A Victorian Virgin? Ch. 04

"Well, perhaps he should." Before Ned could react, the policeman was beside him, gripping his elbow and aiming him toward the staircase. His fingers were like iron, their clasp as tight as any vice. For all his boyish appearance, this man seemed entirely capable of ripping another man limb from limb.

Sam waited until he heard the door close and his wife's feet pitter away like light rain on wet soil. Then he let go of Ned Hawke's arm. By now, they were at the foot of the staircase, in the hallway that made up the main entrance of the house. His mouth was dry. He knew not what to say. The words he had read in that letter had not really shocked him. It was the effect that they had had on Charlotte had caused him grief. He had never seen her in such a state before; she was normally levelheaded. "Why are you here?" he asked Hawke, abruptly. It was a straight question; there was no hint of hostility in his voice.

"I came to speak with Victoria. I have found her a nursing position," Ned replied, stiffly. "Where is she?"

Sam clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and mulled the question over. "Is that the only reason you came here?"

"I-" Ned felt like a small, stupid child again. It was that unnerving blue stare, he told himself. Those eyes. What was it about Victoria's family and eyes? "I wanted to see her again."

"Why?"

"Because I-" his voice was stuck in his throat. He was lost for words.

"Do you love her?" the policeman asked.

Pinpoints of heat stabbed into Ned's cheeks. His heart seemed to jolt in its fastenings. He felt his eyes grow moist and his throat become drier than any desert. He more caught off guard than if Morpeth had hit him. The policeman stared back at him, observing perhaps the destruction of his composure. "I think so," Ned admitted, finally.

"Think? You had better be sure," Sam said. He took a deep breath. "Have you bedded her?"

There was no frown in his eyes or inflection of anger in the policeman's voice, Ned thought. It was the same tone as he might use to ask a stranger the time. He had dealt with angry brothers before, but they had never acted as coolly as Victoria's brother-in-law. "No," he replied, shakily. "We kissed and touched, but nothing more than that, I promise."

"I'm sorry that I had to ask that. It isn't really my affair what you do with her, just as long as you don't hurt her."

"Did she say that I did?" Ned asked, quickly.

Sam shook his head. "No. She didn't say anything of the sort."

"Then what happened? Where is Victoria?"

"Women fight..." The policeman took a deep breath and considered his next move. Morally, he should have shown Victoria's suitor the door and left it at that. That was what Charlotte had expected him to do. Sam thought differently. Sam's interpretation of the man's behavior was that Hawke genuinely cared about his sister-in-law. The man would not be so red and shaky if he did not. Sam believed him when he said that he had not bedded the girl. From past experience, Sam was good judge of a liar, and so far Hawke had not lied to him. Hawke could not be a debaucher. If he were, he would have chosen some busty, brainless girl with legs as easily spread as jam, rather than cold, stiff Victoria.

Sam watched the doctor. He had the sort of face that would give him the pick of any number of ladies, should he feel that way inclined, yet he had gone for Victoria. Yes, Victoria was a beauty, but she had a tongue as sharp as any razor and the disposition of a particularly nasty lap dog; the kind that would bite you as soon as look at you. She must be special in some way in order for Hawke to put up with her, barbs and all. Hawke cared for his sister-in-law; he was sure.

"Charlotte found the letter that you had sent Victoria," Sam said, slowly. "They had a huge row and Victoria left."

The policeman's words shot through his ears and into his brain. "Shit," Ned hissed. Why on earth did he write that stupid letter? It had been a laugh, a gag, a spur of the moment thing, when he had felt his lowest. Half the words seemed to be aimed at pushing her away, just as he had wanted to do as soon as he realized what she really meant to him, and the other half were his real feelings. As real as he could hope to write upon paper. "I didn't mean- It was just a bit of fun- You know how Victoria is- Get her shocked-" Everything that had gone wrong this evening, from Victoria's absence to Charlotte's stony reception was the fault of that scribbled note. He kicked himself for sending it. Victoria could be in any sort of danger, out on her own in the East End, all because of one ill-conceived piece of paper. "Do you have any idea where she's gone?"

