Page 25 of A Treacherous Trade
“It’s quite lucky I am neither of those things, then. Tough and full of gristle is this hide.” I smirked in spite of myself.
“One of them wears Jack's face,” she prophesied ominously. Her eyes went even more glassy as she went deeper into her troubled mind. “I-I had a dream. That the Ripper was old. He had a wrinkled face and knobbly hands. This means he is going to live long, Fiona. Or maybe that he already has. Perhaps you may not catch up to him. Perhaps… you should stop trying.”
There was no chance of that, but I realized now what all this hullabaloo was about.
Nola was worried for me.
She’d been aware of what happened to Mary Kelly. To all of Jack’s poor victims. She’d seen what a letter from Jack, peppered with words of admiration couched in thinly veiled threats, did to my composure. How it had threatened my sanity.
She was afraid for me.
For the danger I put myself in, not only when I worked my own trade, but when I searched for a killer in the blood of the dead. Anyone might feel this way on behalf of a beloved niece.
“If Jack is old, Nola, then you won’t have to worry about his overtaking me anytime soon, at least not before you pull me another reading, yeah? Maybe tomorrow the cards will be kinder. And I won’t be leaving the house before then.”
“It’s the young and powerful you need to have a care for,” she insisted, ignoring me altogether. “All these wolves at your door. Poor lamb. All these wolves and no one to kill them for you.”
Finally, I decided I’d had enough of this nonsense. Taking Nola about the shoulders, I steered her down the last step and toward the back kitchens by way of the dark squares.
“Nola, do you remember back in Limerick, that wolfhound old Seamus McGrady had in his pastures?” I asked. “Big as a horse, he was, and I kept asking old man McGrady if I could ride the beast.”
“Aye. I remember,” she murmured, allowing herself to be led by me.
“What if we got a dog? Someone to keep you company and entertained. To keep the house safer from the wolves, as it were. Would you like that?”
“That dog’s name was Lothaire, and he would take naps and accept treats as the O’Driscoll boys stole some of McGrady’s ewes. Useless creature.”
I sighed, settling Nola into a chair so I could put the kettle on. I wished I could tell her she didn’t have to worry so much.
I already knew I had wolves surrounding me, and the way I survived was to become a member of their pack. I walked a very thin line, performed a very skilled and intricate dance to keep them at bay. To convince them of my loyalty and my discretion.
Lest they turn on me.
ChapterSix
Was I going to go through with this?
Was I, Fiona Ina Muerin Mahoney, going to don the uniform of a prostitute and join the denizens of the night?
Standing on the ledge off my back door that dared to call itself a balcony, I leaned on the railing and watched evening shadows elongate over my back garden. I suppose I should say it was Nola’s garden, as she was the only soul who tended to it. Though it was a testament to her deteriorating state, I thought, that she’d neglected to clip the dead and frozen blooms this winter, leaving a strange bed of floral corpses wilting beneath overgrown hedges. I should pay someone to clean it up before spring, when I hoped that things would improve for us both.
Perhaps her distress, too, could be laid at my feet. I hadn’t been well since Aidan’s death, and her anxiety for me might have made everything worse.
Lord, but I was a fool. I needed to do better by her. By everyone.
Somehow.
I hunched over a large tin of tea, linking my fingers around it as if the warmth might spread to my core.
It didn’t.
However, I would brave the cold for a moment of blessed silence in which to organize my thoughts. Or perhaps my feelings.
When confronted by the skepticism of others, it’d been easy to stand my ground and stubbornly debate the reasons I should be going to The Orchard to gather information.
But in my quiet moments, uncertainty leaked in through the cracks in my courage.
What business had I doing this? What expertise? What sort of trouble could I land myself in, either legally or otherwise, that would have repercussions on the people who relied on me?
