Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper

by David Barnett

  “But what is it doing?” asked Mrs. Cadwallader.

  * * *

  The bath at least made Gideon feel more human again. He shaved the black whiskers from his cheeks and chin, staring at himself in the fogged mirror.

  Who are you?

  He wasn’t sure he knew the answer any more than he had when he’d asked it of himself in the aftermath of Mesmer’s hypnotic attack. But perhaps people never knew the answer to that question, not until they were on their deathbed. He was Gideon Smith. He was the Hero of the Empire.

  “I’m the Hero of the Empire,” he said aloud. The words felt hollow. Had Collier tricked him? Somehow, he felt not. Collier was what he was, the product of the British Empire. He had gone bad, in Britain’s eyes. Just like John Reed had. But were there any villains, really? And if villainy was just a matter of perspective, did the same ring true for heroism?

  Wrapped in a huge towel, Gideon padded out of the bathroom and made for his room. As he passed Maria’s quarters, her door opened. He stopped, and they locked eyes for a moment. She wore a silk dressing gown, clutching it closed at her breast. He stood there, dripping water on the carpet, staring at her. She took a step toward him, reached out, and took hold of the towel bunched at his waist, dragging him with surprising force into her room.

  “I’ve missed you,” she whispered, closing the door and pushing him against it.

  He was stirring beneath the towel, and he wrapped his arms around her neck, drawing her lips to his. She let go of the silk gown, letting it fall open to reveal her milk-white nakedness beneath.

  “Touch me,” she instructed, taking his hand and placing it between her legs. She gasped as he laid his fingers on her.

  “You can feel that? It’s nice?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I can, and it is. I can feel more and more, day by day.” She took his other hand. “And touch me here. And here.”

  He followed her instructions as she loosened the towel. He murmured, “Lie on the bed.”

  “No,” she said. “You lie on the bed.”

  He blinked and smiled as she turned him around and steered him, backward, toward the bed. She smiled back. “While you have been away I have been learning how to be a lady. And how not to be.”

  The towel dropped away, and Gideon fell backward onto Maria’s bed as she shucked off the dressing gown and began to sit astride him. Then she stopped. “Did you hear that?”

  “No, I don’t—” he began, then paused. He had heard something, a whirring and ticking as though …

  “Oh,” said Maria. Gideon followed her gaze to the bedside table, where there resided a mesh of wires, gears, and lenses that, too late, he recognized.

  “It’s the Hypno-Array I stole from Markus Mesmer,” said Maria.

  Then a silent rainbow explosion filled the room.

  * * *

  Markus Mesmer waited impatiently as Alain, who had been a burglar in Paris of some notoriety, picked the lock to the front door of 23 Grosvenor Square. When the thin Frenchman clicked his tongue and pushed the door open, Mesmer strode into the hall, his henchman Alfonso following close behind. He did not have much time. He had never tried to activate his Hypno-Arrays from a distance before, and guessed that the instructions he had mentally projected—to give anyone within sight of them their heart’s desires—would not have a long-lasting effect.

  * * *

  He looked around the empty lower floors of the house. So this was where Einstein’s automaton had been hiding all this time. She must have left the stolen Hypno-Array here before getting herself captured by Garcia. Above him he heard the rhythmic creaking of bedsprings; so the house was not empty, then, and someone was getting their heart’s desire. He could hear voices, perhaps from a kitchen to the rear of the house, and stole across the hall as quietly as he could. He entered a room he guessed was a study, and a mystery was solved. Behind a pane of shattered glass in what appeared to be a trophy cabinet was a very old, early version of his Hypno-Array. He smiled. One taken from him by Dr. John Reed. So Maria had been hidden here, by his old foes Reed and Trigger? Their house inhabited after their deaths by their successor, Mr. Gideon Smith?

  The creaking of the bedsprings continued above. In the parlor he found what he was looking for—a map of London spread out on a table, a ring inked around a location near the river at Hammersmith. Beside it was the original notice he had asked to be put into the newspaper—evidently Smith or his compatriots had intercepted it—and a sheet torn from a notepad.

  The Dove, Hammersmith, 7 o’clock.

