Burning Lamp Read Online Free PDF Page A

eggs. The other girls did the same. The Widow might be passionate, even fierce in her zeal to save them, but upper-class ladies were not always as intelligent as one might expect.
    Lizzie soldiered on bravely. “Begging your pardon, madam, but we can’t go to a real boarding school.”
    “Why not?” The Widow asked. “Do any of you have families to which you wish to return? Any decent relatives who will care for you?”
    The girls swallowed hard and looked at each other.
    Lizzie cleared her throat. “No, ma’am. It was my pa who sold me to the Avery Street house. He won’t be wanting me back.”
    “My parents died of a lung fever last year,” Sally explained. “I was sent to the workhouse. The manager of the Avery Street brothel took me out of there. She said I was going to go into service as a house maid. But, well, that wasn’t what happened.”
    Irene did not offer her own history. It was all too similar.
    “As I thought,” The Widow said. “Well, rest assured you will have every opportunity to embark upon new careers now.”
    “But, ma’am,” Lizzie said, “we’re whores . Whores can’t go to a proper girls’ school.”
    “I assure you they can go to this school,” The Widow said. “I own the Academy. I make the rules.”
    Sally cleared her throat. “What good will it do? Don’t you see, ma’am? Even if we learn to type or make fine hats no one will hire us because we were once whores.”
    “Trust me,” The Widow said, “you are about to disappear forever. By the time you graduate from the Academy, you will be respectable young women with irreproachable backgrounds. You will have new names and new identities. No one will ever know that you once worked in a brothel.”
    That explained everything, Irene thought. The Widow was mad.
    “What if someone recognizes one of us in the future?” Sally asked. “A former customer, perhaps?”
    “That is highly unlikely to happen,” The Widow said. “London is, after all, a very big place. What’s more, you will be a few years older by the time you leave the Academy. You will look different. Furthermore, your new, respectable backgrounds will be fully documented all the way back to your birth. You will leave the school with excellent character references that will guarantee that you will find decent employment.”
    Sally widened her eyes. “Can you really make us disappear and come back as different people?”
    “That is precisely why my Academy exists,” The Widow said.
    The lady was offering a dream. It was, Irene realized, a very different vision of her future, not the one that had sustained her since embarking on her career as a whore. But unlike those vague fantasies, this dream seemed almost real. It was as if all she had to do was reach out and seize it.

3
     
     
     
    “IT’S AN INTERESTING ARTIFACT BUT THERE IS SOMETHING DECIDEDLY unpleasant about that stone vessel, don’t you agree? I suspect that is why the museum staff chose to tuck it away back here in a gallery where very few visitors are likely to stumble across it.”
    The words were uttered in a deep, masculine voice that stirred Adelaide’s senses and sent a whisper of heat through her veins. Energy shivered in the atmosphere. The man was a talent of some kind, a powerful one at that. She had not anticipated such a turn of events.
    Nor had she expected such a strong reaction from herself. She was unnerved. There was no other word for it. She had never met the man known throughout London’s criminal underworld only as the Director of the Consortium, but she would have recognized him anywhere. Some part of her had been waiting for him since her fifteenth year.
    For a few seconds she continued to look at the ancient vessel as though studying it. The truth was that she was using the time to pull herself together. She must not let the Director see how badly he had unsettled her senses.
    It took a supreme effort of will for her to steady herself, but she managed a deep breath