From Whitechapel

by Clegg, Melanie

  I looked him right in the eyes. ‘Did you arrange to have her sent there?’ I said.

  He nodded, looking really quite infuriatingly pleased with himself. ‘Not at first, as you know, but later on when she threatened to cause trouble for me. She’d fallen in love, you see, with a most unsuitable young man and when your father refused to countenance the match, she came to me to ask for money in exchange for her silence about what had passed between us all those years before. As the owner and chief patron of Panacea House, it seemed like the perfect solution to have her sent there.’

  I remembered the letter. I was just a girl, little more than a child at the time. I couldn’t defend myself against him, you see. He was too powerful, too strong. I tried to fight him but it was impossible and afterwards I felt only the shame of what he had done. ‘You violated her,’ I said flatly, making sure that he could see the flash of cold hatred in my eyes. ‘Your friend’s daughter.’

  He looked away then, unable to meet my eyes and the accusation that lay within them. ‘I believed myself encouraged,’ he muttered. ‘How was I to know? Young women these days are so bold, so openly flirtatious. It’s impossible to know what they are really thinking…’ His voice trailed away as I thought with a pang of shame of Henry Mercier and the kiss we had so briefly shared and then my avoidance of him afterwards.

  ‘That’s not an excuse,’ I said. ‘She must have been not much more than a child herself when I was born. I’m amazed that you can sleep at night, Lord Brennan, when you think about all the damage you have done.’

  He shrugged. ‘I think you’ll find that I sleep very well,’ he said. ‘I have nothing to reproach myself with. I could have had Beatrice killed when she tried so ineptly to blackmail me but instead I persuaded your father to have her sent to Panacea House, where she was intended to live out the rest of her days in some comfort. How was I to know that the stupid girl would run away to her lover and end up in some French whore house, presumably after he had tired of her?’ He looked at me. ‘I can’t really be blamed for that you know, although I can well imagine how much it distresses you to hear the truth about your mother. Certainly, I can’t condemn you for wanting to pin the blame on to someone else.’

  ‘I blame you because it is all your fault,’ I whispered before pushing myself from the chair and making a grab for the reticule, ‘and it is you who distresses me, not Beatrice.’ I fumbled inside the bag, feeling desperately for the pistol that I had secreted within its depths as he rushed towards me with his hand upraised. ‘Where is it?’ It had gone. I felt desperately within the depths of the bag, my fingers coming into contact with my remaining money and some coins but the pistol I had taken from my father’s study had vanished and I felt my heart sink with despair as I realised that it must have fallen out when I was taken from Miller’s Court and no doubt lay there still, waiting for some criminal denizen of Dorset Street to claim it for their own.

  ‘You stupid bitch.’ His blow almost felled me and I felt myself reel against a pile of crates arranged neatly against the wall before he grabbed me by the front of my coat and dumped me back into the chair, the reticule hanging uselessly from my fingers. ‘I can see that you are becoming quite deranged, Alice.’ His eyes were cold and he was breathing hard after the exertion of half carrying, half dragging me across the floor. ‘Perhaps an extended sojourn in the wilds of Scotland would be of some benefit to you after all.’ He smiled at my look of surprise. ‘You didn’t think that Panacea House was the only string to my bow, did you? Oh no, I also own a much more select property, run along far more stringent lines, in the Highlands of Scotland. Whereas Panacea House is a delightful rest home for the wayward daughters of the aristocracy, I suppose you could say that its sister residence, Kildaire Manor is more of an asylum.’ He smiled and grasped my jaw, forcing me to look at him. ‘The staff there were all handpicked by me for their efficiency and discretion. You could bury someone alive there for decades and no one would ever know.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ I said, wrenching my face away from his grasp. ‘Someone would come after me.’

  He shook his head. ‘Would they? I think not. It would be an easy matter to persuade your father that you have run away as your mother did and once you are safely ensconced in solitary confinement with a new name and story and an official diagnosis of complete derangement in the wastelands of Scotland, there would be no point looking for you. He could search all the four corners of the globe and never find you again.’

