by Viola Carr
“Or an accomplice.” Todd licks ruined lips, as if it’s a delicious idea fit for eating. “Yes. I think so. So cui bono, Miss Hyde? That’s the question.”
I scowl. “Screw me with a toothpick and call me a lolly, Todd. Shove your poxy Latin up your arse and talk English.”
His eyes twinkle. “Really. Anyone would think you a common slattern on the make.”
“Anyone’d think you a gentleman, too. Don’t make it so.”
He retrieves the candle, light tarnishing his scars with gold. “I ask, to whose profit? Who benefits from this sordid charade? Why would this unwilling person slaughter the only subject who can identify the real Slasher? And the answer becomes apparent.”
“Great,” mutters I, the irony glaring. “What kind of sick freak-show act protects a murderer?”
Todd smiles thinly. “It’s someone who loves him, Miss Hyde. Given the circumstances, it’s a wonder we’re not all suspecting you.”
CUI BONO
I GOGGLE, AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IT OCCURS TO ME that Mr. Todd might wish my father ill. Eddie rescued him from Newgate, sure. Eddie also locked him in a cage. And never say Malachi Todd missed a chance for vengeance.
Shit. I edge away. “Don’t be ridiculous—”
A cough in the doorway makes me spin.
It’s Rose, Eddie’s duchess, bouncing pigtails and bruised red lips. She’s wearing a tight-laced black burlesque dancer’s dress, flesh swelling up in handfuls. “Mess, ain’t it?”
She looks well, considering my father’s tender ways with love. My mouth brims with questions I suddenly don’t want answers for. “Eddie here, then?”
Rose chews a candied apple on a stick. “Sleeping it off. Couldn’t hardly stand by the time he’d emptied last night.” She assesses Todd with professional interest. “And who are you, handsome?”
Todd grins like an eel. “I’m her crime scene expert. Exquisitely bloody tableaux are my specialty. Do you know that your eyes hold an uncommon shade? Egyptian blue, no less. Most pernicious to manufacture. I once tried preserving them, you know,” he adds blandly. “Eyeballs, I mean. The results were peculiarly disappointing. The pupils just dilate when the subject expires, and the pigments decay too quickly to make good paint.”
Rose stares blankly. “Y’what?”
Jesus, the things that come out of his mouth. “Never mind. Tell us about May.”
“Found her around nine.” Rose stretches an artful leg. “Last night, she told me . . . well, maybe you ain’t interested.”
I flip her a crown.
She plucks it like a plum and tucks it between her breasts. “May told me what she seen that night. Outside the doss house where the Slasher killed Turquoise Tim.”
“This cove in fancy britches, aye.” I force my voice steady. “Why’d she ping him for the Slasher?”
“She were in the alley turning a trick, and seen Fancy Britches legging it out the back, right afore the screaming started.”
I lick parched lips. “Didn’t know ’is name, then?”
A shrug.
I hold my breath, a sharp edge. “So he weren’t Eddie Hyde.”
Rose gapes, as if I’ve grown an extra nose. “All the girls know King Eddie, bless his hungry cock. He were live as a jumping bean in here that night. Too busy screwing me up and sideways to fart, let alone carve up Turquoise Tim. Jesus, the shit folks talk.” She sucks her lolly. “ ’Twere more. May said she seen a second bloke with Fancy Britches.”
Todd speaks. But I’m barely hearing. All those bloodthirsty pictures? Just a mirage. A madwoman’s dream.
Eddie ain’t guilty.
Relief staggers me, a sucker punch of shame. I’d swallowed Eliza’s treachery. I’d really believed my father were the Slasher.
Certainly. A sarcastic whisper, that demon I can’t be rid of. Is it Eliza, fighting her way back? Or just my own conscience? Because Rose is completely objective about Eddie, after they’ve been lovers for weeks. Eddie murdered our MOTHER, Lizzie. Once a killer, always a killer. It’s in our BLOOD. He’s a monster and so are you.
My vision fogs scarlet, and I claw for Eliza’s throat.
Only she ain’t there. I realize Rose is talking, and I force my hands down, that prickly blue mixture burning my throat like bile. “A toff square-rigged,” says she, “with a funny face, hanging about a-waiting the other to get his load off.” She glances over her shoulder. “May had done Fancy Britches the week previous,” she whispers. “Tried some ugly games, so she kicked him in the jewels and ran for it.”
