The ride was tedious through snaking traffic and the rain. The coach was as sumptuous as Grenville's with velvet walls, gold leaf on the windows, and cushioned stools for our feet. Denis looked out the window as though Alice did not exist, and the bulky footman watched her with his cold, blank stare.
The carriage wound its way to London Bridge, and thence across. We entered Southwark.
"Where the devil is he taking us?" I asked, peering out at the gloom.
Denis shrugged, with the air of a man who is always surrounded by a bubble of safety. I fully expected a gang of toughs to be waiting at the end of the journey, Jemmy taking us straight to them. Or Denis might have recruited Jemmy to lead me into the lion's den, but I didn't think so. The terror in Jemmy's eyes had been real, and Denis and I seemed to have called a truce of sorts.
The stink of the river hung heavily in the air, as did the smoke from an ironworks. Stagnant pools of noisome water reflected the black of coal smoke and the dreary sky. The carriage ground to a stop in a back lane that fronted the river. From here, steps led down to the shore of the Thames, where fishermen clung to their trade.
The footman assisted me down, and I handed Alice out myself. A wave of rain swept over us. Alice tented her shawl above her head. Jemmy had descended from the top of the carriage and now stood uncertainly between Denis's two servants.
"Down there," he said, pointing to the river.
"Where? Show me."
He didn't want to. But his fear of Denis overcame his fear of me, and Jemmy plodded down the muddy, slippery steps. I followed with Alice.
Denis remained inside the carriage. He could easily tell his coachman to drive away and leave us stranded, and I think the same thought occurred to Alice, because she melted close to me and stayed there.
Jemmy led us to a fishing shack that looked no different from the others that dotted the shore. The Thames rolled away beyond us, the far bank lost in the mist and rain.
Before he reached the door, Jemmy stopped suddenly. "It's the beaks!" he shouted into the shack. "Run!"
A man came boiling out and sprinted down the beach. A woman followed him, but too slowly. One of Denis's men leapt forward and caught her as she slipped on the rocks. He dragged her back to us. Hanks of gray hair hung limply about her face, which was lined and worn.
Her eyes were frightened, but defiant. "We didn't do nothing. Makes no difference what 'e said."
"Where is Miss Thornton?" I asked.
She looked bewildered. "'Oo?"
"This way," Jemmy said.
He tramped around the shed and down a path that led to the shore. Jemmy led us along this, myself and Alice trailing him, Denis's servant following with the woman, who kept up a constant patter about nothing being her fault.
At the end of the path, behind a stone staircase that led back up to Southwark, lay a pile of debris, looking like nothing more than a caved-in shed and a tarp held down by rocks. Jemmy made for the tarp.
"No!" the woman shouted. "It weren't me."
Jemmy lifted pieces of the debris and hurled them aside. One of the footmen stepped in and helped him. After a space had been cleared, Jemmy reached down and tugged back a fold of tarp.
Beneath it lay a small, white hand, palm up, fingers curled in supplication to the uncaring sky.
Alice gave a sharp cry.
"It weren't us," the woman bleated. "He brought her to us, told us to hide her. We wanted to dump her in the river, but he said no, we had to hide her. She were already dead when she came."
I moved to the debris as Alice clung to my coat. I slid my walking stick under the tarp and turned it back.
A woman's body lay there, covered in muck and mud. What had once been a nightdress clung to her chest, which was sunken with time and the piles of board that had rested atop her. Her face was pale, serene, eyes closed, mouth limp, but the skin of her neck was puckered with decay.
Alice sank to her knees beside me, a wail tearing from her. The fisherman's woman darted back, as though afraid of the sound, and pointed a thin finger at Jemmy. " 'E brought her 'ere. 'E's the murderer."
"I didn't murder no one," Jemmy said. "She were dead already when he sent for me."
I believed him. I'd seen what Horne had done to Aimee. Possibly Horne hadn't meant to kill Jane; possibly it was pure accident. Perhaps when Horne had seen what he'd done, he'd panicked. He'd sent for Jemmy, remembering the young man's help abducting the girls in the first place, and bade him get rid of her. Young Philip Preston had told me someone had carried a bundle, like a carpet, to the dark carriage that night. A carpet, yes, but with Jane's body rolled inside it.
Alice's sobs turned to a wordless keening. I covered Jane's body with the tarp, then I straightened and faced Jemmy.
Jemmy stepped back in alarm. I stared him down, the man who'd caused Jane Thornton's ruin and death, even if indirectly. Jemmy had made the abduction possible and was as much to blame as Horne.
I unsheathed my sword. The blade rang, and raindrops glittered on the bright steel as bitter anger burned through me. I wanted nothing more than to press that sharpness through the terrified coachman's heart and watch him bleed until he died.
Behind me Alice sobbed. "Please don't, sir. It won't bring her back."
It was as though my conscience had spoken aloud. I pressed my anger down, slid the blade back into its sheath, and helped Alice to her feet. In silence, I led her back up the path to the stairs.
Not until we approached the waiting carriage did I realize that Jemmy and Denis's two footmen had not returned with me. I glanced back through the rain to the bank below, but I couldn't see them.
The footman who'd remained with the carriage opened the door and hoisted both Alice and myself back inside. Alice huddled, damp and miserable, into a corner. I took the seat next to her, forcing the footman to sit next to Denis.
We rode in silence back through Southwark, winding into the traffic heading across the bridge to the City. Denis studied me in the soft lantern light, the only one of us dry and unmussed.
"Revenge, Captain, is usually a waste of time," he said. "I don't deal in it."
"Jane was avenged," I said quietly.
"With the murder of Horne by the butler? I suppose she was, indirectly."
"But it will not be enough. I want the procuress and anyone else who helped them."
Denis shook his head. "You are a hard man, Captain Lacey."
"If Horne had taken an innocent child and dashed out its brains, it would have been no different. All she'd ever known was happiness and people who cared for her. Suddenly all that was ripped from her, and she faced a monster. I cannot even begin to imagine her terror. She must have found it unbelievable that such a thing could happen."
Alice whimpered. I wanted to pat her hand, to comfort her, but I had no comfort to give. Sometimes there is no comfort, only the knowledge that the worst has happened.
"I want everyone who was a part of that to face a magistrate and be punished for their sins."
Denis gave his head a slight shake. "Jemmy will not face a magistrate. He will face me. He had no business dealing directly with Horne without my knowledge."
I looked into his blank, handsome face and cold eyes, and my anger grew hot and heavy. "You are filth."
Denis held up his hand in its immaculate, expensive glove. "Have no doubt, I will make him name his accomplices."
"And send them to a magistrate? I want them tried before God."
He looked idly out the window. "It will do you no good to take them to court. First, you would have to prove what you say. I told you, I will not give you Jemmy, and without him, you will have no eyewitness. Second, you would have to tell the story of your Miss Thornton in all its sordid details, a story that would be sensational enough to be printed in the newspapers for all the world to see. Her family will always bear the stigma of having a daughter abducted, ruined, and murdered. Is that what you want?"