  I stared at him, touching my fingers delicately to the blood that I could feel seeping from the corner of my cracked lip. All of the fight had gone out of me now. It was over. I was done. ‘You’ve thought of everything,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Almost everything,’ a familiar and oh so loved voice behind me said and I turned to see Patrick standing in the doorway, his handsome face hard and unsmiling as his gaze swept over the scene before him. ‘Has he hurt you, Alice?’ he asked softly, moving forward to take my face gently between his fingers, his eyes sharp with concern. ‘Minnie sent a note to tell me where you had gone. While you were taking a tour of Panacea House, I was going through the papers in Mrs Smith-Welsh’s office so when I couldn’t find you at Miller’s Court, it wasn’t too difficult to guess where you had been taken and by whom - after all, my Lord Brennan has been boring half of society with talk of his latest acquisitions in the docks. As to the rest of it - even on Dorset Street, the spectacle of a toff hurling an unconscious young woman into the back of a carriage is unusual enough to occasion some remark. ’

  I smiled as best I could despite the pain of my split and bleeding lip. ‘I am only a little hurt,’ I said. ‘Oh Patrick, I don’t think I have ever been so happy to see anyone in all my life.’

  He grinned down at me and gently ran a finger down my cheek. ‘Finally,’ he said softly and with some satisfaction. ‘Perhaps I should have arranged for you to be abducted long before now.’ He looked up at Lord Brennan, who remained standing as if transfixed on the other side of the room. ‘I heard it all,’ he said coldly. ‘What sort of a man are you to take that which is not freely given, to destroy lives, to show no care or concern for the victims of your selfish lusts?’

  Lord Brennan shrugged. ‘Oh come now, Patrick, don’t play the innocent and expect me to believe that you wouldn’t do the same thing.’ He lunged towards me, pulling me to my feet and holding a knife to my throat. Patrick was quicker though and no sooner had the knife flashed silver in the corner of my vision but he’d pulled back his fist and punched Lord Brennan full in the face, knocking him immediately unconscious.

  I gave a scream as his blood splattered onto my face then stared down in horror at his body, which lay crumpled at my feet. ‘Patrick…’ I held out my hand to him and he immediately took it, his fingers warm and comforting as they intertwined with my own. ‘My God, Patrick.’

  He looked down at Lord Brennan’s body, his face so pale that one for one awful moment I thought he was going to faint. ‘I couldn’t let him hurt you, Alice,’ he said quietly, pulling himself together and putting an arm around me, ‘and I won’t let him hurt anyone else ever again.’

  I sighed and leaned against him. ‘And how do you propose to do that?’ I asked. ‘Short of keeping him a captive on one of your estates?’

  He smiled. ‘That’s not such a bad idea,’ he said. ‘However, I think it’s enough for now that he knows that we both know what he has done. When he wakes up, I think that he will be immensely amenable to my proposal that he takes himself off overseas for an extended tour if he doesn’t want his vicious little secrets to be exposed to all society.’

  I nodded, unable to resist giving Lord Brennan’s unconscious body a little prod with my toe although I couldn’t quite bring myself to fully kick him. ‘That seems reasonable enough.’ I sighed. ‘I just hope that he doesn’t take Lucasta with him. It hardly seems fair that she should suffer just because she has such a monster for a father.’ And me too, I might have added but didn’t becaus
e I still couldn’t quite face the truth of the fact that this dreadful, wicked man lying bleeding and inert at our feet was my actual father. ‘Is it really all over?’ I said in a quiet voice, thinking of Beatrice and feeling as if my heart must surely burst from the sorrow of all that I had learned that night.

  He nodded and gently pulled me towards him. ‘It’s all over for Lord Brennan,’ he said, kissing my forehead, my eyelashes, my nose and then finally, and almost shyly, my lips. ‘But I think we’ll both live to see another day.’

  Chapter Twenty Nine, Emma, November, 1888

  ‘I’ll have a pint, Em and have a gin yourself, lass,’ one of the regulars, a cheerful Scottish docker with a shock of grey hair and lazy eye called across the bar. ‘Cheer up, it might never happen.’

