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

her mother, he would eat a broom handle.  
    ‘You look worn,’ she purrs. ‘Fancy some recreational activities?’
    He feels himself grow hot. The frisky and merry-arsed Thrulow makes his privates whimper. Not that he feels drawn to that bloody flogging business, but this woman’s backside surely had magnetic qualities.  
    ‘I have no money,’ he replies. ‘Besides, I prefer to remain in one piece.’ And you are too expensive, he adds silently.
    She pokes him again. This time harder. ‘You could do me, if you like.’
    ‘Thrulow, I have no money and I don’t like your birches, nettles, and whatnot. If I want to hit someone, I pick a fella my size. Never beat a woman and never will.’
    ‘Whatever you wish, my dear.’ The sugary lilt of her voice goes unnoticed by him. Her hand on his arm doesn’t, though. Heat spreads from there down to his balls. She moves closer to him until he feels her bosom press against his shoulder.  
    ‘Good night, then, Garret,’ she breathes, mouth puckering, eyelashes waving. She turns around and swings her buttocks more than necessary when she walks out the door.  
    Garret presses his forehead against the wooden table top and counts to ten, thinking of the last time he'd paid a woman.  
    His encounters with the weaker sex are usually awkward and rather hasty. Bawdy women willingly lifted their skirts, as long as a shilling or two were involved, a dark alley could be found, and only the rats watched the rubbing, the grunting, the spending, and wiping off fluids. Often they said one thing and meant another, behaving as though they didn’t want to have a man, as though they were well-bred and hard to get, all the while teasing him to come over and show them his manhood. Why some of his friends got married was a mystery to him.
    His heart begins to flutter — an alarmingly unfamiliar condition — as the nurse’s face shows up in his mind, her mouth slapping a command at him: Take off your trousers!  
    How come he doesn’t even know her name?

Birth

    B arry squats on the pavement. Often, he arrives much too early, like today, but the waiting doesn’t bother him. He keeps forgetting which days are the Tuesdays and the Fridays, but he does take his part-time occupation seriously. He calls them “pie man nights,” but only secretly, because the two are not going out to eat. They work .
    People here think she’s adopted him. But they have it all wrong. It was precisely the other way around. When Anna arrived in St Giles (Barry believes it to be long ago, but it’s barely three months), she stood out like a peacock with her clean and well-kept clothes (nothing fancy, mind you) and her funny English. That she must be in the possession of a few shillings (guineas, even?) any half-talented ragamuffin could extract from the folds of her skirts was clear from day one.  
    Barry had made a spontaneous attempt at pickpocketing, together with his gang of street arabs. Three of them bumped into her and toppled her over. Easy as crap. Barry probed her clothing with quick hands, and that was easy, too. But he couldn’t find anything. Not even a handkerchief. Quite outraged, he had demanded where that lazy devil of a bludger was. At that, Anna calmly answered, ‘Well, no hole in the head for me today, I guess.’  
    Barry can remember this one sentence more clearly than most things that have happened in his short life. He can still feel the wind in his gaping mouth. How odd that a woman like her knew what a bludger is — the strongest boy in a gang of arabs responsible to beat victims unconscious. Despite that bit of highly unusual education, Barry was convinced she is a lunatic when she — still lying on the pavement — informed them in a strange sing-song dialect that she is a nurse and will give free medical treatment to anyone in need.
    He began revising his opinion two seconds later, theorising there might be at least some sense in her head when she said she would have to move