What on earth had Mrs. Duff told her?
"I only came for a moment!" he said hastily. "I did not wish to interrupt you! How are you?"
The colour burned up her cheeks.
"Quite well, thank you," she said sarcastically. "And you?"
"Tired, chasing an exhausting and un hopeful case," he answered. "It will be difficult to solve, even harder to prove, and I am not optimistic the law will prosecute it even should I succeed. Am I interrupting you?"
She closed the door and leaned against the handle.
"If you were I should not have come. The maid is perfectly capable of carrying a message."
She might look less businesslike than usual, but she had absolutely no feminine charm. No other woman would have spoken to him like that.
"You have no idea how to be gracious, have you?" he criticised.
Her eyes widened. "Is that what you came for, someone to be gracious to you?"
"I would hardly have come here, would I?"
She ignored him. "What would you like me to say? That I am sure you know what you are doing, and your skill will triumph in the end? That a just cause is well fought, win or lose?" Her eyebrows rose. "The honour is in the battle, not the victory? I'm not a soldier. I have seen too much of the cost of ill-planned battles, and the price of loss."
"Yes, we all know you would have fought a better war than Lord Raglan," he snapped. "If the War Office had had the good sense to put you in charge instead!"
"If they had picked someone at random off the street, they would have," she rejoined. Then her face softened a little. "What is your battle?"
"I would rather tell you somewhere more comfortable, and more private," he replied. "Would you like to dine?"
If it was a surprise, she hid it very well... too well! Perhaps it was what she had expected. It was not what he had intended to say! But to retreat now would make it even worse. It would draw attention to it, and to his feelings about it. He could not even pretend he thought she was busy, Mrs. Duff had told him she was not.
"Thank you," she said with an aplomb he had not expected. She seemed very cool about it. She turned and opened the door, leading the way out into the hall. She asked the footman for her cloak, and then together she and Monk went outside to the bitter evening, again dimmed by fog, the streetlamps vague moons haloed by drifting ice, the footpaths slippery.
It took just under ten minutes to find a hansom and climb into it. He gave directions to an inn he knew quite well. He would not take her to an expensive place, in case she misunderstood his intent, but to take her to a cheap one would find her thinking he could not afford better, and possibly even offering to pay.
"What is your battle?" she repeated when they were sitting side by side in the cold as the cab lurched forward then settled into a steadier pace. It was miserably cold, even inside. There was very little to see, just gloom broken by hazes of light, sudden breaks in the mist when outlines were sharp, a carriage lamp, a horse's head and forequarters, the high, black silhouette of a hansom driver, and then the shroud of fog closed in again.
"At first, just women being cheated in Seven Dials," he answered. "To begin with it was no more than using a prostitute and refusing to pay..."
"Don't they have pimps and madams to help prevent that?" she asked.
He winced, but then he should have expected her to know such things.
She had hardly been sheltered from many truths.
"These were amateurs," he explained. "Mostly women who work in factories and sweatshops during the day, and just need a little more now and again."
"I see."
"Then they were raped. Now it has escalated until they are being beaten... increasingly violently."
She said nothing.
He glanced sideways at her; as they passed close to another carriage, the light from the lamps caught her face. He saw the pity and anger in it, and suddenly his loneliness vanished. All the times of resentment and irritation and self-protectiveness telescoped into the causes they had shared, and disappeared, leaving only the understanding. He went on to describe to her his efforts to elicit some facts about the men, and from his questioning of the cabbies and street vendors, in order to learn where they had come from.
They arrived