  So that was where Garcia would be with the automaton. Mesmer snapped his fingers. “We leave now. We must pack our things and be ready to flee the country immediately after taking the mechanical girl. Our network is in place?”

  Alfonso nodded. “We have a sympathizer on standby to take us by cargo dirigible to Malta, from whence we can make our way back to New Orleans. I shall have a message sent to him immediately to be ready.”

  Mesmer took one last look around. “Good. I shall be glad to be away from London. You would think, with half the world under their bootheels, they would seat their empire in a place where the weather is not so appalling.”

  * * *

  The sun shone in through the window, waking Gideon. He felt in the bed beside him, but it was empty. She must be up already. The scent of cooking bacon drifted up the stairs. Gideon yawned and reached for his pocket watch on the bedside table. Seven o’clock. He started for a moment, thinking he should be out on the sea, but then remembered it was Sunday. He heard a whistle playing a jaunty melody, and tinkling laughter, and smiled. His father, Arthur, entertaining Gideon’s son, while Maria, heavy with their second child, cooked breakfast.

  Life was good. Breakfast, then church, then playing on the beach at Sandsend, and an early night in readiness for taking the Cold Drake out at dawn. Old Arthur would insist on coming, of course, but Gideon had decided this was going to be his father’s last summer fishing the gearship. He deserved to retire and enjoy what was left of his life.

  He heard a tread on the stair and the door opened, a tray bearing breakfast entering first. “Breakfast in bed?” he said. “What have I done to deserve this?”

  His wife smiled at him, the sun catching in her short, auburn hair and giving her a flaming halo. Gideon tried to smile back, but failed, as the room began to shudder, crack, and shatter like a broken mirror.

  “Rowena?” he said.

  * * *

  Maria was running, running for her life, or so it seemed. She fled through a dark forest, branches whipping her face, thorns grabbing at her skirts, tearing the skin of her arms, catching in her hair. And still she ran, whether to something or from something she couldn’t quite tell.

  She could stop, catch her breath, get her bearings. But she didn’t want to. Because every time she looked down at her hands, her arms, she could see the scratches there, leaking not oil or hydraulic fluid.

  But blood.

  Maria laughed joyously and plunged headlong into the thick trees, reveling in every drop of blood that was torn from her flesh.

  Her flesh.

  And she kept running. Running for her life.

  * * *

  Aloysius Bent wasn’t quite sure how he’d found his way into his room, nor where he’d found the suit. He hadn’t seen it since he was twenty-one, if not younger. A lovely check, it had, green and blue, with wide lapels. He turned this way and that, admiring his reflection in the full-length mirror.

  He was a handsome bugger, was Aloysius Bent. Always effing had been. Straight back, strong arms, thin legs, a fine head of dark hair. A solid jaw and a smile that had made many a woman swoon.

  From somewhere close he could hear music. Stirring, vibrant music. He gave himself a wink and went off to investigate, stepping out into the hall in shiny polished shoes. The music—opera, he thought, maybe Wagner—came from the next floor up, and it sounded louder and stronger as he climbed the stairs.

  Mrs. Ca
dwallader’s rooms. He paused outside the door, then knocked briskly and let himself in before he was asked.

  What he saw took his breath away.

  Mrs. Cadwallader was standing there by the bed, her gramophone vibrating from the loudness of the music. She wore a long blue dress with a plunging neckline, her magnificent breasts heaving in time to the tune. “Ride of the Valkyries,” that was it. She held a spear in one hand and a shining shield in the other, and her hair hung in plaits on either side of her heavily made-up face. On her head was a horned helmet.

  Bent shook his head in wonder. “Sally?”

  The music seemed to hold its breath. She looked at him, her breasts rising as she inhaled deeply.

  “Oh,” she said, her lips full, her eyes half-closed. She flung her arms wide, the spear clattering against the light fixture, the shield knocking a vase from a chest of drawers. The music roared again. Sally Cadwallader threw back her head and cried, “Oh, take me, Aloysius! Take me!”

  He didn’t need effing telling twice.

  28

  GOING UNDERGROUND

  This wasn’t, conceded Lizzie Strutter to herself, going quite as planned. Christmas was looming, and the stock of money was getting low indeed. Perhaps she hadn’t thought this through. The strike had gotten her name in the papers, of course, and focused some attention on the police’s abject inability to capture Jack the Ripper, but still. There was a living to be made, and being made it most certainly wasn’t.

