Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (44 page)

“And look!” cried Maria. “Gideon!”

*   *   *

“I must make this right,” said Collier. “For Rowena.” He drew his knife from his boot. The tyrannosaur had its back to them, the red-raw body of an MP before it, roaring in triumph.

Gideon put a hand on his arm. “A fortune-teller told me …
‘a lost father dies’
 … don’t you wish to see Rowena again?”

“Better she remembers me like this,” said Collier.

Gideon held on to him. “Wait,” he said. “Look.”

Through the fleeing crowd a black shape was vaulting toward the beast, sword held high, crying, “El Chupacabras! El Chupacabras!”

“We need to get its attention,” said Gideon. He ran, Collier behind him, straight for the beast, screaming and shouting until he was just feet from it. He began to stamp his boots on the wooden floor, and eventually it grunted and turned, its yellow eyes lighting upon him. It opened its mouth and roared, the chandeliers far above shaking in the roof. Then it lunged for Gideon.

Jip, the monkey, leaped from Collier’s shoulder, screeching and waving its arms. It was a tiny, inconsequential thing compared to the dinosaur, but it was enough to distract the beast and buy enough time.

Garcia put one boot on the fallen Speaker’s chair and launched himself into the air, holding the hilt of his rapier with both hands and pointing it downward, landing like a cat on the arched back of the reptile and calling out one last time “El Chupacabras!” before plunging the blade into the back of its neck.

The dinosaur roared, twisting around and swatting Jip across the room with its huge head. It took Garcia in its snapping jaws, worrying him to the ground in front of it and lifting its head to show its bloodred teeth, scraps of black hood hanging from them.

A lost father dies
.

Then the beast’s tiny brain finally received the messages of pain being sent by its nerve endings, and it howled and fell forward with a crash.

Gideon and Collier leaped out of the way as the beast fell. It lay silent for a moment, then raised its head and tried to claw its way to its feet, the rapier protruding from its neck. It fell again then pulled itself forward until it was near the splintered hatch, turning to regard Gideon with a baleful yellow eye, before dragging itself over the lip and into the shaft, and slithering out of sight.

Maria ran through the thinning crowds to embrace Gideon. “Is it dead?” she asked.

He held her tightly and looked down into the black shaft. “It’s certainly gone,” he said, looking up at Collier. “Though being gone and being dead are not necessarily the same thing.”

*   *   *

Lizzie Strutter surveyed her room after packing her meager belongings into a battered trunk. Not much to show for a quarter of a century in the sex trade in London. It was her body that carried the main baggage, bore the memories, sported the scars. And speaking of scars … Lizzie looked up, frowning, as Rachel burst in unannounced.

“Mum, you’ll never guess…,” said the girl, then stopped, looking at the trunk. “Mum? You off somewhere?”

“Manchester,” said Lizzie.

Rachel gaped at her. “What for?”

Lizzie sighed. “I’m done with London. For a bit, anyway. We’ve wrung each other dry.”

“But Mum, the riot … it’s over. Haven’t you heard? There’s been some sort of monster attacking the Houses of Parliament. The
real
Jack the Ripper was there. He fought the monster and now he’s dead. It’s over, Mum.”

Lizzie fastened the trunk. “Yes, it is.” She looked at the girl. “Time for a clean break, love. There’s too much bad blood for me here now. The police’ll never leave me alone, not after starting that riot on Commercial Road.”

“But what about me? And the rest of the girls?”

Lizzie tapped her finger against her chin, then dug in her apron pocket and fished out a set of keys. She tossed them to Rachel. “Time for you to make a go of it, love. Give your cunt a rest.”

“Me?” asked Rachel. “Run the house? Be a madam?”

“Yes.” Lizzie smiled. “You’ve earned it.”

*   *   *

Mr. Tait chewed the bone reflectively. A poodle, it had been, with a little ribbon in its curly fur. Wiry thing, not a lot of meat on it. He said, “Funny old thing, Mr. Lyall.”

“The poodle, Mr. Tait?”

“No, all that business with Smith. And the one-legged chap. And this thing they had, what did he call it? Tyrannosaurus?”

“Tyrannosaurus rex, Mr. Tait. King of the dinosaurs, by all accounts.”

Distantly there sounded an echoing roar, as if something were in pain, or angry, or perhaps both. They listened to it for a while, until it faded.

