by Kim Wright
“Oh course. I saw you fumbling about in your bag and thought ‘Now here’s a girl who needs my help.’ And there is nothing on earth so irresistible to a man as a girl who needs his help.” He leaned over and kissed her roughly on the cheek. “Why are you smiling like that?”
“Sit down, John,” Leanna said. “There’s something we need to discuss.”
12: 15 PM
“Trevor,” Emma said with surprise, opening the door a bit wider. “You just missed them. They took the 11 o’clock train.”
“I know,” Trevor said. He stood on the stoop to remove his coat, which was half crusted over with the first snow of winter. “I actually dropped by to visit you.”
“And caught me lazing, I’m afraid,” she laughed as he stepped in. “It’s so rare to have the house to myself. Or almost to myself, for Gage is quiet as the proverbial mouse.” She looked at Trevor more seriously. “So you deliberately missed the chance to say goodbye?”
“My God, are my feelings that plain on my face?”
Emma smiled. “Yes, yes they are.”
“Very well then, my dear detective of the heart, I’ll confess to you that it will be difficult at first if they do indeed return from the countryside engaged, but I can’t very well say it’s unexpected, can I? Things always end as they should. People end up partnered as they should. None among us can fight his fate.”
Emma could think of nothing to add to this. “I was just about to have a bit of lunch. Would you join me?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” said Trevor, following her into the cozy parlor and seating himself on the huge armchair Gerry normally secured. The parlor was warmed by a roaring fire and he propped up his feet and was seized almost at once with the feelings of peace and homecoming which engulfed his senses whenever he entered this particular house. Odd, he had always thought it was Geraldine who radiated the comfort and security, but she was miles away. It must have been Emma all along who had made this house a home. The knowledge surprised him, but it was not displeasing.
Emma returned within minutes, carrying a tray of fruit, cold meats and cheese. “I hear congratulations are in order. Another Ripper has confessed, according to the morning papers.”
“Yes, we’re up to thirty-seven at last count. This one was a bit dramatic, by any standards. A public hanging, yesterday, of a man who had gleefully admitted to poisoning his mistress. He’s up on the scaffolding and just as the trap door opens, he yells ‘I am Jack the…’ That’s it, the neck is broken, the crowd is in hysterics. They like to watch them go down but this was a bit more of the excitement than anyone bargained for.”
“Could there be any truth to it?” Emma asked, slicing a bit of cheese and popping it in her mouth.
“No, he was in America when the first three murders were committed. Just a ploy to get his name in the history books, I gather. Poor sots. Some of their confessions are quite convincing.”
“And what of the others? The one whose friends committed him to the asylum? Or the man who threw himself into the river?”
Trevor’s face changed, grew somber and dark. “Both legitimate possibilities and growing more plausible each day that passes without a murder. If a man commits suicide, or is quietly put away, and then the killings stop we will probably conclude, by default, that our Ripper has been caught.”
“Or was simply scared off, which has the same effect.” Emma said, speaking with surprising detachment of the man who had murdered her sister. “But either way, the case stays open for all eternity, just as Madame Renata predicted it would on the evening of the dinner party. Could that have been just four months ago? It seems more like a lifetime.”
“I owe you an apology,” Trevor said. “I never came to see you after Mary died.”
She shrugged. “You blamed yourself.”
They sat for a moment, concentrating on their food. Finally, Emma spoke again.
“But life goes on, does it not? The heart doesn’t really break at all.”
“Do you think he will be enough for her?”
It was an abrupt shift of topic, but she knew his meaning at once. “I don’t know. He sees things rather simply.”
“And perhaps in time it might become tedious to find yourself married to a saint?”
“Well, if he isn’t enough on his own, she won’t rest until she makes him so. We women are like that, Detective Welles. Men are our careers. We read things into them, we convince ourselves that our devotion in and of itself is enough to lift them to a higher level. Leanna will convert John into whatever sort of man she needs him to be.”
“It is your gender’s highest accomplishment.”
“Really? I would have said it’s our greatest failing.” Emma turned her chin toward Trevor. “Do you mind if I ask you a very personal question?”
He snorted. “I think you’ve earned the right.”
“What bothers you more, losing the Ripper or losing Leanna?”
“Now don’t laugh…”
“I seriously doubt that I shall.”
“…but I think they were somewhat bound together in my mind. Get the killer, get the girl, as if I were a character in a penny dreadful. Instead, it’s almost as if I lost them both in the same moment.”
“You learned that some things matter more to you than solving crimes.”
Trevor winced. “Which makes me a bad detective.”
“I don’t agree.”
“So Leanna goes to John, the Ripper goes into the darkness, and I am left with gratification of knowing that in the moment of decision, I opted to save a human life.”
“I assume Leanna thanked you.”
“Copiously.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “But if memory serves, the life I saved was yours.”
“Only by mistake. You dove in after Leanna and came up from the water with me.”
He shook his head. “I saw more than you think that night on the pier.”
