In the Arms of a Marquess(78)

A tiny coal-blackened sweep curled around a mutt sleeping across the gin house’s threshold. Ben stepped over boy and dog and pushed the door open. His throat tightened at the odors of stale ale and unwashed bodies. God, but it was good he’d always been drunk when he had come here.

The tables seemed clean, though, which they never were when the tavern was fully occupied. A handful of patrons slumped upon benches, slack-jawed with drink though it was not yet noon. Given his three days at Fellsbourne, Ben withheld judgment.

Lil looked up from behind the tap. Her lips curved into a sloe-eyed smile.

“Well, look what the cat drug in so soon after the last visit.” Her gaze traveled up and down him. “You look good enough to eat, duck. But I don’t suppose that’s in the cards for ol’ Lily today, is it?” She winked. Her skin looked thin over tired bones, her hair combed but in the daylight garishly tinted.

“Thank you, Lil. I have come to speak with you.”

“ ’Bout what, love?”

“The other night when I was here, my friend Lord Styles came in. Do you recall?”

She nodded, her mouth settling into a line.

“You seemed unhappy with him.”

“Unhappy weren’t the word, love.” She tilted a mug beneath the tap and drew ale into it, and set it on the bar before him.

“Why, Lil?”

“Seeing him got me to thinking about the girls. Especially my Missy.”

“The girls?”

“All them girls who went off at once.”

Ben’s grip tightened. “Who is Missy?”

“Not but a sweet little one. Used to stay with me when the gentlemen weren’t, you know. Didn’t want to get herself into my line o’ work, see, but we was good friends still. I used to know her mother ’fore she drank her sorry hide into a hole in the ground.”

“Do you still see Missy?”

She shook her head and placed her palms upon the bar’s surface as though for support. “Just the one letter in two years.”

“Why did she go?”

“Told her she shouldn’t, of course. But she liked the idea. All them girls did, but they was too young to know. And none of them ever came back, so I was right to worry, wasn’t I?”

One letter in two years. Ben released the glass carefully.

“Do you still have Missy’s letter?”

The doxy’s gaze fixed firmly in his. “What would you want with a thing like that, duck?”

Ben held her regard. Lines fanned from the corners of her big eyes—eyes that had seen at least as much of the worst of the world as his.

“I wish to help,” he said.

She studied him for a moment, then pushed away from the bar and went through a door behind. She returned with a folded envelope and proffered it.

“Here it is, love. Don’t know what good it’ll do you. Just a mess of tears and loneliness.”

Ben’s breathing stalled. It must have cost the girl a considerable sum to send the missive, perhaps all the wages she had earned since her departure from London. The mark of origin on the envelope indicated Fort St. George. Madras.

He unfolded the single page and read the spindly lines. This was no clerk’s hand, nor a prostitute’s. The girl, Missy, could write.

Tears and loneliness, indeed. Her horrifying shipboard experience. And a name: Sheeble.

Ben folded the page, slipped it inside the envelope and handed it back to Lil. Crispin would pay for this. And Styles . . .

“How many girls went with Missy, Lil?”

Lil shrugged. “A few score, I ’spect.”

“Perhaps this Mr. Sheeble that Missy mentions will know.” The Mr. Sheeble who, when girls died from sickness that ran rampant aboard ship during the ocean voyage, cut off a lock of hair from each before casting the bodies overboard. To record his captain’s losses, according to Missy’s account.

Lil reached for Ben’s hand.

“You’re a clever one, love.” Her voice was uncustomarily thick. “D’you think they made my Missy into a tart like me after all? She didn’t say, so I think p’raps they did and she was too ashamed to tell old Lily.”

Ben curled his fingers around hers and squeezed. “If Missy is anything like you, Lil, then she is a finer person than most I know.”

She pulled away, sniffing.

“Lil?”

“Duck?”

“Why did seeing Lord Styles the other night remind you of Missy?”

Her eyes went flinty again, like that evening in Ben’s fogged memory when he had barely noticed anything outside of his mind and heart so wrapped around the woman who had come back into his life. Who had never left it, in truth.

“Before they went off, he came in here looking all spruced up like you now. Turning eyes down the street, making promises to everything in a skirt, including my Missy.” Her lips tightened. “He’s the one as got them girls to go.”

Tavy struggled against the lump in her throat and met Abha’s gaze. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Ask him.”

She took a deep breath and turned fully around once more. Marcus had donned a shirt and was drawing the door shut behind. A small hand arrested his action, becoming an arm then an entire slender body. Tavy’s breath escaped her slowly.