Page 94 of A Treacherous Trade

Izzy. I’d considered her an ally, if not a friend. We hardly knew each other, but she’d demonstrated such a sweetness of nature. She’d been almost childlike in her interactions with others.

And it’d all been a lie.

I thought of the night I’d been attacked. She was one of the women to drive him away. Had that all been staged? Or was it Indira’s presence?

Or perhaps because he’d been about to hurt me, and that wasn’t what she’d hired him to do?

Regardless of this revelation, I intrinsically rejected her responsibility for the murders of two innocent women. I wanted an explanation. A good reason for her to do this terrible thing to me.

All whores are good at acting.

Her and Indira’s faces floated before me in the darkness of that night. I’d had the thought that they resembled ghosts because of their pale gowns and their paler-than-usual skin.

I’d assumed they were walking out in the cold for too long, because their lips had been tinted with the lightest shade of blue in the pallid lamplight.

Or had they been painted?

It was all connected somehow.

Ghostly regalia. Corpses with bleeding eyes. Poisoned prostitutes. Preachers. Pornographers. Photographs. Police.

Kitchen witches.

I do commemorative pictures of many ladies’ societies, if that’s what you’re after.

Charles Hartigan’s words fractured into a thousand pieces, echoing through my racing thoughts like ricocheting bullets in an empty room.

This very well could be bigger than Izzy…

What if, instead of one bad apple in The Orchard, the rot had spread to them all?

ChapterTwenty-One

Shame struck me immediately upon finding Amelia in Bea’s parlor at The Orchard.

I’d entertained dark suspicions about her. Looking at her now, I found the entire notion patently ridiculous.

Dressed in an airy lemon day gown, more suited to a spring morning than a winter’s afternoon, she beamed at my entrance. If two streaks of silver did not emboss her glossy, dark hair, one might not have known she was over forty.

One look at me and her smile faded in slow increments.

Bea, on the other hand, seemed to notice nothing amiss. “Fiona, my dear, won’t you join us for tea?”

Amelia’s bright and statuesque grace only served to illuminate how weary and frayed Bea was in the light of day. Her jewel-red evening regalia, the crystalline beads shimmering in the firelight, made me certain she hadn’t yet been to bed.

They sat across from each other in chairs drawn close to the fire, and I noted that there was no tea to be found, though I’d been offered it.

“What’s wrong, Fiona?” Amelia stood, dispensing with pleasantries as she pushed a book, a blanket, and some discarded frippery around on the settee to clear a place for me.

“Does Izzy work today?” Manners dictated I sit when bade to, though I was too anxious to do aught but perch on the edge of the settee, ready to jump up at a moment’s notice.

“She was supposed to.” Beatrice waved a handkerchief she clutched in her hand. “But I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since last night.” Finally, she seemed to notice my state of extreme discomfiture, and she blanched. “Tell me something else has not happened.”

I shook my head, distressed to hear that Isabelle hadn’t shown her face yet. There was no way she could know that she was suspected of anything, was there?

Croft had warned me not to divulge information to anyone, but surely he hadn’t meant his sister. And I had to say something, hadn’t I?

“I was at the hospital chatting with the coroner today,” I began. “And I happened upon my assailant from the other night. Apparently, his stab wound had gone to rot.”