City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (48 page)

 Geraldine leaned back in her chair,
shaking her head.  “When I picture those poor girls walking the streets of
Whitechapel….”

Tom looked at his older brother. 
“You must think you’ve come into absolute insanity.  Aunt Geraldine said you
had news?”

“Oh that,” said William.  “It hardly
matches your story for drama, in fact it doesn’t seem worth mentioning in the
light of all this.”   He looked at John.  “My sister will fully recover, won’t
she?”

“Up and about in a day or two,” John
said.

Something in him has shifted, Tom
thought.   The anger has gone.  He hasn’t come to London to rant and rave, to
fight the will, or to try and drag Leanna back to Rosemoral.  He’s thinking of
something other than himself now. 

“Tell us, William, really,” Tom
said.  “Why are you here?”

William shifted his large frame
uncomfortably in the chair.  “Well, it’s the damnest thing,” he said.  “But Cecil
has disappeared.” 

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

November 13

7:20 AM

The man asks the woman to marry him. 

It doesn’t happen exactly as she’d
dreamed…. but then, what does?  He is not on one knee, but instead bending over
her on the bed.  He may not speak of love, but he does promise to take her away
and that’s all she ever wanted, really.   She wants this man to be here with
her, holding her hand, talking of a different place, where they can live a
simple life and forget everything that has happened to them in London.

So Lucy says yes.

Severin had endured a very bad
night.  He sat until daybreak on top of a rum keg and for the first time in recent
memory, he was frightened.  The man from the bar, the tall dandy who threw
around his money and rolled his pale eyes in disdain, had stood no more than
two feet away, staring at the knife in Severin’s hand.  Drunk as he was, he had
understood at once what he was seeing. 

The man had glanced at the form of
Maudy, had swayed on his feet a bit, and had then looked back at Severin.  It was
a strange moment, almost like seeing oneself in a carnival mirror.  Each had
sensed from the start how much they were alike.  Of course, Severin would never
let himself go to drink in such appalling fashion and he didn’t know what manner
of unsavory business this dandy was up to, but he knew they shared a certain
way of looking on the world. 

He genuinely regretted that he would
have to kill him. Severin had never killed a man. 

But when the air had suddenly split
with sound and an avalanche of bobbies had come rolling toward the waterfront,
the dandy had bolted.  He ran into the street and when Severin tried to follow,
he found himself caught in a swarm of rushing men.  They rumbled past him,
nearly knocking him off his feet, and the shrillness of their whistles was
unendurable, like a woman’s scream.  The one thing Severin despised above all
else was the sound of a woman screaming. 

He let himself be carried down to the
docks with the wave of the crowd and he stood back while they dragged Micha
from the water.  Tied his hands and threw him into the back of a wagon, and when
the thud of Micha’s great weight hit the floorboards, Severin had felt it deep
in his own gut.  Because last night was the very first time it occurred to him
that someday he too would be caught.  There were so many coppers when you saw
them like that all together, swarming around with their clubs and lanterns, so
many that you knew no man could escape forever, no matter how clever he might
be.

 Severin had stepped back from the
crowd and focused on the figure in the middle of it all, Trevor Welles.   

He had, of course, watched Welles for
weeks.  Setting up his ridiculous laboratory at the Yard, reading his reports
from France, giving lectures to anyone who would listen, and imagining himself
the great detective.  The fat fool had even come into the Pony Pub to interview
Lucy and had somehow failed to notice Severin sitting at the end of bar.  So
much for his self-proclaimed powers of observation.  Severin had eavesdropped
on Trevor throughout that whole night, as sickened by the man’s hypocrisy as by
his arrogance.  As it turns out, the hero of Scotland Yard likes his young
whores just as much as the next man.   

