Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper

by David Barnett

  There would be no oil for the heater until the next batch of invoices was paid, that was for sure. She unfolded the paper that bore the address of the Midgrave Sanatorium and, most crucially, a room number on the third floor. The room was—according to the deliveryman she had accosted before dawn that morning, and whom she had paid handsomely for the information—at the rear of the dark building. The light was falling rapidly, and dim gas lamps were flaring in the dirty windows. Rowena stuffed the paper back into her jacket and edged around the boundary wall to the back of Midgrave.

  The window was barred, as she had expected, but there was a solid growth of ivy up the back of the building, and a small window in the center of the third floor without a grate. Rowena expertly pulled herself up the ivy, and by the time she reached the window, despite the cold and flurries of snow that spun around her, she was sweating beneath her thick leather jacket and jodhpurs. She took a moment to pull off her leather flying helmet, tucking it into her jacket and running a glove through her short auburn hair. Then she peered through the small window, into a deserted corridor dimly lit by candles in the sconces set into the wood paneling. Quickly, before she changed her mind, she pressed against the glass until it cracked, then broke, and reached in to unlatch the window and pull it open, sliding headfirst through the gap and pulling herself to the threadbare carpet.

  Rowena crouched on the floor, but no one came to investigate the sound. She picked up the pieces of glass and threw them through the broken pane, then pulled the tattered lace curtain across the window. It wouldn’t fool anyone for long, not the way the icy wind sent it billowing into the corridor, but she had the feeling that no one would be up here before the evening meal was served in any case. And that would not be for another hour, if the staff stuck to the routines she had observed from her surreptitious scrutiny of Midgrave over the past two days.

  The room she wanted was the last one down the corridor to her left, a simple wooden door. She rattled the handle: latched, but only with the simplest of locks. A matter of a few seconds’ work with her lockpicks, and the chambers clicked. Cautiously, Rowena opened the door and looked inside.

  The room was lit by a single gaslight and dominated by a metal-framed bed. The walls were whitewashed and grimy, and there was a simple wooden bedside cabinet, a rickety chair, and a large wardrobe, scuffed and hanging with cobwebs. Beneath the bed frame a chamber pot lurked. Rowena wrinkled her nose. A chamber pot in need of emptying.

  “Hello?”

  The figure in the bed was so thin, so tiny, that Rowena had hardly registered it was there at all, sticklike beneath the blankets, propped up on lumpy pillows. A woman, looking twice as old as the fifty years Rowena knew her to be, her skin almost translucent, her white hair as insubstantial as dandelion clocks, her face engraved with tragedy and loss.

  Her voice came again, the exhalation of a dry tomb, as pale as her body.

  “Hello? Nurse?”

  Rowena quietly closed the door behind her. “Hello,” she said.

  The woman’s eyes flickered and she began to shake alarmingly, putting her hands together as though in prayer until the tremors passed. “Is it time for my medication?”

  “Not yet,” said Rowena, crossing the bare floorboards and perching on the end of the chair. “How are you?”

  The woman blinked, as though the question were meaningless. “How am I? I … I have no idea. Are you a nurse?”

  “How are you liking it here?” asked Rowena, looking around. It wasn’t dirty, so much as half-abandoned. Unloved. Uncared for. She looked at the woman and felt a sudden stab to her heart.

  “It isn’t as nice as the other place,” sighed the woman. “They don’t speak very much. Just bring me my medication and my food.” She smiled, and Rowena suddenly feared her face might tear from the effort. “But you’re here. You’re nice.”

  Rowena fought back sudden tears. “Do you know what day it is?”

  The woman seemed to weigh more heavily on the bed, on her pillows. “Yes,” she whispered, barely audible. “Yes, I do. It’s the day my daughter died, isn’t it?”

  Rowena said nothing, and the woman’s spidery hand felt for hers, trembling and shaking as it moved across the blanket. “You came to see me before, didn’t you? At the other place?”

  “Yes. A year ago. Do you know how long ago it was that your daughter died?”

  The woman turned her head. “My daughter is dead? Jane is dead?”

