Page 102 of A Treacherous Trade
“He took it too far, obviously.” She held up her hands. “Isabelle, that idiot girl, probably misremembered the orders.”
“She was only good for one thing,” Charles leered from where he still blocked the doorway. “Well, two if you count the fucking.”
My confusion must have shown on my expression.
“Izzy procured my models for me for a nominal fee,” he added.
“Where is she now?” Amelia’s voice cracked with emotion.
Bea rubbed at her eyes, stretching the bags beneath them. “Yes, but it was Alys’s greed and her ego that did her in. She wanted a bigger cut, tried to leverage secrets to get them. To blackmail me. So I had Butler drown her in the river.”
“No.” Amelia gasped.
“Are you saying Izzy is dead, too?” I asked, doing my best to keep talking in a pathetic attempt to elongate my life.
Beatrice turned her remorseful gaze on me. She appeared almost contrite. “Isabelle liked you as well. It didn’t sit well with her, your attack. She began to have dangerous doubts… to talk nonsense. She should have learned from Jane’s mistakes.”
“Jane’s mistakes? What did she do?”
“Jane went to the police, and, luckily for us, it was a cohort of Davies she confided in. He brought the matter to me, and of course I had to deal with it.” Beatrice looked to us as if we would share her frustration, but she found no compassion between us.
Her idea of “dealing with it” was to poison the poor girl.
“Is that how you’re going to take care of anyone who defies you?” I slapped the table, so angry I wanted flip it over, to scatter the photographs and stomp them beneath my feet. “You’re just going to discard them—us—like so much rubbish?”
She shrugged. “I do what I have to. Just like you.”
“You hypocritical bitch!” I snarled, the strength of my wrath intensifying my dizziness, which in turn fueled my anger.
The woman had the gall to look incensed.
“I can’t believe I respected you,” I cried, incandescent with rage. “I admired your grit and your savvy. I cheered when you chopped the legs from under men who would oppress you. I appreciated that you gave women who would do this dangerous work a safe place off the streets. Away from Jack’s domain. Except they werenotsafe. Not from you.” I stabbed a condemning finger at her but had to put my hand back down on the table to stop the world from swaying beneath me like a ship in a storm.
“They would have been safe, if they had any loyalty,” she countered, venom stinging her every word. “But in this game, one does what one must to survive.”
“Don’t you dare think you’ve won,” I warned her. “All these disappearances will lead to your doorstep, or do you not remember that the police are on their way to your establishment, if they aren’t there already?”
“What sort of imbecile do you take me for? Of course I didn’t forget. Which brings me to what happens to you…” She turned toward the door. “Charles, would you fetch the tray, please?”
The tray was already on something just outside their door, because he never left our line of sight to reach for it. Upon the silver perched three glasses of what appeared to be water.
Before Beatrice said anything, I already knew better.
“I am not a woman without a conscience. I find the thought of your suffering untenable. In here is a lethal dose of chloral. It will put you into a comfortable sleep and then paralyze your heart and lungs, so you slip away softly. You won’t feel a thing.”
“Yes,” hissed Charles from behind her. “Nothing is felt by the dead.”
I knew, without a doubt, that if we drank that poison, we’d be the next portraits he would take. I’d do everything I could to avoid such degradation.
“I’m not drinking that,” Amelia said.
“That is up to you,” Charles said with a pleasant, almost anticipatory grin. “But you’ll stay in here regardless… and it’ll take a day for you to be desperately thirsty. Three at most for you to wither away.”
Beatrice fetched silk gloves from a reticule and began to tug them on. “I’m going home to change and bathe, which is where the police will find me after they search the empty Orchard. That business with Isabelle took up almost our entire night, and I’m knackered. Once they inform me that the two of you are missing, I will launch a search the likes of which this city has never seen. One that will lead us to Indira here.” She motioned to the slumbering woman, still curled up on the hard ground. “I’ll cultivate a fiction wherein she hurt Alys and Jane over sheer whorish jealousy. She wanted to be the premier courtesan and needed to get rid of the opposition. When you two ventured too close to the truth, she’ll have killed you, as well, and then disappeared. Possibly back to India.”
“Gray will not stop looking for me,” Amelia warned. “Nor for my killer. You know how he is, like a hound on a fox hunt.”
“Well, India is a rather large place, Amelia, and after all this tragedy, I’m going to decide to sell and retire to the Continent. We all know how Inspector Croft hates to step out of his boundaries…” She chuckled at her own joke, and it was all I could do not to claw her eyes out.
