Ghost of the Thames Page 21

  “Wedding?” she burst out.

  “Yes, the banns will be posted immediately. In three weeks, you will be married and then you and your husband will be on your way before Christmas.”

  He watched the hands fisting in her lap. The color of her face matched the embers in the hearth. He’d heard she was spoiled by Arthur, but he hadn’t witnessed her temper before now. He was glad they were not alone in the room.

  “He never mentioned any of this—of any arranged marriage.”

  “Why would he? He expected to live forever. In that case, he had all the time in the world to allow you to be involved in choosing a husband.”

  “And who is my husband to be?” she asked through clenched teeth.

  “Mr. Peter Hodgson. I know you two have met.”

  She leaped to her feet and whirled on the other man.

  Warren watched his assistant visibly cower in the chair. After the wedding, any plan for Catherine’s demise would clearly have to be engineered by Warren himself. Hodgson was obviously no match for her on any level. To be honest, he had been questioning, of late, the usefulness of the pitiful creature. Hodgson was bright enough, but he hadn’t the brass to continue at his right hand. He needed to feel the lash at all times. He would certainly not do to be stationed on the other side of the world. After the wedding, both of them would have to go.

  “I will die before I marry him,” she finally was able to say before marching out.

  Warren waited until the door slammed shut before he turned to Hodgson.

  “Either way, it works.”

  CHAPTER 36

  She stormed out of the sitting room and then stopped dead.

  The news Sophy had been handed would certainly be enough to make any free-thinking woman jump off the deck of a ship. She wondered if some hint of this conversation had been the motivation for doing just exactly that.

  She knew her father would never have chosen someone like Peter Hodgson for her as a husband. The sycophantic weasel was everything Arthur Warren despised. People like him were kept a safe distance away when she’d been in India. Sophy had been told repeatedly the importance and the purpose of the education arranged for her. She was raised to be independent and strong and had been encouraged to surround herself with whomever she wished, so long as they were respectable. To be offered that kind of upbringing by her father and then have Hodgson chosen as a husband? Never!

  One servant girl and two footmen were waiting to escort her when she left the sitting room. Sophy directed her steps toward the front foyer. She would walk right out of this house with only the clothes she was wearing, if she could.

  “Not that way, miss,” one of the footmen called after her.

  She ignored the warning and reached the front entrance. Two large men stood by the door, ready to block the exit. She was certainly outnumbered.

  “The stairs is that way, miss,” the servant girl at her elbow whispered.

  Sophy considered dashing for the door and testing their quickness. The problem was that even if she were able to escape right now, her situation was really unchanged. Priya was still in their grasp. And if she tried to force her way out and failed, there was nothing to say that her uncle wouldn’t treat Sophy the same way, drugging her with an opiate until this accursed marriage took place.

  “I will see the house now,” she said in her haughtiest tone. “You can go and get permission from my uncle, but I doubt he would object to it.”

  None of them moved, not knowing how to respond. Every servant in the house knew he was forcing her to stay here. Still, she was his niece; it made sense that she should know the layout of the house. For her part, she had no doubt that Edward would arrive tomorrow, demanding her release. When that happened, she had to be ready. She would know not only the location of every window and door, but also how many servants John Warren employed.

  Sophy wandered off ahead of the three escorts. One of the footmen carried an oil lamp, but he was hardly interested in serving as her guide. He obviously did not want to encourage this tour. So Sophy took her time, meandering about, poring over every painting and every fixture and every detail, from the design of the molding to the size and shape of each doorway. She asked what each room was used for and then walked inside, taking her time to study the furniture and fireplaces and everything else that took time and bored her escorts.

  “Wouldn’t ye be better able to see the house in daylight, miss?” the servant girl asked.

  Sophy just glared at her with an air of superiority and continued on.

  In a hallway past the dining room, she stopped short. Amelia was standing in front of them. She smiled at Sophy and then disappeared.

  Sophy felt a rush of energy course through her veins. She preferred this new leaf in their book of friendship. Just like the night that they’d discovered Henry’s body, Sophy thought of an idea and the ghost confirmed it.

  Outside of a ballroom, she noticed her escorts had grown tired enough of the tour to remain by the door. At the next room and the next, they did the same thing, allowing Sophy to venture farther on her own. In the library, she took an excruciatingly long time. Using the dim light coming in the door, she perused the titles, finally choosing two large books containing maps and drawings of India to take with her. The three servants stood outside the door grumbling to each other.

  Then, she saw Amelia again, next to another door at the far end of the library. Sophy watched the ghost turn and walk straight through the wooden door, disappearing into the next room.

  Taking her books, she quietly followed. The door was slightly ajar and she entered. On the opposite wall, a tall door of glass faced the garden, and the winter moon was shining through a half-circle fan at the top. A large table with a map on it stood in the center of the room. Against the wall, a wide case containing what looked like rolls of more maps faced the table. The air was stuffy and smelled of cigars.

  Amelia was standing next to an ornately carved desk and pointing to a drawer.

