Page 61 of A Treacherous Trade
ChapterThirteen
Inever saw him coming.
I was thinking of Charles Hartigan, Inspector Davies, and Jack the Ripper. About all the men who liked to hurt women, who enjoyed them tied and helpless or posed as supplicants in death, as Jack did. Men who behaved violently in the face of rejection, as if a woman’s scorn was the greatest challenge to their masculinity. Their civility.
Their humanity.
How many women died because they’d made a man feel less about himself?
The world of men disrespected women every moment. The weights and measures of their standards were so physically impossible, we caged our ribs to meet it. They laughed at us constantly, patted our heads like children, and told us to sit down. They deemed our fears as hysteria, our needs as inconsequential, and our opinions as adorable or ignorant.
And though it irked us—at times enraged us—we did what we must to endure.
So muchof our energy was expended just surviving men.
Burning with an ire that heated me against the frozen night, I marched from The Velvet Glove to The Orchard in the wee hours. The intensity of my wrath melted ice crystals unfortunate enough to drift into my atmosphere before they even landed on my skin.
The Strand turned into Fleet Street at Chancery Lane, and I needed to be alone with my thoughts, so the length of the walk didn’t bother me. Nor did I feel particularly unsafe at such an hour.
London was a city in which one was rarely alone, even on a night this dark and cold. We owed our lives to the denizens of these hours. The doctors and nurses. The midnight bakers. Watchmen on their fifteen-minute routes. The revelers. The lantern-lighters. Midwives. Even the lonely and those who offered them comfort, if only for a few minutes. They outnumbered the cutpurses and crooks by far.
Even so, I was always armed and usually alert.
After such an eventful day, however, I was both too distracted and agitated to sense the shift in the shadows until I was yanked into them.
Rough hands wrenched me off my feet like I was a rag doll and dragged me into the recesses of an alley where my assailant tossed me against the brick wall. The gap was so dark and tight, I hadn’t known it was there.
I shrieked as he ripped my spectacles from the bridge of my nose, and again when I heard them land on the cobbles with a sickening crunch. A hand slammed over my mouth and nose, inhibiting my breath but saving me from the juniper reek of gin drenching the man.
He had no face.
At least here, where he’d drawn me deep enough into this crevice, this purgatory between the dazzle of Fleet Street and the shadows of Hell, I couldn’t make him out.
He wore no hat, but I had the impression that a dark mask or cloth covering of some kind obscured his appearance. Thin enough to breathe through, but tight enough to distort any defining features.
With preternatural strength, he held me above the filthy floor of the alley with an arm dug into my ribs. I kicked and struggled like a fox caught in a trap. I was no rabbit, no animal of prey, but still my bones were delicate, and I had to rely on my wits and guile more than did predators larger than I.
The toe of my boot found his shin, and I dragged it down the bone, eliciting a growl of fury that could have been made by a bear. Instead of backing off, he bore down, using his entire body to imprison me to the wall.
I panicked then, fighting for a life that only had minutes left if I could not find some air. Bucking and pushing with all my might made little difference. I pounded on his shoulders, wishing I had no gloves on so I could claw his face. Frantically, I searched for purchase to bring my knee into contact with any part of him. The softer the better.
Except the part I found was not so soft, but hardening rapidly, and my struggles only seemed to make matters worse.
I went limp in his arms.
If fighting didn’t work, there were creatures that would play dead until an opportunity presented itself, andthenthey would strike.
This was more difficult than frenzy. It took every ounce of willpower I’d ever cultivated to force stillness. Readiness.
“There’s me good girl.” Uncultured and uncultivated, it was the most garbled Cockney I had encountered.
The Irishwoman in me wanted to bite him, to spit and fight and flail.
I wasnota good girl. I belonged to no one.
And he belonged to the Devil, which was where I would send him just as soon as I could move and breathe at the same time.
“I seen you working at The Orchard, and I thought to meself… why do those idiots pay for a fuck when its easy as this to take one?” Keeping one hand over my mouth, he reached down with the other to gather at my skirts.
