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 (5 page)

BOOK: The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery
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She stands up and finds a woman leaning her massive backside against the door frame. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow night to examine the suture,’ Anna says and gets a
shweeeet
of air sucked through fat lips as a reply. ‘If she takes customers too early, this wound will never heal, and she’ll be of no use to you.’
 

The madam tips her chin. Anna finds no pity in her face. A boy slips into the room, holding out a bowl with water. ‘Ma’am,’ he squeaks at Anna. She takes the offer and washes her hands. Brown lumps settle on the grey zinc bottom.

When she walks towards Clark’s Mews’ exit, passing Mum’s boarding house, she hears laughter from within. A man steps out of the front door, burps, and tips his cloth cap at her.

She steers towards home, and tiredness settles heavily on her shoulders. Onlookers have long closed their windows, but have taken a minute to empty their chamberpots one last time before retiring for the night. Urine is still trickling down the walls and a fresh wave of sewage begins to crawl along the street. Anna wishes for rain and that her feet wouldn’t feel so numb.
 

She crosses Broad Street onto Endell, passing dark shop windows and a group of what she believes are young thieves getting ready for the night. They greet her with a grin and a nod, hands deep in their trouser pockets. Otherwise, the streets are empty. Vendors will come back tomorrow around five in the morning to begin a day like any other. Buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, while the whores and the thieves are sleeping.

A few more steps, and Anna comes to a halt and sits down. Her ribcage is clenching, her eyes burning. She knows precisely why she’s doing this to herself, why she cannot rent a room in a nice house, one that has a housekeeper with manners instead of a gin problem, one that is clean and even warm in winter. One without death, disease, and violence surrounding her. ‘No use to ask yourself that same damned question again,’ she growls at herself.

Two large boots come to a halt in front of her. Without looking up she says, ‘What do you want, Garret?’

He clears his throat. ‘Saw you sitting here and thought you might be needing something.’

‘Do you have a cigarette?’

‘Hum…’ He grunts, one foot tapping indecisively. ‘In a minute, for sure.’ He dashes off and Anna considers running the other way. But she’s too tired, and she’d have to bump into him another day and possibly explain herself. Hoping he won’t start a brawl with someone who looks funny, she remains sitting.

A few moments later, Garret returns. His chest is heaving from the run. He fumbles with tobacco and paper, then holds out a cigarette to her.

The fine golden down on the back of his hand looks cleaner than the day he had stumbled into her room. He has looked cleaner ever since. She squints at him. Does he wash regularly?

‘Thank you,’ she says, moving to the side a little so he can sit if he likes to.

The doorsteps are a little too narrow for both of them, but he squeezes in nonetheless.

‘You look tired,’ he says.

She leans her chin onto her palm and watches the fog rise. ‘Look.’ She points, and Garret watches the everyday spectacle as though he has never seen it before. Tendrils waft into the street, covering puddles with delicate frosting, then grow thicker until a breeze pushes them back to where they came from.

‘You have shit on your shoes,’ he observes.

‘I have been at Clark’s Mews.’ She bends down and unlaces her boot, pulls it off, and whacks it against the wall. ‘Dammit,’ she mumbles.

‘Let me try.’

She gives her shoe to Garret, and he whacks and whacks until the last bit dislodges. ‘Thank you,’ she says, putting her boot back on.

Tobacco smoke mingles with rising fog and the stink of the Thames. Anna sees herself with the eyes of her colleagues — a cigarette touching her lips without a tip separating the unwomanly thing from her skin, her hands are gloveless, her hair short, her shoes stink of excrement. None of the good doctors would recognise her, should they ever dare place their lacquered boots in this part of London.
 

‘Want me to bring you home?’ he asks.

‘If you are in need of a woman, go this way.’ She points to where she has just come from. Her tone, devoid of emotion, cuts him deeper than fury.

‘That’s not what I meant!’ His orange hair sticks out in all directions as though indignation has shot lightning through his skull.

‘What do you mean, then? You want me to believe we
accidentally
run into each other every so often? I’d never seen your face until the day you fell into my rooms, bleeding all over the place. Now I see you almost every evening. Why is that?’

‘Only mean to protect you,’ he grumbles, rising to his feet. ‘You saved my life. You don’t belong here; you don’t
need
to be here, and everyone knows it. Some are just waiting to take advantage of you.’

She sees his broad shoulders sag and feels an odd urge to apologise, or at least explain. ‘A girl’s mouth had been slit open because she didn’t want a cock in it. The man didn’t take the time to notice or even care that she is only a child.’

Garret sits back down and, not knowing what might be the appropriate thing to say, takes her hand into his, sucks at a corner of his shirt, and uses the moist thing to rub a speck of blood off her wrist.

‘Why are whores wretched, I wonder. Seems like a rule: whores are wretched. Even the ones that do the gentlemen,’ he muses and inspects both her hands for more blood, but finds none. ‘Maybe men leave their wretchedness inside a whore. Cleanse themselves of it, in a way.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never had a prostitute.’ She extracts her hand from his grip.

‘I didn’t say that, did I now?’ He presses his lips to a thin line. ‘I never believed I owned them! Don’t want to be owned by anyone myself. Always trying to treat others the way I want to be treated.’ He clears his throat. ‘I’m lucky. No one would take me serious with that soft head of mine if it were set on a normal body.’

‘It works. You scared me,’ she confesses.

‘Didn’t mean to. I mean, scare
you
.’

