Page 50 of A Vocation of Violence
We spoke then, not of nightmares, but of the innocence we’d lost—the childhoods stolen by the cruel hands of fate. It was a dance of words and memories, a delicate choreography where pain met comfort, grief met understanding.
I hadn’t forgotten about the Ripper’s note or any other number of threats and troubles that belonged to me.
But I seized this moment with everything I had.
Because this path may lead me to doom…but my footsteps were finally my own.
Chapter Sixteen
The disappearing sunlight slanted across the sitting room parquet floor, reaching for the small, toddling form of Tegan. It was a melody I’d come to cherish in the dim corners of my heart. On wobbly legs, the wee thing lurched toward me, her arms outstretched like the branches of an eager sapling reaching for sunlight.
I knelt on the floor, prepared to catch her should she falter.
Mary Sullivan, my housekeeper, clapped her hands from where she stood behind her daughter.
“Look at ’er go, Miss Fiona! Ain’t she just the cleverest?” Mary’s cockney lilt danced through the air as Tegan plopped into my arms, her giggles infectious and pure.
“Bravo, Tegan!” I exclaimed, the words a rare note of warmth in the otherwise chill room. Mary stood at the edge of the faded Persian rug, clapping her hands, her laughter pealing like church bells through the heavy air of my cozy Chelsea dwelling.
I’d drifted home this morning on sore legs and a cloud of satisfaction, my night with Night Horse a lascivious memory I visited with a secret smile at the most inopportune moments.
He’d been gone when I woke, and I’d dispelled the initial sense of disappointment with the sumptuous breakfast his staffprepared. We’d spoken of what the intimacy meant before we indulged.
Or, rather, what it didn’t mean.
What we shouldn’t expect.
I’d do well to remember that the man I’d ultimately chosen as a lover was a murderer for hire. A broken man whose heart was buried with his murdered wife and son in a grave on the other side of the Atlantic.
I reminded myself last night was a respite for two weary souls. Nothing more.
And that life was wondrous and weird.
At leastmylife.
“Me little bird’s already about to fly the nest.” Mary beamed with pride, her round cheeks flushed with the joy that only a mother’s love could paint.
She’d not said a word when I arrived home late morning in the same gown I’d left in the night before.
Instead, she’d brewed me a terrible cup of coffee and drawn me a bath.
I’d met Mary at Katherine Riley’s murder scene. The twenty-year-old girl had been recently widowed by a factory accident and had planned to use her husband’s last coin to give her baby up to a wealthier couple before she committed herself to the workhouse.
Maybe it was because she looked like my own Mary Kelly, or because I’d just found out that Katherine Riley would have cremated poor Tegan and pocketed Mary’s money like she had with Amelia Croft’s child. I lied to myself and said it was because I was a decent person…
But I hired Mary on the spot. A woman with exactly no training or knowledge in the art of housekeeping.
To my surprise and delight, she was a quick study and could do the work of two women all with her toddler underfoot.
As a bonus, Aunt Nola had taken to her immediately and been a bit healthier since Tegan’s sunny yawps filled our house with enough noise to drown out her ever-present spirit guides and their incessant portents of danger and doom.
“This little wanderer is a natural,” I replied, settling Tegan back onto the carpeted surface. The child gazed up at me, her eyes wide and trusting, as though the sordidness that lingered just beyond these walls could never touch her. I envied her blissful ignorance, wished I could shield her from the London that lay in wait—a beast with an insatiable hunger for innocent souls.
“Go on, darling,” Mary coaxed, kneeling and stretching out her arms to her daughter. “Show Miss Fiona one more time.”
Tegan took a tentative step, then another, her gait growing surer until she reached her mother’s embrace. They laughed together, a sound so sweet it almost banished the shadows from my heart.
The moment, however, was shattered as brisk knocks echoed against the oak door, a harbinger of reality’s cruel return.
