The House That Jack Built by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

That won’t do you any good if he comes after you, she told herself grimly. Might as well get some money out of it, then leave London, maybe go across to America.

She’d find someone to translate the sheets of foolscap for her, get out of this hellhole, live decently for a change. Meanwhile, she’d do a bit of charring to earn her keep, maybe offer to clean some of the rooms in the lodging house for a few pence. She might even ask around the Jewish community to see if anyone needed a charwoman for a few days. She’d done a great deal of char work for Jewish businessmen and their plump wives. They knew her to be dependable when she could get the work. And not a lot of charwomen would work for a Jew just now, not with these Whitechapel murders being blamed on a foreigner, same as that Lipski fellow last year, who’d poisoned that poor little girl, barely gone fifteen.

Long Liz didn’t care how many people in the East End hated Jews or called them dirty, foreign murderers. Work was work and she certainly didn’t mind cleaning houses, if it came to that. Charring was better than selling herself and she’d done that enough times to keep body and soul together, not only here in London, but back in Sweden, too, so what was a little thing like charring for a few Jews? Besides, she wouldn’t need menial work much longer, would she? Not with money to be made from Annie Chapman’s legacy.

“Say, Catharine,” she asked quietly, leaning close to her friend so as not to be overheard, “do you know any Welshmen?”