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

over the place. Now I see you almost every evening. Why is that?’
    ‘Only mean to protect you,’ he grumbles, rising to his feet. ‘You saved my life. You don’t belong here; you don’t need to be here, and everyone knows it. Some are just waiting to take advantage of you.’
    She sees his broad shoulders sag and feels an odd urge to apologise, or at least explain. ‘A girl’s mouth had been slit open because she didn’t want a cock in it. The man didn’t take the time to notice or even care that she is only a child.’
    Garret sits back down and, not knowing what might be the appropriate thing to say, takes her hand into his, sucks at a corner of his shirt, and uses the moist thing to rub a speck of blood off her wrist.
    ‘Why are whores wretched, I wonder. Seems like a rule: whores are wretched. Even the ones that do the gentlemen,’ he muses and inspects both her hands for more blood, but finds none. ‘Maybe men leave their wretchedness inside a whore. Cleanse themselves of it, in a way.’
    ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never had a prostitute.’ She extracts her hand from his grip.
    ‘I didn’t say that, did I now?’ He presses his lips to a thin line. ‘I never believed I owned them! Don’t want to be owned by anyone myself. Always trying to treat others the way I want to be treated.’ He clears his throat. ‘I’m lucky. No one would take me serious with that soft head of mine if it were set on a normal body.’
    ‘It works. You scared me,’ she confesses.
    ‘Didn’t mean to. I mean, scare you .’
    They watch a cat cross the street. Her ribs grind against the inside of her coat, shoulder blades pointing toward the night sky. The moonlight cuts her bony outlines onto the pavement. She steers towards them until a rodent sticks its nose too far out of a piece of banged-up piping. As the cat jumps, it is as though two black cats separate, one in the air, one street-bound. A moment later, they touch paws again.
    ‘Men hate whores because they show us what we are,’ says Garret.  
    Anna opens her mouth and shuts it again.
    ‘They know we are a herd of horny monkeys with a variety of appetites,’ he adds.
    The crunch crunch of cat teeth on rodent bones is barely audible over Garret’s low voice. Whatever kind of judgement was forming in Anna’s head topples into nonexistence with these two sentences of his.  
    ‘Whores serve as a refuse heap,’ she begins. ‘A set of arms to weep in, a lover, sister, mother, child, punisher. Whatever a man needs, he can buy it for a few shillings, maybe a sovereign if it’s special . Thousands of whores live in this city. They are doomed to die early, be it from disease, from sloppy abortions, or from having been used so often that their souls bleed out their orifices.’
    ‘You don’t hold men in high esteem,’ Garret says.
    ‘I don’t hold pretence in high esteem.’
    ‘What do you… You don’t think I…’
    ‘No!’ She slams a fist against her forehead. ‘Simple calculation: there are about eighty thousand whores in London, all receiving between three and ten customers each day. That makes a lot of Londoners lying in the arms of someone they despise in public.’  
    A flock of street urchins hurries past them. Their squeals of delight seem to be directed at a man who has just entered the street. There, where the lone lantern stands. The gleaming silver knob of his walking stick betrays his idiocy. The thing is whacked from his hand, his clothes are tugged off, and only seconds later, all he’s left with is his birthday suit.  
    Anna rubs her brow. She is struck by an oddity. People here are saving their non-existent money by sharing rooms. They are honeycombing themselves and their meagre belongings into rooms the size of a cupboard. Yet, Garret has his one mattress, his one hook on the wall, his one creaky chair all for himself. When she asks him about it, he falls silent for a long moment, and she begins to think her question might have