Page 48 of One Night with a Rake

Georgette stepped a little closer to the table and peered down at the body. She worried her lower lip and looked so stricken, Nate wished he could wrap his arms around her and whisk her away from this squalid scene.

“Vesta was only nineteen,” she said softly. “She hadn’t taken sick, had she?”

“No. She was perfectly healthy,” Mrs. Throckmorten said. “So far as anyone could tell.”

As Georgette slowly circled the table, Nathaniel couldn’t take his eyes off her. Most ladies of quality would be useless in this situation, flapping their hands like broken wings and succumbing to an attack of the vapors, but Georgette merely became more quietly determined to uncover the truth of the matter.

“There doesn’t seem to be any visible wound,” she finally said. “Why do you suspect foul play?”

Mrs. Throckmorten opened Vesta’s high collar to reveal an angry red weal across her throat. “She was strangled.”

“Whoever did it didn’t break the skin.” Nate leaned over to take a closer look, edging Georgette out of the way. He picked up one of Vesta’s cold hands to examine it more closely. Rigor mortis had set in, so her fingers were stiff. She’d been dead a few hours. “She didn’t fight. No bruising on her knuckles.”

“True.” Mrs. Throckmorten nodded. “But her neck has been broken as well. Snapped like a dry twig.”

One of the girls whimpered, but Mrs. Throckmorten shushed her.

“If the break was done quickly,” Nathaniel said, “that explains why she didn’t fight or cry out.”

Given the skillful efficiency of the kill, Nate had to wonder if the murderer had military training.

But why strangle her too? It seemed unnecessarily vicious to do both.

“If it’s any consolation,” Mrs. Throckmorten said, “she probably didn’t suffer long.”

“No, it’s no consolation at all,” Georgette said, her tone flat.

Nate looked around the room at the huddled clumps of young women, two or three in each bunch of sniffling mourners. “Are all the other girls present and accounted for?”

Mrs. Throckmorten sighed. “They are, but Meg Pritchard wants to leave at first light.”

The girl in question rose to her feet and bobbed a shallow curtsy. With a smattering of freckles across her pert nose and a thick head of auburn hair, she was pretty in a speckled pup sort of way. “If it so pleases you, my lord.”

“It doesn’t so please me,” Nate said. “This world is a hard place for a young woman on her own. Where will you go, Miss Pritchard?”

“My family’s gone, but I’ll take my chances in the shire where I was born.”

“You’re the vicar’s daughter, aren’t you?” When she nodded, Nate fished a sovereign from his pocket. “Take a coach. If you find your welcome in your home shire is less warm than you hope, present yourself to the steward at Colton Hall in Wiltshire. Tell him I said he was to find a position for you there till we can sort you out with something more suitable.”

Meg Pritchard dropped to her knees and pressed a kiss on the back of his hand. “God bless you, my lord. You’ll be in my prayers every day for as long as I live.”

Privately, Nate thought the prayers of a reformed whore were more than he deserved, but he thanked her in any case. Then he asked the rest of the girls what they intended to do.

“Gorblimey, I h’ain’t never set foot outside o’ London town and, please God, I don’t rightly want to,” one of them declared, voicing the sentiments of the others. “All that empty sky and cows munchin’ and crickets chirpin’…it’d be the death of me. Better the devil ye know.”

“Very well,” Nate said. “You’ll all continue here with Mrs. Throckmorten, following your chosen fields of study. I’ll send a locksmith to fix the front door and find a replacement for Mr. Bagley first thing in the morning.”

He did a slow turn around the room, meeting each pair of eyes that were fastened on him. “It won’t be easy, but I mean to get to the bottom of this. Vesta will have justice, I promise you. But in the meantime, Lady Georgette, I wonder if you’d loan me your footman.”

“My footman?” She snapped out of her quiet brooding and finally looked away from Vesta’s body. “What do you want with Mr. Darling?”

“I can think o’ any number of things I’d want with ’im, ducks,” the little cockney whore said with a toothsome grin at the tall footman. “Mr. Darling, eh? ’E certainly is, h’ain’t he, girls?”

Reuben blushed deeper than a debutant who’d stumbled at her “come out.”

“Bedelia, mind your manners. I suspect Lord Nathaniel wants Mr. Darling to stay with us for your safety, not your entertainment,” Mrs. Throckmorten snapped, then turned to Georgette with a softer tone. “Provided my lady agrees, of course.”

“Oh, of course.” Georgette seemed to emerge from the morbid spell Vesta’s death had cast over her and turned to her footman. “I’ll explain to Mr. Humphrey that you’ll be staying in Covent Garden for the night and can’t be expected to help serve at breakfast.”