Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

Jenna had to grasp Noah’s shoulders as the whole room spun. Ianira’s little girl, Artemisia . . . only she was too old, much too old, and Marcus had aged, as well, there was grey in his hair and she didn’t understand . . .

  “No, Misia,” Marcus choked out, going to his knees to hug the little girl close. “Noah and Jenna tried, honey, but something went wrong and a bad man took Mama away. We’ll find her, sweetheart, we’ll look all through London and find her. But Jenna’s been hurt, trying to protect your mother, and we have to help her, now. I need to go for a doctor, Misia, and Noah has to watch Jenna until the doctor comes, so we all need you to help us out, tonight, okay? Can you watch Gelasia for us, make sure she’s had her milk and biscuits?”

  The little girl nodded, wide eyes wet and scared as she stared up at Jenna.

  “This is Jenna,” Noah said gently. “She helped me save your mommy’s life tonight. The bad men we ran away from a long time ago chased her, honey, then another man hurt her and took your mother. I’m sorry, honey. We’ll get her back.”

  No child of seven should possess eyes like Artemisia’s, dark as mahogany and too wise and haunted for her age, eyes which had, like her mother’s, seen far too much at far too early a point in life. She disappeared into the back of the house. Marcus said raggedly, “I will bring the hot water bottle, then go for Dr. Mindel.”

  “Good. And take my Colt Thunderer with you. Put it up, when you get back, someplace where the girls can’t reach it.”

  Marcus took Noah’s revolver and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Noah carried Jenna up a narrow, dark staircase that smelled of dampness and recent, harsh soap. “Noah?” she whispered, still badly shaken.

  “Yeah?” The detective carried her into a neat, heartlessly plain bedroom and settled her gently into a deep feather bed.

  “Why . . . why is Artemisia so much older? I don’t understand . . .”

  Noah dragged off the wet, bedraggled bonnet which hid the detective’s face, pulled blankets up across her, then gently removed Jenna’s makeshift bandages and peered anxiously at the side of her head before pouring out a basin of water and wetting a cloth to sponge away dried blood, all without answering. Jenna found herself staring into Noah’s eyes, which had gone dark with an even deeper sorrow Jenna didn’t want to know the reasons for. Noah met her frightened stare, paused, then told her.

  “You’re too foggy to work it out, aren’t you? The Denver Gate opens into 1885. The Britannia opens into 1888. It’s been three years for us, kid. There wasn’t any other way.”

  The whole bed came adrift under Jenna’s back. She found herself a foggy stretch of time later floating in a grey haze while Noah very gently removed her clothing and eased her into a nightshirt, then replaced the blankets. Jenna slowly focused on the detective’s haunted eyes. “Three years?” she finally whispered, her foggy mind catching up at last. “My God . . . Even if we find her . . . Ianira’s little girls won’t even know their own mother. And poor Ianira . . . God, three years of their lives, gone . . .”

  “I know.” Quiet, that voice, filled with regret and hushed pain. “Believe me, we wanted there to be some other way. There wasn’t.” The detective kept talking, voice low, giving Jenna a lifeline to cling to while her world swung in unpredictable circles all over again. “We’ve been in London for nearly two-and-a-half years, now. Waiting for you. I showed up at Spaldergate tonight, hoping to catch your attention, but . . . You know how that ended.”

  The shock, the misery of what Jenna had caused, was too much. She squeezed shut her eyes over hot tears. What else could I have done? Could any of us have done? They could’ve brought the girls through with Ianira, at least. But Noah’d been right to guess hit men would be sent through both gates after them. If they had brought the little girls through with Ianira, none of them would have escaped the Picadilly Hotel alive. There really hadn’t been any other choice. Knowing that didn’t help much, though, with Ianira missing somewhere in this immense city, in the hands of God alone knew what kind of madman, and those beautiful little girls downstairs, unable to remember the mother they’d waited three years to meet again and deprived of her once more by violence and death. None of them had expected Marcus and the children to have to stay down time in Denver long enough to catch up to the Britannia Gate.

  The knowledge that none of them were safe, yet, after everything they’d already been through, was a pain too deep to express. So Jenna just lay there, staring blankly at the stained ceiling, waiting for the doctor to arrive while Noah slipped a hot water bottle under the blankets to warm her and brought a basin full of hot, steaming water that smelled strongly of disinfectant to wash the gash in her head. She was grateful that Noah Armstrong had managed, at least, to set up a hiding place in London, ready and waiting for her. Outside, lightning flared and thunder rumbled through the dismal streets of Spitalfields as rain poured from leaden skies.

