Page 37 of A Vocation of Violence
“Could be nothing,” I allowed, unwilling to spar with him when there were larger games afoot. “But that’s why I think Croft is the one with the most ability to follow this clue to its origin.”
Jorah and Night Horse were glaring at each other like two storm clouds ready to clash. The air bristled with their silent confrontation dark looks exchanged with the subtlety of a loaded pistol beneath a dinner jacket.
“Your dispute seems a private affair,” I ventured, attempting to gauge the crux of their tension.
“Private affairs have a way of becoming public display,” Night Horse retorted, his voice low and dangerous.
“Especially when blood has been spilled,” Jorah added, fixing Night Horse with a glare that could freeze the Thames over.
“Enough,” I said sharply, rising to stand. “We are allies inthis, whether by choice or circumstance. Let’s not forget that.”
The room settled into a begrudging truce as I folded the handkerchief, tucking it away like a card yet to be played. The scent of old leather and lingering tobacco wrapped around us—a shroud for secrets too perilous to unearth.
“Then we’re agreed,” I concluded. “The handkerchief will go to Croft, along with our collective silence on certain matters.”
A chorus of reluctant nods followed, each man steeped in his own brew of suspicion and fear.
“I was half hoping the evidence would point to Drumft,” I muttered.
“Drumft,” Jorah growled, the name leaving his lips like a curse. “He never treated Vivienne as she deserved. Used her beauty for his gain and discarded her spirit like waste.” The scorn in his voice was palpable, laced with a venom that suggested a personal vendetta against the Prussian dignitary.
“More than that,” Darcy chimed in, “she told me of his beatings. Oswald’s temper is infamous, but with Vivienne… It was a cruelty that ran deeper.”
“Why do you think he hurt her?” I asked, a cold fury rising inside me. “Is he a sadist, you think?”
Jorah’s expression tightened, the lines around his eyes deepening. He hesitated, then released a breath he seemed to have been holding for an eternity. “He’s an antisemite.”
“What?” I gasped, when no one else made a sound.
“Vivienne was more than what the world saw,” he confessed, his voice suddenly low and intimate. “The name she bore when we met…was Blumfeld.”
“Blumfeld?” Tunstall repeated incredulously, while Night Horse simply stared, a carefully blank expression advertising that he was ignorant to the revelation.
“She was a Jew,” I murmured.
Jorah nodded gravely. “Concealed behind a gentile mask. We were both refugees in the Jewish Quarter when the world was harsher, colder. She shed her heritage like a second skin, lost her accent, and wove a new identity from sheer will. Vivienne used every ounce of her guile and ambition to ascend London’s social ladder. She was a fierce soul, even then, determined to escape the squalor and make something of herself.”
“Which she did,” I said, unable to keep the admiration from my voice. “At great cost.” Vivienne’s past held more shadows than I had imagined, each one a potential motive wrapped in the fabric of her untimely demise.
“She was remarkable,” Darcy agreed, though his tone bore the weight of a man mourning the loss of an era. “But now she’s gone, and all that’s left are the secrets she kept and the enemies she made.”
“Enemies who might kill because of her heritage,” I added, the severity of our situation settling over me like a shroud. There was much at stake—more than mere reputations. It was a matter of life and death, tangled in the web of Vivienne’s mysterious past.
“Vivienne Bloomfield-Smythe,” I mused, the name now holding the power of a once-concealed truth. “A rose by any other name…”
“Can still harbor thorns,” Tunstall finished.
“Vivienne had a fire in her,” Jorah murmured, the Russian lilt of his accent more pronounced in the somber quiet. “A spirit that even the darkest alleys of Whitechapel couldn’t snuff out. And now…” He trailed off, clenching his jaw so tightly that I thought it might shatter.
The hush that fell over the Shiloh room was as thick as the London fog outside, cut only by the occasional crackle from the hearth. Jorah stood apart, his gaze lost in the roaring fire, a man adrift on a sea of regret. His voice, when he finally spoke, carried the weight of a thousand sorrows, each word etched with a pain that seemed to transcend mere grief.
I watched Darcy, the Dublin Destroyer, a man whose reputation for ferocity in the ring was matched only by the depth of his loyalty. He stood silent, the usual spark in his green eyes snuffed out by grief. Yet even in mourning, it was Jorah’s anguish that drew my eye—raw and unguarded. I noted this discrepancy, the incongruity of emotion between former lover and current. The observation left me unsettled, a piece of a puzzle I was reluctant to place, for fear it would reveal a picture too grim to face.
It was Darcy who broke the stillness, his voice hollow with shock. “A Jewess,” he breathed, his broad shoulders sagging under the weight of this new knowledge. “I wish she’d trusted me enough to tell me…after I trusted her with…”
“It wouldn’t have mattered to anyone here,” Tunstall interjected, his usual brusque demeanor faltering. His face, often stern and unreadable, now betrayed a clear sense of astonishment. “How did she manage to keep such a thing secret in a city that thrives on gossip?”
“By being smarter than the lot of us,” Jorah answered, a bitter edge to his tone. “And by understanding that some secrets are a matter of survival.”