Sam voiced Ned's fears, "It's not safe for a woman to be alone in this area, especially with the Ripper on the loose. I tracked her down when she first left, but she would not come home. I went back the next day. She was gone, as I knew she would be. Victoria and I are like fire and water, whenever I come near, she spits. The current situation just antagonized her further. She thought that I was the one that gave Charlotte that letter, but Charlotte found it all on her own. My wife went right off, I've never seen her in such a state before. I tried to tell her that, well, Victoria's pushing six-and-twenty; it's unnatural for a woman of that age to have no interest in men. She took a different line, as ladies do."

"So you gave up looking for Victoria, after discovering her departure?" Ned asked.

Sam shook his head. "No. I know exactly where she is now-" he saw the flicker of fear in the doctor's eyes, "Don't worry, she's safe. She's in a woman's boarding house. No harm can come to her there. I was going to give Victoria a few days to decide that her new situation was worse than her last and Charlotte some time to cool down. Then I was going to approach her again."

"Which boarding house?"

Sam gave a slight smile. "I can tell you that, but there are some other things that you need to know first."

"Such as?"

"Have you a trap waiting for you outside?" the policeman asked.

"Yes," Ned said. "What's that got to do with Victoria?"

"Go and get in it, drive along until you are out of sight of the house. I'm supposed to be heading off to work. I'll go up and say goodnight to my wife and then I'll come and speak with you. I'll be ten minutes at most."

The policeman was true to his word; less than ten minutes had passed and he was rapping on the door to Ned's hansom cab. Ned heard the latch undo and moved over for the policeman to sit next to him. "Where are you heading for work?" he asked his companion.

"You don't have to drive me there, it's not far," Sam Morpeth protested.

"We can talk as we travel," Ned replied. "Which station is it?"

Sam gave the street and Ned told the driver.

"So what are these other things that I need to know about Victoria?"

"I only know what Charlotte told me when I came home after Victoria left, and if comes from Charlotte, especially in the mood she was in the other day, it's not going to be objective information."

"But it's important?"

"Yes."

*

After their conversation, Ned left Sam at his station and continued on to the woman's boarding house that Sam said Victoria was staying in. He had known that there were unhealed wounds in Victoria's past, but he had never imagined that they would run far deeper than his own. It put his life into perspective, his own experiences paling beside hers. He had not lost everything as she had. He had been beaten, but he had not been raped, intercourse with Arabella had always been consensual. His father pushed, groomed and designed him into his ideals, just as her father had. But whereas Victoria had been exploited by her father for monetary gain - prostituted to multiple suitors in the hope of creating business links through marriage, at least Edward's father loved him. His father hadn't embezzled, lied or cheated to get where he was, and he certainly had not killed others and himself to escape a debt. Sam had known most of these points, having been one of the investigating officers on the case, but he had not known about the rape. It was debatable whether Victoria herself knew.

He got out and paid the cabdriver. Then he strode across to the shabby, grey building that he took to be the women's boarding house. He stopped and talked to the doorman and discovered that Victoria had only stayed two nights before moving on to somewhere else. Where, the man knew not.

Ned kicked himself. Where was she? As Sam Morpeth had said, it was bloody dangerous to be a single woman in this area. He hated to think of his Nightingale alone and frightened in some horrible garret of a room, if she had gotten that far. What if she hadn't? What if she'd been attacked or abducted? He had heard stories of respectable women who had been manhandled, drugged and taken to some terrible brothel to work. He had always dismissed them as urban myths, but now they played heavily on his mind. What about Jack the Ripper? This was his stamping ground. Ned had read all the lurid details of the four women who had had their throats slashed and bodies mutilated. And if Jack didn't get Victoria, there were always the drunks, the lechers, the Jews and the foreigners (both viewed as naturally sinister at that time). Anything could happen to her.

He strode down the street with his fists balled in his pockets in apprehension. Where could Victoria have gone? Why had she left the relative safety of the woman's boarding house, a place guarded by a doorman and free of men? He saw the soft, white skin that he had brushed with his hands scratched and bleeding. He saw her pretty, tightly bound hair thrown around her head in disarray, her scared eyes screaming from the shadows cast by her attacker. Blood formed lines like a strand of string, and then beaded like a red necklace before streaming from her cut skin. He needed to protect her. He needed to find her.

