And so to The Strand she went.
On his first walk to The Grand Palace on the Thames from the Stevens Hotel, before he’d been set upon by a would-be assassin, Hawkes had taken swift note of who the neighborhood characters were. The ones who saw everything. Who loitered in alleys and peered out windows from attic rooms. The costermongers, the merchants, the prostitutes.
So the next morning, shortly after the maids were in to poke up his fire, he was out doing the necessary work of espionage.
A bottle of gin and a conversation bought him two garrulous friends who were leaning against a nearby building and whom, he discovered, were quite fond of Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Hardy, because they had been given scones in exchange for not leaning on The Grand Palace on the Thames. One of them had even recently been invited inside the Annex to hear a soprano sing. Or so they told Hawkes.
Hawkes briskly hailed hack after hack for a swift little conversation during which he handed drivers coins and promised more if he was discreetly alerted to the comings and goings of a certain pretty young woman wearing a blue cloak.
And he’d thought he’d wind up deploring the dearth of bribable servants at The Grand Palace on the Thames. But he soon found that he seemed to have already paid Dot in flattery when they were first introduced.
Because he learned within fifteen minutes of theevent that Mrs. Gallagher had been taken to an address on The Strand. One of the hack drivers he’d paid earlier had asked for him at the door of The Grand Palace on the Thames, and Dot had raced to tell him straightaway.
One of the drivers he’d earlier bribed was, in fact, waiting for him, face alight with the anticipated thrill of a chase. He took Hawkes swiftly to that lively part of London.
Once in The Strand, Hawkes thumped the ceiling of the hack to be let down about five houses away from the address to which the driver had taken Mrs. Gallagher. Which put him conveniently across from a row of shops, cheese and confectioners and books and tea, all things he very much enjoyed.
He purchased a newspaper at the Andrew Millar bookshop, and then nonchalantly strolled past the address, which turned out to be a small, unprepossessing townhouse in need of a coat of paint.
He slowed when he heard the unmistakable cadences of an argument—a woman’s voice, adamant, distraught, a man’s voice, insinuating, strident.
Closer now, he could see that the front door was open and a man, young, hard faced, hatless and cravatless, nearly tall enough to fill the doorframe, stood with one foot inside the house and the other outside.
Suddenly Mrs. Gallagher—it was unmistakably she, as his first ever sight of her had been from behind and the view was branded on his memory—backed away from the man swiftly, and continued walking backward, as though she was afraid to let the man out of her sight until she’d joined the crowds on the street once again.
Hawkes froze when the young man took two long steps after her.
The man came to an abrupt halt when he noticed Hawkes standing rigidly, staring death into his eyes.
He immediately turned about on his heel and vanished into the townhouse, slamming the door behind him.
Mrs. Gallagher finally whirled about, dashing her fingers against her eyes.
Oh God. She was weeping.
The realization felt like a knife slashed through him all over again.
For an instant he couldn’t breathe.
She nearly collided with him.
“Mrs. Gallagher?”
She reared back in shock, her face tipped up.
She swiftly turned her head, clearly embarrassed by her brimming eyes. “Good morning, Mr. Hawkes. My apologies. I did not see you.”
Something like a surfeit of emotion stopped his words.
Mutely, he found a handkerchief for her in his pocket and handed it gently over.
For an instant, they stood there, a private little island on the teeming, noisy street.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
They stood together wordlessly as she applied the handkerchief to her eyes. She kept her head down.
“Mrs. Gallagher,” he said gently, “I should be pleased if you’d allow me to buy you a cup of tea.”