Never Call It Love Read Online Free

Perhaps twenty
minutes had passed before he returned, perched on the driver's step of a
carriage. Maude had handed the boy his copper, and given the driver Sir
Patrick's address.
    Farther
along Kingman Street, the carriage had slowed, then halted. Maude had poked her
head out of the window.
    "There
was a carriage in front of the house up ahead, and a small crowd on the
sidewalk. Two men was carrying someone into the carriage, someone wrapped in a
blanket. Then I saw her red hair and I knew—oh, my God, sir—I knew it was our
little Anne."
    Maude
had gotten out of the hired carriage just as the vehicle holding Anne had
driven away. Moving as fast as her asthma would allow, she joined the sidewalk
crowd.
    "There
was one of Sir John Fielding's bailiffs there, the ones they call Bow Street
Runners. I guess someone had gone to fetch him after it... happened."
    "Did
he talk to you?" Patrick forced the words through a throat that had grown
hard with pain and gathering fury.
    "Yes,
sir. After I told him who I was, he took my name and address and told me what
he knew."
    It
was a maid in the house opposite, the Bow Street Runner told her, who had been
a witness, probably the only witness. Retiring to her garret room after
fourteen hours of hard work, she had looked down from her window, to see
something odd going on in front of the area-way across the street. A group of
men, five or six of them, were there on the sidewalk. "The Runner told me
the maid said they was young gentlemen, to judge by the look of them." One
of them was carrying something or somebody.
    Too
curious now to sleep, the housemaid had kept watch. She had seen a faint glow
for a minute or so through the front door's fanlight. After that, darkness and
silence. She had been about to go to bed when again she saw faint light, this
time beyond a long window in the upper story. Then had come the sound of
shattering glass, and a drawn-out, despairing scream, and the sight of a thin
white body hurtling down through the night.
    The
housemaid had hurried down to tell her employers, who were still at supper. It
was they who told the Bow Street Runner their housemaid's story, and who
volunteered their carriage to take the girl to the hospital.
    "He
said she seemed to be in a bad way, sir." Maude wept. "She may be
dying."
    "Go
on upstairs. Wait for me."
    He
turned around. They were standing on the stairs, faces shocked and outraged,
the respectable couple who would never be Anne's parents-in-law, the
nondescript young man who would never be her husband.
    With
cold rage swelling his heart, he said, "You must excuse me." He went
down the steps and into the carriage Maude Reardon had left waiting.

CHAPTER 3
    Young
gentlemen, he thought, as the carriage moved forward. He knew of them, those
groups of wellborn youths who prowled London by night.
    They
were aping the Hellfire Club, of course, that group of aristocratic debauchees
who met for their orgies well outside London, in the ancient ruins of St.
Mary's Abbey at Medmenham. There such profligates as Lord Sandwich and Sir
Peter Dashwood, robed and cowled and chanting obscene parodies of Christian
liturgy, celebrated the Black Mass and tried to summon up the devil. To a
religious skeptic like Patrick Stanford, their blasphemous antics would have
seemed merely absurd—except that part of their ritual required the raping of
virgins on the ancient altar. In the countryside around Medmenham, the wretched
and powerless poor whispered of torchlight flickering at night through the
abbey's ruins, and of chanting mingled with terrified screams, and of girls,
some as young as twelve, wandering dazed and bleeding along the roadsides in
the early morning.
    Already
vicious, but too young to be welcomed by the Hellfire Club, a number of
aristocratic youths had formed into gangs. They gave themselves the names of
American Indian tribes—the Mohawks, the Algonquians, the Saginaws. And at night
they moved through the ill-lit London streets,