The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery (22 page)

His wrist twitches as his hand wakes up. He strokes her back, and presses her to him before his eyes are fully open. ‘Hmm…’ he breathes when the church bell strikes six.

‘I have to leave soon.’

He looks at her, his eyebrows drawn together, and brushes a black curl from her face. ‘Are you alright? Wasn’t I too…something?’

‘You were certainly too something.’ She grins at him, then grows serious. ‘Lie on your stomach for a moment.’

He does as she asked, trying not to push her off the small mattress. ‘It doesn’t hurt, Anna. I already forgot it’s there.’

Softly, she sends her fingers over the criss-crossing scars. ‘After more than nine months in St Giles, observing disease, violence, and severe poverty, I still didn’t learn to
not see
, nor will I ever learn to forget. This,’ she lays a palm flat onto his back, ‘will always hurt me, no matter how old the scars are. I’ll never forget Poppy’s face, either. Is she dead?’

Garret clears his throat. ‘What did your husband do to you?’

She sighs and presses her face to his neck, wondering how many dark secrets can possibly stand between two lovers until the distance between them begins to grow.

He turns, wraps his arms around her, and kisses her face, her neck, and her bosom until she chuckles. ‘When do you have to leave?’

‘In half an hour.’

‘Rather short, but…’ he throws the blanket up and over both their heads. ‘I need to see where exactly I have been too
something
. Them places might need soothing.’

‘Such hasty medical treatment might be interpreted as sloppy and careless.’

‘We can discuss it at length, or we can make an attempt at saving the patient.’

‘Hard to tell which alternative would be the most reasonable,’ she says. ‘But I’d suggest an emergency treatment of all parts that had to endure your stubble.’

‘Hmm. Can’t remember all the places I put my mouth last night. Perhaps here?’ he says and touches his lips to hers.

‘All over, I’d wager.’

Helena

‘W
illiam,’ she whispers. ‘Are you still not sleeping?’ The boy cracks one eye open in response. ‘It’s late. Your mother won’t be pleased.’
 

‘But my head is so noisy, Miss Worthing, it wants me to stay awake.’

‘What noises does it make?’

‘Noises of the park we walked today, the pretty birdsong and children playing, and what Mother said about the countryside and Grandfather’s house. And Father, who looked ill and upset. I always think of this. Did I upset him, Miss Worthing?’

She caresses his head and his warm cheek and says softly, ‘Of course he is not upset with you, William. He has business to attend to and works hard. For you and your mother.’

‘But he left and didn’t return last night, and the night before. Did I make him leave?’

‘Of course not. Shush now, you silly boy, and promise to not bother your mother with your strange thoughts. You’ll only upset her.’

The boy squeezes both eyes shut, folds his hands under his chin, and whispers, ‘I promise.’

‘Good boy, William. Say your prayers.’ She removes her hand from his hair, smoothes her dress, and leaves the nursery.

The boy is spoiled and overly sensitive, she thinks. How could his mother let this happen? Surely, he was already like this when she arrived a year ago. A sickly child, too. Wouldn’t survive a day without his mother pampering him. William this and William that.

Bristling with disapproval, she climbs the stairs to her room — a small compartment just beneath the attic where the servants live. She pushes the door into its frame. A soft creak, then silence. Her haven of privacy.

She undresses and washes with warm water the maid brought a few minutes earlier. She lies down flat on her bed, her legs straight out, her arms on her sides, face directed at the ceiling. A body methodically arranged, ready to drift off into bleak nothingness. But then, thoughts of her twin brothers creep through her skull.

Peter and Timothy. When she was a child, she spoke their names with love. Now she dreads the monthly meetings with them. She dreads their stories of hardship, their petty lives, their sour-smelling, thirdhand clothes, their fat wives and sick children, their ragged haircuts, their scrubby beards. Just thinking of their home makes her skin crawl. That hovel of a dwelling that reeks of shellfish gone bad and diapers gone rancid. It smells of something that will glue itself onto her, never let go, drag itself along when she returns to her well-kept room that smells of lemon juice the maid put into the water to wipe the windows and scrub the floors, threatening to turn all that she has accomplished with her own hard work into something just as rancid, stinky, diseased.

Whenever she meets her brothers, the word
discarded
scurries through her mind. Then, she quickly extracts all her savings — despite her resolutions not to — and gives Tim one pound and Pete another, knowing the money will melt away like the ice they use to keep their oysters fresh.
 

Surely she does wish to help, she tells herself then. It isn’t bad conscience at all. Or, at least, not the only reason for her to regularly abandon all the savings she possesses.
 

And yet, every time she turns her back to her brothers to catch a cab back home, she feels as though she’s bribed the rancid, stinky, and diseased thing to stay with them one month longer before it comes and fetches her.

