God, I must find her.The prayer grew with sickness, with heaviness, as she entered a peeling white inn with vulgar caricatures in the windows. She asked after a woman in fine dress, perhaps with her hair arranged in a tight chignon.
But mayhap her hair had changed.
Mayhap her dress too.
The innkeeper shook his head with a yawn, then pointed her on to the next lodgings on Seeley Lane. A four-story stone building on a street corner, with tattered clothes and blankets drying from a rope secured to the neighboring roof. Wind flapped the threadbare fabrics. From a window two stories up, a woman leaned into the night and slung a bucket of waste into the air, the splash lightly bespattering Georgina’s skin and dress.
Shuddering, wiping her face, she approached the grimy red door.
She knocked twice, but when it didn’t open, she tried the knob and let herself in.
The dim taproom smelled of mildew and dirt and the overwhelming odor of yeasty beer. She almost fled. She almost scrubbed her face yet again to remove the splatters, and peeled off the already-stained white gloves, and hurried back to where she’d paid the jarvey to wait for her.
“Eh, you.” From a creaking chair by the hearth, a sloppy white-bearded man leaned up, eyes hazy. “Wot you want?”
Her courage dwindled. What little she had left. “Sir, I am…I am looking for a woman who might be staying here. Her name is Miss Agnes Simpson.”
“Wot you want wif her?”
“You have seen her?”
“I seen every barque of frailty in London.” He hiccuped, swayed to his feet, gaze shifting up and down her. “Deed. Every last one.”
“Is she here?”
“Don’t suppose you’d be wanting a drink, then.”
“Sir—”
“Plenty there be. Enough for the night, eh, that is.” He reached for a stoneware beer bottle on the brick floor, staggered forward another step. “I’ll get a chair, and we can—”
“Sir, you do not understand me.” Heat blasted her face with such force that her hairline perspired. “I have a gentleman awaiting me outside in a carriage, and should I so much as snap my fingers, he would come charging in to assist me. Shall I call for him now?”
“Oh.” Disappointment, more so than intimidation, sank the man back into his chair. He took a long drink from his bottle before he answered. “Top floor. Room with the cracked door. Meant to fix that. Will soon, if paupers like your friends would pay their Dun territory.”
Relief trickled through her. Agnes was here. She was not…gone. Taking the doorway the bearded man nodded her toward, she climbed stairs that were dark and soft, as if the rotting wood was ready to crumble beneath her.
The second floor increased her heart rate.
The third trapped her breathing.
The fourth numbed her, because the last thing in the world she was ready for was to see Agnes’ face.She won’t come.The realization, the one she’d forced away from her heart all evening, bludgeoned pain inside her chest.
What was Georgina doing? What did she truly think she could accomplish?
Agnes had made her choice.
She no longer wanted home, nor safety, nor truth—nor Georgina. Just like the rest of them. But ever since the library, she had been plagued with the burden that if she’d only known to plead with Papa, to beg him against such a horrid decision, she might have saved his life.
Perhaps that was what she was doing now.
Hurrying through the winding dark hall on the top floor, Georgina passed several quiet rooms until noises penetrated the silence. At the end of the hall, light streamed out from underneath a door—and through a jagged crack between two of the door planks.
With every step, the voices loudened.
One soft and whimpering, like the mournful cousin Georgina had comforted that first year of her arrival, in the floral-papered bedchamber where they had played and bonded.
The other was harsh. Gruff. Cutting in its fierceness and rage.
