What could I do to survive? I was fourteen years old. What could I do, except for what to me was the unthinkable. Well, I realized I could do what my mum had trained me to do: I might become a street dancer and earn some coin from the passersby. And I did that through the spring and summer, living in an abandoned warehouse in Whitechapel with a number of other castaways like myself. You knew them as the Black-Eyed Broodies, though I imagine my group was not the same as yours. My relationship with them began as a threat of violence. Since I was dancing on the streets of their territory, I was made to give up half my earnings to their treasury. In time we worked out an arrangement. I would only dance on their territory, and only if I was made a Broodie and came under their protection. And so that was how I got the tattoo and went through the same initiation ceremony you likely did.
And now, Matthew, we come to the part of my life when RakeHell Lizzie began to awaken. Or perhaps she was already awake, and just waiting.
We were four and we were attacked by six of the Mohock gang. You might have had some encounter with them yourself. It was late night, we were coming back from the tavern that fed us—in our territory—and they jumped us from a passing wagon. They were painted up like the savages from the colonies. As I say, six of them—all male—and four of us, two male, myself and my friend Audrey. The Mohocks had daggers and sabers. They cut down the two boys before one of them could blow his warning whistle. Then they were on us. We fought, but they had very hard and capable fists. They threw us in the wagon and were off, and the whole thing probably didn’t take over a minute.
They blindfolded us and took us somewhere that smelled of old damp. A cellar, of course. I was prepared to be raped again and killed, but it wasn’t to be. Oh, they kicked me around a bit but they laid off the other. I found out later that they’d hit Audrey too hard in the first attack and she died early the next morning. So they were in trouble because they’d been paid to deliver two girls of a young age to a house that I learned was in Shoreditch, close to the prison.
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.
Right there I realized that evil existed to corrupt innocence. To take innocence and turn it into an ugly thing that could be bought and sold like any commodity. At that moment I wished with all my heart to kill him, to rend him to pieces and to rend to pieces all the evil men who preyed on those who could not fight back. RakeHell Lizzie awakened and began to think on murder as a remedy…if not a remedy for the whole world’s evil, at least a remedy for evil in the small world I knew.
I bided my time. I was at the house for nearly a year, Missus Spanner began to trust me to accompany her out to buy fabrics, but always one of the Arab men went with us. I acted as docile as I could, until the moment was right. Then I bolted into the crowd of people on the street, and I ran and ran until I had to collapse in an alley.
I hope Missus Spanner was all right. DeKay might have had her killed for losing one of his properties, but I knew I had to get out. But where to go next? We had been in the Spitalfields district where most of the textile work in the city was done. I could sew and weave. Many of the workers in the mills were children. I had no trouble finding a job for a few pence a day, and at that time I had just turned seventeen—much older than most of the other workers—and I also had no trouble finding a little hovel near the mill.
On my walk from work one evening I saw a man take up a little girl by the neck and drag her into an alley. I realized—RakeHell Lizzie realized—that here in Spitalfields was a paradise for evil. The predators came from miles around to get at the children, most of whom were orphans and lived in groups in small rooms like myself. I began to roam around at night and recognize the signs of the predator who was looking to further corrupt innocence that the world had already touched. So I—she—bought a knife. It became her obsession…a driving need, to strike back at the Robsons and the DeKays. It was on her all the time, and she realized it was the only way for either of us to not lose our minds to madness.
She dressed as a younger girl and made herself look like a child. The first man who came at her got away because she swung with the blade and missed. The second one she only cut on the arm. She realized she needed something better, something more efficient. Thus I bought for her ten blades and I stole some leather, and I sewed the gloves for her.
She had some trouble. The gloves were hard to handle. She cut herself the first few times, getting them on in haste from the bag she carried. She had to learn the art of killing and not injure herself. That took practice. So while Elizabeth Mulloy worked in the day among the children at the mill, by night RakeHell Lizzie—the name I gave her, as the public only knew the title of the Spitalfields Murderess—walked the streets of Spitalfields, and so it began with that man who she thought looked so much like Broderick Robson. She made a fine mess of him. She learned to cut their throats first before they could cry out, and she learned also where the most blood would jump from so as to diminish the spatter on her clothes. That was a difficult thing for her and meant a lot of clothing stolen from clotheslines, but again…she learned.
