“May I have him when you’re done?” Thaïs asked prettily, fluttering her lashes.
She decided to change the subject before the thought of retiring Adam from her bed made her forlorn.
“Oh, loves, I’ve missed you,” Sera said, wrapping her arms around them. “But what could possibly have possessed you to journey all the way here without writing?”
Jack peeked back into the room, as if he’d been waiting in the hall for the subject to change from the subject of copulation. Normally he looked like a bulldog crossed with a prizefighter, but his stocky bearing held none of its usual vigor, and his face was hollowed out. He was a scarecrow version of the man he’d been two months ago.
Thaïs pointed at him. “We couldn’t write because Jack thinks Bell might try to intercept our letters.”
The feeling of warmth and comfort that had washed over Sera in the presence of her friends went decidedly icy at Bell’s name.
“We discovered where he’s keeping Elinor,” Jack said, rubbing his eyes. “A place called Willowgate, a few hours from here.”
“Dear God,” Sera breathed. “Cornelia wrote that you suspected, but . . . All this time, I don’t think I really believed he was capable of it.”
Cornelia crossed her arms over her chest. “Luckily, the bastard doesn’t know what we’re capable of.”
“Damned right,” Thaïs said, rising. She slung an arm around Jack’s shoulders. “Bell always said Elinor kept tavern company, and he wasn’t wrong, was he, Jackie?”
Jack opened up a satchel and produced a map. “No. And we lowlife bastards are going to get her out.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I was expecting an asylum to be more forbidding,” Cornelia mused the following morning, looking out the carriage window at the pleasant, manicured lawn of a handsome manor house.
“The forbidding thing is the fact that Elinor is locked inside it,” Seraphina muttered, eyeing its impressive iron gates.
“I only meant,” Cornelia said loftily, “that it is not precisely Bedlam.” Her aristocratic accent was at odds with the drab dress, white apron, and spinsterish lace cap she wore in her effort to disguise herself as a nurse.
“Do not match wits, you harridans, my head can’t bear it,” Thaïs groaned.
They had stayed up late into the night fortifying themselves with brandy while Jack demonstrated such arts as picking locks and felling a man with a quick jab to the kidneys. Now, Jack was hiding in wait in the forest like a common highwayman, and Sera and the girls were dressed as matrons, with picks and scissors sewn into the linings of their gowns.
It was all rather gothic for Seraphina’s taste.
“Now remember,” Thaïs said. “We talk our way in, I stir up a mighty clatter, you two find Elinor. If we can get her outside to Jack we have a fightin’ chance.”
That was it. That, and a flimsy story about a sick aunt, was their plan.
“I still have a bad feeling about this,” Sera muttered. “If we spent a little more time planning, I’m sure we could come up with something—”
“We don’t have time,” Cornelia said quietly. “If Bell learns we left London he will suspect we’ve found her, and move her before we have a chance to get her out.”
Thaïs rolled her eyes at them. “You both worry too much. Jack’s man got all the information we need. No bars on her window, only two attendants. We’ll be toasting with Elinor by supper.”
“Not all of us count petty crime among our chief accomplishments,” Sera said.
Cornelia shushed them. “Someone’s coming,” she murmured, gesturing at a tall man in a long black coat approaching the gate.
Thaïs gave Sera and Cornelia a blinding smile. “That must be the doctor. Let’s be villains, girls.”
With a wink, she threw open the door and stepped outside.
“Good day, sir,” she called in a well-bred accent, curtsying. She’d worn a modest yellow dress sprigged with roses and a girlish bonnet over her red curls. If the large amount of wine she’d consumed the night before and the inverse quantity of time she’d had to sleep it off were having an effect on her health, it did not show in her appearance. She was so dazzling that the doctor audibly gasped at the sight of her.
She smiled at him beneath her lacy bonnet. “Sir, I’m looking for Willowgate Asylum. Have I come to the right place?”
“Indeed, miss. I’m Dr. Hogue. May I help you?”
“I do hope so. My name is Miss Elspeth. Forgive me for not writing in advance, but I am desperate. My elderly aunt has gone mad, and I am looking for a place where she might seek treatment.”
The doctor looked delighted. “How dreadful for you and your family,” he said in a concerned tone that did not travel to his eyes. “I would be happy to take her.”
Sera gaped at Cornelia. “He acts like a piece of bullion just fell from the sky,” she whispered. “It’s bloody mercenary.”
“Hush,” Cornelia whispered back, pinching her wrist.
“Allow me to show you inside to make arrangements,” the doctor said in an oozing voice, resting his hand on the small of Thaïs’s back.
Sera’s skin crawled in sympathy.
Thaïs glanced back at the carriage. “I’ve asked my friends to accompany me, if you wouldn’t mind. My aunt’s condition is so upsetting I am liable to forget the details.”
“Of course,” the doctor said. He removed his hand from Thaïs’s posterior, conscious of being watched.
Cornelia inhaled like she was about to dive into the ocean from a cliff top, took Sera’s hand, and stepped out the door of the carriage.
“This is Miss Best, my aunt’s nurse,” Thaïs said, gesturing at Cornelia. “And my lady’s companion, Mrs. Lowell.”
Sera curtsied, bracing under the doctor’s eelish gaze. She had worn old mourning garments of her stepmother’s, stuffed at the bosom, in an effort to look as unlike herself as possible. If any of them were recognized, their mission would be over before they even got inside.
But the physician barely bowed to them, quickly turning his eyes back to feast on Thaïs’s sumptuous proportions. “Follow me, Miss Elspeth.”
“What a beautiful place,” Thaïs enthused as they approached the house.
It was, indeed, much lovelier than Sera had been expecting, given what Jack had learned about the medieval-sounding treatments it was known for. But a pretty prison was still a prison.
“Lovely grounds help soothe our patients’ spirits,” the doctor said. “Though they are not allowed, of course, to go outside.”
“Oh, I should hope not,” Thaïs agreed. “Fresh air is so perilous for a fragile constitution.”
“Especially for ladies,” the doctor said. “And we only treat ladies.” He led them inside and showed them to an expensively appointed parlor, where a young woman sat at a desk writing. She looked up when they entered.
“Miss Smith, these ladies are here to inquire about treatment for a lunatic,” the doctor said. “Would you bring us a pot of tea?”