Free Suzanne Robinson by Lady Dangerous

when the carriage turned the corner and drove past them. They were off again, this time toward the countryside beyond Fulham.
    “What was that all about?” she asked.
    “I don’t like it,” Toby said, chewing his lip. “And we can’t follow them out of the city much farther without being noticed. Gor, missy, this business got a foul smell to it. Watch it!”
    Liza lurched forward as the driver hauled on his reins, and Toby threw an arm in front of her.
    “I think they stopped again. Can’t go no farther without them seeing.”
    Toby opened the door that stretched across hislegs, stood up and peered into the darkness. “They did stop.”
    Several minutes passed with Liza anxiously waiting for some sign from Toby. Even if she stood up, she wasn’t tall enough to see anything, for the road descended the other side of a hill and plunged into a stand of trees.
    “Gor!” Without warning Toby jumped back into his seat. “They’re coming back. Turn this cart around and scarper, lad.”
    They clambered ahead of their would-be quarry and managed to pull into a busy street in Fulham before being overtaken by the carriage. Tangled in a snarl of vending carts, omnibuses, and carriages, they watched the vehicle disappear.
    Liza slumped back in the cab seat. “Let’s go home, Toby.”
    It was well past midnight when they paid off the cab and entered the house that served as the offices of Pennant’s Domestic Agency. Situated between Kings Cross and Shoreditch, it was near the wealthy, yet not so far from East London that working people couldn’t reach it. Pennant’s was the third in a row of terraced houses done in Grecian style with columns marching down the row one after the other.
    The house was dark. Toby lit a lamp in the genteel drawing-waiting room before passing through the fictitious Pennant’s reception room to the true center of the agency, Liza’s office. Customers were never admitted here, where they could encounter the real owner. Indeed, not all of Pennant’s employees knew who Liza was.
    Liza trudged into the office as Toby lit another lamp. After pulling off her cloak hood, she removed her cap and rubbed her face with it. Her eyes felt as ifthey were coated with sand, and her back ached where she’d twisted it trying to wriggle away from Jocelin Marshall.
    She collapsed on a settee and sighed. “Find out what that place was in St. Giles.”
    “Nasty, that.” Toby stood over her, his arms folded.
    “He’s up to something,” she said. “Damn him. I couldn’t find anything in the house.”
    “You know he got that little girl and that boy from St. Giles.” Toby cleared his throat. “Missy, there’s goings-on you best not know about. Some things ladies shouldn’t—”
    “Don’t bother,” Liza snapped. “Ignorant ladies are helpless ladies, helpless and powerless. By now you’d think you’d have given up lecturing me on delicacy. Women aren’t delicate, Toby, or they wouldn’t survive childbirth, or the slums, or husbands who run off and leave them with the children. Oh, never mind. I’m too tired to argue. Just do as I say.”
    “It ain’t proper,” Toby growled.
    “Go to bed.”
    “I’m going. Gor, who’d have thought a miss with a father as rich as King Solomon would turn out such a witchy, bluestocking shrew.”
    Groaning, Liza maneuvered herself off the settee, crossed the room, and carefully lay down on the longer sofa. She propped her head up on an embroidered pillow and snuggled down in her coat. She stared at a painting of a Scottish loch that hung above the couch.
    What was Jocelin Marshall doing? Regardless of Toby’s attempts to shield her, she had learned much since coming to London to work. She knew most men frequented women of low morals. What had shockedher was the little girl, and the boy. But if the viscount had taken the two children from that pretended boardinghouse, he hadn’t done so for the same reasons the other patrons had. Why had he deposited them