Kendra shuddered. Even in the twenty-first century, infection was the predominant worry in hospitals. So-called superbugs could be more deadly than the illness that brought the person into the hospital. She didn’t want to consider what could happen if she got an infection here.
Munroe might work as an M.E. but he knew how to deal with the living. He was both gentle and thorough in his examination.
Afterward Kendra sank back against the pillows, exhausted. “So what’s the verdict, Doc?”
“I do believe you shall live, Miss Donovan.”
He was putting his instruments into his bag when the door flew open and Rebecca ran into the room in a swirl of lemon-colored skirts. Ignoring the doctor, she rushed over to grab Kendra’s hand, and like Molly, burst into tears.
“You’re the second person who started crying after looking at my face. I’m going to get a complex.”
“Pardon me!” Rebecca blotted her tears with a lacy handkerchief.
“Miss Donovan shall recover, your Ladyship.”
“Yes. Thank you, Dr. Munroe. It is only . . . dear heaven, Miss Donovan. You look simply awful!”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“Oh. You know what I mean.”
“Never fear, Lady Rebecca,” Munroe assured her. “The inflammation ought to subside in a few days. The bruising will take longer, though I shall have a poultice brought up to help with both matters. It should be applied three times a day.” He gave Kendra a long look. “I shall return later, Miss Donovan. Do not exert yourself.”
Rebecca sat on the bed. “Can I get you anything, Miss Donovan?”
“A glass of water?”
She popped off the bed, and hurried over to the table that held a glass and carafe. A moment later, she returned, handing Kendra the glass. “I simply cannot believe what has transpired,” she admitted. “Mr. Morland was the monster . . . and Thomas. And poor Gabriel . . .”
“Gabriel?”
“Oh.” Her eyes slid away. “I am uncertain—”
“Tell me what happened to Gabriel.”
Rebecca’s eyes filled with tears again. “He was a member of that horrid club Mr. Morland founded. A vile, blasphemous club in the cave where you were held, where he—Morland—brought the other girls.” She shivered. “Gabriel had no notion—none of the men involved had any notion what Morland was about, you understand. ’Twas similar to Sir Francis Dashwood’s secret society. Are you familiar with the Hell Fire Club? As an American—”
“I know of it. Benjamin Franklin was rumored to be a member.”
Dashwood had created the Hell Fire Club to mock the Catholic Church, Kendra recalled. He’d even purchased a medieval abbey for the club’s activities, but when that had become too well known, he’d moved his group to his West Wycombe estate, where he had utilized its network of caves. There, the club members were reputed to have been involved in all sorts of drunken debauchery with prostitutes. The debauchery supposedly extended beyond sex into Satanism.
“I’d forgotten,” Rebecca murmured. “It caused quite a scandal at the time, and several gentlemen—including the baron—were ostracized from society. Morland thought to re-create this abomination, and lured bored young bucks to participate.”
“Gabriel.”
“Yes. Gabriel.” Rebecca let out a sigh. “He was troubled. More than anyone suspected.”
“Ripe for the picking.”
“I do not understand the whole of it. He . . . apparently, he had difficulty remembering events, details—”
“Blackouts caused by his alcoholism.”
“Yes, his drinking was to blame. He wasn’t entirely certain if he’d murdered the first soiled dove.” She frowned. “I do not understand what exactly made him realize that he had not murdered her, but he did realize it. When you went missing, he knew where the caves were and went to find Thomas.” Rebecca shuddered suddenly. “Thomas and Mr. Morland—they were partners in this madness.”
Yes and no, Kendra thought. Partners implied equality. She remembered how Morland had brutally slit Thomas’s throat.
“Thomas was a puppet.” She dropped her eyes to the glass of water she held. “My profile never included two men. I should have factored that in.”
“Would it have mattered so very much if you had considered it? Would we have uncovered these madmen any quicker?”
“I don’t know.”
“Partner or puppet, Thomas was as much a monster as Mr. Morland.” Rebecca gave another shudder. “Sutcliffe said that they found hair from the victims in his possession, and paintings of the young girls. Terrible paintings. Evil. The Duke ordered them burned.”
Kendra considered that. The Duke could destroy the paintings, but she knew it wouldn’t be the end of such evil. In another hundred years, in 1920s Germany, there’d be an artistic movement called Lustmord—sexual murder. Artists would be celebrated for painting female sexual mutilations and death. Thomas had simply been ahead of his time.
It was a depressing thought. “Gabriel was in the cave?” she asked, to move away from it.