The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery (3 page)

Down at the street he chuckles, slapping his healthy thigh. ‘Womenfolk!’ he groans and begins strolling towards St Giles. At the back door to the duffer, he steps in without knocking.
 

‘What’ve ya got?’ the scrubby man enquires, barely tearing his eyes off a well-thumbed book, its binding greasy, pages dog-eared.
 

The man considers himself well read, although the reading of tuppence material with women in all kinds of positions, usually with at least one man attached to their orifices, doesn’t quite meet the classical definition of
reading
material.
 

The duffer remains sitting, not the least bothered by the Irishman’s presence. If he were to rise all the way to the tip of his toes, his nose might reach Garret’s shoulders.
 

‘Only the best,’ Garret says with false conviction, then holds out his square palms.

‘I’ll be damned if it ain’t the ugliest fat little angels I’ve ever seen!’ The man stares down at the two tiny statues, raises an eyebrow at Garret, and knows this man is desperate. ‘Two pence each.’

They haggle until the thief’s brow perspires. Angry, he leaves. A public house is precisely what he needs now, or that howling stomach of his will scare off everyone, including the rats that scamper across his path.
 

Three pies and two pints of ale later, an elbow — complete with buffed sleeve and a cloud of perfume — pokes his side.
 

‘Oy, Thrulow,’ Garret says, ‘no gentlemen to flog today?’
 

Gloved hands flutter down upon his arm. Beneath her blue velvet dress, a corset shapes her body to a perfect hourglass. Thick blond curls pour from beneath the bonnet and course down her spine, cheekily pointing at her hindquarters. With her fine clothes, she almost looks like a lady, if not for that squeezed-up bosom. Birching some noble lord’s backside while a
fricktrix
was busy at the man’s front paid very well indeed.
 

She scowls at him. ‘Took a day’s vacation to see my mother.’

‘I see,’ says Garret, thinking that if she would abandon her
calling
for a single day only to see her mother, he would eat a broom handle.
 

‘You look worn,’ she purrs. ‘Fancy some recreational activities?’

He feels himself grow hot. The frisky and merry-arsed Thrulow makes his privates whimper. Not that he feels drawn to that bloody flogging business, but this woman’s backside surely had magnetic qualities.
 

‘I have no money,’ he replies. ‘Besides, I prefer to remain in one piece.’
And you are too expensive,
he adds silently.

She pokes him again. This time harder. ‘You could do me, if you like.’

‘Thrulow, I have no money and I don’t like your birches, nettles, and whatnot. If I want to hit someone, I pick a fella my size. Never beat a woman and never will.’

‘Whatever you wish, my dear.’ The sugary lilt of her voice goes unnoticed by him. Her hand on his arm doesn’t, though. Heat spreads from there down to his balls. She moves closer to him until he feels her bosom press against his shoulder.
 

‘Good night, then, Garret,’ she breathes, mouth puckering, eyelashes waving. She turns around and swings her buttocks more than necessary when she walks out the door.
 

Garret presses his forehead against the wooden table top and counts to ten, thinking of the last time he'd paid a woman.
 

His encounters with the weaker sex are usually awkward and rather hasty. Bawdy women willingly lifted their skirts, as long as a shilling or two were involved, a dark alley could be found, and only the rats watched the rubbing, the grunting, the spending, and wiping off fluids. Often they said one thing and meant another, behaving as though they didn’t want to have a man, as though they were well-bred and hard to get, all the while teasing him to come over and show them his manhood. Why some of his friends got married was a mystery to him.

His heart begins to flutter — an alarmingly unfamiliar condition — as the nurse’s face shows up in his mind, her mouth slapping a command at him:
Take off your trousers!
 

How come he doesn’t even know her name?

Birth

B
arry squats on the pavement. Often, he arrives much too early, like today, but the waiting doesn’t bother him. He keeps forgetting which days are the Tuesdays and the Fridays, but he does take his part-time occupation seriously. He calls them “pie man nights,” but only secretly, because the two are not going out to eat. They
work
.

People here think she’s adopted him. But they have it all wrong. It was precisely the other way around. When Anna arrived in St Giles (Barry believes it to be long ago, but it’s barely three months), she stood out like a peacock with her clean and well-kept clothes (nothing fancy, mind you) and her funny English. That she must be in the possession of a few shillings (guineas, even?) any half-talented ragamuffin could extract from the folds of her skirts was clear from day one.
 

Barry had made a spontaneous attempt at pickpocketing, together with his gang of street arabs. Three of them bumped into her and toppled her over. Easy as crap. Barry probed her clothing with quick hands, and that was easy, too. But he couldn’t find anything. Not even a handkerchief. Quite outraged, he had demanded where that lazy devil of a bludger was. At that, Anna calmly answered, ‘Well, no hole in the head for me today, I guess.’
 

Barry can remember this one sentence more clearly than most things that have happened in his short life. He can still feel the wind in his gaping mouth. How odd that a woman like her knew what a bludger is — the strongest boy in a gang of arabs responsible to beat victims unconscious. Despite that bit of highly unusual education, Barry was convinced she is a lunatic when she — still lying on the pavement — informed them in a strange sing-song dialect that she is a nurse and will give free medical treatment to anyone in need.

