Page 29 of Grave Expectations
"From the jail?" I looked to Lincoln, but he'd not reacted. "This can't be good if he's calling on us in person."
"Tell him I'll be down in a moment," Lincoln said.
I raced from the ballroom to my bedchamber and quickly washed and dressed in my deep green day dress. Although I hurried, Lincoln beat me to the parlor, where he was already deep in conversation with the governor of the Surrey House of Correction
"Good morning, Mr. Crease," I said.
The governor rose. "Miss…er…I didn't catch your name, last time."
"Charlotte is my fiancée." Lincoln sounded a little more distracted than usual. "You were just about to tell me why you're here, Crease."
Crease stroked his woolly sideburns. "It's with grave concern that I have to inform you that Holloway has escaped."
Chapter 6
My stomach flipped. I clutched my throat where Holloway's knife had nicked my skin the night he'd attacked me in the courtyard. In order to keep my name and identity out of the papers, Lincoln had told the police that Holloway attacked Cook but Cook had managed to capture him.
Lincoln placed a steadying hand at my lower back. "How?" he asked. "I thought he was too ill to move."
"The medic thought he was dead."
"Dead!" I echoed. "Didn't he check?"
Crease winced. "He claims he did and that there was no pulse. The body was removed to an outbuilding that isn't guarded. When the mortuary staff came for him in the morning, the body was gone."
"So he may indeed be dead," I said.
"You think body snatchers took him, Miss…Charlotte?"
"Oh, er, yes. The city is rampant with them. Didn't you know?" I wasn't sure which was worse—a living Holloway on the loose, or a resurrected one.
"Ordinarily I would agree with you, but the door was bolted from the outside and the windows are nailed permanently shut. The police surmise that someone opened the door, carried the ill Holloway out, and locked it again from the outside."
"And the lack of a pulse?"
He shrugged. "The medic was mistaken."
"That is quite a serious mistake."
"Quite," he said with a twitch of his sideburns. He cleared his throat and seemed to be waiting for something. "I thought you should know, since he was arrested here and you showed interest in him recently."
"Thank you," I said, because Lincoln had gone quiet. "It was good of you to inform us."
"It was, wasn't it? I doubt the police would have bothered." Crease did not move toward the door.
I was beginning to think we might have to offer him tea when Lincoln strode to the door and called for Seth. He whispered something and Seth disappeared, returning a few moments later with an envelope identical to the one Lincoln had handed to Crease when we'd visited Holloway in jail.
Crease tucked it into his jacket pocket. "Good morning, sir, miss." He put on his hat, touched the brim and saw himself out.
"Do you think he's alive or dead?" I asked as soon as Crease had climbed into the hackney waiting for him. "He can't be alive, surely. His health couldn't have improved enough for him to escape unassisted, and nobody cares enough about him to risk freeing him. He must be dead. But that throws up another horrible prospect."
"Who raised his spirit and helped him re-enter his body."
Seth and Gus joined us and I repeated what Crease had told us. "There must be another necromancer," Gus said with a shrug. "Someone we don't know about, like the Brumley woman. There ain't no other explanation."
Lincoln dragged his hand through his hair. "Either way, someone helped him. Are you certain no one cares about him enough to orchestrate an escape?"
"No," I said. "No one."
