by M. J. Tjia
“Why are you doing this? Why mutilate all those poor women?”
“I couldn’t let my poor pater’s work go unfinished. He can no longer fight for himself, but I can seek justice for him.”
“That’s justice, is it? Slaughtering young, defenceless women?” I ask.
“They weren’t just normal young women, though, were they? They weren’t decent ladies, at home, minding their families. They were diseased. They were immoral. A wound, an infection, in our society.”
“That’s nonsense,” I whisper.
He places the heavy knife on my stomach and with his free hand he strokes the loose hair from my face. “Your desire for pleasure causes too many problems, Heloise,” he says in a low voice, close to my ear, his warm breath on my face. It has the sourness of rancid milk, of decay. “Disease, illegitimacy, madness. I decided to further my father’s work. Cut pleasure from whores’ lives and cut the risk of procreation out of them while I was at it. This wanton desire of yours is dangerous. It needs to be destroyed. Have you read any of Darwin’s fascinating work? But of course you have. I’ve heard of your Mayfair evenings with gentlemen of science and culture.” He strokes my hair some more until I toss my head away. “Let’s say my method is more akin to artificial selection than that of the natural sort. Instead of choosing the good, Heloise, I am choosing to cull the bad.”
“But do the girls have to die?”
“Well, I’m not a doctor, like I said. Although I have learnt some rudimentary surgery from the good Dr Mordaunt. Not that he knew of it. He’s usually too far gone with whisky to know I’m skulking in the background.” He smirks down at me. “At first I meant for the tarts to live, but most of them didn’t which I realised wasn’t so unfortunate after all. I was quite excited when I found out one had survived and how she didn’t return straight back to the streets. But I had to finish her off too, although she was surrounded by a sentinel of infernal whores. What with her ghoulish account and the other whores’ deaths, my actions might mean an eventual end to prostitution.”
“Why don’t you just chop off your cock? And the cocks of all the men in London? Then there’d be an end to prostitution,” I mock, unable to stop the bitter words.
His eyes narrow as he looks down at me. He returns to his side-table and pulls something from the doctor’s bag. He holds up a rounded, metal contraption. “Do you know what this is?”
He punches my face as I breathe in to scream. In the following blinding moments he rams the gadget into my mouth, securing it behind my head. “It’s called a choke pear, meant for shutting you women up. My father had it specially designed for my mother when she finally succumbed to her hysteria. I’ve found it very useful in my work.”
A scorching pulse of pain beats beneath my cheek as I gag against the choke pear. I fold forward, fighting rising nausea.
He presses my head back against the chair and, waiting until he has my full attention, he flourishes the butcher’s knife. He slowly rakes its blade at an angle down the skin of my throat and across my bosom.
“I fucked ‘em all first, you know. Although I had to… cajole that young woman staying in your house.” He clutches the knife in his fist, and hacks at the bodice of my gown, slicing an opening down the middle. “I saw she’d recognised me outside Mordaunt’s the day he was arrested. I remembered her too from the morning I disposed of that blond girl’s body. I had to make sure she didn’t expose me. She wasn’t exactly a whore, but clearly I had work to do on her too.”
I think back to the bright, sunny day Eleanor and I watched the arrest outside Mordaunt’s. Think of how we watched Bill escort Henry past Ignatius to the police buggy, surrounded by all the uniformed policemen and the Inspector. Think of how they each had on a brown suit. How stupid of me. My breaths come in noisy gasps, my chest spasming up and down so that he nicks my skin. A patch of blood blooms through my white chemise.
“So I followed you home. You had no idea. I’ve had a lot of practice shadowing people for Mordaunt, after all.” He shook his head at me. “But a chink? You had a dirty chink there. There really is no end to your depravity, woman.” He pulls the fabric of my gown apart. “And I see you found Mordaunt’s diary downstairs. Handy that I saw it in the bedroom when I killed that girl. My initials are against some of the entries, after all. And, of course, if I want to continue with my work in the future I need only peruse that notebook for the whereabouts of all the whores in Waterloo.”