The air struck his face like a solid fist of ice. Good Lord, it was cold. Even through his coat, jacket, waistcoat and singlet, it stabbed his ribs like a knife. He was not used to this weather. He thought of Nightingale lying somewhere in the cold, her skin blue and blotchy with impaired circulation. Slipping out of consciousness, beyond the shivering stage...

There were people all around, bustling in and out, carrying on their own private lives at this hour. He kept his head down and did not make eye contact. Any of these people could hurt him, just because he had what they didn't. A warm coat, a top hat, boots that did not leak when he stood in a puddle. They would do the same to Victoria, taking advantage of her inexperience in such a world.

Where was she? What sort of trouble could she be in? He would search until he found her. But where? There must be a hundred lodging houses and tenements in the area. He would have to enter all of them.

He started to look up at the buildings around him, noticing which ones appeared to hold more than one room and which ones had doormen. He started to ask questions, repeating her name over and over again, but getting no response. It wasn't until he noticed a woman going into a tenement that he stopped.

She had dark hair tucked up beneath a plain straw bonnet. The skin beneath was pale, but not pasty. Her dress was flat, dark and drab, draping a curvaceous form. She held her small, naked hand upon her hip at a suggestive angle, he thought. As he approached her, he saw the chiseled rim of her lips form a smiling pout. "Are yer looking for summat?" the girl asked.

"I was wondering whether you could tell me something." It was a long shot, he knew, but maybe, maybe she'd know something. She looked as if she knew the area well.

"Oh, and what would that be?" She was a toucher, her hand flickering through the air between them to tap the area above his heart. Her body was now in his space, her breasts resting no more than a few inches from his chest. He saw now that she was in her twenties, her skin already showing signs of age, creased and sunken beneath her dark eyes.

Ned smiled and removed the hand that was clamping his breast. He turned it over in his gloved fingers and palpitated the frozen palm. "I'm looking for a woman."

She gave a silly, high-pitched laugh that shot through the cold air in white blasts of warmth. "Look no further. I'll soon get yer warm."

Her pink lips loomed closer, barely masking the scent of hops and stale alcohol. It made his stomach rather than his heart leap. Quickly he broke away from her. "I'm sorry, you must have misunderstood me. I'm not looking for any woman, I'm looking for a particular woman."

"Particulee aye? And how's that? I'll take yer cock wherever yer want; in me mouth, me privy, even me arse, if it pleases yer. I'm very accomplished, yer see."

Bile rose in Ned's throat. This womanly figure should have been attractive. She was not ugly or old. The way she peddled herself forward like some ware made him sick. It reminded him all too much of Arabella. "Her name's Victoria Buckley. She's about the same height as you, same hair color, similar figure," he saw the girl's lips prickle in disbelief, quickly he added, "If you can find her, I'll make it worth your while."

Money could always buy out rejection. "How much?"

"More than you'd make if I'd fucked you. But the condition is that you come with me to wherever you say she is before I pay you, understand? I'm not having any shite." His eyes were steely and cold, not unlike the money pressed firmly into his inner jacket pocket (he was not taking any chances; he could not afford for it to jangle and alert a potential mugger).

They went to three different tenements before the woman finally found somebody who had seen Victoria. It was just after midnight when Ned arrived at her door. She lived on the second storey of a block of rooms belonging to a landlord named Bernard. The staircase that lead up to this floor was within a small room with street access, which was unlocked and seemed to be kept permanently open. Ned's heart raced when he realized that anybody could wander in from the streets and gain access to the rest of the house, and Victoria. From the rickety old staircase, he and the woman walked along a thin, creaking passageway, which ran between two sets of rooms. The walls dividing rooms were paper-thin, permeable to light, sound and the air. They were recent installments used to subdivide much larger rooms to maximize Bernard's profit.

When he came to room eleven, he gently knocked, hoping that the woman had indeed found the right Victoria. No reply came from within. He banged harder, not realizing that the occupant within was curled up beneath her blankets in fright. He tried the doorknob, causing the heart of the occupant to leap into her mouth. She waited to hear the key in the door, praying that the barricade she had set up would prevent the man's entry. The sound did not come. Instead, she heard a man's voice ask, "Victoria, are you in there?"