She hasn’t asked for another coin, hisses demon-Eliza. Not since you mentioned Hyde. Working for nothing all of a sudden?
I fight to ignore her. But I remember my Johnny’s words of wisdom—anything free is shit—and my veins crackle cold.
Todd smiles delicately. “So imagining this elaborately trousered ex-customer to be the Soho Slasher, frightened in retrospect by her hairsbreadth escape, May runs to our tragic Inspector Griffin of the Metropolitan Police.”
Rose nodded. “Scared her stiff, it did. But Funny-Face, she never seen him before.”
“Most instructive, madam. Sadly, we must be on our way. Do take care of those eyes. I’d hate them to be spoiled before their time.” Todd bows, and steers me out.
On the landing, my legs buckle.
Bang! My kneecaps bruise, and it’s Todd what helps me up, Todd what stops me falling on the stairs, slips a fevered arm beneath mine and practically carries me out into the street, where night has fallen, sparkling bright with gaslights and torches.
I won’t have to beg Todd to kill my own father. Eddie ain’t a monster. And neither am I.
The crowd flows around us, blurred rainbows. The world gleams brighter, more alive, colors spiked afresh with strange beauty. I’m dizzy, drunk, delirious. I take wheezing gulps of frigid Soho air, the stink of shit and mud and stale gin never so precious as it is now.
I want to bottle this moment. This one dazzling instant in my sick and sorry existence when there’s hope.
Todd grabs me, keeps me on my feet. Is this what he sees, in all those colors he craves: a priceless moment that always dies? A fleeting beauty to be preserved only in death? Do I understand him at last, this creature of blood?
My flesh stings with poison. I don’t want to. But I don’t care. He smells of absinthe and copper and the desperation I know so well, and I fall against him and sob like a lost child.
He stiffens, surprise or distaste, and then his hands settle timidly over my hair. Just a fevered, feather-light breath. Like he don’t know what to do.
Eliza screams, a high-pitched blade that skewers my eardrums to bleeding. I convulse, hair standing out in electric shock. My skin ripples like rubber, it’s our skin, our face, our eyes popping like a hanged woman dancing on a rope. Our joints wrench, a shudder of tendon and bone, and kersplack!
Eliza shot backwards, heart bursting.
Mr. Todd. Alive.
But only just. Oh, God, the livid ruin of his face . . . The damage was painful to look at. Painful and beautiful and terrifying.
Mr. Todd gave a torturous smile that made his scarred lip bleed. “You look well, my sweet. Better than I did after my house burned.”
She scrabbled for Lizzie’s cane and bared the blade. “Stay away from us.” She was breathing hard, hoarse, on edge. Just a single stab of steel . . .
“Why not kill me, Eliza? You’ve already broken my heart.”
“Save it,” she hissed. “You have no heart.”
A delicate lick of lips. “Your Lizzie might beg to differ.”
“Don’t you dare involve her,” she spat. “I should scream your name, show this mob who you are. They’d have your hide.”
“But you won’t. You never do. Your threats are dust.” His fairy-green eyes flashed. “I’m disappointed. Think you wouldn’t already know pain, if your pain was what I craved?” A cruel laugh. “You flatter yourself, madam. I’ve quite moved on. Perhaps you should do the same.”
Her grip on the blade shook, and she fought to summon Lizzie’s screw-it-all courage. Gut him right now. Our father would. Nothing easier. What’s one more corpse? Todd tricked you. Humiliated you. Killed dozens who deserve bloody justice. Slice him and be done.
But her grasping nerves found nothing. That prickly blue concoction gurgled sourly in her throat, just an empty flavor with no heart. Without Lizzie, she was hollow. Her courage an empty shell.
“Your indecision mocks me, Doctor.” Todd’s poisoned whisper pierced her soul. “I thought better of you.”
She whirled and fled into the crowd.
Staggering, slamming into walls and lampposts. Shoulders and elbows bumped her. Gaslit windows glared, accusatory. Run, Eliza, you coward. It’s what you’re good at. Every eye held an evil glint, every coat seemed to conceal a weapon. God, this place was full of murderers.
But Todd wasn’t following. That was evident. She was still alive.
She stumbled on, curses choking her. She was a fool, as she’d always been a fool for Todd’s bright eyes. Should’ve run him through at last with Lizzie’s glinting blade.
But she wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t surrender to Hyde’s taint in her blood.