  Their safe haven was at least well hidden by grinding poverty. It was probably the last place on earth her father’s hired killers would think to look for them. London’s violent and poverty-stricken East End during the middle of the Ripper horror . . .

  When Dr. Mindel finally arrived, he praised Noah’s “nursing” and sutured up Jenna’s scalp, then fed her some foul-tasting medicine that left her drifting in darkness. The final awareness to impinge on her exhausted mind was the sound of Marcus in the hallway, talking quietly with Noah, with the cold and granite sound of murder in his voice as they made plans to find his missing wife.

  Then she drifted into pain-free oblivion and knew no more.

  * * *

  Malcolm tilted his pocketwatch toward the light of a gas lamp on the street corner, putting the time at half-past eight when he alighted from his hansom cab at the corner of Bow and Hart Streets. Clouds, shot through with lightning, swirled in thick drifts and eddies above the rooftops, muting the sounds of a boisterous Thursday evening with the imminent threat of more rain. Although they were past the official end of the annual London social season, cut short yearly when Parliament adjourned each August 12th, not everyone was fortunate enough to escape London immediately for their country homes or the rural estates of friends. Business matters had to be wound up and some gentlemen remained trapped in London year-round, particularly those of the aspiring middle classes, who had acquired the tastes and pursuits of the wealthy without the means of fleeing London at the end of the social season.

  As a result, cultured male voices the length of Bow Street could be heard discussing theater and dinner plans, birds they planned to shoot on favorite grouse moors up in Scotland now that grouse season had opened, or the ladies who inhabited the country houses they would visit during the fall’s leisurely hunting seasons, beginning with grouse, graduating to partridge and pheasant, and ending lastly—but perhaps most importantly—with the noble fox.

  Also drifting through the damp night came the light laughter of women Malcolm could not actually see, whose carriages rattled invisibly past in the murk that was not quite rain but not quite fog, either. The jingle of harness and the sharp clopping of horse’s hooves struck the lime-rock gravel bed of the street with a thick, thumping sound, carrying the hidden ladies off to bright dinner parties. Carefully orchestrated affairs, such dinners were designed to bring together eligible young ladies and equally eligible gentlemen for the deadly serious purpose of finding suitable spouses for the unmarried daughters of the house.

  It being a Thursday evening, many such dinner parties throughout the ultra-fashionable west end would be followed by musical and other soirees, theater or the opera, and after that, the final, few elegant balls of the year, at which silk-clad young ladies still unmarried and desperate would swirl across dance floors and sip wine with smartly dressed young gentlemen until three in the morning, with a fair number of those young gentlemen equally desperate to find an heiress, even from a fortune made in trade, God help them all for having to stoop to such measures, just to bolster the finances of blue-blooded but cash-
poor noble houses.

  Above the jingle of harness as carriages rattled past, filtering through the sounds of gay laughter and merrymaking, came other, more plaintive cries, the calls of flower girls and eel-pie vendors hawking their wares to the genteel folk who frequented this fashionable district on such evenings. Malcolm could just make out one such girl, stationed beneath the nearest street lamp where she would be most visible in the drizzle and murk. She held a heavy tray of carnations and pinks suspended from cords around her neck. Her dress, damp in patches from the raw night, was made of cheap, dark cotton, much mended and several years out of fashion. The toes of the shoes peeping out from beneath her skirts had been cut open to accommodate the growth of her feet.

  As Malcolm watched, three gentlemen emerged from the darkness and paused briefly to purchase boutonnieres for their lapels. They strolled on toward Malcolm, nodding and smiling as they passed, locked deep in conversation about the best methods of cubbing the young foxes and adolescent fox hounds once cub season opened. Malcolm nodded in return, wishing them a pleasant, “Good evening” as they crossed Bow Street and moved past the looming edifice of the Royal Opera House down Hart Street in the direction of Covent Garden Theater.

