Mina Wentworth and the Invisible City by Meljean Brook

Author:Meljean Brook
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance, Paranormal steampunk romance, Paranormal, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101564639
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-08-07T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Aside from the bedrooms, the library had always seemed the warmest, most comfortable room in Rhys’s house, and so Mina chose to take Anne there. She poured herself a glass of wine. A maid brought in a tray with bowls of strawberries and cream. It would ruin the girl’s dinner, perhaps, but Mina could not think of a better night for it.

Rhys came down after depositing Scarsdale in his room upstairs. He looked to her, appearing slightly uncertain—oh, that was not an expression familiar to his face—but Mina had no idea how to proceed. She couldn’t interview the girl like a witness.

Perhaps it was best to start where they’d already begun. “Anne, why can’t you return to the Blacksmith’s?”

“Oh.” The girl sank a little lower in her armchair. She glanced at Rhys before focusing on Mina again. “I should tell you everything, right? Including my motivations.”

“If you feel that you can,” Mina said. “Or we can wait until you’re ready. But if you need help for any reason, I hope that you’ll let us know.”

“I don’t need help. But I thought . . . I thought someone else did.” Her lips quivered slightly, and she touched the side of her face.

Mina tensed. Oh, she knew that touch. She’d seen hundreds of women make that same gesture. Someone had hit her girl. She glanced at Rhys, saw the same banked rage burning in his eyes.

“Who did, Anne? Does this person need our help?”

The tinker shook her head, took a deep breath. “No. It was a mistake. Geordie took an apprenticeship with another blacksmith. An inventor. He didn’t pass his test for work at the Blacksmith’s, but I told him to just wait another year. And I didn’t hear from him for a while, and none of the others did either, so I was worried.”

Mina decided not to make a point at that moment. “I’d have worried, too,” she said. “Did you try to find him?”

“Yes. It wasn’t hard. I knew he was apprenticed under Wilbur the Reacher.” She glanced at Rhys when he drew a sudden breath, his lips white. “You know him?”

Her heart pounding, Mina watched him struggle for an even tone. “I only know of him, and the automated machinery that he builds,” Rhys said. “And that his workshop is in Birdcage Alley.”

Smoking hells. Farther into Southwark than she and Newberry had ventured the night before, and although not as dangerous as some of the rookeries farther west, Birdcage Alley was still not an area that she’d ever want Anne venturing to alone.

Blast it all, Mina would not venture there alone.

“That’s right.” Anne nodded, apparently oblivious to their horror.

“Did you go there?”

“I sent grams to the workshop from the Blacksmith’s,” she said, but Mina’s relief was short-lived. “Geordie never answered them, though. So I went across the river a few times during the day; Wilbur the Reacher said Geordie was busy. He was always busy. So I realized I needed to go at night, instead.”

Mina barely stopped the moan from passing her lips.

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