Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

I usher Jack into the library, where Isla waits. Jack is our new housemaid. She’s also the writer of our chronicles, as part of her double life as an anonymous chronicler of Edinburgh crime. Double life? Make that triple life or even quadruple. Jack has endless irons in the fire, and when she says her chosen moniker comes from “Jack of all trades,” I’m not sure she’s joking, but I always follow up with “master of none,” because she’s just asking for that one.

The choice of a masculine moniker isn’t accidental, either. In public, she usually wears male attire. I wouldn’t call it a disguise as much as a choice. She goes by female pronouns and keeps her hair long enough that she needs to put it up in a cap for the male persona. In our world, she’d be considered gender fluid.

During work hours at the town house, Jack wears a dress. Isla has made it clear that isn’t necessary, and certainly, I’d have much rather cleaned in trousers. Easier to move in and much easier to bend in. I think Jack makes the choice to present as a female maid because it’s easier for Gray and Isla, saving them from adding to the heap of eccentricities that already puts them on the fringe of their social class. If I’d told Isla I wanted to clean in trousers, she’d have let me. I didn’t for this exact reason.

Jack’s work dress is like my old one, simple and blue. Victorian households haven’t yet adopted uniforms, but Isla provides work clothing so her employees don’t need to buy it themselves, and she sticks to a blue-and-white color scheme and well-made attire.

Before Isla hired Jack—or, more accurately, accepted Jack’s work proposal—I’d only ever seen Jack present as male, so I’m still getting used to her feminine persona. As male, she looks in her late teens, very slender and fine featured. As a woman, she’s obviously in her early twenties, with gorgeous red-brown hair that answers the question of why she doesn’t cut it to better suit her male persona.

I wave Jack to a chair and shut the door.

“I have called you both here today to discuss something of great import.” I look from one to the other. “Pornography.”

Isla stares at me.

Jack bursts into snickers and says, “Please tell me you actually meant to say ‘pornography,’ Mallory, and you haven’t simply misused a word again.”

Jack doesn’t know my real identity. She’s been given the cover story—that a blow to Catriona’s head changed her personality and she now goes by Mallory. Also, the blow affected Catriona’s memory, and she sometimes gets confused, especially with vocabulary, misusing words or making up new ones altogether.

“Yes, I meant ‘pornography.’ We have a case that involves it, and I need opinions.”

“On... pornography?” Jack says.

“Mallory is having fun with us,” Isla says. “This is not the first time she’s managed to connect a case to illicit material of a pornographic nature.”

“Managed to connect?” I say. “The connection was there. We had a suspect who moonlighted as a nude model.”

“Moonlighted?” Jack says.

“Whatever the word is. She worked a secret job. This is different. We now have a case where a woman...” I curse under my breath as I see Jack lean forward. I forgot how she moonlights.

“A case?” Jack says, eyes gleaming.

“Not a case for public consumption. Certainly not for your chronicles of our cases. It is a woman being threatened with exposure for writings... of an erotic nature.”

Jack’s brows climb.

I continue, “She wrote it for an audience of one, but the work has been stolen, and she is being blackmailed by the thief.”

“Sadly, I could not use this in our chronicles,” Jack says. She quickly adds, “Not that I would. It’d be wrong. But even if I could, it is not the sort of case your audience wants.”

“Our audience being women who can read murder mysteries to their children under the guise of providing didactic tales to prove that no crime goes unpunished.”

Isla sniffs. “In this case, the crime some would see is that a woman dared pen such things and was, in their minds, rightfully threatened with punishment.”

“Either way,” Jack says, “it would be inappropriate. Depictions of gruesome murder, yes. The mention of writings exploring sexuality?” She shudders. “Think of the children.”

I want to roll my eyes at the very Victorian-ness of this. And then I remember the childhood friend who was allowed to rent any action or horror movie, however violent, as long as it didn’t contain nudity.

I can still blame the Victorians, right? They started it.

Okay, it was probably the Puritans, who passed it on to the Victorians, but still...

Isla says, “I presume the blackmailer is threatening to expose this poor woman as a pornographer?”

“Worse,” I say. “They’re threatening to make her a pornographer. To have her writings published and sold, with her name attached.”

