Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (18 page)

As Stanger disappeared through the door into the chambers, the press bench as a man made for the exit, the afternoon editions to fill with the scant but doubtless sensationalized business from the morning session. Rowena managed to give Bent a small wave before she was led down to the holding cells beneath the court.

“Shine a light,” said Siddell. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Scientific evidence? What’s he talking about?”

“I don’t effing know,” said Bent, keeping his eyes on Scullimore, who was talking to a short, mustachioed man whom he presumed was the mysterious Doctor Miescher. “But I want you to play your little heart out, Willy Siddell. Lay off the gin, keep your tripe in your trousers, and early to bed. And for God’s sake, be on top of your effing game tomorrow like never before.”

I
NTERMEDIO
: A V
ILLAIN
B
IRTHED
IN
T
HEIR
O
WN
P
RIMAL
F
EARS

A costermonger wheeled a barrow up and down the busy sidewalk outside the pale edifice that was the Old Bailey, the framework erected on the barrow fluttering with copies of back issues of the penny dreadfuls.

He wove through the crowd toward the man, who spied him and halted his lurching progress, pushing his half-moon spectacles up on his nose and enquiring if he would like to purchase some old adventures of Miss Rowena Fanshawe, from before she turned bad, as told in these very collectible editions of
World Marvels & Wonders
.

He took a story paper from the man, leafing through it. The man hazarded a guess that he was an aficionado of such things, and that right at the moment there was a convention of like-minded individuals gathering close to the docks, where trading in the penny dreadfuls was brisk, and even some of the writers of the adventures were present to mingle with the public.

“Dr. John Reed, perhaps?” he asked, gesturing at the adventure printed in the magazine, a tale of derring-do featuring Captain Lucian Trigger, the erstwhile Hero of the Empire, in which Rowena Fanshawe had played a not inconsiderable part. The tale, as were all the Trigger adventures, was supposedly penned by the good Captain’s constant companion, Dr. Reed.

The costermonger squinted at him. “A joke in bad taste, sir. Perhaps you haven’t been in London long enough to know.”

He handed back the story paper. Of course he knew, as did everyone else, that Captain Trigger and Dr. Reed had died the previous summer while trying to prevent anarchists in a fabulous flying brass dragon from raining fire and destruction on Buckingham Palace.

There was a new Hero of the Empire now, Mr. Gideon Smith. He wondered what would happen to this one. Heroes died, like Captain Trigger, or were found wanting, like Rowena Fanshawe.

He looked at the colorful cover illustrations of the penny dreadfuls as the costermonger pegged the one he had flipped through back in its place. The British loved their heroes. They loved their villains almost as much, thrived on booing the pantomime antagonists as much as they enjoyed cheering on the Empire’s finest.

As he watched the costermonger move away with his fluttering barrow, he wondered what they would make of
him
. Jack the Ripper was perhaps the biggest and worst villain of them all, not an external threat to England like the ridiculous grotesques Captain Trigger had faced off against every week in the pages of
World Marvels & Wonders
. Jack was one of their own, as far as they knew, a legend born in their own smog-cloaked streets, a villain birthed in their own primal fear—that of not knowing what was really out there in the dark. London teemed with humanity; its towers and ziggurats scraped the underside of heaven with an arrogance only the British could muster; new wonders and inventions sprang forth fully-formed from sweating brows every single day.

Yet still, for all this, as a new century loomed but a decade distant, they lay sleepless in their beds, fearful of one lone man who stalked the slums by night.

The costermonger gone, he could see himself reflected darkly in one of the narrow windows of the Old Bailey, his image warped and twisted, as though it showed his soul, his intermedio self, rather than what those who milled about him saw, and ignored.

He wondered what they would say if they truly knew who Jack the Ripper was.

12

A
IRS
AND
G
RACES

Gideon had not returned home, and Maria felt a dullness in her chest, as though the mechanical components that powered her had suddenly gained weight and substance. It was almost as if the mere presence of Gideon allowed her to forget her true nature, and into the vacuum left by his absence rushed keenly felt reminders that she was not, and would never be, a real woman.