He sweeps his hand over my breasts, cupping one, the knife’s cold edge resting against my skin. “I’ve noticed how much pleasure you women receive from these. I thought the only pleasure was ours.” He squeezes my breast so that I wince. “My usual experiences with whores are mere romps – bent over a table, a quick one on a musty bed.” He’s thoughtful for a moment. “Although I do prefer a hard one against a wall.”
He licks my nipple before sucking it into his mouth. I feel nothing.
“So I sliced ‘em off,” he says, straightening up. “It’s a pity you weren’t home the night I finished off the other two. I was like a fox. I was going to clean out the whole hen house – her, you, your chink, the whore-house maid. After all, finishing you whores is not unlike killing chickens – a lot of squawking, then blessed silence.” He pulls his snuff box from his pocket and inhales, his eyes shut in momentary contentment. He turns back to his surgical instruments and picks up the scalpel.
My eyes water as the choke pear stabs against the roof of my mouth with the slightest of movements. I try to shrink as far back into the chair as possible when he approaches me again.
The scalpel hovers above my bare skin. “I’d like you to survive. You’d be a perfect specimen of chastity versus pleasure, and its terrible outcomes. But, alas, despite my negligible medical skills, you definitely have to die. You are more dangerous than the rest, my dear, because you think you are entitled to the freedoms of a man.”
My bladder loosens as the wretched scalpel lowers to my breast. He presses the sharp point to the edge of my nipple, and the blade slips easily into my flesh. I scream against the choke pear. I flinch from the keen, searing pain, knocking his hand aside.
He lifts the scalpel away. “This won’t do. I cannot do a neat job with you struggling against me.”
Pulling the tie from around his neck, he binds my upper arm with a savage tightness. Once the make-shift tourniquet is secured he turns to his instruments and, after some moments, returns with a syringe.
“In America they use opium in this form to relieve you feeble women from your special pains,” he says, as he forces the needle’s point into the vein of my arm. “I hope I have the dosage right – although I hardly think it matters.”
I sink into the morphine almost immediately. I feel weightless, at peace, a lovely warmth engulfs my body. I retch against the choke pear, hot vomit rising in my throat. As darkness surrounds me, a great, black moth envelopes Ignatius, its wings beating furiously.
LI LEEN
“Your skin is as smooth as polished ebony, dark and tight,” Tiri said, as he ran his finger down my forearm.
I trembled and pulled back. “Please stop touching me,” I said.
I stood to get away from him, but he followed and stepped close, so close my breast almost touched his.
“How full your lips are, you tempting little fox-fairy, and when you open your mouth, yes, like that, your mouth is pink, as pink as the flesh of a fig.”
I felt his breath on my own so I moved back again and said, “Please, leave my room, Tiri.”
He laughed. “Beloved, this is my room in my house, and now you are mine too.”
I stared at him, but he wasn’t really looking at me. All those times Mother pleaded with him to stop staring at me, he was not really seeing me. He was availing himself of my body with his eyes, those same eyes that now followed the lines of my breasts, and lingered. That flickered over my waist line, over my hips, down my tightly clad limbs. The fear I felt melted away until a sore hardness stiffened i
nside me. He was so blinded, he did not see me draw out my scaling knife. I slid the blade into his throat, under the jawline.
Then he looked at me.
His warm blood sprayed my skin as softly as a spider treads, and he sank to the floor. The life shuddered out of him, and all his gore, and words, and rapacity seeped into Mother’s special Persian rug. I wiped the knife on the side of my sarong and gazed at the beads of blood on my arm that glistened like ripe pomegranate seeds.
