The stench of rot filled her nostrils, and she gagged, covering her nose in a futile bid to block the smell of it.
Bertha leaned forward, and then swiftly drew back. “Good God.” She pressed her forearm over her face.
Nay, there was no God down there.
“I suspect it is going to get a good deal harder when you’re in there,” the older woman pointed out with her usual blunt honesty.
And damn if she wasn’t right. Forcing her arm to her side, Verity eyed the opening.
She could do this.
How difficult could it be? Climb down—
And search for a man who didn’t wish to be found? So much so that he’d forsake a title in place of . . . this?
Verity scrabbled with her lip. Mayhap Bertha was right, after all. Verity was a-hunting a madman. For no sane person could prefer this life to the one awaiting him if he simply claimed his fortune. And for the first time since she’d been handed her assignment from Lowery, unease wound its way through her for altogether different reasons. Not from the sheer desperation to locate and tell the story, but from what would happen if—when?—she did locate the man in question.
An image slipped in: a beastlike figure, with the stench of filth clinging to him. Wild eyes. A feral mouth.
I cannot do this . . .
“Mayhap you don’t go in,” Bertha murmured with her first vocal doubts raised. “Mayhap there is another way to find him.”
There wasn’t.
“I’m going, I’m going,” she muttered again. Only, as she remained standing there, she couldn’t determine whether she was trying to convince the other woman she was going to climb down—or herself.
Either way, before her courage deserted her, Verity shimmied onto her belly until she dangled with half her body in and the other half out of the opening. Then, slowly, she lowered herself down into the sewers.
She choked on the acrid scent that slapped at her.
Her arms ached. Her muscles screamed. But for the life of her, she could not let herself make the final descent.
There has to be another way.
“There isn’t,” Bertha whispered, confirming she’d spoken aloud. “Only way down into the sewers is through one of them grates,” she murmured, misunderstanding Verity’s wonderings. “Now you should hurry on with yourself. Before someone comes and we don’t have either our lives or your story to show for it.”
And in the end, it was that ominous warning about either of the fates awaiting her that compelled her. Verity closed her eyes and let go; her stomach dropped along with her in a fall that seemed eternal.
She landed hard, sinking into a small puddle, the freezing-cold water instantly penetrating the thin soles of the pair of slippers she’d received just that morning. “Bloody hell,” she whispered, her voice pinging off the stone walls.
Verity climbed her gaze up the six feet between her and that lone exit, and her stomach flipped over once more. How in blazes was she to get back out now? “Bertha,” she whispered. “Bertha,” she repeated, this time more insistently. And for one horrifying moment, she believed she’d been duped, lured, and left to die in this dark pit where none would ever know.
But then . . .
Bertha ducked her greying head into the opening. “What?” she cried, her voice ricocheting around the brick walls.
“Shh,” Verity implored. “It’s fine. It is just . . . I . . . I’ll need help climbing out.”
Even in the dark, she caught the pull of Bertha’s high forehead. “Help? You only just climbed in.”
And despite herself, Verity found herself laughing. “Not now. Later.”
“I’ll wait here—”
“I’ve told you. You cannot.” Too many would be watching and questions would be asked, and Verity wouldn’t have her story stolen once more. “Go with your fellow . . . Return in thirty minutes.”
Bertha hesitated, then caught the sides of the grate. Panic swelled as the older woman slid the covering back into place.
Oh, God.
There was a sharp clatter that echoed with an eerie finality, as with its closure the fragile glow cast by the moon was stolen, and Verity was plunged into complete darkness.
Her breathing increased, growing more ragged, the sharp sound of it echoing around the tunnel.
Verity briefly closed her eyes.
You’ve done far worse . . . You’ve . . .
Only, had she? Had she truly?
She’d had rocks tossed at her by village children who didn’t want to keep company with a whore’s daughter. Been hungry from an empty belly. Cold in the harshest of winters. But had she truly known the full extent of life’s ugliness and depravity? An ugliness and depravity she continued to learn the endless bounds of. Plunging herself underground, locked away from the world, trapped.
Her breath rasped loud in her ears.
“Enough,” she whispered, needing to hear her voice. Verity forced her legs to move, and focusing on the simple command of placing one foot in front of the other, she wandered deeper into the tunnel.
Tunnel.
There, that was a better way of thinking of it . . . tunnel, and not sewer. Sewers were dark. Dank. Dangerous. Tunnels, were . . . well, similar, but—
Verity shivered and huddled deeper into her wool cloak.
Drip. Drip. Drip-drip. Drip. Drip. Drip-drip.
As she walked, she scoured the narrow pathway, lined with increasingly deepening water. “Bloody hell.” She sighed at her slippers, the silliest of shoes to ever go traipsing through London—let alone the sewers of London—in. And now hopelessly ruined. They’d take days to dry, and even when they did, the leather would be threadbare.
Verity reached the end of the tunnel and stopped abruptly, the grimy, stone-slicked path sending her foot sliding forward. Gasping, she shot her palms out and braced herself against the uneven bricks. Catching herself.
Verity looked beyond . . . at a network of tunnels. That led off in both directions. She squinted in an attempt to better see how far down the current path led.
It was an infernal maze that a person could simply get themselves turned around in and wade through waste until he—or, in her case, she—drew their last noxious breath.
And all the questions raised about the Earl of Maxwell’s sanity whispered forward, for no sane man should choose . . . this . . . over a life of untold comforts. Verity held her sleeve against her nose in a bid to mute the stinging odor permeating the air. “You had better be here,” she muttered, conflicted even with that utterance as to whether she wanted to run face-first into a man who preferred to call this place home over his Grosvenor Square residence.
Verity hefted her skirts around her waist and continued forward.
She waded through the deepening water. Her submerged skin quickly went numb from the frigid cold.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
And when you find him . . . then what?
“Then you convince him,” she assured herself in the eerie silence, her own echo oddly terrifying. And she’d certainly convinced any number of men—more than she could count or remember, men of all stations—to share their secrets.
It had been the blessing and curse of her thirty years of existence.
This earl would be no different. This earl, who’d identified as a commoner for more years than he’d ever lived his comfortable existence as a peer.