“Ever eaten lizard, Mr. Lyall?”

“Once or twice, Mr. Tait.”

“Bet there’d be a bit of meat on a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

They dampened the stove and packed away their pans and plates, hefting their packs onto their shoulders in the gloom of the sewer.

“Shall we, Mr. Lyall?”

“Well, you know what we always say down here, Mr. Tait. Eat or be eaten.”

They began to trudge toward the ringing echo of the roars, and Mr. Lyall broke into song.

31

S
COURGE
OF
THE
B
RITISH
E
MPIRE

“How … how was it, Rowena?”

She blinked and looked at him as though she hadn’t heard. She was pale and thin, her hair dull and matted, and he immediately chided himself for the stupidity of his question. She had spent the best part of the week in Holloway and the Old Bailey, wrongly accused of murder, the death penalty looming over her.

She gazed into the depths of the fire. “I thought you would come for me, Gideon.”

“I was lost,” he began, but she put up a hand.

“I know. You would have come if you could have.” She looked at him. “They formally dropped the charges this morning. At the same time they arrested my father. He admitted everything. He came back for revenge, Gideon. Came back to kill the man he thought had killed me long ago.”

Gideon nodded; he remembered everything of his sojourn in the sewers. “He … his heart was in the right place, Rowena. I don’t think he meant to cause harm, really.”

She sighed. “I think you’re wrong, Gideon. He knew what he was doing. The Empire treated him very badly.”

Gideon said carefully, “But of course, you cannot condone his plan to attack Parliament.…”

Rowena raised an eyebrow. She had changed out of her prison shift and into her more usual clothes, but there still seemed something … trapped about her. She looked around the parlor at Grosvenor Square as though it were little better than her cell at Holloway. She said, “I still haven’t seen him, you know.”

Gideon poured her another cup of tea. “I’m sure that can be arranged. Mr. Walsingham will be able to sort out—”

Her lip curled viciously, unattractively, into a sneer. Gideon was taken aback. He’d never seen her like this. “Walsingham? Walsingham left my father to die. He would have watched me hang.”

“He is as hidebound by the rule of law as the rest of us, Rowena.”

She sneered again. “Law? We are above the law, Gideon.”

He shook his head. “We are not.”

She looked into the depths of her teacup, as though seeking her fortune there. “If not above it, then outside it. That has always been the way for me. The things I’ve seen, Gideon, the things I’ve done. And most of them at the behest of the Crown. Yet they would have hanged me like a dog for something I did not do.”

He wasn’t quite sure what to say, so he said, “What are your plans for Christmas? You are most welcome, of course, to join us.”

She gave a wry grin. “I am planning to be out of the country for the season.”

Gideon raised an eyebrow. “You are? Not working?”

She shook her head then met his gaze. “Gideon. I need to know something. You love Maria?”

He held her stare a long time before replying. He was back in the dream, the illusion created by Mesmer’s Hypno-Array. The one where he lived a life of mundane happiness back in Sandsend, a life he had thought saw him married to Maria, until the door opened and his beloved walked through … and it was Rowena.

Illusion, misdirection, the mind playing tricks. Mesmer’s mischief. Nothing more.

“Of course I do,” he said. “Do you need to ask, after everything I’ve been through with her?”

Rowena pursed her lips and nodded, as though she had made up her mind about something. She said, “You do not have to be what they say you are, Gideon. The Empire owes you nothing, really. If you must be a hero, be a hero for Maria.”

She placed her teacup in the saucer and stood. Gideon stood also. She said, “Will you say good-bye to Maria, and Aloysius, and Mrs. Cadwallader for me? I don’t think I could bear to.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You sound like you are not planning to return.”

“I think once we are gone, we shall be away for some time. Perhaps, as you say, forever.”

“
We,
Rowena?”

She smiled. “When Aloysius came to see me at court I asked him how I was to be freed. A tunnel? A daring escape over the prison walls? He told me that I was at the mercy of justice. I am Rowena Fanshawe, Gideon. The Belle of the Airways. When I drowned Jane Gaunt, I also killed the fetters of normal society. I will never be bound again, Gideon. No one clips Rowena Fanshawe’s wings.”

At last, it dawned on him. “Collier,” he said. “You are going to break him out of Newgate Prison. I cannot allow this, Rowena.”

