Page 48 of The Business of Blood

Wouldn’t that be a first?

God. He wasn’t about to…console me, was he? I could handle Croft’s antipathy. I’d come to expect it. But what the hell would I do with his kindness?

It might melt the fortifications I’d erected, leaving my glass heart even more vulnerable.

Hastily, I retreated several steps until I almost slipped off the curb and into the gutter of Whitechapel Road. “You want to solve a mystery, Inspector? Find Frank Sawyer’s murderer. Better yet, apprehend Jack the Ripper,” I challenged. “But don’t waste your time trying to figure me out. You won’t like what you discover.”

As exhausted as I was, I stormed off in the opposite direction of home, searching for a place that might provide me with some semblance of sanctuary.

And perhaps a few answers.

* * *

To seea sweet-faced child in Aidan Fitzpatrick’s arms unstitched me. The unexpected ache buckled my knees and clenched feminine muscles with which no man was familiar.

Aidan could have been. I’d have given myself to him.

He stood tall and straight by the front pew of St. Michael’s Cathedral, the wee girl clinging to him like a burr, her legs around his trunk, and her arms clasped at his nape. His large hand cupped her head over a dingy bonnet beneath which wisps of flaxen hair escaped.

Would our children have been fair-haired or red? Dark-eyed or green? Would our boys have been tall as a Greek statue, like Aiden? Or stout and sturdy like my da?

How needless to ask questions to which I’d never know the answers. How utterly weak I was.

Sinful, even.

Dipping my fingers into the holy water, I crossed myself and touched a knee to the floor. Rising, I pressed a kiss to my knuckle, letting my fingers linger at my lips as I observed.

Silent tears leaked from the child’s red-rimmed eyes.

Aidan conducted a whispered conclave with a stooped-shouldered woman. The distressed girl’s mother, I assumed.

What tragedy does the unfortunate girl mourn? I wondered. Something as simple as a skinned knee? Or as complicated as a broken heart?

Those young eyes held an ageless kind of pain as they found me. Though I’d put the girl at maybe six or seven, I found no innocence in her gaze.

A broken heart, then.

I tried not to consider all she might have suffered. A cruel father? Maybe an absent one. Poverty. Hunger. Disease. Loss…?

Such heavy burdens Aidan must sometimes carry, ministering to such heavy, weary souls.

Touched, I wriggled a few fingers in a tentative wave at the child, putting all the pathetic cheer I was capable of summoning into my smile.

She turned her head away, burying her solemn little face against Aidan’s neck.

My shoulders fell. Perhaps it was for the best I remained childless. Children found me far too honest to be charming. And besides, I had no granddad ormóraífor them. No uncles to tease them, or cousins to make mischief with. There was no music left in me for dancing. No Mahoneys to dance with. No lullabies for comfort.

What sort of mother would I make?

What right had I to create life when my only business was death?

Aidan glanced across the chapel. Noting my inelegant loitering by the holy water, he nodded toward a bench beneath the stained-glass window on the far wall.

I tiptoed to the seat, knowing he’d join me once he finished comforting the afflicted.

In so many Catholic cathedrals as ancient as this one, a lack of windows and a preponderance of heavy stone filtered daylight into a sonorous gloom.

I appreciated St. Michael’s for its luminescence. Time inched toward noonday, and celestial pillars of sunlight from the many kaleidoscopic windows felt as comforting as God’s love.