The Half Killed

by Quenby Olson

  "No one sent me," I tell her, my conscience pricking at the hint of falsehood underlying those words. For have I not been slowly working my way towards this young woman’s threshold, circling it as a hunter stalks its prey, while fricative whispers urge me onward in my progress? " I am a Spiritualist," I tell her, seeing no reason to prevaricate on this matter, at least. "Some might refer to me as a medium."

  Her mouth gapes for a moment before her jaw snaps shut. "So how’s that? You talk to ghosts and monsters and such-like?"

  "That is what the newspapers used to proclaim, when they were feeling complimentary."

  Again, her gaze leaps towards an area somewhere behind my left shoulder. Her lips draw together, and I notice her teeth—tolerably straight and with only a faint yellowing to them—as they nibble at the corner of her mouth. The rest of her face is fit for a miniature, all delicate lines and youthful proportions, eyes large and clear as they continue their survey of my own figure.

  What she sees there must not be enough to impress. I note the look of indifference that wipes the lines from her brow, eyelids lowering as her attention settles on my face. Surely, I think, she must wonder what attraction I held for such a discerning connoisseur of the fairer sex as was our Lord Ryall.

  "I’ve not got all day," she declares. And yet the door opens to me, not wide, but enough to admit my slender frame. Once inside, I'm forced to blink until my eyes settle to the meagre amount of light permitted through the shuttered windows. A minute passes before I can trust my sight to lead me far beyond the door, and yet I hear a bustle of movement from somewhere off to my right, a loud clunk and a scrape before a swirl of sparks announces the stirring of a fire on its way towards resurrection.

  The fresh glow of embers suffuses the room with a soft orange light, along with an unwelcome warmth that exerts a pressure not dissimilar to the weight of a hand upon my chest. Instinctively, I move to back away, but the room is smaller than I anticipated and so I find myself knocking my elbows against the door before another step brings my hip into hard contact with the blunt corner of a table.

  "You can sit, if you like."

  This, spoken with such an evident desire that I will in no way avail myself of the use of either of the two rush bottom chairs set perpendicular to the fire. My host, on the other hand, feels no such qualms against reclining in my presence. A twitch of her skirts and she is seated on the chair nearer to the fire, the heavy iron of the poker still in her hand as she reaches out to prod the sluggish flames with its hooked end.

  "You’ll not be getting an offer of tea and light refreshments, if that’s what you’re waiting for."

  I'm still near to the door, my sleeve brushing the latch as my hands fidget for a moment, restless beneath Miss Wing’s attention. And yet, she has not once looked in my direction since taking her seat, and I find it is this lack of acknowledgement that succeeds in unnerving me while I struggle to arrange my thoughts and dampen the lingering discomfort that seems to swathe my entire skull in a dull, throbbing pain.

  "I’ve come…" I say, but my voice falters and I must take another breath and start over. "I’ve come to ask a few questions of you, only a few, if you will allow it."

  I watch her fingers as they tighten and relax around the thickest part of the poker. "Ask away. I’ve nothing to hide."

  The lie is a bold one. She wants me gone. Gone, and never to lay eyes on her again. But she shifts in her chair, tugs at the edge of her sleeve, and with that slight movement, I notice the cracks in her armour, this show of bravado nothing more than a shield hastily assembled, and as swiftly demolished should I wish to put forth the effort required to unsettle her.

  "You were acquainted with Ryall," I say, and it is not until the words are spoken that I realise how quick I am to abandon the use of his title.

  Another swift jab to the fire, a blackened log splitting in two before the flames brighten amid a burst of sparks. "That wasn’t a question, but even if it were, the fact that you’re here in my house, prying into the more sordid bits of my life tells me you would already know the answer to it."

  And now, she looks at me. Her eyes seem to have taken on the glow from the fire, and I ignore the heat now pulsing out from the fireplace as I step forward—one, two, three paces and I’ve covered more than half the breadth of the room—so we may regard each other with greater clarity.