Aloysius and Mrs. Cadwallader had, of course, tried to reassure her over breakfast that Gideon would be fine, that he must have been caught up in some minor adventure or other, and he would soon be bursting through the door with a breathless tale to tell. But Maria could see in their eyes, in Bent’s particularly, that they did not really believe that.

“He can’t have come to mischief,” said Bent for the hundredth time. “He’s the Hero of the Empire.”

Around Maria’s growing anxiety that harm had indeed befallen Gideon there lurked a shadow of something else. He was a young man of modest means, handsome and strong. And, as Mr. Bent had pointed out, he was the Hero of the Empire. What if it was not peril that had ensnared him, but sin? What if he had suffered second thoughts about inviting Maria to his bed and had given into the temptations of the flesh? She clenched and unclenched her hands, feeling the brass joints within her fingers extending and closing, watching the way her skin—the softest, butteriest leather, but not
true skin
after all—stretched and contracted over the fake musculature beneath.

What if he had gone out and found himself a real woman?

The only thing about Maria that could be said to be real was her brain, and that wasn’t hers at all. Annie Crook, who had dared to love the grandson of Queen Victoria, had been put to death by agents of the Crown for her insolence, her brain given to Professor Hermann Einstein for his experiments with the mysterious Atlantic Artifact. When Gideon had first rescued Maria—then unaware of her true nature—from the absent Einstein’s tumbledown house, she had confided in him her dreams of London, impossible dreams of a city she had never visited. Now she knew they were the residual memories of Annie Crook. She could not call even her dreams her own.

Those dreams troubled her still. She had no other memories of Annie Crook, and she fiercely believed that, whatever experiments Einstein had conducted to ally the brain with the clockwork automaton he had created for his own amusement, she was greater than the sum of her parts. She was not just a mechanical girl with a human brain, any more than Mrs. Cadwallader or Aloysius Bent or any of them were merely sacks of flesh and blood and bone.

She was Maria. She was
Maria
.

But was that enough for Gideon?

Maria stood from the sofa in the parlor and paced the rug before the blazing fire yet again. Aloysius had said he would accompany her to the theater to see if there was any clue in Markus Mesmer’s performance as to Gideon’s whereabouts. But who knew what demands the trial of Rowena Fanshawe would put upon Bent, and she could not just sit here all day and do
nothing
. Maria was sick and tired of waiting for the Hero of the Empire to burst in and save the day, sick and tired of being the one who was captured or menaced or required rescuing. Gideon had saved her life—she snorted a humorless laugh. Her
life
!—more times than she could count. Her feet took her to the bureau, and the letter from the Elmwoods. Maria picked up the picture of Charlotte Elmwood, suddenly hating the girl for the
life
she pulsed with in the grainy monochrome image even as she marveled at the uncanny resemblance the girl bore to her.

No,
she reminded herself.
She doesn’t look like me. She’s the living one, the natural one. I’m the copy, the creature, the toy of an idle genius. I look like
her
.

Maria glanced at the letter the Elmwoods had sent to Gideon, imploring him for help, and felt a leaden weight settle in her stomach. Perhaps he had taken the case because Charlotte Elmwood had everything that Maria had, and life besides.

She tucked the letter into her skirt pockets and went to get her jacket, muffler, and bonnet. It was time she took matters into her own hands.

*   *   *

There was a small area where the steam-cabs gathered just off Grosvenor Square, and after a light lunch with Mrs. Cadwallader, Maria found the driver at the front vehicle shoveling coal into the furnace at the back, warming his hands at the same time. He looked at her from beneath the brim of his woolen flat cap as she approached through the slush and said, “Climb in the back, miss, and I’ll be with you directly. Not half using a lot of coal, this weather is, just to keep the engine running.”

When Maria had climbed into the leather seat the driver closed the door behind her and climbed into his cab, blowing on his fingers. “Devilish weather, miss. Devilish. Worst winter for years, they’re saying. Where can I take you?”

“Winchmore Hill,” she said, reading out the address she had copied from the Elmwoods’ letter.

