Not because he had affairs. Everyone hereabouts had affairs. The conjecture wasn’t confined to the name of his lover, but to the sex thereof.
“Constance minds Cyril and Vyvyan, and I mind how much noise those adorable miscreants of mine make whilst I’m writing.” He blew a puff of smoke into the morning and followed it with a sip of coffee.
We gazed at each other over our cups across the round mosaic table upon which I’d spread an expensive gold lace cloth.
I didn’t tell him that I suspected he’d not been writing at the Savoy.
And he didn’t tell me to mind my own business.
We offered each other closed-lipped smiles and sipped coffee strong enough to strip the need for sleep from our blood.
“Come now, Fiona,” he urged, tapping some ash onto the grass and resting his chin in his hand. “You very well know I subsist on absinthe and ado. You must tell me of your latest adventure in all its gruesome glory.”
I began with poor Frank Sawyer’s ripperesque murder and his lake of blood. I delighted in explaining pittura infamante to him as Oscar was ignorant of the antiquated practice. I was relieved to discover I was not the only one.
For such a bombastic man, Oscar was a surprisingly attentive listener and made all of the appropriate noises as I spun the tale of my heart-stopping alleyway encounter with the Ripper into a simple mugging for his benefit. I did, however, loosen my collar to reveal the Hammer’s stitches, and was nearly out of coffee when I reached the part of the recounting where I’d been deposited at my doorstep by an infamous American assassin.
Releasing a low whistle, Oscar lit his second cigarette. “I’d call blarney on the entire narrative if it weren’t just absurd—nay, preposterous—enough to be accurate.”
“I wouldn’t blame you.” I released a sigh, feeling somewhat unburdened by the telling of my misadventures.
“A blouse ripped to shreds by the dusky hands of a handsome savage.” Oscar sighed romantically.
“I don’t imagine he’d appreciate being called that.”
He leaned in to account, “I observed Aramis Night Horse once at the Café Royal, you know. What an intoxicating sight he is.”
An inarticulate noise of disbelief squeaked out of my nose. “That’s what you’re concentrating on? I tell you about a perfectly gory murder, not to mention the fact that my throat was nearly slashed, and all you can think about is who took off my blouse to doctor the wound?”
He slid me a mischievous smile. “To be perfectly fair, darling, we’ve discussed your gory murders a multitude of times, but I’m unaware that anyone, as yet, has taken off your blouse. You are both a paradox and a prude.”
A virgin and a whore. Like Salome.
“You take that back, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde!” I shrieked, tossing a linen at him in mock outrage. “I am no prude. I’ll have you know my fiancé removed my blouse more than once upon a passionate interlude.”
“You’re referring to the pulchritudinous priest that calls around sometimes?”
“You know I am.” I did my best to wither him with my glare.
“Yes, but instead of properly debauching you, he joined a famously celibate order, didn’t he? More’s the pity. Why do you think that is?”
I poured myself a second cup of coffee. Oscar’s wit was most often entertaining, but at times, it came with a cutting price. “Don’t be cruel,” I admonished. “He broke my heart.”
“The heart was made to be broken.” He waved his cigarette lavishly. “Everyone knows that. Your tragedy is that you’re still in love with a man who is in love with God.”
I was in no mood to discuss my tragedy, and so, we sat in silence for a moment, listening to the vibrant sounds of the morning and the commotion of industry filtering in from the river.
“The book of life begins with a man and a woman in a garden, does it not?” Oscar observed dreamily. “It ends with Revelations. I hope we shall be, from now until the end, revealing ourselves in the garden after such adventurous nights.”
“Now until the end of what?” I mused.
A world-weary sound escaped him as he motioned to our spacious, tidy houses and lovely gardens. “The end of this…whatever this is. Matrimony, civility, prosperity.”
Did he mean ours, his, or England’s, I wondered?
Troubled, I placed my hand over his. “Is something bothering you, Oscar?”
