The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery

by Annelie Wendeberg

  ‘Can you keep it?’ Forget-me-not eyes blink at her.

  ‘I will,’ she answers, and adds in her mind, I keep so many secrets that sometimes I don’t know where I left my head.

  ‘I…read.’

  It takes her a moment, but puzzle pieces fall together eventually. ‘The dangerous Irish thief cannot be seen with his nose in a book. People would think him a harmless freak. Who taught you how to read?’

  ‘My father. He wanted to give me the farm when I’m old enough, so he taught me bookkeeping and all.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  He shrugs. ‘Um…books?’ She squints at him, and he shrugs again. ‘This and that.’

  He doesn’t want to say that he reads what he finds in the houses he burgles. ‘The one I’m trying to read now makes me all cross-eyed. From some idiotic fella named Percy Shelley.’

  He turns his head away.

  ‘Why are you ashamed?’ Her voice is like a soft caress, trickling down his spine. He feels a sudden urge to press his face to her bosom. Instead, he gazes towards the one lit lantern, far down the street, where a naked man holding his crotch staggers out of the yellow light.

  ‘I told you so you wouldn’t think I’m a stupid brute. But now that I told you, I think I’m a stupid brute.’

  ‘I don’t like that Percy fella, either,’ she says with a smile. ‘Try Mary Shelley next time. And no, she’s not related to Percy. She’s all together different material.’ With that, she rises and touches his shoulder as a farewell, knowing precisely he would insist on leading her home safely.

  The Girl

  The stairwell is dark this time and the steps seem to be creaking louder as Anna ascends to the second floor. The women go about their usual business and only one is in bed without company. Anna knocks and — not expecting an answer from the severed mouth — she enters. ‘Hello.’

  The girl sits on her bed, her shoulders squared, chin set. Her face is swollen; black silk threads stick out of the wound, giving her a monstrous, tilted grin.

  ‘How are you doing? You can nod or shake your head, no need to speak.’

  ‘I can sheak,’ she answers slowly. ‘’Ust’nt use sone ‘ords.’

  ‘I’m relieved,’ says Anna and places her palm on the girl’s forehead. ‘You have no fever. Good. How does the wound feel?’

  The girl’s face begins to glisten.

  ‘You are my patient. I’m bound to never mention a word to anyone about your condition or what circumstances led to it. That includes your madam,’ Anna says.

  Considering, the girl’s eyes glide out of focus for an instant. ‘I’n alright.’

  Anna tips her head in reply. ‘I’ll examine your wound and give you something to speed up the healing process. If anything I touch hurts a lot, you must tell me. Otherwise, I might miss an infection that could kill you. Do you understand?’ She tries to make her voice soft.

  The girl nods.

  Anna disinfects her hands, dabs a little iodine on the wound, and gently probes with her fingers. Clear liquid exits the ragged cut. ‘Open your mouth, please.’

  Her lips are parting just a fraction. With an uhnf, she closes her mouth and shakes her head.

  ‘I know,’ says Anna. ‘Can you try an inch? I need to take a quick look only.’

  The girl’s eyes get glassy when she opens up her mouth, the fingers of one hand pressing against the corner of her lower lips to lessen the tension on the suture.

  Anna twists her neck to peek through the small opening. The girl’s teeth are two curved rows of pearls in a tortured oyster.

  As gently as possible, Anna inserts two fingers into the girl’s mouth, moves the tongue aside, and uses her other hand to hold a candle close enough to see the inside. The cheek looks raw and inflamed. ‘Did you eat anything?’ she asks when she cleans her hands on a kerchief.

  The girls shakes her head.

  ‘I thought so.’ Anna pulls a bunch of dried camomile from her bag. The valuable disinfectant would be taken from her patient in less than an hour, while camomile is but a weed of no particular interest. ‘Can you walk around and make yourself tea from this?’

  She nods.

  ‘It is important that you wash your mouth at least five times a day with camomile tea. The inflammation will go away, and the pain, too.’

  The girl nods.

