Page 37 of Who Cries for the Lost

Chapter 21

The woman was dangerously thin, her bones painfully obvious through the pale, nearly translucent flesh of her bare wrists and hands, her face gaunt and drawn with cold and hunger and the kind of fear that has become habitual.

Sebastian found her leaning against the worn sandstone column of a building across from the Haymarket theater, a clutch of oranges cradled in her worn shawl, her shoulders slumped and her head bowed. She was dressed in a dirty, torn brown dress and broken shoes, and he thought at first that Tom must be mistaken, that this could not possibly be a woman educated and cultured enough to have served as governess to the grandchildren of a marquis. But then she stirred at his approach and stepped forward to say, “Oranges for sale. Fresh oranges, sir,” and her flawless, precise diction gave her away.

“Miss Phoebe Cox?” said Sebastian, walking up to her.

He saw the horror that flared in her eyes, saw the shame that contorted her features as she shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you’re looking for, but you’ve made a mistake.”

She must have been pretty once, he thought, before months of starvation, ill health, and desperation wore her down. She had her lifeless dark hair pulled back in a way that emphasized the thinness of her face, and she’d obviously pawned whatever decent clothes she’d possessed.

“I simply want to talk to you,” he said as she began backing away from him. “I’ll buy all your oranges, and get you a cup of tea and some dinner, too, if you’d like. You only need to talk to me for a few minutes.”

That stopped her, hunger, longing, and need warring with caution in her haunted gray eyes. Then she shook her head, her chin coming up. “I don’t do that. I may be on the streets, but I don’t go with gentlemen.”

Not yet.

“All I want is to talk,” he said again, wishing he’d thought to have Hero approach the woman instead; this was the sort of thing Hero did all the time. He nodded to a nearby coffeehouse, its paned front windows gleaming with a golden, welcoming warmth with the approach of evening. “We can sit in there.”

Alarm flared anew in her eyes. “They have back rooms they rent out in that place. I know what they’re for.”

He cursed silently to himself, wondering how in the hell Hero did this. He decided to change tactics. “How long were you with the Sedgewicks?”

The question surprised her so much that she answered him. “Four years. Why do you ask?”

“You’ve heard that Miles Sedgewick is dead?”

Something he couldn’t quite decipher shifted behind her eyes and she looked away. “I heard.”

“I’m looking into his death, and I thought you might be able to help me.”

She sniffed in disbelief. “You don’t look like a Bow Street Runner. You don’t sound like one, either.”

“That’s because I’m not a Bow Street Runner. The name is Devlin, and I promise you, I only want to talk to you. If you prefer, we can buy something from a street vendor and you can eat it sitting on the steps here while we talk.” He paused, then said, “Please?”

The lure of warm food and drink overcame her fear and suspicion. He stood with his shoulder propped against one of the old stone columns while she sat on the steps and wolfed down massive quantities of sausages and bread and butter.

“Where are you from?” he asked while she ate.

“Lincolnshire,” she said without looking up from her meal. “My father was the vicar in a small village there.”

“Would you go back there, if you could?”

She paused, her head coming up as a look of painful longing suffused her face. Then she swallowed and shook her head. “They’re dead now—my mother and father both. I have a sister—she married the local squire. But when I wrote her after I was dismissed, asking her for help, she said I’d made my own bed and must lie on it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sebastian. “When exactly were you dismissed?”

Her gaze dropped to her food again, although she made no move to resume eating. “They turned me off last February. Or rather, she did. But Mr. Sedgewick didn’t do anything to stop her. Afterward, I went to him for help—begged him to help me, or if he didn’t care what happened to me, to at least think of his child. But he just turned away.”

Sebastian sucked in his breath in a quiet hiss. “You were carrying his child?”

She nodded, her cheeks flaming with shame. “I hid it as long as I could. But then one day I fainted in the front hall, and one of the maidservants who’d guessed the truth let it slip.”

“And that’s when Mrs. Sedgewick dismissed you?”

She nodded again. “I begged her not to turn me out without a character—told her I had no place to go. But she said I should have thought of that before I got myself in trouble.” Her voice cracked. “I was desperate, and she didn’t care. She was smiling. It was as if she liked the idea of me suffering.”

“Did she know Miles was the father of your baby?”

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