Page 34 of What Cannot Be Said

Sebastian nodded. “Yes, she was originally apprenticed to a cheesemonger who was extraordinarily cruel to her. It was Lady McInnis who fought to have her removed from the woman and given to a new mistress.”

“Interesting. So what do you know about this cheesemonger?”

Sebastian looked up to meet her hard gaze. “Not enough.”

Chapter 21

Sebastian spent the next hour or two combing the Tower Hamlets and surrounding area, from St. Katharine’s and Tower Wharf to St. Dunstan’s and a certain ancient Tudor pub, looking for Gibson. In the end, frustrated, he returned to his friend’s surgery to find Gibson sprawled in one of the overstuffed chairs beside the parlor’s cold hearth, his sweat-stained cravat askew, his head lolling to one side, the pupils of his eyes tiny, telltale pinpricks.

“Devlin,” he said, looking up with a hazy smile. “You back? Alexi said you’d been here looking for me. Pour yourself a drink and have a seat. You don’t mind if I don’t get up, do you?”

Sebastian stayed where he was, one hand curling around the edge of the door beside him, torn between a raging desire to pull the surgeon up out of that damned chair and shake him, and the equally powerful urge to wrap his arms around his friend and weep. His voice cracked as he said, “Leg hurting, is it?”

“Not so much anymore.”

“That’s good.” Sebastian drew a deep breath. “Where’s Alexi?”

“I don’t know. She went out. Said she told you about... the girl. Can’t remember her name.”

“Gilly Harper.”

“That’s right. Gilly.” Gibson gave a faint shake of his head. “Need to stop whoever’s doing this, Devlin. Before he kills again. Wish... wish...” His chest lifted with his breath, and whatever he’d been about to say was lost as his eyes slid out of focus.

Walking over to him, Sebastian rested one hand, gently, on his friend’s thin shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly. “You just take care of yourself. You hear me? Please take care of yourself.”

Then he turned and left, his heart heavy in his chest and his eyes stinging with what he realized were unshed tears.

?“He’s going to kill himself if he keeps this up, isn’t he?” said Hero as they took the boys for a walk later in Grosvenor Square. The day was still warm and sunny, the soft breeze sweetly scented by roses and damp earth, the boys shouting cheerfully as they raced ahead along the winding gravel paths.

“Yes,” said Sebastian. “But if Alexi can’t make him see sense, I’ll be damned if I know how to do it.”

Hero was silent for a moment, her gaze on the laughing boys, and he knew by her stricken expression that her thoughts were drifting back, inevitably, to the foster mother she’d interviewed near Richmond Park. He said, “You really think this Prudence Blackadder has been killing the babies left in her care?”

“She either kills them or she deliberately lets them die. I don’t see how there can be an innocent explanation. I mean, I know foundlings and orphans put out to foster do die at an alarming rate, but that woman cheerfully oozed evil. What I don’t understand is how she can have been allowed to get away with such a thing for so long.”

Reaching out, he took her hand in his and felt her fingers tighten around his. “She gets away with it because no one cares,” he said. “The workhouses assume most of the infants they send out into the country will die, so why would anyone be suspicious when they do? In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if your Mr.Fry is less than pleased whenever any of the parish’s infants somehow manage to survive to the age of four and come back to the workhouse.”

“The local vicar must surely realize what she’s been doing—or at least guess.”

“Perhaps—if she was telling the truth when she said they give all the children a ‘good Christian burial.’ But they do live on a farm, and the river is not far away.”

“What a horrid thought.” She paused, her brows drawing together in a frown as she watched the boys hunker down to examine a dandelion growing beside the path. “As a motive for murder, having someone accuse you of regularly killing the children left in your care must surely rank right up there near the top.”

“I’d say so, yes—as would being a society darling threatened with having it known that you abandoned one of your own by-blows to such a fate.”

She turned her head to look at him. “You think Blackadder was telling the truth about Basil Rhodes?”

“It seems rather too fantastical of a lie for the man to have invented on the spur of the moment, wouldn’t you say?”

“There is that. I wonder how Laura came to know of it.”

“It is curious. It’s not as if McInnis and Rhodes run in the same set. Not only is Rhodes about as far from a sporting man as you can get, but he’s a good ten to fifteen years younger than either Laura’s brother or her husband. He’s my age.”

“You know him?”

“Oh, I know him. We were at Eton together.”

Her eyes crinkled with a smile at whatever she heard in his voice. “Ah. Not one of your favorite people, I take it?”

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