She took down six of them. With the seventh, she was too confident and a shade slow. She took off the side of his face, but he was able to run screaming for help. He was the one who gave the law our description. After three months, they trapped her in a blind alley. Four constables who had come to track her. They took her to jail, to the court, and to prison. After two years behind bars we were removed by Doctor Firebaugh to the asylum at Highcliff where he was doing his experimental treatments on what was termed criminal minds. They even sold him the original gloves, to put in a museum he was planning to build there on the grounds.
I was not the only one at Highcliff, but a few of the others died from the drugs. I survived, and so did Lizzie. And even though she was contained, she was not dead.
Samson Lash brought his wife in. She had lost all knowledge of who she was and who he was. She
could not dress herself, feed herself or anything else. She babbled and cried and made no sense. The doctor announced her as a hopeless case, but Samson returned to see her nearly every day. Eventually he and I began to talk, as I had been allowed to do some clerical work in the doctor’s office. I was as amazed as anyone might be when, after a period of some weeks, he paid the doctor to take me to his house, and also paid for a regular application of the drug.
Lizzie slept most of the time. But when she awakened, Samson arranged for there to be an outlet for her violence. Without victims she would perish, and I told him that I feared part of me would die with her. I think he feared I would diminish in mind and spirit as his wife had, and he enjoyed my companionship. He has always been kind and gracious to me and considers me a fine lady, but of course untouchable. His figurehead on his grand ship, he calls me.
Well, the victims need not be child molesters at this point. Lizzie was beyond that, as someone used to dining on roast beef will eat beef hash if necessary. It was an urgency in the blood. He could tell the signs of agitation that began well in advance. But with the drug’s continued application, I found that Lizzie could be released when the time was appropriate and then—with a bit of effort—confined again. She doesn’t like it but she has to live with it. As I say though, I don’t know what the effect will be without the drug. Samson thought that particular gathering would be entertained by the show of the constables, as such a display would impress upon them the fact that he disdains the law of small men and that his ambition is on a greater scale. It was good business, and Lizzie needed the exercise.
My story. I consider that Lizzie put to death six men who might have preyed upon the mill children in Spitalfields, and they would’ve been back for further victims. She could not save all the innocence of those children, which was likely already lost, but she could keep the corruption from spreading and destroying more of them, body and soul, as it had very nearly destroyed me.
My story.
twenty-seven.
At Elizabeth’s final two words, Matthew felt the coach slowing.
Firebaugh made a muttering groan from his huddled bundle of tormented flesh.
“We’re stopping,” said Elizabeth. “Why?”
Matthew peered out the porthole to his left. He felt a twinge as he turned his attention away from the woman and he figured the back of her neck was tingling aplenty. Through the falling snow he saw only dim gray light and the further blue darkness of a forest.
The coach stopped with a crunch of wheels.
“I think we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Matthew said. “Do you see anything out there?”
She looked out the porthole on her side. “Woods,” she answered. “Nothing else.”
The doors on the right side opened and Julian stood there shivering. “Spell me on the reins, Matthew. I’m freezing and my back’s a wreck. God knows how these drivers do it.”
“Me? Spell you? I’ve never driven a coach this size or handled a four-horse team!”
“Understood. It’s time for you to learn.” He motioned with a thumb for Matthew to get out.
“What is it? What? Where are we?” Firebaugh had been roused at the sound of the earcutter’s voice. The eyes were wild with fear in his swollen face, and it appeared he was trying to desperately squeeze himself into a seam in the coach’s wall at his back.
“Settle yourself,” Julian told him, as one might tell a dog to behave. “Here, take the coat and the gloves,” he said to Matthew, but before he removed the items he waved his pistol in Elizabeth’s face. “No tricks from you, miss murder.”
“I’m content to watch,” she answered coolly, and Matthew had the creepy feeling that she might be speaking on behalf of her other half.
He got into the polar bear coat and put the gloves on. The air was bitterly cold and the wind blew the snow at a slant, whistling past his ears. He pulled his woolen cap lower. Before he climbed up to the driver’s seat and before Julian could get into the coach, Matthew said, “Don’t injure Elizabeth. Hear me?”
“I won’t if she doesn’t try anything.” He frowned. “What’s your concern for her?”
“She and I are both Black-Eyed Broodies. I made a vow not to—”
“What’s that?” Firebaugh had leaned forward to hear through his good side.
