“Smells like pigs in ‘ere!” someone yelled.
“Oink! Oink!” sounded out in chorus. The rattle of tin cups against iron bars followed. I grimaced.
“You’ve started a trend, Inspector,” Reid commented mildly, picking at some lint on his tweed.
“I believe I know where the orphans have been taken to,” I said urgently.
“Do you now?”
“Durham, Reid. We must go there.”
“Ah, shame you’re behind bars, then, in’t it?”
“Good God, man! This is not a game.”
He stepped forward and gripped my shirt between the bars, hauling me hard against the steel.
“No, Inspector. ’Tis a game, indeed. Checkmate.”
I stared at the man and wondered what it was I had done to garner such hatred.
“Got some news for you, and all,” Reid said conversationally. He did not release my shirt front. His breath smelt faintly of tobacco. “Your doctor was seen leaving Temple Bar.” I closed my eyes, a familiar feeling of exasperation flowing through me. “My men followed her to Whitechapel, and all.” I smiled; it was in no way humorous. “But that’s not all, Kelly. Guess who’s with her?”
God, please let it be Blackie.
“Who, Inspector?” I asked as he seemed to want me to say it.
“Why that fop, of course. That one that’s been sniffing around her skirts.”
“Tempest?” I all but shouted.
“The one and same.” Reid grinned and released my shirt front, using both hands to flatten the wrinkled fabric.
Panic coursed through my veins, heating my blood and making me desperate.
“It’s him,” I said. “He’s her foil. Her contact. Don't you see?”
“You’re talkin’ a load of bollocks, man. Can’t handle a little time away, then? Making you sickly?”
“Tempest. The Londonderry mines. That’s where the orphans are. That’s where Wilhelmina is. County Durham, man! This,” I said, starting to pace, my hand flinging out and indicating the cell I was in. “This is a ruse. A ploy. A trick. She wants me out of the way.”
Reid studied me, his pipe in his hand, his lips in a thin line.
“She is not coming, Inspector. She has already fled. And Tempest is acting in her stead to secure Dr Cassidy.”
“You don't say?” Reid muttered.
I rushed the bars. He stepped back slightly, scowling.
“Anna needs me.”
“I have men on her. She is fine.”
“Is she? This is Eliza May we’re talking about.”
“I know who she is,” Reid snapped. “Your wife.” The knife should have cut, but I felt no pain.
I needed to get to Anna.
“The woman who pulled the Ripper’s strings, Edmund. What think you now she is capable of?”
He swore. Looked to the ground for a moment. And then pulled a thick bundle of keys from his pocket. I stepped back as he unlocked the cell’s door, the iron bars rattling.
Shouts sounded out from the cells joining mine; Charlie screamed at me to honour our bargain from across the way. I would. I would put a good word in for him. But not now. Not with Anna in such peril.
We ran down the hallway, ignoring the jeers and globules of saliva spat at us. And burst through the next gates with urgency. Reid freed lock after lock with surprising alacrity, and finally we emerged to dull sunshine and a hansom waiting.
“Whitechapel Road,” Reid yelled at the driver. “The Blind Beggar!”
The Blind Beggar. It all made sense. The Petticoat Lane Market gang. The tavern Tempest had been seen at on occasion. Henry Tempest, ESQ, nephew to the Marquess of Londonderry.
And he had my Anna.
“Faster!” I shouted to the horseman, the horse tossing its head and snorting in agitation. Our wheels splashed through murky puddles and the horse’s hooves clattered upon the pavement. The wind whistled through the gaps in the carriage. A ringing sound invaded my ears.
I was sure we took too long to arrive.
But the streets were remarkably bare, and the way unhindered, and as The Blind Beggar Tavern appeared through the mist, my heart in my throat, my breaths ragged, a small smattering of hope blossomed.
And then I heard it. It could not be mistaken.
A pistol firing. The percussion of which matched itself to the rampant beat inside my chest; the echo of its retort leaving me shaking, repeating again and again inside my head.
