A Gentlewoman's Guide to Murder, by Victoria Hamilton

than with his male appendage exposed. “You have raped your last scullery maid.”

“Rape? It is not rape,” he blustered, his neck waddles waggling in indignation. His thin gray hair was standing straight up, his pate gleamed in the faint light, and his chin was shiny from saliva. His waistcoat was disarranged, his breeches sagging down over his stockings. “They have a place to lay their head at night. I buy the girls sugarplums and trinkets aplenty, and any bastard born is sent away to a decent home.”

“You speak of by-blows like they are unwanted kittens. How fortunate for them you do not drown them in the stew pond.” Her mask, both actual and figurative, was starting to slip; t’was time to leave.

Every second she spent with an execrable male like his lordship his confidence would increase, and thus her safety decrease.

“Bitch! Who are you?” he bellowed. He had decided Emmeline wasn’t going to use her dagger to wound him mortally and was tugging at his breeches, his paunch drooping and concealing his penis like a coverlet over a bedpost.

She must make haste and leave, but she had a message to deliver first. “Listen to me, you poxy cit,” she commanded, swirling her cloak like a jaunty highwayman. He stared up at her, his eyes protruding from his pouchy face. “If you defile one more maid—just one more— I swear there are a legion of women like me, and one of them may slip a knife between your shoulder blades while you sleep.” He was about to bluster but she waved the dagger menacingly, and finished with, “Or she may decide the offending member must come off. Remember that when next your prick stiffens at the sight of a child!”

Emmeline turned and slipped swiftly back through the hallway and thence to the kitchen, witnessed only by the cook and another woman—probably the housekeeper—who huddled in the shadows 7