The Constantine Affliction Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough for her purposes. Men who’d transformed into women after sleeping with prostitutes were probably not chief among the clientele for a brothel, staffed with clockwork women or not. But with the right hat and enough confidence, perhaps… “Thank you, uncle. How is it to be affixed?”
    Mr. James applied a sticky, slightly sweet-smelling substance to her upper lip and carefully pressed on the mustache, holding it in place for a few moments. Ellie felt as if a rodent were attempting to nest on her face, but there was no help for it. “Thank you, uncle.”
    “You can thank me best by bringing these items back, unstained and whole, at your earliest convenience. You’re off straight away to your mysterious meeting, then?”
    “Not for an hour or two yet.” She was unsure of the protocols, but assumed visiting a brothel after the dinner hour might be more reasonable.
    “What will you do in the meantime?” he asked.
    Ellie favored him with a smile, though she wondered how much of it was visible beneath the abominable mustache. “I believe I’ll walk a bit and find out what life is like for a man. There could be an article in that , too.”
    “And a scandal as well.”
    “Nothing better when it comes to selling papers, uncle.”

An Offer One Cannot, In Good Conscience, Refuse
    H e means to shock me , Pimm thought, and did not allow the shock he did in fact feel to show. “ Your whores, Mr. Value?” Prostitution, long tolerated as a necessary evil, had been made illegal by a special act of Parliament once the full impact of the disease known as the Constantine Affliction, and its most common means of transmission, came to be understood. The clockwork brothels which had sprung up to at least partly replace the need for human prostitutes currently operated in a legal shadow land—officially they were classed as “amusement arcades,” no different from bagatelle parlors and penny-admission showcases of automatons, though they were rather more expensive, and had a more limited clientele—but by admitting to employing human prostitutes, Value was confessing to a serious crime.
    “I think we’re past the need for discretion, aren’t we, Halliday? You aren’t a police inspector, though I’m told you drink as much as most of the constables do. I could confess to the murder of an Archbishop in your presence and it wouldn’t matter. It would merely set my word against yours, and I’ve been accused of worse crimes by better men. So, yes: my whores. There are still independent operators, of course, women who have no other options making personal arrangements with men who have no better sense, but I’ve been organizing, and plenty of the whores in London pay a certain percentage to me. In exchange for their contributions, I offer them safe places to ply their trade, plus protection from the police—and even more unsavory characters.” He leaned forward, clutching the silver head of a cane he certainly didn’t need to help him walk. “But now the situation has become unbalanced. Those ladies are no longer getting good value for their money. Someone is killing them.”
    “Murder is a matter for Scotland Yard,” Pimm said.
    “Old Bill is no good to me. The police don’t even know these crimes have been committed.”
    Pimm frowned, interested despite himself. “How so?”
    “The corpses are left on my doorstep. Figuratively, anyway. They appear laid before the thresholds of my more… exclusive establishments. The legal ones. I’ve chosen not to involve the police. That kind of attention is bad for business, in so many ways.”
    “Exclusive establishments? The ones with the clockwork courtesans?” Pimm suppressed a shudder at the thought of such creations. He loved women, or at least, had loved certain women, though the one he’d loved most was nearly a dozen years dead. The thought of having intimate relations with what was, essentially, an enormous doll was comical at best, and horrifying at