Free The Thames River Murders by Ashley Gardner

filling out his red coat. He had a round face, canine teeth filed to points, a large nose, small eyes, and not much hair on his head. He made up for the lack of hair on top by growing a set of luxurious side whiskers.
    Hagen had come off the top of our coach. “Don’t sir him,” he snapped. “You tell him where ye took the mistress.”
    Unlike Aline’s man, Hagen was lean and ropy, with a leathery face, dark eyes, and a thick shock of brown hair. I always thought he looked more like a highwayman than a coachman, but he was a skilled driver and protective of Donata and her son.
    Aline’s coachman was much more good-natured, apt to tell a joke he’d heard or talk horse with me in a spare moment, but at present, he looked nonplussed. “I took her nowhere,” he said in bewilderment.
    “Then where is she?” I demanded.
    “Answer him,” Hagen said. He took a belligerent step to Aline’s coachman, murder in his eyes. “She was with her ladyship, then you came here. What happened in between?”
    “I set her down in Park Lane, as she told me,” the coachman said. “She gave me quite a few coins and suggested I visit my cousin. She’d send for her own conveyance to go home, she said. Kind of her, I thought.” He ended with a defiant look at Hagen.
    I held on to my patience. “What house in Park Lane?”
    “Near Brick Lane. I saw her go into the courtyard—she has friends there, she said.”
    Since Donata had friends and acquaintance all over London, this sounded plausible. Less plausible that she’d sent the coach away and hadn’t bothered to tell Hagen and her own household.
    “Her abigail descended with her?” I asked.
    “Of course.” Aline’s coachman looked worried. “Is her ladyship well?”
    “We don’t know, do we?” Hagen snarled. “Why do you think we’re asking ye?”
    “I can take you to the exact place I set her down. I saw nothing wrong in it, sir. The viscountess was quite decided.”
    As only Donata could be. The best thing for me was to go home and wait for her to return, but my agitation would not let me. Why should Donata suddenly decide to visit a friend in the middle of the night and not arrange transport for herself to get home?
    If she were any other woman, I might suspect she’d gone covertly to meet a lover. With Donata, I could not fathom her motive.  
    Though she’d been quite willing to not bother with fidelity to her first husband, who’d paraded his mistresses before her, I doubted she had taken up those ways again. Donata did not much like or trust men, with very few exceptions, and she’d declared it a relief to be married to a man who wanted to be with none but her. Besides, if she had been dashing off to a paramour, the rest of Mayfair would have told me about him.
    I began to have other, more worrying suspicions about what she’d done. I turned to Hagen. “Let us go there and fetch her.”
    “Yes, sir.” Hagen brightened, happy to be commanded to do what he wished to anyway.
    He turned to the carriage, then his eyes narrowed, and he pointed a long finger at the back of the coach. “You there! I see you—get out of it.”
    Hagen charged toward the carriage, where I suspected someone had helped themselves to a ride by clinging to the back.
    I did not expect the man who strode firmly into sight from the morning shadows. Although, I ought to have expected him.
    “Captain,” Brewster said. “If you’re looking for your wife, I know exactly where she is.”

Chapter Eight
    Brewster spoke calmly, though he shot Hagen a fierce glance.  
    “What the devil?” I approached Brewster, barely keeping my temper. I wanted to strike at the man, though I knew I’d only land on my back with his boot in my stomach for my pains. “What are you doing here?”
    “I saw you rush off early this morning,” Brewster said. “’S’my job to follow you, innit? Almost missed you—had to hop on the back in passing.”
    Hagen did not look happy, both with the fact that