  ”I found a photograph of you, among Ryall’s possessions."

  She ponders this for a moment, her bottom lip sliding in and out of her mouth as she turns the poker between her fingers. "And I assume the nature of this photograph," she says, and clears her throat. "I assume it’s not something you’d show off to your mum?"

  I raise my eyebrows. She nods once, the abused bottom lip pushing out until her mouth takes on a pout I can imagine would have been used to great effect with Ryall, along with others of his ilk. "I see."

  At that moment, I wonder what indeed she does see. Her eyes glaze over, and I sense the way her mind drifts over an assortment of thoughts and memories, stored away until now. And then her gaze clears, her examination of my person resuming, but this time with a more accusatory edge, as if I should feel some remorse for coming here and forcing those memories upon her.

  "And you say you found it? He didn’t give it to you?"

  My fingers flutter, the nervous movement travelling upwards through my arms until I shake it off with a sharp roll of my shoulders. "I was there, when he died. Many people were," I amend, before she can construe something criminal from my presence at his home at such a time. "But I came across a collection of photographs, one of which is of you, and another of a young woman who is now also deceased. Murdered." I push the word into the air between us. "And in the same manner as Ryall."

  She returns her attention to the fire, the poker prodding at a stubborn bit of wood until it cracks and splinters. I notice she is not burning logs, but rather dry, broken boards, some of them still sporting bits of nails and other metalwork, as evidenced by the blackened pieces that litter the ashes at the edge of the hearth. "So your visit today," she begins, punctuating each word with another jab before she finally gives up the poker to its place by the fireplace. "I should take it as a service, perhaps? You’ll be expecting some gratitude for tottering all the way down here to warn me of my impending demise?"

  It is fear that prompts this speech. I feel it rolling off of her, filling the room around us until I think it should be heavy enough to smother the fire she stirred back into life.

  "I expect no such thing." I swallow, take a step forward, and do my best to blink away the warmth that assaults my eyes. "As I said, I wish to speak with you. To ask some questions, if you would allow it."

  Edith tilts her head back, and I notice a flash of pink as her tongue slides across her lips before taking up residence in her cheek. "Ask what you like," she says, her words sounding thick as her tongue continues its survey of her molars. "I can’t imagine I’ve any particularly startling revelations to impart."

  "You’d be surprised," I breathe, but when she looks in my direction, her brow furrowed, I shake my head. "Nothing, only…" I clear my throat. "Did you know a woman named Isabel? Isabel Capaldi?"

  I say nothing more, allowing that name to slip into her head, to unfurl itself like a net and drag through her memories, in the hopes it will snag something pertinent.

  "Oh," she says, her tongue still prodding at the corner of her mouth. "Oh! Izzy, you mean. Lovely thing. Wanted to be an actress, if I remember right. Her mum was one, and fairly successful, too."

  "Did she ever mention her family to you? A brother, perhaps?"

  A shake of the head, a return of the pout.

  "But you both had your portraits done?"

  "Our portraits." She scoffs. "As if we had Gainsborough in to do our likenesses, eh? All feathered hats and flocks of sheep?"

  A bubble of laughter begins its ascent from somewhere in the region of her chest, but a glance in my direction and the levity is subdued.r />
  "Not Gainsborough, then." She lifts her hands, palms up, fingers curved slightly, as if making an offer of the emptiness held inside them. "I don’t remember the chap’s name, the one with the camera. My sincerest apologies there, as I’m sure that’s something you’re after. But there was nothing remarkable about him. Dull face, dull hair." She shrugs, and her face brightens. "Wouldn’t it be a thing, if all the miscreants, all the ones with villainy on their minds, what if they were like actors in a play, all cast to look the part?" Here, she straightens up in her chair, spine stiff, shoulders back, while her gaze focuses on some point in an imaginary distance. "‘Oh, see that one with the harelip and the lazy eye? Get the coppers after him in a trice!’"

  "Who else was there?" I ask, cutting across her final words, my voice struggling to rise above a whisper after her boisterous performance. "Was Ryall ever in attendance?"

