Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (36 page)

“Aloysius. Thank God. I thought you were never coming to see me.”

“I couldn’t, girl. Not while I was down as a character witness.” He held her at arm’s length, taking a good look at her. “How are you doing?”

She shook her head tightly. “You don’t want to know, Aloysius. In Holloway … they know who I am. It’s not good for me.” She looked at him and brightened. “But you’re here now! You’ve come to get me out!”

“Well … things have been a bit odd out there. Gideon had a run-in with Markus Mesmer and went missing. That’s why he hasn’t been in court.”

“But he’s back now?” Her voice fell to a low whisper. “What’s the plan, Aloysius? An airship rescue? A tunnel through these cells?”

A pained look came across Bent’s face. “Rowena … nothing like that, girl. We’re at the mercy of the courts on this one.”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I didn’t do it, Aloysius. I didn’t kill Gaunt.”

He held her tight. “I know you didn’t. But I’m going to find out who did. Rowena … I need to find your parents. And quickly.”

She slumped in his arms. “If that’s all that will save me, then I’m lost, Aloysius. They’re both beyond us.”

He felt his heart sink like a stone. “Both of them? In what way?”

She nodded, pulling back to meet his anguished gaze. “Edward Gaunt’s wife? Catherine?”

“The one he killed with the mercury from the barometers?”

Rowena nodded sadly. “I knew he was doing something to her. If only I had acted earlier. I could have saved her. Saved my mother.”

Bent stared at her. “Catherine Gaunt was your mother? Then Edward Gaunt…?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No. Never. He married my mother after she divorced my father.…”

“Divorced him?” Bent exhaled in relief. “We must find your father, Rowena. Now. Tell me his name.”

She smiled sadly. “It won’t do any good, Aloysius.” She looked at him levelly. “My father was Charles Collier.”

25

L
EARNING
TO
F
LY

“I was twelve years old when I learned to fly,” said Rowena. “I wasn’t Rowena Fanshawe yet, though she was in the process of being born. Back then I was just plain Jane. Jane Collier, at first, then when she divorced my father and remarried, I became Jane Gaunt.”

She looked beyond Bent, beyond the cool, musty air of the stone-lined cell, into the clean, blue sky of the past. She had been tiny when her mother told her that Father would not be living with them anymore. “He loves adventure more than his wife and child,” her mother had said tremulously. “He cannot give up his perilous travels, even for us.”

And little Jane Collier thought it must be a wonderful thing, to put adventure above everything else in the world, and did not blame him at all. Besides, he still visited most weekends and took her on days out, and on those weekends when his travels took him away he at least brought her presents: lumps of stone that floated on water, intricately carved jade statuettes, polished jet pendants. And then Charles Collier came to her and said he was going on a distant journey that would take him away from her for a long time, but he would bring her back a special present.

Jane had clapped her hands together. “A monkey!”

Charles Collier ruffled her hair with his big, callused hand and laughed. “A monkey.”

But he never came back.

Catherine Collier was a handsome woman, and she had been courted in Charles Collier’s absence by a man named Edward Gaunt, a businessman and entrepreneur. After a suitable period of mourning had elapsed, and Charles Collier had been legally declared dead, Edward Gaunt announced his intention to marry the Widow Collier, and she duly accepted. Jane Collier, who was twelve years old, was forced to change her name to that of her adoptive father, Edward Gaunt.

It was not long after the wedding that the arguments started. Jane would listen to them from the top of the staircase. They were invariably about money. Edward Gaunt was a businessman and an entrepreneur, but evidently not a particularly successful one. He constantly needed money to shore up his failing companies. Charles Collier had not been without money, and he had made a provision in his will for an allowance to be paid to his ex-wife. The bulk of his money, though, was put into a trust for his daughter, Jane, to pay for an education for her or, should she wish, a dowry for a marriage.

Jane Gaunt had no interest in marriage, at the age of twelve, and the only education she had any desire to pursue was the one she obtained from her father’s old books. She had taken all his books on aeronautical engineering, the history of the flight pioneers from Jean-Pierre Blanchard onward, techniques of airship flying, and atlases and gazetteers of the world. She filled her head with all this knowledge and more, hiding in her room, away from the arguments below.