  Then he was alone again on the pavement, turning over in his mind everything the Spaldergate staff had learned about Mr. Benny Catlin’s disappearance. Foul play was now the major fear consuming everyone at Spaldergate. Catlin’s abandoned luggage, the corpse in Catlin’s hotel room, and the wounded Time Tours carriage driver had led police constables straight to Spaldergate House, asking about the body at the Picadilly Hotel and a second grisly corpse found outside the Royal Opera. The police, comparing witness descriptions, had concluded that the Picadilly Hotel shooting and the Opera House shooting had been committed by the same desperate individual.

  The Time Tours driver injured at the Piccadilly Hotel had, thank God, arrived at the gatehouse unconscious but still alive, driven by one of the gatehouse’s footmen dispatched to fetch him back. Catlin’s luggage had been impounded, but the footman had managed to secure Catlin’s bloodstained gloves from the room before police could arrive, giving the Spaldergate staff at least some chance of tracing Catlin with bloodhounds. Weak from shock and blood loss, the wounded driver had barely been alive by the time he’d been rushed downstairs to surgery.

  A massive police manhunt was now on for the missing Mr. Catlin and for anyone who might have been involved in the fatal shootings. Marshall Gilbert, gatehousekeeper, was faced with the worst crisis of his career, trying to assist the police while keeping the secrets of Spaldergate House very much under wraps.

  Malcolm dreaded the coming night’s work and the lack of sleep this search would mean. At least—and he consoled himself with the prospect—he wouldn’t be searching alone. For good or ill, Margo would be assisting him. He needed her close, tired and soul-sore as he was from weeks spent plunged into the misery of the East End, preparing for the coming horror.

  When two hansom cabs traveling close behind one another pulled up and halted at the corner of Bow and Hart, Malcolm pocketed his watch and moved rapidly forward to greet the occupants alighting on the pavement. “Ah, Stoddard, very good, I’ve been awaiting your arrival. Miss Smith, I’m so dreadfully sorry about this trouble, I do wish you had reconsidered coming along this evening. Madame Feroz, frightfully decent of you to accompany her, I know the demands upon your time are keen. And this must be Mr. Shannon?”

  The man who had jumped to the pavement behind Spaldergate’s stable master, hanging slightly back as Malcolm greeted Margo and Shahdi Feroz in turn, was a temporal native, a stringy, tough old Irishman in an ill-cut suit. He was assisting another passenger to alight, a striking young woman in very plain garments. The girl’s skirt was worn but had been made of good quality cloth when new, and her coat, also faded, was neat and clean. Her hair was a glorious copper in the gaslight, her face sprinkled with far too many freckles for her to be considered a beauty by Victorian standards. But she had a memorable face and a quiet air of utter and unshakable self-confidence. She’d wrapped one hand around the leash of a magnificent Alsatian or—had Malcolm been in America—a beautiful black-and-tan German Shepherd dog with bright, intelligent eyes.

  The grizzled Irishman, who was doubtless far stronger than his slight frame suggested, shook Malcolm’s hand. “That’s me, sir, Auley Shannon. This is me granddaughter, Maeve Shannon, Alfie’s ‘er dog, trained ‘im she did, ‘er own self, won’t find a better tracker in London.”

  “Malcolm Moore,” he smiled in return, offering his hand. “My pleasure, Mr. Shannon, Miss Shannon.”

  The inquiry agents whom Stoddard had been sent to fetch shook Malcolm’s hand firmly. Miss Shannon kept her dog on a short leash, even though the animal was immaculately behaved, sitting on his haunches and watching the humans with keen eyes, tongue lolling slightly in the damp air.

  Malcolm turned to Spaldergate’s stable master. “Stoddard, you have the gloves that were found when poor Mr. Catlin disappeared from his hotel?”

  “I do, sir.” He produced a small cloth bag, inside which nestled a gentleman’s pair of kid gloves. Relatively fresh blood stains indicated that they had, in fact, been on Catlin’s person when the shootout at the Piccadilly Hotel had occurred and Catlin had rendered life-saving first aid, just as the wounded driver had described via telephone before losing consciousness.

  Malcolm nodded briskly. “Very good. Shall we give the dog the scent, then? I’m anxious to begin. Poor Miss Smith,” and he bowed to Margo before returning his attention to the Shannons, “is understandably distraught over her fiancé’s absence and who can blame the dear child?”

  Margo was doing a very creditable job, in fact, of imitating someone in deep distress, shredding her own gloves with jerking, nervous movements and summoning tears through God-alone knew what agency. “Please, can’t you find him?” Margo gasped out, voice shaking, one hand clutching at Mr. Shannon’s ill-fitting jacket sleeve.

