TWENTY-ONE
I’m soon glad I didn’t try to escape. We don’t even make it to the end of the alley before a young constable comes running to help. I’m tempted to ask how they manage that without radios, but professional curiosity will have to wait. Once the second constable joins, I plead my case again. I don’t stop walking. Don’t resist arrest. I just try to explain.
I leave out the part about my attacker being the raven killer. The reaction last time makes me regret saying that. Without the feather, I have no proof. I’ll save that part for McCreadie and Gray.
Instead, I say that I heard what sounded like a child’s cries, and went into the lane to find a pile of rags. I was attacked by a masked man with a rope. I had a knife to defend myself, and I stabbed him with it. That’s when the two men came.
“I saw no mask,” says the older constable.
“Did you see his face?” I ask.
The younger constable jabs me hard in the back with his baton. “Watch your tongue. You’re in enough trouble already. You admitted to stabbing a man.”
“Because he attacked me. He tried to strangle me.”
“We don’t know that. We only know you admitted to stabbing him.”
I close my mouth against argument. Save it for someone with seniority. Failing that, save it for McCreadie.
I have no idea what to expect from cops in this era. Hell, while I’dnever admit it aloud, half the time I don’t know what to expect from cops in my own era.
Here, I’m a pretty nineteen-year-old girl being led down dark and empty streets by two police officers. I’m lucky the older one didn’t take that blacksmith brute up on his suggestion.
“I am Dr. Duncan Gray’s housemaid,” I say.
“Bully for you,” the younger constable says. “Perhaps you should have stayed in the New Town. Your master finds out where you were, I’ll wager you’ll be out on your arse.”
“I’m asking that he be contacted, please, sir. Either Dr. Gray or Detective McCreadie, who is a good friend of his and who knows me.”
The younger constable growls and pokes me again. “What’s that supposed to mean? It sounded like a threat.”
“No, sir. I’m not familiar with the procedure for arrests, and I’m hoping my master can be contacted, so he knows where I am.”
“Well, I don’t know no Detective McCreadie. No Dr. Gray either.”
“She means Hugh McCreadie,” the older man says. “He is a criminal officer. Dr. Gray is the ghoul that cuts up the bodies. Says it’s for science.”
“She works forhim?” The younger man pokes me harder. “I know your master. If he weren’t some educated toff, they’d be hauling him on the gallows for what he does.”
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 hehasthat 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.