India Black and the Shadows of Anarchy (A Madam of Espionage Mystery) (11 page)

Everyone was getting snappish by then for it was quite late. Indeed, it must have been the wee hours of the morning before everyone got tired of debating abstract principles of anarchism and Harkov announced that we would meet in three days’ time, at the same hour and place. We should be prepared, he said, to discuss our next operation at that meeting. I felt a surge of excitement, for I’d finally have something to report to Superintendent Stoke.

Bonnaire cupped a hand under my elbow. “I’ll escort you to New Oxford Street. You should be able to find a cab there, even at this hour.”

It was kind of him, but what I really wanted to do was cut French from the herd and pump his nibs about his recent activities. At the moment, he and Schmidt had their heads together and French had his back to me.

“Shall we go?” asked Bonnaire. Flerko had materialized at his side, like a nervous shadow.

Bugger. I resigned myself to seeing French in three days. By then I would have concocted a plan to get him to myself. It occurred to me that I hadn’t the slightest idea where he lived, although it was unlikely he was residing in his own home while playing at being a radical sympathizer. He certainly wouldn’t be staying anywhere in the filth of Seven Dials, being as fastidious as a cat when it came to his appearance.

Our trio was almost out the door when Schmidt halted us with a word. “If you are walking to New Oxford Street, Bonnaire, then perhaps Mr. French should accompany you.” He cuffed French gently on the shoulder. “We know our way around these streets, but it is not wise for strangers to travel alone. You will be safer with Bonnaire and Flerko.”

My Bulldog would be far more useful in warning off footpads and fingersmiths than Flerko’s twitching, but as I did not want to draw attention to the fact that I was armed, I said nothing.

We trekked out into the fog. Schmidt lifted his hat and disappeared into the murk, followed by Harkov and Thick Ed moving off in different directions.

“This way,” said Bonnaire, grasping my elbow. The others fell in behind us, and Flerko began to chatter away to French about the inhumane conditions at Third Section headquarters.

Damn and blast. My heart had lifted when French joined us for the walk, but with Bonnaire attached to my side like a bloody leech and Flerko monopolizing French, I wouldn’t be able to have a private word with the man. Perhaps when we reached our destination I’d have the opportunity to sidle alongside French and arrange a rendezvous.

But that ambition was thwarted as well. After slithering through refuse and stepping over sleeping drunks, we arrived at the cabstand where a few yawning drivers were gathered around a brazier drinking tea. They looked up drowsily. We must have made an odd tableau looming out of the dripping mist: an English gentleman, a beautiful, well-dressed but obviously experienced woman, and two foreigners, one of whom conveyed a distinct piscine odour.

French spoke up. “Good evening, gentlemen. We shall require two cabs.”

An old fellow with a crushed bowler and a pipe between his teeth stirred. “Where to?”

French looked enquiringly at me, and I gave the address of Lotus House.

“Not far,” said the old gent. “I’ll take you.”

“And I wish to go to Fleet Street.”

I flung a quick glance at French, for his objective lay in the opposite direction from Lotus House. He hadn’t paid me a jot of attention tonight, and I wouldn’t put it past the fellow to have chosen his destination deliberately to avoid sharing a cab. He evaded my eyes but tipped the brim of his hat in my direction. Bonnaire handed me into an ancient hansom with sprung seats and the smell of mildew, and the last I saw of French, he was haggling with a wall-eyed driver over the cost of conveyance.

The drive to Lotus House seemed to last an eternity, and I fumed the entire way. My head ached, I was drained from the effort of playing the revolutionary hellion and I was furious that French had made no effort to arrange any sort of meeting before the next assembly of anarchists. For God’s sake, we were both agents of the Crown and you’d think the fellow would want to share some information and formulate a plan for getting our hands on Grigori, but French had ignored me for most of the evening. I considered the notion that he was just being cautious; for all I knew I might even now have Harkov or Thick Ed or any one of the others on my tail, and so might French. He was a wise bird, was French, and even I, who was prone to check the depth of the water by plunging in, could see the sense in being wary. That did not, however, mean that I wasn’t desirous of getting French in a headlock and forcing him to divulge all his secrets, professional and personal.

