The River Knows by Amanda Quick Page A

spoken anything less than the truth. She had come home quite late last night, and she could not deny that arriving back here at Number Twelve in a carriage other than the one in which she had departed was certainly a first. So was being walked to the door by a gentleman.

    In the study she found a cheery blaze crackling on the hearth.

    “There you are, ma’am,” Bess said, getting to her feet. “It will be nice and cozy in here soon enough.”

    “Thank you,” Louisa said.

    “Here’s your tea, ma’am,” Mrs. Galt said from the doorway. She set a tray on a table. “Let it steep a bit.”

    “I will,” Louisa promised. She needed her tea to be strong this morning. There was a great deal of thinking to be done.

    She waited until she was alone before she sat on the chair behind her desk. Clasping her hands on the blotter, she surveyed the small room. The bookshelves were gradually filling up with volumes, among them a wide assortment of sensation novels. She had developed a passion for them in the past year because they generally featured stories of illicit love affairs. It had become clear to her that, given her
    secret past, an illicit love affair was the only sort she could ever hope to have.

    Each new book increased her sense of security. It was as if every addition to her small library was a brick in the fortress wall that she was constructing around herself.

    But the reality was that she would never be truly safe. Emma had done her best to make her feel welcome, but the small flame of hope that burned within her, refusing to be entirely extinguished, was enveloped in an icy dread. She felt this same gloom almost every morning when she woke up, and it was usually the last sensation she experienced every night before she went to sleep.

    The emotion had a depressing effect on her spirits at times. Even on the sunniest days, the knowledge that someday she might be discovered and arrested on a charge of murder was always there, hanging over her head like an ominous thundercloud.

    Meeting Emma had been a stroke of the most incredible good fortune. But she was only too well aware that the new life she had found for herself could be destroyed in an instant if her dark secret were ever revealed to the world.

    Don’t think about the past or the future and, most of all, don’t think about Anthony Stalbridge. Concentrate on your work.

    Her new career as a secret correspondent for the Flying Intelligencer was the one bright star in her life. It provided distraction from the melancholia and fear and gave her a strong sense of motivation and purpose. She had determined to dedicate her life to journalism.

    She opened the leather-bound notebook she had brought downstairs. In her short career as a reporter she had learned the value of keeping good notes. For the sake of speed and out of concern that her notebook might be found and read by one of the servants or some other prying eye, she used a private code. She was always careful to spell out proper names, however. It would not do to get those wrong.

    She picked up a pen and went to work, reviewing and elaborating on the brief, cryptic notes she had made.
    There seemed to be little doubt that Hastings was engaged in blackmail, a criminal enterprise that meant he was even more vile than she had first thought. Unfortunately, she could see no way to expose him without also exposing the identities of his victims, which would not be right.

    Of course, there was still the evidence linking him to Phoenix House, she reminded herself. The papers Anthony had retrieved from the safe confirmed Hastings’s involvement as an investor in the brothel. That news alone would be sensational enough to satisfy Mr. Spraggett, the publisher of the Flying Intelligencer. Spraggett prided himself on presenting only the most lurid and riveting news to the reading public. The announcement that a high-flying gentleman in Society was part owner of a whorehouse would sell a lot of