  “Ten years ago,” said Rowena, taking off her glove and clasping the woman’s hand. “Ten years ago today.”

  A single tear rolled down the woman’s cheek, as though it was all her desiccated body could summon. She said, as dry as sandpaper, “I don’t like it here.”

  Then Rowena felt wetness on her own cheeks, and a sob building within her that threatened to be torn forth. She swallowed it down and wiped her cuff across her face.

  “I know. I know,” she said soothingly.

  The woman took her hand back and held it at her breast, trembling with those terrible shakes again, her eyes suddenly wide. “Are you a ghost?”

  Rowena opened her mouth to speak, then stopped. Was that the sound of footsteps in the corridor? But the nurses weren’t due for … She stood up suddenly, at the voices that rang out clearly beyond the door.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Gaunt. I can’t think how the window was smashed. It must have been children.…”

  “I’m not sure I pay you for this sort of service,” rumbled a lower voice. “We might have to think about renegotiating our contract.”

  Rowena stood there, frozen. It was him.

  Gaunt.

  And she was trapped.

  Keys jangled and slotted into the lock, then there was a pause.

  “Is there another problem, nurse?”

  “I could have sworn … this door … oh, ah, nothing, Mr. Gaunt.”

  The door opened inward, and a small nurse in a plain white apron and a cap pinned to her dark hair entered first, followed by a man clutching a stovepipe hat and a cane, a waistcoat fastened across his bulging stomach, his muttonchops twitching as he glared around the room with pinprick eyes.

  Through the crack she had left in the door to the wardrobe, where she crouched amid rows of thick coats—none of them belonging to the woman, she guessed—that stank of mothballs and damp, Rowena watched the man glare with undisguised loathing at the woman in the bed.

  At his wife. Edward Gaunt, evidently no stranger to luxury, given the cut of his suit and the polish to his boots, and his half-dead wife, Catherine, all but forgotten in this misbegotten waiting room for the afterlife.

  Rowena could have shot him dead where he stood.

  Instead, she did nothing, just watched through the crack in the door as Gaunt dismissed the nurse and stood at the foot of the bed, regarding his wife who looked, in age and infirmity, more like his mother.

  “How are you?” he asked eventually, with effort.

  “Edward? I don’t like it here. No one ever comes.”

  “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” he snapped. He paused, as though reeling in his temper. “You know it’s for the best, Catherine. With your condition. You know you are a danger to yourself. You need constant care, and I simply cannot provide it, not with the amount of time the business takes.”

  “Do you know what day it is, Edward?”

  “I’d be surprised if you do,” he muttered, and Rowena had to stop herself from bursting out of the wardrobe and strangling him.

  “It’s the day Jane died.”

  That seemed to stop him in his tracks, and he frowned, his sideburns bristling. “Ah, yes, well. I suppose it is. Best not to think about that, eh, Catherine?” He rubbed his chin. “Perhaps I’ll have a word with that nurse, get them to look again at your dosage. No good will come of getting yourself upset.”

  “A ghost came to see me, Edward.”

  “What are you talking about, woman?” He frowned.

  “A ghost. I thought she was a n
urse, but she was a ghost.”

  He shook his head. “See? This is why you have to be here, Catherine.” He dug into his overcoat. “I need you to sign these checks. For the business. I’ve been trying to get all your assets formally signed over to me, Catherine, but you wouldn’t believe the bloody hoops a man has to jump through.”

  He shook his head and pushed a pen into her hand. “Bloody ridiculous. If they could only see you, rambling on about ghosts. Sign here. And here. It doesn’t matter, Catherine, keep your hand still and just make a bloody mark! And here.”

  “Are you staying, Edward? I get so terribly lonely.”

  Gaunt pocketed the checks. “I am insufferably busy, I am afraid, Catherine. I will come to see you after Christmas, if the business allows. You concentrate on getting well.”

  “Then I might come home?” she asked tremulously, hopefully.

  He smiled, not a pleasant thing to see. “We’ll see, Catherine. But don’t hold your breath. At least, not until I have full authority over your finances.” He felt in his pocket. “I have brought you some medicine. To help you get well.”