  ‘What happened?’ slips out of Anna’s mouth.

  Shame begins to colour the girl’s face. ‘Scared ’ee.’ Her eyes water, she shakes her head as if to get rid of the memory, then she lies down and stares at the ceiling.

  Anna watches her unmoving figure for a long moment, then touches her arm. ‘You will be better soon.’

  The girl turns her face away.

  Anna rises and makes to leave. When she holds the doorknob in her hand, she hears a whisper from the bed. ‘He loohes his knihhh.’

  Returning to the bed, she asks, ‘He loves his knife?’ and receives a nod in return. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Ex…Ekhen’ive.’

  ‘Expensive?’

  Another nod.

  ‘’Other of ’earl handle. He did…’ The girl lifts her right hand, her index finger and middle finger straight out like a blade. She caresses her face with the pointy tip, slides it down her throat, around her breasts, down her stomach where her knife-hand compacts to a trembling fist.

  ‘Did he cut you there?’ Anna asks, but knows the answer already. There was no blood leaking from the girl’s vagina last night. ‘Are you still a virgin?’

  The girl nods again.

  Behind her back, Anna curls her one hand around her other compacted one, but the tension won’t lessen. ‘The madam will let you stay here. I’ll come back tomorrow.’

  Descending the stairs, she tries to make sense of the little information she got. He must have asked for a virgin, for they are kept for the highest bidding customers. Was he a regular? Surely he must have paid for silence.

  The corridor to the parlour is blocked by the madam. ‘The girl wouldn’t speak a word,’ Anna lies. ‘I examined her. Her wound will heal in due time. And she’s still intact.’

  ‘Good,’ grunts the woman and crosses her arms over her chest. ‘We can’t pay you.’

  ‘You sold the virginity and health of one of your girls to a rich man only yesterday. Some of that money must still be in your possession.’ Anna holds out her hand and does something she’s never done before. ‘I have to charge five shillings.’

  Narrowed eyes pierce hers.

  ‘Make that a half-sovereign and you’ll keep your mouth shut,’ the madam says.

  Hot blood rushes up Anna’s face. ‘Since the man paid for a virgin but didn’t deflower her, will he return and ask for the money back, or will he ask for the services he paid for?’ She drops her hand.

  The madam calls over her shoulder, ‘Butcher! Our guest wishes to leave.’

  A man emerges. The nickname does him justice. His body is made for lugging halves of pig and cattle, his eyes are empty.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he says.

  ‘I will be back tomorrow,’ Anna says. ‘Should the wound get infected, the girl will die.’

  She leaves the brothel, wondering yet again why anyone had the need to cutify this place by calling it a boarding house. A bitter taste constricts her throat until Clark’s Mews is out of sight.

  Garret strikes another match on his boots, then searches the tall shelf. He is about to grow impatient when his eyes finally fall on “Shelley. Frankenstein.” He pries the volume — gently held by books on either side — from its place, opens it, and whispers, ‘Hello, Mary,’ then slips it into his shirt and proceeds with his primary goal.

  Strongboxes — or rather, their preferred hiding places — infected Garret with a love for stories. Often, he had to search the library, or the sitting room, if it wasn’t a too-well situated household he burgled, to find the strongbox hidden behind books. Sometimes, when he was lucky, a larger strongbox was concealed by a panel of fake spin
es.

  Once he followed a whim and picked up a slender book that was beautifully bound in fine leather with golden letters crawling across it. He was far from wanting to read it. To him, it looked valuable.

  And valuable it was. When he arrived at his room and stashed away his loot, he thought it couldn’t cause any harm to see if the pretty book contained anything entertaining. He’d never heard of Walt Whitman. But the following morning he awoke with his nose and cheek pressed flat against “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Drool had smudged the ink, giving him a somewhat reasonable excuse to not sell Mr Whitman to the duffer.

  Now, Garret makes to pry open the strongbox before him. This particular specimen had been hiding at the very top of the shelf, behind a disorderly stack of encyclopaedia, papers, and magazines. He’d had to climb a chair to find it, and the combined weight of burglar and strongbox make the furniture underneath him creak.

