Page 45 of Taken to the Grave
“When was this?” Hugh asked. The man on the broken bits of the table stirred again and moaned.
“Last month. When you mentioned both Minerva and Stromburg, I knew you must know something,” she said. “But I want nothing to do with the Sanctuary. I let every girl go, every guard who might have heard something about Opal, and hired new ones.”
He looked again at the moaning guard on the floor, and a memory of something Mrs. Givens had said struck him. “Was a man named Harlan Givens one of your guards?”
Sir’s mother had mentioned that he was working at more than just the Seven Sins as security.
“Givens? Yes. Why?”
Hugh was finished here. And by the increasing mobility of the man bound on the floor, in more than one way.
“Rest assured the Sanctuary will not pay you a visit. Now, I’m leaving. Am I going to meet with any trouble as I go?”
Madame Knight turned her head far enough to display her hateful glare. “Just get out. And do not come back.”
“With pleasure,” Hugh said. Then, lowering the candlestick, he slipped out of the bedchamber.
Chapter
Fourteen
Shortly before nine o’clock, Carrigan parked the barouche-landau at the edge of the coach field outside Vauxhall, along Kennington Lane. The position gave them an unobstructed view of the other conveyances coming and going. There weren’t many. In the few days since a body had been found at the pleasure gardens, Mr. Gye’s concern that such a thing would frighten off visitors had come to fruition. The papers were reporting that the sale of entry tokens and season’s passes had decreased, and the nearly vacant coach field supported it.
It had been over an hour since Carrigan had parked them, and not one of the carriages that had arrived or departed had possessed an inverted cross stamped on the door. With every passing minute, Audrey found it more difficult to suppress her urge to stamp her foot and groan in frustration.
Hugh would be at the Red Lotus by then. It made perfectly good sense that she could not go with him to such a place. And if they were to close in on the Sanctuary and discover who had killed Bethany Silas, it also made perfectly good sense that they should split up. Divide and conquer, as it were.
But every time she pictured him walking into a house of ill repute, a vibration of anger and envy shook through her. It was absurd, and she despised the reaction. She was more mature than that. Too confident in Hugh and his morals. And yet, logic failed to disperse the feelings.
Sir leaned on the ledge of the open window, his cheek digging into his palm. “I’m getting hungry.”
“You just barely finished the biscuit that was squirreled away in your pocket,” Basil replied.
“That only made me hungrier.”
The two had been bickering since they, along with Carrigan at the reins, had driven away from Violet House. Hugh’s valet had become increasingly more dramatic with his sighs of boredom and annoyance too.I am a valet, he’d muttered several times,not an assistant inquiry agent.
Sir teased him about just missing his nightly tea and crumpets while he read romantic novels in bed. When Basil had denied the accusation, Sir had whipped out a copy ofA Romance in the Forestby Ann Radcliffe from his own coat pocket. “Then what do you call this?”
Basil had tried snatching it away from Sir, complaining that the little pickpocket had no respect for privacy. The bit of levity had only lasted until Basil had finally succeeded and stuffed the book back into his own pocket. Then, they returned to watching for any sign of the inverted cross on passing carriages.
Audrey sighed. “This isn’t working.” Sitting still, in one spot, was entirely ineffective. She thought again of her idea to watch Sir Oliver Pendleton’s home, and to follow him should he leave. She probably did not possess the patience for that endeavor either.
“Maybe this Sanctuary place isn’t even around here,” Sir suggested.
“It is,” she replied. The vision she’d had of Mr. Comstock in the coach with the lights of Vauxhall’s coach field in the background had proved it. But as Hugh was the only one who could know of that, she ticked off the reasons she was certain. “Miss Silas met Mr. Comstock here for the first time. He took her here the day she disappeared. Her body was found near the Vauxhall stairs in the Thames. And the other bodies that were found—” She swallowed her next words. Sir kept looking out the window, as if unaffected, but she knew he wasn’t.
“I’m sorry, Sir, we won’t speak of it.”
He shrugged. “It’s all right. We’ve got to if we’re going to figure out who snuffed my father.”
“Wewillfigure it out.” She raised her voice. “Carrigan?”
“Yes, Your Grace?” He had remained seated in the driver’s box, just as many other drivers with the thankless task of waiting for their charges were.
“Can you take us around the streets here, relatively close to the pleasure gardens?”
He whistled and shook the reins and the carriage rolled from its spot.