I blame French for what happened next. If I had not been seething over his behavior, I would certainly not have exited the cab without bothering to check the street. I flung a few coins at the driver and mounted the steps of Lotus House, fishing in my purse for the house key. I was rummaging through the contents with my head bent in concentration, when I heard the scrape of shoe leather on the stone step and I looked around just in time to see a cosh whipping through the gloom toward my head.

I got a hand up, which helped to ward off the blow, but pain juddered through my forearm as my attacker struck again and I staggered, half-falling against the door. I tried to raise my fist to hammer on the door, but my arm hung, nerveless and inert, at my side. Then I felt a mighty blow on the crown of my head, and the last thing I remember is the dim yellow glow of the gas lamps fading, first to starry white pinpricks of light and then to velvet black.

* * *

A grimy thumb pried open my eyelid and a bolt of lightning pierced my brain.

“Bloody hell,” I said, and rolled over to burrow my face in the pillow. This action was not sufficient, however, to cloak the noxious stench that had pervaded my room.

“Open the window, you stunted little sod,” I said in a muffled voice.

Vincent probed cautiously at the back of my head, and I let out a howl that would have done credit to a countess birthing triplets.

“Get your bally hands off me,” I shouted.

“Should I get some brandy?” Mrs. Drinkwater sounded anxious.

“Only if it’s for me, you bloody woman.”

“It ain’t cracked,” said Vincent, running a finger along the base of my skull. The thought of where that finger had been was enough to make Lazarus leap off his cot, and I rolled over and glared at my ragged nurse.

“Kindly remove your hands from my person.” I did my best to sound severe, but the act of turning over and inhaling an unadulterated dose of pure Vincent made my stomach heave.

Vincent whipped a basin under my nose, and I retched like a drunken sailor. Mrs. Drinkwater vanished, her hand fluttering to her breast in dismay. After I’d finished emptying the contents of my stomach, I sank back onto the pillows, exhausted, the beat of my pulse pounding in my temple like a piston. Vincent set aside the basin and kindly dabbed my mouth with his handkerchief. If I didn’t die from the blow to my head, I’d surely be felled in short order by some loathsome disease.

“What are you doing here?”

“Ole Drinkwater sent one of the ’ores for me at the crack o’ dawn. She couldn’t sleep last night and she was cleanin’ in the kitchen. She ’eard a shindy outside the door and run out and saw a man with a cosh standin’ over you. She said she screamed and he run away and there you was on the ground, out cold and wif the blood runnin’ out your nose.”

Mrs. Drinkwater cleaning in the middle of the night? More likely she was creeping about, filching my liquor. Still, it would be churlish to be ungrateful. Not everyone would have ventured outside to interrupt a cosh-wielding assailant.

“She could have sent for the doctor,” I muttered, struggling to sit upright. Ooh. A mistake, that. I refrained from further movement.

“Aye, she could ’ave,” agreed Vincent, though he looked offended that I preferred the ministrations of a qualified medico to his own well-intentioned assistance.

“Wot ’appened to you? Did one of them anarchist buggers bash you over the ’ead?”

“I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see. It was dark and the fog was thick.” I pressed a hand to my forehead. “But it wouldn’t make sense for one of them to follow me all the way back to Lotus House and attack me here. I was with them for hours. They had plenty of opportunities to whack me.”

“Well, you’ve chapped somebody good and proper, to get a wallop like that.”

The light began to dawn. “Mother Edding,” I said gloomily. “The old bitch.”

“An ole woman done that to you?” Vincent asked skeptically. “It’s a ’ell of a drubbin’.”

“Of course not,” I snapped. “She’s hired someone. Mrs. Drinkwater said my attacker was a man. Mind you,” I added, “she could have done it herself. She’s as stout as a Berkshire sow and twice as mean.”

“Wot you gonna do about it?”

“I’ll sic the Bulldog on her if she tries it again.”

“You ain’t gonna give ’er some of ’er own medicine?”

