Dressing in her soup kitchen clothes, she went to enjoy breakfast with Horace, who greeted her with a scowl.
“I was home before midnight,” she said mildly, “escorted to the door by both Worths.”
He grunted.
“What will happen to Goddard?” she asked after a few bites of toast.
Horace rustled his newspaper. “Transportation, I expect.”
“Will he be tried for sedition?” she asked curiously.
“No need. The police found evidence of enough straightforward crime to hang him.”
She set down her toast. “Then the leaflets that were found in the rookery won’t be used as evidence?” Was that why they were being dumped in a St. Giles alehouse for destruction? “Did the police not take them?”
“How the devil should I know? I’m not a policeman! Griz, I can understand, if not approve, your interest in Nancy’s untimely death. But not in Goddard!” He threw down his paper. “You haven’t got involved with radicals, have you?”
“Oh, no.”
“Then leave Goddard rotting in Newgate! He’ll be on his way to New South Wales, or the prison hulks, soon enough.”
Having discovered what she needed from Horace, she drank the last of her coffee and bade him enjoy a good morning.
Five minutes later, she stepped into her mother’s carriage and gave John, the coachman, instructions to take her to Kensington. Time enough to add Newgate to the itinerary when the house servants had no chance of hearing.
She was lucky enough to catch Dragan striding along Caroline Place and looking quite startled to see her hanging out of the carriage window as the vehicles slowed. “Quick, get in!” she instructed, throwing the door wide.
She thought laughter hissed between his teeth, but he didn’t hesitate. While he climbed in, she spoke into the tube to the coachman. “Newgate Prison, please, John.”
“Is that where Goddard is?” Dragan asked, sitting down beside her. “I suppose it saves me a lot of shoe leather going from prison to prison, but you don’t really intend coming with me, do you?”
“Of course. You might not ask the right questions.”
He arched one eyebrow. “Might I not?”
“No. Do you know, they’re not bothering with charges of sedition? I think Art somehow planted those leaflets and persuaded the police to raid the rookery because of them. Only Art benefits from Goddard and his people being transported.”
“Not law and order?” Dragan asked mildly.
“Not if Art just takes over everything Goddard was doing.”
Dragan shifted position, causing a flutter of awareness down her spine. How close he was. How long his legs.
“Why bother with the leaflets?” he demanded. “Why not just inform against him for the things he did do?”
“Because the police already know what goes on in the rookeries. There’s a sort of stability in that knowledge, and they won’t risk their officers in raiding them without a very good reason and a big push from behind.”
Dragan gazed at her as though wondering if she saw where that push must have come from. But he said only, “We still can’t tie any of that to Nancy.”
“Except the note of the alehouse among her letters.”
“I certainly can’t imagine any gentleman suitor taking her there,” Dragan said. “But to the more immediate point, prisons are hardly salubrious places for ladies to visit either.”
“Well, the Kelburn coach and the Niven name worked like a charm at Great Scotland Yard,” she said blithely.
“I would rather go alone,” he said firmly.
“I would rather be there, too.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re annoyingly stubborn?”
“Of course!”
There was no denying that the ancient prison was much grimmer the closer she got to it. And when the door closed behind them, she was conscious of a sense of panic. She couldn’t help shivering. The very air seemed redolent with the misery of hundreds of years, with the captive souls of those who had died in their cells or on the scaffold.
Griz, prepared to adopt her mother’s dignity and Augusta’s disapproval to gain access to Goddard, found herself instead, standing back and admiring.
Having read Mr. Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, she knew to enter the prison by the governor’s house, where a servant, having admitted them, scratched his head in consternation over their lack of an appointment.
“We need to see one Goddard,” Dragan pronounced. “Without delay, if you please. His Grace’s carriage is waiting.”
Dragan’s new manner was a revelation. Gone was the amiable, easy-going refugee. This was the army officer, the commander of men. Even his speech was clipped, his accent almost entirely gone. More than that, he had told no lies. By his very presence, it seemed, he