Page 37 of The Business of Blood
“I don’t imagine he’d appreciate being called that.”
He leaned in to account, “I observed Aramis Night Horse once at the Café Royal, you know. What an intoxicating sight he is.”
An inarticulate noise of disbelief squeaked out of my nose. “That’s what you’re concentrating on? I tell you about a perfectly gory murder, not to mention the fact that my throat was nearly slashed, and all you can think about is who took off my blouse to doctor the wound?”
He slid me a mischievous smile. “To be perfectly fair, darling, we’ve discussed your gory murders a multitude of times, but I’m unaware that anyone, as yet, has taken off your blouse. You are both a paradox and a prude.”
A virgin and a whore. Like Salome.
“You take that back, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde!” I shrieked, tossing a linen at him in mock outrage. “I amnoprude. I’ll have you know my fiancé removed my blouse more than once upon a passionate interlude.”
“You’re referring to the pulchritudinous priest that calls around sometimes?”
“You know I am.” I did my best to wither him with my glare.
“Yes, but instead of properly debauching you, he joined a famously celibate order, didn’t he? More’s the pity. Why do you think that is?”
I poured myself a second cup of coffee. Oscar’s wit was most often entertaining, but at times, it came with a cutting price. “Don’t be cruel,” I admonished. “He broke my heart.”
“The heart was made to be broken.” He waved his cigarette lavishly. “Everyone knows that. Your tragedy is that you’re still in love with a man who is in love with God.”
I was in no mood to discuss my tragedy, and so, we sat in silence for a moment, listening to the vibrant sounds of the morning and the commotion of industry filtering in from the river.
“The book of life begins with a man and a woman in a garden, does it not?” Oscar observed dreamily. “It ends with Revelations. I hope we shall be, from now until the end, revealing ourselves in the garden after such adventurous nights.”
“Now until the end of what?” I mused.
A world-weary sound escaped him as he motioned to our spacious, tidy houses and lovely gardens. “The end ofthis…whatever this is. Matrimony, civility, prosperity.”
Did he mean ours, his, or England’s, I wondered?
Troubled, I placed my hand over his. “Is something bothering you, Oscar?”
He shook his head, no, but answered the question in the affirmative. “I’ve been having dreams lately. Nightmares full of dire warnings and signs…apocalyptic, really. And yet, I can’t seem to heed them. To do so would require me to change who I am, and that I cannot bring myself to do.”
The hand beneath mine trembled a bit, and I wondered if he was in danger.
Or worse, in love.
“I know this goes against everything we Irish believe,” I said, doing my best to offer comfort. “But I’ve long held dreams are merely the conscience tending to your fears, desires, and memories while you sleep. I dream of my family’s death often. Of Mary’s. I dream of the Ripper. I think I do because they are so often with me whilst I’m awake.”
“You truly think so?” His lively eyes widened with a bit of hope.
“Categorically,” I lied. In truth, I hadn’t made up my mind about this musing quite yet, but I thought it was something both of us needed to hear. Nightmares had a way of following one into the morning, and neither of us wanted that. “It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one encounters,” I told him. “It makes life too full of terrors.”
An inspired smile replaced his brooding frown, and he extracted a short pencil and a little diary from the pocket of his vest. “I’m writing that down,” he informed me, as he often did. “I may just use that later. Now, let’s not dwell on our sorrows whilst we can be entertained by those of others. Tell me more about this Frank Sawyer and his turquoise beads.”
At this, I paused. “I never really stopped to consider that the beads might, in fact, be Mr. Sawyer’s. I automatically assumed they belonged to the murderer.”
“To the Ripper?” He seemed to digest this slowly.
“Yes. But where would a poverty-stricken man like Mr. Sawyer obtain such rare and expensive stones?”
“He could have stolen them, I suppose,” Oscar postulated. “Perhaps from the murderer.”
It didn’t seem likely. “Mr. Sawyer wasn’t a thief. He was a hard-working, staunch Catholic with no enemies to speak of.”
“Ha!” Oscar swatted his thigh. “Then the murderer is not the Ripper, obviously.”
