The sensation that I was not a part of this moment somehow spurred me, along with a feckless sort of lunacy. I stood in the safety of the gas lamps, watching some other terrified, bespectacled Fiona Mahoney babble nonsense to her nemesis. I even silently screamed at her to shut her idiot mouth before she landed us both in our graves.
She didn’t, though.
I didn’t.
Everything bubbled out of me in a great, chaotic deluge. My bicarbonate exhilaration mixed with the acidic vinegar of my hatred created a frothy confession that overflowed all reason.
Here he was. Finally.
Jack the sodding Ripper. The malevolent killer who’d eluded the finest police force in the entire world for two full years stood right. Behind. Me.
I even told him about the beads, invited him to reach into my bloody pocket should he wish to inspect them.
He didn’t.
He didn’t move at all, nor did he say anything negative or affirmative. His breathing sped up as I talked, and I occasionally felt a hitch or two in his chest as though I’d revealed something significant.
I thought about other things while I talked. About how badly I needed a wee, and then instantly after that, I dearly hoped Inspector Croft never saw my corpse—though more because of the wee and such than the blood. For some reason, relinquishing control of my bladder and thereby my dignity in front of him seemed like losing a contest I hadn’t been aware of until now.
And I hated to lose.
I thought about how I missed the ocean and wanted to see it again. And how I’d intended to take a lover someday but couldn’t bring myself to do so. I thought about Aidan, and the cavern in my chest where I kept him opened. How much easier would it be for him to lose me than the other way around? He had the church. He had God. He had his faith and his endless reserves of grace.
I had none of that. I had nothing but dashed hopes, responsibilities, and a creed.
Lex talionis.
The law of revenge.
The Latin phrase reminded me of pittura infamante.
I was back to myself again. No longer divided, no longer standing apart in the safety of the light.
I stood in the arms of Jack the Ripper.
I’d joined him in the darkness. I had, in my presence, the man to whom I’d devoted the last two years of my life.
I was suddenly ravenous. A deep, dark void opened inside of me. Not in my stomach, but in my soul. I desired sustenance, but not in the form of food.
I wanted answers. Craved information. I yearned for the absolution tendered by the response to the ubiquitous, tedious, but eternally pertinent invocation…
Why?
Why come back after all these years? Why seek me out on the Strand and not in Whitechapel, his preferred hunting grounds? Why kill a man and hang him upside down by one foot? Pittura infamante? If I were going to meet my maker, I’d do it with some revelations, so help me, God.
I loosened my jaw to ask him, and what escaped was, “Why Mary? Why did you do what you did to her?”
The questions stunned us both. A gust of his moist, odorless breath disturbed the wisps of fringe at my temple and cooled a warm tear I hadn’t realized had escaped down my cheek.
“She wasn’t like the others you carved. I’m not saying they deserved it, but you had to know she was different. Why did you take her from me?” I hated that I’d begun crying. My voice tended to thicken to downright raspy when I cried, and there was no hiding the weakness. It didn’t stop me, though. Nothing but the swipe of that blade could stop me now.
“I loved her. She was all I had left. And you took her. She was the last person I had, the only one who hadn’t abandoned me in some way or another. When I was destitute enough to consider working in the factory where my two cousins were killed, she procured me a job here in London. I was going to be a whore.”
I spat the word at him, though he was still behind me.
“That’s right, the very thing you hate. I was to work at one of the West End brothels where I could earn enough in a year to set myself up someplace nice and respectable. Even though she walked the dirty streets of Whitechapel, she wanted better for me. She was good. Her soul was good. So, you tell me. Tell me why before you send me to Hell.”
I was nearly yelling now, and my blood flowed so swiftly in my veins that my skin became unbearably hot from it. I didn’t even remember to take care. I’d become my hatred. Had melded with it until it morphed into something tangible that I might wield as righteously as an archangel’s sword.
