Free The Children of Silence by Linda Stratmann

the same time or there would be what Mr Antrobus called ‘an atmosphere’, something he wanted to avoid. Mr and Mrs Antrobus had not dined together for some little while. Mrs Antrobus usually took her meals in her parlour, and often Miss Pearce would join her there. Then when they had dined, Mrs Antrobus would play the piano and Miss Pearce sang or hummed songs in a strange deep sort of voice.
    The cook was aware that medical men called, but she never saw them and they didn’t stay to dine. If Mr Antrobus had quarrelled with anyone she knew nothing about it. She could provide no information that would help locate the present whereabouts of the parlourmaid and the charwoman.
    Sarah was not disheartened by this very modest success and felt confident that she would find the other two servants in time. Frances felt similarly confident. When, a year and a half previously, Sarah had asked to be an apprentice to Frances in her new business, the request had come not from a burning desire to be a detective but because she wished to remain loyally at Frances’ side. Since then she had not only proved to be a valuable assistant and an indispensable protector of her employer’s safety, but she was taking on cases of her own, ones appropriate to her very special talents. She had earned a formidable reputation in Bayswater for meting out justice in a robust manner.
    Sarah had recently become the champion of a poor washerwoman who lived separately from her husband and supported four small children. Believing that the earnings of his wife were his own property to enjoy as he pleased, he had a habit of descending upon her when short of beer money, terrorising his family and taking away whatever he could find.
    A neighbour of the unfortunate woman, hearing of her plight, suggested she employ Sarah’s services. The unhappy washerwoman had pleaded that she had barely enough to feed her children, but the neighbour had gone to Sarah and appealed to her good nature and general distrust of men. Sarah, whose relish at dealing with such a case was payment enough, realised that simply taking the husband to a private location and explaining to him the error of his ways, pleasurable as such a task would be, might not be sufficient. The fact that since 1870 married women had been entitled by law to keep their own earnings was something that had been lost on too many men, who had chosen to ignore the wishes of parliament and continued to cow their wives into submitting to their demands. Sarah decided to engage the services of Tom Smith, a young relative of hers and a junior businessman of extraordinary energy who was running a team of messenger boys he referred to as his ‘men’. Tom had the washerwoman’s husband followed and as a result, when he was about to raid his wife’s home once more, the police were summoned in time to witness the crime and arrest him.
    Sarah’s only regret was that any respite for the wife would be temporary, and she was considering what to do about this when, to her relief, the husband suffered an attack of delirium tremens and was removed from the police cells to the public asylum.

    Unusually for Frances, that evening was to be given over entirely to the pursuit of pleasure. She allowed herself not to feel guilty at such an indulgence since it was a special occasion marking the recent return to London of Frances’ near neighbour and friend Cedric Garton. Cedric was a dedicated man about town, suave and elegant in his clothing, amusing in his conversation and a great lover of all things artistic. He lived in a beautifully decorated apartment with his devoted manservant Joseph and, though widely considered to be both handsome and eligible, had never shown any inclination to marry.
    He had spent the last few months travelling about the Home Counties – he refused to go north of Hertfordshire because of the climate – to give lectures on Classical Art to enthralled audiences of mature ladies and aesthetically minded