by Linda Evans
Shahdi Feroz, however, surprised Margo with an attempted first gesture at friendliness. The scholar smiled hesitantly, one corner of her lips twisting in chagrin. “I did not mean to embarrass you, Miss Smith. If you are to guide the Ripper Watch Tour, then you clearly have the experience to do so.”
Margo almost let it go. She wanted badly to have this woman think she really did know what she was doing. But that wasn’t honest and might actually be dangerous, if they got into a tight spot and the scholar thought she knew more than she did. She cleared her throat, aware that her face had turned scarlet. “Thanks, but I’m not, really.” The startled glance Dr. Feroz gave her prompted Margo to finish before she lost her nerve. “It’s just that I’m in training to be a time scout, you see, and Kit wants me to get some experience doing fieldwork.”
“Kit?” the other woman echoed. “You know Kit Carson that well, then, to use his first name? I wish I did.”
Some of Margo’s nervousness drained away. If Dr. Shahdi Feroz could look and sound that wistful and uncertain, then maybe there was hope for Margo, after all. She grinned, relief momentarily transcending worry and fear for Ianira’s family. “Well, yeah, I guess you could say so. He’s my grandfather.”
“Oh!” Then, startling Margo considerably, “That must be very difficult for you, Miss Smith. You have my sympathy. And respect. It is never easy, to live up to greatness in one’s ancestors.”
Strangely, Margo received the impression that Shahdi Feroz wasn’t speaking entirely of Margo. “No,” she said quietly, “it isn’t.” Shahdi Feroz remained silent, respecting Margo’s privacy, for which she was grateful. She and the older woman began testing doors they came to and jotting down the numbers painted on them, so maintenance could check the rooms later, since neither of them had keys. Margo did rattle the knobs and knock, calling out, “Hello? Ianira? Marcus? It’s Margo Smith …” Nobody answered, however, and the echoes that skittered away down the tunnel mocked her efforts. She bit her lower lip. How many rooms to check, just like these, and how many miles of tunnels? God, they could be anywhere.
No, she told herself, not just anywhere. If they had been killed, the killer would either have needed keys to unlock these doors or would’ve had to use tools to jimmy the locks. And so far, neither Margo nor Shahdi Feroz had found any suspicious scratches or toolmarks indicating a forced door. So they might still be alive.
Somewhere.
Please, God, let them still be alive, somewhere …
Their tunnel twisted around, following the curve of the cavern wall, and rejoined the main tunnel fifty yards from the point they’d left it. Kit was already there, waiting. Skeeter, grim and silent, arrived a moment later.
“All right,” Skeeter’s voice was weary with disappointment, “that’s the whole section we were assigned.” The pain in his voice jerked Margo out of her own worry with a stab of guilt. She hadn’t lost anything, really, in that goof with Shahdi Feroz, except a little pride. Skeeter had just lost his only friends in the whole world.
“I’m sorry, Skeeter,” she found herself saying, surprising them both with the sincerity in her voice.
Skeeter met her gaze steadily for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “Thanks. I appreciate that, Margo. We’d better get back up to Commons, get ready to go through the Britannia.” He grimaced. “I’ll carry the luggage through, because I agreed to take the job. But I won’t be staying.”
No, Margo realized with a pang. He wouldn’t. Skeeter would come straight back through that open gate and probably kill himself searching, with lack of sleep and forgetting to eat… . They trooped wordlessly up the stairs to the boisterous noise of Frontier Town. With the Wild West gate into Denver set to open tomorrow, wannabe cowboys in leather chaps and jingling spurs sauntered from saloon to saloon, ogling the bar girls and pouring down cheap whiskey and beer. Rinky-tink piano music drifted out through saloon doors to mingle with the voices of tourists speculating on the search underway, the fate of the construction workers who’d attacked Ianira, her family, and her acolytes, on the identity of the Ripper, and what sights they planned to see in Denver of 1885 and the surrounding gold-mining towns.
In front of Happy Jack’s saloon, a guy with drooping handlebar mustaches, who wore an outlandish getup that consisted of low-slung Mexican sombrero, red silk scarf, black leather chaps, black cotton shirt, black work pants tucked into black, tooled-leather boots, and absurdly roweled silver spurs, was staggering into the crowd, bawling at the top of his lungs. “Gonna win me that medal, y’hear? Joey Tyrolin’s the name, gonna win that shootin’ match, l’il lady!”
