Rachel ran to fetch it back, then guided Silvia closer to the tree.
“Put thy fingers so,” she said, “then draw thy arm back and fix thy eye firmly upon the spot thee has chosen. Then throw, but do not let thine eye stray.”
Silvia nodded and, taking a fresh grip upon the apple, faced the tree with the fire she should have shown to Friend Cadwallader, and let fly.
“Oh.” She made a small sound of pleased surprise. “I didn’t think I could.” She laughed, but self-consciously, looking over her shoulder. “I suppose this is sinfully wasteful, but …”
“Ask the squirrels if they think so,” Rachel advised, nodding toward one of these creatures, who had rushed down the trunk of the tree within seconds of the first impact and was now on the ground, stuffing itself with the fragments of their bombardment. Silvia looked, then glanced around. At least a dozen more were bounding across the grass, tails bushy with purpose.
“Well, then,” she said, and drew a deep breath. “Thee is right. I feel much calmer.”
“Good. Can thee eat?” Rachel asked. “I’m starved. Perhaps we might have a pie and discuss what to do next.”
The calmness at once disappeared from Silvia’s face, replaced with pale apprehension, but she nodded and obediently followed Rachel back onto the street.
“I should not have gone,” Silvia said, pausing after a bite or two of her beef-and-onion pie. “I knew what they would say.”
“Yes, thee told me, but I didn’t want to believe it.” Rachel bit into her own pie, frowning. “That people who profess charity and the love of Christ could speak in such a way! No wonder thy husband turned his back upon them.”
“Gabriel wasn’t one to stand what he thought of as interference,” Silvia agreed ruefully. “But thee can see their point, surely? I am in fact exactly what they said—a whore.”
Rachel wanted to contradict her on the spot, but having opened her mouth to do so, paused, then took another bite of flaky pastry and gravy.
“Thee had no choice,” she said, after chewing and swallowing.
“Mr. Cadwallader appeared to think I had,” Silvia said, a little tartly. “I should have married again—”
“But thee didn’t know whether thy husband was dead! How could thee marry?”
“—or come to the city and turned my hand to laundry or needlework—”
“Which wouldn’t pay thee enough to feed thyself, let alone thy daughters!”
“Perhaps Friend Cadwallader hasn’t found occasion to discover what the life of a laundress is like,” Silvia said. She finished her pie, and her bony shoulders slumped a little, relaxing in the late-afternoon sun. “I suppose we must look for the light within him and Friend Sharpless, mustn’t we?”
“Yes,” Rachel said reluctantly. “But I may require a few more apples and a bottle of beer before such a search might be effective.”
Silvia laughed, and Rachel’s heart rose to hear it. Silvia Hardman was battered, no doubt of it—but not yet broken.
“Still, it would have been good to be part of a meeting once again,” Silvia said wistfully. “I have not had such company or support in many years.”
Rachel swallowed her last bite and took hold of Silvia’s hand. It was slender, callused, and ill-used, bearing the burns and scars of unrelenting toil and many small household disasters.
“Wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there am I,” Rachel said, and pointed at Silvia, then herself. “One. Two.”
Silvia smiled, despite herself, and her true nature—kind and humorous—peeped out behind the wariness in her eyes.
“Then thee is my meeting, Rachel. I am blessed.”
IAN CAME BACK from his visit to Elfreth’s Alley in something of a brown study, oblivious to the shouts of dairymaids and beer sellers.
He’d thought he might have to expend considerable time and money in order to get the inhabitants of the brothel to talk, but the mere mention of Jane Pocock’s name had opened floodgates of gossip, and he felt as one might after being washed overboard from a ship and carried ashore in a flurry of foam and sharp debris.
Now he wished he had paid more attention to Fanny’s drawing of her sister.
The loudly stated opinion of Mrs. Abbott, the madam, was that Jane Pocock had been strange, plainly very strange, demented and probably a practitioner of Strange Arts, and how it was that neither she nor any of her girls had been murdered in their beds, she did not know. Ian wondered why a young woman with such skills would have been working as a whore, but didn’t say so, under the circumstances.
It took some time for the talk about the murder of Captain Harkness to die down, but Ian Murray did ken his way around a brothel, and when the flow diminished, he at once ordered two more extortionately priced bottles of champagne.
This altered the air of accommodation to something more focused but less vituperative, and within half an hour, Mrs. Abbott had retreated to her sanctum and the whores had reached their own silent accommodation amongst themselves. He found himself on the red velvet sofa common to such establishments, with Meg on one side and Trixabella on the other.
“Trix was friends with Arabella—Jane, I mean,” Meg explained. Trix nodded, doleful.
“Wish I hadn’t been,” she said. “That girl hadn’t any luck at all, and that kind of thing can brush off on you, you know. What are those things on your face?”
“Can it?” Ian touched his cheekbone. “It’s a Mohawk tattoo.”
“Ooh,” said Trix, with slightly more interest. “Was you captured by Indians?” She giggled at the thought.
“Nay, I went of my own accord,” he said equably.
“Well, me too,” Trix said, with an uptilted chin and a wave of the hand presumably meant to draw his attention to the relatively luxurious nature of her place of employment. “Not Arabella, though. Mrs. Abbott got her and her sister off a sea captain what didn’t have the scratch to pay his bill. Those girls were indentures.”
“Aye? And how long ago was that? Ye canna have been here more than a year or two yourself.” In fact, she looked to have been in the trade for a decade, at least, but minor gallantries were part of the expected pourparlers, and she laughed and batted her eyes at him in a practiced manner.
“Reckon it would have been six—maybe seven—years ago. Time flies when you’re havin’ fun, or so they say.”
“Tempus fugit.” Ian filled her glass and clinked his against it, smiling. She dimpled professionally, drank, and went on.
“Mind, I wasn’t but two years older than Jane …” Bat-bat. “Mrs. Abbott wouldn’t’ve bothered with them, save they were pretty, both of ’em, and Jane was just about old enough to … um … start.”
Ian was counting back; six years ago, Jane would have been about the age Fanny was now. Old enough …
After a few accounts of harrowing initial experiences in the trade, he managed to drag the conversation back to Jane and Fanny.
“Ye said a sea captain sold the girls to Mrs. Abbott. Do either of ye by chance recall his name?”
Meg shook her head.
“I wasn’t here,” she said. “Trix …?” She lifted a brow at her friend, who frowned a little and pressed her lips together.