Page 1 of Method of Revenge
Chapter One
London
March 1884
Screams of wild laughter filled the dance hall, piercing Leonora Spencer’s ears and grating on her nerves. She winced and knew she’d made a mistake.
The nightlife at Striker’s Wharf had always been lively, but Leo didn’t recall it ever being this boisterous. As the other patrons raised their voices above the fast tempo of the piano, trumpet, and clarinet, all she could dwell on was how quiet the Spring Street Morgue would have been at this time of night. Leo worked there as an assistant to her uncle, a city coroner, and in fact, an evening in the morgue’s office appealed vastly more to her than the popular dance club on the Lambeth wharves.
However, as it wasn’t at all ordinary for a young woman to work at a morgue, let alone prefer the company of dead bodies to living ones, she kept the disquieting thought to herself.
Next to her at their table, Nivedita Brooks swayed in rhythm with the music, her eyes turned toward the busy dance floor with longing.
“Go,” Leo urged her friend. “I can see it’s torturous for you to sit here with me when there’s a polka playing.”
Dita cut her rapt attention away from the dozens of dancers. “It isn’t torture to sit with you,” she said, appearing offended. “Besides, I can’t possibly take to the floor by myself. I’d need a partner.”
Leo gave her arm a gentle shove. “I’m quite certain a number of gentlemen would appear as if out of the ether if you were to take one step toward that dance floor.”
Thanks to a handful of favorable articles inThe Illustrated London News, the club was packed with a surfeit of men, many of them from the upper classes. In fact, the surge in popularity was so noticeable, Leo had started to think Eddie Bloom, the proprietor at Striker’s Wharf, must have held some power over the paper’s editorial choices. As the head of a criminal gang operating out of this area, his influence over the newspaper wouldn’t have been out of the realm of possibility.
Despite Mr. Bloom’s questionable business practices and the establishment’s mixed clientele, this was one of Dita’s favorite places to go for music and dancing, and she had decided it was high time Leo threw off the mundane nightly routine she’d been keeping for the last several weeks.
Habits were easy and comfortable, and Leo had fallen into the practice of returning to her home on Duke Street from the morgue, preparing supper for her aging uncle and aunt, and then trundling off to bed with a book. The singular interruption to her schedule had been an evening she’d spent out at a chophouse with a Scotland Yard constable—though she had yet to tell Dita about it. Her friend would have made too much ofit, and Leo wasn’t even certain she’d enjoyed herself enough to accept a second invitation…ifthe constable ever extended one.
“You could have your pick of dance partners,” she told Dita now as she glanced at the tables surrounding theirs. “The gentlemen at the table behind you have been looking your way since we arrived.”
The three men had been taking furtive glances at Dita for the last quarter hour. She was pretty when she wore her blue wool Metropolitan Police matron uniform to her shifts at Scotland Yard, but she was downright stunning when she put up her dark hair and wore one of her brightly hued dresses for an evening out. Sunset-orange silks and deep pink taffetas looked radiant against her darker skin, compliments of her late mother, who’d hailed from Calcutta, India.
Leo, however, with her dark hair and pale, ivory skin, preferred more somber shades. Tonight, she’d consented to wear the deep sapphire-blue satin dress Dita had selected from Leo’s limited wardrobe, the skirt fashionably gored, if unfashionably long-sleeved. She was certain none of the men at the neighboring table would be casting out their nets toward her. And in truth, she didn’t care for any of them to attempt it.
Dita covered Leo’s hand with her own. “Forget dancing. This is your first night out in ages, and I’m not leaving you to sit alone at our table.”
“That never stopped you before,” she replied with a good-natured grin. Dita would usually bring her steady beau, Police Constable John Lloyd, with them to Striker’s. They would spend half of the time on the dance floor, while Leo remained at the table. Dancing was not her forte, nor was she interested enough in it to improve her skills.
“Perhaps not, but you weren’t in mourning before,” Dita reminded her.
Leo sighed. “I’m not in official mourning. I wasn’t family.”
Not exactly, anyway.
It had been two months since Detective Chief Superintendent Gregory Reid had succumbed to a prolonged illness. The Inspector, as Leo had always called him, had taken his last breath one night at the end of January while sleeping. It was just one week after the tumultuous case that concluded with his good friend, Police Commissioner Nathaniel Vickers, being accused of murder.
It had been Leo and Detective Inspector Jasper Reid, the Inspector’s adopted son, who had exposed the police commissioner’s desperate plot to thwart a blackmail operation that had threatened to reveal compromising intimate photographs of his seventeen-year-old daughter, Elsie. The illicit photographs would have ruined both father and daughter publicly and personally, and Sir Nathaniel had decided there was no line he would not cross to prevent that from happening—including lowering himself to murder. He’d even planned to have Jasper and Leo killed once they discovered the truth of his involvement in a series of murders connected to her uncle’s morgue.
The only consolation for Jasper and her had been that Gregory Reid was already unconscious when his longtime friend had been found out. He’d been completely unaware of his friend’s decision to end his own life rather than face the humiliation and consequences of his crimes.
“He thought of you as family,” Dita said, then sneaked a coy glimpse toward the table of men behind her.
Leo shook her head, amused. Her friend simply could not resist flirting. Dita was correct though; the Inspector had thought of Leo as family.
For a short while when she’d been nine years old, he’d taken her in and cared for her after the murder of her family. The Metropolitan Police had been tracking down Leo’s maternalaunt, Flora, who’d been living on the island of Crete at the time with her husband, Claude Feldman. While awaiting their arrival back in London, Leo had stayed with Gregory Reid, who at that time had ranked as Detective Inspector. His home on Charles Street was an affluent address, a residence any other police inspector would never have been able to afford. However, Gregory had married a viscount’s daughter, and the home had been bestowed upon them at their marriage.
When Gregory’s wife, Emmaline, and their two young children died in a horrific accident while ice skating on Regent’s Pond, he’d been distraught. A year later, he’d still been in mourning for them when he’d rescued Leo from the attic of the Red Lion Street home in which her family had been brutally slain. He’d treated her with all the tenderness and care of a father, and even after her aunt and uncle had arrived to claim her, he’d stayed a prominent figure in Leo’s life.
She still felt the swift plunge of her stomach when remembering that early Sunday morning in late January. Heavy knocking on the front door had roused her from sleep just past seven o’clock. Throwing on her dressing gown and hurrying downstairs, she’d had the inkling in the back of her mind that it would be news of the Inspector’s demise. She’d been correct.
There was Jasper, standing on the threshold, his hat crushed in his hands. Even now, months later, her memory drew up the vivid image of the anguish cutting through his green eyes. Grief had seized her too, crumpling her up inside like old newsprint bound for a stove, and it hadn’t relinquished her yet. The detailed memory of that moment would never leave her.
