The Business of Blood

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  I couldn’t fathom where Night Horse had come from, but I was both unutterably relieved and devastated to see him.

  As Aidan rattled out another cough, blood erupted from his mouth.

  Night Horse met my stare of astonishment with hard, black eyes as fathomless as any hellish void. He bared his teeth in what could have been a silent snarl, or a smile.

  Today, vengeance didn’t belong to the Lord.

  It belonged to Aramis Night Horse, and to many of his slaughtered people.

  With a cry, I caught Aidan as his knees buckled, and supported his fall to the cold floor. His blood pooled instantly beneath us as I held his head on my lap. My sobs had turned to whimpers. They became softer than the almost indistinct whooshing of the candle flames.

  “Pray for me, Fiona.” Aidan’s voice was even darker than before. Wetter. “And remember me.”

  I made a terrible sound. How could I forget such horror? This would paint my nightmares red for eternity, if not beyond.

  “Not like this.” He read my tormented expression correctly. “Like we were. By the river. With Finn and Flynn and… And Mary. When we were still…innocent.”

  I nodded. My last gift to him was an utter lie. I’d remember his confession. I’d recall that he tried to both save me and kill me. That he’d not felt worthy of my forgiveness, and in the end, he’d not deemed me worthy of his.

  “Pray for me,” he begged again. “Finish it.”

  I don’t know how I managed, but I warbled and sobbed along with him as he gurgled and drowned in his own blood. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”

  I was dimly aware of noises. Maybe I should have been afraid, but anguish smothered any fear, and I whispered the words I knew by heart.

  Aidan’s mouth filled before we were done, the blood overflowing until it streamed from the seam of his lips. He didn’t fight it anymore. He no longer struggled for breath.

  I finished the last stanza of the prayer with a stronger voice.

  My tears died when he did.

  I stared down into his vacant eyes, swathed in a cloak of grief and pain. Agony he’d inflicted on me, yet again. For the final time. His golden, cherubic aspect a mask for such deep wells of madness and violence.

  I gazed at him for what felt like ages but was only enough time for Aramis to free Jorah from the cross on the altar.

  “I tried to be quiet.” The dazed gangster said almost apologetically as he sat up. “I was when he started on my shoulder. But…once he reached my ribs, I could no longer swallow the screams.”

  I knew that would happen to me, eventually. I could remain quiet now, but the day would come when I could no longer swallow the screams.

  “Only you white men find shame in screaming. When we kill, when we die, we make enough noise to alert the dead that more are coming to join them.” Aramis looked over at me. “Unless silence means survival.”

  I wondered if it meant survival for me now. All to the good, I thought. I had nothing to say.

  Did they blame me for this? For Aidan? Had I become someone on the other side of a chasm they couldn’t cross? A liability. An enemy?

  I waited for either of them to strike, my fingers clutching my knife.

  They didn’t.

  “You are not bleeding much,” Aramis noted as he examined Jorah’s heinous wounds.

  “No,” Jorah groaned. “I’ll live. He cauterized as he cut with that infernal blade. I think he hoped to flay as much of me as he could before I gave up the ghost. Tell me the carriage is here. I’m embarrassed to admit that I cannot make it home on my own power.”

  “It’s here. Though I did not wait to bring anyone else to aid us. We’ll have to send for the doctor.”

  Jorah patted Aramis’s amber shoulder, then clutched it, his gratitude unspoken.

  I used my sleeve to wipe my tears and blot at my nose as I sniffed. I had no handkerchief, and one was not offered.

  The shadow of numbness crept through me. Much as I imagined the biblical Angel of Death had crept through Egypt so many thousands of years ago. It snuffed out everything it found. First, the terror, utter and unutterable. Then, the anger, cooling it like the marble had cooled Aidan’s tempered blade. And, finally, loss and despair. They folded into a void infinitely emptier than the well of grief threatening to drown me.

