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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

I learned that because that’s where they took me the next night. That’s where I met Missus Spanner, who ran the house, and the other seven girls who ranged in age from twelve to fifteen. I was the oldest, at sixteen, but I’d always looked younger and they figured I could pass for fourteen. Of course I tried to get away, several times. Missus Spanner had a couple of Arab men who worked as guards. They couldn’t touch the girls … that was for the dandies who paid high coin for the privilege. So I was there to stay, and it was made clear to me that if I didn’t work I didn’t eat. Well, I didn’t eat for a while … but you know, sooner or later you get so hungry nothing else matters. And so I did the unthinkable, to survive.

Missus Spanner wasn’t all bad. She was a business woman and she had to eat too. She’d been a seamstress by trade, many years before, but her hands gave out and her eyes weren’t what they’d used to be either. I wasn’t there very long before Missus Spanner asked me to help darn the girls’ clothes and to add little puffs of lace and flower decorations and such on them. She said if I did that she’d go easy on me and wouldn’t make me work when I was tired out. And she was true to her word.

Then one day I met the man who owned the house. Not only that house, but several others around the city. He was involved in many things, Missus Spanner told me. Better not to know too much, she said, because that was the way to get your throat cut.

His name was Maccabeus DeKay. He arrived in a coach that made this one look like it belongs to a mule train. I would say that if the Devil decided to come to this earth in human form, he would choose to resemble the extraordinarily handsome man who strode into the house that afternoon, accompanied by his two bodyguards. This was a man to whom nothing would be forbidden nor denied. And he knew it. He was there to inspect his merchandise. We had all been made to wear our nicest dresses and told to curtsey before him as if he were royalty. He himself was dressed in the finest suit I had ever seen. We lined up and he went along the line checking our teeth and such. When he reached me he ran his hand along my cheek and I shivered because his touch was icy cold.