We stood in the darkness together, panting and still for a disquieting moment. I got the distinct impression I’d mystified Jack the Ripper, and a hysterical giggle threatened to belch past the fury burning in my stomach.
After an uncomfortably long while, he said, “At least you never became a whore.”
And with one swift movement of his hand, the darkness took me.
6
I see her stumble through the arched doorway at 13 Miller’s Court and I scream her name.
Mary!
She’s drunk, as she often was, and she’s singing sweetly, as she often did.
She opens the door wider. As wide as it will go. The devil behind her needs all that space to follow, for he brings as much evil with him as that minuscule room will encompass. More so.
When she turns to smile at me, it’s so excruciatingly lovely, I’m reminded how sometimes I hated her just as terribly as I loved her.
Aidan kissed her first, you see, and she hadn’t been the one to tell me. We were fourteen, and she’d been visiting for the summer from Wales. She’d a new dress, but wouldn’t enlighten me as to where she’d acquired it. We both knew it wasn’t from her destitute parents.
I didn’t press the subject but was acutely aware that my brothers and their mates commented on how fetching she looked in her new sunshine-hued gown.
I studied her, thinking yellow a rather silly color.
And then I noticed what the bodice did to her breasts—breasts I didn’t yet have—offering them up proudly like ripe apples, begging for a bite. I noticed her small, even teeth while stretching my lips along my suddenly more prominent and despised overbite. She’d stopped plaiting her hair and securing it in dowdy ribbons like we did to keep it from disrupting our play. Today, she’d pinned it like some of the pictures we’d fawned over in the society papers.
Aidan had called round that day, and suddenly, I’d ceased to exist. My brothers, and the boy I loved, heard me plenty yet marked me not at all.
I’d let them all go off somewhere, refusing to leave in a silent and mulish dither. Waiting for them to cajole me out. Aching to be wanted.
They hadn’t. I wasn’t.
Finn and Flynn had returned much later, sly smiles affixed to their freckled faces. They proudly announced that all three of them had kissed Mary, but only Aidan had been brave enough to use his tongue.
“You probably shouldn’t run ‘round with Mary anymore, Na-na,” Finn cautioned, using the moniker our youngest brother, Fayne, had coined when, at two years old, he’d found Fiona too difficult to pronounce.
“She’s becoming the type of girl that’ll let just anyone…kiss her…and whatnot,” Flynn agreed, a blush deepening his ruddy features.
I furrowed my brow at their identical expressions of sage and manly sincerity, angrier at Aidan than anyone else.
I’d flayed them with my own sharp tongue that day, shrill as a banshee, beating them with their own masculine hypocrisy. I defended Mary, well aware that she wasn’t just allowing anyone to kiss her…she was letting my someone kiss her.
And yet, I loved her. I forgave her with no words spoken between us. We understood, as Mary let more men kiss her, that Aidan would not be for her. After a while, I saw who began to pay her for her time. Her kisses. Her…whatnot. I didn’t begrudge her the taste any longer.
Even at seventeen, Aidan had been an angel. Who wouldn’t want an angel’s embrace?
And Mary—ceaselessly
pretty Mary—was about to let the devil into her room at 13 Miller’s Court.
I had to stop what happened next.
I was running now, my soles are bare on the filthy cobbles just as they had been on the shores of the River Shannon during the days that Mary and I romped through the chilly currents until our feet and lips turned blue.
It takes took me no time to reach the doorway. Seconds, maybe.
But I am still too late.
The devil has gone. Most of Mary remains.
Mary’s remains.
A glut of carnage. It’s the only way to describe it. Almost surreal in its ubiquity. None of her viscera is left untouched, but. Instead, it is splayed across the white bedclothes with the careful pride of a child showing off a collection of toys. An artful arrangement.
Just so.