He shook his head, no, but answered the question in the affirmative. “I’ve been having dreams lately. Nightmares full of dire warnings and signs…apocalyptic, really. And yet, I can’t seem to heed them. To do so would require me to change who I am, and that I cannot bring myself to do.”
The hand beneath mine trembled a bit, and I wondered if he was in danger.
Or worse, in love.
“I know this goes against everything we Irish believe,” I said, doing my best to offer comfort. “But I’ve long held dreams are merely the conscience tending to your fears, desires, and memories while you sleep. I dream of my family’s death often. Of Mary’s. I dream of the Ripper. I think I do because they are so often with me whilst I’m awake.”
“You truly think so?” His lively eyes widened with a bit of hope.
“Categorically,” I lied. In truth, I hadn’t made up my mind about this musing quite yet, but I thought it was something both of us needed to hear. Nightmares had a way of following one into the morning, and neither of us wanted that. “It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one encounters,” I told him. “It makes life too full of terrors.”
An inspired smile replaced his brooding frown, and he extracted a short pencil and a little diary from the pocket of his vest. “I’m writing that down,” he informed me, as he often did. “I may just use that later. Now, let’s not dwell on our sorrows whilst we can be entertained by those of others. Tell me more about this Frank Sawyer and his turquoise beads.”
At this, I paused. “I never really stopped to consider that the beads might, in fact, be Mr. Sawyer’s. I automatically assumed they belonged to the murderer.”
“To the Ripper?” He seemed to digest this slowly.
“Yes. But where would a poverty-stricken man like Mr. Sawyer obtain such rare and expensive stones?”
“He could have stolen them, I suppose,” Oscar postulated. “Perhaps from the murderer.”
It didn’t seem likely. “Mr. Sawyer wasn’t a thief. He was a hard-working, staunch Catholic with no enemies to speak of.”
“Ha!” Oscar swatted his thigh. “Then the murderer is not the Ripper, obviously.”
“You can’t know that,” I argued.
“I can, and I do,” he volleyed back. “Frank Sawyer’s killer is most unequivocally someone of his close acquaintance.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because, dear Fiona, if a man has no enemies, then he is almost certainly intensely disliked by his friends.”
At this, a laugh erupted from me. From us both. I adored Oscar’s observations of humanity. They were unrivaled in their poetry by any philosopher, alienist, or spiritualist I’d ever read.
Also, they were rarely wrong.
Leaning forward, I took a contemplative sip of my coffee, ticking my teeth a few times against the porcelain rim of the cup as I thought. I still couldn’t bring myself to reveal that the Ripper—or who might be the Ripper—had already confessed to the deed.
“So, if you had to make a wild speculation, who would you say killed him?” I asked.
“Mrs. Sawyer, of course.”
I shook my head. “It can’t be, the inspectors said she had an alibi.”
He lifted a skeptical eyebrow at me. “You underestimate your sex, Fiona, if you assume a woman cannot commit murder without being in the room. Tell me, is Mrs. Sawyer a handsome woman?”
The answer to the question made me squirm. Was it a sin to tell the truth if that revelation was cruel? “Not…particularly.”
“So plain as a peaky nag, then,” he surmise
d.
“I don’t know that I would say—”
“Was Mr. Sawyer a handsome man?”
I searched my memory of last night. “There was too much blood to get an accurate sense of his aspect. One dies inverted, and everything sort of…pools in his head.”
Wincing, Oscar put down his scone, scrubbing the crumbs off his fingertips with quick, dainty rubs. “I’ve always hated that word…invert.”
It didn’t escape me that invert was another word for homosexual.
Tapping his chin, he asked, “Where does Mr. Sawyer work?”
“The docks, if I remember correctly.”
“Not a place one finds a great deal of women, so he likely met her somewhere else like…a public house or possibly church, seeing as how he was a God-fearing man.”
I blinked at him, utterly confused. “Met whom?”
“His mistress, Fiona. Really, do try to keep up.”
I seldom could keep up with Oscar, but at the moment, I felt as though he were leading me somewhere ridiculous. I told him so. “You can’t know he had a mistress. At this juncture, that’s just rank speculation.”