She drew herself up to her full height and looked him square in the eye. Her pale skin flushed, the brightness returned to her eyes, and her auburn hair seemed to acquire a luster that had been absent.

Rowena Fanshawe was back.

She said, “I am. And so here we are. You are going to stop me, Gideon?”

He looked away first. How could he stop her, after all they had been through? Was he meant to wrestle her to the ground? Was he that sort of hero?

“No,” he said quietly. “But I cannot let this go unchallenged.”

She moved toward the parlor door. “Then do what you must, Gideon. But after what has happened to me, I doubt I shall be returning to England.” She smiled, baring her teeth, and at that moment Gideon saw she was truly Charles Collier’s flesh and blood. “Not as a friend, at any rate. Fair winds, Gideon. I’ll see myself out.”

“Fair winds,” he said quietly as she closed the door behind her.

*   *   *

“Gideon?” Maria let herself into the parlor, looking around. “Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader said that Rowena—”

“She has been, and gone,” said Gideon. “I do not think we shall see her for some time, I fear.”

Maria raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I had rather hoped she might spend Christmas with us.”

Quickly, Gideon crossed the rug and gathered Maria in his arms. She yelped in surprise as he lifted her from the floor, holding her gaze fiercely.

“Maria. Tell me that you love me!”

She blinked. “Gideon, I do! I have told you many times.…”

“But always at moments of stress, or danger. Atop dragons high above London, amid Yaqui warriors baying for our blood! Tell me here, now, in the safety and comfort of our very own parlor, that you love me!”

There was urgency in his eyes, his voice, that infected her as well. “Put me down,” she whispered, “and I shall tell you. I shall show you.”

He lowered her to the rug, and she took his face in her hands. “Gideon Smith. Until I met you I thought I had no right to love, to hope that another could love me. I considered myself less than human, unable to enjoy the privileges of normal people. But Gloria Monday taught me, Gideon, that whatever I feel here”—she touched her head—“and here”—she placed his hand on her breast—“makes me what I am. And I feel that I am a woman, Gideon, despite outward—or rather inward—appearances. A woman who loves you very, very much.”

He broke out into a huge smile, and she kissed him, hard and long and deep, until she felt his body stirring against hers. She broke away, planting a smaller kiss on his lips, and said, “And now I am going to take you upstairs to your room, and I am going to show you how much of a woman I am, and how much I love you.”

She led him by the hand from the parlor, and he paused in the hall. “Wait,” he said. “I need to make one very quick call.…”

*   *   *

Gloria Monday considered herself someone apart from the ordinary masses of London, but even she had to admit that the past few days had been somewhat unusual. Jack the Ripper, gigantic lizards, fleeing through the sewers … she sighed happily, and not a little forlornly, looking at her unmade-up face in the cracked mirror in her small room. Back to real life, performing for those cabbage-throwing Philistines to raise enough money to go to Zurich, with the added complication that her affair with George was now out in the open.

She started at a knock at her door. The landlord, probably, after the rent arrears. Or word was out about her and George, and it was someone from the Britannia Theater in Hoxton, telling her the rest of her run there had been canceled due to the scandal. Or … she sighed and went to open the door a crack, throwing it wide as she saw the figure standing on the other side.

“George!”

He stepped in and laid the leather bag he was carrying on the bare floorboards, allowing Gloria to plant a kiss upon his cheek. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t shaved yet.”

Somewhat alarmingly, he withdrew a revolver from his overcoat pocket and began to check the chamber. “George…?”

He smiled. “I have just received a telephone call from Mr. Gideon Smith, and there is some business to attend to at Highgate Aerodrome. I would like it if you could accompany me.”

Gloria smothered him in kisses again until he playfully pushed her away. “So am I being deputized into the Metropolitan Police?”

“After a fashion. Are you ready?”

She fixed him with a hard stare. “I just told you I have not yet shaved, and I need my makeup. I’m not going
anywhere
like this.”

Lestrade sighed and checked his pocket watch. “As quick as you can, dear.”

*   *   *

There was nothing—nothing!—like the feeling of an airship pulling free of its tethers, nosing into the air with a sudden lurch, defying the gravity that had kept mankind earthbound for so many millennia. Rowena stood on the bridge of the
Skylady III,
her heart soaring higher and faster than the ’stat could rise in the sluggish, cold December air. How could they have thought to deny her this? Anger burned within her, flushing her cheeks. How
could
they?