  There was an urgent rap at the door to her private room, and she swiftly pushed the few pound notes back into the wooden box on her lap, locked it, and slid it beneath the loose floorboard by her bed. The knock came again, louder, and a voice called, “Mum? Mum?”

  She opened the door to Tess, a pockmarked girl with a thumb missing from her days working in the fish market, before Lizzie took her away from all that. The girl looked all of a flutter.

  “Mum, come quick. There’s a big mob in the square. They’ve got torches and sticks and everything. Salty Sylvia’s with ’em.”

  Salty Sylvia? What was that old whore doing on Lizzie’s manor? She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and followed Tess downstairs and out of the house to the square at the head of Walden Street. The girl had been right. There were maybe forty or fifty of them, hard-looking men who appeared to be out for trouble. And they might just get it. Henry Savage’s mob were pouring out of tenements and houses, throwing their shoulders back and facing up to the interlopers. This could get very ugly indeed.

  Lizzie marched through the snow to the neutral ground between the two growing mobs, where Salty Sylvia stood by a fierce-looking meathead with a grubby patch over one eye.

  “What’s all this about, Sylvia?” she called.

  It was the man who answered. “We’re here for Henry Savage. He done Gruff Billy in and made Sylvia shut up shop. We’re saying enough’s enough.”

  Lizzie looked down her nose at him. “And who’s we?”

  The man jabbed his broad chest with his thumb. “One-Eyed Bob, they call me.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Lizzie.

  One-Eyed Bob frowned, as though unsure whether she was serious or not, then sniffed. “Me and the boys say it’s gone too far now. We want Savage. Where is he?”

  “Henry Savage is dead,” said Lizzie. There was a wave of muttering from both sides. She’d had the girls wrap Henry’s body up and dump him in the Thames in the dead of night, as far as possible from Walden Street. “Somebody cut off his balls and choked him on ’em.”

  One-Eyed Bob looked disconcerted. He glanced back at his gang, then at Lizzie again. “Then we’ll take our pound of flesh from somebody else. Who’s taken over his mob?”

  Lizzie heard the rattle of weaponry being disgorged from pockets and shirtsleeves, knives clicking open. There was going to be bloodshed here.

  “Mum!”

  She looked up to see Rachel running across the square, between the two bristling factions. The scar-faced girl pelted through the snow, stopping in front of Lizzie to catch her breath. “Mum, I just heard. They’ve got Jack the Ripper.”

  A fresh wave of muttering swept through the ever-growing crowd. There must have been two hundred people in the square now, maybe more. Lizzie said, “You sure?”

  Rachel nodded. “They’ve got him at the Commercial Road police station, so I heard. Does that mean the strike’s off?”

  Lizzie looked up at Salty Sylvia and One-Eyed Bob. She was still Lizzie Strutter, and these people had come onto her turf looking for trouble. She couldn’t back down so easily. She tapped her chin then said, “Why don’t we all go down to the Commercial Road station, see for ourselves?”

  One-Eyed Bob nodded. “Yeah. Maybe get them to hand him over to us, for a bit of street justice.” He grinned, showing the stumps of his blackened teeth. “Whether they like it or not.”

  * * *

  They had all emerged, cautiously and disoriented, from the effects of Markus Mesmer’s attack, unsure what had happened, uncertain whether what they had seen and experienced had been real or imagined. The whole ordeal had taken twenty minutes, perhaps less. Gideon had awoken naked in Maria’s room, her nowhere to be seen. He had wrapped the towel around him and ventured out into the hall, in time to see a confused-looking Bent descending the stairs from the top floor.

  “What just happened, Gideon?” Bent had asked.

  He shrugged helplessly. “Mesmer’s Hypno-Array … a long-distance assault, of some kind. How do you feel?”

  Bent made a face. “Tolerable. You?”

  Then Maria emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in her silk dressing gown. She was jabbing a needle into her finger. She looked up, tearfully. “Nothing.”

  Bent looked at his pocket watch. “Four hours, give or take, before we nail Garcia and get Charlotte Elmwood back. I think that just gives us enough time to track down Charles Collier.”