  I’d found power here. I couldn’t explain how. But for a pure, empty moment, I was untouchable. I stared up at the Hammer and the Blade and, while I couldn’t feel what my features were doing, I silently dared them to move on me.

  It wouldn’t matter. I had nothing left to lose.

  A fraught silence became a death knell as they stared back.

  The Hammer leaned heavily on the altar, his chest struggling against his uneven breaths. His teeth bared slightly in a now ever-present grimace of pain.

  I couldn’t lock gazes with Night Horse. I was afraid I’d find regret or pity in his regard.

  I was afraid I wouldn’t.

  Did I hate him for killing the man I loved? Even though he’d saved my life?

  I closed my eyes, returning my knife to my pocket. I placed my hands beneath Aidan’s scalp, threading fingers through his golden locks as I lifted his upper body from my lap and extracted myself from beneath him.

  Gently, so gently, I settled his heavy head on the white marble. No one helped me to my feet.

  I stood on my own.

  I skirted the growing pool of Aiden’s blood as I took an altar cloth from the sacristy beside the lectern. I might have floated rather than walked. I couldn’t feel a single limb.

  As I covered Aidan’s face, I felt as if I should say something, but words failed me. Other elegies I’d read or heard flitted across the silence of my thoughts like errant, unwanted moths looking for light or warmth and finding none.

  Goodnight, sweet prince.

  Better to have loved and lost…

  Today shalt thou be with me in paradise...

  It all meant nothing.

  Woodenly, I surveyed the scene, almost too weary to draw more breath.

  I turned and addressed the Blade, though my gaze found nothing higher than his chin. I harbored no hatred for him, no real condemnation, but neither could I summon gratitude.

  Not yet.

  In a way, Aidan was the embodiment of his Jack the Ripper. But infinitely worse. The scale of his loss was unimaginable, even now. All of this pain, all of this emptiness he carried in his heart, along with the ghosts of thousands.

  “I’m not cleaning this up.” My declaration echoed through the cavernous cathedral like a celestial commandment. I wouldn’t survive it. If I were ever to remember Aidan fondly, I couldn’t look at his empty eyes again.

  Night Horse’s chin dipped in acknowledgement.

  I turned to go home, but Jorah stopped me with a grip on my elbow I’d not thought him capable of in his weakened state.

  “I owe you a debt for what you did today. No one, not even Night Horse, has so fiercely protected my life with their own.” Overcome for a moment, he glanced at the floor, grappling with his emotions. “It is currency I’m not certain how to spend.”

  I nodded politely and extracted myself from his grip, making my way down the long aisle toward the doors of the cathedral. I wasn’t sure how to spend it, either.

  But I’d think of something.

  22

  Forgive me, for I have sinned. It’s been…

  Lord, how heavy my soul must be if I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been driven to confession. Long enough to be laden with damnation, some would say.

  I’d locked myself in my grand house for several weeks, waiting for the screams to come. Waiting for the tears to find me.

  But my voice never rose above a hoarse murmur. My eyes remained eternally dry.

  My body betrayed me in other ways. Guilt and shame became a cancer proliferating through every vestige of my awareness.

  There was no corner of m
y mind safe from my pain.

  I trembled at night. For no reason at all, my muscles erupted into cold shivers of bone-wracking weakness. I’d lose my breath upon climbing the stairs. I’d sleep the days away, waking occasionally to the sensation of a wrathful specter smothering me. I’d gasp in a few desperate breaths, willing my heart back into its place, hissing at shafts of unwelcome afternoon sunlight only to reject consciousness and force myself back into oblivion.

  I ached everywhere. My bones, my guts, my head.

  My heart.

  Nights were a paradoxically welcome nemesis. Too dark to reveal how pale and gaunt I’d become, but also a lonely void in which I had to keep company with my worst enemy.

  Myself.

  I’d haunt my own hallways like a ghost. A shade of grief and regret. My entire world, this grand, endless city, had been pared down to my narrow walls.

