Read The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery Online

Authors: Annelie Wendeberg

Tags: #london, #slums, #victorian, #poverty, #prostitution, #anna kronberg, #jack the ripper

The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery (4 page)

BOOK: The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery
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Anna turns to see where Barry is, but the dark room has swallowed him. The hairs on her neck prickle. She feels a tension in the air, as though the walls are anticipating a thunderclap.

She collects more straw and a threadbare blanket, and spreads them out to make a softer bed. As the girl’s contraction subsides, she helps her over and examines her abdomen. The child’s head is already very low in the girl’s pelvis. Her skirts aren’t wet, the water bag must still be intact. ‘How long have you been in labour?’

‘Mighta been yesterday.’

‘Your first child?’
 

‘Na.’ She waves her hand dismissively. ‘First one died within the hour.’
 

Anna swallows a sigh. The girl couldn’t be older than — what? Fifteen, sixteen years? Had she ever had a menstruation, going from childhood to first pregnancy to the second?
 

A tap on her shoulder makes her jump.
 

‘Howshhe?’ The voice of gin — raspy and about to tilt. It makes Anna feel alone and small. ‘Vomman, anshwer mee!’
 

The girl in front of her begins to labour again, tearing her attention from the man behind her. A second later, pain jerks her upwards, together with a fist in her hair. ‘Ashhked ya ’ow me girlie ish!’ Spittle wets her cheek. The stink hauls bile up her throat. For a short moment, she considers using the jackknife hidden in her sleeve, then decides against it. With all her might, she inserts her knee in the man’s testicles. Grunting, he drops.

‘What ya doin’, ya trollop?’ shouts the girl and kicks Anna’s shin. The water breaks and gushes over her exposed legs. Her screams gain in pitch. People are moving closer now, mumbling demands Anna cannot understand over the girl’s complaints.
Trapped
, is all she can think.

The crowd parts, and a man steps through. He dominates the room instantly. A skinny boy is peeking out from behind his legs. ‘What ya doin’ here?’ Garret’s voice booms.

‘Knitting, quite obviously!’
 

The girl has just begun to push. ‘Squat, if you can,’ Anna suggests between two contractions.
 

The girl tries it once, but too exhausted to keep herself upright, she lies on her side again. Anna pushes the skirt farther up to watch the progress of the child through the birth canal. The head begins to crown. An inch forward, half an inch back; the rhythm of birth. Like waves, the contractions wash over the mother to carry the child ashore.

Anna cups her hands around the child’s head as it descends. In the dim light of the lantern, the small face looks almost normal. Its blueish tint is so subtle that one might believe it’s alive. But her fingers feel no pulse tapping against the slick skin of the child’s throat. Once the shoulders are born, the boy slips out easily. A wrinkled corpse, so small it hurts Anna’s heart. She picks him up and hands him to the girl. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers.

Neither of them speaks until the placenta wants to be born. ‘Push once,’ Anna says, tugging gently at the umbilical cord. A few moments later, Anna wipes her hands on a kerchief, checks the girl’s bleeding, and rises to her feet.

The girl nods decisively and reaches out, offering the small corpse. Dumbstruck, Anna steps back. A large hand grabs her shoulder. ‘Time to go,’ Garret growls.

‘You can sell it for a better price. At your hospital,’ calls the girl and Anna pushes past Garret, past Barry, past the crowd, and stumbles down the stairs.

Heavy footfall sound behind her, a
clonk clonk
on cobblestones, then the call of a steam engine. ‘Will ya stop, for Christ’s sake!’ She obeys and looks up at Garret, his hair wild, his arms hugging her doctor’s bag.
 

‘Where’s Barry?’ she asks.

‘He’s fine. Took ’im outa there an’ sent ’im home. Shoulda given tha’ boy a good spankin’ for lettin’ ya go into tha’ house!’ he barks.
 

She squints, as though his angry Irish accent would slide down easier that way.
 

‘They’re one o’ the mad ones! Havin’ four or five houses here with people like tha’! The fella ya knocked out? What did he do to ya?’

‘He fucked the girl.’