And here I am again, many years later, wiping the drops of another man’s blood from my skin. I still wonder what it was that tormented my mother so greatly that she felt she had to take her own life. Was it her husband’s lust for me? Her daughter? Or was it that I was her accursed, yet beloved, half-gweilo, who burdened her with bad luck? Perhaps she knew that it would be impossible for her to keep me safe from Tiri’s attentions.
It can be difficult to protect a daughter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Heloise… Jia Li… Heloise, my child, wake up.”
I stir, but I’m only forced to open my eyes when slapped across the cheek. “Bloody hell,” I protest, pressing my hand gently over my wounded cheek. The effort is almost too much. Morphine-induced lethargy weighs upon my limbs.
Amah gathers me into a sitting position. “We have to get out of here, Heloise. You must get up.” She tears away a strip of my ruined chemise and wipes the vomit from my chest and chin.
I lean into Amah’s bosom. The horrors of the past hour come back to me in dizzying clarity. I’m no longer bound, no longer choking on the mouth-piece. I let out a sob and clutch at Amah’s arm. “Where is he?”
“You’re safe now, Jia Li,” replies Amah. We both look down at the cuts to my skin, and Amah clicks her tongue. She carefully draws my bodice together and tucks her own cloak around my shoulders.
I bury my face in Amah’s shoulder. “Oh, Mama, I was so scared. So scared.” I sob dryly.
“I know, child, I know,” says Amah, patting me on the back. “But no good will come from sniffling over it.”
My face is still pressed against her chest, but I manage a weak grin. “Can’t you be tender just this once?”
“What good would that do?” she says. But her cold, bony fingers grasp me closer.
We stay like that for only a matter of seconds before she says, briskly, “Come. We must leave.” She pulls my veil back in place before covering her own face. Placing the handgun in her reticule, she takes me by the arm. “The police may be here at any moment.”
“But that’s a good thing, surely. We can tell them who the murderer is.”
I lean heavily against my mother as we stagger from the room.
“Not such a good thing,” she answers. She pauses for a moment and nods towards the floor on the other side of the room.
On his back, his white shirt shredded with several gaping, crimson slashes, lies Ignatius, quite dead.
“The police will work out that he murdered all those young women,” says Amah. “But they need not know that it was I who had the pleasure of murdering him.”
Taff helps us climb into my carriage which he’s parked around the corner.
I lift the veil from my face and rest my head against the cushions. “How did you two find me?”
“We followed you.”
I frown. “Followed me? But you were locked up.”
“Taff freed me.”
“What?” I lift my heavy head to look across at Amah.
“He provided me with an alibi. We were with the Inspector most of the morning.”
I shake my head in wonder. “So when I was at the station, the Inspector was with you, all along?”
“I suppose so.”
“What was the alibi he gave you?”
She lifts her chin and gazes steadily out the window. “He just told the Inspector he knew of my whereabouts for the whole evening of Eleanor’s death.” Her ears turn plum as she speaks.
“Well, how’s that convincing? I told them the same thing, but they didn’t believe me.”
“He said he was with me… with me,” she stresses the words, slowly. “For the whole night.” Her hard, dark eyes widen defensively.
It takes my drug-impeded mind a moment to catch on, and then I hoot with laughter.
“So, Taff pretended that he was with you, under the covers, for the whole evening?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t realise he was so brave.” I continue to chuckle, my eyes on my rigid mother. “The police think you two are living in sin? Under my roof?”
“Yes.”
I press my lips shut, only allowing myself a little smirk, until a troubling thought occurs to me.
“It’s bloody lucky for me that you followed. Did you see me at the station?”
“The Inspector had just released me when we saw you hopping into a cab. Taff collected your carriage and we followed. We assumed you were returning to Mayfair.”
“If you were following me, why did it take you so long to save me?”
“We lost you for a few minutes. We asked for you in the tobacco shop and the butcher’s, but it was not until we spoke with the milliner that we found out where you’d gone. Even then we weren’t sure where you’d disappeared to from that slaughter yard.”