Her breathing shuddered through her chest. She could swear that he would be able to hear her heart beat through those horrible thin walls. She tightened the finger-locked grip upon her pillow, pulling it down upon her face to stifle her breath. She heard the man's voice booming through the tiny shell that was her room. She recognized it, she thought. Slowly she pulled the pillow from her mouth. "Who is it?" she said, in a strangled squeak of a voice.

"It's Edward."

Her body ran with fire. He'd found her. She was going to be all right. It wasn't the other man. She scrambled from the bed and pulled her shawl about her shoulders. Her shaking fingers found the stump of candle that sat in its meager iron dish, and the packet of matches beside it. She struck the flame hurriedly, feeling the sting of heat warm her frozen fingers.

"Victoria?"

"I'm coming." In the faint, globular light of her candle, she examined the space she called her room. Bare wooden walls, a small iron bedstead, a short table, a set of drawers and a chair, all crammed into a tiny space. Her skirts and dress were draped across the chair, forming a frightening dark shadow like a crouching man. There was no place for them to hang.

She spat upon her cold fingers and organized her hair back into the long braid from which it had escaped. She straightened her skirt and wound the shawl more closely about her shoulders. She must look a frightful mess, but she had no glass to examine herself.

Ned heard the sound of furniture grating across the floorboards as Victoria removed the barricade she had placed upon the door. She turned the icy iron of the key in the locking mechanism and pulled the door inwards toward her.

Her face was lit only by her small candle, but seemed far more shadowed than it should be. He made out the purple blossoms of bleeding beneath the skin and saw the cracks where the blood had escaped from her lips. Her left cheek was discolored with mottled bruises, as was her jaw. The glazed eyes that met his seemed less powerful than before, sunken into the shadows thrown by her lower eyelids. Her smile was slack, the broken lips drooping at the sides.

"My God, what happened to you?" Ned gasped. He watched as her facial composure cracked into tears. It tore him up inside. Quickly he gathered her in his arms, depositing the flailing candle upon the chest of drawers just inside the bedroom door. He felt her body heave with the grief that escaped her chest in a sobbing roar, like a wounded animal. He held the silky dark hair against his shoulder, and did not care about the salty warmth that wicked into his collar. "It's all right now," he heard himself whisper.

The stupid bitch who had found Victoria chose this moment to ask for payment. He whirled upon her, almost in rage for interrupting him, and handed her a handful of change that he been sliding against his thigh through the fabric of his trousers. She said some sort of obscenity, but this was drowned by the sound of the door slamming in her face. He flicked the large key in its lock less than a second later as the fists struck the wood.

He turned back to Victoria. "Don't worry; she'll tire herself out soon."

"Who is she?" Victoria stuttered through her tears. "She looks like a-"

Ned nodded. "She is. But I didn't pay her for that. I paid her to find you," he said, shortly. He watched the bruised mouth sink back into rest. "What happened to you? What happened to your face?"

Her mouth contorted as she tried to hold back a fresh crop of tears. "Charlotte... Charlotte found the letter you sent me... She was so angry- I've never seen her like that... She was so angry, like I've never seen her before. It reminded me of Father, before he died-"

"She struck you?"

"Yes," Victoria whimpered.

"For being with me? Didn't you tell her that we never did anything?" Ned asked.

"No, I never- I got angry. That's why she slapped me."

"She did more than slap you, those bruises are from a beating. God, Victoria, why did you let her do that to you?"

"I deserved a good slapping. I feel so guilty-"

"Why? Because you wanted me to kiss you and hold you? You shouldn't be ashamed of that, it's natural."

"I said some terrible words to Charlotte. I said things that I should never have thought, let alone said aloud. I let my tongue run ahead of my brain and I hurt her more than I have ever hurt anybody. I goaded her and pushed her until she struck back."

"What did you say that could have aroused her anger enough to beat you? She does not strike me as an angry person."

"She's not. Father had a temper, I have a temper, but Charlotte has always been levelheaded. It takes a lot to bring her to rage. It's the sort of anger that builds up for weeks before it finally blows, whilst mine is spent and gone in the place of a day. I'd been needling her for days, I knew it was coming. I just didn't expect her to be so vicious toward me, and to say such things. I'm her sister, we've been together all my life. Sisters should not fight like we did."