He began revising his opinion two seconds later, theorising there might be at least some sense in her head when she said she would have to move to East End if she were to be mugged every time she crossed a street in St Giles. Besides, she stated solemnly, a nurse’s income is rather meagre.

Some crank in Barry’s head must have turned a wrong way, then, because he blurted, ‘My mother used ter be a toffer,’ as though that would relate to the topic in any way. He refrained from slapping his forehead, because that would have given him away.

‘What’s a toffer?’ asked Anna as she stood and knocked the dirt off her skirt.

‘A toffer is a posh trooper,’ one of the other boys explained, eyebrows raised all the way to the brim of his cap, head bobbing. ‘Now she’s only a trooper. Old hag that.’
 

Deeply insulted, Barry had punched the boy’s stomach and received a whack in his face in return. Blood spurted from cracked lips, and Anna had her first patient in St Giles.
 

Later, Barry explained to her that a trooper is a prostitute of the most wretched kind. The mixture of love and shame in his face had touched Anna’s heart. She liked him at once.

For a while now, the two have been taking their nightly strolls together; the boy chattering away, the woman listening and her eyes sweeping the alleys. Often, all she can do is diagnose: syphilis, gonorrhoea, typhoid fever, consumption. With no miracle cure available, she suggests alleviation through rest, good food, and plenty of clean water, but none of those exist in the slums.
 

Rest means days without income. Clean water means to either walk very far, or to boil it using the scant wood, cardboard, or — for the comparatively well-to-do — coal. Good food means expenses beyond the affordable. She knows all this, but has learned that saying something is better than saying nothing at all.

She performs simple surgeries, sometimes amputations. She helps reluctant children out of their mothers’ wombs, cleans and stitches up cuts. When, in a few months, the summer comes and heats up people’s heads and makes them go wild about trifles, her supply of bandages, disinfectant, and opium will melt away in but a few days.

Tonight, Barry tells her everything he knows about skinners. Listening to his tales about women who lure children into alleys, strip them, and leave their victims to terror and nakedness while selling all their clothes, Anna strolls across Castle Street and watches how the evening sun dips the slums into a warm red, transforming tired faces into friendly ones.
 

Costermongers’ barrows rattle past, their wares sold, the men worn but satisfied. Prostitutes step down onto the streets, shake out their skirts, and show their ankles. The cheeky ones among them even flash their stockinged knees, resulting in whistles from passers-by with too limited a budget. The ones who can afford the offered services curtly approach and mutter something only the woman can understand. An agreement is struck and the temporary couple enters the boarding house. Now, the hour is too early and the clientele too sober for anything cheap and hasty performed in the open.

Barry drifts towards their first mandatory stop — the penny pie man. Next to him sits his wife, her bare breast nourishing a youngster. A slender pipe is clamped between her teeth, producing an abundance of clouds and stink.

While Barry’s chronically empty stomach is being filled with eel pie and he must cease his chatter for once, Anna gets a time to think her own thoughts.

Talking while eating would result in loss of food through crumb expulsion — an unacceptable waste, according to the boy. Tonight, however, he breaks his rule. He elbows Anna’s side, mumbles something that sounds like, ‘Don’t turn around,’ and pulls her into an alley. ‘That thief,’ he whispers and sticks his nose around the corner, ‘has been following us since… Oy! He’s coming!’ He snatches her hand and off they run. Through the alley, around a corner, through a partially unhinged back door, then along what looks like a corridor and out onto a street.

A woman calls to them from the other side, pointing to the house behind her. ‘Will ya see tha’ girl? She’s makin’ a ruckus since yesterday. Can’t stand ‘nother night like tha’!’

Barry makes round eyes, plucks at Anna’s skirt, and shakes his head. Anna shrugs, lights her lantern, and enters, pulling the boy along.

A scream leaks down the dark stairwell. The rotten wood cries out with each step they take. Rats scamper up and down, untroubled by the newcomers and the shine of their oil lamp.
 

Following the noise, they step into a room. The setting sun doesn’t reach through the windows. Anna cannot see whether they have been nailed shut or simply blocked with garbage.
 

‘Bedroom,’ mumbles the boy sarcastically. They step over mouldy straw, potato bags, and piles of rags; neither of them feeling the urge to find out what’s moving underneath. Someone
 
lies curled up on the floor and pants, but onlookers block the view partially.

‘Get them out of here,’ Anna whispers to Barry. ‘Then come back.’ She squeezes through the crowd and squats down, placing the lantern at her feet. ‘I’m Anna. I’m a nurse. I can help you if you wish.’ Her hand reaches out; the clean, white skin is in stark contrast to the grime on the girl’s rags. Tears and dirt smudge her cheeks. A moan parts her lips, canker cracks, and yellow teeth gleam in the unsteady light.

The moan transforms into a shriek. While she waits for the contraction to subside, Anna takes in the room. Judging from the refuse, the number of makeshift mattresses, and the stink, more than twenty people must be sleeping here. Barry is trying to usher them out. His success rate amounts to about fifty per cent.

The girl regains her senses. ‘Hello,’ Anna says. ‘Can I see how you and your child are doing?’
 

She nods and wipes spittle off her chin. Anna holds the lantern higher, illuminating the too-young face. ‘Can I touch your stomach?’

‘Already said yes, didn’t I?’ the girl hisses with the next contraction rolling over her.