  He places the box on the rug, squats down, and inserts one of his slender cast-iron tools into the first lock. He listens intently. Not only for noises that would indicate the house’s inhabitants are awake and possibly aware of his presence; he’s also listening for the soft clicking and scraping of lockpicks against levers. He works with fingertips and ears, his eyes half-closed, his head tipped as though to place a kiss on a lover’s brow.

  It doesn’t take long and Garret moves on to the second lock. How stupid, he thinks. If he would ever have cause to protect his valuables in a strongbox equipped with two locks, he would not use identical ones and certainly not use locks that had two levers only.

  In less than three minutes, Garrets cracks the thing and opens the lid. He strikes another match. A smile flits across his face when light is reflected by sapphires and gold. He’ll have to hide the jewellery for at least six months, until the police have given up searching for it. He takes it all — it’s not much, fitting snugly into his large palm — then wraps it into strips of cloth together with his cracksman equipment and rises to his feet to leave.

  It always gives him a stomach ache when he places valuable loot together with his tools. In his whole career as a cracksman, he had to drop the package twice, and only once was he able to retrieve it from the muck of the Thames. But it would have cost him his freedom, perhaps even his life, had he not rid himself of evidence.

  Tonight, no one disturbs him. He exits the villa through the back door and walks home as though he is taking a casual stroll. His heart is thumping a little faster than normal. Partially with the excitement the adventure brings, partially with hope. The jewellery will allow him an above-average lifestyle for months, perhaps even a year. Above St Giles average, to be specific, once he has turned gems and gold into money.

  Rarely a day passes without him dreading the hovels he once called home. He had been fourteen or fifteen years old, had just fled to London, and lived with several other inhabitants in a too-small room. The place reeked, and not even a wide open window could reduce the stink to a bearable level. Rotten food was squeezed in between the floorboards’ cracks — floorboards so dirty that one must think they'd never seen a brush in their entire life.

  Twelve pallets with mouldy straw mattresses atop were stuffed into the limited space. He had to climb over sleeping bodies to reach his bed. He can still hear the tinkling of urine in chamber pots, the snoring and grunting, the bawling of an infant, the swearing, burping, and farting. This was not the shiny paradise his once-boyish mind had dreamed up. This was the place where humans had reached their lowest point and had long lost all shame.

  The boarders came and went, always too many for the few bedsteads. People had to sleep in shifts — half of them during the day, the other half at night. Whenever Garret returned from his nightly thieving adventures, heat rose up his cheeks just before he pushed the door open. There was no privacy when poverty was as severe as it was here.

  He can still taste the bile on his tongue when images of that particular night flit unbidden past his retinae. He had just returned with Mr Strike — his so-called mentor — from burgling a shop. In the light of his oil lamp, he saw an elderly man and a young woman coupling on a palette in the middle of the room. The flimsy cover barely concealed the man’s wrinkly buttocks. In the far corner, a girl smiled up at Garret when he stepped through the door. Her face was reddened, her skirts hiked up, and her fingers fluttered through the dark triangle between her legs. Upon her inviting nod, the adolescent Garret chucked his brain on the nearest refuse heap.

  The resulting pregnancy ended in an early and rather bloody miscarriage and in Garret avoiding cramped quarters at all costs.

  Disappearance

  She knocks at the door and it takes a while until someone answers. Butcher’s face shows in the crack. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Same as yesterday.’

  ‘She left this morning.’

  Suspicion tingles Anna’s neck. ‘Where did she go?’

  He snorts. ‘Her mother.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘How would I know? Now get off the doorstep.’

  ‘I don’t believe a word,’ says Anna.

  ‘Not my problem.’ The door shuts in her face. She remains standing. Her eyes trace the cracks in the wood. One part of her wishes the girl had left to a mother who cares for her. The other part knows that one doesn’t simply leave home to go straight to the most wretched whorehouses in London. Women end up here when they have nowhere else to go. Girls end up here when their parents have sold them, or a professional seducer has lured them away.

