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Bristol’s room?”
    Mrs. Dennis, who was fiercely attached to Mrs. Wemberly, and therefore had never approved of a young and relatively attractive governess in the house, nodded reluctantly. Turning to leave, she shot a glare over her shoulder at Caroline. “Be sure you don’t take nothin’ that don’t belong to you. Beckett will be watching.” Beckett, the footman, was her nephew, and had his own troubles keeping his hands away from Caroline’s posterior.
    “Of course.” Caroline adjusted her spectacles which had slipped down her nose during the scuffle. Tucking a stray strand of straight blond hair behind her ear, she turned toward the stairs. “I shall tell the children I am leaving to care for an elderly aunt.” The two Wemberly boys were spoiled brats, of course, but they were only children, after all, and therefore deserved some consideration, unlike their deplorable parents.
    Spine held rigidly erect, she mounted the servants’ stair toward her room beside the nursery, where she began to methodically pack her minimal number of possessions under the wrathful gaze of Beckett, and with the more sympathetic help of Sally, the nursery maid. Then she sent Sally to wake the boys, while Beckett carried her trunk down to the waiting hack.
    Having said her goodbyes to her charges, she donned her cloak and hat before allowing Levenger to escort her out to the cab. Her gaze remained fixed entirely forward during the drive through the cool evening fog to the same unprepossessing hotel she’d used several times before. Looking back was always a waste of time and energy. So was crying. Caroline blinked back the tears pricking at her eyelids.
    She had enough money saved to exist for a short time in genteel poverty, the same state she’d known since her grandfather’s death just before her sixteenth birthday. For the last eleven years, she had lived at the mercy of others, and Caroline was more than sick of it. Regrettably, she had no choice in the matter. Starvation was an even less acceptable option. With that in mind, she’d have to begin seeking a new position immediately. Perhaps, this time, as a companion to an elderly lady—preferably one with no male relatives likely to visit.
     
     
    Wapping by daylight was nearly as unpleasant as Wapping by night.
    Merrick sidestepped to avoid the emptying of a slop bucket from an upper-story window, and only just managed to miss treading in a horse pile in the street. The mingled sounds of prostitutes soliciting business and vendors hawking meat pies was lent cadence by a blacksmith pounding an anvil somewhere nearby and the shouts of dock workers unloading a ship on the next street over.
    He’d spent the whole of Thursday night and a good bit of Friday helping Jack Dugan and his young werewolf constable sort out the business of the shop girls. The hired thugs had sung loudly, thoroughly implicating Haverston and admitting that the young women were to be auctioned among several Whitechapel brothels rather than being shipped overseas. When it came to human trafficking, most of England’s business was domestic, rather than international, despite what the penny news sheets would have one believe.
    Either way, the girls had escaped an unpleasant fate. Most of them had been welcomed home by their families, but one or two were orphans who had been replaced by their employers and were left with nowhere to go. That’s where Merrick’s aunt Dorothy had stepped in. She’d rallied her crowd of middle-aged bluestockings and found positions for each of the girls in her friends’ households. This hadn’t been as easy as it would have been ten years earlier. The advent of modern steam and clockwork machines made possible by Lord Babbage’s engines had reduced the need for human servants. Even while society slowly accepted women into the ranks of professionals, more and more working class young women were left with no choice but prostitution.
    Dorothy had recognized this at once