The Winter Rose (10 page)

India looked at the man, aghast. Had she thought him old-fashioned? A
bit of a dinosaur? He was downright medieval. A monster from the dark
ages.

"Don't let me keep you, Dr. Jones. You have a patient to attend to,"
he said curtly. "Give her a rag to bite or a piece of cloth to pull. And
remind her of our dear Lord's sufferings."

Fiona Bristow sunk her hands into a wooden tea chest, lifted a mound
of fragrant leaves to her face, closed her eyes, and inhaled.

All around her, the dockers of Oliver's Wharf stopped what they were
doing to watch. Old hands leaned on their tea rakes, well used to this
sort of thing from Mrs. Bristow, but the new men stared goggle-eyed,
unaccustomed to the sight of a woman in a warehouse. Few women ven-tured
into the docklands. Fewer still made the trip in a silk suit and plumed
hat, striding past sailors and stevedores, sidestepping ropes and
winches, to inspect a tea ship's cargo. But Mrs. Bristow was no ordinary
woman.

"Darjeeling," she finally said, opening her eyes. "A good one."

"No prizes for that," Mel Trumbull, the foreman at Oliver's Wharf, said. "A child could have told me as much."

"Hold on a mo'. I'm not finished yet. It's a single estate... ," Fiona said.

"Which one?"

The men nodded and nudged one another; coins changed hands.

Fiona closed her eyes and inhaled again. "Margaret's Hope."

"Harvest?"

She hesitated, then said, "Second flush." She opened her eyes and
grinned. "Plucked from a north-facing field on a Wednesday afternoon by a
woman in a pink sari."

The men roared laughter.

"All right, all right. Very funny," Mel sputtered.

"Am I right?" Fiona asked.

Mel didn't answer. Instead he grudgingly reached into his trouser
pocket, pulled out a sixpence, and tossed it to her. Fiona caught it. A
cheer went up.

"Are you lot paid to lark about?" Mel barked. "Back to work!"

"I was right!" Fiona crowed. "I won the wager! I told you I could name any tea in here blind. Any tea at all!"

"Don't be such a gloater, Mrs. B. It's unbecoming." Mel sniffed.

Fiona laughed. "Don't be such a sore loser!" she said, as her workers
went back to their tasks. "And do give me two pounds of that
Darjeeling. It's wonderful."

"I can't. We can't spare it."

"Why not?"

"The Kensington shop just rang up. They've sold five chests and want
four more. Knightsbridge wants three. That leaves me with six. And
Buckingham Palace wants eight. Seems the princess is very partial to
it."

Fiona frowned, all business now. "I knew I should have bought more.
Short the Kensington shop and give the palace whatever they want. With
our compliments."

"What ...for free?" Mel squawked. "That's four hundred pounds of premium tea! Cost us a small fortune!"

"Yes, but they'll make us a big one, Mel, don't you see? Princess
Alexandra hasn't ordered yet. We have a royal warrant from the queen.
We've got one from Prince Edward, but not from Alexandra, and we need
her. She's a fashion plate. She's in every magazine, on all the social
pages. Every woman in the country wants to be like her. If she drinks
TasTea, they'll drink TasTea, too. Her patronage is the kind of
publicity a thousand adver-tisements can't buy."

Mel looked doubtful. "It's a bit of a gamble, Mrs. B."

"And I'm a bit of a gambler," she said, tossing his sixpence in the air and catching it again. "But you know that."

"All too well," he grumbled.

"Have one of the men take the chests to the palace in the morning.
And throw in a chest of our vanilla tea. She might like that, too. Has
the Numalighur Assam arrived yet?" she asked, already halfway up the
stairs to the second floor. "Have you sampled it? Let's get a chest
opened up then. It had better be good...."

Mel ran after her, sweating in the June heat. He was always chasing
af-ter her. Everyone was. She was a hard woman to keep up with. At
thirty years of age, Fiona Bristow was head of her own company,
TasTea--a multimillion-pound tea empire that was begun with a few crates
of tea in a small shop in New York and now included TasTea shops and
Tea Rose tea-rooms in all of the world's most fashionable cities.

"This is very good," she said now, examining a handful of rich, dark
leaves. "I'm thinking of launching a new label, Mel. Something strong
enough and bold enough to appeal to coffee drinkers. This could be the
ticket."

The rest of her words were drowned out by a loud and cheery, "Fiona, old trout! There you are!"

