Captain Lacey 06,5 - The Gentleman's Walking Stick by Ashley Gardner

Author:Ashley Gardner [Gardner, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Romance, Murder, Mystery, England, Missing Persons, London, regency, napoleonic wars, bow street runners
ISBN: 2940013014299
Goodreads: 12583813
Publisher: Jennifer Ashley
Published: 2011-09-08T22:00:00+00:00

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The Disappearance of Miss Sarah Oswald

* * * * *

The Disappearance of Miss Sarah Oswald

London, 1817

London swallowed people whole. It had swallowed me. It had swallowed Thaddeus Oswald, MP. It had swallowed Thaddeus Oswald's daughter, and now he expected me to find her.

Oswald told me about his daughter in a coffee house in Pall Mall late one afternoon, in a room that reeked of scalded coffee and cheroot smoke. His daughter, sent to London to live with her aunt, was now lost, gone, vanished into the city.

There wasn't much hope, he said. Either she was dead or beyond redemption.

"My sister searched and gave up," Oswald told me, looking tired and ashamed. "My son even posted a reward, but nothing came of it."

"That was eight months ago," I said. "Why approach me now?"

Oswald twisted his coffee cup on its saucer as he invented an explanation for why he'd waited so long. "I met Brandon over cards last night," he said. "Hadn't seen him in a donkey's age. Brandon said that if anyone could find out the truth, it would be you."

Brandon had been my colonel during the Peninsular War. He was the man responsible for my career in the army, for saving my life, and for the destruction of my leg that had forced me to resign. Our current relations had become more cordial of late but remained stiff. Brandon did not much approve of my habit of running all over London hunting criminals, but he conceded that I'd had success in the past.

Oswald had given up finding his daughter, I surmised, but Colonel Brandon, who could rally the most dejected of men, had persuaded him to try one final time. So he'd sent Oswald to me, but I could see that Oswald had already tired of hope.

"How old is you daughter, Mr. Oswald?"

"She would have been eighteen in April," Oswald said and started to cry.

*** *** ***

In my rooms above the pastry shop near Covent Garden, I stripped to my skin and stood before the fire, letting it bake the chill from my bones. I studied the drawing of Sarah Oswald her father had given me before we parted--one of the reward notices his son had posted. It showed a smiling girl with dark curls wearing a close-fitting white cap. She looked the same as many other girls of her age, rich or poor, gentry or working class.

What had happened was probably very simple. Procuresses met coaches from the country and enticed away lone girls with promises of honest employment or places to stay. The girls ended up in nunneries or walking the streets or as the private playthings of upper-class gentlemen. Some were lucky and thrived, but many, many more found their way to the workhouses and death.

Whorehouse or workhouse, I did not think Sarah's family wanted her back. They were upright, middleclass people who would view shame as a fate worse than death--best to sweep it far away and out of sight. But Brandon

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