He accosted a tourist who wore a buckskin skirt and blouse. She staggered back, apparently from the smell of his breath. Joey Tyrolin, drunker than any skunk Margo had yet seen in Frontier Town, drew a fancy pair of Colt Single-Action Army pistols and executed an equally fancy roadhouse spin, marred significantly by the amount of alcohol he’d recently consumed. One of the .45 caliber revolvers came adrift mid-air and splashed into a nearby horse trough. Laughter exploded in every direction. A scowl as dark as his clothes appeared in a face that matched his red silk bandanna.
“Gonna win me that shootin’ match, y’hear! Joey Tyrolin c’n shoot th’ eye outta an eagle at three hunnerd yards …” He bent, gingerly fishing his gun out of the horse trough.
Margo muttered, “Maybe he’ll fall in and drown? God, am I ever glad we’re going to London, not Denver.”
Kit, too, eyed the pistolero askance. “Let’s hope he confines his shooting to that black-powder competition he’s bragging about. I’ve seen far too many idiots like that one go down time to Denver and challenge some local to a gunfight. Occasionally, they choose the wrong local, someone who can’t be killed because he’s too important to history. Now and again, they come back to the station in canvas bags.”
Shahdi Feroz glanced up at him. “I should imagine their families must protest rather loudly?”
“All too often, yes. It’s why station management requires the hold harmless waivers all time tourists must sign. Fools have a way of discovering,” Kit added with a disgusted glance toward the drunken Joey Tyrolin, who now dripped water all over the Frontier Town floor and any tourist within reach, “that the laws of time travel, like the laws of physics, have no pity and no remorse.”
Skeeter said nothing at all. He merely glared at the drunken tourist and clamped his lips, eyes ravaged by a pain Margo could literally feel, it was so strong. Margo reached out hesitantly, touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Skeeter. I hope you find them. Tell them … tell them we helped look, okay?”
Skeeter had stiffened under her hand. But he nodded. “Thanks, Margo. I’ll see you later.”
He strode away through the crowd, disappearing past Joey Tyrolin, who teetered and abruptly found himself seated in the horse trough he’d just fished his pistol out of. Laughter floated in Skeeter’s wake. Margo didn’t join in. Skeeter was hurting, worse than she’d ever believed it possible for him to hurt. When she looked up, she found Kit’s gaze on her. Her grandfather nodded, having read what was in her eyes and correctly interpreted it, all without a word spoken. It was one of the reasons she was still a little in awe of him—and why, at this moment, she loved him more fiercely than ever.
“I’ll keep looking, too, Imp,” he promised. “You’d better scoot if you want to get into costume and get your luggage to the gate on time.”
Margo sighed. “Thanks. You’ll come see us off?”
He ruffled her hair affectionately. “Just try and keep me away.”
She gave him a swift, rib-cracking hug, having to blink salty water out of her eyes. “Love you, Kit,” she whispered.
Then she fled, hoping he hadn’t noticed the tears.
Time scouting was a tough business.
Just now, Margo didn’t feel quite tough enough.
*
The night dripped.
Not honest rain, no; but a poisonous mist of coal smoke and river fog and steam that ca
rried nameless scents in the coalescing yellow droplets. Above a gleam of damp roofing slates, long curls of black, acrid smoke belched from squat chimney pots that huddled down like misshapen gargoyles against an airborne, sulphurous tide. Far above, an almost forgotten moon hung poised above the city, a sickle-shaped crescent, the tautly drawn bow of the Divine Huntress of the Night, pure as unsullied silver above the foul murk, taking silent aim into the heart of a city long accustomed to asphyxiating beneath its own lethal mantle.
Gas jets from scattered street lamps stung the darkness like impotent bees. The fog dispersed their glow into forlorn, hopeless little pustules of light along wet cobblestones and soot-blackened walls of wood and stone and ancient, crumbling brick. Diffuse smells lurked in eddies like old, fading bruises. The scent of harbor water thick with weeds and dead things afloat in the night drifted in from the river. Wet and half-rotted timbers lent a whiff of salt and moldering fungus. Putrefied refuse from the chamber pots and privies of five million people stung the throat and eyes, fighting for ascendency over the sickly stench of dead fish and drowned dogs.