  Autumn slipped into winter. Somehow, I failed to notice. I was already so cold. Most days, my fingers hurt to bend. My skin hurt to touch, often riddled with waves of prickly goose pimples.

  Every moment felt as though a demon danced on my grave.

  Nola stood vigil over me as best she could. She consulted every spirit within her domain. She read cards and plied me with broth. After a while, she wrung her hands and asked when I was going to get up. If I was going to get up.

  “You can’t be a spirit yet, Fiona,” she reproached as she cleared away yet another untouched breakfast. “They say you’ve work to do. You’ve secrets to uncover. You can’t lose your wits, or he will win.”

  He? Jack?

  What did it say about me that a confirmed lunatic worried after my sanity? How could I tell her that I’d uncovered enough secrets to last a lifetime?

  “You were right,” I told her with no inflection, then held up my hand before she corrected me. “They were right about the Hanged Man.”

  Her soft eyes welled with tears. “I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t see her again for a while. Polly brought me my toast the next morning.

  Several days after Aidan’s death—I couldn’t tell you how many—a note arrived scrawled in rather rudimentary script, accompanied by an article neatly cut from a paper.

  St. Michael’s Cathedral had burned in a mysterious fire.

  I’d stared at the photograph. A greyscale skeleton of ancient stone. The beloved priest and local philanthropist, Father Aidan Brendan Connor Fitzpatrick likely perished in the blaze, though no remains had been uncovered.

  So, that’s how they’d done it.

  An efficient disaster, was fire. It saved nothing but cleansed everything.

  The note had simply read:

  I have his ashes if you want them.

  ~Aramis

  I heard nothing from Jorah.

  I imagined his wounds healed faster than mine. But not his pride. He was likely once again the Hammer, at least to me.

  Condolences came to me in the form of other notes, some accompanied by flowers. Dr. Phillips’ arrived first. Then Aberline, Oscar, Hao Long, others I’d employed, and a few people who remembered me from home.

  Aidan’s mother wrote to me.

  I was certain her heartfelt letter full of pride and regret would have left me in a soggy, sobbing heap on the floor. But I discarded it on the growing pile with similar apathy. She’d expressed her secret wish that he’d married me instead of joining the clergy. She wished she had a grandchild to remember him by. But he was never the same after he returned from the war. He’d needed the love of Christ more than the love of a woman.

  I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t think a woman would have told him to torture anyone to death.

  Depended on the woman, I supposed. There were the Katherine Riley’s of the world…

  I’d read the concise script on Dr. Phillips’ perfunctory note and thought about the livers I’d promised him. The lecture would have been over by now. I’d completely forgotten. And, even if I’d been capable of working, I couldn’t have faced the Hammer or the Blade just yet.

  I’d let Dr. Phillips down, and he’d not mentioned a word about it.

  What a dear man.

  When the weather turned, no corpses landed for me to clean.

  Mary Jean showed up on my doorstep with little Teagan. I’d almost forgotten about her.

  Polly was certainly grateful for the help, as she had been nervous to tell us that she was engaged to be married and might not work for much longer.

  Nola took to Mary right away as the girl was both gullible and fanciful enough to see spirits in shifting shadows. She even blamed one of Nola’s wayward guides when she knocked over a crystal dish, and we let her.

  Teagan was a happy baby, if louder than I often wished. Some children screamed their discomfort, and she certainly did that. But she yelled her delight, as well. She warbled, cooed, burped, and yawped just about every moment she wasn’t asleep.

  Sometimes, the sounds of the child reminded me of all the infant ashes shoveled from Katherine Riley’s fireplace. Sweet, chubby Teagan could have been one of them.

  If Aidan hadn’t done what he did.

  Mary was both kind and careful around me. She suspected my grief. I saw it mirrored in her eyes when she wasn’t trying to appear chipper.

  She’d lost her husband not so long ago. She spoke to him when she cleaned sometimes, when she thought she was alone. She nagged him. Berated him for leaving her. For being careless when she’d warned him not to. She told him stories about Teagan. Told him she missed him.