She turned and saw a tall blond man striding toward her. "Freddie? Is that you?"

"None other. I looked for you at Mincing Lane. Your girl told me you were here."

"This is a surprise."

"Not at all, just your Member of Parliament at work for you and for
East London." He drew an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it
to her.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Open it and see."

She did. It contained a bank draft for five hundred pounds made out to the Toynbee Mission Girls' School.

"From the government. House approved my request," Freddie said,
smiling. "I'm delivering it to the Reverend Barnett, but I wanted you to
see it first."

"Then you weren't just..." She paused, unsure how to tactfully say what she wanted to.

"What? Blowing smoke? Talking rubbish? No, I wasn't. I'm very serious
about working hard to make things better for my constituents, Fiona. I
only hope that my dedication is noted and remembered. ...I say, what are
you doing?"

Fiona was turning the paper over and over in her hands. "Looking for strings," she said cheekily.

"You won't find any," Freddie huffed, taking the draft back. "But it
would be awfully nice of you to put in a good word for me with Joe."

"For five hundred quid, I'll put in two. Thank you, Freddie. I'm very, very grateful to you. Truly."

Freddie nodded. "You might also want to tell him that I'm working on a
new Irish Home Rule Bill, with my Irish constituents-- and your
workers-- very much in mind. And I'm working night and day on my
anti-crime measures."

"Would you care for a cup of tea?" Fiona asked, hoping to change the
subject. "We've plenty here, as you can see. A nice Darjeeling,
perhaps?"

"No, thanks. Must dash," Freddie said, barely pausing for breath.
"But do tell Joe that I've been meeting officials from Scotland Yard and
the Home office. And we are absolutely getting things done. Funds have
been apportioned to pay for extra officers in Tower Hamlets. Five men
from the Wapping station nabbed a pair of housebreakers two nights ago
and some Whitechapel chaps broke up a counterfeiting ring last week. Sid
Malone is next. I'm certain he's a concern both to Joe and yourself, to
any merchant who uses the wharves. Malone's gang has struck twice along
the river in the past six months alone. But I assure you, I'm getting
closer to him every day. I almost had him for the wages robbery, and I
nearly got him the other night in Limehouse. Turns out he's got his busy
fingers in opium, too. The pressure's on and he knows it. He's a
vicious, brutal man and he deserves the harshest punishment. Pity
hangings are no longer public. His would be one I'd dearly love to
attend."

Terror gripped Fiona. She felt as if she couldn't breathe, but she forced herself to smile. Freddie must not see her emotion.

"Well, I must be off. Do give my regards to Joe," he said.

Fiona said she would and bade him goodbye. Mel, who'd been busying
himself with another tea shipment while Fiona and Freddie talked,
returned to her side.

"Come have a gander at the Keemun... Mrs. Bristow? Is there something wrong, ma'am? You've gone as white as chalk."

Fiona shook her head. She tried to tell him she was fine, but her
knees buckled. She grabbed for the edge of a tea chest, but managed only
to slow her fall.

"Bloody hell!" he shouted, catching her just before she hit the floor. He lifted her up and sat her down on the chest.

"Mrs. Bristow? Mrs. Bristow, are you all right?"

Fiona nodded weakly. "Just a little... dizzy. Must be the heat ...and the baby. I'm expecting."

"I'll call for a doctor."

"It's not necessary. I'll be fine. It was just a spell." She mustered a smile, but Mel looked unconvinced.

"Can I fetch you something? A glass of brandy?"

"No brandy, but a cup of tea would be nice."

"Can you walk downstairs?"

"I'd rather sit here for a minute. I don't trust my legs just yet. Would you bring it up?"

"But you shouldn't be alone, Mrs. Bristow. What if you faint again? I'll send a man up to sit with you...."

"No, Mel, really. I want to be alone. Just for a minute or two. To gather myself."

Mel nodded uncertainly, then hurried downstairs to his office where he kept a kettle simmering on top of a small iron stove.

As soon as he was gone, Fiona covered her face with her hands, sick
with fear. Freddie Lytton had stood next to her, smiled, and said he was
going to kill her brother. He'd said the same things at the garden
party for the girls' school. They'd upset her then, too, but after he'd
left she'd denied his words, telling herself that he was only
grandstanding, as politicians did. She'd pushed the fear from her mind,
but it had returned now with a vengeance.

