This Haunted World Book Three: Highgate: A Truly Haunting Supernatural Thriller by Shani Struthers

Author:Shani Struthers [Struthers, Shani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authors Reach/Storyland Press
Published: 2019-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Grace – 1850s

She remembered so well the words that he’d said to her: “You are very pretty, unusually so. Some might say exquisite. Do you realise, Grace, how pretty you are?”

No, she hadn’t realised. How could she? There’d been no mirror at home to gaze into; she hadn’t even been able to catch her reflection in one of the room’s windowpanes, as they were all so dirty. But more than that, no one had ever told her. Her Mam hadn’t. All she’d done was warn her of the perils that faced young girls on the street. Dangers of a particular kind.

She closed her eyes as she had done that time at the bottom of Swain’s Lane, in order to hide her tears, this time from someone who was more than a boy, who was grunting and sweating on top of her, foul blasts of hot air from his mouth coursing over her in waves. This man wasn’t taking what he wanted, unlike that boy; oh no, this man had paid handsomely for it. Not that she would see any of it. All the money went to him, the gentleman, who had saved her. For this?

As the man on top of her – another that society would call ‘gentle’ and yet who was anything but, his hands before the act of penetration pinching, pulling, and punching – continued in his endeavours, her mind returned to that first attack, as it did so often. How the boys had stepped out of nowhere to bar her way. And he had sprung from nowhere too, the gentleman, and beaten the boys from her, leaving the main perpetrator little more than a bloodied pulp. But he’d been too late to really save her. Deliberately?

She’d been defiled. And so, just as the gentleman had decided, why not continue along that path? She remembered also how he would come to sit by her in the days after the attack, when she had lain in a fever, the words he had spoken as he’d twisted that black jewelled ring round and round his finger.

“So beautiful…” Yes, he would murmur that, but other words too, a strange perfume on his breath, one she recognised: the smell of the street women. When she had seen him through the window, he’d been sniffing something from a bottle, some sort of medication, she had thought. Perhaps it was that, but it made his voice slur and his body sway from side to side. Funny how she hadn’t noticed anything remiss all the times they’d met, or perhaps it was that she’d refused to acknowledge it, wanting only to believe in him. Oh, how she wished she could’ve turned her head when he’d leant closer. “I’m sorry for what happened to you, truly I am. I berate myself constantly for not reaching you sooner.” There’d been no sincerity in his voice; even in her tortured state, she understood that. “But, dear girl, don’t you see? The damage has been done. You are soiled goods.

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