Page 16 of A Treacherous Trade
“But Fiona’s right,” Amelia said. “Theydotalk to each other… keep their secrets among themselves. So many of them have no one else.”
“True…” Beatrice drew out the word.
Amelia tapped the air as if plucking an idea out of the space between them. “What we need is someone on the inside, as it were. Someone who they could learn to trust. Someone clever. Who would ask the right questions.”
In an eerily synchronized motion, both women’s heads swiveled to look at me.
“No.” I put up both hands. “Nonononono.I’d make a terrible—I mean—That is—No one would believe I—”
“Because you’re a virgin?” Beatrice’s head cocked to the side as if it were an affliction she pitied.
I lifted my hand to my own forehead, wondering if I had my virginity scrawled there for worldly people to read. She’d not been the first person to guess I’d never taken a lover, and certainly not the first pimp, I was ashamed to note.
“No! Because I’m nearly thirty and—let us kindly say—well fed.”
“You are lovely, Fiona Mahoney,” Amelia replied, with genuine emotion and a sparkle in her eye. “Any number of men would pay a pretty penny to warm your bed.”
I gestured to Beatrice. “That is decidedly not what she said when she thought you’d brought me here to work for her.”
“I was distraught.” Beatrice shrugged, raking me with another assessment, this time with a more favorable eye. “With a bit of color in your cheeks and the right clothing, you could sell the devil out of the reluctant mistress, or perhaps the buxom and desperately lonely widow. Oh! The curious and tempting spinster schoolteacher. Not the innocent ingenue, per se, but still a sort of woman so many men would just kill to corrupt.”
“Oh yes!” Amelia clapped her hands together. “That would be splendid… Large, sad eyes. She can keep her spectacles on. Show plenty of ankle and tits. I have just the costume to accentuate all the right areas.”
I put my hands over the pertinent areas, as if they might see through my many layers of clothing with their unrelenting gazes. “I’m happy to help the two of you in any way I can, but my job is to clean up the blood, not solve the crimes or gather the information.”
“But wehaveno one else to solve the crimes.” Amelia put out her hands to show how empty they were of solutions. “There is no justice for women like us.”
“Just like there was no justice for Mary,” Beatrice said—the one thing that gave me pause. Had I not devoted my life to her justice? Just how far would I go to find it for her?
Did Jane and Alys deserve any less?
“I am not losing my virginity in a brothel,” I said. “I’m sorry if that offends you, but it’s not something I’m willing to do to solve a crime.”
“Of course not!” Beatrice stood and sniffed, lifting a stubborn chin so she could look down upon me like an imperious dowager. “I’m offended that you assumed that was part of our discussion. We’d give you Alys’s old room, of course, as I’ve not yet replaced her. She was more like one of the mistresses of Versailles holding court than a proper whore. Her time was engaged in advance, and her clients were spirited up the back way through the inn. The girls will be told this is also the case with you, and won’t be privy to the comings and goings—or lack thereof.”
I pressed my lips together against ano, and then castigated myself for even considering it. “I’m sorry,” I said firmly. “There’s nothing you can say to talk me into this. My answer will forever beabsolutely not.”
ChapterFour
“Absolutely not!” Grayson Croft roared. He stood like a sentinel, alternately scowling and roaring at the very idea I’d allowed his sister to break to him.
It irked me that I’d said the same thing, and through some technique of trickery and magic manipulation, I’d been brought around.
Judging from the thunderous look on Croft’s face, he wouldn’t be so easily persuaded.
Not that I blamed him. It had taken me the entire hackney ride from The Orchard back to the Croft residence to figure out just how I’d come to be influenced myself.
As I stood in the aromatic kitchen with the siblings at each other’s throats, I was surer of my decision than I’d ever been.
Because chief among my reasons was that Jack the Ripper wouldn’t like it.
These deaths had forced me to recognize that, though the Ripper had been pulled out of his hellish hiding hole to answer back for the perceived insult of imitation, he’d gone quiet again for the months I’d taken to mourn Aidan.
Which was both a blessing and a blight. Because he made himself known by taking a life, which I absolutely didn’t want…
And yet I still needed to find him.
This way, perhaps I could provoke him to come after me, rather than another hapless woman. And when he did, I would do everything in my power to be ready to face him when the time came.