  Rowena leaned forward as far as she dared, watching Gaunt unstopper a small bottle and waft it for a long moment under Catherine’s nose. “Breathe deeply, my dear. It will hasten your recovery.”

  When he seemed satisfied that she had inhaled enough, he replaced the stopper. “And now, I am afraid I must depart.”

  “Please don’t go, Edward,” she said, holding out a bonelike arm. “Please.”

  “Perhaps your ghost will come back to keep you company, Catherine.”

  He rapped on the door and the nurse appeared in short order, and Gaunt left without a backward glance.

  * * *

  “Hello? Nurse?”

  Rowena let herself out of the wardrobe and sat down by Catherine Gaunt. “No, it’s me again.”

  The woman shied away. “The ghost.”

  “Yes,” said Rowena. “The ghost. But it’s not the dead you must be wary of, it’s the living. Why has he locked you up in this place?”

  “Edward? He has my best interests at heart. He tells me so.”

  “What is that medicine he gives you? Do the nurses know? It seems to me he keeps you drugged and complacent, little more than a prisoner,” said Rowena. “While he spends your money.”

  “He is my husband,” said Catherine Gaunt simply.

  Rowena stood. “I have to go. I’m sorry. I can’t just stand by and let this happen.”

  Catherine looked up hopefully. “Will you come again?”

  Rowena nodded. “Yes. I will.”

  Catherine sank back into the pillows. “Fifteen years. Fifteen years to the day. Poor Jane. Poor, poor Jane.”

  “Jane is beyond pity,” said Rowena. “It’s yourself you should worry about.”

  Quietly, she let herself out of the room and locked the door behind her.

  * * *

  Gaunt must have been haranguing the nurses or arguing over the bills for his wife’s care, because he still had not emerged from Midgrave by the time Rowena had climbed down the ivy, stolen across the lawns, and climbed over the iron gates to where his brougham waited. The driver poured himself hot drinks from a flask while the team of two horses steamed and stamped in the freezing night air, flurries of snow battering at the windows of the red-liveried cab.

  The driver was parked a little way up the track and did not see Rowena letting herself quietly down from the gates. She heard voices from Midgrave and through the wrought iron saw a rectangle of light as the door was opened and the shape of Gaunt, flanked by nurses, emerged. The carriage driver glanced over the wall from his perch and then leaned forward to pat the horses.

  There was Rowena’s chance, and she stole it. Bent double, she ran for the rear of the brougham, swinging herself under the chassis and bracing her feet against the front axle, her arms against the rear. She heard the iron gates swing open and the driver climb down; staring at his boots, she immediately regretted her recklessness. She could already feel the cold steel of the axle through her thick gloves, and the awkward starfish position was beginning to give her cramps in her leg muscles.

  Idiot, she chastised herself. What are you thinking? What are you doing?

  But the brougham was already lurching as Gaunt climbed inside and the driver pulled himself up to the front, and the carriage lurched forward as the driver gave the whip to the horses. Edward Gaunt was going home, and for better or worse, Rowena Fanshawe was going with him.

  * * *

  It was slow going through the snow-packed streets, for which Rowena was alternately thankful and miserable. Thankful because the roads the carriage took were potholed and pitted, and more than once she was almost rattled loose; any faster and she would certainly have lost her grip. Miserable because the cold was intense and the wheels threw up freezing slush and, once, a slurry of horse dung. But just as she felt she could hold on no longer, the driver reined in the horses and the brougham pulled up on a well-paved street lined, as far as she could see from beneath the carriage, with plane trees and hedges bordering long gardens.

  Before Gaunt could descend from the carriage she dropped down to the road and crawled out from the back of the brougham, rising to a crouch and running for the nearest of the trees. She stood behind it, shivering and wet, and tried to get her bearings. From the location of such landmarks as she could make out in the misty, snowbound night—the distant crown of the Lady of Liberty flood barrier, the tall ziggurats of the financial district—she surmised they had traveled west from Southwark, and the grand facades of the houses put her, she thought, somewhere around Kennington.

