Page 32 of The Marriage Method

And Miles wasn’t just any man. Not anymore. He was her husband, by heaven.

Her husband.

It didn’t mean he was deserving of all of her secrets, but it surely allowed for her to confide in him a little. He had, after all, already proven himself to be an honorable gentleman. One who, in the past, hadn’t hesitated to hold another powerful man to account.

She quickly recovered her self-possession, ignoring the lingering effects of the look he’d given her. “Very well,” she said. “If you must know, a girl has gone missing and I’ve been tasked with finding her.”

“What girl?” he asked.

“An orphan named Flora Brent. She was en route to the Academy from a workhouse in Surrey. We’ve traced her as far as Shoreditch. It’s one of the reasons I came to London yesterday, and why I booked a room at Mrs. Marigold’s.”

“You have reason to believe the girl is in Whitechapel?”

Nell nodded. “We suspect she might have fallen victim to one of those unscrupulous madams one reads about. You know the breed—procurers who lure country girls from railway stations with promises of reputable work, only to spirit them to a brothel somewhere where they drug them with adulterated tea and—”

Miles’s brows snapped together. His gaze was no longer scorching. It was as sharp as a hunting hawk’s. “Brothels?” he repeated, cutting off her speech. “That’s where you want to go?”

Nell couldn’t tell if he was outraged or intrigued. “Not for my own amusement,” she said. “It’s purely to find out if one of them has taken her. And I won’t be ‘traipsing aimlessly about the slum’ as you so delightfully put it. I have a list of brothels, given to me by a reliable source. I mean to visit each name on it in a perfectly orderly fashion.”

“A list of brothels,” he repeated without inflection.

Nell recited the names Miss Jean had given her from memory. “Mrs. Pritchard’s Gentlemen’s Establishment, Mrs. Early’s Pleasure Palace, and Mrs. Silkweed’s House of Sin.”

Miles’s eyes narrowed. “And what’s this about tea?”

Nell paused to consider. “I suppose it isn’t always tea. The madams may drug some other drink. The point is, the girl falls asleep, and once she wakes, she finds herself in a sad state—ruined, alone, virtually a prisoner. Given the choices available…” She trailed off.

As she’d been speaking, Miles hadn’t been idle. She’d not uttered two sentences before he’d extracted a small notebook and tiny pencil from the inner pocket of his coat and begun scratching away.

“I’m sorry, are you taking notes?” she asked him.

“No.” His pencil moved rapidly over the page in short strokes. “I’m sketching a portrait.”

Nell stared at him, nonplussed. “Of me?”

He turned the notebook in her direction for a moment, revealing the rudimentary image of a thin, bushy-haired man with mutton-chop side-whiskers.

Nell leaned forward to see, fascinated in spite of herself. “Who on earth is that?”

“Lawrence Cowgill,” Miles said, resuming his drawing.

“And you’ve chosen this moment to render his likeness because…?”

“I’m going to show it to the employees at the brothels we visit.”

We?

“I don’t understand,” Nell said. “What would be the point—”

“Two points,” Miles said. He snapped shut his notebook. “One, Cowgill’s death may have had something to do with a story he was writing related to brothels, and this adulterated tea you mention.”

Nell let the information sink in, all the possible scenarios racing through her mind at once. She was almost afraid to ask. “And point two?”

Miles held her gaze. “When you disembark at Shoreditch, I’m coming with you.”

8

Miles set a protective hand at the small of Nell’s back as they departed the front steps of Mrs. Early’s Pleasure Palace in Brick Lane. An oversized brute of a man stood outside the house’s sagging door watching them go, his coarse features shadowed in the late-afternoon sunlight. He was flanked by a vulgar woman in a shockingly low-cut satin dress.