The driver chuckled. “That’s not Winchmore Hill, strictly speaking, miss. Friends of yours?”

“No, I’ve never met them,” she said.

The driver wrenched at the levers on his dashboard, and the cab shuffled forward in the snow. “Just on the edge of Winchmore Hill that is, miss, where the people live who want to say they live in Winchmore Hill, but can’t rightly afford it. Airs and graces those sort have, miss. Like to think they’re something they’re not.”

Like me?
thought Maria. She said, “Perhaps they are merely aspirational, sir. Is there anything terribly wrong with wanting to better your situation?”

He chuckled again. “Not at all, miss. But a person shouldn’t rightly say they are a thing until they properly have become it, don’t you agree?”

Maria said nothing, simply looked out at the snowbound city as the cab steamed northward.

*   *   *

Oblivious to, or perhaps uncaring of, Maria’s reflective silence as the cab negotiated the valleys of black slush that had once been the major thoroughfare of a well-to-do neighborhood, the driver continued to expound at length on all manner of topics.
One does not need to buy a newspaper every day,
thought Maria,
merely take a steam-cab ride every lunchtime to find out the happenings of the day, with a liberal
(or perhaps not so liberal, in the case of this particular driver, who had already advocated the transportation of all opium addicts to Australia, the closing of the poor houses, and several army regiments being given control of London to aid the capture of Jack the Ripper)
dose of comment and opinion.
He broke off from his tirade to heave the cab into a narrow street of semidetached two-story houses with modest front gardens, and said, “Here we are, miss. Not-quite-Winchmore Hill.”

It was noticeably colder here than the squares of Mayfair, insulated by the loving embrace of affluent London, and fresh snowfall threatened, heralded by a few flurries that played around the unlit gas lamps. Maria climbed out of the cab and paid the driver.

“Do you want me to wait, miss?”

She considered then said, “If you would. I shouldn’t be long.”

Then, double-checking the address on the letter, she let herself into the snow-covered front garden of the nearest house by the flaking iron gate and padded up the paved path, wondering whether she had not acted somewhat rashly and pondering what she was going to say when the black-painted door ahead of her was suddenly flung open.

“I thought I saw you walking up the path!” exclaimed the man with center-parted hair and red-rimmed eyes who hung in the doorway. “Oh, my darling daughter Charlotte, welcome home!”

Maria was still trying to find the right words as the man—Henry Elmwood, she presumed—strode out in his shirtsleeves to embrace her, calling over his shoulder, “Martha! Martha! Oh, do come! It is Charlotte, come home to us.”

Awkwardly, Maria extricated herself from Elmwood’s grasp as a small, neat woman came to the door and regarded her coolly.

“Martha! Are you—ah, you’re here! Look! It’s—”

“It’s not my daughter,” said Mrs. Elmwood, her eyes flicking toward her husband. “For pity’s sake, you are in the view of the whole street. Remove your arms and ask yourself how you could have possibly thought this was Charlotte.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Elmwood…,” began Maria. She suddenly felt sure she couldn’t have made a bigger mistake than coming here.

Elmwood stepped back and frowned. “Not Charlotte? But … then who?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Mrs. Elmwood, her lip curling. “It’s that unholy creation of Professor Hermann Einstein.”

*   *   *

Mrs. Elmwood ushered Maria away from the twitching net curtains on the narrow street and into a small parlor dressed with slightly shabby furniture and a painted portrait of their daughter on the wall that brought her up short. She perched on the edge of the worn green sofa as Mr. Elmwood stared at her, unabashed.

“It really is quite remarkable,” he said, sitting down on the other sofa without taking his eyes off Maria. “Did it talk the last time we saw it? And did it look so real?”

Maria felt the oils and fluids that coursed through her body thumping in her human brain. She thought she might be about to have her first headache. She put her hand to her temple and asked, “You have seen me before?”

“No matter how real it looks, I cannot believe that for a moment you thought it was our daughter,” said Mrs. Elmwood. “A mother knows these things in a heartbeat.”

Elmwood placed his hands on his knees. “Old Einstein must have been working on it, improving it. I say he’s done a bang-up job.”