Where Serpents Sleep

Chapter 46

“Indeed?” said Hero, lifting one eyebrow. She’d wondered how long it would be before hordes of tawdry “Hannahs” started showing up at her door.

The girl frowned in confusion. “Aye,” she said slowly.

Hero crossed her arms. “Prove it.”

The girl’s mouth sagged. “What? Ye don’t believe me? Ye can ask anybody. They’ll tell ye.”

“Anybody such as . . . whom?”

The girl put her hand to her forehead. “Aw,” she wailed, half turning away. “Now what the bloody ’ell am I supposed to do?”

“You could go back where you came from,” suggested Hero, torn between annoyance and amusement.

“What? An’ get me neck snapped like poor Tasmin?”

Amusement and annoyance both fled, chased by a cold chill. “Come in here.” Hero put her hand on the girl’s arm, plucked her into the morning room, and closed the door on the interested footman.

“Where precisely have you been?” Hero demanded.

The girl’s eyes slid away, going round as they assessed the room with its yellow silk hangings and damask chairs, its gilt framed paintings and tall mirrors. “Gor,” she breathed. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this. It makes the Academy’s parlor look downright shabby, it does.”

Hero spared a thought for her grandmother’s reaction, were she to be told that her morning room compared favorably to a brothel. “After you left the Academy,” said Hero, still unconvinced this ingenue really was Hannah Green, “what did you do?”

Hannah wandered the room. Hero kept an eye on Hannah’s hands. Hannah said, “Rose drug me to that bloody Magdalene ’Ouse. She said we’d be safe there, that no one would think t’look for us there.” Hannah’s lips thinned with remembered outrage. “Six o’clock in the bloody morning!”

Understanding dawned. “They made you get up at six?”

“Not just get up. Get up and pray. For a whole bloody hour!”

“Every day?” said Hero.

“Aye! The first time, I thought it was just some mean trick they was playin’ on us, but when they done it again the next day, I knew we were in for it.”

“Rose didn’t mind?”

“No,” said Hannah in a voice tinged with mingled awe and exasperation. “I think she actually liked it. It was scary.”

“So what did you do?”

“I left. I was afraid they might try to stop me, but if truth were told, I think them Quakers was glad to see the back of me.”

“You weren’t afraid to leave?”

“Nah. I mean, I was scared when we left the Academy, but after a couple of days, I started thinking it was all a hum, that Rose had made it all up.” She reconsidered. “Well, most of it.”

“Surely you didn’t go back to the Academy?” Hero asked, stunned.

The girl looked at her as if she were daft. “Ye take me fer a flat or something? No. I got me a room off the Haymarket.” She paused. “ ’Course, when I heard what happened at the Magdalene ‘Ouse last Monday, I got scared all over again. I tried to lay low but, well, a body’s got t’eat.”

Hero studied the girl’s animated face. If she really was Hannah Green, the girl was living proof that God takes care of idiots. “Tell me about Tasmin,” said Hero.

The girl sniffed. “I was working the stretch between Norris Street and the George when she found me. She said there was a gentry mort willin’ to pay ten pounds t’talk to me, but if’n we was smart, we could maybe figure out a way to get more.”

Hero had actually offered twenty pounds to anyone who could put her in touch with Hannah Green. But Tasmin Poole had obviously been less than honest with her former coworker. “Go on.”

The girl’s eyes slid away. “Tasmin was gonna write ye—Tasmin was clever, ye know. She could read and write like nothin’ you ever saw. She came up to m’room to work on writin’ the note while I went to get us some sausage rolls. It’s when I was comin’ back that I saw that cove going into the lodging house.”

“A man?” said Hero. “What man?”

“What do you mean, what man?” said Hannah scornfully. “Don’t you know nothin’? The same man what killed Hessy.”

Lady Jarvis’s querulous voice could be heard raised in annoyance somewhere above stairs. Hero looked at Hannah’s burgundy-plumed hat, the plunging décolletage, the glory of spangles and pink-and-white Polonaise stripes and said, “Wait here.”

Yanking open the door, she found James standing patiently in the hall. “Watch her,” Hero told him, then hurried upstairs to furnish herself with the reticule, hat, gloves, and parasol without which no respectable lady would be seen out of doors in London—no matter how nefarious her errand.

Hannah Green sat in the hackney pulled up across from Paul Gibson’s surgery, her body rigid with mulish obstinacy. “I ain’t goin’ in there,” she said with all a prostitute’s loathing of the medical profession. “I don’t need no doctor.”

With difficulty, Hero resisted the urge to shake the girl. “That’s not why we’re here. You need someplace safe to stay. There isn’t anyplace else.” Not that Paul Gibson’s surgery was exactly safe either, Hero thought, remembering the fate of the wounded assailant she’d brought here. But she kept that information to herself.

Hannah Green cast her a doubtful glance. “No medical exam?”

“No exam,” promised Hero.

The girl consented to get out of the hackney. Hero paid off the driver, then had to practically pull the girl across the road.

“Good God,” said Paul Gibson, his eyes widening when he opened the door to Hero’s knock.

“Dr. Gibson, meet Hannah Green. I think,” she added as Hannah glared at the surgeon and Gibson continued to stare in awe at the lady’s burgundy plumed hat and spangled pink-and-white stripes. “I’m sorry, but I had no place else to take her,” said Hero, putting her hand in the small of the girl’s back and giving her a push that propelled her over the threshold and into the hall.