  Funny. I’d never speak to Aidan whether he haunted me or not. It was believed that ghosts were tethered to a moment in time. Or a place. Or, if they were very unlucky, a person.

  I never felt Aidan’s presence. And, I imagined, if anything of his spirit remained in this world, it wouldn’t be condemned to revisit me.

  He’d be in America, somewhere. On the bloody ground of that village. Tormented by the souls of the innocent.

  I read the paper every day. Only because I had one thing left to fear…

  A murder in the East End. A mutilated corpse.

  A victim of Jack the Ripper now that he’d been coaxed out of hiding.

  He was still out there, I knew. Watching me? I almost felt sorry for him. How bored he must be.

  He never sent me his condolences.

  Or did he? Hidden in the notes of another?

  One morning, Mary brought me breakfast on a tray. “Thought I’d brighten such a dreary morning wif a flower, miss.” She drew the drapes, and I moaned at her. “It’s going to snow, I fink.”

  Let it. What did I care?

  She bustled out, not waiting for a thank you, and for whatever reason, I rolled toward the tray. Butter actually smelled good this morning, and my stomach made a rude noise.

  I stared at the flower in the vase as I gobbled the toast and tea like a doomed man would his last meal. A lily of the valley. Trimmed from a hot house, obviously, and drooping like shy little church bells. A waterfall of white.

  I washed and dressed early, for once, and arranged my hair, surprised that I’d not forgotten how.

  A sudden and intense need to unburden myself drove me into the cold of the approaching winter. God help me, a church was the last thing I wanted to see.

  Forgive me, for I have sinned.

  I’d lived my life for so long with one purpose in mind: to find Jack the Ripper.

  A body needed a purpose in order to keep on ticking. So many people worked themselves to exhaustion, only to die the moment they retired.

  Because what did they have left to do?

  I still had Jack. I was no closer to finding him, but he’d crept closer to me.

  And that meant something.

  But first, I had to confess. I had so many secrets. So many sins. I had to cast off the heavy burdens and make some sort of recompense, or the weight of it would crush me like some inconsequential vermin beneath guilt’s unrelenting boot heel.

  I’d found that God
was like the law—His reason for being to judge and punish you for your dastardly deeds. To warn others away from breaking long-standing tenets. In my life, He’d been more vengeful than benevolent.

  But perhaps because I’d gone about it all wrong.

  God, like the law, had a tendency to be merciful if a supplicant were willing to do two things.

  Confess. And atone.

  I could do both. It was time I unburdened my soul. I knew where bodies were buried. I knew the sins of so many others.

  But I’d only confess my own.

  I knocked on the imposing wooden door, not surprised to find it locked. The arch was taller and wider than most.

  It’d have to be, I decided, to house who lived behind it. I knew the hour was early, that now was not the proper time for revelations, but if I didn’t unburden myself now, I’d explode.

  The door opened, and a surprised breath released a fragrant cloud of smoke from the person on the other side. I shivered on the doorstep while he inspected me with eyes that glinted, his expression shifting from hard, to uncertain, to concerned.

  And then, Inspector Grayson Croft took my elbow and pulled me inside his home.

  I opened my mouth before I could change my mind and inhaled deeper than was necessary to speak seven words.

  I need you to take my confession.

  “I told her not to write to you,” he growled, less helping me out of my cloak than yanking it off me.

  My lips slammed shut of their own accord. To whom was he referring? Had Inspector Croft not sent his own condolences?

  I didn’t want to examine my feelings on that score, so I took in my surroundings while gathering the thoughts that had scattered like moths. I’d been mistaken. Inspector Croft’s dwelling resembled nothing close to a lair. If I were to pick a word for it, I’d choose cozy.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with that information.

  “You don’t have to do it,” he continued. Resuming his grasp on my elbow, he conducted me through the oddly feminine front parlor and down a hallway cluttered with paintings, portraits, and photos I suddenly ached to examine.