  A window creaks open. The contents of a chamber pot descend along the wall, yellow trickling over dull grey. A head sticks out the window and Anna recognises one of the women who had held the injured girl two nights ago. Before she can call up to her, the woman presses a finger to her lips, then signals Anna to wait.

  Two minutes later, she is at the window again, drops a crumpled piece of paper, and hisses, ‘Leave!’

  Anna picks up the message and disappears down the street.

  ‘What’s up?’ a low voice inquires over the singing and brawling produced by semi-drunk clientele.

  ‘Hello, Garret.’ She slips the message into her sleeve and turns towards him.

  ‘You look…sad?’

  ‘Hmm…’ she says, eyeing her food.

  ‘If you want me to leave you alone… Erm… Do you want me to leave?’

  She looks up at him, crinkles her brow, and shakes her head. ‘Want an ale?’

  ‘Sure.’ He slumps down next to her. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘Eat. Drink.’ She indicates the yet-to-be-eaten meat pie and the almost-finished glass of brandy. Carefully, she picks at the pie, its inside steaming hot, and puts a piece into her mouth. She sees Garret’s eyes dart to her plate, then tearing himself away from it. ‘Two more,’ she shouts at the landlord and points to her food. ‘And an ale.’

  Soon, the requested items are placed in front of her, baked pork aroma wafting from it.

  She pushes the new arrivals to Garret. ‘I don’t like to eat alone.’ With someone drooling on my sleeve, she adds silently.

  ‘Thanks.’ Garret stuffs half a pie into his mouth. ‘Oufff!’ he hisses, then sucks in air to cool his scorched tongue. He swallows and says, ‘You got a secret message. What does it say?’

  ‘If I would tell you, it wouldn’t be secret, would it?’

  ‘It would be a secret between you and me.’

  ‘I don’t share secrets with you.’

  ‘Hrm,’ answers Garret and puts more pie into his mouth. She watches him chew on his food and her rejection.

  He shrugs. ‘Just thought you might need help from an accomplished cracksman.’

  ‘What’s a cracksman?’

  ‘A burglar.’

  ‘Is that your speciality?’

  ‘Best in the neighbourhood.’ He slaps his chest, blushes, and returns to eating.

  Anna wonders whether he might indeed be able to help. ‘Finish your food,’ she says a
nd puts money on the counter, nods at the landlord, and rises to her feet.

  Big-eyed, Garret grabs the last pie, tips the entire ale down his throat, and follows her outside.

  The door of the “Dog and Rat” slams shut and the two walk until they find a quiet place. ‘If you wanted to find a man, how would you go about it?’

  Surprised, he cocks his head and squints down at her.

  Her cheeks grow hot. ‘God, no, Garret!’ she cries and slaps her forehead.

  ‘What man?’

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  ‘What do you want from him?’

  ‘Ah,’ she begins, her eyes searching the pavement for the proper words. ‘He’s hurt a girl. Cut her face open with a knife. The girl disappeared. The man will probably not come back. I want to know what happened to her and whether he somehow…made her disappear.’

  ‘Oh, that fella,’ grumbles Garret, and Anna’s heart hollers a wild thump thump.

  ‘You know who he is?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course not. Never seen his face. But I heard things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Well-to-do fella who likes to run his knife over bare skin. Likes to leave marks. Nothing serious. Just…scratches.’ Garret stuffs his hands in his trouser pockets and looks at his shoes.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘People say that…that he likes it when women are bleeding. The monthly…thing.’

  ‘Menstruation,’ she supplies, trying not to slap her head again.

  ‘Yeah, that.’

  ‘Does he fuck them or is he only using his knife?’

  Her words shake off Garret’s timidity. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you find out?’

  He takes a step towards her. ‘You will not get near this fella.’

  ‘Why not?’ She crosses her arms over her chest.

  ‘How naive are you?’ he almost shouts.