Page 34 of Murder in Blackfriars

“Katharine Holloway.” Daniel interrupted me as proficiently as I did him. “Let me speak.”

I curbed the rest of my impassioned speech. “Yes, of course. I apologize. Please, carry on.”

Daniel eyed me with disparagement, then shook his head. “You will drive me mad, but what’s done is done. I take it my efficient and obsessive brother found things out? What did he tell you?”

For answer, I produced the letter and handed it to him.

Daniel’s frown returned as he read Mr. Fielding’s flippant words, but he said nothing until he folded the page and handed it back to me.

“Interesting,” he observed.

The fact that he returned the letter without tearing it up or refusing to relinquish it increased my awareness that this man was nothing like Joe.

I slid the letter into my pocket once again. “I found it more than interesting. If she took in children to keep them from dire fates, she might have scooped you up as well.”

“Possibly.” Daniel edged his answer with caution. “Or she may have no connection to me at all. Banks apparently thought she did, but Banks might have wished to tell me about something or someone else entirely.”

“I know. But it’s all we have.”

“Unless Banks’s friend Ramsay is steering us toward Mrs. Kerr for his own purposes.”

I flinched as a gust of wind came down the narrow passageway and whipped about us. “Did you discover anything about Mr. Ramsay?” I assumed Daniel had been occupying himself with this task when he wasn’t busy with his deliveries.

“I did. He’s also a builder, when he can get the work. He’s more of a casual laborer than Banks was. Has been arrested for assault a few times but never convicted—the victims could not prove their assailant was him beyond a doubt. Means Ramsay is careful, not necessarily innocent.”

“He did look rather rough,” I admitted.

Daniel heaved a sigh. “I am happy he was civil to you. If he told you about Mrs. Kerr, I’m certain itwasfor purposes of his own.”

“Or he saw no harm in it. He knew you by reputation, well enough.”

Daniel huffed a short laugh. “Many do. Let us go inside and take our leave, if we are to meet Errol at two o’clock. I will commandeer a hansom for the ride—this wind is growing bitter.”

I did not like to see the weather turning. Colder nights andblustery days meant October was marching toward us, and when it arrived, Grace would go.

I squared my shoulders, held in my hurt, and returned with Daniel into the cozy house.

* * *

Not long after, we were in a hansom, bumping through the City and out through Aldgate High Street to Whitechapel. We rode north and east, farther than I was comfortable venturing, on through Spitalfields, then Shoreditch.

The cabby kept to main roads and didn’t wind through the rookeries, wise of him. We passed shops and ordinary-looking houses all in neat rows, where women in pinafores wended their way with baskets, as I might do in Oxford Street.

This was typical of London—respectable and even upmarket streets dominated for a quarter mile, and then a turn of a corner brought one into the worst of slums.

In Bethnal Green, people could live ten to a room in run-down lodgings, with only a small cistern in the yard for the entire house. Any outbreaks of cholera, which had happened often in my mother’s day, hit the worst here.

The cab rumbled along Bethnal Green Road to Cambridge Street, then a jog took us to Green Street, which led to Victoria Park.

The cabbie set us down near one of the gates. He barely waited for Daniel to toss him a coin before he was turning and racing his horse back the way we’d come.

Victoria Park was lined on this side by a canal—the Regent’s Canal, Daniel informed me, which began at Paddington, then flowed east and south to empty into the Thames near Limehouse.

A little footbridge took us across the canal and through the gate into the park.

On any other occasion, I might find our outing pleasant. The walkway we followed meandered toward a wide lake, where a few people strolled its banks, it being too cold for bathing or even boating. I spied, on a small island in the middle of the lake, what looked like a pagoda, gleaming in the sunlight.

“Built for an exhibition many years ago,” Daniel said when he saw the direction of my gaze. “Moved here to decorate this park after it opened.”