Which, she soon discovered, were not all about money.

*   *   *

Jane hated it when Edward Gaunt let himself into her room uninvited. She ignored him for as long as possible, taking pleasure from his rapidly rising anger as he stood in the doorway and watched her concentrating intently on a technical manual concerned chiefly with the maintenance and repair of altimeters. Eventually he closed the door behind him and crossed the space between them, slamming shut the book she was reading at her desk.

She glared at him, hating him intensely, but held her tongue, for her mother’s sake. Gaunt swayed somewhat in the gaslight, and she could smell a cloud of brandy clinging to him. Her father, Charles Collier, had sometimes drunk (though never to excess, not in her presence) rum, which she considered an adventurous sort of liquor. Brandy, on Edward Gaunt, at least, was the perfume of desperation and gloom.

And, forever more after that night, the smell of something she would not be able to put a name to for many years, and when she finally did, it would end in death.

Gaunt had put a hand on her shoulder, making her flesh crawl. He said: “How old are you next birthday, Jane?”

“Thirteen.”

“And what do you know of what occurs between a man and a woman, who are married and share a bed?”

Jane blushed furiously, staring at the leather cover of the book Gaunt had slammed shut. In truth she had no idea what he was talking about. Gaunt had insisted she be taught by the nuns at the nearby convent school, and such matters were not on the curriculum.

Gaunt left his hand on her shoulder. “Jane … a married man has certain rights. And your mother … well, she has been unwell recently. She has been unable to discharge her wifely duties. Therefore, I must exercise my rights in other ways.” She felt his hand tighten on her bare flesh. Her throat was suddenly dry, and she thought there must have been a sudden heavy heat in the room, for when Edward Gaunt spoke next, his voice was thick and odd.

“Take off your dress and lie upon your bed.”

*   *   *

“Jesus effing Christ,” said Bent. “
Jesus,
Rowena.”

She nodded. She felt as though she should cry, show some emotion. But she couldn’t. “That first time, that was when I learned to fly. All the time he was … doing it, I was thinking about the construction, maintenance, and repair of altimeters. And the time after that I memorized the trade routes between London and North Africa. And then the correct inflation procedures for single, double, and four-celled rigid helium balloons. And the time—”

Bent held up a hand to stop her, then awkwardly placed it upon hers, knotted together on the table surface. The action moved her more than anything else she could remember in years. He asked, “How long?”

Rowena gathered the memories like reeling in anchor lines. “It was inevitable, even at a convent school—or perhaps especially at a convent school—that conversation would turn at some point to matters of the heart, and the body. Whispered words, hushed questions, surreptitiously shared books on anatomy and magazines of pictures of women in states of undress. And every whisper, every query, every grainy photograph of white, bruised flesh, had made me want to throw up.

“I was sixteen. I went to my mother and asked her if she knew what Edward Gaunt had been doing to me since I was twelve years old. She looked at me as though she barely knew me. Now I know, of course, that even then Gaunt had started poisoning her, giving her doses of mercury to keep her compliant and eventually have her committed so he could begin the process of taking her money. She told me I was a liar and a fantasist, that I had my head in the clouds, and that I was just like my father.”

“What did you do?” asked Bent.

Rowena took a deep, ragged breath. “I knew Gaunt would have designs on the money that was held in trust for me, and even then I feared he might harm me to get it. So I took matters into my own hands. I wrote a note that I posted through the next-door neighbor’s door as I knew they would be out until teatime. Then I took a cab to the River Thames, weighed my dress pockets down with stones, and threw myself in.”

Bent stared at her. “You tried to commit suicide?”

She smiled tightly. “Not suicide. Murder, after a fashion. I killed Jane Gaunt that day, let her weighted dress float to the bottom of the Thames, left a note saying my stepfather had been terribly abusing me, then floated downriver, hanging on to a piece of driftwood. I climbed out at Greenwich and waited, shivering, by the Lady of Liberty flood barrier for a courier to bring a trunk I had dispatched two days earlier. It was filled with clothing, my father’s books, and all the money I could find in the house. It was addressed to a name I had plucked out of the air, like a passing dirigible. Jane Gaunt was gone, and I got my hair cut short then went to the Union Hall of the Esteemed Brethren of International Airshipmen and signed up. Despite much opposition I eventually managed to obtain a position as an apprentice aerostat first mate with a small cargo-running dirigible company flying out of Highgate Aerodrome. Rowena Fanshawe had arrived.”