  Sophy hurried to where the young woman was waiting. The spirit moved to the side. Opening the drawer, Sophy reached in and withdrew a large ledger book. When she glanced up at the apparition questioningly, Amelia simply faded away.

  “Miss? Miss?” The cry came from the library.

  Around the partially open door, she saw the room brighten.

  “Lor, she’s in ’is private office!” a footman exclaimed.

  “Ye can’t go in there, miss.” The girl’s voice was panicked. “Quick, now! That’s her uncle’s office. We’ll be sacked, for sure.”

  Before they yanked the door open, Sophy slid the ledger book between the two other volumes and moved to the table bearing a map of the world. Small carved models of ships were spread over it.

  “Ain’t the master always kept this door locked?” one of the footman asked the other in a hushed tone.

  “I ain’t ever seen the inside of this room before.”

  Sophy moved to the glass door and looked out into the garden. This could provide a possible way out. Through the glass door, she could escape into the garden and scale a wall if she needed to. She tested the handle. It was locked.

  “Watchmen walks the grounds, miss. Ye won’t get far, if that’s what yer thinkin’.”

  Again, she treated the three to a haughty sneer and walked out of the room. All of them were out of the office in an instant, with the door pulled shut behind them. She noticed one of the servants test the handle; it was locked.

  Sophy was anxious to see whatever it was that Amelia wished her to see. The three volumes in her arm were heavy, and one of the men offered to carry them for her. She refused and started for the stairway leading to the upper floors.

  She was half way up the stairs when John Warren and Peter Hodgson came out of the sitting room into the foyer. They both looked up, apparently surprised to see her.

  “What were you doing still down here?” Warren growled.

  “I borrowed some books from your library to read. Do
you mind?” she said testily, never slowing down.

  Moments later, once again locked in her rooms, she pulled up a chair next to Priya’s bed and lit an oil lamp. The older woman’s breathing continued to be labored. It seemed that she was fighting demons in her sleep.

  Sophy put the book she’d taken from her uncle’s desk on her lap. The volume was a large, old-fashioned ledger. She opened to the first page.

  “Shipping records,” she murmured under her breath.

  The script was done in a tight, masculine hand. Dates of ship’s voyages, names of passengers, descriptions of cargo, statements of profit and loss. Except for some of the abbreviations, Sophy found that she had no trouble understanding the contents of the carefully lined columns. Another part of her education, she thought gratefully. The ledger contained reports of everything transported on the company’s ships.

  Sophy looked at the pages carefully, trying to decipher the script, column by column and line by line, for each specific voyage. Dates at sea. Ports of call. Harbor costs. Cargo. Cotton. Silk. Silk goods. Wool. Sugar cane. Molasses. Opium. Tobacco. Coffee. Tea. Indigo. Jute. She skipped through a few pages. The salaries of the crew. Marginal notes in the same hand, conveying information provided by a ship’s captain. At the end of each voyage’s entries, she found the names of warehouses the shipments were dispersed to and the final sale. Total profit lines for the closure of each voyage.

  Sophy assumed the ledger was a copy of the books kept by her uncle at the shipping office. She fanned quickly through the ledger, comparing the handwriting, and found it to be all done in the same hand.

  Priya sighed in her sleep, as if she were in pain, and Sophy watched the older woman for few moments. She was determined to put an end to the drugs being administered to her friend. Whoever returned in the morning with more of the supposed medicine would be facing a battle.

  Sophy buried herself in the ledger again, paging through, trying to find something that would stand out. There had to be a reason that Amelia wanted her to have this ledger.

  She peered at a clock on the mantel. Time was passing. What had felt like moments turned out to be several hours. Sophy stretched and looked around the room, hoping Amelia would return to her. The volume of information in the ledger was overwhelming. She wished she knew where exactly she should look and what she should look for.

  Sophy also feared the next time John Warren went into his office, he’d notice the ledger was missing, and she’d be found out. At the moment, with his plans of marrying her off, she surely must seem harmless enough to him. But if he was trying to hide something in these pages and she were able to find it, she could be much more dangerous.

  Suddenly, an idea struck her. She couldn’t remember the name of the ship she’d been on for the crossing or the exact date that they had departed, but she knew when it had arrived in Gravesend. Sophy wondered if this ledger was current enough to include that journey.

  She opened the book to the last entries. They were four recent arrivals. Paging backward, she matched the dates and then found the specific entry she was looking for. She found her name listed among the passengers.

  As before, the totals showed a very profitable crossing. Starting on the first page with the cargo manifest, she moved down line by line.

  Nothing stood out.

  Something must be here, she thought, going through the columns again.

  Nothing.

  Frustrated, she tossed the ledger onto the bed. As she did, additional, unbound sheets slipped out.

  Sophy stared for a moment and snatched them up. The same carefully ruled lines and columns were there. The same tight script. A score of pages, folded and tucked into the back of the ledger.

  Sophy’s eyes ran up and down the pages. She matched the dates of voyages with the bound pages of the ledger. This addendum had goods and profits not included in the master list. As she read through, she understood why.

  Sixty women under age twenty . . . .Ten boys age six to eight . . . .Fifty eight women sold . . . .Ten boys sold . . . .

