The Last Hellion Read Free

inches under six feet tall, she was about as delicate as the average Valkyrie or Amazon, and her body, like those of the mythical warriors, was as strong and agile as her mind.
    When he slammed the object of his indignation down upon the desk, she calmly took it up. It was the latest edition of Bellweather's Review . Like the previous issue, it had devoted several columns of the first page to attacking Lydia's latest journalistic endeavor:

    Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

    Like her namesake, the Argus' s "Lady Grendel" has once again launched a noxious assault upon an unsuspecting public, spewing her poisonous fumes into an atmosphere already thick with her pollutions. Her victims, still reeling from previous assaults upon their sensibilities, are hurled once more into the very abyss of degradation whence uprises the reek of foul and tainted creatures — for one can scarcely title as human the vermin she's made her subject — whose cacophony of self-pitying howls — for we cannot call these excretions language —
    the petticoated monster of the Argus...

    Here, Lydia stopped reading. "He has lost all control of the sentence," she told Angus. "But one cannot sue for bad writing. Or for lack of originality. As I recall, the Edinburgh Review was the first to title me after the monster in Beowulf . At any rate, I do not believe anyone owns a patent on the name 'Lady Grendel.' "
    "It's a scurrilous attack!" he cried. "He all but calls you a bastard in the next to last paragraph, and insinuates that an investigation into your past would—would
    —"
    " 'Would doubtless explain the virago of the Argus's otherwise unaccountable sympathy with an ancient profession whose bywords are disease and corruption,'
    " Lydia read aloud.
    "Libel!" Angus shouted, pounding his fist on the desk. The mastiff looked up again, uttered a deep canine sigh, then once more composed herself to sleep.
    "He merely implies that I have been a prostitute," Lydia said. "Harriet Wilson was a harlot, yet her book sold very well. If she'd had Mr. Bellweather abusing her in print, I daresay she might have made a fortune. He and his fellows have Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    certainly assisted ours. The previous issue of the Argus sold out within forty-eight hours. Today's will be gone before tea time. Since the literary periodicals began attacking me, our circulation has tripled. Rather than sue Mr. Bellweather, you should write him a note of thanks, and encourage him to keep up the good work."
    Angus flung himself into the chair behind his desk. "Bellweather has friends at Whitehall," he grumbled. "And there're some in the Home Office who aren't exactly friendly to you."
    Lydia was well aware that she had ruffled feathers in the Home Secretary's circle. In the first of her two-part series on the plight of London's younger prostitutes, she had hinted at the legalization of prostitution, which would enable the Crown to license and regulate the trade, as in Paris, for instance. Regulation, she had suggested, might at least help reduce the worst abuses.
    "Peel ought to thank me," she said. "My suggestion stirred so much outrage that his proposal for a Metropolitan Police Force seems quite mild and sensible to the very same people who had been howling that it was a conspiracy to grind John Bull under tyranny's heel." She shrugged. "Tyranny, indeed. If we had a proper police force, that fiend might have been caught by now."
    The fiend in question was Coralie Brees. In the six months since her arrival from the Continent, she had become notorious as the worst of London's procuresses.
    In order to get her employees' stories, Lydia had promised not to reveal the woman's name—not that revealing the bawd's identity would have aided the cause of justice. Eluding the authorities was a game with the whoremongers, and one at which they were highly skilled. They changed their names as often and as easily as Lydia's father had done, to elude his creditors, and scurried