Katie leaned over and squinted, trying to read the words, but the ink had seeped into the paper over the decades and was splotchy and smudged.
“I think it says, ‘My sister’s pet name was Tuppence.’ ”
“On the other hand,” Toby maintained, “It might say, ‘My sister’s pet’s name was Tuppence.” His glance lifted to hers. “Maybe his sister had a pet cat or dog named Tuppence.”
Katie nodded. “But look here. The next sentence reads, ‘Because of me, she died.’” Katie cocked her head sideways. “Does that mean the pet died or the sister?”
“Dunno. The sister, I think. But why write this? The dude’s not Jack the Ripper, is he?”
Katie swallowed hard. “I don’t think so. No. Not possible. I mean, it’s unlikely.”
But was it? she wondered. Could Toby be Jack the Ripper? Or Collin, for that matter? Or even the Duke?
Chapter Twenty-one
Do Not Go Home say the Bells beneath the Great Dome
Ten minutes later they were back downstairs heading out the door.
“Hold on!” Katie sputtered. “I just thought of something—”
She raced down the hall to the library. There was an old Bible in the library that listed all the births and deaths in her grandmother’s family going back generations. Katie never went near the dusty old tome because it listed her parents’ deaths. Both deaths had been carefully recorded in her grandmother’s spidery handwriting. It had so upset Katie, Grandma Cleaves had taken to hiding the heavy leather-bound book or at least wedging it unobtrusively among the bookshelves.
“What?” Toby asked, tromping noisily behind.
“Help me look for the family Bible. It’s leathery and old, with a huge gold clasp that looks like a buckle,” Katie said, tugging him along with her into the library where afternoon sunlight was pouring into the room through floor-to-ceiling windows, making the rows upon rows of bookshelves sparkle and seem to dance.
Katie blinked around, shading her eyes from the dazzling light. The room was half the size of its nineteenth-century counterpart, yet it still looked massive. Katie remembered seeing her father perched on top of the tall, wheeled ladder that ran on brass rails around the book-crammed shelves, his arms laden with leather volumes. She remembered watching him climb midway down and when he caught sight of her peering up at him, he had laughed and called out, “Look, Kit-Kat! A veritable feast for a book-lover such as myself!” Then he climbed down several more rungs and held out a small book to her. “You’ll like this one. Same author as Kidnapped. Remember when I read that to you and Courtney? You hid under the covers and begged me to stop reading. Well . . .” he chuckled from his perch on the middle rung of the library ladder. “This one’s scarier. But of course you’re older now.”
She remembered reaching up for the book. Remembered the kindness in his eyes. They had been visiting Grandma Cleaves during a school vacation. The slender volume her father handed to her was by Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Katie had forgotten.
Dad gave it to me the summer before he died. How could I forget he gave it to me? After the double funerals everything had become a blur for Katie. And when she moved to London to live with Grandma Cleaves she had tried hard not to think back on the life she had once shared with her sister and her mom and her dad. It was far easier to lose herself in a book than to remember who had given it to her.
Katie felt the sting of tears. “My dad loved this room,” she said out loud. She shook her head trying to banish the memory of how happy her dad looked that afternoon, sunlight bathing him in a golden glow. Her heart caught in her throat. I wish my parents were alive. If Collin’s plane hadn’t been delayed . . . Her parents had died on the way to the airport to pick up Collin. They had waited an extra fifteen minutes because his plane was delayed. If her mom and dad had driven to the airport on schedule, they would have missed the truck that overturned in the Sumner Tunnel, causing their car to crash. “If only they hadn’t died—”
If wishes were unicorns, maidens would ride.
That was one of her father’s favorite sayings.
“Hey!” Toby called out. “Is that it? Over there?” He pointed to the oak table against the far windows; as he strode across the room toward it, he stepped into the same golden, dazzling light that had engulfed her father that day so many years ago. The light spilled over Toby’s shoulders like a shimmering golden cape, enveloping him and swirling out behind him onto the floor.