I didn't feel my leg when I jumped down from the hansom cab. I didn't feel the chill on the air as evening approached.
I felt nothing. Nothing but my fear.
This Town Is My Kingdom
Anna
Eliza May’s arm about my neck stiffened and then tightened to an almost unbearable pressure. Breathing became difficult. She jerked my body backward, then spun us both until we faced the brick siding of The Blind Beggar Tavern. With one final heave, she pushed my cheek against the rough surface. Her rapid breaths sounding out beside my ear.
“Now, now, doctor,” she whispered harshly. “We don’t want to cause ourselves an injury.” Her booted foot came down hard on my toes. “An eye for an eye,” she murmured.
I bit back a gasp, certain she’d fractured a bone somewhere. Tears blinded my vision. She tightened her arm minutely, and then slowly released the pressure enough so I could draw air. But she did not move away from her position. I could feel her eyes on the side of my face. Her breath slower now, but no less loud inside my ear. She wore a dark cloak made of fine material. The skirts of her dress were hidden behind the heavy fabric as it draped to the ground picking up dirt from the pavement.
I studied the brick wall before me, trying to think of a way to extricate myself. The pistol pressed into my side, reminding me how much at her mercy I actually was.
“Well?” I said, archly. “What now? You have me at a disadvantage. I am unarmed. You are not. Seek you your revenge and be done with it.”
Perhaps calling the mad woman’s bluff was not the wisest of actions. But had she wanted me dead, I was sure she would have pulled the trigger already. No, Eliza May Kelly’s desires were more complex than that. I could sense her curiosity. Her excitement at having trapped me. Her eagerness to make me suffer some more. The only thing missing from her tableau of evil was Andrew’s presence and him witnessing my downfall.
“In such a hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil?” she purred.
“I am bored of our conversations. I seek an end to them once and for all.”
“You are in no place, Dr Cassidy, to achieve such. I hold all the cards. Your life. Your cousin’s life. His.”
His. She meant Andrew’s. And yet, I could not assuage the feeling that she would have killed him already also, should that have been her ultimate desire.
“He awaits you now, Moriarty,” I said, using her moniker; I was not so immune to her threat to push her beyond that which she could endure. Calling her out by her given name may well have tipped the scale.
Eliza May Kelly was psychotic in nature. Unstable, irreverent, and completely mad. Unfortunately, her type of mental illness was also laced with a lethal and sharp intelligence. She thought herself above all others, superior in abilities and mind, untouchable.
A noose about her neck was all that would fell this woman.
But she also owned Newgate Gaol. The orphans’ disappearance through those gates said as much. And prosecution via the Old Bailey would prove ineffectual. Eliza May Kelly had far reaching influence in too many different places. Places of power.
She’d built herself an empire. And she the evil empress.
“I see you understand at last, Doctor,” she whispered when my shoulders drooped and the starch evaporated from my spine. “You cannot win. You are but a tool in my shed to be used when I so deem it.”
“And what, pray tell, do you deem of me?”
She laughed. It sounded unhinged and faintly familiar. Leaning forward, she pressed her lips to my cheek, her bl
onde hair falling free of its ties and stroking my forehead. She shifted slightly, making it impossible to see her face. I knew she wore a hood of some description, but her continued efforts to hide herself even from me seemed strange. Had we not revealed ourselves sufficiently?
The pistol dug in deeper. Her arm tightened again, making breathing painful.
“Did he go calmly?” she asked, having no desire it seemed to answer my question.
“Did who go calmly?”
“Your disloyalty does not become you, Doctor.”
Andrew. She meant Andrew. Did he go quietly into the Black Maria.
“Why do you do this?” I pressed. “Why hunt him so?”
“He started the hunt. I aim to finish it.”
“You killed people. Poisoned them. You’re doing it again. The prostitutes. The telegraph boy. To what end?”
“You would not understand.”