Everyone ignored him. “I made a vow not to injure a brother—sister—Broodie,” Matthew went on. “She made the same vow. That’s why she didn’t—”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Julian. He tapped his chin with the pistol’s barrels. “But she’s not my sister, Matthew, so if she makes a move I don’t like…I told you before, I’m the bad man. What else do you expect of me?”
“A bit of honor.”
Julian grunted. “What you haven’t yet seemed to realize, Matthew, is that very often it takes a bad man to do the things that have to be done. Would we have gotten this far if our main concern was honor?”
“I made a vow. I stand by it, no matter what.”
“Let him come inside,” said Elizabeth, with a silky smile. “She won’t bite him. Yet. And please close the doors before I turn to ice.”
Julian wore an expression that told Matthew he might be weighing the cold and his aching back against the wisdom of being in close quarters with RakeHell Lizzie, but then he climbed into the coach. “Just keep us on the road,” he said grimly before he shut the doors, leaving the problem-solver on his own.
Matthew put his gun into the waistband of his breeches and used a handgrip and a bootstep to haul himself up to the driver’s seat. From here the landship looked truly immense, as did the south ends of the horse team. Julian had left the reins tied around a railing beside the seat. With the snow flying into his face he took the reins and looked ahead at the road that curved to the right between stands of forest. How far they were out of London he had no idea, but there was no use dawdling; the further they got away from that city, the better.
He flicked the reins. “Giddap!” he shouted.
The horses didn’t move.
He tried it again. “Giddap!”
Two of them snorted gouts of steam in derision. One shook its mane as if saying no, and the fourth just stood there like a huge chestnut-colored statue.
Matthew remembered the driver’s command. He gave the reins a harder flick and shouted, “Hiiiiiyupppp!”
They started off with an irritated rumble and a force that jerked the coach. The power of the horses against the reins gave Matthew the first inkling of what his back and arms would feel like after a few hours of playing at being a driver. Still, they were moving…not very fast, but moving all the same, and Matthew tried to settle back against the cold-hardened cushion but found that the heavy pull of the horses was not going to let him relax one iota. It seemed they were in full command of this coach, and they knew it.
As he sat in obedience to the team, Matthew reflected not only on Elizabeth Mulloy’s tale but upon everything that had brought him and Julian to this point. He thought of Elizabeth saying had very nearly destroyed me and considered that she was likely more insane than she knew, for if anyone had been destroyed in the story of her life it had certainly been she.
And Julian’s comment: Very often it takes a bad man to do the things that have to be done. True, Matthew thought. If Julian’s nature weren’t what it was, they would neither have the book of potions nor Lazarus Firebaugh. Of course cutting the doctor as Julian had done was not a thing to be praised, but still…there would be no more attempts to escape, so the bad man had done his deed to its ultimate success.
And of ultimate success: on the road to Fell’s village was no promise that they’d get there, as Matthew was sure Lash was following in the other coach. How fast that coach was being driven was another question mark that seemed to hang in the snowy air before Matthew’s face.
And would Firebaugh be able to
reverse Berry’s condition? Even at the point of a dagger threatening his other ear?
And of the mirror purportedly created by Ciro Valeriani with the aid of an Italian sorcerer…a mirror that could summon a demon up from the depths of Hell? If Matthew had vowed to help find Valeriani’s son in the search for that mirror, what kind of accomplice to the act of demon-raising would that make him? Such a thing if true would mark a soul forever.
Of course it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Could it?
Well, by Matthew’s reckoning they had quite a way to go yet. It had taken thirty-eight hours from Bristol, but that had been in much better weather and the horses able to be driven harder and faster. Matthew recalled that the condition of the roads—the cart tracks, would be a better description—was not ideal for fast travel up into Wales, and particularly around Y Beautiful Bedd. So say forty-eight hours plus another twelve? That, he thought, would likely be a conservative estimate, particularly as the wind was picking up and shrilling past himself and the coach. Seventy-two hours from London to Fell’s village, say? And that was with hardly stopping at any of the coaching inns along the way except for resting the horses and the necessities, just as they’d done on the trip from Bristol.
There was nothing to do but to flick the reins every so often, to try to convince the team that a driver was in charge, to count off the miles and keep this polar bear coat wrapped around him, and God bless the taste in clothing of dead Count Pellegar, whose corpse and that of Baron Brux had surely by now been found at the Mayfair and would cause a profitable spike in the business of Lord Puffery’s Pin when Lady Puffery got hold of the story.
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