Never Call It Love Read Online Free Page A

robbing the well-dressed,
assaulting the penniless, and raping any girl found alone and unprotected in
the darkness.
    Patrick
Stanford was sure that it was such a group who had seized his ward.
    Up
ahead, a small sidewalk crowd still lingered before one of a solid row of
houses. Despite his anxiety to get to Anne, he rapped with his stick on the
cab's trapdoor, signaling the driver to stop. A bulky man with the authoritative
air of a Bow Street Runner turned around. As if sensing that the carriage's
passenger belonged to the gentry, he moved briskly forward and raised a crooked
forefinger to his tricorne hat. "Good evening, sir."
    "My
name is Sir Patrick Stanford. I already know something of what occurred here.
Do you have any idea who they were, the men who carried the girl into this
house?"
    "No,
sir, except it appears they was housebreakers. There's a broken window into the
scullery, and the door is locked, so I guess that's how they got in, through
the window."
    "And
the girl has been taken to Guy's Hospital?"
    "Yes,
sir, in St. Thomas Street"
    "One
more thing. Whose house is this?"
    "It
belongs to a family named Montlow. The people across the way told me the place
has been empty since last winter. The ladies, Mrs. Montlow and her daughter,
are in the country, and the young gentleman, Mr. Montlow, is away at
Oxford."
    Patrick
again looked at the house, recognizing it now. It was the house where once,
before he had decided against it, he had thought of calling on the girl with
the chestnut hair, sun-warmed complexion, and clear gray eyes.
    "Thank
you," he said.
    Again
the Bow Street Runner touched his hat. Patrick rapped on the trapdoor for the
driver to proceed. As the carriage rattled forward over the cobblestones, he
wondered how she would feel, that girl with the sensitive, intelligent face,
when she learned of the brutal violence that had taken place in her house.
    The
brother, "the young gentleman away at Oxford." Could it be that he
was one of...? But no. Surely he would have no need to break into his own
house.
    Unless
the shattered window was a trick, designed to mislead the authorities....
    He
hoped Elizabeth Montlow's brother was not one of those degenerates. But if he
were, he would pay for it. If the Prince of Wales himself were among those who
had taken Anne into that house, he would pay for it.
    Thirty
minutes later, he moved beside a doctor through a series of lofty-ceilinged,
dimly lighted hospital wards. Occasionally a groan or a strangled snoring came
from one of the beds set in cubicles against the walls. Otherwise there was no
sound except the hollow tread of their footsteps. Now and then the doctor
raised his walking stick and sniffed at something, undoubtedly perfume, carried
inside its knob. Patrick did not have to wonder about the reason. With the
windows tightly closed against the "infectious" night air, the series
of rooms was redolent of sweat, excrement, and bitter medicines. Patrick,
though, was too filled with anxiety and rage to be more than dimly aware of the
foul air.
    The
doctor, plump in his floor-length gown and flat velvet cap, conducted him
through another doorway. "This is the ward. I fear, Sir Patrick, that
there is little hope. We have not bled her. Bleeding is of no efficacy against
multiple fractures of the bones. No doubt, too, the spleen has been
ruptured, releasing foul humors throughout the body...."
    Pompous
ass, Patrick thought, and stopped listening. A few seconds later they stopped
beside one of the cubicles.
    Except
for the reddish-blond curls, she was unrecognizable. One light-blue
eye was open, the other swollen shut in her puffed and lacerated face. Her
right arm, miraculously undamaged, lay outside the coarse sheet. With despair
he saw that already her arm had taken on the waxy look of death.
    He
bent over her. "Anne. Anne, my dear child."
    A
spark of expression lit that one open eye. "Patrick!" It was a bare
whisper, little more than a stirring of her swollen lips.