The distant, sweet freshness of wet hay and muddied straw eddying down from the enormous hay markets of Whitechapel and Haymarket itself lent a stark note of contrast, reminding the night that somewhere beyond these dismal brick walls, fresh air and clean winds swept across the land. Closer at hand came the stink of marsh and tidal mud littered with the myriad flotsam cast up by the River Thames to lap against the docks of Wapping and Stepney and the Isle of Dogs, a miasma that permeated the chilly night with a cloying stink like corpses too long immersed in a watery grave.
In the houses of respectable folk, rambling in orderly fashion to the west along the river banks and far inland to the north, candleshades and gas lamps had long since been extinguished. But here in the raucous streets of Wapping, of Whitechapel and of Stepney, drunken voices bellowed out the words of favorite drinking tunes. In rented rooms the size of storage bins, huddled in ramshackle brick tenements which littered these darkened streets like cancerous growths, enterprising pimps played the blackmail-profitable game of “arse and twang” with hired whores, unsuspecting sailors, and switchblade knives. Working men and women stood or sat in doorways and windows, listening to the music drifting along the streets from public houses and poor-men’s clubs like the Jewish Working Men’s Association of Whitechapel, until the weariness of hard work for long, squalid hours dragged them indoors to beds and cots and stairwells for the night. In the darkened, shrouded streets, business of another kind rose sharply with the approach of the wee hours. Men moved in gangs or pairs or slipped singly from shadow to shadow, and plied the cudgels and prybars of their trade against the skulls and window casements of their favorite victims.
Along one particular fog-cloaked street, where music and light spilled heedlessly from a popular gathering place for local denizens, bootheels clicked faintly on the wet cobbles as a lone young man, more a fair-haired boy than a man fully grown, staggered out into the wet night. A working lad, but not in the usual sense of the word, he had spent the better part of his night getting himself pissed as a newt on what had begun as “a quick one down to boozer” and had steadily progressed—through a series of pints of whatever the next-closest local had been selling cheapest—into a rat-arsed drunken binge.
A kerb crawler of indeterminate years appeared from out of the yellow murk and flashed a saucy smile. “You look to be a bloke what likes jolly comp’ny, mate.” She took his arm solicitously when he reeled against a sooty brick wall, leaving a dark streak of damp down his once-fine shirt, which had seen far better days in the fashionable West End. She smiled into his eyes. “What about a four-penny knee trembler t’ share wiv a comfy lady?” A practiced hand stole along the front of his shapeless trousers.
He grabbed a handful of the wares for sale, since it was expected and he had at least the shreds of a reputation to maintain, then he sighed dolefully, as though a sluggish, drunken thought had come to him. He carefully slurred his voice into the slang he’d heard on these streets for weeks, now. “Ain’t got a fourpence, luv. No ackers a’tall. Totally coals an’ coke, ‘at’s what I am, I’ve spent the last of what I brung ‘ome t’night on thirty-eleven pints.”
The woman eyed him more closely in the dim light. “I know ‘at voice …”
When she got a better look, she let out a disgusted screech and knocked his hand away. ” ‘Oo are you tryin’ t’fool, Morgan? Grabbin’ like it’s me thripenny bits you’d want, when it’s cobbler’s awl’s you’d rather be gropin’ after? Word’s out, ‘bout you, Morgan. ‘At Polly Nichols shot ‘er mouth good, when she were drunk, ‘at she did.” The woman shoved him away with a harsh, “Get ‘ome t’ yer lovin’ Mr. Eddy—if th’ toff’ll ‘ave you back, whoever he might be, unnatural sod!” She gave a short, ugly bark of laughter and stalked away into the night, muttering about wasting her time on beardless irons and finding a bloke with some honest sausage and mash to pay her doss money for the night.