Her womb, kidneys, and one breast pillowed the weight of her head. Her face was still all smiles…but only because her high cheeks, suggestive eyebrows, and pert Irish nose ha been carefully removed, while her lips are blanched by several oblique incisions. It is her skull that smiles up at me, relieved of superfluous flesh. A feminine Yorick. A woman of infinite jest…of most excellent fancy. Of a sprightly nature and a quick temper.
In need of validation that only the touch of a man—of many men—could provide.
I find her other breast by her right ankle. Her liver in between her feet.
Her thighs, splayed open in invitation, are missing their skin and fascia. Enough that I can tell her bones are healthy and sturdier than mine. Her intestines stretch along the bed on the right side of her body, her spleen discarded on her left.
She’s open from sternum to pubis. The skin taken from her thighs and abdomen draped across the bedside table, not unlike macabre doilies knitted from dust and clay by the hand of God.
Muscle is carved from her ribs, carved away until the Ripper got at what he was looking for.
Her heart. The one thing he stole.
Dr. Phillips says in his report that the deep gashes to her throat were inflicted first, killing her swiftly.
So why, then, are her fingers clenched so tightly?
Mine clenched also, clawing at an unrelenting pain in my throat. An uncomfortable pressure.
Tears? No.
Dread? Perhaps.
Croft.
Croft had wrapped one arm around my waist and the other about my chest, pulling me from the doorway that day. Away from Mary. He’d said I’d been screaming. I didn’t remember making a sound. When I fought him, he’d bent the other arm at my throat, effectively immobilizing me by sheer necessity for breath.
I could not feel him now. I could not smell his fragrant tobacco nor hear his thick, exasperated voice.
This someone was above me. I was on the ground. Incense and exotic, aromatic oils cloyed at my senses, beckoning me away from the room I visited in so many nightmares.
No, this was not Croft subduing me at the doorway to 13 Miller’s Court. This pressure also burned my throat. Burned and stung and…
A mortifying whimper of pain escaped me, and the fingers at my throat tightened.
The heavy lids of deceptively gentle amber-grey eyes met mine as the darkness began to recede.
“Do not move, Fiona.” A familiar, accented voice slid into my ear with the ease of a honed blade. “If you do, I shall hurt you irreparably, and neither of us wants that.”
He did hurt me then.
The sharp pain in my neck was more a jab than a slice and did a great deal to clear the dreamy fog from my vision.
I blinked up at the Hammer rapidly, my mind following at a slower pace. The cloudy darkness of the nightmare lingered for longer than I wanted to bear.
Once I realized that his hold on my neck was meant to steady and not to strangle, the tension in my body eased if only enough to allow facts to reveal themselves in no particular order of importance.
I was in a place foreign to me.
Gold had always been something the Hammer dealt in, not decorated with. In my experience, he painted his world in varying shades of red. Crimson wallpaper for the ladies in his employ, wine for his customers, and blood for his enemies.
This cavernous room, foiled in butter-soft arabesque paper contrasted with bold, bronze draperies made me absurdly question if I were even in London anymore. It’d the feel of a country chamber—earthy, spacious, and pleasantly perfumed.
I wanted to look around, but another sharp pain brought more alarming actualities into focus.
I lay on a carpet, sprawled on my back.
The Hammer had cropped his dark hair very close to his head, as though to hide its propensity to curl. Though, why I noted the detail before my own state of undress would likely remain a mystery to me.
Warmth from a fire glowed over the right side of my body, even though I wore no pelisse.
Or blouse.
I gasped and would have covered my breasts, only half-concealed by my corset, if the Hammer’s body weren’t hunched over my prone form, imprisoning my limbs as well as he could whilst sticking my neck with a needle thrice more to stitch it closed.
“You are fortunate my father was a doctor back in Russia,” he informed me blithely, his gaze flickering to mine before focusing on his work. “I learned many things from him. How to slice flesh in the correct way, and how to stitch it back together.”
When confronted with a virile, attractive, but unthreatening magnetism such as his, one’s immediate response upon meeting the Hammer was often an overwhelming desire to hold him in one’s good graces.