‘Well, congratulations!’ He chucks her bag on the pavement, arms waving. ‘’E might ’ave, and all others migh’ ’ave, too! Ya didn’ hit
’em.
Want ter go back and make up for it?’
 

‘Why did you follow me?’

‘Ya went into tha’ house, goddammit! Everyone ’ere knows they’re mad. It’s like an asylum for insane vermin. Only tha’ the bars are missing and ’em inmates seek each other out. There is nothing in their heads, didn’t ya see tha’? She wanted ya to sell her babe, knowing that ya get a better price for it and tha’ ya won’t keep the money for yerself!’

Anna nods, steps forward, and picks up her bag. ‘Stop shouting at me. Stop throwing my medical instruments about, and most of all — stop believing I need your help,’ she snarls and walks away.

After a few yards, she hears his footfalls yet again. ‘Fancy a tea?’ There’s an apologetic tint in his voice.

She groans, her eyes search the tips of her boots for an appropriate answer. ‘Brandy.’

He exhales in relief. ‘Sounds good. I know a place. It’s on me tonight,’ he says as though they regularly went for a drink. He takes the bag from her hand and walks by her side.
 

‘You know,’ she begins, ‘this is one of those nights I wish I lived in the countryside.’

‘You are naive.’

‘I know.’

‘That life is tough. You get up before sunrise, work hard all day, go to bed late.’

‘I know,’ she says again, wondering how he could not know that
this
life is much harder.

‘I grew up on a farm, a small sheep farm. My father taught me everything about it. How to care for the lambing ewes. How to move a herd, handle the dogs. When I was this tall,’ Garret points to his knee, ‘I helped my mother score and comb the wool. She always had soft hands…’ he trails off.
 

Anna flicks her gaze to his large hands and tries to imagine them much smaller, the size of a boy’s, helping a newborn lamb to reach its mother’s teats.
 

‘Here we are,’ he says a minute later, opening the door of a public house for her. She reads “The Rat’s Tail” scrawled in white paint over the door, then she’s hit in the face by noise and tobacco smoke so thick one could move it with a shovel.

‘Two brandies!’ Garret slams a coin on the greasy wood.
 

He hands one glass to Anna. His eyes widen as she chucks it all down in one fluid move. ‘Another one?’
 

‘Hmm,’ she agrees, tension slowly peeling off her. ‘Do you have siblings?’

He turns away; his mouth sags. The word, ‘Sister,’ is barely audible. Garret’s gaze sweeps the room. Suddenly, his bow crinkles and his eyes get stuck on something behind her back. She has no time to turn around. His fist flies past her face. A thud and a grunt behind her, then Garret shouts, ‘Blasted cockchafer!’ grabs her hand, and pushes past the clientele, parting the crowd like a large ship parts the ocean.

‘What was that about?’ she cries, once outside.

‘Tha’ fella... I know ’im. ‘E was ’bout ’ter…’ He looks down at her small hand in his large one. ‘Never mind.’

She wiggles free and he’s surprised by the twinge of disappointment this small gesture brings. ‘Sorry for tha’… word.’

‘Which one do you mean?’ she barks. ‘The blasted or the cockchafer?’

Garret’s face reddens considerably. ‘Never thought a woman like you would say that.’

‘I
live
in St Giles,’ she reminds him and walks ahead, tired and impatient with his brutishness.

‘You grew up in the countryside?’ he calls after her.

A smile scampers across her lips. He had listened. ‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘In Germany.’

‘Ha! And I thought you were Dutch.’ He laughs. ‘I knew a Dutch sailor once. Tattooed all over, that fella.’ He gestures at his chest, his large arms thrashing like windmill blades. ‘His ship got lost on its way down to India.’

Anna thinks of the Atlantic ocean, the waves rolling the vessel this way and that, the sunsets, and the vastness of the sea. She hums to herself.

‘Have you seen the ocean?’ he says. ‘Oh, you must have!’ He slaps his forehead. ‘I meant the
real
ocean, not the channel.’

‘No. Never,’ she lies and turns away. ‘It’s late. I need to go home.’

He nods, surprised his chest would answer her dismissal with a painful clench. ‘Oh!’ says Garret. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

She laughs. ‘I’m sorry, I thought I’d introduced myself weeks ago. Anna Kronberg.’

