Page 43 of The Marriage Method

“I don’t know,” Nell said. “Perhaps there’s no reason. Mrs. Pritchard and her bully boy didn’t strike me as very reasonable people. I thank God Miss Brent is no longer with them.”

“She made a brazen escape for one so young and inexperienced,” Miles observed with suspicious nonchalance.

Nell was at once on her guard. “She’s a resourceful girl. I only hope her wits enable her to survive the city long enough for me to find her.”

“Is that why she was recruited to Miss Corvus’s Academy?” he inquired. “Because she’s resourceful?”

Nell narrowed her eyes at him. For a man so fond of cats, he did sometimes bear a striking similarity to a dog with a bone. Would he never give up on solving the mysteries of the Academy? Not even now, with Mr. Cowgill presumed dead, Miss Brent missing, and Nell newly his wife?

“Don’t be absurd,” she replied. “I’ve never even met Miss Brent.”

“Then how is it that she came to be traveling to the Academy?”

Nell lifted one shoulder. “The matron of the workhouse wrote to me.”

That much was true. She’d told Nell that Flora Brent was bold, clever, and possessed of a formidable talent for mimicry. A girl with keen intelligence who might benefit from further education.

“I see,” Miles said.

Nell ignored his skepticism. “Workhouses provide no opportunities for advancement, but the Academy does. When we hear of promising prospects, as we often do from matrons we’re in contact with or from gentlewomen benefactors who minister to the poor, we seek to intervene. That’s why the matron in Surrey wrote to us. She hoped we would take Miss Brent in and train her up to be a governess, schoolteacher, or something else of value.”

“Something else of value,” Miles repeated, lending a wealth of ominous meaning to the statement.

“Indeed,” Nell said, growing impatient. “When a person is possessed of natural talent, their prospects necessarily broaden.”

“In other words,” Miles concluded, “Miss Brent is not like other girls.”

“No girls are like other girls,” Nell informed him. “We are all of us individuals with our own unique sets of gifts. Sometimes, those gifts are in harmony with the goals of the Academy. Sometimes not.” She paused. “Which has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re dealing with at present.”

“Except that Cowgill and Miss Brent’s paths intersected—to Cowgill’s detriment.”

“That’s not Miss Brent’s fault. To be sure, it doesn’t appear that Mr. Cowgill was there on her behalf at all. Rather, it was she who liberated him. Perchance, in doing so, she made him an unwitting witness?”

“And they silenced him for it? After she’d already escaped?” Miles shook his head. “Doubtful.”

“What else could it be, then? If procuring a defenseless girl isn’t crime enough—”

“Something worse. Something that would drive someone to kill a reporter, to ransack his rooms, and to send his tongue to the editor of one of London’s most prominent newspapers as a warning.”

Nell shivered at the reminder. She’d been surprised with many a lizard, spider, or other creepy crawly hidden in her desk during her tenure at the Academy, but she had never yet seen anything so gruesome as a severed tongue. Not until yesterday.

“What about the other entries Mr. Cowgill had in his notebook?” she asked. “The dates and the names, and something to do with Hertfordshire. It must mean something.”

“Exactly so,” Miles said. “This encompasses more than an East End brothel. It must. Cowgill didn’t report on the poor and downtrodden. He wrote about the upper classes. Lords, ladies, people with money, influence, and pedigree.”

“And yet it appears he met his end at a brothel.”

“Perhaps that’s just it. Perhaps we’re viewing this backward. We’ve begun at the end. But that isn’t where this started. Something else happened to set it in motion. Pritchard and Silas are no criminal masterminds. They were an expedient solution to a problem.”

“They should be in prison,” Nell said.

“They will be,” Miles assured her. “Eventually.”

She raised her brows. “You’re not going to inform the police?”

“I’m not going to tip our hand.”

“I suspect we’ve already tipped it, visiting Mrs. Pritchard’s as we did.”