Excerpt from THE LADIES ROAD GUIDE TO UTTER RUIN
by Alison Goodman
In this extract from THE LADIES ROAD GUIDE TO UTTER RUIN, Lady Gus and Lady Julia––spinster twin sisters who are investigating a long-ago murder––are trying to find the location of a notorious gentlemen’s club in London 1812.
Before long, our carriage turned into King Street. The dwellings and shop fronts were small and the pavements busy with gentlemen on their way, no doubt, to the nearby pleasures of Covent Garden and the ladies from Harris’s List who worked there. On one corner, a balladeer sang for pennies, a small group clustered around him, and the patrons of a gin shop had spilled out onto the road, yelling their own raucous songs. We turned into the wider part of Bedford Street and I rapped upon the wall for John Driver to slow our momentum.
“What are we looking for?” Julia asked, peering out her window at the passing frontages.
A good question. The street was ill-lit and I did not want to draw attention by ordering Samuel to walk alongside with a lamp. “I’m not sure. Something that looks like a gentlemen’s club.”
Julia looked back at me with eyebrows raised. “And what exactly would that look like?”
I had no answer, of course—neither of us had ever been near St. James’s Street to view the elite gentlemen’s clubs. To do so would have been social death.
John Driver kept the horses at walking pace as we progressed down the street. On my side of the carriage, some establishments had light in the windows, some did not, but none of them gave any clue as to whether they housed a club of dubious activities.
“Anything on your side?” I asked Julia.
“I have no idea,” Julia said.
I rapped on the wall and called out, “Stop!” The carriage drew to a halt near the corner of Maiden Lane.
“Perhaps it is up ahead,” I said, peering into the final section of the street, which looked too narrow for our town carriage to pass.
Julia huffed an irritated breath. “Frankly, if we walked up and down the whole length of Bedford Street, we would have no way of knowing.” She leaned across and opened the door. The carriage rocked as Samuel immediately descended from his position at the back and appeared alongside, ready to help us down. “We need local knowledge,” she said over her shoulder as she took his hand and alighted.
“From whom?” I asked as I arrived behind her on the cobbled pavement.
I shivered, my silk evening cloak and gown not adequate for gallivanting on a cold night. Was Julia thinking of knocking on the door of one of the houses? How on earth would we explain a request for information about a gentlemen’s club?
“From her,” Julia said, nodding toward a hunched shape sitting beside a basket on the corner of Maiden Lane.
An old flower seller.
I had not even seen her there. One of the truly invisible.
“I would lay odds that she has sat in the same spot for years selling her flowers, just like Peggy in our square,” Julia said.
Peggy? But of course, my sister knew the name of the flower seller near us.
“She will have sat there unregarded, watching the world walk by. That is the local knowledge we need,” Julia added.
“Brilliant,” I said.
Julia acknowledged the accolade with a nod, then turned to our footman. “Samuel, bring the lamp.”
Samuel unhooked the carriage lamp and followed us across the road. He still walked a little stiffly from his beating from Mulholland’s man but otherwise seemed to have recovered from the ordeal.
The old woman looked up as we approached, immediately holding out a raggedy bunch of snowdrops. The tiny white bell blooms trembled in her hold. “Flowers, milady? Flowers? Penny a posy.”
In the light of the lamp, I could make out a deeply lined face with inflamed, crusted eyes and a sunken mouth. She wore an old knitted shawl tied over a threadbare coat, and a straw bonnet sporting a large hole and a frayed ribbon around the crown.
“I will take all that you have left,” Julia said, peering into the basket. She worked open the drawstrings of her reticule and dug her fingers inside.
“All?” the old woman echoed. She peered into her basket too. “I got this many.” She held up her other hand—wrapped in rags for warmth—and splayed her fingers. Four posies.
Julia withdrew a shilling and crouched beside her, holding out the coin. The old woman stared at it. “That’s a shillin’, that is. I ain’t got the wherewithal to give back the difference, my lady.”
Julia dropped the coin into her hand. “The shilling is yours. What is your name?”
“They call me Weepy Iris,” she said, inflamed eyes fixed upon the coin cupped in her palm.
“What is your real name?” Julia asked gently.
The woman looked up and blinked in the lamplight. “Dorothy, my lady. Dorothy Martindale.” Her voice rasped on the n, as if she had not spoken the name in a long while.
“How long have you sold your flowers on this corner, Dorothy?” Julia asked.
The woman closed her hand around the coin. “Nigh on twenty years, my lady.”
“Am I right in thinking you see everything that happens in Bedford Street?”
