Someone to Watch Over Me (Bow Street Runners #1)(68)

"What the devil are you talking about?" He glanced at the assembled servants with their funereal expressions. "Where is Victoria?" he snapped.

The question caused all the faces in the entrance hall to pucker in confusion. "Victoria?" the housekeeper repeated bemusedly.

Grant shook his head impatiently. "Vivien. Miss Duvall. The woman who has been living here for the past few weeks, dammit. Where is she? Where is Keyes?"

A moment of heavy silence ensued, charging his nerves with immediate alarm and fury. No one wanted to answer him, he realized, and in his consternation he barked out a question at a volume that made all of them jump. "Someone tell me what's happened, damn you!"

Mary stepped forward, her shoulders slumped and her head slightly ducked, as if she suspected he might be tempted to strike her. "It was my fault, sir," she said in a small voice. "I saw Miss Duvall leave the house. On the servants' stairs, heading to the outside door by the kitchen. She asked me not to tell anyone. She said it was life and death to her. But I thought 'twould be best to go to Mrs. Buttons, and so I did."

Grant's blood pumped brutally hard, causing a drumming noise in his ears. "Life and death," he repeated thickly. Victoria had somehow realized the danger she was in, and bolted.

Mrs. Buttons smoothed her hands repeatedly on her apron front, as if she couldn't seem to blot her palms thoroughly enough. "You see, sir, Mr. Keyes said immediately upon his arrival that Sir Ross had asked him to bring Miss Duvall to Bow Street. His manner was rather odd and cold. In the years that I've been acquainted with him, I've never seen him quite like this. It was clear Miss Duvall did not want to go away with him, but she asked leave to change into her walking shoes. And while we waited for her in the library, she slipped out of the house. I suppose any woman in her position would be a bit fearful of strangers."

"I watched her from the window as she left." Mary interceded. "She was heading to the market, it looked like. With Mr. Keyes going right after her."

"She's going to Bow Street," Grant muttered. As far as Victoria knew, it was the only place of safety other than this house. He snapped out a command for one of the footmen to take a horse and ride hell-for-leather to Bow Street. "Tell Cannon to call out every man available. Tell him to cover every inch of Covent Garden and the surrounding streets with constables, Runners, and watchmen until Miss Duvall and Keyes are both found. Now,hurry --I want your arse in Cannon's office in less than five minutes."

"Yes, sir." The footman headed for the back of the house in an outright run, taking the shortest possible route to the stables.

Grant charged outside, barely aware of the rain that soaked his hair and clothes. A strange feeling had taken hold of him, a fear he had never experienced before. He had never given a thought to his own safety, had known that he possessed sufficient wits and physical strength to muddle through whatever danger he found himself in. But this fear for someone else, this blend of love and terror and fury, was the worst kind of agony.

He ran toward Covent Garden at a breakneck pace, while animals and carriages sloshed through the wet, dirty streets and pedestrians scattered for cover from the storm. If anything happened to Victoria...The thought caused a hellish pain in his chest, making his lungs feel as if they were filled with fire rather than air.

He passed the churchyard of St. Paul's, the sacred ground layered with two centuries worth of human remains. The charnel scent of accumulated bones greeted him as he cornered the eastern portico of the church. Covent Garden spread before him, a massive intermingling of traffic and squalor. Pickpockets, procurers, thieves, bloods, and bullies wandered freely about the place...and all of them would take a great interest in an unaccompanied woman with a pretty face and red hair. Panic welled inside him as he debated whether Victoria might have skirted around the Garden and traveled through the dark alleys filled with vagrants and criminals, or possibly gone straight through the market square. He had to find her before Keyes did. "Victoria, where are you?" he said beneath his breath, his frustration doubling with each minute that passed. It took all his self-control to keep from bellowing the question aloud.

Blinking hard against the deluge, using both hands to wipe the streaming water from her face, Victoria blundered down a side street that branched from Russell, and realized in despair that she was heading in the wrong direction. She should have reached Bow Street by now. If only she knew the way. If only a few more minutes had passed before Keyes had learned of her absence.

The hem of her rain-soaked skirts tangled around her ankles as she ran farther into an accretion of dilapidated buildings. As everywhere else in London, there was a jumble of whorehouses, thieves' kitchens, and slum cottages tucked behind the clean, well-fronted high streets. Without pausing to glance over her shoulder, Victoria darted into the nearest place of refuge. She hurried down the basement steps of a two-story building, with signs outside identifying it as a betting shop.

Struggling to catch her breath, she opened a wooden door and plunged into the shadowy, lamplit basement room. It was filled with at least a dozen men, all of them too engrossed in the proceedings to immediately notice her presence. Gentleman and louts alike huddled at a counter lined with tobacco jars and cigar bundles, studying lists of odds on the back wall. A bookmaker wearing heavy leather pouches at each hip swaggered behind the counter and conducted transactions at a rapid pace. "...got an 'eavy bag against all comers..." he was proclaiming, stroking the ends of his curly sideburns with thumb and forefinger, then jotting down bets with a stubby pencil.