The Angel of Highgate

27 THE GATHERING STORM

Clara opened the front door and stepped inside. It was her day off, and instead of wearing her maid’s uniform, she was dressed in the height of fashion: a yellow skirt over a crinoline, a blouse with mutton leg sleeves, and a new hat with brilliant feathers and lace pinned to her hair. She stopped for a second to admire herself in the hallway mirror, lifting her skirts and extending a toe coquettishly to admire her new lace-up boots while she twirled the parasol she had purchased to complete her outfit.

Unbeknownst to her, Mister Greenley had just stepped from the parlor and stood silently watching. She jumped when he cleared his throat to let her know she was not alone.

“Oh, Mister Greenley. You gave me such a start!”

Mister Greenley stood silently appraising his maid’s new clothes, his gaze overbrimming with recrimination.

“It’s my day off, sir,” she hastily pointed out.

Greenley sniffed at the comment. “Is that a new outfit?”

“Yes,” Clara said uncertainly.

“It looks very expensive. Where did you get the money from?”

“The money? I, I saved it, sir.”

“You’ve been stealing, haven’t you?”

“No!” Clara gasped. “I ain’t never stole nuthin’, sir—”

“Don’t lie to me, girl!” Greenley bellowed. “I pay your wages. I know full well how much money you have and it’s certainly not enough to dress like a harlot.”

“But, Mister Greenley, this is what the fashionable ladies of London are wearing—”

“Not on the wage of a maid-of-all-work they aren’t!”

“I didn’t steal it!” Clara shouted defiantly. “I never stole nothing!”

Mister Greenley’s brows contracted in a fearsome glower.

“Don’t back-talk me, girl! I will not brook lying, thieving, dishonesty or secrecy in my home!” Mister Greenley lunged toward her and Clara flinched away, expecting a blow across the face. When it didn’t come she ventured a trembling look at her tormentor. Mister Greenley’s face was a clenched fist hovering close.

“Now,” he said, his voice trembling with violence straining to be unleashed, “tell me what is happening in my house… after I am in my bed.”

Once again, Thraxton idled in his carriage until the light in Greenley’s bedroom went out. Then he trotted across the road, swinging his walking stick, and danced up the marble steps. Things were going to change. He was already planning strategies of how he would reintroduce himself to Robert Greenley in a more advantageous way, so that he would come to look upon Thraxton as a future son-in-law.

But Thraxton’s knuckles met only thin air as the door snatched open before he had a chance to knock. Clara greeted him with an inscrutable expression as he entered, and then, instead of leading him up the stairs as usual, she held open the door to the front parlor.

“Miss Aurelia’s waiting for you in here, sir,” she said, her voice stretched to a brittle whisper.

Thraxton threw a puzzled look at her. Clara kept her eyes downcast, lips trembling.

Even before he entered the room, Thraxton knew it was a trap.

Through the open door he could see a white top hat sitting atop the sideboard. The likes of Mister Greenley would never wear a top hat — especially a white top hat. Thraxton knew there was someone waiting for him in the room, a stranger to the household. He stepped inside the parlor and the sharp bark of a cough pulled his eyes right.

Robert Greenley sat in a tall wingback chair, his meaty forearms stretched out along the chair arms, huge, knobby-knuckled hands gripping the leather so hard they left indentations. The violet eyes glowed incandescent in a face chiseled from granite.

Thraxton swallowed hard. The trap was sprung and he was caught.

“Sit down, sir!” Greenley commanded.

The words were like a scalpel slicing the tendons at the back of his knees. Thraxton collapsed onto the only seat: a low, floral-patterned ottoman that forced him to look up at Greenley.

Two smaller chairs flanked Greenley’s. Aurelia sat in one. She never once looked up at him, but kept her eyes fixed upon the carpet. In the other chair lounged the owner of the white top hat: a tall, weaselly man with a head covered by a mop of brown curls and the most preposterous side-whiskers. As Thraxton’s gaze fell upon him, the man tipped his head slightly, peering over the top of the rose-colored pince-nez perched on the bridge of the hawkish nose. His dark brown eyes held the voracious stare of a ferret that has cornered a rabbit in its burrow. The face was chillingly familiar. Thraxton was certain that he knew the man from somewhere, and then he remembered the tall, thin doctor who had spoken to him after the duel with Augustus Skinner. The realization thrust a knife blade of anxiety between his shoulder blades.

“So,” Robert Greenley said, his voice quaking with rage. “You have been found out, sir!”

“Found out? What are you insinuating—”

“I have discovered the truth, sir, of how you have been routinely bribing a domestic servant in my household to gain access to my daughter for immoral purposes.”

“That’s a damned lie!”

