The Constantine Affliction Read Online Free PDF Page A

assisted the police, making what poor efforts I could to aid their inquiries. But I have always operated on a purely informal basis. Though I have a certain amateur interest in matters of criminology, I am hardly a detective, and I regret that my services, such as they may be, are not actually for hire.” He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “My family wouldn’t stand for it, I’m afraid, if I adopted such a vocation. It would hardly strike them as a gentlemanly pursuit.”
    “He does use a lot of words to say ‘no,’ doesn’t he, Ben?” Value said.
    “Some might say that’s the sign of an educated man,” Big Ben opined.
    “Listen, Lord Pembroke,” Value said, leaning forward. “Someone is murdering my whores, and I need to find out who.”

Womanly Arts
    E llie numbered among her acquaintances a certain tailor on Savile Row who, in addition to his other business, also catered to those men who’d been transformed by the Constantine Affliction—and hoped to hide that fact. Though Mr. James had the usual distrust for the press (a stance that was, if anything, amplified by the necessarily confidential nature of his back-room business), he’d been fond of Ellie ever since her engagement to his nephew David, and tolerated her inquisitiveness. David had worked for the British East India Company, and had sadly perished in 1858 during the Indian uprising, crushed by one of the Steel Raja’s terrible steam elephants. For Ellie, his death had been the end of her hopes for a traditional life as a wife and mother, and her dabbling in writing for women’s periodicals had blossomed—both due to passion and from financial necessity—into a life’s work as a journalist.
    Mr. James greeted her warmly, taking her by the hand and directing his assistant to watch the store while he led her through the workroom at the back and into a small office, where he had a gas ring and a kettle, and busied himself preparing tea. “Such a pleasure to see you, Eleanor,” he said, setting out cups and spoons and sugar with the same sort of precise movements he used when taking measurements for a new suit. “How are you keeping yourself?”
    “Very well, thank you.”
    “Still wielding your ferocious pen?”
    “Indeed, uncle,” she said, using a term of affection they had settled on long ago. “Your assistance on the article I wrote last year was a great boon to my career.” Mr. James had put her in touch with a few of his clients, who were willing to speak about their experience of the Constantine Affliction on the condition of anonymity. Ellie had also spoken to the close relations—mothers, fathers, children, husbands, wives—of the afflicted. The resulting article had been a great sensation, and a source of great surprise for Ellie personally. She’d known there were some highly-placed figures who’d succumbed to the affliction—everyone knew about Prince Albert, who now languished in the Tower of London as punishment for his infidelity, and no one had much sympathy for him—but she’d spoken with two members of parliament, an Oxford don, and a judge who’d all successfully hidden their transformations. She was not surprised at their subterfuge—their bodies had not become as obviously womanly as some, and Mr. James’s skill was equal to hiding those changes—but at the knowledge that all those men of fine reputation had at some point engaged the services of a prostitute who carried the affliction. That was the beginning of a certain cynicism that had served her well in her chosen career, though it also sometimes made her sad.
    The genesis of the disease had been tentatively traced to an English-born gentleman named Orlando, onetime resident of Constantinople—most assumed the disease had its origin there, possibly developing somehow among the eunuchs, hence “the Constantinopolitan Affliction”—and a frequent visitor to one of the city’s more exclusive brothels, where he had infected several employees. From