  I smiled at him. ‘It already has, Jock, it already has.’ I served him his drink and necked a shot of gin when Mrs Ringer had her back turned. It was the first drop of alcohol I’d had for a couple of days and I coughed as it made its fiery way down to my stomach, while thinking that there wasn’t enough gin in the world to solve my problems.

  ‘You having tonight off, Em?’ one of the other barmaids, a pink cheeked girl called Cassie said, giving me a nudge with her plump elbow. ‘It’s about time you went outside and had a bit of fun.’

  I grinned. ‘Maybe I will,’ I said. ‘There’s been no murders for over a month now.’ I resisted the temptation to claim any responsibility for this - after all, I’d barely set foot outside the Britannia since Cathy was killed and then only in broad daylight with one of the other girls for company. It may have been something of a stretch to say that I had personally been keeping the women of Whitechapel alive and well by negating Jack’s need to send me bloody messages but at least I felt like I was doing something to help myself and by extension others.

  Cassie laughed. ‘I never had you pegged as such a worry wart, Em,’ she said, rolling her huge blue eyes. ‘That whole Ripper business shook you up good and proper, didn’t it?’

  I turned away, feeling the smile falter on my lips. ‘A little bit,’ I conceded with a shrug. ‘Hard not to be a bit shaken up when women are being split open like bags of corn in the street.’

  She gave an eloquent shudder. ‘It’s all over and done with now, Em,’ she said, moving forward to serve a customer who was gesturing impatiently with his pipe in a bid to get our attention. ‘Mark my words. There’ll be no more killing.’ She winked at me.

  I looked out of the window as I briskly rinsed out and dried a pile of dirty glasses. Dusk had long since fallen and the street lamps had been lit so that they cast their peculiar pale green glow on the damp pavements. As I watched, a young couple, thin cheeked and dressed from head to toe in sombre black walked slowly past the pub windows, their heads ducked down and braced against the cold wind and rain, their arms wrapped tightly around each other. For some reason they made me think of Albert and I was forced to give myself an angry shake to dislodge him from my mind. That was all finished. He was someone else’s man now, not mine.

  ‘You off then, Em?’ I didn’t hear Mrs Ringer coming up behind me until her voice was booming in my ear. I liked the landlady well enough although I feared her plump fists, dark currant like eyes that seemed to see everything that went on either side of the bar and far beyond and annoying habit of creeping up behind us.

  ‘In a bit,’ I said placidly, taking my time drying the last of the glasses before putting it back on the shelf. ‘You don’t mind me having the night off do you?’

  Mrs Ringer shook her head. ‘It’s not like you ask often,’ she said. ‘Not like the other girls. Just don’t make a racket when you get back later.’ She leaned in close. ’And no bringing any men back with you. We’ve had more than enough trouble of that sort around here, thank you very much.’

  I smiled. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ I said, folding up the towel and putting it on a ledge. ‘I’ve had more than enough trouble of that sort too.’ I took off my apron, picked up my shawl then checked my reflection in the mirror that hung behind the bar. I looked pale and a trifle drawn about the face but not too bad really, especially as I’d just spent some of my carefully hoarded pennies on a brown dye to cover up the blonde, which had been more roots than yellow by the time I tackled it. I thought I looked rather nice now or at least not as down on my luck as I had done before.

  ‘You have a good time now,’ Cassie whispered as I gave my hair one last pat into place then crossed to the other side of the bar. ‘If you do want to bring someone back, I promise that none of us will tell.’ It was no more than I’d done for the others several times after all, even if they’d kept me awake half the night with their gasps and gigglings and I’d had to stuff a pillow over my head to help me sleep.

  I took a deep breath of fresh air when I came out of the Britannia, pleased despite myself to be out at night again and thinking that perhaps I needn’t have left it so long. He’d gone after all. No one had seen head nor hair of him since that night on Mitre Square and it seemed unlikely that anyone ever would again. It really was over. I pulled my shawl tight about my shoulders, put my head down against the wind and turned left up Commercial Street.