‘Nice to meet you, Anna.’

‘I’m a widow,’ she lies.
 

On their silent way back, Garret decides that he’ll keep an eye on this woman. Someone will take advantage of her someday, he is certain.

As they reach the door to her house, he stops and speaks to his hands. ‘The fella in the pub was a pickpocket and a burglar. He tried to steal your money.’

‘I noticed. I was about to tell him that I had nothing.’

‘But we all know you’re a nurse. You must earn at least fifty pounds a year.’ He looks at her as though he is offended.

‘And we all know,’ she replies, ‘that the nurse will leave if she doesn’t feel safe here. And we all know that good pickpockets, burglars, or whores earn more than fifty pounds annually.’ With that she turns and leaves him standing on the slick cobblestones.

Why, then, do you live here?
Garret wonders. There is no reason for a non-criminal to seek refuge in a rookery.

Whores

A
s she turns into Clark’s Mews, she cannot help but imagine the odour of rancid globs of ejaculate. Of course, one cannot smell it down here — not yet, not so close to the gutters and far from the moist sheets.

Girls and women between eleven and forty years of age litter the pavement. Their faces show anxiety, annoyance, or boredom. All customers were driven off by recent events. Income will be scarce for an hour or two, but once the winds have settled, men will return and quench their various appetites.

The only two men in sight belong here like the stink of semen and urine. Butcher and Nate, both providing a well measured dose of male brutishness to protect the flow of money to Clark’s brothels — one known as “Mum’s,” the other as “Fat Annie’s.”

Anna is waved into Fat Annie’s boarding house — decrepit, to say the least of it. The stairs yield under her weight as she climbs to the second floor; the wallpaper a pathetic joke with its leftovers slowly eaten by mould. Three tallow candles provide unsteady light. They must have been lit for her — an additional expense most of Fat Annie’s girls aren’t able to afford every day. But one of them was hurt tonight and now they act like a uniform mass of warrior ants against an intruder wasp.
 

Fingers point towards a room. Weeping trickles through the open door. She sheds all softness and steps in.
 

Blood on a wall. A thin sliver of dark red, arching from floor to ceiling. A blade must have been pulled through flesh with a violent swing.
 

A naked woman squats in the centre of the small room, held by two others. Whimpering seeps from all three mouths.

‘What happened?’ Anna kneels down in front of them. The two women peel off the third like petals of an opening flower. The girl’s right cheek is parted by a hideous gash, mouth and wound are one. Rivulets crawl along her jawbone, drip from her chin down to breasts the size of small peaches. A scarlet band is parting around a pink nipple. The blood on her stomach is smudged by comforting hands; knees have cut through the congealing mess on the floor.
 

Anna places a hand on the trembling girl’s arm. ‘I will give you morphia for the pain and stitch up the wound. You will look like new.’
 

She shows no reaction. Her eyes are wide, pupils small like pinpricks, her skin ashen.

While the two women hold the third, Anna fastens the tourniquet and inserts a needle into the elbow bend. Eyelids flutter, taut muscles soften.
 

All three carry her to the bed — a greasy thing that smells of sweat and sperm about to ferment. Armed with iodine solution, needle, and thread, Anna begins to work.

‘Do you know his name?’ she enquires softly. Yielding to the pressure of the curved needle, the girl’s skin breaks with a gentle pop, followed by the soft rasping of thread being pulled along.

‘No,’ one woman says. Palpable decisiveness in that lone word. ‘She dinna want ter suck ’is cock,’ she whispers, as though news of the neglect hadn’t spread already. Bad for the business if you don’t submit at first command.

‘He was her first one,’ explains the other.

Anna is closing the girl’s wound with the most delicate stitches she can accomplish. Too disfigured, men will pay her too little or even avoid her altogether. She might starve to death. ‘She will need help to heal,’ she says.

One of them nods. Anna wonders whether she’s the girl’s friend, whether she can afford paying twice the food and rent. The thought is a wisp of naivety against the bland backdrop of life. One beat of lashes and hope vaporises.

BOOK: The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery
11.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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