“Of course, I can. You only just said he had an ugly wife.”
“I said nothing of the sort. I merely admitted she wasn’t comely.”
“Yes, well, I know you well enough to recognize when you’re being kind.”
“But what if he was unsightly?”
“I’m telling you, an unsightly man may use his wit, charm, and humor to make a woman fall in love with him. An unattractive woman, unfortunately, rarely has the luxury. Men do not use their hearts to fall in love as the fairer sex does, it’s why our affection is so easily lost.” For a surreal moment, I was unsure if he was going to laugh or weep as he stood and stretched his lithe body, regarding his house as one would an unpleasant conundrum. “Find his Salome, Fiona, and I promise you, the mystery will solve itself.”
9
“Did you find the Hanged Man?” My hand froze halfway to my cape as a veiled specter drifted to block my front door.
Aunt Nola often wore a shroud of black lace over her aging features and down her back. It was an utterly macabre practice, but she claimed it assisted her while walking among her spirit guides with ease. Apparently, they recognized her as one of their own. And while I found the idea of spirit guides prosaic and ridiculous…I did acknowledge that she was a living ghost. A shadow of a once vibrant woman who was tied to this one place. She haunted my home. She haunted me.
Nola had not left my house since I’d brought her here, aside from venturing into the gardens. And only then, on what we called her “good days.”
Today was not likely to be one of them.
“How did you know about the hanged man?” I queried, recovering from my shock. “Surely, it’s not in the papers yet.”
Black velvet rasped against wine-red muslin as she rustled toward me. “You need to find the killer, Fiona, before he kills again.”
Despite my skepticism, her dire words chilled me. “I do what I can, Aunt Nola, but don’t you think finding the killer is the inspectors’ job?”
Claw-like fingers clung to my elbow as the smell of incense and mothballs stung my nose. When Aunt Nola spoke, it was like the words were shaken out of her, tumbling from trembling lips with no apparent shape or trajectory. “No, no, no. You already know him. And he knows you. He knows you so, so well.” Her eyes were wide and wild behind her veil as she held up the card in her other hand for my inspection. “You—you just need to look him in the eyes. Right in the eyes, Fiona. And ask him why. Why did the hanged man deserve to die? What did he do wrong?” She released my elbow to tap the figure on the card several times too many.
“May I?” Reaching out, I took the card from Nola and inspected it thoroughly.
The Hanged Man. I hadn’t realized he was part of a tarot deck. On the face of the card, a man hung from a crossed beam by one foot. His other knee bent in a triangle; hands tied behind his back. Exactly like Frank Sawyer, but for one significant difference.
The man in the card seemed alive. Relaxed even. Contemplating his fate rather than fighting it.
Pittura infamante.
This was an interesting development. I wondered if Aberline or Croft had made the connection. Neither of them seemed the type to study the arcane. But then, Inspector Croft had surprised me with a depth of intellect I’d not previously assumed he was burdened with.
“Would you mind, awfully, if I take this card for the day, Aunt Nola? I promise to return it.”
“Yes. Yes,” she encouraged. “Show the others. See what they see.”
I didn’t believe Aunt Nola could see the future.
But, sometimes… Sometimes, when I looked into her touched and tortured eyes, I feared I could see my future in them. That, maybe, reality would become too intolerable, and I’d begin constructing my own. That the world would seem too big and cruel, and so I’d limit it to whatever four walls I was allowed by the benevolence of a loved one.
Except, besides Nola, all my loved ones were dead or some other form of gone.
And I’d rather die than go to an asylum.
One must do one’s best not to go mad, then.
A spurt of sudden tenderness and tolerance warmed my heart toward my father’s sister. She looked like him, copper-haired and fair-skinned, plagued with a multitude of freckles. We resembled each other, actually, in both stature and structure. Though her teeth and eyesight were both perfect, whereas mine, were not.
