Page 51 of Her Majesty's Necromancer
Gillingham stopped in the doorway, sighed, and put out his elbow for her to take. They left together. Lincoln followed them out with General Eastbrooke, and Gus and I returned to the kitchen.
I sank onto a chair and accepted a cup of tea from Cook. The steaming liquid helped settle my nerves, but I suspected a slice of cake would do more.
"Glad that's over with." Gus sat opposite me and stretched his legs out under the table. "So what happened after I left the parlor?" His thick brow bunched into a frown as I recounted the meeting to him and Cook.
When I finished, I proceeded to cut the rest of the cake into four slices. I was about to take my first bite when Lincoln entered.
"That was supposed to be all for you," he said with a nod at the cake.
"There's enough left for the four of us." I pushed a plate toward a spare chair while he poured himself a cup of tea at the stove. "Seth will have to miss out."
He joined us but didn't eat the cake. Cook, Gus and I gobbled ours up then Lincoln pushed the plate in front of me. I ate his slice too.
"You be dining here, sir?" Cook asked.
"Just something quick before I go out. I'm returning to Lee's, and I'll investigate some other establishments during the night."
I dabbed my mouth to catch all the crumbs. "It was clever of you to suggest the captain is a medical officer in the army."
"It's a possibility."
"A likely one, I think. I wonder if the general will learn more. It can't be difficult to find details of doctors dismissed from the medical corps for misconduct."
"That's if he was dismissed," he said. "He could still be practicing. His army record could be an exemplary one."
"True, but wouldn't he be stationed overseas? He wouldn't have been able to visit the men here regularly over the last few months if that were the case."
"He might have been stationed here, or on long leave for an illness." He shrugged. "But hopefully you're right. A dismissed officer will be more conspicuous in the records than an active one." He continued to watch me, but I couldn't begin to fathom why.
After a moment, unable to stand it any longer, I got up and collected the dishes.
"Charlie," he called after me before I disappeared into the scullery. "Will you go to another orphanage tomorrow?"
"I…are you giving me time off to do so?"
He nodded.
"Then yes, I will. Thank you." I disappeared into the scullery and stacked the dishes in the tub. I couldn't stop my smile as I went to fetch water. He'd not only given me time off, but he'd actually trusted me to leave the house when he knew someone was searching for my mother, and potentially me. It meant he trusted me enough to protect myself.
One day, he would hopefully trust me enough to take care of myself alone at night in the streets, but for now it was enough that he accepted that I could do so in broad daylight with lots of people milling about.
He probably wouldn't have let me go if he had known someone had followed me the other day, however.
CHAPTER 9
Lincoln was out all night and hadn't returned by the time I left the house in the morning. I paused as I passed through the Lichfield gate, looked left and right, then continued on when I saw no one about. I caught an omnibus into the city, then another over the bridge. I felt terribly conspicuous in my new cloak, among the women wearing practical woolen ones, but by the time I alighted in The Borough, I no longer cared. Indeed, I felt rather grand and important. A gentleman even gave up his seat for me and another doffed his hat.
Although I kept alert, I was quite sure I hadn't been followed when I arrived in Bermondsey. The orphanage was small compared to those I'd visited in the north of the city, and unhappy faces peered down at me from second floor windows. They must think me a well-to-do lady in my cloak, and I regretted wearing it again. I wasn't a lady; I was just like them. Or I had been once, as a baby, and then again at thirteen when Anselm Holloway had thrown me out of his home. While I'd chosen to live on the street instead of taking myself to an orphanage or workhouse, I'd been friendless in the city too.
I pulled the edges of the cloak together and knocked. Thinking of past choices was never a good idea. From now on, I wanted to only look to the future.
After shouting at the elderly administrator with poor hearing, I was able to cross the Bermondsey orphanage off my list. Thanks to his excellent memory, he hadn't needed to check his records. No one by the name of Holloway had adopted a little girl eighteen years ago, nor had anyone been asking the same question in recent days.
I visited another two orphanages on the south side of London and received the same answers. Only the Brixton one had received a letter asking about my adoption. As with Mr. Hogan from the Kentish Town orphanage, the administrator couldn't recall the address he'd sent a reply to and he hadn't kept a copy of the letter. He'd claimed it had been written on plain paper bearing no monogram, and the signature had been illegible. Another dead end.
I caught a train back to the city and was about to search for an omnibus heading toward Highgate when I had another idea. I knew my father's name was Frankenstein, so perhaps my mother had listed it on my birth record. I enquired at the post office in St. Martin's Le Grand and learned that the General Register Office was only a short distance away on the Strand. It was located in the North Wing of Somerset House, an imposing building that was more like a palace with an air of stuffy authority about it. I waited for my turn to be called to a desk where a snowy-haired man with a pointed beard peered over his spectacles at me.
He asked me to write down my name and Frankenstein's on a form then passed the form on to a younger man. The poor fellow was already laden with forms and documents, and I was afraid that even one more might see the lot toppling.
