Page 22 of A Treacherous Trade
Mary stepped closer, smoothing a bit of Teagan’s russet frizz to her round head even as a speaking look made me forget what I’d been about to say.
“If you don’t mind me saying, miss, when me Joseph died…” She swallowed, then continued, “… people was always handing over advice like I asked for it. And I know it was kindly meant and all, but… I secretly hated ’em for it. And here I go about to do the same thing.”
She screwed up her courage, looking so vividly young, even though we were a scant handful of years apart. “I realize there are rules around what you're supposed to feel about the departed, and for how long. But whoever came up with them was a right git, if you ask me. The way I sees it is… you feel what you feel because that's what you feel.”
I felt my tense face crack into a smile. The whole of her philosophy was charmingly, absurdly simple, and yet infallible.
“You mourn for as long… or in my case, as short as you do,” she continued. “I loved me Joseph with all me ’eart, but we ’adn't known each other long enough to build a life or even many memories, past the notches we put in our bedpost and the chaotic merriment of my pregnancy with Teagan. He was gone after little more’n a year together, and I’m supposed to be wearing the mourning garb and casting me eyes down for more than the whole of the time we even knew each other? Seems a bit loony, don’t it?”
It did. I had to admit.
“And since Joseph went so young, all I can think is, what if I died, too? What if I died before I never learnt to smile again? IneedTeagan to grow up with smiles and laughter. With a mother wot’s a whole woman, even though a part of her has been cut out. That’s important to me. I can’t make myself be sober a whole year or more. I weren’t really built like that. I’m silly and ridiculous and I find the world all sorts of funny and strange. I have to laugh at it.”
She paused to coo at Teagan, who wrapped her fist around the maid’s cap and tugged at the lace, pulling it askew. The young mother pried it from her daughter’s grip before turning sage and solemn eyes on me. “Me father used to say that some people were built to carry sadness in ’em. And I say, if you don’t want to give that sadness to God or to the gutter, then you carry it as long as you feel it. And bugger all who tell you when and where to put it down.”
“Thank you…” I managed, feeling as if my dark heart had been poked with a cauterized needle, allowing a pinprick of her light and warmth to permeate the gloom.
Drawn by the adorable, if bulbous, spherical impossibility that was Teagan’s head, I avoided the dribbly bits by tracing my fingertip down the bridge of her nose. She rewarded me with a sopping smile and the view of two little white ridges in the bottom pink of her gums.
“Oh my, she has some teeth in there,” I said, avoiding the grateful emotion threatening to close off my throat.
“And sharp little buggers, too,” Mary complained with her customary good nature. “It’s why she’s been an absolute monster of late, and will be for a few weeks longer, I think.”
I found a sudden and fervent gratitude at the prospect of spending the time away, even if it would be at a house of ill repute.
How did I couch this to my household, I wondered? I couldn’t very well say I was on my way to pretend to be a prostitute in order to help catch a killer the police didn’t seem in any hurry to find. That certainly wasn’t in mycurriculum vitae. In fact, it might be altogether illegal. I wasn’t sure.
Croft had said he would use his connections, of course, and if anyone had the ability to mobilize the powers at Scotland Yard to link two murders when one was already marked as solved on paper, it was him.
But my father had a favorite saying:It’d be easier to get blood from a stone.
And as many stones as Croft could break with his bare hands, I doubted he’d squeeze much blood from them, metaphorically speaking.
I’d vowed to let him try, but I wasn’t holding my breath.
“I suppose I should warn you now, Mary, but I might be gone on a long… position for a few evenings come this Thursday. Nola would need some extra care, and someone else to tend to the evening meal. Should I hire Mrs. Shively to cook for the week?”
“It isyouwho will need the extra care,Fiona,” shrilled a voice from behind me.
Startled, I whirled at the threshold of the parlor to see the slight and unsettled specter haunting the bottom step of the ornate staircase.
My aunt, Nola Mahoney, lifted a gnarled hand to pull back the black lace she often draped over her features. The veil was to help her walk among her spirit guides more easily, she claimed, to make them feel as though she belonged in their realm without fearing her.
But what had the dead to fear from an enfeebled old woman?
No, I thought that she wore the shroud so that when she heard the disembodied voices echoing through her troubled mind, she wouldn’t have to look up and see that no one was there to make the sounds.
Her veil created shadows and shapes where none existed, and therefore, when the voices came, she could pretend they were merely otherworldly company. Not malevolent demons, as she’d once assumed.
Or worse, her own mind turning on itself.
It was kinder, I thought, to let her assume this. Kinder than the hellish asylum I’d found her underfed and unwashed body wasting away in some years ago.
And certainly kinder than the truth.
She was, indeed, losing a bit more of her mind with each passing year, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“Aunt Nola.” I steadied my alarmed breaths as much as I could, before addressing her odd outburst. “What do you mean, I need to take extra care?”
