The Lion's Courtship: An Anna Kronberg Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

anxiety, annoyance, or boredom. All customers were driven off by recent events. Income will be scarce for an hour or two, but once the winds have settled, men will return and quench their various appetites.
    The only two men in sight belong here like the stink of semen and urine. Butcher and Nate, both providing a well measured dose of male brutishness to protect the flow of money to Clark’s brothels — one known as “Mum’s,” the other as “Fat Annie’s.”
    Anna is waved into Fat Annie’s boarding house — decrepit, to say the least of it. The stairs yield under her weight as she climbs to the second floor; the wallpaper a pathetic joke with its leftovers slowly eaten by mould. Three tallow candles provide unsteady light. They must have been lit for her — an additional expense most of Fat Annie’s girls aren’t able to afford every day. But one of them was hurt tonight and now they act like a uniform mass of warrior ants against an intruder wasp.  
    Fingers point towards a room. Weeping trickles through the open door. She sheds all softness and steps in.  
    Blood on a wall. A thin sliver of dark red, arching from floor to ceiling. A blade must have been pulled through flesh with a violent swing.  
    A naked woman squats in the centre of the small room, held by two others. Whimpering seeps from all three mouths.
    ‘What happened?’ Anna kneels down in front of them. The two women peel off the third like petals of an opening flower. The girl’s right cheek is parted by a hideous gash, mouth and wound are one. Rivulets crawl along her jawbone, drip from her chin down to breasts the size of small peaches. A scarlet band is parting around a pink nipple. The blood on her stomach is smudged by comforting hands; knees have cut through the congealing mess on the floor.  
    Anna places a hand on the trembling girl’s arm. ‘I will give you morphia for the pain and stitch up the wound. You will look like new.’  
    She shows no reaction. Her eyes are wide, pupils small like pinpricks, her skin ashen.
    While the two women hold the third, Anna fastens the tourniquet and inserts a needle into the elbow bend. Eyelids flutter, taut muscles soften.  
    All three carry her to the bed — a greasy thing that smells of sweat and sperm about to ferment. Armed with iodine solution, needle, and thread, Anna begins to work.
    ‘Do you know his name?’ she enquires softly. Yielding to the pressure of the curved needle, the girl’s skin breaks with a gentle pop, followed by the soft rasping of thread being pulled along.
    ‘No,’ one woman says. Palpable decisiveness in that lone word. ‘She dinna want ter suck ’is cock,’ she whispers, as though news of the neglect hadn’t spread already. Bad for the business if you don’t submit at first command.
    ‘He was her first one,’ explains the other.
    Anna is closing the girl’s wound with the most delicate stitches she can accomplish. Too disfigured, men will pay her too little or even avoid her altogether. She might starve to death. ‘She will need help to heal,’ she says.
    One of them nods. Anna wonders whether she’s the girl’s friend, whether she can afford paying twice the food and rent. The thought is a wisp of naivety against the bland backdrop of life. One beat of lashes and hope vaporises.
    She stands up and finds a woman leaning her massive backside against the door frame. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow night to examine the suture,’ Anna says and gets a shweeeet of air sucked through fat lips as a reply. ‘If she takes customers too early, this wound will never heal, and she’ll be of no use to you.’  
    The madam tips her chin. Anna finds no pity in her face. A boy slips into the room, holding out a bowl with water. ‘Ma’am,’ he squeaks at Anna. She takes the offer and washes her hands. Brown lumps settle on the grey zinc bottom.

    When she walks towards Clark’s Mews’ exit, passing Mum’s boarding house, she hears laughter from within. A