Even if it meant Todd would go free? To delight once more in slaughter, his victims unavenged?
Sick self-hatred thrashed in her belly. Bleeding Christ, it was the worst kind of cowardice to stand on one’s principles when others would suffer. Her convictions were shattered. Her precious justice a joke. Remy would be disgusted. What kind of weakling was she?
The image of that beautiful, terrible oil painting seared into her brain. Pretty Eliza, sleeping while a hungry monster licked its lips. Such shameful vanity, to imagine evil could be tempered by love.
So why couldn’t she let it go?
Gritty laughter clanged. Right. You’re just sore ’cause he’s ceased to care and you still do. Can’t bear to be ignored, can you? How does it feel, Eliza, to be forgotten?
“Shut up!” Her yell startled a pair of prostitutes as she pushed by. Her reflection lurched in a gin palace window. Wild-eyed, hair raked into knots. The Eliza from her nightmares. A madwoman.
Her brain stretched, sanity tearing thin. Thinking was so difficult. Her head hurt ferociously. Please, no more pain. Her fingers clawed at her clothes. So easy, to slip into addled oblivion. Just like the lunatics she’d once treated at Bethlem. So safe . . .
She burst out onto Oxford Street, where nighttime ramblers idled and carriages swept by with electric lights crackling. Glaring relief staggered her. The real world. No ghosts.
Shivering, she gathered her skirts, and ran the rest of the way to Cavendish Square.
A startled Brigham opened the door. “Hipp,” she gasped, as the little creature hurtled down the stairs to greet her, “run and telegraph Inspector Griffin. He’ll be working late. Tell him . . .”
Dizzily, she caught herself on images of Todd, his burned fingers stroking Saucy May’s face. An accomplice. Passing off. Something else entirely.
Griffin didn’t need yet another impossible victim right now. Chief Inspector Reeve would only use it against him. Three days, Reeve had said, to come up with a lead in the Slasher case. Three days were nearly up. This would play right into Reeve’s hands.
As for Todd . . . Her stomach squirmed. Lying? Perhaps. Ulterior motive? Absolutely. But he wouldn’t give her another easy chance to end him. Fact was, she’d nothing to gain by revealing Todd was alive. Reeve already assumed Todd was her lover. If she spoke up now, Reeve would only accuse her of protecting him. Either way, her career was over, and Griffin’s, too.
But she’d another suspect available. A man who was undoubtedly guilty—though perhaps not guilty as charged.
Presuming Mr. Todd told true.
Why would he lie, Eliza? He never needed to fake it to addle your wits before.
Hipp ground querulous cogs. “Telegraph. Griffin. Information please.”
“Inform Inspector Griffin that his witness Saucy May is dead,” she said. “The Slasher, at a brothel called Mrs. Fletcher’s. And tell him . . .”
For a moment, her duplicity sickened her. What of her precious justice? Could she frame an innocent man?
But he was far from innocent. She couldn’t let personal loyalties interfere, not this time. Lizzie was deluded, clinging to a madwoman’s fantasies. And justice was justice. For Saucy May, for Turquoise Tim and all the Slasher’s other victims . . . but also for Madeleine Jekyll, hurled down the stairs by her lover in a fit of jealous rage.
Lizzie howled, beating the inside of their skull, her voice oddly distorted by that strange potion that weaved new barriers between them. Our mother’s DEAD, God rot you. She don’t give a fig for justice. You just want him gone. You’ve always hated him for making us what we are, and now you’ll destroy him for it and justice be damned.
Prickly blue guilt stung Eliza’s throat, but firmly she swallowed it. “Tell him he should enquire about a man the girls call King Eddie. Real name of Edward Hyde.”
LUPUS IN FABULA
THE NEXT DAY, ELIZA ARRIVED EARLY TO ALBEMARLE Street. The day’s traffic had barely begun—even the anti-science protesters hadn’t yet arrived—and mist sparkled along the cobbles in tentative morning sun.
Light clouds smeared a brightening blue sky. For once her hair wasn’t wet, her gloves weren’t soaked, her petticoats weren’t filthy with mud. Just as well, because she’d come to wheedle information out of Bryon Starling. The alternative was to interrogate Marcellus Finch, and she’d avoided the pharmacy lately, her nerves pinging like grasshoppers. She wasn’t ready to confront Finch. Not after he’d lied to her about the project, her illness, the asylum. Everything.