  Already, the lips purse, the head shakes from side to side. "No, no. And why would he be? As always, we were the ones left to take care of the unpleasant side of things, no matter that the room and all those lovely cushions and draperies we posed on reeked of sweat and mildew, or that we got a cuff upside the head should we have voiced a single word of complaint." She shakes her head again, the movement more violent this time. "It was just us. A few of the girls, the man with the camera… Oh, and her Majesty would occasionally deign to make an appearance. That is, if she thought our Missus was being too slack in her duties."

  "Her Majesty?"

  Edith waves a hand. A flick of her fingers to illustrate that while I'm not privy to the joke, she will neither take the trouble nor the time to enlighten me.

  "Mrs. E. That’s what she preferred." And before I can pose the next question, she raises her shoulders in a small shrug. "I know nothing else about her, so don’t bother inquiring." She attempts a smile, but I notice a return of her previous fear, appearing as a glint in her eyes, one she’s unable to smother before it draws her lips into a tight line. "Well, it was only them, and us. And then the pictures went out, and the men would ask for the girls they liked—all through the Missus, of course; we never had a say in it—and that was that. All arrangements neat and completed."

  And now she will not meet my eyes. The floor holds a greater claim on her attention, followed by the tips of her boots, sticking out from beneath the stained hem of her dress. Her fingernails—blunt, chewed down to the quick—are the final recipients of her gaze, and with that focus I notice a slight rounding of her shoulders, her back curving forward as her entire form seems to pull away from me.

  "What of Ryall?" I ask, hoping to catch her before she has withdrawn entirely. "Did he ever ask for you?"

  I watch her fingers as they pick at a sliver of dead skin on the side of her thumb. "He did. Once. He seemed to lose interest rather quickly, but perhaps that’s just his character." She looks at me, as if expecting me to shed some illumination on Ryall’s quirks, but I ignore the conversational worm dangling at the end of her hook.

  "And Isabel?" I press forward, my mind immersed in the tangle that occupies my head. Desperately, I attempt to pluck at a solitary thread, in the hope that it will unravel the entire snarl. "Did she know Ryall? Was she ever one of his choices?"

  "It’s possible." Her head tilts to the side as she considers. "But doubtful. I was under the impression he preferred those with a fairer sort of colouring." This, spoken with a keen glance at my own pale head.

  There is silence after this. Of course, it isn’t quiet at all. There’s still the crack and snap of the fire, the slow creak of the house around us, the rustling of some creature creeping about inside the walls. And further out, the bustle of horses, of wheels, of boots and slippers on the pavement, of shouts and whispers and the faltering hum of a city as the Thames—its very lifeblood—drains away from it.

  "Is there anything else?" Edith’s voice drags me back, back from the receding waters of the river, from the pain that flickered in my head as quick as a single heartbeat, and back into the sultriness of the small, dark room in which I still find myself. "Or are you all out of questions?"

  "Would you…" I begin, and I close my eyes, squinting hard until the pain fades to something more manageable. "Would you have wanted Ryall dead, for any reason?"

  "No," she says, without a thought, and I realise it can be nothing else but the truth. "He wasn’t a bad sort, really. There are worse than him, much worse. And most of them still with the ability to walk the Earth."

  My hand reaches back behind me, searching for something on which to lean. The burst of energy that brought me here is nearly dissipated, and I'm so tired. "Thank you," I tell her, the words feeble and empty. They’re spoken for no other reason than to foster my departure from the house. "I’ve taken up enough of your time today, and I should be on my way."

  A nod of my head, a gesture towards the door. Edith rises from her chair, one hand sweeping down the front of her skirts, her posture erect as she takes on the role of charming hostess about to make her farewells.

  "Good day to you, Miss Hawes."

  "Thank you," I say, forgetting that I had already said it a few seconds before. "If you remember anything else, anything at all…"

  I offer her no direction, no way of contacting me should she wish to offer any additional information. I'm already turning towards the door, my hand grasping for the knob as my eyes squint in preparation for the brilliant daylight I know lies beyond the panel of wood.