“I would try if you would tell me.”
She shifted, readjusting the pistol as if it were too heavy. Her arm about my neck had loosened some, enough to draw breath without injury. But she did not step back and face me. She kept my body pressed against the brick wall, my back to her chest, my face turned away from her visage. This was to be a clandestine confrontation.
Which left me with no other conclusion than she did not wish to end my life today.
“He causes suffering wherever he treads,” she whispered. “He leaves behind a trail of broken pieces. He cannot see it, for he is too closely observant of his role in life. All else falls by the wayside. Have you not experienced such neglect of attention? Have you not sought it simply because it was not there?”
“You were his wife.” She laughed. It was not so much bitter as full of amusement. “He came home to you every night.”
“Did he?”
Andrew would have returned to his matrimonial home as often as his role of police inspector would have allowed it. He was a man of honour. This I had no doubt. His reluctance to start a physical relationship with me was due in sole part to his promise to this woman. This woman who held me flush against her breasts, pressed up against a wall, and cut off my air. Despite everything Eliza May had done to him and others, Andrew was still loyal to his wife. To the legalities of his marriage.
“What more would you have had of him?” I demanded.
“What I would have had is irrelevant. What he failed to provide is all that matters.”
“The past is the past,” I tried.
“And yet is not life built on the shattered remains of where we have trodden? Are we not but mere reflections of where we have been? What we have done? How we have been treated?”
She sucked in a breath as if the subject riled her beyond anger; that anger removing all oxygen from the air with its lethal flame of rage.
“Did he fight them?” she asked eventually. “Or did he take the punishment as stoically as he walks through his day?”
Andrew. I refused to be pulled further into this macabre retelling of events. She would have had someone watching in Temple Bar. She would have known how Andrew had been arrested and had been treated by H Division. His former superior, Superintendent Arnold. His replacement, Inspector Reid. Eliza May would have known all, and yet she wished to relive it, just as she relived that fateful night in Lime Street, when Andrew was the hunter and she his prey.
“Did you stay to watch?” I asked, my throat parched, my lips sticking together in their dryness. “Did you burn along with him?”
Her arm tightened. The pistol pressed in harder.
“What know you of this?” she hissed in my ear.
“I know everything. He has told me.”
“No.”
“He shares his darkest secrets and brightest hopes.”
“Never.”
“He tells me all.” I was certain Inspector Kelly did no such thing. But he had revealed much since arriving here in London. More so than he had in the past several years of living in Auckland city.
“You are inept at lying, Anna Cassidy. But I do so admire your gall.”
She shifted again; either to taunt me with her continued hold or because she herself was uncomfortable in this position. Was she smaller than me? Shorter? I could not say. For now I was trapped and she the faceless jailor.
“Tell me,” she whispered against my ear. “Does he speak of his wife when he shares these things? Does he think of her when he holds you? Can you be sure it is not her he sees when he closes his eyes and ruins you?”
I did not want to let her words reach me, but standing as I was, helpless and contained, nowhere else to escape to, I had little choice but to confront them. Hear them. Feel them.
Andrew Kelly lived by a noble set of rules. Rules which defined his every action. Rules which, undeniably, included his wife’s continued existence.
If I were a different woman, I would wish her dead.
A sobbed laugh escaped me.
Maybe I was not so indifferent as I thought.
“You think this amusing?” Eliza May snarled. “You think I will not pull the trigger?”
I did not know what to think. Emotions coursed through me. Sadness. Hopelessness. Defeat.
For once in my life, I could not rise to my father’s expectations. Fight had been drilled into me from an early age. Fight for my place in society. Fight against the pull of my mother’s addictive personality. Fight the unfairness in life.
Fight.
And yet I stood there and let a woman who held my happiness in her hands abuse me. My parasol forgotten. My anger defused. All that was left was sorrow.