Until he quirked a lip and said something like, “You are unfortunate, however, that I have less opportunity to practice stitching than slicing, which is why you must remain still, even if this causes you pain.”
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the Hammer’s ever-pleasant expression and illusorily mild, kind eyes had helped him attain unimaginable power.
Where Aidan was beautiful, and Croft brutal, the Hammer’s appeal appeared in hints of the exotic, masterfully crafted with the familiar. His skin was just a bit too golden to be strictly Teutonic. His nose a little too prominent. His eyes tilted down, fringed with long, sooty lashes.
In fact, everything about the Hammer was deliciously lengthy. His limbs, his cheekbones, his fingers…
His influence and ruthlessness.
The moniker never made sense to me. The Hammer was an elegant monster. A gentleman gangster. Nothing about him spoke of a propensity to bash or thunder. As far as I knew, he never even wielded his own weapons.
He was much too powerful for that.
“Whoever cut you did so with the intent to frighten you, I think,” he observed. “Your assailant missed arteries and trachea. The wound is too low to be deadly, and barely deep enough to have disturbed the delicate muscles of your neck.”
His thumb lightly traced said muscles on the unwounded side of my throat.
The cuts had been deep enough to require a few stitches, so his assessment ingratiated him to me not at all.
“You were found bleeding in Crossland Alley.” He glanced away from me. That, in itself, unsettled me. I’d never known the Hammer to flinch. “Were you…otherwise molested?”
Color flushed his cheeks, and a vein pulsed in his forehead near his hairline.
He was asking me if I’d been raped.
“No,” I whispered. I’d have known if I were. I’d been told that some women might not notice should the deed be done during a loss of consciousness, but I could scarce believe it.
There was no doubt I would know. At least, in my current condition.
“I did not credit you as a woman with enemies, Fiona. Perhaps I was mistaken?” The prospect obviously caused him more delight than dismay as he finished his last stitch.
I drew on my hard-won stoicism, successfully fending off a wince as he tied the stitched knot and clipped the thread.
“Do you feel you can stand?” He reached down to assist me.
I nodded,
testing the muscles of my neck and finding that careful motion didn’t cause too much pain, only a strange, warm sting.
I tried my voice next. “You know I have one very particular enemy.”
The other corner of his mouth joined the first, turning a quirk of his lips into a dubious smile. “Yes, but was it the Ripper who cut your neck?”
“I—I think so.”
His gaze sharpened. Suddenly, I wondered how I ever considered it mild.
Or kind.
“Tell me.” His command leeched all the warmth from the room, reminding me of my dishabille with a hair-raising shiver.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I whirled around in desperate search of my blouse, noting the fine marble floors, the desk fit for a king, dark leather furniture, and the golden Japanese-style partition behind which any number of things could hide.
“Where are we?” I wondered in the direction of an unfamiliar potted plant. A fern, maybe? “More importantly, where are my clothes?”
“I asked you a question, Fiona. I am not in the habit of repeating myself.”
“And I’m not in the habit of telling stories in my undergarments,” I remonstrated.
When he stepped toward me, I found that swallowing was more painful than I’d expected.
My ill-concealed fear seemed to appease him, and he merely cupped my bare elbow and led me to the only feminine piece of furniture in the room, a gold velvet settee with remarkably intricate scrollwork.
I glanced at it, at the floor I’d woken up on, and then sharply back up at him before joining him upon it. He had a comfortable chaise, and yet he’d left my unconscious body on the floor?
“You were bleeding,” he said by way of explanation, though his strong shoulders lifted in a Gallic shrug. “And this is a priceless, irreplaceable Louis XIIIV antique.”
I, on the other hand, was neither priceless nor irreplaceable. Though I wasn’t an antique just yet either, I’d thank everyone to note.
Needless to say, I kept my back straight enough to support a Bible on my head, and my thighs quivered with readiness to spring away from him.
The Business of Blood Page 6