Katie saw where he was pointing. She dashed over to the table and tugged out the leather-bound Bible from under a stack of dictionaries. But the leather-bound book with its gold clasp was so heavy it fell from her grip and clunked against the surface of the table. She yanked it open and thumbed through the pages, then ran her finger down a column of dates. Her heart pounded. She couldn’t believe what she was reading. She blinked. Then blinked again. “So young. He died so young,” she gasped.
“Who?”
“Collin Chesterfield Twyford, the third. The nineteenth-century Collin. Here’s his birth date, and here—! Wait a sec. It says he married Prudence Farthington in eighteen hundred and eighty-nine . . . at the age of eighteen. That’s awfully young, isn’t it?” She glanced up at Toby.
Toby shrugged. “They married young in those days.”
“But look here! It’s so tragic. He died several months later on September 12. Drowned in a peat bog on the moors in Devon, near Bovey Castle, the Duke’s country seat. He was so young.” Katie stared hard at the old-fashioned script, with its curlicues and flourishes, hoping she had misread it. She pointed to the next sentence and stepped away. Toby moved forward.
“Hmmm,” he said, looking perplexed. “Seems like my namesake was with him when he died. Says here Tobias Becket”—Toby glanced up—“did you know that Becket is my last name? Anyway, Tobias Becket pulled Collin’s body out of the bog. Horrible way to die. It’s like quicksand.” He blinked at Katie, then back down at the page. “Says here that Tobias Becket, trusted family friend, accompanied Collin on a hunting expedition on the moors. Collin lost his footing and . . . drowned in the peat bog. He was buried in Dartmoor at the castle. Oh, no—” Toby groaned. “He died just after his son and heir, Collin the fourth, was born.”
“This is awful!” Katie cried. “How can I go back knowing that Collin has less than a year to live? Maybe I can warn him. Maybe—”
“No, don’t. You can’t. I mean . . . you shouldn’t.”
“Who says I shouldn’t? I’m going to warn him. And Toby. I’ll make Toby promise to keep Collin off the moors. Or better yet, stop them both from going to the castle at all.”
“Katie.” Toby took both her wrists in his hands.
She tugged back.
He held fast. “These people—these other boys, Collin and Tobias—have been dead a very long time. You can change little things in the past, but not big ones. And I thought you told me you wanted to save Beatrix Twyford? What’s it say about Lady Beatrix in the family book?”
“I forgot to look.”
Katie ran her index finger down the page. “There’s only one entry. Nothing about Jack the Ripper or how she died. Just the date. November ninth, in the year eighteen eighty-eight.”
“Which is odd,” Toby said. He cupped his large hand over hers and ran it down the page as if guiding a computer mouse. “Each of these other entries list the person’s place of interment and cause of death: apoplexy, scarlet fever, brain fever, consumption, old age, infected wisdom teeth. Not much advanced medicine in those days. This entry here says the fifth Duke of Twyford died a lingering death from gout in 1842 at the advanced age of fifty. Didn’t know you could die of gout. But I do know that fifty was considered ancient.”
“That would be the Duke’s father or grandfather.” Katie’s mind flashed on an image of the guv’nor, with his large domed head, watery blue eyes, and multiple chins. The poor man would lose Beatrix and Collin all within a year. It would proba
bly kill him. He wouldn’t need gout to do that for him. He’d die of sorrow.
“So what does this other Toby look like? Not as handsome as me, eh?”
Katie blinked at him. “Toby looks like you . . . or, rather, you look like your ancestor,” she said, and quickly changed the subject, not wanting to think about how handsome they both were. “Why does Collin have to die so young? It’s not fair. It’s bad enough Beatrix gets slaughtered . . . but Collin, so shortly after?”
“At least the Duke gets an heir. Collin Twyford the fourth. And obviously Toby has kids, too, cuz I’m here.” Toby grinned.
Katie definitely didn’t want to think about the other Toby having a girlfriend or a wife . . . and children. She stared down at the page once again. But the Duke will have an heir. Collin had a son before he died. She read the dates and chuckled. “What a goose.”
“Who?”
