Where Serpents Sleep by C. S. Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

echoing with the shouts of fisherwives and the hawkers’ cries of “fresh hot tea” and “fine ripe oranges sweet as sugar.” The rouged and willing women who would emerge later to prowl the darkening colonnades and the theaters could still be found huddled in desultory conversation in the kitchens of their lodging houses.
     
     
    Hero directed her coachman to a discreet lodging house in King Street run by an aged Irishwoman named Molly O’Keefe. A large woman with an ample girth and improbable red hair, Molly greeted her with hands on hips, a broad smile crinkling the flesh beside her watery gray eyes. Once, Molly had been a prostitute herself. But she’d been shrewd enough to pull herself out of the downward spiral that ended for most in disease and an early death.
     
     
    “I didn’t expect to be seein’ your ladyship agin,” said Molly, reaching out to pluck Hero off the small stoop. “Come in, come in.”
     
     
    “I’m not a ladyship and you know it, Molly,” said Hero, pressing into Molly’s hands the basket of fine bread and fresh farm cheeses she had brought. “My father is a baron, not an earl.”
     
     
    Molly laughed, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Sure. But you’re a lady, no gettin’ around that. Besides, you could be a ladyship if’n you wanted it. All you’d need do is marry one o’ them lords I’ve no doubt are courtin’ you.”
     
     
    “Now why would I want to do that?”
     
     
    Molly laughed again. “Damned if I know.”
     
     
    Trailed by her sour-faced maid, Hero followed the landlady down the shabby hall and into the kitchen, which served as the lodging house’s common room. The center of the kitchen was taken up by an old and battered scrubbed table around which grouped the house’s various lodgers. Clothed in shabby dressing gowns and slippers, a dozen or so women chattered with brutal frankness about men and clothes and their own wildly improbable schemes for the future. The close air smelled of beer and gin and onions faintly underlain by another scent Hero had come to associate with such places, although its exact nature continued to elude her.
     
     
    Molly O’Keefe’s lodging house was not a brothel, although most of her lodgers were prostitutes. These were free-ranging prostitutes who preferred to keep their private lives separate from their trade. Scorning both the residential-style brothels and the lodging-house brothels, they lived here, in Molly O’Keefe’s house, and took their pickups to an accommodation house to rent a room.
     
     
    Hero had never been to a residential brothel or a lodging-house brothel, or to an accommodation house. It frustrated her, but because she was a young unmarried gentlewoman, there were still certain boundaries she did not dare cross, however impatient with convention she might be. Her contact with the women of the street she studied had therefore been limited to neutral territory such as this, or refuges such as the Magdalene House. But she’d learned enough about them to understand the ties that bound one segment of the underworld to the next. Through the residents of Molly O’Keefe’s house, Hero would have access to virtually every prostitute in London.
     
     
    “I would like to address your boarders, if I may,” she said to Molly, and pushed back her veil.
     
     
    Molly clapped her hands together. “Right then,” she said loudly. “Listen up, ye drunken lot of worthless tarts. The lady here wants to talk to you.”
     
     
    Someone snickered, while perhaps half of the women around the table continued to talk. A woman with short blond hair and massive breasts visible at the gaping neck of her gown said, “And why the ’ell should we listen to ’er?”
     
     
    “Because what I have to say could earn you twenty pounds,” said Hero, stepping to the head of the table.
     
     
    Twenty pounds were considerably more than a good house-maid could earn in a year. An immediate hush fell over the room. Now that