I open my mouth to defend Gray, but that won’t help, so I murmur, “I do not know what you mean, sir. I am only the housemaid.”
“Housemaid to a monster,” the older man says. “That’s what happens when you go fobbing off that sort of fellow as a proper gentleman. Blood will out.”
That sort of fellow?
I stiffen. “If you mean—”
“You know what I mean, and if you don’t, then you ought to be more careful who you work for. He’s a right bastard, that one, in every sense of the word. Poor Mrs. Gray. I knew her father, I did. He fixed up my broken arm when I was a boy and never charged my mother a ha’penny. A good man, who had himself a good daughter. Then that husband of hers brings home his bastard like it’s a babe he found in the streets. A half-caste bastard no less. Who knows what kind of woman the mother was.”
The two men grumble together, speculating about Gray’s mother.
Gray’s mother … who was not Isla’s mother. I remember the inscription in that book, and I kinda love Mrs. Gray for that. Her husband brought home his child by another woman, and she raised him as her own, recognizing that the baby had nothing to do with the situation. A good woman indeed.
This is what Davina meant about the scandal. She’d tapped her face and said something about that reminding me. She hadn’t meant the scandal of Gray’s skin color. She meant the scandal that explained why he has that skin color.
While I’m sure Gray endures prejudice on account of his skin, it’s even more significant for the fact it signals his illegitimate status.
I don’t see the police station as we reach it. I’m too caught up in my thoughts. I catch a glimpse of a stonework entrance that looks like every other stonework entrance—just a door in an endless row of attached buildings along a narrow street.
The next thing I know, I’m being shoved through that door into a dimly lit room that stinks of smoke and sweat. Once my eyes adjust, though, it feels more familiar than any place I’ve been in this world. Squint, and I could imagine it’s a small twenty-first-century police station, housed in an old downtown building.
There’s a desk with a uniformed officer behind it. Benches and chairs. Two constables chatting as they head out on shift. Shouts and clatters rise from the building’s bowels, presumably the holding cells, where the drunk and disorderly protest the end of pub-crawl night.
The constables are leading me through when one of the exiting men stops short.
“You again?” he says. “I thought you were dead.”
I glance around, but he’s looking straight at me.
“You’re Gray’s maid, aren’t you?” he says. “The one that got herself strangled a week back. Last I heard you’d been given up for dead.”
“I was unconscious for nearly two days,” I say. “But I have recovered. I came back tonight hoping for clues to my attack.” Since the police don’t give a damn. “I was attacked again. I think it was the same man.”
My younger escort rolls his eyes. “Oh, don’t tell me she’s tried this before. Said she was attacked by a man in an alley?”
The other constable rocks back on his heels. “She was attacked all right. I’m the one who found her. You can still see a bit of bruising around her neck and on her temple.”
“Thank you for finding me,” I say. “However, as I said, I have been attacked again.”
He shakes his head. “Cannot stay out of trouble, can you?”
“I was attacked.”
“This time she knifed the man,” the younger constable with me says. “Stabbed him twice.”
“He attacked me,” I say. “Tried to strangle me. Like before.”
The older constable’s eyes narrow. “Twice in a week? Teddy here is right. You do get up to trouble.”
I bite my tongue. “May I speak to—”
“You’ll speak to whoever we let you speak to,” the younger constable says.
The others all nod, and with that, I’m led away.
* * *
I spend the night trying very hard to convince myself that this is a singular life experience, and I ought to take full advantage. How many people from the twenty-first century get to spend the night in a Victorian jail? Hell, in the modern world, tourists would pay for this.
A mere hundred dollars to sleep in a historic Victorian cell, re-created just for you! Once-in-a-lifetime experience! See what it was like to be rousted from the street and tossed in jail, with a bucket to piss in and rats skittering across the floor!
Okay, in the re-creation, there’d be a portable toilet with a screen. Also no rats. I get the full experience, including two cellmates. One is mentally disturbed and keeps shouting at me, spraying me with spittle and calling me Molly. The other is drunk and determined to snuggle up with me, and lice visibly crawl in her hair.
When something bites my leg, I look down to see a flea. I leap up, smacking at it, to the delight of the drunk woman. Within an hour, I stop panicking at every flea bite. Within two, I am huddled in the corner, knees drawn up, shivering with cold and disgust and fear that threatens to crystallize into full-blown terror.
When I decided not to run from the first constable, I’d shrugged off any fear of a night spent in prison. I was tough. I could handle it.
I can’t handle it. The twenty-first-century dweller in me is freaking out, like a teenage spring breaker tossed into a foreign prison cell. I’ve been around dirt. I’ve been around rats. Even been around lice and fleas. But this is all that tenfold.
There’s a men’s holding cell right across from ours, and a guy who keeps ranting, and when I make the mistake of looking over, he leers back from a face with a pit for a nose. It takes everything in me not to scream.
Oh, I try to rationalize. This is simply the face of abject poverty. These poor people, encrusted with filth, crawling with pests, their minds and bodies eaten away by alcohol and mental illness and syphilis. It’s tragic, and I should remember that and not be freaking out like that damned spring-break brat, huddled in a corner lest she touch something icky.
But all the rationalization in the world doesn’t help when fleas and lice are crawling over me and I’m trying hard not to look at the man without a nose. Then there are the rats, creeping ever closer, bold and disease-ridden vermin waiting for me to drift off so they can snatch a bite.
I try to focus on other things. I was attacked by the raven killer, the very man we’re searching for. He might also be the twenty-first-century guy who tried to kill me. Focus on that. Fall into the implications of it and spend the night dwelling there instead.
I can’t. I try, and I cannot form a single coherent thought, all my awareness consumed by the horror of my surroundings. I am in jail. I am alone. I don’t even have the damned locket, the very thing I took all these risks for. The officers confiscated the locket along with my knife and leftover coins, and I doubt I will see any of them again. All this, and I still lost my chance to make things right with Isla.
The night is endless. Then morning comes, and I’m thirsty and hungry, and I need to pee but there’s a puddle under the bucket, and I don’t know how to use it without stepping in that. I’m torn between hoping for breakfast—even bread and water—and knowing I won’t dare touch anything that arrives.
While we’re in the basement and I can’t see a window, the activity level tells me it’s well into the morning hours. Footsteps overhead double and then triple. Someone comes to collect a prisoner and mentions the “procurator fiscal’s office” and I mentally pounce on that, remembering it’s what they call the crown prosecutor here. I am overly delighted with myself for recalling that, which proves my grip on reality is slipping.