The Factory Girl // Book 1 in the Rosie Grey series

Chapter Thirty-Four

Everything started to make sense.

Before, I had just thought Mr Warrington hadn't liked me because I was a servant, because that was the way he treated everyone he deemed to be beneath him. Only that appeared to be far from the truth. He had known who I was the moment he had heard my name, I was a danger to him and he knew that. To protect his position, to protect his lifestyle, he needed to get rid of me and the only way he could do that was to convince Doctor Ealing that I was the wrong person to employ. It wasn't as if Mr Warrington could turn around and say he knew me from somewhere else without exposing his knowledge of his brother's actions.

In a way, I was glad to know why he hated me without having met me, but on the other hand, he had known about everything and never saw in wrong in it, only money. He was just another person who cared more about profit than human life.

"You mean to tell us that just the other day we were dining with a man who knew of the factory and its conditions but said nothing?" Robert said. His voice was hard, and his gaze was still fixed on a spot in the grounds. He had been so quiet I had hardly even realised he was there until he spoke.

"It seems that way. From the correspondence we found, Gregory Warrington was purchasing the cloth off of his brother to sell to tailors across the country. One of the girls told us she saw both Gregory and his son around the factory floor a few years ago. Miss Grey, did you ever see them?"

"Not that I remember, but my memory has never been the best if I'm being honest. It would explain why Alexander locked in me linen cupboard if he knew how many times for the foreman had locked me away."

"All right, I'll have to talk to the others again and confirm that both of them were seen in the factory at some point. Unless they had direct involvement with any deaths, I doubt there is anything we can arrest them for. We have the foreman and Mr Luke Thompson for child endangerment, breaking the 1833 Factory Act and possible murder charges. They'll be going away for a long time."

"But there's nothing you can do about Gregory and Alexander?" Doctor Ealing asked. His eyebrows were furrowed together, and he knotted his hands together in his lap as though not entirely sure what to make of the whole situation, and I couldn't blame him.

"Unless they committed a crime, no. I don't think we can arrest or charge them simply for being aware of the factory and Edward Warrington's actions."

"Alright, well, thank you for your help, Constable. We appreciate all the hard work you're doing do send this coward down."

"You're welcome. Do you have any more questions about anything, Miss Grey?"

"What's going to happen to Isabel?" I asked, glancing down at my hands and refusing to look the Constable in the eye.

"The coroner will determine how she died and after that her body will be released for burial. If we can't get in touch with her family, it may well be an unmarked grave."

"We'll handle the burial if you cannot reach her family," Doctor Ealing said.

I glanced up at Doctor Ealing, furrowing my eyebrows together in confusion as to why he would do such a thing. Despite Doctor Ealing doing so much for me already, the idea of him volunteering to arrange the burial for Isabel shocked me more than I thought it would. He hadn't met her and knew next to nothing about her apart from what I had said to the Constable that afternoon, he had no reason to offer to do such a thing. Burials were expensive, we had been told that by the foreman countless times when someone was killed and the idea of Doctor Ealing offering to assist in the burial of someone he didn't even know made me wonder why he was doing it.

After lying to his face for over a week and risking his son's life in the fire, he was still willing to do something for me. I didn't deserve any of it after what I did. I didn't deserve Matilda being nice to me, Robert running into that fire to help me or Doctor Ealing paying for Isabel's burial. None of what I had done over the past week earned those actions. All I had done during my trial period was cause trouble for them and the idea of them being nice to me for it made me feel physically sick.