What the Devil Knows by C. S. Harris EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: C. S. Harris
- Language: English
- Genre: Amateur Sleuth Mysteries
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Saturday, 8 October 1814
Molly Maguire hated the fog. Hated the way it reeked of coal
smoke and tore at her throat. Hated the way the damp, suffocating
blanket could turn even the most familiar lane into something
ghostly and strange.
It was always worse at night, when the temperature plummeted
and folks lit their fires. That’s when the mist would drift up from the
docks, swallowing the dark hulls and tall masts of the big ships at
anchor out on the river and creeping along the mean streets and foul
alleyways of the part of East London known as Wapping. Sometimes
Molly would dream of a different life, the life she’d once known,
when cold, wet nights were spent safe and dry in a warm, gently lit
cottage. But that life belonged to the past. In this life Molly walked
the streets at night.
She’d been on her own since before she turned thirteen, and she
told herself she should be used to it by now. Yet after three years, she
still shrank from servicing men with foul breath and rough hands
and urgent, rutting manparts. It didn’t hurt anymore like it had at
first, at least not usually. But Molly still hated it even more than she
hated the fog.
The bell in the clock tower of St. George’s-in-the-East struck
midnight, the dull clangs sounding oddly loud in the dense fog. If
business had been good, Molly would have given up and gone back to
the small, wretched room she shared with five other girls. But she
was desperate for money. It might be Saturday night, but the fog had
driven most potential customers off the streets. She’d had a couple of
drunken seamen who took turns on her, one right after the other,
then demanded a discount. But even they weren’t as bad as the fat
old magistrate who’d pinned her against one of the looming towers of
St. George’s.
A man like him, he could’ve bought himself a fine piece of
Haymarket ware and tumbled her in the back room of a Covent
Garden coffeehouse. Instead he’d picked up a cheap little Wapping
doxy and taken her up against the soot-stained old stones of the
church, his big hands tearing at her bodice and painfully squeezing
her breasts as he thrust into her hard enough to make her wince. She
could still smell the stink of his spilled snuff and fine brandy clinging
to her. And when it was all over and she’d asked for her money, he’d
laughed at her.
“I don’t pay whores,” he said, buttoning his flap over his
ponderous gut.
“Wha-aat?” she’d wailed. “What you think? That I did this
because I—”
He backhanded her across the mouth, splitting her lip against her
teeth. “Consider yourself fortunate that I’ve decided not to have you
committed.”
“Fat old wagtail,” Molly muttered now to herself. It felt good,
saying it out loud, so she said it again. “Fat old wagtail. Should’ve
lifted his bloody watch, that’s what I should’ve done.
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