“I haven’t time for that. I’m in the midst of playing spies, and Mother Edding will just have to wait until I can give her my full attention. Maybe I’ll ship Martine back to her when this affair is over with a note apologizing for the inconvenience. Which Mother Edding won’t be able to read.”

I could see the lad was disappointed, but whether it was due to my reluctance to take on the stout, elderly madam or because I’d been felled by a thug for hire and not an anarchist, I wasn’t sure.

Vincent sat down on the mattress at my feet.

“Not the bed,” I cried. “A chair, for God’s sake. Take a chair.”

Vincent shrugged and dragged a spindle-backed chair to my bedside.

“Tell me about the meetin’,” he demanded. “Are you gonna scrag someone? Who’s gonna get hit next?”

Mrs. Drinkwater lurched into the room, bearing a glass of brandy. She staggered to the bed and handed it to me. By the length of time she’d been gone and the alcoholic haze following her like a cloud of perfume, I presume she’d had a medicinal jolt herself. I swallowed a mouthful of the brandy and waited until the top of my head condescended to join the rest of my skull.

“I’ll bring you some broth,” said the cook, and disappeared to make a perfectly good beef bone and a pot of water into a disgusting sludge.

“Well? Wot ’appened last night?”

He wanted every detail, so I recounted it all, struggling a bit to remember some of the hazier moments (that humbug about the rights of man, for example). When I reached the part where French had walked in the door, Vincent clapped his hands in excitement and sprang out of the chair.

“’E’s back? Where the devil ’as ’e been?”

“I’ve no idea. He hardly spoke at the meeting, and he didn’t say a word to me directly.”

Vincent nodded thoughtfully. “’E’s a sly dog, alright. Trust ’im not to let on that ’e knew you.” Naturally, my own artfully concealed acquaintance with French drew no praise.

The brandy was working its magic and my head had begun to clear, though a steady drumbeat throbbed in my veins. “I need to get in touch with him before the next meeting of the anarchists. Do you think you can find him?”

I hadn’t meant to cast aspersions on Vincent’s professional skills, but I’d obviously touched a nerve.

“Wot do you mean, can I find ’im? If ’e’s in Lunnon, I’ll run ’im to ground before noon.”

His easy assurance irritated me. I had no idea where French might be found. I did not know his address or the name of his club (the poncy bastard surely belonged to several of those). I didn’t even know his Christian name, a fact that annoyed me no end. It nettled me so much that I persisted in dreaming up improbable names for the chap, which in turn chafed him. I’d had a great deal of sport out of French with that little game, but at the moment I would have foregone the pleasure of vexing the man if I’d only known how to reach him.

“Tell him I want to see him, but don’t you dare say anything to him about Mother Edding.” I wasn’t keen that French should know I’d been careless enough to be ambushed by a portly bawd’s hired hand. He might draw the conclusion that I wasn’t up to the task of taking down a few dynamite-toting foreigners.

Speaking of foreigners, I remembered that I’d tasked Vincent with checking the background of my newest slut and her acquaintances in the anarchist community.

“What have you learned about Martine?”

“Nuffink to worry you. When she ain’t ’ere, she’s ’angin’ around Bonnaire. She’s sweet on ’im. When she ain’t taggin’ along after Bonnaire, she’s visitin’ her mates.”

“Does Bonnaire feel the same about her?”

“Nah, I don’t fink so. ’E’s nice enough to ’er when they’re togevver, but ’e don’t appear all that interested in ’er. She’s useful to ’im. ’E sends ’er off wif messages, and she pays for his baccy at the smoke shop.”

“And her mates? What are they like?”

Vincent shrugged. “Most of ’em earn their bread on their backs, but one sells apples and another one sells matches. Nice girls, I reckon, though they all speak Frog when they’re togevver. I been close to ’em and I can’t make out wot they say.”

“And Bonnaire?”

“’E showed up a year ago, best as anyone can remember. ’E’s a quiet bloke, but a devil with the ladies. Got one on every corner, ’e does. Keeps ’imself to ’imself most of the time, but folk say ’e ’angs out with a crowd of political types.”