Page 19 of A Treacherous Trade
The door to the kitchen exploded open and heavy boots marched in, interrupting my question. “All right, you two, you win. I’ve decided I’m going to Scotland Yard to discuss this Inspector Orson Davies with Chief Inspector—” Croft suddenly went still and quiet for the space of several breaths before growling, “Jesus Christ.”
At that moment, I realized the screen had been placed in front of the window, and the sun wasn’t down yet.
Croft could see me stripped down to my corset, drawers, and stockings… or at least the shadowed outline behind.
“Get out of the kitchen, you rank pervert!” Amelia shrieked, striking him with something I could only assume was a wooden spoon, by the sound.
“What in God’s name, Amelia?”
“She’s trying on a gown I’ve made.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know some woman would be changing garments in my kitchen?”
“Inmykitchen,” she corrected him with another loud swat. “Now stop staring and leave.”
The sanctimonious Grayson Croft had been staring? I did my best not to preen at that information.
If someone thought you looked terrible, did they stare?
One would think not.
As he left, I forced myself to ignore his existence by conjuring the name of the man who made me forget all human emotion but for hatred.
The Ripper. He’d told me once in a letter that if I was searching for a killer, I’d find his motives if I investigated the victims. If Alys and Jane’s deaths were related, what traits did they share? Other than their vocation, obviously.
“Amelia, you mentioned you were close with Alys Hywell? More so than Jane?”
“Aye,” she replied, the spitfire draining out of her at the mention of her dearly departed friend. “She paid me to stitch her costumes. We spent a lot of time in this very kitchen, tittering and gossiping, when Gray was off at work.”
“Why only when he was out of the house?” I wondered.
“He doesn’t like to know how close I’ve remained tothe life.” That sisterly fondness crept into her smoke-cured voice once again. “Not after all he’s done to save me from it.”
“I understand that, I suppose.”
“I do and I don’t,” she said. “I am a firm believer that all we once were informs what we become. Of course, we can change, we can grow, but to think ourselves better than anyone else because we’re no longer as desperate as they are… Well, it’s not right. Not in my mind.”
“I agree,” I murmured, because I did.
“Anyway, Alys… She was everything Bea said. Vain, self-involved, a little devious. But she was also lively and funny and very warm-hearted. Generous with her compliments and her money and, of course, her favors. She was loud and bombastic, a notorious flirt. The lifeblood of any room one would find her in. And yet…”
Amelia broke away for a moment, the only sound the snick of a knife falling through potatoes. “There was a vulnerability to Alys as well. A sadness that I think she overcompensated for with all that gaiety. She was alone in the world, and so aware of it. No parents to speak of, or siblings. So many of us are orphans. Either without a family or… better off far away from them.”
The bleak note in her voice squeezed my heart.
I thought about Mary, who’d had a cruel father, one she’d turned tothe lifeto escape.
Then I thought of my kind da, and my six murdered brothers lined up in a row on cold metal tables. I’d been left with nothing. No money, no opportunity but for factory work, where two of my cousins had already been killed or maimed. Mary had sent me some coin and a ticket to London. She’d set me up with a madam in a very upscale establishment, one she’d been kicked out of because of her drinking and carrying on.
She’d be happy to see me doing better than she did.
That was the kind of friend she was.
“I was orphaned,” I told Amelia, surprising even myself. “I was going to turn to the profession out of… financial desperation.”
“I see,” she replied carefully.
“Croft mentioned the two of you were also orphaned. Quite early, I gather.”