The cash-poor—and recently infamous—young drunk reeled at her sharp shove and plowed straight into the damp wall, landing with a low grunt of dismayed surprise. He caught himself ineffectually there and crumpled gradually to the wet pavement. Morgan sat there for a moment, blinking back tears of misery and absently rubbing his upper arm and shoulder. For several moments, he considered seriously what he ought to do next. Sitting in muck on a wet pavement for the remainder of the night didn’t seem a particularly attractive notion. He hadn’t any place to go and no doss money of his own and he was very far, indeed, from Cleveland Street and the fancy West Side house where he’d once been popular with a certain class of rich toffs—and until tomorrow night, at least, when Eddy would finally bring him the promised money, he would have nothing to buy food, either.
His eyes stung. Damn that bitch, Polly Nichols! She was no better than he was, for all the righteous airs she put on. Just a common slattern, who’d lift her skirts for a stinking fourpence—or a well-filled glass of gin, for that matter. Word on the streets hereabout was, she’d been a common trollop for so many years her own husband had tossed her out as an unfit mother and convinced the courts to rescind the order for paying her maintenance money. Morgan, at least, had plied his trade with respectably wealthy clients; but thinking about that only made the hurt run deeper. The fine West End house had tossed him out, when he’d lost their richest client. Wasn’t my fault Eddy threw me over for that bloody mystic of his, with his fancy ways and fine house and his bloody deformed …
And Polly Nichols, curse the drunken bitch, had found out about that particular house on Cleveland Street and Morgan’s place in it, had shoved him against a wall and hissed out, “I know all about it, Morgan. All about what you let a bloke do t’you for money. I’ve ‘eard you got a little rainy day fund put aside, savin’s, like, from that ‘ouse what tossed you onto the street. You ‘and it over, Morgan, maybe I won’t grass on you, eh? Those constables in H Division, now, they might just want to know about an ‘andsome lad like you, bendin’ over for it.”
Morgan had caught his breath in horror. The very last thing Morgan needed was entanglements with the police. Prostitution was bad enough for a woman. A lad caught prostituting himself with another man … Well, the death penalty was off the books, but it’d be prison for sure, a nice long stretch at hard labor, and the thought of what would happen to a lad like himself in prison … But Morgan had come away from the house on Cleveland Street with nothing save his clothes, a half-crown his last client had given him as a bonus, which he’d managed to hide from the house’s proprietor, and a black eye.
And Eddy’s letters.
“Here …” He produced the half-crown, handed it over. “It’s everything I’ve got in the world. Please, Polly, I’m starving as it is, don’t tell the constables.”
“An ‘alf a crown?” she screeched. “A mis’rable ‘alf crown? Bleedin’ little sod! You come from a fine ‘ouse, you did, wiv rich m
en givin’ it to you, what do you mean by givin’ me nuffink but a miserly ‘alf crown!”
“It’s all I’ve got!” he cried, desperate. “They took everything else away! Even most of my clothes!” A harsh, half-strangled laugh broke loose. “Look at my face, Polly! That’s what they gave me as a going away present!”
“Copper’s’ll give you worse’n bruises an’ a blacked eye, luv!” She jerked around and started to stalk away. “Constable!”
Morgan clutched at her arm. “Wait!”
She paused. “Well?”
He licked his lips. They were all he had … but if this drunken whore sent him to prison, what good would Eddy’s letters do him? And he didn’t have to give them all to her. “I’ve got one thing. One valuable thing.”
“What’s ‘at?” She narrowed her eyes.
“Letters …”
“Letters? What sort of fool d’you tyke me for?”
“They’re valuable letters! Worth a lot of money!”
The narrow-eyed stare sharpened. “What sort o’ letters ‘ave you got, Morgan, that’d be worth any money?”
He licked his lips once more. “Love letters,” he whispered. “From someone important. They’re in his handwriting, on his personal stationery, and he’s signed them with his own name. Talks about everything he did to me when he visited me in that house, everything he planned to do on his next visit. They’re worth a fortune, Polly. I’ll share them with you. He’s going to give me a lot of money to get them back, a lot of money, Polly. Tomorrow night, he’s going to buy back the first one, I’ll give you some of the money—”
“You’ll give me the letters!” she snapped. “Hah! Share wiv you? I’ll ‘ave them letters, if you please, y’little sod, you just ‘and ‘em over.” She held out one grasping hand, eyes narrowed and dangerous.