Page 78 of A Treacherous Trade
“I wish I was like you,” she said in a falsely bright voice. “Strong enough to swim against the current. Most of us… we know where the river is going, we expect to be swept away by it, and we just allow it to happen.”
Tucking the Ripper letter into a pocket, I went to her. “Not you, though. You changed your path. Your very existence disrupts the currents, and you are a force to be reckoned with.”
“Go on, you. What nonsense.”
“I mean it. I respect and admire you.”
Blushing, she flapped her hand at me. “Tosh. If you’re going to stand here, you might as well make yourself useful and stop trying to flatter me.”
With a fond smile, I opened the drawers on my side of the chest and lifted crinolines and bustle straps into the trunk. I tried not to think of the gravitas of the chore. Of the woman I’d never known, whose delicates I now handled.
I wondered if we would have liked each other, Alys and I.
After emptying the first drawer, and then the second, I found the third full of petticoats shoved in without order. Drawing them out in armfuls of frippery, I heard something fall against the floor.
I wrestled the layers of fabrics to the bed and returned to where Beatrice retrieved a bundle of envelopes from the ground. Tied with a single white ribbon, they bore no name or address, but were written on similar pale blue stationery.
“I’m almost afraid to read another letter today,” Bea said. “What if they’re dreadful?”
“What if they reveal the killer?” I asked.
She looked up at me with tears shimmering in her eyes.
I took the bundle from her frozen fingers and carefully untied the ribbon.
“I’m going to need a drink for this,” Beatrice said in a shaking voice. “Wait here, and I’ll pour us some brandy.”
“No need,” I murmured, scanning the first letter. “You’ll want to read this.”
She hurried to my side, looking over my shoulder for a moment, her breath close and heightened. “I can’t make out such tiny scrawl at my age,” she admitted, drifting over to the fireplace. “Read it aloud?”
“My love,” I began as Bea idly poked at the coals with a fine instrument, rekindling a long-burning blaze. “When you look at me across the room, the chandelier turning your hair into a waterfall of silk, I find I cannot say the words that fill my heart. And so, I am compelled to write them down or drown in them. My entire life, I’ve been told I was wicked, but I never knew how transcendent that word was until you. You are the divine and I am the profane. I worship you. And I live for the next time our bodies can move in reverence and with abandon. I cannot wait to begin our future together. You are a dream realized. And I am devoted to making yours a reality. Love always—”
I gasped, putting my hand over my mouth as grief drenched me.
“What?” Abandoning the poker to its place, Beatrice circumnavigated the bed, wringing her hands. “Who.”
“Love always, yourSappho.” I flipped through the stack of letters. “It looks like there are replies here as well.” I skimmed a few of the letters, no less lovely in their language. “They don’t sign their names…”
“Oh, Alys. Poor lamb.” It was Bea’s turn to sink to the bed, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the counterpane. A spate of coughs overtook her, leaving her pale and wan when she finished.
“Did you know?” I asked, handing her a glass of water I’d poured from the sideboard. “That she was in love with a woman? Do you have any idea whom it would be?”
She drank deeply, clutching the glass in her hand when she rested it on her knee. “No… we all lost Alys. We all wept for her. Or grieved in our own ways. But no one expressed any more heartache than the rest of us.” Bea looked up at me, her dark eyes shining. “Did the other girls mention anything about this?”
“Not a word.”
She made a caustic sound. Half laugh, half sob. “And here I thought all this time that Alys was shit at keeping secrets. This was one she didn’t have to keep. I would have given them a safe place to love each other.”
I put my own hand over hers, offering her a clean handkerchief. “Perhaps they were not ready to share their love with the rest of the world. Sometimes a love this powerful is more sacred than secret.”
She nodded. “All I can hope is that God is kinder than the Vicar Jewett believes. That they found each other in eternity somewhere.”
The vicar.I still needed to ascertain if Croft was going to investigate him.
“I really should go, Bea. The longer I’m here, the worse it is, I’m afraid.”
She patted my hand. “I understand.”
