it. If Nancy had stumbled on some connection between this criminal fraternity and treasonous politics—”
“It’s quite a leap,” he interrupted. “I can’t follow it.”
“Nancy had money,” she blurted. “More than we paid her. She had a silk bonnet and a dress she could never have afforded. They don’t sound like the gifts of a gentleman suitor.”
“Gifts to a mistress,” he murmured, thoughtfully. “It’s possible she did not understand. There was a certain naivety beneath her worldliness. He could have been offering to set her up in her own little establishment, and she mistook this for marriage. But it does not make him a thief.”
“I know.”
“Nor does it tie reformers or political radicals to the underworld.”
“They both have an interest in keeping the law away,” she said defensively. “And you need not take it personally. Look. I found all these addresses on the map. None of them are obviously not respectable. Except this one, which seems to be near Seven Dials in the back streets of St. Giles. Which is not so far from Mudd Lane, where we found Nancy.”
An arrested look came into his eyes. “I did hear talk of the police cleaning out some thieves’ den in St. Giles. Did your soup kitchen patrons ever mention it?”
She shook her head. “They would never talk of such things to me. But if Nancy had been somehow involved with people like that,” she added eagerly, “it might more easily explain how she came to be murdered. I wanted to at least go and look at this address, but I didn’t want to go alone, considering—”
“Dear God, no,” Dragan exclaimed.
“Will you come with me, then?”
He regarded her. “Your family would string me up. And rightly so. If anything were to happen to you—”
“Perhaps you should bring your pistol,” she suggested.
A breath of laughter seemed to take him by surprise. “Perhaps I should.”
Chapter Eight
Seven Dials, in the heart of St. Giles, seemed like another world. The hackney dropped Griz and Dragan at the junction itself and left at worrying speed.
At one time, the seven roads converging at the junction had been elegant, the center itself marked by a great sundial with lesser ones facing each street. If one peered under the grime, no doubt the old buildings were fine, but it was impossible to tell.
There seemed to be an alehouse or gin shop on most of the corners, with men and woman spilling out of them, some arguing, some laughing uproariously, most of them drunk, even at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.
Dragan plunged down Little White Lion Street—at least that was what Griz worked out from her memory of the map. Even the sky seemed dirty here, hazing the rooftops and casting an unhealthy dimness across the maze of back alleys, the scattering of dingy shops, and the unhealthy yet aggressive looking people who passed them.
There was really no way to avoid the filth on the ground. Griz gave up trying to step around it and merely held her old skirts as far away from the ground as was seemly. And concentrated on not wrinkling her nose at the smell of rotting fish and fruit.
“That is it,” Dragan murmured, nodding to his right where two blacked-out windows flanked a closed door.
“What is it?” she asked, coming to a halt. A rusty sign hung above it, though it was impossible to read through the filth.
“An alehouse,” Dragan replied.
“How can you tell?”
“I can smell it.”
“You must have a nose like a dog.” Dubiously, she eyed the blank, grimy face of the building, which stretched up several floors at a crooked angle. “Nancy would not have come to a place like this.”
“She might have.”
“But why?”
“Adventure,” Dragan said, reaching for the door. “The same as you.”
He walked in first, holding the door to let her join him.
They were inside a gloomy room. A wall of tobacco and the smell of stale beer deprived her of breath—in fact, of any desire to breathe. Silence surrounded them, although she had the feeling it hadn’t been quiet when Dragan first pushed the door. Through the fog of smoke, a few still figures seemed to be staring in their direction. Every hair on her body stood up in alarm.
“Ale, if you please,” Dragan threw to a man she could barely make out behind a small counter. He took Grizelda’s arm, for which she was pathetically grateful, and steered her to a table by the wall.
“Is it my imagination,” she murmured as he slid onto the stool opposite, “or is the