Greenley’s voice rumbled like an earthquake. “I’m afraid your denials are wasted on me. Clara has made a full confession.”

“And what does Aurelia say?”

Greenley seemed to blow up with rage, coming half out of his chair. “That is none of your damned business! For her part in this sordid affair, I fully intended to sack Clara and throw her out on the street. However, my daughter has begged me to show mercy. I grudgingly acceded to her wishes, but only after she swore a solemn oath never to see you or have congress with you again. Is that not so, Aurelia?”

Thraxton looked at Aurelia, who looked straight ahead and acknowledged only with the slightest nod of her head.

“This is monstrous! Sir, if you truly love your daughter—”

“I do love my daughter!” Greenley interrupted. “And that is why I must protect her from men such as you — blackguards and seducers who prey on the naïveté of young women.”

Thraxton could sit still no longer and sprang to his feet.

“I do not believe for one second that Aurelia feels this way.”

Greenley rose from his chair. “Then perhaps you will believe it from her own lips. Aurelia, what do you have to say?”

All eyes fixed on Aurelia, who never looked up as she answered in a small voice, “I… I wish never to see you again…”

Thraxton unleashed a look of utter hatred at Greenley. “Those are your words, not hers.”

“Believe what you will. This gentleman is Silas Garrette, a medical doctor. He has examined my daughter and finds that she is no longer a virgin.”

Thraxton’s mouth filled with a metallic bitterness.

“Have you had carnal knowledge of my daughter, sir?”

Thraxton’s knees trembled. It angered him having to lie, but he had to think of Aurelia. He took a breath, tried to quell the rising surge of dread in his chest and turned his gaze back to Robert Greenley. “What is it you wish, sir? I will do anything—”

“I wish never to see your despicable face again. If I do, I will pursue this matter further — in the courts. I will bring legal action against you so that you may never see my daughter again. Given the evidence I can mount of your bribery of my domestic and your infamy as a seducer and womanizer, I have no doubt that any judge in England would take my word over yours — Lord or no Lord.”

Thraxton felt all hope slipping away. Anger would not serve him. He had to be diplomatic. “Perhaps… perhaps there were some… minor… improprieties in the way I pursued my courtship of your daughter. But my intentions toward Aurelia have never been anything but honorable.”

“Honorable? You?” Greenley snorted. “Get out! Get out before I beat you like the filthy cur you are!”

For a moment violence seemed imminent. Thraxton stood, jaw tensing as he wrestled with his emotions, but then his shoulders slumped. He cast a final despairing look at Aurelia, who never once raised her eyes to meet his, and then turned on his heel. He paused at the threshold of the door and looked back. “Believe me when I say this. Neither you, nor the courts, nor the law, nor God, nor Death itself will prevent me from being with Aurelia if that is what she wishes.”

Thraxton stepped outside and the front door slammed behind him with a thunderous crash that threatened to collapse the entire row of houses.

A fine mist of rain was falling as he stepped into the street. Hansom cabs passed in either direction. Pairs of horses clopped by pulling ponderously laden omnibuses. He looked at his waiting brougham.

But Thraxton had nowhere to go.

Mordecai Fowler and his two cohorts stepped from the alley to find a black carriage waiting at the curbside. The side glass had been let down and now a hand extended from the open window clutching a white top hat, which it rocked from side to side as a signal.

“Wait here, you two.”

“What is it?” Crynge asked.

“Business,” Fowler answered, then trooped over to the carriage and clambered in. He settled himself on the leather seat and nodded at the tall man sitting opposite.

“Doctor Garrette.”

“Mordecai,” Silas Garrette said, nodding in response.

“Job for me?”

“Yeeeesssssss.”

“The usual? Another knocked-up dolly-mop?”

Garrette shook his head, light flashing from the rose-colored pince-nez. “Not this time. There is a girl I want taken.”

“A girl someone would be lookin’ for if she went missin’?”

“Oh, I very much think so.”

Fowler lifted the bowler hat from his greasy mop of hair and resettled it. “Risky. Nobody cares if a whore goes missin’—the Grips dredge ’em out the river every other day. But a girl from a good family gets snatched, people notice. The Grips notice.”

“I will pay double the usual rate.”

Fowler ruminated, sensing there was a lot more he wasn’t being told. “How do we get hold of this girl?”

“She steals out of the house at night to meet her lover.”

Fowler grinned. “A toff, I’ll wager.”

Garrette nodded.

Fowler’s filthy fingernails scratched his stubbly chin with a rasp-rasp sound.

“Five times the usual.”

Garrette didn’t need to think about it. “Done.”

“What do you have in mind for her?”

The man behind the rose-colored lenses flashed a guillotine smile. “Something special. Something quite extraordinary.”