by Viola Carr
“Did you hear anything unusual last night? Loud noises, anything like that?”
“From this dreadful house? Constantly! Groans and booms and screeches at all hours. The devil himself, laughing as they carouse!” She wagged a bony finger. “This hussy and her coven will burn in hell, mark my words.”
“I see. Thank heavens you were here, Lady Redstoat. You’ve been most diligent in rooting out the sinners.”
Satisfied, the good lady snapped her book closed. “If I were you, madam, I should vacate this loathsome cavern of depravity immediately. We know not the hour!” And she gathered her black skirts and huffed away.
Eliza eyed Griffin expectantly. “See the devil on your way in, perchance?”
“Afraid not. But this corroborates Locke’s tale of the afternoon caller,” said Griffin. “And if you include our killer, Lady Redstoat is the second person we’ve met today who doesn’t approve of Miss de Percy’s lifestyle. Perkins, did you get all that?”
“Yes, sir.” Perkins finished scribbling and looked up expectantly.
“Good man. You questioned the footman. Did he mention these same visitors?”
Perkins dutifully consulted her notes. “The four scientists around noon, then Mr. Locke at four. But no mention of the caller at a quarter to three!” Her face shone. “He didn’t mention the fellow in the blue scarf. I’m sure of it!”
“Excellent work. What should we do about it?”
“Um. Question him again?”
“Top marks, Perkins. What are you waiting for?” Griffin watched her rush off. “A mysterious visitor. How droll.”
“A long-haired man in a blue scarf,” mused Eliza, “who wasn’t at the team meeting—and who lingers outside for ten minutes. Waiting for the footman to absent himself, so Miss de Percy would admit him personally?”
“If it’s that easy to arrive unnoticed, he could have returned after six to kill her. So could Locke, for that matter. Or any of them.”
“Or,” added Eliza, inspired, “Blue Scarf remained the entire time! Damn. I should’ve asked Lady Redstoat if she noticed him leaving.”
Griffin grinned. “Perhaps Blue Scarf is a fiction, too, and Locke and Lady Redstoat are in cahoots. Fabricated the entire story to hide their sordid affair, and even now bemoan the failure of their scheme to elope to the wilds of Mongolia.”
“Foiled by the village idiot. How embarrassing. Still, one thing’s certain: not much here is what it seems. And that includes Seymour Locke, engineer’s lowly assistant.”
But uneasily, she recalled Lady Redstoat’s exhortation: This hussy and her coven will burn in hell. Locke’s angry riposte: They’ll spread filthy lies to keep her in her place. The scrawled accusation on the ledger: WHORE.
Miss de Percy had lived as she pleased, with no care for opinions or scandal. And someone had killed her for it. Scorched electricity through her body until she died in agony.
But was it Seymour Locke, jealous of a secret lover? Or someone else? Someone who loathed independent women. Who thought a “lady” ought to be just that and nothing more.
Who assumed any woman who entertained male visitors must be a whore—and that whores deserved to die.
Either way, this killer merited no mercy. She would root him out, and give him his due justice. Sobered, she managed a smile. “Meanwhile, back to the Slasher, yes? Before Reeve fires us both and the Met never solves a murder case again?”
Griffin straightened his already perfect hat. “Four days since the last victim. Perhaps our nemesis has fallen under a convenient train.”
“One can always hope.” She opened her umbrella, eyeing the blackening sky. “I might take you up on that cab after all. I’ve no wish to swim all the way to Mr. Finch’s.”
MARVELS AND MIRACLES
ELIZA JUMPED FROM THE CAB AT NEW BOND STREET into a splash of dirty water, and struggled to open her umbrella in torrential rain as she bade Inspector Griffin good day.
“God rot it,” announced spectral Lizzie at the top of her voice, hopping down beside Eliza and swiping ghostly mud from her skirts, “won’t this poxy rain never piss off?”
The cab clopped away into the traffic, and Eliza rounded on Lizzie with clenched teeth. The remedy hadn’t lasted but a few minutes before Lizzie was upon her again like a red-skirted barnacle. “What were you doing, mooching around in that cab like a sixpenny whore? I honestly didn’t know where to look. Harley must think I’m quite insane.”