“Collin. He married Prudence after he got her pregnant. The baby was born just weeks before Collin’s accident. At least that’s something. He got to see his son before—” But Katie couldn’t say it. Why, oh why, does everyone in my family die violent deaths? Katie took a deep breath. That’s not true, she told herself. In her own family her parents were the only ones to have had an accident, as far as Katie knew. But Collin and Beatrix felt like her family. She fisted away a tear and thumped the leather-bound Bible shut. I have to get back to the nineteenth century! “Maybe . . . just maybe I can change history. Save Beatrix and Collin!”
“Don’t count on it. The most you might be able to do is discover the identity of Jack the Ripper, which is pretty cool. But don’t count on—”
Katie wasn’t listening. She sped out of the library and veered down the hall to the kitchen. She needed to call Courtney. Just to hear her voice. Katie’s own cell phone, nestled in her backpack, rarely got reception at her grandmother’s house. The stone walls were too thick.
Hurrying into the kitchen, Katie snapped up the land-line phone on the butcher-block counter next to the microwave, hit the speed-dial button for her sister’s number, and waited impatiently until Courtney’s voice message pounded in her ear: “Yo! Dudes and dudettes! Leave a message at the beep and I’ll get back to you as soon as I am able . . .” this last was sung to the tune of a Beatles song.
“Hey, Court! It’s me,” Katie all but shouted into the phone. “I just wanted to say . . . um . . . I miss you. Call me. Please, Courtney. It’s important. I’m heading back to Madame Tussauds. I’ll be on my cell phone for the next half hour. Call me! Call me! Call me!”
Katie dropped the receiver into its cradle, and the thunking sound of plastic hitting plastic reverberated through the kitchen. A sound not heard where she was headed.
Chapter Twenty-two
Secrets to Tell, tolls the Tyburn Vestry Bell
An hour later Katie was standing in the rain-soaked churchyard of St. Swithin’s, a swirl of mist rising up from the ground as she splayed her fingers against the surface of the London Stone and took deep, shuddering breaths until the vertigo sensation of tumbling through time and space started to wear off, and she could just make out Collin in the distance, jabbing his umbrella at a moss-covered headstone.
She closed her eyes. Right before hurling through time, in the 21st century, Katie had raced into the Jack the Ripper exhibit to memorize the names of his victims, the dates and places in London where they were murdered, all in the year 1888.
1. August 31, Mary Ann Nichols, Buck’s Row
2. September 10, Dark Annie, Hanbury St.
3. September 30, Molly Potter, Berner St.
4. September 30, Catherine Eddowes, Mitre Square
5. October 3, Elizabeth Stride, All Hallows Field by Traitors’ Gate
6. November 9, Mary Jane Kelly, Wareham Rd.
7. December 1, Dora Fowler, Birdcage Alley, near Clavell St.
8. December 7, Lady Beatrix Twyford, Miller’s Court, Dorset St.
Next to her, Toby was bending low, whispering into her ear. His presence, looming over her (so soon after being with the other Toby), was unnerving. Almost menacing. Katie pulled her shawl tightly around her shoulders. The high lace collar of her dress was soaked with perspiration or mist. Katie couldn’t be sure which.
“Let’s have it, lass,” Toby demanded in a mocking tone. His coat, thin and black and several sizes too big, hung on him like a loose cape. “If you are truly clairvoyant, as you insist that you are, surely it ought to be an easy thing to tell me what is written on the parchment, sewn into the guv’nor’s stuffed vulture?”
Toby inwardly smiled, then outwardly grimaced. He knew, as surely as he knew his own name, that Katie could not comply. How could she? There wasn’t a person alive who knew the pet name he had called his sister. His baby sister who died of an infected rat bite. Toby shuddered just thinking about little Emma. The gangrene that had set in. Her contorted, bloated body. Three years old. He had called her Tuppence. Her tiny face always so trusting, so adoring. Even up to the last minute of her life, when the fever had taken hold and the puncture wound on her arm had swelled to the size and color of a red beet, bursting its skin, Emma had blinked up at him with wild, yet trusting grey eyes.
Toby was breathing hard now. He tried to slow his breathing, but a chill, having nothing to do with the mist-soaked air, prickled down his spine. His secret was safe, surely? Katie would not, could not, know about Emma. He had never shared his inconsolable grief with anyone. So sure was he that Katie was a charlatan that he had recklessly written down the name of endearment he had used for Emma. Tuppence.