 It had been such a game to mislead
them.  Sometimes when he was alone in the mortuary, Severin had interfered with
Trevor’s experiments, poking a fork into one of the wounds on Mary Kelly’s leg,
replacing the human hairs in his notebook with a few he’d plucked from a
passing Whitechapel dog.  Pulling an enormous skirt off a clothesline to burn
in Mary Kelly’s fireplace, sending them kidneys plucked from bodies in the next
room, scribbling messages about Jewes just to fuck with that prissy Raylay
Abrams.  Stirring a bit of arsenic into Phillips’ tea - not enough to kill him,
just enough to hasten the shakes.  Watching them all search so earnestly for a
scalpel that was – here’s the great joke – all the while within an arm’s
reach.  He had even left a button from a bobby’s coat on the roof of the Kelly
house but they hadn’t found it, had they?  How that would have set them
spinning. 

He had listened to every meeting,
every conference, and at times it had taken the sum total of his substantial
self-control to keep from laughing in their faces.

Yes, it had been easy to disregard
and mock Welles for weeks but something in his manner last night had pulled
Severin up short.  Welles knew Micha was not the Ripper.  He knew the minute
they pulled him from the water and plopped him on the dock that Scotland Yard had
caught a whale, but not a shark.  Severin had watched as the detective’s
shoulders sank with disappointment.  Just a little, but enough that Severin had
understood that Welles was not deceived. 

This was going to be a problem.

The police had gotten very close last
night.  They had touched him, had jostled him, had shoved him and shouted “Step
aside, damn you.”  Much worse, there was a man out there somewhere who knew his
name and had seen his face.  Severin had walked back and forth among the crowd
at the waterfront and when he had not found the man, he had stationed himself
on his rum keg and watched each figure that passed.  But the drunk dandy with
the pale blue eyes had eluded his grasp.

And when the sun finally rose,
Severin had known it was over. 

So he had walked back to the rooming
house where Lucy slept, had crawled through her window as he had so many times
before, slipped into her narrow bed beside her.  She had awakened with a start,
almost crying out in her surprise, but he cupped his hand around her mouth.

Beneath his palm he can feel her
muffled cry turn into a smile.  She loves him.  God knows why, but she does,
and at long last her devotion might prove useful. 

“You were right all along,” he tells
her.  “There was dreadful business in the streets last night and this is no
city for decent people like us.”

Under his palm, she nods.

“I could learn to like the country
life,” he says, removing his hand.  “So yes, we’ll get married and we will go
to your sister in Jersey.”

She laughs softly. “You don’t listen,”
she says.  “Men never do.  My sister isn’t in Jersey, she’s in New Jersey.”

He frowns. 

“New Jersey,” she repeats. “In
America.  You’ll still go, won’t you? You’ll take me that far away?”

“Oh yes indeed,” he says quietly,
slipping his hand beneath her flimsy bedgown.  “America is even better.”

7:34  AM

The household in Mayfair had managed
to sleep a few hours but with the rising of the sun most of them were up too. 
Trays had been prepared for the girls and William had insisted on carrying up
Leanna’s.  What passed between the two siblings, he did not divulge, but Tom
thought William seemed lighter as he came downstairs, relieved and full of
appetite.  Despite his own aches and pains Tom was ravenous too and the
brothers sat together at the breakfast table with Geraldine.  William did not
seem surprised when Gage emerged from the kitchen with his own plate.   Instead
he slid his chair a little to make more room for the man, and began to tell
them all his plans for getting a degree in estate management.

“Will you release the funds for the
tuition?” William asked Tom, his mouth crammed full of toast and jam.

“With great pleasure,” Tom said. 
“Leanna will be thrilled when you tell her.”

William smiled shyly.  “She was. She
said it would be a great load off her mind and I have the impression she
doesn’t see herself returning to Rosemoral to live.  Is something keeping her
in London?”

As if on cue, there was a rap at the
back door and John Harrowman entered.

“Take a plate, John,” Geraldine
directed.  If the household had been casual before, Tom reflected, this Ripper
business had turned them into absolute bohemians.