  His granddaughter spoke, not unkindly. “Now, then, get ‘old of yourself, miss, wailin’ and suchlike won’t do ‘im a bit o’ good an’ you’re like t’give yourself a fit of brain fever.”

  “Maeve,” her grandfather said sharply, “the lady ‘as a right to be upset, so you just give Alfie the scent an’ mind your tongue! Or I’ll give yer me German across yer Hampsteads, so I will.”

  “You an’ what army, I’m wonderin’?” she shot right back, not cowed in the slightest by her grandfather’s uplifted hand. “Give Alfie a sniff o’ them gloves, now,” she instructed Stoddard briskly.

  “Where were the chap last spotted?” the elder Shannon wanted to know as the dog thrust an eager nose into the gloves held out to him.

  Malcolm nodded toward the opera house across the road. “There, between the Opera and the Floral Hall. The doorman caught a glimpse of him engaged in what he described as a desperate fight with another man and ran to fetch the constables he’d just seen pass by. This other man was evidently shot dead and abandoned by Mr. Catlin in his terror to escape. Probably one of those desperate, criminal youths in one of those wretched, notorious Nichol gangs. Their depredations have all London in an uproar. God help us, what are we coming to when young boys no older than fourteen or fifteen roam the streets as armed thugs and break into homes, stealing property and dishonoring women—“ he lifted his hat apologetically to the ladies “—and attacking a man in front of the Floral Hall, for God’s sake? The last time anyone saw Mr. Catlin, he was down Bow Street that way, just past the Floral Hall, fighting for his life.”

  “Let’s cross, then,” Maeve Shannon said briskly, “an’ we’ll give Alfie the scent off them gloves again when we’ve got right up to where ‘e were at the time.”

  They dodged carriages and ghostly, looming shapes of horses across the road, carriage lamps and horses’ eyes gleaming in the raw night. Clouds of white vapour streamed from the horses’ distended nostrils, then they were across and the copper-haired girl held the gloves
to her dog’s nose again while her grandfather tapped one impatient foot. The shepherd sniffed intently, then at a command from his trainer began casting along the pavement. A sharp whine reached them, then Alfie strained out into the road, following the scent. The dog paused at a dark stain on the cobbles, which, when the elder Shannon crouched down and tested it, proved to be blood.

  Margo let out an astonishing sound and clutched at Malcolm’s arm. “Oh, God, poor Benjamin . . .”

  “There, there,” Mr. Shannon soothed, wiping his sticky hand on a kerchief, “it’s most like the blagger wot attacked ‘im, ‘oo bled on these ‘ere cobbles. Police took ‘is body away to the morgue, so it’s not like as to be Mr. Catlin’s blood. Not to fret, Miss, we’ll find ‘im.”

  Miss Shannon said, “Alfie, seek!” and the dog bounded across the road and headed down a drizzle-shrouded walk which passed beneath the graceful colonnaded facade of the Royal Opera House. The dog led the way at a brisk walk. Malcolm and Philip Stoddard, escorting Margo and Shahdi Feroz solicitously, hastened after them. The darkened glass panes of the Floral Hall loomed up from the damp night. The high, domed roof of the magnificent glasshouse glinted distantly in the gaslights from the street, its high, curved panes visible in snatches between drifting eddies of low-blown cloud.

  The eager Alsatian, nose casting along the pavement as the dog traced a scent mingled with thousands of other traces where gentlemen, ladies, horses, dogs, carters, and Lord knew what all else had passed this way today, drew them eagerly to Russell Street, where Alfie cast sharp left and headed rapidly away from Covent Garden. They moved down toward the massive Drury Theater, which took up the better part of the entire city block between Catherine Street and Drury Lane. The drizzling fog swirled and drifted across the heavy stone portico along the front, with its statue at the top dimly lit by gaslight from hanging lamps that blazed along the entrance. Malcolm worried about the scent in weather like this. If the drizzle turned to serious rain, which rumbled and threatened again overhead, no dog born could follow the scent. The deluge would wash it straight into the nearest storm sewer. Which, upon reflection, might be why the dog was able to follow Catlin’s trail so easily—most of the competing scents had been washed away, by the night’s earlier rainstorm.