“And if you don’t get in?” she presses.
My gaze falls to the shears, which she’s lifted to her hip like a knife. “If not…” I take a breath, and I’m aware of my voice softening. “Then I suppose I’d have no choice but to report your refusal to cooperate. Which would be… unfortunate.”
The seamstress freezes.
“The Yard would investigate. Top to bottom, every ledger, every receipt. Every little secret you, Lewis and Allenby, your mother, and your fellow tailors might have stitched into these very walls.”
I’m not serious, of course. I abhor the police and everything they stand for—hate that my father worked somewhat alongside them when he had to. They serve whomever wears the heavier boot with no real or refined sense of honor.
I realize the error in my empty threat as her eyes burn with hatred. Unblinking, as if she wants to set me on fire. She lifts the shears. Not threateningly, not yet. But high enough, and my lips uncontrollably twitch.
I’m abhorrent, I’m entirely aware. A reluctant investigator—I never said I was a good person. One might even argue my profession is proof of my moral ambiguity. But the way she wields her tool-turned-weapon and the thought of her brandishing it at me does something most foul to my raging senses.
A sudden burst behind my temples, like something inside me is cracking open.
I blink. Once. Twice, and violet spots dance before me. The room is tilting. My lips curl before I can stop them.
It's wrong, this is all wrong.
But there’s something in the way the seamstress holds the shears—her sheer defiance and scorching fury—that sets something rotten and wired humming beneath my skin. My stomach lurches, and in time with my pounding head, my ears begin to ring.
I want to touch her. To run.
Heat floods my chest, then my neck, like steam building with nowhere to go. Suddenly, the shop is sweltering. The fabrics and silks glimmer behind her like water. The seamstress is shouting, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. A high whine has filled my ears, and the sound of my father’s wails drowns everything out.
I reach out for her, not for balance, but on instinct. Something—someone—to anchor myself to.
Before I know it, she’s cussing at me, the shears are shoved into her pocket, and my hands are in hers.
“Isthis your way of getting me to comply? Falling into my arms?” she pants, tugging me out into the street.
My arm tucked in hers, she tugs me out into the early evening. The air isn’t as stifling here, the heat lessened by the breeze. I gulp it down, unable to answer, not entirely sure what she’s asking. All I know is that she looks disarmingly beautiful in the checkered flat cap she’s pulled on after removing the ribbon from her hair, which cascades in loose curls and waves around her collarbone like a fragrant scarf. The wool of the tawny coat she donned is scratchy but warm against my thin shirt.
“Well?” Her eyes dart to the road, yankingme across it. I would check for carriages and horses, too, if a wave of violent nausea hadn’t momentarily consumed me. “Were you going to have me arrested for refusing to talk to you?”
She needs to know that she can trust me.
“No,” I manage honestly as she pulls me along. “I was never going to do that. I was going to propose I act as your boss’s lawyer, or a magistrate—to go into the infirmary expressing interest in their offer. It’s the only way they’d let me in.”
“That isn’t the only way, but itishow we’d get pinned for fraud. I’m not meddling in legal affairs that aren’t mine. This is how someone like me gets jailed, or worse,” she snaps, suddenly looking ready to throw me in front of a passing carriage. “If you want a scapegoat, you are talking to the wrong person.”
I fall silent and fix my bewildered expression, following her until we stop at a corner.
She stares at me long and hard. “Tell me, Jacques. What business do I have helping a town that wants nothing of people like me, except for wherever it suits them? When we’re sewing their clothes, cleaning their streets. Do you really think I owe London a thing? It can choke.”
Despite her evident resentment, there’s a glimmer in her eyes. As if she expects an answer.
I bow my head in understanding. “For all their airs of civility, the English easily rival the Americans in their appetite for targeted scandal and their disdain for the foreigner. Fortunately for you, I am French.”
She makes a sound of disgust and untangles our arms, and I resist the urge to reach for her again. “The malpractice at Beecham’s goes far beyond their ability or inability to heal its residents Miss?—”
“Annie Castro-Tan.”
“Annie,” I repeat. “Consumption is a terrible illness as it is.The town is drowning in blood. Your useless police are preoccupied with God knows what, and people are disappearing.”
“They are notmypolice,” she says scathingly. “And those people are dying. Maybe it’s their god punishing them for all of the pillaging and conquering they’ve done. You have no proof of anything else.”
“I’m not sure what is happening behind those doors,” I continue over her, growing impassioned, “but I’m certain of one thing—the sick cannot fend for themselves.” Annie’s expression is unreadable. “Neither can children. There is a family who lost their daughter and was robbed of closure. I was called from across the Channel to tend to them. My own father, a detective himself, was murdered last month when we were on the job. Impaled—it was barbaric,” I hear myself admitting, and I wonder why I feel the need to open up to this complete stranger, to tear open these wounds so willingly. “The pain of losing someone important to you without answers is like nothing else. It haunts a person for a lifetime. If I am able to help, I will. I’ll do it alone if I must.”