And so she returns to a warm and clean home, a respected occupation, to plenty of good food and pretty dresses, feeling guilty instead of grateful.
Shame on you! Say ten Ave Marias!

It wasn’t her brothers’ fault, and had never been. When Father lost his shops and his houses, he took to drink so heavily that soon, the family found themselves without means.
 

Now she’s glad for the piano and poetry lessons her father insisted on. Without them, she couldn’t have obtained a position as governess. Her brothers, however, hadn’t been able to obtain anything but a costermonger’s cart to start a shellfish business in the slums. Selling shellfish no one else would eat but the wretched.

She blinks, absentmindedly fingering the letter she keeps under her pillow. The crinkled sheet of thin paper has been read so often, wept upon, and folded to a small rectangle again and again, that one can barely decipher the writing. She knows its contents by heart. The whore was murdered. A gentleman did it. The tone her brothers had used allows only one conclusion.
 

She’s afraid. Will God forgive her if she says nothing about it?
Thou shall not kill!
But wouldn’t she kill them if she told the police and they were hung? Still, she dearly hopes they won’t be caught. But then, doesn’t that mean she wishes that man to be dead? How can there be redemption, if sin lies in every direction no matter which way she turns?

Condemned be the unlucky day when she and her brothers saw this girl with the cruelly cut-up face! Condemned shall she be herself for this one night, when she was at her lowest and had to seek refuge in Alf’s attic. Perhaps the girl would still be alive had she never lodged there, never known it, or if she’d simply kept her mouth shut.
 

A soft knock interrupts her thoughts and pulls her from the past to the present.
 

When the dark shadow of her master approaches, she feels her cheeks glow like those of a child waiting for candy. She knows she mustn’t give herself to a married man. But he needs her so. He cannot be without her, he said, before he lay with her the first night. And it surely didn’t help her resolution that his hands were knowing and gentle, his manhood strong.

He lifts the corner of her blanket. ‘How are you, my dear Helena?’ he whispers.

He’s barely able to keep his hackles down, so great the pleasure of triumph. He slides his tongue across his incisors and forces the grin off his face before he plants a kiss on the woman’s lips.

Astonishing how incidents fall into perfect place and time, how a small bribe — merely pocket money — can redirect a mob in full rage. Whoever that man was who’d been killed, he doesn’t feel sorry for him. This man will always shine like a beacon of his own glory. He imagines him floating down the river, a sack of clothes hugging a limp body, lazily drifting out onto the sea, waves lapping at it, fish nibbling. Or perhaps, his pockets had been filled with stones and his skin is already perforated and his flesh gnawed at by the countless bottom-dwelling fish and crayfish.
 

He pushes his hand underneath the woman’s nightgown and her sighs make his already rock-hard erection ache with fury.

He growls. Low, and guttural. Wolf-like.

Such triumph! Despite his unforgivable mistake. But he’d never again allow himself such carelessness, such rage. But the brilliance of it!
His
brilliance!

He cares little that he must find a new territory now. A new playground. In fact, he’s
thrilled
. So many slums in this city, countless whores.
 

Like this one.

She rocks her voluptuous hips against his narrow ones, and his mind and body answer with a scream for release.

Behind his eyes, images begin to fade — those of a body in the river, of the girl with an artfully carved grin, and the map on his desk, the streets’ criss-crossing, the Thames’ meandering.
 

His eager fingers dig into her large buttocks, and his hips lodge between her welcoming thighs. It doesn’t take long.

___

Below the skin of history are London’s veins. These symbols, the mitre, the pentacle star, even to someone as ignorant and degenerate as you can sense that they course with energy... and meaning.
 

I am that meaning.
 

I am that energy.
 

One day, men will look back and say that I gave birth to the 20th century.

From Hell
, by Albert & Allen Hughes

Preview of the next book in the series:

THE DEVIL’S GRIN

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies,
and misfortunes of mankind.

E. Gibbon

I
finally found the peace to write down what must be revealed. At the age of twenty-seven, I witnessed a crime so outrageous that no one dared to tell the public. In fact, it has never been put in ink on paper — not by police, journalists, or historians. The general reflex was to forget what had happened.

I will hide these journals in my old school and beg the finder to make public what they contain. Not only must the crime be revealed, but I also wish to paint a different picture of a man who came to be known as the world’s greatest detective.

Summer, 1889
 

O
ne of the first things I learned as an adult was that knowledge and fact meant nothing to people who were subjected to an adequate dose of fear and prejudice.

This simple-mindedness was the most disturbing attribute of my fellow two-legged creatures. Yet, according to Alfred Russel Wallace’s newest theories, I belonged to this same species — the only one among the great apes that had achieved bipedalism and an unusually large brain. As there was no other upright, big-headed ape, I must be human. But I had my doubts.