She considered Julia for a second, a lightning-fast reckoning of an unusual situation. A lady did not often crouch on the pavement beside a flower woman for a chat.
“That I do, my lady,” she finally said.
Julia held up another shilling. “Can you tell us something?” She gathered me into the conversation with a glance. “I am Lady Julia and this is my sister, Lady Augusta. We wish to know if there is a gentlemen’s club somewhere along here. A club called—”
“The Exalted Brethren of Rack and Ruin,” Dorothy whispered. She glanced across the corner and gave a small nod. “Number 2, down there.”
Julia handed over the coin, quickly closed in the filthy hand.
“But you don’t want to go nowhere near it, my ladies,” Dorothy added. “It’s a bad place, full o’ bad men.”
“In what way?” I asked.
Dorothy drew in a portentous breath. “Sometimes girls go in there and I ain’t seen ’em come out.” She looked at us defiantly. “It’s true.”
“We believe you,” I said. “When does the club open? Is it every night?”
“Most, my lady. After the Evensong bells.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping into a whisper again. “Sometimes even on Sundays. Most of the coves come out ’bout a few hours before dawn. All of ’em foxed. They wear masks too.”
“Masks?” Julia asked. “You mean like loo masks for a masquerade ball?”
“No, like the old mummers.”
So, they kept their faces completely hidden.
Julia looked at me: Anything else we should ask?
“What do you think happens to the girls that do not come out?” I asked. “Have you heard any rumors?”
Dorothy shrugged, wariness shrinking her sunken mouth even more. “Maybe I’m wrong and they go out another way. There’s a yard out the back of them row of houses. Could be they go out there.”
She huddled back into her ragged clothes, ducking out of the light of the lamp. Our shilling, it seemed, had run out.
“Thank you, Dorothy,” Julia said, rising from her crouch. “We appreciate your help.”
“Don’t forget your flowers, my lady,” Dorothy said, and gathered up the small posies. She held up the bobbing blooms, her faded eyes darting from Julia to me, then back again. A decision made. “Don’t know if this ’elps,” she said slowly, “but I ’ave seen somethin’ time to time that struck me as another kind of odd: a handcart pushed by two men comin’ and goin’ from that yard. In the wee hours. Only stays for a short while. Looks like a delivery cart, but it goes in empty.”
“Do they bring something out?” Julia asked, taking the flowers.
I glanced at my sister: Like, for instance, a brutalized girl?
Julia quirked her mouth: Exactly.
Dorothy shook her head. “Never seen nothin’ in it. Goin’ in or out.” She shrugged. “Always empty. Thought it was odd, ay?”
An empty cart. Odd, indeed.
Excerpted from The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin by Alison Goodman Copyright © 2025 by Alison Goodman. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
In Regency England, the eccentric Colebrook sisters are amateur detectives who use their wits and invisibility as “old maids” to fight injustice in this delightful and fiercely feminist novel of mystery and adventure from New York Times bestselling author Alison Goodman.
To most of Regency high society, forty-two-year-old Lady Augusta Colebrook, or Gus, and her twin sister, Julia, are just unmarried ladies of a certain age—hardly worth a second glance. But the Colebrook twins are far from useless old maids. They are secretly protecting women and children ignored by society and the law.
When Lord Evan—a charming escaped convict who has won Gus’s heart—needs to hide his sister and her lover from their vindictive brother, Gus and Julia take the two women into their home. They know what it is like to have a powerful and overbearing brother. But Lord Evan’s complicated past puts them all in danger. Gus knows they must clear his name of murder if he is to survive the thieftakers who hunt him. But it is no easy task—the fatal duel was twenty years ago and a key witness is nowhere to be found.
In a deadly cat-and-mouse game, Gus, Julia, and Lord Evan must dodge their pursuers and investigate Lord Evan’s past. They will be thrust into the ugly underworld of Georgian gentlemen’s clubs, spies, and ruthless bounty hunters, not to mention the everyday threat of narrow-minded brothers. Will the truth be found in time, or will the dangerous secrets from the past destroy family bonds and rip new love and lives apart
Mystery Woman Sleuth | Mystery Historical [Berkley, On Sale: May 6, 2025, Trade Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9780593440834 / ]
Alison is the author of the upcoming Lady Helen series, a rip-roaring trilogy of Regency adventures. The first book–THE DARK DAYS CLUB–is due for release in January 2016. Alison is best known for her New York Times bestselling fantasy duololgy EON and EONA, and her ability to dance a mean English contra-dance. She also writes award winning science fiction and crime fiction, and lives with her lovely husband and their machiavellian Jack Russell Terrier in Melbourne, Australia.
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