  Gideon was thankful for him changing the subject. Mrs. Cadwallader, wiping her face with a damp cloth, came downstairs from her quarters then, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. Whatever had happened to them all, no one wished to disclose it. Gideon bit his lip. Rowena? What did that mean?

  They dressed and decamped to the kitchen, where Bent had laid out a map of Bazalgette’s sewers he had found in the study. “Have you any idea where Collier and his henchmen were camped out?”

  Gideon studied the map. “I was in the East End when I went down into the sewers … but I’ve no idea how long I walked before I found the room. I was with…” He paused, then smiled. “What day is it?”

  “Wednesday,” said Maria, entering into the kitchen. She wore a rugged gray woolen dress and black ankle boots, leather gloves on her hands.

  Gideon closed his eyes. If it’s Monday we’re here, Tuesday over Holborn, Wednesday under Tottenham Court Road, Thursday up Highgate … regular as clockwork, ain’t we, Mr. Tait?

  “Ropes, oil lanterns, and guns,” said Gideon. “And Mrs. Cadwallader, can you organize us a steam-cab to take us to Tottenham Court Road as quickly as possible?”

  The housekeeper put on her coat and went outside to hail a cab, while Bent went to the hall to use the telephone. Maria said, “Gideon? Before the Hypno-Array … were you shocked?”

  He met her eyes. “No. Anything but.”

  She crossed the space between them, and he embraced her. “Tonight,” he whispered into her hair. “Tonight you come to my room. And you can tell me more about how you’ve been learning not to be a lady.…”

  Mrs. Cadwallader returned to say the cab was outside, and Bent dragged a knapsack of weapons and tools into the kitchen. “I got these from the armory. Tried to telephone Commercial Road, but the operator said all the lines are down. Do you want to swing by there first…?”

  “No time,” said Gideon, taking a revolver from the bag and squinting along its barrel. “We’ll have to do this without the police.”

  Mrs. Cadwallader wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Good luck, and take care.”


  Bent leaned in to her—to kiss her? Gideon thought with astonishment—but she turned away from him at the last moment. “Mr. Bent,” she murmured. “Please…”

  “Sorry, Sally,” he said quietly. Then he looked up at Gideon and Maria. “Are we going to effing do this, or what?”

  * * *

  “Jesus effing Christ, it stinks down here,” said Bent. “And I know that’s a bit rich coming from me.”

  Gideon helped Maria down the ladder that led from the manhole cover they had pried free in an alley off Tottenham Court Road. As she stepped onto the brick ledge, the river of effluent running sluggishly beside him, she said, “I was real.”

  He looked quizzically at her. “You are real.”

  “No, in Mesmer’s illusion. I bled. I was a real woman.”

  He took her face in his hands. “You are a real woman.”

  She met his gaze. “Do you love me for who and what I am?”

  He nodded. Maria said, “What did you see?”

  Gideon paused, still troubled over the vision. Carefully, he said, “I was in Sandsend. My father was still alive. I was married, and happy…”

  Maria bit her lip. “To me?”

  He had thought it was Maria cooking breakfast, hadn’t he? Even as he knew it was impossible, one child playing in the garden, another on the way, he had thought it was Maria. So it wasn’t really a lie.

  “Yes,” he said, and she embraced him even tighter. “Yes, it was you.”

  And a hollowness opened up within him, whether from the telling of the lie or the truth it masked, he wasn’t quite sure.

  “When you lovebirds have quite finished,” said Bent, “there’s rats as big as effing dogs down here. What are we looking for?”

  “Ssh,” said Gideon, holding up a hand. “That.”

  From the shadows that hid the curve of the sewer tunnel ahead of them came a low and sonorous singing.

  * * *

  “Miss Crotchety Quaver was sweet seventeen, and a player of excellent skill / she would play all the day, all the ev’ning as well / making all the neighborhood ill / and to keep her piano in tune she would have a good tuner constantly there / and he’d pull up the instrument three times a week, just to keep it in proper repair.…” Mr. Lyall finished the verse with a belch that echoed around the narrow sewer tunnel. “Oh, I do apologize, Mr. Tait. It’s that cat we had for dinner. Always gives me indigestion, cat.”