“No time,” John said briskly.  “I
wanted to check on the girls and then I need to see Mrs. Byrd, the woman Tom
helped me deliver last night.”    

“Dear Lord,” said Geraldine.  “Do
doctors ever sleep?”

John grinned, grabbed a roll from a
serving plate, and kissed her on the cheek.  “Not often,” he said, and then
turned toward the stairs.

“He’s a saint,” Geraldine said.

“And I think he’s going to be our
brother-in-law,” Tom said to William, who gazed thoughtfully toward the
staircase.  “Now, what’s this business about Cecil?”

“Do Gage and I need to give you
privacy?” Geraldine asked, but William shook his head and took a gulp of tea.

“The time for pretending is long past
us,” he said and then proceeded to tell them of Cecil’s last disastrous night
at the tracks, the missing pounds from his pocket, the notable absence of
Gwynette’s opal and diamond brooch. 

Tom groaned.  “Where do you think he’s
headed?”

William turned up his broad palms. 
“I could only think he came here, to beg funds from Leanna, but now I’m at a
loss.”

Another rap at the back door, this
time Trevor Welles.  He looked as if he had slept about the same amount as John,
but he had at least changed out of his wet clothes.  

“Trevor,” Geraldine said.  “Get a
plate.”

“No time,” Trevor said briskly.  “I
just came by to check on Leanna and Emma.”

“John’s up with them now,” Tom said. 
“This is our eldest brother, William.”

Trevor extended a hand, surprise on
his face.  “I’m not sure I knew there were two older brothers.”

“Congratulations, darling,” Geraldine
said.  “It came at a high price, but we have our Ripper at last.”

“Afraid not,” Trevor said, sitting
down with a sigh.  “Maybe I will take a few sausages,” he said, as William slid
the platter toward him.  “What we have is one Micha Banasik, a hired killer
who, thank God, is not very skilled at his craft.”

“Hired?” Geraldine said with a gasp. “So
this wasn’t a random crime?  Are you saying he was after Emma?”

“Leanna was his target.  Just as you
said last night, Tom, someone who knew she had money.”  Trevor looked pointedly
at Tom and then William, but did not elaborate, and they both seemed to
understand there was something he wished to discuss with them later, truly in
private.  “So no, Geraldine, we don’t have our Ripper.  Not yet.  But I think
we came very close.”

“Close enough to scare him off?” Tom
asked.

“That’s exactly what Davy Mabrey
thinks, that Jack may move on somewhere of his own accord.  I envy you younger
men your optimism, and who knows, perhaps you’re right.   But here’s the
thing.  Whether the Ripper is in London or not, I fear he has opened up some
sort of door that others will now walk though.”

“The criminal of the future,” Tom
said.

“Precisely.  A modern man.  Death for
the sake of death and this is uncharted territory for the Yard, a sort of new
world order.”  Trevor thoughtfully chewed his sausages.  “So yes, the next time
I fall into my bed, which may be months from now, I will take a moment to send
up a prayer asking God to please let young Tom and young Davy be right.  That
we have frightened Jack off and that we have – if not a conclusion, at least an
ending.  And if that ending is not entirely happy, it is at least one we can
all live with precisely because we all lived.”  He looked at Geraldine.  “Emma
and Leanna are better today, I trust?”

“They both took breakfast.”

“Good.  I will give them my best
before I go.”

“Trevor, what would we do without
you?” Geraldine said.

“Gad, Auntie, that’s precisely what
you said to John last night,” Tom said, as Trevor left the room.  “You’re quite
the coquette, are you not?  Going from one man to another, declaring you can’t
live without any of them.  Oh, and there’s an equally good chance he might be
our brother-in-law,” he said to William, who turned again to look up the
stairs. 

“They both seem all right,” William
said.

“But it’s true,” Geraldine went on,
setting down her teacup with a clatter.  “We don’t have a practical skill among
us and Trevor and John have held us up during this whole appalling mess.”