She stood and took a few faltering steps toward the stairs. She had
to find Charlie. Right away. She had to warn him before it was too late.
"But how?" she whispered, stopping dead. She couldn't send anyone else
after him, not after what he'd done to Michael Bennett.

She remembered Bennett's arm, and Freddie's voice echoed in her head. He's a vicious, brutal man....

Joe had said the same thing. He'd said Charlie was dangerous, and
insisted that she stop looking for him. How could she do that? He was
her brother.

Tears suddenly welled in her eyes as she remembered the way Charlie
once was. Not brutal, but good and kind. Full of life and laughter. She
remembered how he used to play football with their little brother,
Seamie, or take him to the riverside to watch the ships. She remembered
how he fetched grofficeries from the corner shop for neighbors too old
or ill to get there themselves, refusing to take money from them even
though he needed it.

They'd had so little then. Nothing, really. They'd lived in
Whitechapel in a draughty two-up, two-down. There was barely enough
money to buy food after the rent had been paid. And yet they'd had
everything--parents who loved them. Songs and stories by the fire at
night. Laughter. Hope. Dreams. Until, almost overnight, it had all been
taken away. They'd lost their father. Their mother. Their baby sister.
Finally, Charlie disappeared, too. She and Seamie had survived only
because of caring people who'd helped them--their uncle Roddy, their
uncle Michael in America, her first husband, Nicholas.

But Charlie had had no one to help him then. Only Denny Quinn and his
pack of thieves. He had no one now, either. No one to tell him about
the danger he faced. If he didn't leave East London, and turn his back
on the life he was leading, Freddie Lytton would do for him.

Don't get involved, Joe had told her. Forget him. Bury the past.

She wondered now if Joe had forgotten the lesson they'd both
learned-- that the past was a restless corpse that never stayed buried.
It crawled out of its grave again and again, trailing its bitter stench
of sorrow and regret.

Sid Malone was a product of that past--a violent and bloody past--one
that had begun in 1888 when a murderer had stalked the streets of
Whitechapel. When dockers worked sixteen-hour days for fivepence an
hour. When villainous lodging houses spilled forth thieves and
prostitutes.

It had all begun when their father died. Paddy Finnegan had had an
accident at Burton Tea, where he worked. He'd fallen from a high doorway
at the company's wharf. The children had weathered his death, but then
their mother was killed--stabbed by a madman called Jack the Ripper--and
something had happened to Charlie. He'd come home to find his mother
dying in the street and it had unhinged him. He'd run off and no one had
been able to find him. A few weeks later a body had been fished from
the Thames, so badly decomposed that the authorities had been able to
iden-tify it only because of a watch they'd found on it--a family
heirloom that Paddy had given to Charlie.

Alone with Seamie, and desperate for money, Fiona had pursued a claim
for compensation her mother had made after her father's death. She'd
gone to Burton Tea one evening, determined to speak with the owner,
William Burton. Instead, she'd overheard him discussing her father's
death with a criminal named Bowler Sheehan. Her father hadn't died
acci-dentally, she learned; he'd been murdered by Sheehan at Burton's
behest because he'd been trying to convince his fellow workers to join a
dockers' union. Discovering this had put Fiona's own life in jeopardy.
She'd fied London, vowing that Burton would pay for what he'd done, and
she'd kept that vow, returning ten years later to take his tea company
from him.

Burton had tried to kill her then, too, but was thwarted. He escaped
the police, but they hunted for him. When weeks passed and he wasn't
found, it was assumed he'd gone to the Continent, but he hadn't. He'd
hidden in his old tea wharf. Eventually, he managed to lure Fiona there
and had made a third attempt on her life. The only reason he hadn't
succeeded was because of Sid Malone.

Unbeknownst to Fiona, Sid had been watching her ever since her
stun-ning takeover of Burton Tea made the newspapers. His men had
followed her to the wharf and had saved her and Joe, spiriting them away
to the south bank of the Thames. There they'd learned that Charlie
Finnegan had not died back in '88; instead, he'd become Sid Malone.

After Charlie had run away from the sight of his murdered mother,
he'd wandered East London half mad, not knowing where or who he was. One
night, while digging in a rubbish bin for food, he was attacked by an
old en-emy, a lad named Sid Malone. Sid beat him viciously, robbed him
of his watch, and tried to kill him. Charlie hit back in self-defense,
but he hit too hard and fractured Sid's skull. In a panic, he dumped the
body into the river, forgetting to take his watch back.