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keep the sparks at bay.
    “Now, we have an appointment with Madame Toulouse this week,” Fanny continued briskly. “Be sure to consider carefully your wardrobe. We’ll want at least three new dinner gowns and as many day dresses as pique our interest.” She paused to sip at her tea. “The Ladies’ Monthly Review has featured a new gown from Paris. The Directoire fashion is returning.”
    “I want tea gowns,” I mumbled around the sweetened toast.
    “Not with your mouth full.” I winced behind the paper and swallowed hastily, but she was already adding, “Absolutely not. Tea gowns are nothing more than indecency cloaked as fashion. They are not appropriate for an unmarried lady, and we’ve better things to purchase for you than gowns that will never see the light of day.” Without missing even a breath, she added, “And speaking of going out, the Honorable Theodore Helmsley has sent an invite to a formal.”
    I rolled my eyes from behind the safety of the paper. “He’s just Teddy.”
    “He is a viscount’s son, albeit the youngest of three and unlikely to inherit anything.” Fanny’s china clinked, this one a firm sound that suggested she was once more following her own path of conversation.
    My chaperone’s every gesture was a dialect in and of itself.
    “Which baffles the mind,” she continued. “Your relationship with him defies explanation. Why on earth are you wasting your time on a man who stands to inherit nothing?”
    “I don’t intend to marry him, Fanny,” I said, but only absently exasperated. My attention focused on the article. A woman, one of many prostitutes in the East End, had been found with her throat brutally slashed. Gruesome.
    “Well, if he hasn’t asked for your hand by this time,” Fanny said briskly, “it’s unlikely that he’d be so inclined to offer anytime soon. You’re twenty years old, my dear, and take it from me—”
    The prostitute’s entrails had been wound around her neck? I grimaced, the toast suddenly ash in my mouth. I swallowed it down with effort, but the details in the print were too horrible to put down. Organs shredded like so much raw meat. Vast quantities of blood, as if murdered in a rage.
    “—Are you at all listening to me?”
    “Yes, of course, Fanny,” I murmured.
    I knew a great many of the streetwalkers of the East End. Not all, of course; there were far too many women selling themselves for me to know more than a passing face or recognize a distinct call in the night. Women driven below by the higher wages earned turning tricks for coin, or exiled from a society unable to forgive the transgressions of independent thought.
    I couldn’t turn my back on them.
    Especially since I knew I was only an outed secret away from the same fate.
    “Cherry.”
    I scanned the broadsheet again. It didn’t give me a name. Who was killed? The odds were low that I knew her, but then again, such a brutal murder had to have clues. Perhaps I could investigate.
    “Cherry?”
    And who was Leather Apron? Was it in any relation to the terrible murder of the August before? The broadsheet seemed to suggest that the two were related, and certainly the details were equally as gruesome—
    “Cherry St. Croix!”
    I jerked the paper down, crumpled it in my lap and sat straighter in my chair. “Yes, madam,” I said smartly.
    Fanny’s eyes glittered in dangerous warning. Her rigid posture never bent so much as a millimeter, but I could sense her genteel bristle even from across the long table. “You haven’t,” she said with the icy control I’d learned to recognize at a young age, “heard a single word I’ve said, have you?”
    I wracked my memory. Cinnamon-peppered clouds of laudanum and the newsprint words were all I found. “No, madam,” I replied. Very quietly, I pushed the newspaper off my lap and reached for my tea.
    Fanny’s eyes slitted. “Earl Cornelius Kerrigan Compton is returned from his station with Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. He is, as