The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr Read Free Book Online

Dials, and they’ll tell you, so they will. I’m far too classy for that.
    Sweet. I shove a fistful of coins in the secret pocket deep in my skirt and toss a long black cloak around me. Wouldn’t do to be seen around here, after all, not in Eliza’s snotty neighborhood where the crushers strut by every hour and chase away anyone who don’t look rich enough to breathe their air.
    Last of all—best of all—I slide open a drawer and pull out my little darling.
    She sparkles in the firelight, four inches of shiny stiletto steel on a blackwood handle. Hello, sweet sister. I give her akiss, and she’s cold on my lips. My breath frosts on the metal for a moment, then vanishes like a ghost.
    I hike my skirt above one knee and snap her into my garter. Sleep now, sister. Won’t be long.
    And down the dusty back stairs like the red satin harpy of vengeance I prowl.
    It’s cold outside, the late winter night closing in, and I wrap the cloak tighter and walk on. Down the back alley, where rats lurk in the nightman’s wagon tracks, and out onto Southampton Row. Moonlight drenches the smoky sky with blood, and mist drifts, a yellowing specter that haunts the blue-glowing electric lampposts and iron fences.
    A cold finger trails down my spine. I whirl, in case anyone’s following me . . . but ain’t no one there. Just shadows.
    It takes me a good quarter hour to walk to New Oxford Street. Carriages and hansoms rattle by, electrics flickering purple and green in the night with the stink of thunder and hot iron. Costermongers yell their wares— sweet strawberries, ripe! —and expensive whores strut like duchesses in fine gowns and feathered hats. Beggars of all ages weep, bleed, shake with faked palsy. Children ramble and scatter, selling matches, picking pockets, dancing like hurdy-gurdy monkeys under spinning carriage wheels.
    Square-rigged gents in fine coats and gloves stroll in pairs and threes, flicking their canes and tipping their lids to ladies. Unless you’re like me and have an eye for these things? Ain’t no telling who’s quality and who’s the swell mob, stalkingthrough the crowd to relieve ’em of their purses and jewels and fancy tie-pins.
    On a corner, an Irish ballad-chanter sells his latest tale of woe, scraps of paper with the words printed on jabbed onto his pointed stick. “Gold watch, she picked from his po-cket, and shyly placed into my hand . . .” He tips his hat to me as he sings. “The hair hung down on her shou-l-der . . . tied up with a black velvet band . . .”
    Aye. You fell for a pair of pretty diamond eyes, and got yourself transported to the colonies for seven years. Such is life.
    I duck along a narrow street beside a broken churchyard wall, where crumbling gravestones loom and the shadows reek and thicken with weird . Down a twisting alley, beneath an overhanging doorway, and suddenly I’ve left civilization behind and I’m deep in the Holy Land.
    People teem, filthy dresses and torn coats, feet bare on the freezing cobbles. Blank eyes slide over me and away. In a shitty gutter, two dirty children gnaw on the same bone. A skinny girl soaked in gin burps loudly in my ear and hitches up ankle-cut skirts to show me her goat’s feet.
    Yells and drunken laughter chime through the night. All kinds of accents; Irishmen, to be sure—it’s where the name Holy Land came from—and these days they can hang your sorry carcass for an Ave Maria but it still ain’t no crime to be Irish. Scots accents, too, Welshmen and Geordies and guttural Rom, Chinamen and Turks and the dense dialects of navvies and coal diggers.
    Everyone comes to London, desperate for a better life, and when they get here there’s no work and no food and cruelmonstrous winter is always on its way, the hungry chill that never quite leaves your bones again, no matter how much rotgut gin you choke down your