  The names of warehouses where they were unloaded. Names of buyers. Payments received. No different than if these human beings were bales of cotton, or hogsheads of sugar, or any other commodity.

  She stared at the names of the buyers. One name, Shill, was mentioned in some capacity of distributing the human cargo of every shipment.

  Sophy went hurriedly through the loose sheets, cross-referencing with the bound pages. They were there, on most of the crossings. Women. Children. Not all of them survived. Those who did were brought to London and sold.

  Tears blurred her vision. This was her business. Her ships. This was what her inheritance was built on. And now she understood why Amelia reached into that river and saved her. Now she understood the reason for being led to Hammersmith Village or to the warehouse on the Isle of Dogs. She was responsible for those people’s misery.

  Sophy recalled the vision Amelia had forced her to see on one of their first nights in the city.

  Women and children dressed in rags, chained together in a belly of a ship, crying out for help. She was looking down at them through an open hatch. Their heads had been shaven of every last strand of hair. Sophy tried to go to them, but a cloak thrown over her shoulders was too heavy. She tried to take a step forward, but the weight was crushing her, body and soul. She looked down at the garment. It was made of gold. Pure gold . . . and woven from hair of the victims.

  She recalled Amelia’s words.

  “Nothing you do is irrelevant. It is your responsibility to stop the evil that afflicts them.”

  A sob escaped her. A rush of tears followed. Shame, unlike anything she’d experienced before, overwhelmed her.

  The ledger slipped off her lap to the floor with a loud bang. Sophy dropped to her knees next to Priya’s bed, burying her face in the bedclothes next to the old woman’s body. Priya knew, too. That was why she encouraged Sophy to come to London. Not to marry, but to right what was wrong.

  Sophy understood why she had tried to forget her past. She was never told of this vile side of their business, but there had to be signs that she’d ignored.

  Snatches of memories from this ocean crossing came back to her. She was not supposed to leave her cabin unescorted, and there were specific times of the day she was permitted to go on deck. Sophy had ignored the rules.

  A week into their crossing, she’d gone to the upper deck unexpectedly, only to find the group huddled together. Women and children, frightened, some crying, a few sick. She’d asked the captain about them, but she’d been denied an answer and asked to return to her cabin.

  Sophy was not satisfied, and she’d used Priya as her eyes and ears, for the Bengali servant had the freedom to roam the ship with no one taking notice. She’d found out for her where all these people were kept and who they were.

  They were the ship’s human cargo. And they were kept in a special storage area of only three feet in height running fore and aft in the ship. Sophy was sick at the news, but until now, she’d thought that this was a business conducted by and for the profit of the ship’s crew. Her family would certainly not have any knowing role in this. Once, she had even escaped her cabin and crawled below to visit with those prisoners.

  She recalled some of their stories. They had all been taken against their will. Some were sold for money by their families, thinking they’d be allowed to stay in India and work as nauch girls. To be used and ill-treated but allowed to stay in their homeland was a world better than the unknown life they were being taken to.

  She’d confronted the captain of the ship, knowing he would not dare harm her. There had been no answers—no solution offered.

  “I was a fool, a blind fool,” she muttered, lifting her face off the blanket and trying to blow her nose.

  Priya’s eyes were partially open. They were watching her.

  “Are you awake? Are you with me?” Sophy asked.

  The bony fingers crawled out from under the blanket and reached f
or her hand. Sophy grasped them tightly in her hands and brought them to her lips.

  “Please, I need you. I need answers.”

  Priya opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Her lips were dry. Some wine had been brought for Sophy with the supper. She hurried to the table and poured a cup for Priya. She didn’t trust what had been left on the bedside table. Holding the cup to the old woman’s lips, she watched Priya struggle to sip some of it.

  Lying back on the pillows, she seemed more awake than Sophy had seen her since reuniting the day before. Sophy glanced at the clock. Dawn was near. She feared there would be servants sent to the room soon.

  “What happened during that last night on the ship?” Sophy asked in Bengali, sitting down beside her on the bed.

  Priya’s confused expression reminded Sophy that the older woman had no idea that she’d suffered a loss of memory. In a few words she explained what she could and couldn’t recall.

  “He was going to poison you.”

  “My uncle?”

  Priya nodded. “One of the ship’s hands, a Bengali cook’s mate. They thought he spoke no English. Overheard it after your uncle returned to the captain’s cabin after dinner. He told me. And I warned you.”

  Sophy knew Priya was fluent in English, too. But she never let it be known to those she didn’t trust.

  “Why?”

  “You complained to him after dinner about finding the compartment below and the people they’d brought over.”

  The night, the conversation, all came back to her then. They were docked at Gravesend, and she was having dinner with John Warren. Peter Hodgson was there, and the captain of the ship, too. The storm was growing stronger, outside, lashing at the small windows of the cabin. She’d asked her uncle to step out with her after dinner. Speaking privately, she’d told him of what she’d witnessed. She’d been furious, demanding action. And he’d acted appropriately horrified. Liar!

  “They were afraid you would make public what you saw after you arrived in London.”