Bent was rubbing his face. “Jesus, Rowena. I had no idea.”

Rowena smiled sadly. “So you see, Aloysius, that I have nothing but motives for killing Edward Gaunt, and I have no living relatives who can aid me in whatever eleventh hour legal challenge you had in mind.”

But Aloysius Bent had taken a rolled magazine from the inside pocket of his overcoat and was staring at the cover. “I wouldn’t be too sure, Rowena.”

She raised a quizzical eyebrow at him, but he simply stuffed the periodical back into his coat and said, “You sit tight, girl, we’re going to get you out of here. I just need a quick word with old Stanger.…”

*   *   *

Judge Stanger peered down with arched eyebrows at Willy Siddell, who sweated under his gaze in a courtroom still empty of the jury and public. Stanger said, “I am inclined to agree with Mr. Scullimore, Mr. Siddell. This is highly irregular.”

Bent sighed and elbowed Siddell out of the way. “Look, Your Honor, while we’re being highly irregular about everything, you might as well talk to the organ grinder as the monkey.”

Siddell began to object, but Stanger waved him down. “Ah. Aloysius Bent. I have been used to seeing you on the press bench, but not so much with the defense counsel. Somewhat a case of poacher turned gamekeeper.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a friend of Rowena Fanshawe, and I can tell you for a fact she didn’t do it.”

Stanger smiled. “A plea for clemency?”

Bent shook his head. “No, because I know that would do no good. It’s a plea for time, Your Honor. New information has come to light. I know who killed Edward Gaunt. I just need to find him.”

Stanger scrutinized Bent for a moment then took out his pocket watch. “Mr. Bent, given the defense case’s sore lack of witnesses thus far, I am inclined to grant you this boon. You have until ten o’clock tomorrow morning to produce your new evidence.” He leaned forward. “Take warning, though, Mr. Bent: If you fail I shall be sending out the jury to consider their verdicts. And should they return with a decision that Miss Fanshawe is guilty of murder … well, given the high-profile nature of this case I feel I shall be compelled to impose the most severe sentence for this crime that is open to me.”

Bent gaped at him. “You’d give her the death penalty?”

The judge smiled without humor. “They call me Stanger the Hanger, do they not? Ten o’clock, Mr. Bent, and not a moment later.”

*   *   *

Bent hurtled through the Old Bailey lobby, gathering people in his wake as a gale might snatch up leaves. Siddell followed, muttering over and over “shine a light” as Bent beckoned over Inspector Lestrade. “George. I’m going to need you. Your boys are going to have to comb London.”

The protesting inspector fell in behind Bent as the journalist spied Walsingham and changed course to intercept him.

“You,” he said, jabbing a finger at Walsingham’s chest. “You have some explaining to do.”

The thin secret service man used his cane to move Bent’s finger from his chest. “I doubtless have much explaining to do, Mr. Bent, but none of it to you.”

Bent brandished the magazine at him. “Did you know Charles Collier was still alive?”

Walsingham blinked, and Bent smiled. “I thought you’d be in that one up to your elbows. Now come on, time is short.”

He pushed his way out of the Old Bailey, into the biting, icy wind where crowds still milled on the pavements, not yet aware that the Fanshawe jury was at that moment being sent home for the day. Vendors and hawkers had gravitated toward the court, and Bent barged past a fat Indian in a black turban leaning on a hot chestnut stall before pushing a pin-striped banker out of the way and stepping into the horse-drawn cab he had just hailed. He held open the door for Walsingham and Lestrade and said to Willy Siddell, “Keep an eye on Rowena, and wait for news from me. I want you to subpoena Dr. Miescher in the meantime and take him back to your place. Make sure he’s got his machine with him, and don’t let him out of your sight.”

Siddell nodded. “But where are you going?”

Bent slammed shut the cab door and told the driver to take them to 23 Grosvenor Square, then leaned out of the window to Siddell. “I’m off to find a corpse, see if I can’t effing stop Rowena Fanshawe becoming one.”