She worried about her friends in Paris, but she had a duty to her own country too. Baron had sent her to Liverpool to track down a missing agent. She’d gone, mixing with the factory workers there and listening to their talk of unions. She’d made friends with some of the women, heard the stories of the abuse and harassment they’d faced in the factories. She hoped their union succeeded and they were able to obtain better working conditions, but she couldn’t allow herself to become entangled in their fight or their struggles.
She asked about the agent, heard various contradictory stories, sorted out the fact from fiction, and had made her way to London with reasonable certainty that the man she sought was here. Finding a man who didn’t want to be discovered in London was like finding a grain of salt in a bowl of sugar. But Margaret had spent years in the great cities on the Continent ferreting out double agents and spies as well as traitors and assassins. Her experience and knack for tracking was the reason Baron had given her this mission.
Well, one of them.
And so after three days in London and hours of asking the right questions and bribing the right men, she knew where the man she sought was hiding. Maybe he’d come to this London rookery thinking he could disappear. Maybe he’d come here because he too was tracking someone. Or maybe there was a more nefarious reason he had abandoned his mission and disappeared without any explanation.
She’d leave London with either answers or the man himself. Baron was counting on her.
Margaret turned onto a narrower street, and the crowds of people thinned considerably. Here two dogs fought over some find so meager she couldn’t make it out. A hollow-eyed woman peered down at her from a windowsill above as she hung gray fabric on a clothing line. If the buildings had ever been numbered most of that paint had worn away years ago, but Margaret sensed she was coming closer. Finally, she turned down one last street, little more than a muddy lane, if truth be told, and stopped before a stooped, ugly building that was gray with years of coal dust. Most of the buildings in London were similarly gray, but this one looked as though it might sink under the accumulation of grime.
Margaret took a breath, shoved open the door, and stepped inside.
The smell assaulted her first. She didn’t want to make the effort to identify the individual scents that made up the overall smell, but she caught illness, decay, and excrement. She reached into her bodice and extracted a lavender-scented handkerchief she carried for just such occasions and pressed it to her nose. As her eyes adjusted to the windowless gloom, she spotted a small figure on the floor. It was a child holding some sort of furry animal. Dear God, she hoped it wasn’t a rat. In the silence, she heard the purring and realized it must be a cat, which was a relief.
“Who are ye?” asked the child.
“My name is Margaret. Who are you?”
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
Odd, Margaret thought. The child, a female who looked to be seven or eight, had spoken to her first. “I introduced myself,” Margaret said. “We’re not strangers now.”
“Oh, good.” The little girl gave Margaret a grin that showed a missing canine and another almost grown in. She pushed her matted dark hair back. “Me name is Victoria, but everyone calls me Vicky.”
It seemed every little girl had been named Victoria since the queen ascended to the throne. “Are you hungry, Vicky?”
“Yes.”
Margaret opened her reticule. It was a large reticule as she always needed room for a book. Inside she found the slices of bread and cheese that she had planned to eat for dinner. She pulled them out and handed the paper-wrapped food to the little girl. The child opened it, sniffed, and took a bite. Then she immediately gave a bit of cheese to the cat. Margaret waited until the child had swallowed a few bites. She wished she had more to give the girl, but perhaps she could come back later with an offering.
“I’m looking for a man,” Margaret said.
Vicky shook her head. “Me ma says to stay away from lightskirts.”
“I’m not a lightskirt. This man is a friend, and another friend told me he is living here.”
The little girl bit into the bread again and pinched off another morsel of cheese for the tabby cat.
“He’s a tall man,” Margaret said, though he was only a couple of inches taller than she. Still, that was tall in the rookeries, where lack of food and disease often stunted growth. “He has brown hair and very pretty eyes.”
The little girl stopped chewing.
“You know him then.”
“I didn’t say that.”
But she had. Her actions had given everything away. As soon as Margaret had mentioned the man’s eyes, Vicky’s expression had changed.
“Is he living here?”
“Me ma says to stay away from ‘im. ‘E’s not natural.”
“His eyes are rather unusual, but I assure you, he is no different from you or me.” That wasn’t quite true, but the agent certainly wasn’t a pawn of Satan, if that’s what the mother had told this child. It annoyed Margaret how people judged anyone different to be abnormal. She’d been bullied as a child because of her height and her spectacles and her love of books. Her mother had chided her to dance like the other girls or join their embroidery circles. But Margaret hadn’t been welcomed among the petite girls who had perfect vision and clear skin. She’d found solace in her books and the fictional characters who became her friends.
But she couldn’t blame this child for what the adults in her life had taught her. “Can you tell me where he is?” Margaret asked.
Vicky looked up. Margaret followed her gaze to a water stain on the plaster. “Does he live on the first floor?”