  Edward Gaunt had not done badly for himself while his wife languished in Midgrave. Not badly at all.

  Rowena watched Gaunt arguing with the brougham driver over the fare, then stomping off through the snow toward a tall gate garlanded with climbing evergreens, beyond which lay a mid-terraced house with the lights burning, well tended and most desirable. After he let himself in and the carriage departed, Rowena risked slipping from behind the tree and following Gaunt’s tracks. He had let himself into the house by the time she reached the gate and she stood there, hands on the ironwork, watching his silhouette pass through the hallway and into the parlor.

  She hated him as she had hated no human being ever before in her life.

  Something settled in her gut, something hard and cold, like the iron she grasped. It would be but a moment’s work.… She could be in there and teach Gaunt a lesson. A proper lesson. Finally, after all this time …

  She was idly playing with the latch when there was a cough from beside her. Rowena looked around to see a girl, aged no more than ten or twelve, swaddled in a muffler and a thick coat.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  Rowena blinked. “Sorry?”

  The girl took a deep breath. “Sorry. That was rude. You’re Rowena Fanshawe. The Belle of the Airways.” In her gloved hand she held a copy of World Marvels & Wonders, damp from the snow. “I read about you all the time. I just saw you and couldn’t believe it. But it’s you.”

  Rowena stared at the girl, then at the periodical. She asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Maud, Miss Fanshawe. You’re my favorite. I mean, Gideon Smith is all right, but … well. I can’t be Gideon Smith when I grow up.” She put her face down shyly. “But I could be Rowena Fanshawe.”

  The weight in her belly turned out not to be iron after all. It was ice. And it was thawing. She crouched down in front of the girl. “Maud. Maud, you can be whatever you want to be. I promise. And thank you.”

  “What for, miss?”

  Rowena stood up, gazing back at Gaunt’s house. “I couldn’t put it into words, Maud. But thank you. Now you run along home, yes? It’s cold and dark, Maud. Yes, so very cold and dark.”

  She hardly noticed the girl, clutching her magazine, running off through the snow, so intent was she on the black shape of Edward Gaunt in the parlor of his Kennington house.
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br />   7

  IDENTITY CRISIS

  What are you?

  Maria studied her reflection in the mirror on her dressing table. She had brushed her hair and applied a little perfume to her neck. She had selected a long silk nightgown that tied at her breast with a soft bow. She looked like a woman. A beautiful young woman.

  She considered the words dispassionately, without pride or vanity. “Beautiful.” “Young.” “Woman.” Was she any of these things? By the standards of other women she supposed she was beautiful; her features were symmetrical, her hair blond and straight, her lips full, her eyes clear. Gideon told her she was beautiful, and she caught the surreptitious glances of other men when she walked in London’s streets. But if she pressed her stomach just so her torso would open up, miraculously, revealing the secrets within: pistons and gears, rods and wheels, copper tubes and glass pipes through which pumped viscous, dark liquids. And in her head sat the brain of a murdered woman, poor Annie Crook, killed for the crime of loving above her station.

  Young? From the notebook left behind by her errant creator, Professor Hermann Einstein, Maria knew it had been a mere three years since the brain of Annie Crook, the mysterious Atlantic Artifact, and the hitherto mechanical yet lifelike automaton Professor Einstein had created for his own amusement had been brought together to create Maria.

  And … a woman? “I refer you to my previous answers,” she muttered, tugging the brush viciously through her yielding hair. Was she a woman? Did she deserve to sit here, in these pretty night things, with scented skin—skin made of the finest kid leather!—and dare to hope that a man like Gideon Smith could love her?

  Maria picked up the book from the dressing table that Mrs. Cadwallader had lent to her. Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society; With a Glance at Bad Habits. The page she had kept with an embroidered bookmark began, “Ladies of good taste seldom wear jewelry in the morning; and when they do, they confine themselves to trinkets of gold, or those in which opaque stones only are introduced. Ornaments with brilliant stones are unsuited for a morning costume.”