By the light from the carriage window I can see the damp, dark patches upon the black wool of Amah’s gown, and a fine spray of blood on the skin of her throat. I turn my gaze out the window. My thoughts are drawn into a loop of the nightmare I’ve narrowly missed. A tear slips from the corner of my eye.
“I know, I know. Snivelling will get me nowhere.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I scrutinise my face in the mirror. The bruises to my mouth are clearly visible by the sunlight that shines past the open curtains. There are dark smudges under my eyes, although I slept well and dreamlessly after drinking the dose of laudanum Amah mixed for me the night before. I’m finding it difficult to stop shivering even though Bundle has repeateadly stoked the fire. I tenderly dab cream and powder around my lips to hide the blemishes, and apply a smidgen of tinted lip colour. Testing a smile in the mirror, I flinch at the sting that shears through the split in my upper lip. Well, I won’t smile then. God knows, I’ve nothing to smile about today, in any case. I pull open my peignoir and grumpily scrutinise the bandages Amah has wrapped around my wounds. I’ve no idea how I’m to explain them away to Hatterleigh. In fact it might be best to go away for a couple of weeks. But first I have things to deal with.
The blue dress I’d left for Eleanor at the morgue lies across my bed. The girl’s detestable family sent it back to me last night and while Amah and I had discussed what to do with it, Amah came across a crumpled page of paper in the gown’s pocket. It was a letter from Eleanor to me.
I pick it up to re-read. Fury makes my head ache.
A glint on the carpet catches my eye. The cranberry glass snuff-bottle. Sweeping it up in my hand, I wrench open the window and hurl it out onto the cobblestones. For several minutes I stare at the sparkling pink shards scattered upon the road.
“What are you thinking, Heloise?” asks Amah from behind.
“That I might retire.”
Amah snorts. “Retire? Where would you go? What would you do?”
I watch Amah pull a chemise and petticoats from the dresser drawers.
“I have enough money to live comfortably for a while. Perhaps it’s time I move to my house in Brighton – that would cut costs.” I sit back down at the dressing table and stare at myself in the mirror. What other options do I have? I’m not that good an actress that I could live off my wages. Not in this style anyway. Seamstress? It isn’t worth the hardship. Governess? Nobody would have me. The only other option I can think of is marriage, but aren’t the freedoms of my current situation preferable? “Maybe I could just continue with Sir Thomas’ work.”
“That wouldn’t pay for the champagne,” says Amah. “You’d be back at it soon enough, Jia Li.”
“Maybe not.” I step into the petticoat that she holds out for me. I then wait patiently while she buttons my chemise.
“Why do you think like this now?” she asks, as she lifts an embroidered gown over my head. A new delivery from Worth.
I think of Eleanor and the other dead women. I think of the despicable Silvestre and Tilly and all the other renters I know. It isn’t that I’m scared. It isn’t even that I’m sorry for them. I’m angry. Angry that we’re all vulnerable to the whims of all manner of men.
Before I can answer Amah there’s a sharp rap at the front door.
I pick up Eleanor’s letter and tuck it into my cleavage. “This will be very satisfying, Amah. You should watch through the peacock’s tail.”
Mr Priestly is standing by the fireplace when I enter the drawing room.
He waves a letter in my direction. “What is the meaning of this missive, with its sly undertones and almost threatening tone?” he demands immediately as he sees me.
I sit down on the sofa and spread my skirts neatly around myself, patting down the creases. “Ah, a threatening tone. You noticed that, did you?”
“I most certainly did.” Blotches of colour mottle his skin. “How dare you send for me in this way.”
“Well, why did you come then, sir?”
His jaw bobs up and down as he tries to answer. “Well… I was curious, I suppose. Curious to know what a little trumped up tramp would have to say to me.”
I manage to keep my temper in check because I know I’ve got the upper hand. “Why don’t you take a seat, sir, so we can discuss this matter in a more – I was going to say friendly, but let us say – businesslike manner.”