“Have you nothing to say, Doctor?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“All that talk of equality for women. All that self-righteous indignation at your lot in life. And you are trapped by your circumstances. By your choice to love a man who has a wife. By the laws which govern your existence. Where is your fearless rage? Where is your dignified superiority? Fled, like all courage flees, in the face of such horrors. This is life, Anna! This is what we as women must endure. We have a choice. Live it. Or rule it. We die by choices and if I should die, I will die having ruled my life as I see fit. Not as a man sees fit to rule me.”
“I had not thought suffrage was your impetus,” I murmured.
“I suffer no man and no fool, save those who live by my rules. I fight my fight and no other’s. This world is abhorrent and defiles with such ease, but those who should live outside of man’s rules are above such degradation. The jest is, my dear Dr Cassidy, that the rules man sets that we so despise can be tailored to our own perceptions. Man is not so clever he can turn down a wet quim or soft mouth. Ruled by his sex he is controllable. Given enough and he is owned. Those that own the men who make the rules, own the rules. It is simple biology. Animalistic in nature. I own the men who make the rules. I let them think they are in charge when in reality it is a woman who sets the parameters for them. It does not suit my purpose to fight for equality. For I do not need it. I already have so much. I have my freedom. Do you have yours?”
I stared at the brick wall before me trying futilely to reconcile her speech into some semblance of sense. She was utterly mad, but with a focus that alarmed me.
“You have had such cause to rule men’s lives?” I asked, for want of something to say. My mind was a jumbled mess of words and meanings, images and sensations. Of course she had ruled men, she ruled Andrew to this day.
“This town is my kingdom,” she said. “The streets my palace. The people within its walls my servants. I rule them all, including the men. I say who lives and who dies. Who floods with bliss and who gives the pleasure. There is no one and no thing who can say otherwise.”
“I beg to differ,” a gruff male voice sounded out at the end of the alley. “I seek me own sweet death when it suits me, and no abbess of London tells me when to do so.”
Eliza May spun us both around to face the newcomer, my body shielding hers in case the intruder was armed in a similar fashion to
herself. He wasn’t. Save for a billy club. One I had seen the sergeant wield on many occasions.
“You!” she growled, tightening her hold on me, dragging us further into the shadows. I barely managed to squeeze in a breath or keep my feet under me. Her panic made my heart rate thunder.
“Me,” Blackmore stated, looking none the worse for wear from his fisticuffs with Henry.
I wondered if Henry’s distraction had been planned. And then I wondered how we’d all get out of this without being felled by a bullet.
And then I wondered no more when Eliza May fired her pistol at Sergeant Blackmore.
The sound ricocheted off the high walls, and then my body followed suit, my shoulder bouncing off bricks, my head connecting with unforgiving concrete, the world turning black in an instant.
Not If My Wife Lived
Inspector Kelly
I saw nothing but Anna. Anna lying in the dirt and detritus of a backstreet alleyway. Anna, her face pale, her lips parted. Anna, her body limp, the scarlet of blood pooling beside her head. Anna hurt, possibly dying.
“Anna!” I cried, my cane lost as numbness invaded. My footsteps crooked as my body weaved in fits of motion. The walls of the tall buildings that surrounded shifted closer, leaning in, bringing darkness and heavy shadows.
I fell to my knees at her side, my hands shaking as I reached for her. A sound I am not proud of left my mouth, my lips trembling. I brushed her hair aside to reveal the cream skin of her cheek beneath. My fingers came back wet with blood.
“No,” I said. I pleaded. “No, Anna!” I lifted her frail body up and clung to her with everything in me. Her cheek against my cheek, her heart against my heart, the abundant folds of her skirts spreading out about my thighs as if a mourning shroud, mixing with her blood on the ground beneath us.
I rocked her as though she were a baby. A fragile being needing to be carefully handled. I cradled her in my arms and laid kisses over her face. Her forehead. Each cheek. Her nose, and jaw, and lips.
Breathless (Scarlet Suffragette, Book 2): A Victorian Historical Romantic Suspense Series Page 20