The Constantine Affliction Read Online Free

the food usually was at both. Her editor Cooper had finally given in to her complaints and sent her to interview the river men and the tide-wives and mud-larks about the monsters seen in the Thames, thinking that such rough company would dissuade her from requesting more interesting assignments, but he’d been disappointed. He’d cut the portions of her article that featured more sensible and reasonable voices admitting to seeing strange things in the river, but she didn’t blame him—they’d run short of space, and the more buffoonish quotes made for better reading. Ellie had seen no monsters in the river herself… but she’d spoken to people who genuinely believed they had.
    The newsroom today was the usual buzz of activity, shouting voices, and the smell of ink, and she wove through the desks and knots of her colleagues with the grace of a dancer before ducking into the editor-in-chief’s office without bothering to knock.
    “Oh, good, you got my message.” Cooper looked up from the wreckage that was his desk. “You’ll take passage at week’s end, then?”
    “No, I will not.” There was no chair on this side of the desk—Cooper didn’t like to encourage his reporters to dawdle and chat—so she leaned over it, pressing her hands down on two unyielding piles of newsprint for balance. “I have no interest in reporting on the latest French fashions.”
    “Contrary woman.” Cooper puffed at his pipe, dispersing clouds of foul-smelling spiced tobacco. “You demanded I send you abroad, and now you refuse a trip to Paris—”
    “Send me to Mexico to cover the war. That’s the kind of travel I meant.”
    “Mexico? I hardly think so. Do you even speak Spanish?”
    She was prepared for objections based on her safety or the weakness of her sex—she had been arguing against both lines of argument for most of her twenty-five years of life, it sometimes seemed—but this tactic gave her pause. “Well, no, I don’t—”
    “But you do speak fluent French?”
    “Yes, of course, but—no! I have no interest in fashion, Cooper.”
    “That much has long been apparent,” Cooper said, still infuriatingly calm. She had a sudden urge to tell him his mustache and whiskers looked ridiculous, but refrained. Mustaches and elaborate Dundreary whiskers were the current craze among men—proof they hadn’t contracted the Constantine Affliction and tried to conceal it, she supposed, though fake mustaches were no doubt readily available to those who had transformed, and wished to put up a masculine pretense. Cooper’s nasal undergrowth was, she decided, no more foolish than most, for what little that was worth.
    “Please,” she said, trying for sweetness. “Perhaps I could do something closer to home and spare you the expense of a trans-Atlantic crossing. Send me to Paris when the tunnel is done, and I’ll report on both the novelty of the journey and the dresses I see on the other side. In the meantime, I have something else in mind, and I have already written the first lines.” She opened her journal, annoyed as usual at the graceful looping curves of her handwriting, which did not match the crispness and seriousness she attempted to convey—she much preferred to see her prose in neatly typeset lines. She put the journal on the desk before Cooper, and he sighed and began to read. The lines were fresh in her mind, and she could almost follow along as his eyes tracked the page:

    It is a great irony that no rich or influential man will ever admit to entering a clockwork pleasure house—when only rich and influential men are permitted through those elegant and well-guarded doors. We at the Argus are pleased to give you vicarious entree, and provide a rare opportunity to glimpse the velvet-lined rooms in these houses of—

    “Oh merciful heaven.” Cooper slammed the journal shut. “You can’t seriously propose an investigation like this! You know I believe you write as well as most men, but you are not a man,