  "Miss Hawes," she says, and my grip on the knob tightens, though my steps pause. "The woman we called ‘Her Majesty,’" she continues. "Mrs. E? I know it may not be much help to you in your inquiries, but… Well, it was merely a joke, her nickname. We called her that because of how she dressed, you see."

  I turn around. Now, more than anything, I simply wish to leave. The ache in my head has altered in some way, and over and over again, my thoughts keep straining to escape to the edge of the Thames, to the mud and the silt layered there. "How she dressed?"

  "Like the Queen, all in black. In mourning," she adds, when my expression does not change. "And they said she’d dressed like that for years and years, and all over a dead husband or such."

  The pain… It nearly blinds me. I fumble with the door, my fingers searching without guidance, the knob cold beneath my hand—even through my gloves—as I wrench it open and stagger out onto the pavement.

  I must see Chissick. It is my only coherent thought, driving me forward like a hand at my back. I must see him, I must see him. Before the pain in my head becomes unbearable, before the last of the tangled images in my head unfurls itself… I must see him, and I must tell him, because I know.

  Chapter Eighteen

  * * *

  * * *

  Brick by brick, I feel a wall sliding into place. I cannot fight it. It happens too quickly, the blocks slamming down, shutting out the light but for a few small chinks. It is those imperfections to which I cling, narrow but brilliant shafts of illumination, each of them carrying a flash of memory: the familiar slant of handwriting on the back of a photograph, the rustle of black silk edged with crepe, the intonation of a prayer, a sudden chill that draws up the gooseflesh on my skin.

  But I cannot shape any of these fragments into something greater, and with each attempt, another brick appears, and another piece of knowledge is lost until all that is left is the pain in my head and the exhaustion that holds my body in its trembling grasp.

  And then the bells toll out the hour, announcing to the world that it is three o’clock, and here I stand on Mister Julian Chissick’s doorstep.

  His is not a grand house in any way, nor was it ever. Two narrow storeys, so similar to its neighbours on either side that I have to keep my gaze fixed on the number above the door to prevent myself from drifting over to the wrong stoop.

  I pause on the stair, one hand braced against the doorway as I search for a knocker or a bell of some sort with which to announce my arrival, but there is nothing but a gaping wound where a knocker had once
resided. And so I’m left to beat on the door with my fist, four knocks and a pause, four knocks and a pause. It becomes almost something of a litany, until I press my ear to the wood and hear the sound of heavy boots on a staircase, the steps growing louder before the knob turns and the door swings open before me.

  I expect Chissick to say my name, to offer some kind of a greeting, but instead he stands there, the laces of his shoes straggling around his ankles, his braces twisted over his shoulders in his haste to put them on. His jaw still sports the previous day’s growth of beard, and he looks at me as if he's looking through me, believing me to be nothing more than an apparition turned up on his doorstep.

  "I am sorry," I say, in lieu of a proper greeting. "I thought I had given you enough time to rest, to recover."

  He runs his hand through his hair, still uncombed since this morning. "No, it’s fine."

  If I expected him to say more, I'm sadly disappointed. Without another word, he steps back, ushers me inside with a small dip of his whiskered chin.

  My eyes blink as they acclimate to the semi-darkness that cloaks his front hall. My steps find some strength now I'm indoors, and the absence of direct sunlight seems to act as a balm to the ache in my head. "I would have been here earlier, only I called on someone before I came here, a Miss Edith Wing." I pronounce the name, and wait for a reaction from him. But I can see that his thoughts are still mired in a fog of exhaustion, and so he has yet to attend to my words. "She was one of Ryall’s girls, one of the women from the photographs." Still—Still!—he does not look up. "Chissick, she knew your sister."

  The change in him is abrupt. A rigidity that affects his limbs, his spine, travelling up through his neck until his head turns, his gaze focusing on nothing I can discern as he straightens up to his full height. "And?"