Shelley Adina - 01 Lady of Devices by Shelley Adina

Author:Shelley Adina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Inside the derelict building, the gaseous miasma had already begun to clear, not finding the walls and roof any great impediment to its rise through the atmosphere. But Claire still felt a stinging in her eyes, like an echo of the pain endured by the criminals outside.

Criminals, hmph. They were children. How was it possible that so many children should be parentless and forced to make their own way in the world? It was one thing to be eighteen and possessed of an education. It was quite another to be ten ... or four ... and possessed of nothing at all.

Master Willie, being closer to the ground and less affected by the remnants of the gas, found her a lamp on a hook. Then he towed her over to her trunk, which lay empty on its side next to a cold fireplace that appeared not to have been cleaned since the Queen of Empires had begun her glorious reign.

“Ah. Here’s a start. Well done.” She righted the trunk and laid her embroidered waist inside. Then, holding the lamp high with one hand and her skirts with the other, she followed Willie carefully up a rickety stair more of a ladder, really that creaked alarmingly at their combined weight.

As she collected her various bits of clothing underthings, blouses, walking skirts, dresses, hats she saw they had already been sorted into heaps with sundry like items that were not nearly as clean. “Willie, were these going to the ragmen in the morning?” He nodded, his eyes tearing a little at the last remnants of the gas. “It’s a lucky thing I acted quickly, then. If I had waited, I should never have seen my clothes again. You wouldn’t have observed a small traveling case containing a Bible, would you?”

The little boy glanced to the rear of the apartment, where there was a single plank door. Everywhere else, it appeared the members of this gang were using the piles of rags and clothes as bedding until enough had accumulated to go to the ragman or the stall-keepers in Petticoat Lane. But someone rated the privacy and status of a door, and she had one guess as to who that might be.

“Is that Snouts’s room?” Willie nodded. “Since he has given me carte blanche to recover my property, I shan’t feel too badly about invading his privacy, then.”

Willie looked alarmed, and she suspected all the children were under threat of death if they, like Bluebeard’s wives, succumbed to the temptation to open the door.

For all his status as leader, Snouts had not much more than his minions, she saw as she stepped cautiously inside. A pile of rags, a pipe, a cage containing rags, and a window with real glass in it was the extent of his worldly goods. The room stank of acid alcohol and offal. Primming her mouth in disgust, Claire rooted through the rag-pile until her hands touched a hard and rectangular shape.

Her traveling case. She carried it over to the lamp and opened it to find only the Bible inside.

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