After penning her special name, along with a cryptic missive, Toby had sewn the rolled-up parchment inside the Duke’s stuffed vulture and, after replacing the bird on the fireplace mantel, had locked the study door behind him. Then he escorted Katie to the London Stone at her request. At no time could Katie have sneaked back into the Duke’s study, even if she’d had a mind to. Toby had given her no opportunity. He had stayed by her side from the moment he had locked the Duke’s door. “I’m sticking to you like plaster-paste,” he had informed her. And he had done precisely that.
Aside from a bit of weirdness for a split second when Katie had poked her finger at the London Stone—and the light surrounding her splintered, momentarily blinding him—the girl never left his field of vision. He had watched her as closely as the Duke’s vulture must have watched its prey before it had been stuffed and mounted and showcased.
A little smile twitched at the corner of Toby’s lips now as he studied Katie standing in a puddle of mud. In a matter of moments he would be free and clear of the silly chit. He would deliver her to Major Brown’s doorstep and be done with her. He had upheld his end of the bargain. Good riddance. She meant nothing more to him than a stray, bedraggled, soaking wet kitten—which is precisely what she looked like right now.
Katie glanced sideways at Toby. He was gnashing his teeth. She wanted to laugh. Not because he was glaring at her, but because to the best of her knowledge she had never used the word “gnash” before. But that was exactly what Toby was doing. His face was grim, and he was staring at her with an angry sort of intentness. Glowering at her. And gnashing his teeth. The sound like stone against stone, achingly audible.
I should put him out of his misery and just tell him what he wrote. But will that cause him more misery?
“You’re going to hate me,” Katie said with conviction. She wasn’t sure why, but she knew it as surely as she could feel the grey blanket of mist rise up like gas from the wet ground. Toby’s going to be very, very angry.
“Phhfft,” Toby shot back contemptuously. “Do you put such a high value on your ability to make a bloke dance to your tune? You have no more power to make me hate or love you than you have of throwing a thunderbolt at Mt. Vesuvius.”
A long peal of thunder exploded in the sky.
Katie jumped.
Toby clamped a protective arm around her shoulders just as a gust of chilly air whirled in at them, and a moment later the s
kies opened to a roar of driving rain.
“Tuppence!” Katie shouted above the din of sluicing rain. “Your sister’s name was Tuppence,” she shouted, feeling the thrum of raindrops, slashing down hard. “Or she had a pet named Tuppence. A dog or a cat maybe. And it died. Because of you.” But this last was drowned out by another clap of thunder.
Katie blinked at Toby’s ashen face. He looked, for a split second, as if she had driven a thunderbolt into his heart.
In the distance came the thud of heavy church doors closing shut against the rain, followed by the clang of church bells. Had Katie been truly psychic, the sound of driving rain, the booming bells, the banging of heavy doors . . . and the far-off crash of thunder might have alerted her to the dangers that lay ahead. The foreboding in the air was as thick and ominous as a shroud.
But Katie could think of nothing and no one except Toby, and the expression of pain burning deep in his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-three
Let Us Now Go say the Bells of Le Bow
Two days later it was sunny and bright with no hint of rain in the air.
“Tell me again why I’m in this stupid disguise,” Katie fumed as the horse-drawn carriage carrying her, Toby, and Collin pulled away from the mews behind Twyford Manor.
The date was September 2, 1888. It was Saturday morning and the three teenagers were on their way to Whitechapel to attend the murder inquest of Mary Ann Nichols, which made Katie happy. But the disguise—the boys had made her dress as an old woman—made her miserable. Stickpins jabbed into her head, holding the black widow’s bonnet in place, and the corded ribbon under her chin was tied so tightly, she felt as if she were being strangled. A wiry veil dangled down from the bonnet’s brim, covering her face like a beekeeper’s helmet.
Sitting in the forward-facing seat of the carriage, Katie angrily punched at the enormous patchwork skirt that billowed like a giant mushroom over mounds of itchy wool underskirts. She tugged at the frumpy jacket which was bursting at the seams across her shoulder blades where Toby had wedged a throw pillow to give the appearance of a hump.
Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller Page 16