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

to East End if she were to be mugged every time she crossed a street in St Giles. Besides, she stated solemnly, a nurse’s income is rather meagre.
    Some crank in Barry’s head must have turned a wrong way, then, because he blurted, ‘My mother used ter be a toffer,’ as though that would relate to the topic in any way. He refrained from slapping his forehead, because that would have given him away.
    ‘What’s a toffer?’ asked Anna as she stood and knocked the dirt off her skirt.
    ‘A toffer is a posh trooper,’ one of the other boys explained, eyebrows raised all the way to the brim of his cap, head bobbing. ‘Now she’s only a trooper. Old hag that.’  
    Deeply insulted, Barry had punched the boy’s stomach and received a whack in his face in return. Blood spurted from cracked lips, and Anna had her first patient in St Giles.  
    Later, Barry explained to her that a trooper is a prostitute of the most wretched kind. The mixture of love and shame in his face had touched Anna’s heart. She liked him at once.

    For a while now, the two have been taking their nightly strolls together; the boy chattering away, the woman listening and her eyes sweeping the alleys. Often, all she can do is diagnose: syphilis, gonorrhoea, typhoid fever, consumption. With no miracle cure available, she suggests alleviation through rest, good food, and plenty of clean water, but none of those exist in the slums.  
    Rest means days without income. Clean water means to either walk very far, or to boil it using the scant wood, cardboard, or — for the comparatively well-to-do — coal. Good food means expenses beyond the affordable. She knows all this, but has learned that saying something is better than saying nothing at all.
    She performs simple surgeries, sometimes amputations. She helps reluctant children out of their mothers’ wombs, cleans and stitches up cuts. When, in a few months, the summer comes and heats up people’s heads and makes them go wild about trifles, her supply of bandages, disinfectant, and opium will melt away in but a few days.
    Tonight, Barry tells her everything he knows about skinners. Listening to his tales about women who lure children into alleys, strip them, and leave their victims to terror and nakedness while selling all their clothes, Anna strolls across Castle Street and watches how the evening sun dips the slums into a warm red, transforming tired faces into friendly ones.  
    Costermongers’ barrows rattle past, their wares sold, the men worn but satisfied. Prostitutes step down onto the streets, shake out their skirts, and show their ankles. The cheeky ones among them even flash their stockinged knees, resulting in whistles from passers-by with too limited a budget. The ones who can afford the offered services curtly approach and mutter something only the woman can understand. An agreement is struck and the temporary couple enters the boarding house. Now, the hour is too early and the clientele too sober for anything cheap and hasty performed in the open.
    Barry drifts towards their first mandatory stop — the penny pie man. Next to him sits his wife, her bare breast nourishing a youngster. A slender pipe is clamped between her teeth, producing an abundance of clouds and stink.
    While Barry’s chronically empty stomach is being filled with eel pie and he must cease his chatter for once, Anna gets a time to think her own thoughts.
    Talking while eating would result in loss of food through crumb expulsion — an unacceptable waste, according to the boy. Tonight, however, he breaks his rule. He elbows Anna’s side, mumbles something that sounds like, ‘Don’t turn around,’ and pulls her into an alley. ‘That thief,’ he whispers and sticks his nose around the corner, ‘has been following us since… Oy! He’s coming!’ He snatches her hand and off they run. Through the alley, around a corner, through a partially unhinged back door, then along what looks like a corridor and out onto a