The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7), Nathan Goodwin [little red riding hood ebook TXT] 📗

The young girl sighed, spoke no words and disappeared through the door.

‘Three rum and waters,’ the landlord said, placing the last one down.

‘One for each hand,’ Ann said, picking up the two remaining drinks and taking a gentle sip from each.

‘Hey, Miss!’ the voice repeated.

The words barely filtered into her languid, soporific mind, as though they were trapped behind a net, just out of her reach. She turned listlessly. The room was angled incorrectly and her eyes refused to pull focus onto the origin of the speech.

‘You be brown-deep in thought, Miss. I runned you an ‘ot bath, like what you asked.’

Ann’s mind assembled enough disparate pieces of information for her to understand. She was in the public house. Drinking rum and water. The girl had run her a bath.

She squinted and saw her muddled outline. ‘I be wanting your clothes,’ she said.

‘Pardon me, Miss?’

‘Your clothes. One guinea for them,’ Ann said, attempting to stand from the bar. She picked up her one remaining drink and carried it towards the girl. She tried to ignore the liquid running over her fingers, intending to rebuke the landlord for daring to serve her drink in a glass pitted with holes. That tarnal rotten-toothed nabbler, she thought.

‘Here,’ the young girl said, taking Ann by the elbow and leading her into the room behind the bar. The windowless room was dark and lit by just one dancing tallow candle and a sedate fire grumbling in the grate.

Ann’s vision was in perfect unison with her thoughts—both swimming in the abstract haze of inebriation. Feelings, worries and ideas all whirled together as insignificant as the items of furniture around the room, which her eyes recognised but which her brain failed to identify.

Ann turned to face the girl. She was standing beside her bathed in soft amber light, entirely naked with her clothes pooled around her ankles.

‘A guinea,’ the girl said, unfurling her hand.

Ann remembered and placed the remainder of her money there, looking the unabashed girl up and down. ‘Ever been with a man?’

The girl shook her head. ‘You?’

Ann sniggered. ‘One or two. None of them be worthy of a place in my memory.’ She smiled. ‘Now I got myself a surgeon. Doctor Popham-Hopham. Ralph. A real gentleman,’ Ann boasted, beginning to strip off her clothes.

The girl said nothing more. She turned her back to Ann and disappeared through another door, which she locked with a clatter behind her.

Ann stepped heavily down into the bath, wincing at the high temperature, giving her equal jabs of gratification and discomfort. She stood still for a moment, watching as the flesh on her legs that fell below the waterline turned bright pink, whilst the rest of her body erupted in tiny goose bumps.

After several seconds, she sat down in the bath and shuddered as the water nibbled at her bare skin. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she laid her head to one side, allowing her hair to trail in the hot water, and her mind to begin to reverse its current state of disarray.

Sufficient time had passed for the water to become intolerably cold. Ann stood from the bath and dried herself with a towel which the girl had left. The effects of the rum and water still blighted her thoughts but she was once again aware of herself. Aware, as she dressed in the girl’s clothes, that she was a slightly different person to the one who had arrived here. A cleansing, of sorts.

She took her time in dressing, enjoying the discovery of the new clothes. Hems, seams and buttons in places not found on her own clothing. She looked at the discarded pile of her garments, carried them over to the fire and tossed them into the flames. The clothes writhed as though containing their own life source, then blackened, before fiery spikes rose and ravaged the material. It took just seconds for the apparel to be unidentifiable. It would have been easy to have simply bundled them up for cleaning, but that was not Ann’s way of life. She possessed nothing other than that which she wore.

She ran her fingers through her damp hair, tugging as her nails caught on a knot. Then, she stopped. The low-level rumblings of talking, drinking and laughter, which had unified in providing the background noise to her bath, had altered, as though a maestro had entered the bar and suddenly changed the tempo.

Ann hurried to the door which led to the bar and pressed an ear to the oak frame. Yes, something had changed. There was a kind of excitement. Discussions had heightened. People were speaking over one another, throwing questions to one individual in particular. Ann failed to catch fully what he was saying, his answers being splintered and muffled by the intervening partition.

Ann blew out the candle, pitching the room into near-darkness, then slowly lifted the latch and inched the door ajar. The conversations suddenly came alive, words crystallised. She arranged the sounds in her mind until she found the voice of the man who seemed to have drawn the attention of the inn.

‘He didn’t give none of you up,’ the man imparted. ‘He were a true Aldington smuggler to the end.’

She heard murmurs of gratitude before he was questioned again.

‘So, do that be that, then?’ one asked.

‘Aye,’ he confirmed. ‘That be that; no more smuggling.’

A general groan of discontent erupted from the men around the pub. From the sounds of their unified chorus, everyone had gathered around this news-bearing visitor and they were not happy with what he had come to say.

‘I ain’t told the worst of it, yet,’ the man relayed. The men fell silent to hear the news. ‘They tooked the poor bugger to the gallows, now they be wanting to hang his body in chains in the