A Disappearance in Drury Lane Read Online Free PDF Page B

are we safe from him ?”
    “Jump out if you don’t like it. Run back to your lodgings and bolt the door.”
    “Those were my lodgings. Perry will be back any moment.”
    “Then go to Pomeroy.”
    Felicity let out a snort. “He’s a dear one, inn’t he? If he knew what I’d done tonight, he’d slap me in a cell, never mind I’ve shared his bed.”
    I could not disagree with her. Pomeroy was unforgiving when it came to crime. He’d attempted to arrest me more than once, and I could easily imagine him arresting Felicity without a twinge of remorse.
    “Then it seems you have no choice,” I said.
    Felicity gave me an unhappy look but collapsed against the seats in silence.
    I drifted in and out of consciousness as we moved through the shrouded city. I hoped Marianne had not met with misfortune on her way home. Perry had asked me about Drury Lane, knowing I’d been there. Because I’d given him no answers, he might turn to Marianne for them—it had been his ruffians and Felicity who’d followed us in the dark, so Perry would know Marianne had accompanied me. At least she’d gotten into Grenville’s coach and had been taken to the safety of the house he kept for her.
    Then again, Perry might decide to walk to the theatre itself and find the blind Hannah vulnerable there. I thought of Coleman, huge and strong, and felt a little better. Coleman seemed to care about Mrs. Wolff and would look after her.
    It could not be coincidence that Perry had abducted me just after Marianne asked me to make inquiries about Mrs. Collins. After I married—if Donata would accept a beaten up, tardy groom as a husband—I would return to London, find Mr. Perry, and shake some answers out of him.
    Number 45 Curzon Street was a plain Georgian house with less pretension than most of its neighbors. The house had a black painted door, a thick brass doorknocker, sash windows with black shutters, and solid brick walls.
    The coachman descended, and the horse cocked one back foot to rest its leg. Before the coachman could lift the doorknocker, a large, beefy man yanked open the door and peered out into the fog in suspicion, much as Coleman had at the theatre.
    I clutched the hackney’s windowsill and pulled myself forward, so the man would see who I was. His look turned to faint surprise, but the suspicion remained. He called to someone behind him and stepped out of the house.
    He and another equally large man—I knew both had once been prizefighters—carried me between them into the warm, lighted house. I had no chance to see whether Felicity followed, because the two men carried me all the way up three flights of stairs and into a bedchamber before I could look for her. The bed here was made up, as though the owner of the house had been expecting a guest, although no fire burned in the grate.
    While I sank onto the soft bed, one of the lackeys laid a fire and the other lit candles. Real wax candles, the scent of them soothing. No rush lights for Mr. Denis.
    I hoped to drift to sleep, but a third man, this one spare and small with gray hair, joined the first two. Denis’s former pugilists quickly and competently stripped off my clothes, and the third man, apparently a surgeon, wrapped up my ribs and tended to my other wounds. A sip of laudanum went past my lips, and I slept.
    I woke, blinking, to daylight, in an elegant room decorated in hues of ivory and Wedgwood green. Plaster medallions depicting women in classical Greek dress adorned the walls, and above the fireplace hung the painting of a young lad bending forward to blow a spark to life on a spill. Blackness surrounded the boy, but the spark threw a bright light upward, illuminating him in brilliance. The painting was a masterwork, no doubt old, no doubt pilfered, and no doubt priceless.
    A man I hadn’t met before entered the room. He was younger and more slender than the other lackeys, and he started laying out shaving gear with expressionless competence.
    He helped me out of