They watch a cat cross the street. Her ribs grind against the inside of her coat, shoulder blades pointing toward the night sky. The moonlight cuts her bony outlines onto the pavement. She steers towards them until a rodent sticks its nose too far out of a piece of banged-up piping. As the cat jumps, it is as though two black cats separate, one in the air, one street-bound. A moment later, they touch paws again.

‘Men hate whores because they show us what we are,’ says Garret.
 

Anna opens her mouth and shuts it again.

‘They know we are a herd of horny monkeys with a variety of appetites,’ he adds.

The
crunch crunch
of cat teeth on rodent bones is barely audible over Garret’s low voice. Whatever kind of judgement was forming in Anna’s head topples into nonexistence with these two sentences of his.
 

‘Whores serve as a refuse heap,’ she begins. ‘A set of arms to weep in, a lover, sister, mother, child, punisher. Whatever a man needs, he can buy it for a few shillings, maybe a sovereign if it’s
special
. Thousands of whores live in this city. They are doomed to die early, be it from disease, from sloppy abortions, or from having been used so often that their souls bleed out their orifices.’

‘You don’t hold men in high esteem,’ Garret says.

‘I don’t hold pretence in high esteem.’

‘What do you… You don’t think I…’

‘No!’ She slams a fist against her forehead. ‘Simple calculation: there are about eighty thousand whores in London, all receiving between three and ten customers each day. That makes a lot of Londoners lying in the arms of someone they despise in public.’
 

A flock of street urchins hurries past them. Their squeals of delight seem to be directed at a man who has just entered the street. There, where the lone lantern stands. The gleaming silver knob of his walking stick betrays his idiocy. The thing is whacked from his hand, his clothes are tugged off, and only seconds later, all he’s left with is his birthday suit.
 

Anna rubs her brow. She is struck by an oddity. People here are saving their non-existent money by sharing rooms. They are honeycombing themselves and their meagre belongings into rooms the size of a cupboard. Yet, Garret has his one mattress, his one hook on the wall, his one creaky chair all for himself. When she asks him about it, he falls silent for a long moment, and she begins to think her question might have been too private.

Then, he finally answers. ‘I don’t understand most people. And I
like
living alone.’

Anna’s head turns, her eyes glued to a man she doesn’t know a bit.
 

‘Besides…’ He breaks off, his face heating with shame.

‘What?’

He coughs and shakes his head. ‘It’s…embarrassing.’

‘Oh.’ She’d like to know what’s so embarrassing, but doesn’t want to press him. At least not directly. She puts her chin into her hand again and traps his gaze with hers. It takes a while, but shows effect.

‘Can you keep it?’ Forget-me-not eyes blink at her.

‘I will,’ she answers, and adds in her mind,
I keep so many secrets that sometimes I don’t know where I left my head
.

‘I…read.’
 

It takes her a moment, but puzzle pieces fall together eventually. ‘The dangerous Irish thief cannot be seen with his nose in a book. People would think him a harmless freak. Who taught you how to read?’

‘My father. He wanted to give me the farm when I’m old enough, so he taught me bookkeeping and all.’

‘What are you reading?’

He shrugs. ‘Um…books?’ She squints at him, and he shrugs again. ‘This and that.’
 

He doesn’t want to say that he reads what he finds in the houses he burgles. ‘The one I’m trying to read now makes me all cross-eyed. From some idiotic fella named Percy Shelley.’

He turns his head away.

‘Why are you ashamed?’ Her voice is like a soft caress, trickling down his spine. He feels a sudden urge to press his face to her bosom. Instead, he gazes towards the one lit lantern, far down the street, where a naked man holding his crotch staggers out of the yellow light.

‘I told you so you wouldn’t think I’m a stupid brute. But now that I told you,
I
think I’m a stupid brute.’

‘I don’t like that Percy fella, either,’ she says with a smile. ‘Try Mary Shelley next time. And no, she’s not related to Percy. She’s all together different material.’ With that, she rises and touches his shoulder as a farewell, knowing precisely he would insist on leading her home safely.

The Girl

T
he stairwell is dark this time and the steps seem to be creaking louder as Anna ascends to the second floor. The women go about their usual business and only one is in bed without company. Anna knocks and — not expecting an answer from the severed mouth — she enters. ‘Hello.’

The girl sits on her bed, her shoulders squared, chin set. Her face is swollen; black silk threads stick out of the wound, giving her a monstrous, tilted grin.
 

‘How are you doing? You can nod or shake your head, no need to speak.’

‘I can sheak,’ she answers slowly. ‘’Ust’nt use sone ‘ords.’

‘I’m relieved,’ says Anna and places her palm on the girl’s forehead. ‘You have no fever. Good. How does the wound feel?’

The girl’s face begins to glisten.

‘You are my patient. I’m bound to never mention a word to anyone about your condition or what circumstances led to it. That includes your madam,’ Anna says.

Considering, the girl’s eyes glide out of focus for an instant. ‘I’n alright.’

Anna tips her head in reply. ‘I’ll examine your wound and give you something to speed up the healing process. If anything I touch hurts a lot, you must tell me. Otherwise, I might miss an infection that could kill you. Do you understand?’ She tries to make her voice soft.
 

The girl nods.

Anna disinfects her hands, dabs a little iodine on the wound, and gently probes with her fingers. Clear liquid exits the ragged cut. ‘Open your mouth, please.’

BOOK: The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery
3.42Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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