  ‘Alright Em?’ Several people hailed me from the gloom as I made my way up the street towards the police station, most of them smiling with genuine pleasure to see me. ‘Haven’t seen you out and about for a while. How’s things, darling?’ It’d be a wrench to leave them and start again in a new place where no one knew my face or name but it had to be done. The killings had stopped for now but I knew as well as anyone that it could all start up again at any old time and when that happened, I intended to be as far far away as I could manage.

  I pushed open the door that led to the back yard of the station then scurried into the building and up the stairs. I hadn’t seen Cora since the night Cathy was murdered and didn’t know what sort of greeting I would get but I hoped she’d understand why I stayed away. She’d told me once that the Lee family lived on the top floor and so I panted my way up there, my boots rattling so loudly against the painted wooden stairs that they probably had more than enough warning that someone was on their way to them. God only knew what it was like when the policemen in their great heavy boots were on their way up and down to their duties in the station below.

  I remembered Cora’s father, Sergeant Lee with his great red sideburns and thatch of auburn hair, then and my heart failed me a little as I imagined what would happen if he opened the door to me and not one of his daughters. Cora had told me often enough how kind and polite he was even to the whores of the district but would he feel the same way if one of them tried to befriend his precious daughter?

  There wasn’t a sound to be heard from behind the door but I didn’t allow myself to hesitate for even so much as a second before I raised my hand and softly knocked. It wasn’t too late so surely someone would be awake? There was no response and so I knocked again, louder this time and more confidently. ‘Cora? Are you there?’ I whispered, pressing my face against the wood.

  ‘Who is this?’ The door was wrenched open so suddenly that I almost fell into the room and it took a moment for me to recover myself, all under the cold and distinctly unfriendly eye of a tall redheaded girl whom I realised at once must be Cora’s elder sister, Cat. ‘What do you want?’ She looked me over slowly, quirking her pale eyebrows in a way that made it quite clear to me that she knew exactly what sort of girl I was or at least what sort I had once been. ‘Who let you in here?’

  ‘The gate was left unlocked,’ I said feebly. ‘I came to see Cora.’

  Cat pursed her lips and for a moment I thought she was going to send me on my way but before she could open her mouth to speak, Cora herself appeared, dressed in neat sun bleached pink cotton and bouncing excitedly behind her sister’s shoulder like a puppy. I smiled and relaxed, mentally kicking myself for ever thinking that she might not be pleased to see me. ‘Em!’ she squeaked. ‘I thought you’d run away!’

  I grinned and shook m
y head. ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Not yet anyway. I’m off though in the morning. I’ve been saving up and it’s time to move on.’

  Her face fell. ‘Are you joking?’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘Are you really leaving?’

  I shrugged, feeling a bit abashed now especially as her sister was now glaring at me. ‘I have to go, Cora,’ I said apologetically. ‘I’ve barely set foot outside for over a month now. I can’t live like that. You know I can’t.’

  She hesitated then shook her head. ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘I suppose not.’ She looked up at her sister and a faint flush touched her cheeks and ears. ‘Emma is a friend of mine,’ she said before glancing awkwardly at me. ‘We are friends, aren’t we?’ she asked.

  I nodded and would have taken her hand if it wasn’t for Cat glaring at me as if she wanted to kick me all the way down the stairs again. ‘We’ll always be friends, Cora,’ I said before taking a deep breath. ‘That’s why I thought I’d come and see if you wanted to come out for a bit. I don’t know if I’ll ever be coming back, you see and so it might well be the last time.’

  She caught her breath and looked again at her sister, her eyes shining with tears and hope. ‘Can I, Cat?’ she said. ‘Just for a little while? I’ve finished all of my work and the boys are in bed now so you don’t need my help with them any more.’

  Her sister hesitated, coldly sweeping her eyes over me again then gave a grudging nod. ‘Fine, but don’t stay out too late,’ she said, her gaze softening as she looked down into Cora’s face. ‘You don’t have much fun, Cora love, do you? I’ll tell Pa that you’ve already gone to bed when he gets in - he won’t ever know any different.’ Her blue eyes turned to me again and hardened like ice. ‘As for you,’ she said harshly, ‘if so much as a hair on my sister’s head is harmed, I’ll be looking for you no matter where you’ve run off to.’