Passers-by also, apparently, because they sidled past, shielded by their umbrellas, not meeting Eliza’s gaze. A campaign huckster with a bowler hat and a dripping sandwich board—STOP THE LANDSLIDE! VOTE LIBERAL!—giggled at her and winked, hair plastered down his cheeks. From the corner, a pair of Royal Society Enforcers studied her with solemn electric-red eyes, their brass skeletons speckled with raindrops. Since the old queen’s assassination, there seemed to be more of them every week.
She smiled weakly and turned away. Talking to herself in the street again. Excellent way to get arrested, or worse. And what if those Enforcers glimpsed Lizzie, as Sir Stamford had done?
“Just gettin’ comfortable,” said Lizzie loftily.
“You were trying to sit in his lap!”
“He needed cheering up. What’ll he do, send us to the nut house? Harley’s your friend.” Merrily, Lizzie danced a polka, a scarlet splash of gaiety against the dull gray day, and she didn’t seem to mind the downpour. For a moment, Eliza’s envy was so rich, it choked her.
“I’ll send you to the nut house, as you so charmingly call it.” She dashed for Finch’s Pharmacy, Hippocrates doing his best to trip her up, and ducked shivering beneath the porch. “We agreed, Lizzie. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights. It’s not your turn until eight o’clock.”
“Aye, and I’m makin’ sure I get my share. Mayhap I can’t trust you to quaff that elixir when my time comes.”
“We’ve been over this. Eight o’clock, and not a minute sooner.”
Lizzie glared. Eliza glared back, shaking rainwater from her umbrella. They’d developed a timeshare arrangement, and for the moment it was working. It stopped the writhing skin, the blistering need for elixir, the creeping agony of a monster bursting out.
Yes, it was working. Right until Lizzie decided it wasn’t.
The bell tinkled as Eliza entered Finch’s Pharmacy. Blessed warmth greeted her, the familiar scents of an apothecary’s ingredients. She inhaled, letting the soothing ambience wash over her. The sheaves of drying herbs, the gleaming counter, the shelves of rainbow liquids and towers of drawers with copperplate labels in Latin.
Finch’s was a good place, filled with pleasant memories. Midnight chemistry sessions in his strange-smelling laboratory, arcane potions bubbling. Odd fellows with strange spectacles or artificial limbs, mathematicians and alchemists, botanists and physicists, bringing wild ideas and esoteric inventions. Endless shelves of books filled with bizarre diagrams and meticulously labeled figures that sparkled in her young imagination like fairy tales.
She’d made up stories about them. Much better than those dull morality plays about princesses (and what had these silly girls done to deserve the title?) holed up in desolate towers, waiting to be rescued by equally dreary and inexplicable princes on horseback. Horses were stupid animals, anyway, and fairy-tale princes always seemed more interested in kissing than in thrilling escapades.
Rather, Eliza’s bold adventuresses flung themselves into the sky by means of Mr. Newton’s centripetal forces, explored leagues beneath the ocean’s surface in unorthodox phlogiston-powered submersibles, operated on beating hearts with the new anesthetics to discover the secrets of life itself. And one day she’d read about Dr. Jenner, a vicar’s son from Gloucestershire who’d saved the world from the horrors of smallpox, and she’d known exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up.
As for Mr. Finch, he’d never chided her for dressing late for dinner, or insisted she finish her embroidery. He just relaxed in his armchair in
that purple smoking jacket, a book in his lap, puffing a pipe of fragrant (and probably overly medicinal) herbs. “Eh? Translate that into Latin, my dear,” he’d say, or “No, child, that’s a non-organic compound,” or “Finish your Pythagoras, say what, and you can help me decant my new mosquito repellent before supper.”
An odd childhood, to be sure. In her father’s absence, Mr. Finch had done the best job he could, and mostly Eliza thought it a good thing. What would life have been like as Edward Hyde’s daughter?
Hippocrates hunkered before the little coal fire, grinding contented cogs. She cornered her umbrella and peeled off wet gloves. “Mr. Finch?”
Finch’s head bounced up behind the counter like a jack-in-the-box, his white hair bristling beneath a crumpled cone of silvery metal. “Shhh! They’ll hear!”
“What? Who? I say, are you wearing a tinfoil hat?”
Suspiciously, Finch peered left and right, his pince-nez gleaming. “Sorcerers! Invisible mind-reading waves, say what? Stinking pressure machines that suck your thoughts into the aether. Frenchmen, you know. Republicans! No one’s safe!”