“Published and sold?” Isla’s brows knit. “Is that profitable?”

Both Jack and I turn to stare at her.

“Is pornography profitable?” Jack says slowly. “If that is your question, Mrs. Ballantyne, I fear you are more sheltered than I thought.”

Isla glares at both of us. “I know pornographic sketches and photography are profitable. I mean this sort. Writing that is purely intimate in nature, rather than part of a larger narrative, such as Fanny Hill .”

“You’ve read Fanny Hill , Mrs. Ballantyne?” Jack says.

Isla’s glare locks on her. “I read everything, and if you expect me to sputter and flush, I will not.”

“Actually,” I say, “your question is the reason I called you both in here. I don’t know whether things like this are popular or easily sold. I could ask Dr. Gray, but he really would sputter, as well as turn a very unhealthy shade of red and, ultimately, not answer the question.”

“But you thought I could?” Isla says.

“Hey, you just said you read everything.”

“Having not known this sort of writing existed, I have not read it.”

I grin at her. “Good. Then I know what to get you for Hogmanay.”

She does sputter and flush at that, then skewers me with a glare that says I will pay for this.

I turn to Jack. “How about you? As a writer, would you say there’s a market for letters like this?”

Jack stretches her legs and then remembers she’s wearing a skirt and retracts them. “There is certainly an audience for such work. Putting it into a larger narrative—particularly if one can pass it off as proper literature—is one way to do it, but there is a very avid market for those who do not want story interfering with the risqué bits. It can pay exceedingly well. I tried it myself but...” She shrugs. “I am better at writing about murder. That problem, to be honest, seems to be a lack of experience.”

“You have more experience with murder than sex?” I say.

She sighs. “I strode into that one, didn’t I? No, it’s not even a lack of experience with sexual congress so much as a lack of experience with good sexual congress. No one wants to read about the bad stuff, even if it’s embellished by imagination.”

“I feel I should offer my condolences,” I say. “I would also suggest you stop bothering with the bad stuff.”

“And how would you suggest I do that? Ask men whether they’re any good first? They all think they’re incredible because they finish every time. This is one place where I truly envy men.”

“For being able to finish every time?”

“Well, yes, but beyond that, men can easily obtain good sex by paying for it. Go to a brothel and lay down money for a woman of craft and experience. Women do not have that option. We have to take what we can get and hope for the best, which is never the best, no matter what the men claim.”

I glance at Isla, who is sitting perfectly still, with the expression of a twelve-year-old hearing teen girls talk about sex, trying to look casual, as if she hears this all the time, as if she’s not inwardly shocked that they’re openly discussing it the way one discusses the weather.

As I’ve said, women in this time do discuss sex, but only among themselves and, from what I can tell, primarily among the lower classes. Jack would have no problem with it, and she’d presume I wouldn’t, either.

I also note that Isla doesn’t stop us or even give us a scandalized look. Like that preteen girl, she’s soaking it up.

“So there is an audience for this,” I say, bringing the conversation back around. “How profitable would it be?”

“How much is the blackmail for?” Jack asks.

“Five hundred pounds.”

Jack whistles. “It would never be that profitable. The primary audience for such writing, from a woman’s perspective, would likely be women themselves. In written work, that audience is larger.”

“Men prefer pictures?”

She laughs softly. “They do. Women prefer narrative where they may fill in their own imagination. Probably because they have so much experience doing that while lying under a heaving, grunting, sweaty man.”

“You really need to cultivate a better class of partners,” I say.

She sighs. “I know. But while the audience for such things is largely women, it still is smaller than the audience for visual pornography, and even that would not come close to the price the blackmailer is demanding.”

“Meaning they really are counting on our client paying the ransom.”

“Yes. The blackmailer is not necessarily bluffing about publishing them. Such things could be sold for a nice bit of income. But that also requires knowing where to sell it, which the average person would not.”

“But you do?”

“I do, and if it comes to that, we could attempt to avoid publication by paying the printer for the return of the materials. But that would not be easily done.”

“So we should presume the threat is serious and try to find the blackmailer before those letters reach a printer.”

“I fear so.”