Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon by King Laurie R

Author:King, Laurie R. [King, Laurie R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Anthologies, Historical, Adult, Crime
Amazon: B01E9EHUU0
Goodreads: 30211101
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Published: 2016-10-04T07:00:00+00:00

THE CROWN JEWEL AFFAIR

by Michael Scott

I forget things.

Today is a blur, yesterday is lost in fog and the day before that gone completely.

The calendar on the wall tells me it is October, 1980, and the nurses have drawn a red circle on the 13th, which is my birthday. I was born in the year of our Lord, 1880, so this year I will turn one hundred. It is an incomprehensible age. When I am asked to what I attribute my good health, I have no real answer. I ate all the wrong foods: white bread and sugar, red meat and little fruit. However, in my favor, I rarely drank and never touched opium, hashish nor laudanum, because I never wanted to lose control. I have seen, too often, what happened to women who lost control. I never smoked cigarettes, but not for health reasons; when I was growing up, a lady never smoked.

Though my recent past is gone and faded, the further back I go, the clearer the images and memories become. When I scroll back through the years, the fog of memory clears and I remember who I was, and what I was.

Today, the nurses call me Miss Lundy and the young doctors rather familiarly call me Katherine. They ask about the past, and if I remember the Wars—First and Second—or rationing, and they wonder if I was in Dublin for the Easter Rising? And I do, I remember it all and yes I was in the city for that terrible week in 1916.

But I prefer to remember the city before the Irish revolutionaries and the British army fought in the streets and changed it forever. I lived there during its heyday, when it was beautiful, elegant, and cultured, the second capital of the Empire . . . though, like most cities, there was another side to it: diseased and pox-ridden, with one of the highest child mortality rates in Europe, home to the first venereal diseases hospital in the world.

Society knew me as Katherine Lundy, a widow—though, in truth, I had never married. By day, I was a society hostess, elegant, refined, and reserved, but like the city, I too had a dark side. When night fell, I became Madam Kitten, sometimes called The Whoremistress—though never to my face. I ran one of the most exclusive brothels in the city and my tentacles ran deep into Dublin’s underworld.

What a time that was!

I may not be able to remember yesterday, but I do remember the woman I was half a century and more ago, the life I lived and the man I loved. He was a policeman and it was a crime which brought us together. He believed I had stolen the Irish Crown Jewels.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.