“Marcellus,” said Eliza gently, “didn’t we agree telepathy is impossible? The brain uses too much energy for thought transference to be practicable.”
“Gadzooks! You don’t say? I suppose the calorific would be astronomical.” Reluctantly, he emerged, dusting off his apron and shirtsleeves. “Doesn’t mean they can’t do it,” he muttered, glaring out at the rain-soaked sky. “Vigilance, say what? High alert! Ask that furry Royal Society captain of yours. He’ll know all about it!” He winked. “I expect you’ll be all about the wedding now. No time for lonesome Marcellus and his hare-brained schemes. Housekeeping and babies, eh?”
“Naturally. My usefulness as a human being shall immediately come to an end. Shouldn’t be surprised if my brain stops functioning the moment we say ‘I do.’ ”
The thought of her upcoming wedding made her smile—but then her eye caught on Lizzie outside the bay window, making frightful faces at a passing trio of high-born ladies. Splashing through puddles and throwing mud, for heaven’s sake. Eliza’s skin shrank cold, all the old fears thundering back. How could she ever have an ordinary life? Surely before long she’d be exposed. Arrested as a sorcerer, locked away in the Tower to be interrogated by merciless Enforcers.
She shuddered. Her fears were unfounded. The apparition plaguing her wasn’t real. Just a dream . . .
“Marcellus, I’m going mad.” The words rushed out, unstoppable.
“Ha ha! Not possible, dear girl. Sanest person I know.”
“My remedy doesn’t work anymore.” Her dry throat stung. “I see her everywhere. She moves things, touches people. This morning she threw a vase at Chief Inspector Reeve. I practically had to drag her off Harley Griffin on the way here. We fight, Marcellus, she’s always in my face and no matter how hard I try she’s never satisfied. I want her gone!”
It echoed dully in her mind, an impossible dream. Gone . . . gone . . . gone . . .
Anxiously, Finch ruffled his white hair. “But that’s the thing, dear girl. She can’t be gone. You know that. Not the way the remedy works, eh?”
She stared, hope draining. “But can’t we change the dose, or alter the ingredients? I can’t go on like this.”
“Already at the edge of efficacy, say what? Anything more or less and it’ll be lolly water. Afraid it’ll have to do, old thing.” He patted her hand fondly. “You’ll pull through. Always do, eh?”
Easy tears prickled the back of her nose, and angrily she sniffed them away.
“Luckily,” added Finch, seeing her distress, “I’ve revisited a few old angles on the elixir itself. Bleeding-edge alchemy, all that.” He plonked two black glass bottles onto the counter. “This should make for, shall we say, a more intense experience? Better satisfaction all round. Keep her quieter when it’s your turn. Henry swore by it, back in the day. Until, well, you know, he didn’t.”
Inside the bottles, her elixir shifted, whispering, possessed of a ghostly life of its own. The salty smell watered her mouth, disgusting yet seductive, and the rough twin fists of her addiction yanked in opposite directions, stretching her guts like rubber. Hurl the horrid stuff into the fire, watch it explode. Gulp the whole thing down, peel off her skin like a shedding snake and let Lizzie crawl out . . .
“—strengthening the active ingredients.” Finch’s rambles cut into her fantasies. “The dose was getting ridiculously large. Increases the side effects, eh? Only so much one can guzzle down before one explodes. Guts everywhere, alchemy spilling onto the street. Dead before they can arrest you! How embarrassing.”
She stuffed the bottles into her satchel. It’d have to do. “Any luck with those samples I sent you, from the Soho Slasher cases?”
Finch brightened. “I do enjoy a gruesome murder. From a distance, of course. Reminiscent of that Razor Jack, eh, though without that artistic flair. Blood on the walls, hysterical ladies screaming, missing body parts, ahoy!” He waved his arms. “What’s he doing with all those kidneys and gallbladders and things? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Marcellus, this is serious.” The Slasher was an animal. The victims were beaten, torn, abused by a maniac with no more human sensibility than a beast taunting its prey.
Not like Razor Jack at all.
Besides, Malachi Todd had to be dead. Killed in the fire that gutted Newgate in the riots that followed the old queen’s assassination. No trace, then or since, and Mr. Todd tended to lead a conspicuously bloody lifestyle. She shivered, imagining the bleak hellhole of a cell she’d consigned him to after he’d saved her life. In her nightmares, he’d died horribly in flames, screaming vengeance upon her—not to mention the ghosts of his victims, all those dead she’d failed to save or avenge. They’d haunt her always.
