The Business of Blood

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  “Do you enjoy what you do?” I ventured.

  “I’m good at what I do.”

  I nudged him with my elbow in mock exasperation. “You never answer my questions.”

  That dimple again, deep as I’d ever seen it. “I always answer your questions, just not with the responses you desire.”

  “Well, it’s infuriating all the same,” I huffed.

  “My profession…” He paused for a hesitant moment, choosing his words carefully. “My life is like most men’s, I expect. Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.”

  I doubted most men were trained as he was. To suspect and distrust every extraordinary thing. “What are you doing right now? What you want, or what you have to?”

  Now, there was a question he didn’t answer.

  I tucked my arm into his for the sole purpose of increasing his discomfort. “I know you don’t want to hear this, Inspector. But we’re more alike than you think.”

  “How so? Because we’re both consumed by the pursuit of retributive justice?”

  “Actually, yes.” I’d not at all expected him to be so completely correct.

  The cross into inner Chelsea is abrupt. The gentry becomes more threadbare. The manners and diction learned from a university rather than a governess. Street vendors plied their wares to doctors, solicitors, writers, and students as they disembarked from cabs and trains to retire to their comfortable, if a bit more modest, addresses.

  On the corner of King’s Road and Radnor Walk, a woman approached us with bundles of fresh flowers. She was drenched with rain, shivering, and pathetically thin.

  “Buy a Posey for your missus?”

  She’d startled me a bit, and I took longer to reply than I would have had I been walking alone.

  “I’ve a bunch ‘ere of lilies of the valley. ‘Twould match ‘er fine dress.” The desperate woman shook dripping flowers at us.

  “How much?” Croft asked.

  “A ha’penny.”

  “I’ll give you a shilling to get out of the storm.” He dropped the coin into her hand, but only took one flower.

  Her eyes rounded to positively owlish proportions. “What a lovely man you ‘ave,” she praised me. “Never seen a more ‘andsome couple in me life. May the Lord bless you with long lives an’ many children.”

  Here is where Croft met the end of his patience. “Find somewhere dry,” he ordered with a strange sort of terse gentility. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought him shy.

  She curtsied as though the Queen, herself, had given her a command, and scurried back to her cart.

  “Mrs. Croft.” The inspector smirked, offering me the flower.

  Stymied and more than a bit wobbly, I took it, in spite of myself. We continued in pensive silence. “You didn’t correct her,” I admonished as we turned onto Tite Street.

  “Neither did you.”

  Damn his propensity for relevant arguments.

  “Aberline mentioned you were not married,” I said. “Do you have a sweetheart?”

  All conviviality disappeared from his features as though it had never been. “I did have, once.”

  “No longer?”

  “It became readily apparent that she didn’t have the constitution to tolerate a vocation such as mine. You understand.” He reached in his jacket for his cigarettes, then seemed to change his mind.

  “That I do,” I commiserated. “The long hours. The late nights. The dangerous nature of the work.” The blood on your hands, and the blood in your nightmares.

  I tried to picture Croft down on one knee. Courting a woman. I might as well have tried to peek into the afterlife. It was something that could not be imagined, only experienced.

  “What about you?” His elbow nudged me back. “You don’t want a husband to care for you?”

  I made the most unladylike sound I’d ever made in public. “It is my observation, Inspector, that husbands rarely care for their wives. At least, not for very long.”

  “Is that so? Did your father not care for your mother?”

  “She passed on before I was old enough to note what kind of relationship they endured.”

  He inspected me curiously. “So, if husbands do not care for their wives, what do they do, in your experience?”

  “Men dominate women, or they rely upon them, use them for pleasure, for a dowry, for a family, for society. In the lower classes, men take wives to fulfill what vocations can be hired out to a wealthier rank. For example, a cook, a maid, a nurse, a companion…a prostitute. Women can be many things. Still, they are generally the caretakers of their families, not taken care of by them.”

  Croft’s dark brows drew together in a troubled scowl. “Certainly, it’s only fair for a woman to help the man who protects her and provides for her.”

  “Oh, certainly,” I agreed. “If that’s the contract one makes. But I provide for myself. I am responsible for the care of no one else, save Aunt Nola.”

  “But…don’t you ever get tired of working so hard?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” he confessed. “But—”

  “But you’re a man?”

  His frown turned into a glower. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  He looked down.

  I continued. “My time is my own. My money. My property. My will is also my own.” I ticked all of these off on my silk-clad fingers. “If I were to marry, I’d have to give that all up. Could you do that, Inspector?”

  “No.” He regarded me like a circus oddity for an uncomfortably long time. “But what I was going to ask, is if you ever become lonely.”

  I blinked. Several times. Suddenly, I was very aware of the flex of his arm beneath my hand. “I am rarely alone, Inspector Croft,” I hedged. “My ghosts provide constant company. And until I put them to rest, I have no room to spare in my life or in my heart.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  He was silent until we reached my stoop, where he turned to face me, bringing the umbrella low over our heads. It created a strange world. Just the two of us, the patter of rain, the lily of the valley he pressed into my hand, and his new cologne. “I understand that the dead make for cold companions. Do you have someone to provide you with…heat?”