“Bollocks,” crowed Lizzie, skipping along the pavement beside her. “Ain’t him you’re hiding from, is it? Shame if we should ever find out the truth.”
Did she seem more than usually solid, her skirts not quite so transparent? Was it that prickly blue mixture, taking sinister effect?
“Bollocks yourself,” muttered Eliza. Starling knew about her so-called illness, as much or more as he knew about Project Interlunium. She’d get him to talk, one way or another.
A news-seller danced a jig atop his pile of early-edition broadsheets, red hair sticking up like a porcupine’s needles. “Shapeshifters attack! Beauty and the Beast strike again! Get it for a penny!”
Lizzie plucked up a copy and waved it at Eliza. EMPIRE ENVOYS KILLED IN PARIS BLOODBATH, the banner read.
Oh, no. Her heart sank, and she grabbed the paper, scanning it as quickly as she could. The two envoys assassinated, before they’d even commenced negotiations. In “gruesome circumstances,” whatever that meant. Nothing about their entourage. Surely it would rate a mention if . . .
She sighed, relieved yet dissatisfied as she tossed the boy a penny. Remy’s mission had gone awry, then. What now for him? Did this mean the Empire would go to war?
She smoothed her stained dove-gray skirts, hastily sponged that morning and none too clean. She’d tasked Mr. Brigham to find fresh clothes, but for now this was all she owned. “Never mind all that unladylike politics, Hipp. One must look one’s best when courting . . . Hipp? Whatever are you doing?”
Hipp gamboled in the gutter, spindly legs flashing in the sun. “Rat-rat-rat!” he yelled, pouncing on one wriggling brown specimen. The rodent squeaked, thrashing its fat tail until Hipp let go with a dejected whine. “Rattus norvegicus. Cooperation negative. Does not compute.” He dashed out of sight. “Rat!”
“Don’t go far.” She resisted the urge to throttle him. Her head was bleary after a restless night, jumbled dreams of slashed flesh. Mr. Todd, his razor bright, a cascade of blood. The remains of Saucy May, glistening in ruddy candlelight. The grim hunched form of Edward Hyde, wielding a shining butcher’s knife, hacking gaily away with blood spurting onto his shirt . . .
Lizzie prodded Eliza’s chest. “Why d’you tell Inspector Numbnuts that Eddie did it, e
h? Embarrass you, does he, because he drinks and fucks around and won’t pretend to be civilized? He’s our FATHER, God rot you.”
Guilt stabbed again, but Eliza ignored it. She’d failed with Malachi Todd because she’d allowed emotions to rule her. She wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
“He’s your father,” she said peevishly, “not mine. And he’s an obvious suspect. What’s the evidence that he’s innocent? The testimonies of a greedy prostitute and a lunatic. Wonderful. Now kindly get out of my way.” And resolutely she swept up the steps to the RI, leaving Lizzie behind.
The hall was empty, save for a desk clerk. Out of sight, workmen hammered and sawed, repairing the damaged theater. Plaster dust drifted, and an electric servant hefted a heavy coiled conduit upstairs, easily bearing a weight that would take three men to lift.
She strode up to the curved desk. “Mr. Starling’s office, please.”
The clerk glanced up from his dog-eared copy of Newton’s Opticks. “Are you a student, madam?” Pointedly, as if a student in skirts was a ridiculous idea.
She simpered, longing to poke his eyeballs out. “Tutored at home, of course. My husband says ladies oughtn’t to be seen doing science. I say, is that the Opticks?” She feigned a gasp. “You must be frightfully clever, sir. Perhaps one day you might attend me in my private boudoir and explain to me the Philosopher’s total internal reflection. Silly me, I can’t make it out at all.”
The clerk smiled thinly. “You can find Starling on the lower floor. Just this once.”
“Thank you. Oh,” she added, inspired, “can you tell me if poor dear Professor Crane’s office has been cleared yet?”
A disdainful sniff. “Couldn’t say.”
“Only I was supposed to fetch some books, and Mr. Locke gets so dreadfully impatient. I couldn’t bear to disappoint him.” Lash flutter, smile. Idiot.
“Mr. Locke already arranged it, madam. Starling cleared everything out yesterday. Probably why he’s been in his office all night. There was a lot.”
“Of course. Forgive my confusion. One befuddles so easily when one’s laces are too tight.” She sighed a smile, fanning herself, and started down the basement stairs towards the tantalizing smells of chemicals and hot wire.