She was sorry she’d been so harsh. He had rescued her, no matter how or for precisely what reason, and she could not say exactly why she fought that knowledge or found it so difficult to express her gratitude. We are too much alike, Trevor and I, she thought. We can’t stop wanting things we’ll never have. We claim to be creatures of intellect, and yet we have both made dreadful mistakes of logic. In the moment of truth, we both follow our hearts instead of our heads, and life will pound us over and over for this frailty, the way waves repeatedly pound against rocks.
She struggled for a way to change the subject. “I understand you have the funds for your forensic laboratory.”
“Yes,” Trevor said, brightening. “Can you imagine? From the Queen herself, no less. Someday I may go to France as well.”
“C’est merveilleux.”
“You speak French?”
“You forget that my father was a schoolmaster. He taught all three of his children any number of useless skills, especially in the area of linguistics.”
“It wouldn’t be useless in Paris. Abrams writes that they insist on speaking French there.”
“How very unreasonable of them.”
“Those papers on forensic technique… Could you possibly have a look at them? And then… I know I’m thick and slow to learn, but even a phrase or two would help. Would you teach me?”
“Oui. Naturellement.”
“We don’t have to start right now,” Trevor said, cramming a bit of cheese into his mouth. “Here’s the thing, Emma. Rayley Abrams is already in Paris and Davy Mabrey has shown such promise… I need a physician to serve as coroner, someone who isn’t a million years old like Phillips, and then I’ll have it, the beginnings of my forensics team. The lad I was considering just told me he’s had his fill of London and plans to decamp with his fiancé for that paradise known as New Jersey.” Trevor chuckled. “Now, don’t scoff, but I’ve been thinking of asking Tom to join us. His actions that night may have been misguided but they showed a lot of courage. Trying to kick in the door where Harrowman was deliv
ering the baby, that sort of thing.”
Emma sat silent.
Trevor frowned. “You think he’s too young, don’t you?”
“Young may be better. No bad habits to unlearn.”
“Quite. He’s a boy in many ways, but he has his qualities.”
“I agree. He has his qualities.”
He tilted his head to observe her face more closely. “It occurs to me my team will need a linguist.”
Emma’s lips turned up. “Indeed.”
“Oh, I’m quite serious, especially if we train in Paris and then take cases all over the continent. That’s what the Queen envisions, you know. That when there’s an unsolvable crime anywhere in the world, the authorities will scratch their heads and say ‘We must bring the forensics team from Scotland Yard.’”
“Complete with the schoolteacher’s daughter.”
“Whyever not? The Yard employs women in any number of ways when there’s a task the men simply can’t assume. Off the record, of course.“
“You mean as spies.”
“A harsh word, my dear.” Trevor thoughtfully bit into a pear. “When did you begin to wear your hair down? It’s lovely. How would someone say that in French?”
“You think this will help you in forensic research, to be able to tell the French women they have lovely hair?”
It was not terribly witty banter, and yet they both laughed, and in the laughter certain things began to shift between them. Emma said something in French and Trevor tried to repeat it, failing so badly that they both continued to chuckle. Gage was about to go out the front door on his way to the market but there was something in the tone of their conversation that made him freeze in his tracks. He stood very still for a moment, eavesdropping, smiling. Then he walked through the kitchen and went out another way.
Historical Note
Several of the characters in City of Darkness are based upon real historical figures. The six murders in the book are fictionalized accounts of slayings credited to Jack the Ripper, including the names, dates, and crime scene details. Although Jack the Ripper was never caught, the villain of City of Darkness was an actual man and is considered by Ripperologists – as Jack devotees are known– as one of the most likely suspects. The methodologies used by Scotland Yard, as well as their limitations, are reflective of the late Victorian period.
All members of the Scotland Yard forensics team are entirely fictional, as are the members of the Bainbridge family. Victoria, of course, is real and did indeed take a surprising amount of interest in police matters during her reign, including the specifics of the Ripper case. Although I imagined the conversation between the Queen and Trevor, the suggestions she makes to him in that scene are based on a letter Victoria sent to Scotland Yard in 1888.
Other Stories in the “City of Mystery” Series
Volume II, City of Light, follows Rayley Abrams to Paris, a city swept up in excitement over the Exposition Universelle, the World’s Fair which debuted Edison’s phonograph, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and the Eiffel Tower. But when bodies begin to wash up on the shores on the Seine and a socialite goes missing, members of the newly formed Scotland Yard forensics unit find themselves thrust in the middle of their first international mystery. City of Light is currently available on Amazon.
City of Silence, the third installment in the City of Mystery series, is set in St. Petersburg at Christmastime. The Queen’s beloved granddaughter Alexandra is determined to marry the young tsarevich Nicholas, but Victoria has doubts about how well her sheltered and naïve “Alecy” will fare in the venomous court of Imperial Russia. When a young dancing instructor with ties to the royal family is found murdered in a most bizarre fashion, Trevor and the Scotland Yard forensics unit will travel to the Czar’s Winter Palace to investigate. City of Silence will be available in December.
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