  I leaned back as much as the umbrella would allow. “Heat?”

  “There must be balance in all things. Certainly, your memories—your vengeance—can consume your heart for now…but, surely, it isn’t enough to fill the cold, empty places in your life. In your bed.”

  Abruptly, my knees lost their starch. “You assume much, Inspector.”

  “I know more about you than you think.” His mouth became a hard, alluring threat, hovering above mine.

  “Blood on the streets,” a disembodied voice sang.

  Heat flooding to my ears, I ducked away from Croft to see Nola standing in the archway of my door, dressed in enough black lace to meet the Pope or mourn the dead.

  “They’re gutted,” she informed Croft. “Why aren’t you there?”

  “Aunt Nola?” I rushed forward, leaving my umbrella with Croft. “What do you mean?”

  “Who is gutted?” Croft demanded.

  “They’re at parliament. Didn’t you hear them?” She regarded us as though we were the senseless ones. “So angry. They’re throwing things. They’ll kill each other. You’ll have to wash the organs off the pavestones.”

  “Aunt Nola, where did you hear this?” She never left the house, and an active riot wouldn’t have made it into the newspapers just yet. “Did Oscar tell you something?”

  She speared me with eyes as sharp as jade daggers. My father’s eyes. My eyes. “You know who is there.”

  “Who?” Croft asked.

  She regarded him oddly. “Why, Jack, of course.”

  Croft pressed the handle of the umbrella into my palm, eyeing both of us as though we were venomous serpents who might strik
e at any time. “I’d better be off.”

  Because of how Nola had just found us, I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze. Had Inspector Grayson Croft just offered to warm my bed?

  We didn’t even like each other. Did we?

  “Good day, Inspector.” I dismissed him as I herded Aunt Nola back inside.

  “Take care, Miss Mahoney.” His civil words were delivered with the immensity of a threat. “Until Comstock is found. I’m not convinced you’re safe.”

  What an absurd thing to say. I watched him from beneath my umbrella until he hailed a hansom at the end of the block.

  No one was safe. Not in London. Not anywhere.

  15

  The devil wrote you a letter.

  Aunt Nola’s whisper echoed off the white and silver marble of my entryway and followed me into the dark wood of the more expansive foyer, fracturing into a thousand ephemeral warnings.

  I’d barely had time to stow my umbrella in the wrought iron stand before she shoved the little note into my hand.

  I stared down at the sealed paper through spectacles spattered with rain, struggling to swallow—to breathe—amidst the strangling pressure in my throat.

  Nola paced before me, her feet only ever touching the dark squares on the floor.

  Only the dark squares or it would be a dreadful day. “Don’t you think the paper reeks of brimstone? Wouldn’t the devil write in blood?”

  “It’s not blood. It’s red ink.” This, I already knew. I tested the weight of the note, no more than a feather. I sensed the immensity of it, as vast as a destiny.

  The devil wrote me a letter.

  During the Autumn of Terror, there had been many letters. Some sent to the police. Others to the press. Hundreds. Written by those who would be him. Who admired what he did but never had the nerve, the will, the brutality, the hatred, the… true evil to carry out the deeds of Jack the Ripper.

  Only a few letters had been truly notable. One had accompanied part of a human kidney, delivered to George Lusk. Lusk was the chairman of the East End Vigilance Committee, a rather militia-like organization of neighbors formed in Whitechapel after the police had proven their inability to stop the Ripper from killing.

  The committee proved as futile as the police in preventing the last two Ripper murders. And, it seemed, the various writers of the Ripper letters enjoyed taunting the Vigilance Committee every bit as much as they did Scotland Yard.

  Catherine Eddowes had been missing a kidney, among other organs. But, ultimately, there was no way to tell if the kidney delivered to George Lusk belonged to her. Only that it was human.

  It could have come from anybody.

  Any. Body.

  Then there was what we all called the Dear Boss letter, in which Jack the Ripper had titled himself. He’d signed it:

  Yours truly, Jack the Ripper

  Don’t mind me giving the trade a name.

  He’d been known only as the Whitechapel Murderer before then.

  The penmanship and prose of the Dear Boss letter didn’t match that of the letter sent to Mr. Lusk.

  But the ink had matched.

  Red ink. Identical to that of the letter I now held in my trembling hand.

  The missive bearing my name.

  Nola laid her fingers on my cuff. “I couldn’t give it to you in front of him.”

  She meant Croft, of course, and I applauded her for her foresight. “Thank you, Nola, that was very well done of you.”

  “Burn it,” she urged. “You should send it back from whence it came.”

  From Hell.

  Nothing in the world could stop me from reading this letter.

  Just as soon as I summoned the courage to break the seal.

  “Aunt Nola? Did this come by courier or post?”

  “I couldn’t say. Whoever left it slipped it through the mail slot when I was in my sitting room.”

  I wobbled across the foyer to the staircase and lowered myself with the help of the mahogany banister. Nola went to the gas lamp at the bottom of the stairs, by way of the dark squares, and loosened the wick, providing light to read by on such a stormy day.

