The brief glimpse inflamed the crowd so intensely that someone threw a projectile through a window of the clerk’s office.
Her office.
In a flash, Crompton was off his horse and propelling her by the elbow away from the crowd and toward the front of the building that faced Whitehall Place. “They’ve the very devil in there!” he hollered at her. “I’ve sent for bobbies from Bow Street and St. James precinct to ’elp.”
“Who was that?” she cried.
But as soon as she was on the corner of Newbury and Whitehall Place, Crompton abandoned her to return to the crowd, his club raised in case of violence.
Smoothing her black wool uniform jacket over her dress, she was grateful for the lack of a bustle beneath the crinoline of her skirts. With the ever-shrinking offices at Scotland Yard, she’d never fit were she dressed fashionably.
Farah nodded to the licensing comissioner’s reception clerk, and wound her way through the maze of hallways to the headquarters’ connecting entrance, only to find the pandemonium inside Scotland Yard was barely tamer than the mob without.
She’d been in these kinds of situations before. There was the Irish riot of ’68, and the time an explosive detonated outside of Parliament, not a stone’s throw away, not to mention a constant barrage of criminals, thieves, and whores parading through Number Four Whitehall Place on a daily basis. And yet, as Farah elbowed her way through the Scotland Yard reception office, she couldn’t remember a time she’d sensed such imminent disaster. A thrill of unease trembled through her, disrupting her usually infallible composure.
“Mrs. Mackenzie!” She heard her name rise above the din of constables, journalists, criminals, and inspectors all crowded within the back hall. Farah turned to see David Beauchamp, the first clerk, struggling toward her from the hall of offices. His slight, wiry build didn’t meet the minimum physical requirements for an officer of the Metropolitan Police, so he’d been hired as a clerk, to his everlasting regret.
Farah pushed toward him, excusing herself along the way. “Mr. Beauchamp.” She took his offered elbow and together they pressed toward the relative safety of the hall. “Would you please tell me what is going on here?”
“He’s asking for you,” Beauchamp informed her with an imperious frown.
Farah knew exactly to whom Mr. Beauchamp referred. Her employer, Chief Inspector Sir Carlton Morley.
“Right away,” she replied, removing her bonnet and tossing it onto her desk. She grimaced at the shards of the window on the office floor, but felt guilty at the relief she felt when she realized most of the damage had been done to Mr. Beauchamp’s desk, as hers was positioned closer to the door. Errol Cartwright, the third clerk, had yet to arrive.
“You’ll need your instruments,” Beauchamp needlessly reminded her. “There’s to be an interrogation. I’m to stay here and deal with the press and coordinate the extra bobbies.” He used the street name Londoners had dubbed the Metropolitan Police, which Farah found ridiculous.
“Of course,” Farah said wryly, as she gathered her pen, inkwell, and pad of thick parchment upon which she took down minute notes, confessions, and drafted affidavits for criminals and coppers alike. Ignoring the sound of the mob outside the broken window took nerve, but she managed. Her office was high enough that they couldn’t see her head as a target, though she could look down on theirs. “Will you kindly tell me just who is the reason for all of this hullabaloo?” she asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
Mr. Beauchamp gave a self-important sniff, pleased to be the one to give her news she hadn’t already gleaned. “Only the man whose capture could make Sir Morley’s entire career. The most infamous criminal mastermind in recent history.”
“No, you can’t mean—”
“Indeed I do, Mrs. Mackenzie. I can only mean Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More.”
“Upon my word,” Farah breathed, suddenly more than a little apprehensive to be in the same building with him, let alone the same room.
“Please do tell me you’re not in danger of the vapors or some other such female hysteria. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re in the middle of a crisis, and I simply cannot cover for any missish behavior.” Beauchamp regarded her with distaste.
“When have you ever known me to be plagued with the vapors?” she asked impatiently as she tucked her pad into the crook of the arm that held her pen and inkwell. “Really, Mr. Beauchamp, after all these years!” She huffed past him in a swirl of skirts, frowning with disapproval. Though he was the senior first clerk to her second clerk, perhaps it was time she usurped his authority.
First things first. Farah squared her shoulders and gathered her skirts to descend the stairs to the basement. Though not prone to the vapors, she did feel her lungs strain against her corset more rapidly than usual, and her heart felt like a trapped sparrow, fluttering around the walls of her chest, looking for an escape.
Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More.
Despite her apprehension, Farah realized she was taking part in something unprecedented. Certainly Blackwell had a number of arrests in his history, but he somehow always managed to escape imprisonment, and the gallows. Inwardly, she cited the information she had on Dorian Blackwell.
His countrywide notoriety had begun little more than a decade ago with disturbing and mysterious disappearances of half the criminals being investigated by Scotland Yard. During the initial inquiry, a name had amalgamated from shadows and whispers that rose from the most violent, treacherous bowels of the city such as Fleet Ditch, Whitechapel, and the East End.