I’d inherited a bit of my mother’s darkness. Both literally and figuratively. She’d also been a pale woman, but her hair had been black as midnight, and her eyes blue as cobalt glass.
“A black Irish beauty,” my father used to call her.
Grace Mahoney was dramatic and melancholic, whereas my father, Francis, had been light-hearted and quick-tempered. I supposed I was an assortment of all those qualities—with a few more for good measure.
I missed them so terribly…even their not-so-good days.
“You didn’t come say ‘hello’ to Oscar in the garden.” This was my gentle way of informing Nola that I was aware she’d likely been listening in as I’d told our neighbor the details of Frank Sawyer’s murder, and she’d thought to show me this specific card.
There was no other way she could have known about the hanged man.
Her eyes shifted, and her movements became erratic and sharp. “My…my guides. They woke me. Told me I-I had to come show you this card before you left. So you could be looking for him, explicitly.”
I didn’t fail to notice that she hadn’t addressed my question. “Looking for whom? The hanged man? I already know where he is. They found a body last night. In fact, I’m on my way to the coroner’s office to—”
“No. No!” She shook me a little, stunning me silent. Aunt Nola had been many distressing things since I brought her home from the asylum, but never physically confrontational. “Him. They said to look for him! In the faces of the killers you already know.”
“Think you I’m acquainted with the killer?” I breathed.
“They said you know that he has killed before. He has killed those who did not deserve to die.” Tears wobbled in Nola’s voice, and I feathered a hand down the veil covering her hair.
Though I didn’t acknowledge any veracity to her claims, I couldn’t deny her predictions affected me deeply. My hands and feet felt cold and clammy, and my legs were a little less stable than before.
“Do you mean the Ripper, Nola?”
She recoiled from me with a hiss, gesturing wildly. “I mean nothing,” she wailed. “They. They speak through me. I’m naught but their mouthpiece. You’ve never believed me. You don’t acknowledge they’re real, even though they’re only trying to help you!”
“All right.” Afraid she’d do herself a mischief on the banister with her gesticulating, I grabbed her wrists and held them firmly. The Hanged Man card drifted to the herringbone parquet floor as I clutched her fists an
d brought them to my lips, kissing her knuckles fondly.
“All right,” I soothed. “I believe you, Nola. I’m sorry.”
I believed she heard them. I believed she wanted to help me.
Regarding me with veiled eyes, her expression both wounded and suspicious, she quieted.
“Will you tell me what…they said the Hanged Man means?” I encouraged.
Instantly, she brightened. “I did an entire reading for you. You should come see.”
It took every ounce of self-control I possessed to hide my extreme lack of enthusiasm. “I must be going to the hanged man’s autopsy just now,” I reminded her. “But perhaps you can tell me the meaning of this card. And when I return, you can show me the rest, when I have the proper time to digest it.”
She listened to the silence for a moment. “Yes. Yes, they find this acceptable.”
I found them infuriating.
Cautiously, I released her and stooped to retrieve the card.
She huddled near my shoulder, pointing with one gnarled finger. “The obvious meaning is suspension. This is a card of the in-between, you see.”
Strange, I’d spoken to Aidan of the in-between just last night. We Celts have always believed that passages from one place to another are both sacred and terrifying. Doorways, gates, bridges. Even dawn and dusk. They are nebulous places where demons and fairies and even the odd deity can lurk. In between one place and another, the veil to the other world is at its most brittle. It is because of our tradition a husband must carry his bride over the threshold.
It protects her from the in-between.
I chewed on this as Nola continued sharing her premonitions about me. “You’ve been flirting with the in-between for too long. You are not firmly on one side or the other. The Hanged Man is at a crossroads. It’s obvious what he’s done thus far hasn’t worked, and so he must pick a side. Take a path. Or he’s vulnerable to all the perils of the Otherworld. To all the demons who reside there. Your reading shows that you’re tethered by something—someone—whom you may never have. Searching for answers you might never find. If you follow your current path, Fiona, you will always be reaching, and your hands will always be empty.”
The Business of Blood Page 10