplanted by an even newer place of worship being built near Regent’s Park, for the area had become increasingly wealthy and fashionable in recent years and would only keep growing.

It was at the site of the half-finished new church that Sebastian found the Reverend Palmer standing in a slice of golden afternoon sunlight and deep in conversation with the short, stocky foreman of the half dozen or so stonemasons working on a grand Corinthian portico that looked like it was modeled on the Pantheon of Rome. The Reverend was dressed in a long, plain black cassock, but this was not the rusty, threadbare garment worn by so many parish churchmen; the tailoring was exquisite, the cloth new and fine, and its black faille fascia ended in two long silk tassels. When Sebastian’s curricle pulled in next to the kerb, the Reverend left the foreman and walked toward him, his handsome, even features smiling, his eyes alive with speculation.

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