  I took off my gloves and wiped my damp palms on my skirts before running tentative fingers across the red wax seal. A strange line was the only impression in the wax. A sword, maybe. A blade?

  With a bracing breath, I broke the seal and unfolded the letter. The first sentence spread brittle tendrils of ice through every extremity.

  And then it got worse.

  Dearest Fiona,

  I’ve been watching you since that day. You know the one. The one that haunts us both. The day I made Miss Kelly my masterpiece. You’ve been looking for me, haven’t you? You see me in the blood of every corpse. You erase me every time you clean. What would you like to do to me, I wonder? What mess could we make together? You are so clever, but I begin to fear you are not clever enough. Still so innocent. So provincial. And yet unlike the coarse, violent drunkards who populate your island. Unlike the drunken whores in the East End. I’d hoped you’d absolve me of these new Whitechapel murders by now. I shan’t abide plagiarism; the very thought gives me fits. I’ve sharpened my knife again. I might have to go to work.

  Yours truly,

  Jack the Ripper

  A note: to find the killer, look to his victims. They are chosen because they are the same. Like mine. Good luck.

  I scanned the letter a million times, dissecting each sentence. The prose. The pacing. The penmanship. So achingly similar to the ones I’d pored over countless times when Aberline allowed me into the records room.

  Jack the Ripper considered himself an artist. A painter of masterpieces. One whose technique sometimes evolved. But his preferred hue remained the same.

  Red. Always red.

  And his canvas a woman who sold her body.

  I couldn’t feel the tears until they dripped onto the paper. I didn’t realize I’d ceased breathing until I screamed in a gulp of air and sobbed it back out again. The band clamped about my ribs threatened to squeeze the life out of me. To paralyze my lungs forever. To trap my heart in its cage while it threw itself at the bars like a panicked bird, only to collapse with exhaustion.

  The letter drifted to the floor. I didn’t hear it land. I couldn’t hear a thing but the ocean in my ears.

  It settled on a dark square. Thank God.

  I reached for it, but my fingers were too cold and stiff to move, my elbows had become rusted hinges. My face burned. I was on fire. And heavy, unwieldy like my tongue.

  Was I going to die? Had there been something on the paper, in the ink? Poison, perhaps?

  A strong, bony hand shoved my head toward my knees.

  “Close your eyes and breathe.” I hadn’t heard Aunt Nola sound so completely sane in ten years.

  I couldn’t close my eyes. I could only stare at the letter through vision blurred by vertigo and tears.

  Dearest Fiona…

  Did he think me dear? Dearest?

  Did Jack the Ripper…like me? Did he know me?

  Did I know him?

  My stomach rolled dangerously, and I gripped the hand Nola slipped through mine hard enough to crush her fingers, but she made no protestation.

  “He’s been watching me.” I gulped breaths like a fish drowning in the air. “How? How could he be close enough to—? Who? Who could possibly—? A-and when? How often does he watch—? From where? From where?”

  “Peace, Fiona,” Nola crooned as she rubbed tender little circles on my back. “Peace, child.” She rested her head on my heaving shoulders and sang Mo Gille Mear in the sweetest tones I’d heard since my father died. She made it to the third refrain before I could breathe normally again, soothed by the echoes of the clear Irish words fractured and sent back to me by my foyer.

  I closed my eyes.

  The darkness transported me home, where the air was scented with frost and barley and the River Shannon. Though the cottages were cozy and warm, we sat outside in the cold around a fire
made of peat and rowan branches. My father did his best to belt out Mo Gille Mear with greater gusto than Father Seamus. Their tenors rang through Limerick with a harmonious rapture deepened by whisky and brightened by Robert O’Toole’s accordion, and Thomas McBride’s drum.

  I could see him, my jolly da, red-faced and smiling, petting my hair as those of us gathered for the evening joined in the chorus.

  I opened my eyes, and all the green grandeur disappeared, replaced by wreathed marble embellishments inlaid into dark wood. My house was grand. Grander than anything my father had been able to afford. I lived here because I’d taken one look at the Irish crystal chandelier throwing prisms onto the pale green paper interrupted by mahogany wainscoting and had fallen in love.

  To be clear, I’d fallen in love with Aidan when he snuck me into the library at Trinity College. The dark wood in the house at Tite Street was precisely the same color, the banisters carved with the very likeness of the one I’d leaned against when he kissed me, surrounded by all those lovely books.

  I still wore his ring on my right hand.

  What a maudlin fool I’d turned out to be. I’d filled this house with lovely furnishings and handsome decorations.

  Yet it was still so empty.

  I’d give anything to be back in the modest Mahoney home, curled on my bed in the closet partitioned as a bedroom for me—the only girl—back behind the kitchen. The cookstove had warmed the east wall, and I’d press my hands to it in the morning when mother made breakfast.

  How was it I could live in the largest city in the world and feel so utterly alone?

  I had Nola with me, but one could rarely call her present. Even so, her song meant so much. She’d given me a gift.

  She’d given me a memory. Something to cling to. To pull me back from the edge.

  Stronger now, I reached for the letter, glad when my limbs proved capable of obeying me.

  What would you like to do to me? the Ripper wondered.