Sheepishly, Finch grinned. “Forgive my enthusiasm, eh? Justice for the slain, all that. But I’m afraid I’ve nothing for you.”
She checked a sigh. This Slasher hunted in streets notorious for brothels and liquor-fueled revelry, populated with nameless girls, drunken criminals, and gentlemen in disguise satisfying forbidden lusts. The perfect haunt for anyone wishing to go unnoticed and unrecognized. So far, her precious science had yielded nothing helpful at all.
Her uselessness galled her. If she could catch this Slasher, would it make up for her failure with Razor Jack? Hardly. But it was a start. “Can we hurry it along? It’s rather urgent.”
“You don’t understand.” Finch looked grave. “I tested everything, same as you. No commonalities, eh? No matching blood or hair, not even a fingerprint that looks the same. For what it’d be worth,” he added gloomily, “with no proper records for comparison. Your Slasher is giving us precisely zero. Not a sausage! Dastardly clever chap, say what?”
“Very.” She bristled to think of that mean-spirited, jealous, puffed-up turkey Reeve, handing Harley an impossible case and then crowing about it when he didn’t uncover any evidence. Distorted images swirled, of mangled bodies, clotting blood, gin-soaked laughter. The itch to become Lizzie and take her vengeance scrabbled at her bones like a hungry rat. Reeve bore a grudge against anyone who’d had the easy misfortune to make him look foolish. He’d long wanted to destroy Griffin’s career. His troubled marital life didn’t excuse that. With that muddle-headed Commissioner in his pocket and the superintendent’s job up for grabs, it seemed Reeve would at last get his way.
The bell tinkled, and she whirled, dizzy with dread. Ghost-Lizzie would burst in, a howling harpy in drenched red skirts. It’s my turn, Eliza. Give me my TURN or I’ll throttle you in your sleep, I’ll grab your intestines from the inside and squeeze until they BURST . . .
A gentleman strode in, flourishing a brass-topped cane. He wore a bottle-green coat, a tall hat, and gold-rimmed glasses, one lens clear and one dark blue—for his left eye was sightless, milky like mother-of-pearl.
“Finch, you madman,” he exclaimed, “whatever’s that on your head?”
Hipp scampered up, blue light flashing hopefully. The stranger bent to pet him. Smooth dark locks ended with a flick at his chin. A sprig of jasmine gleamed in his buttonhole.
“Mr. Starling?” Eliza stared, incredulous. Her schoolroom, those difficult mathematics lessons—and her tutor, an awkward young Cambridge scholar in a threadbare coat with white flowers, who’d taught her Euclid and Descartes and the epic Principia.
Recognition dawned as a sunny smile. “Miss Jekyll! Well, I never. How you’ve grown up!” He shook her hand warmly. Still an unfashionable burr of Lancashire in his voice. “And even more beautiful than I remembered.”
“Oh, stop it. You haven’t aged a day.” Almost true. He still had the same dramatic dark hair, although it was shorter now. Quite the romantic poet type. Her adolescent self had been rather sweet on him. “D’you know, only this morning I was thinking about you?”
An odd asymmetrical wink. “Pleasant memories, I hope.”
Finch scratched his head. “Byron, you perplexing old peanut, do you know each other?”
Eliza laughed. “Don’t you remember? Mr. Starling had the ill fortune to tutor me in mathematics. I was fifteen, and my limp wits quite exhausted his patience. I never did master those fluxions.” For years, Mr. Hyde had posed as her anonymous “guardian,” paying for her expenses and education, first in Henry’s rambling house at Cavendish Square, and when she grew older, at her own house in Russell Square. Curiosity warmed her. How much did Byron Starling know about the man who’d hired him years ago?
Starling chuckled. “Who does, my dear? I imagine you’ve never cared about rates of change since.”
Outside in the street, Lizzie leered in, her nose and lips squashed to the fogged window. Eliza tried to ignore her. “Only at school, happily. I’m a physician now, for the Metropolitan Police.”
He grinned, enchanted. “Always knew you’d go far, fluxions or no. I did show you mercy, as I recall,” he added, “under doctor’s orders. Whilst you were so ill.”