Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  In the year 1853, London’s East End was an ethnically diverse, poverty-stricken, industrial cesspool. The world’s poor clustered in overcrowded hovels ten and twelve to a room, fought and drank and fornicated with rough sailors from every port city on the globe, and traded every disease known to humanity.

  Women carrying unborn children swallowed quack medical remedies laced with arsenic and strychnine and heavy metals like sugar of lead. Men who would become fathers worked in metal-smelting foundries and shipyards, which in turn poured heavy metals into the drinking water and the soil. Sanitation consisted of open ditches where raw sewage was dumped, human waste was poured, and drinking water was secured. In such areas, a certain percentage of embryos whose dividing cells, programmed with delicate genetic codes, inevitably underwent massive genetic and teratogenic alterations.

  And so it was that in Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, in that year of 1853, after a protracted debate, many condemnations of a God who would permit such a child to be born, and a number of drunken rages culminating in beatings of the woman who had produced this particular unfortunate offspring, the child was named John Boleslaus Lachley and reared as a son in a family which had already produced four dowerless sisters. Because he survived, and grew to manhood in London’s East End, where he was tormented into acquiring a blazing ambition and the means to escape, the infant born without a verifiable gender grew in ways no innocent should ever have to grow. And once grown, John Lachley made very certain that the world would never, ever forget what it had done to him.

  On a quiet, rainy Saturday morning in the waning days of August, 1888, Dr. John Lachley, who had long since dropped the foreign “Boleslaus” from his name, sat in a tastefully decorated parlour in an exceedingly comfortable house on Cleveland Street, London, opposite his latest patient, and brooded over his complete dissatisfaction with the entire morning while daydreaming about his last encounter with the one client who would finally bring into his life everything his soul yearned to possess.

  The room was cold and damp, despite the coal fire blazing in the hearth. August in London was generally a fine month, with flowers in bloom and warm breezes carrying away the fog and coal smoke and damp chill of early autumn with glorious blue skies and sunshine. But rain squalls and thunderstorms and an unseasonable chill had gripped the whole South of England for months, leaving arthritic bones aching and gloomy spirits longing for a summer that had seemed indefinitely postponed and then abruptly at an end before it had properly begun. John Lachley was tired of hearing the week’s complaints, never mind those which had been lodged in all the previous weeks since winter had supposedly ceased to plague them.

  He had little tolerance for fools and whiners, did John Lachley, but they paid his bills—most handsomely—so he sat in his parlour with the curtains drawn to dim the room and smiled and smiled at the endless parade of complainers and smiled some more as he collected his money and let his mind drift to remembered delights in another darkened room, with Albert Victor’s hands and mouth on his body and the rewards of Albert Victor’s social status firmly within his grasp.

  He had been smiling steadily for the past hour or more, concealing his loathing for his current patient with an air of concerned understanding, while the bloody idiot of a Liverpudlian who’d appeared on his doorstep rambled on and endlessly on about his health, his illnesses, his medicines, his incessant chills and shaking hands, his itching skin and aching head . . .

  It was enough to drive a sane man round the twist and gone. Which was where, in John Lachley’s private opinion, this pathetic cotton merchant had long since departed. Hypochondria was the least of Mr. James Maybrick’s woes. The fool daily swallowed an appalling amount of “medicinal” strychnine and arsenic in the form of powders prescribed by his physician, some doddering imbecile named Hopper, who should have known better than to prescribe arsenic in such enormous quantities—five and six doses a day, for God’s sake. And as if that weren’t enough, Maybrick was supplementing the powdered arsenic with arsenic pills, obtained from a chemist. And on top of that, he was downing whole bottles of Fellow’s Syrup, a quack medicine available over any chemist’s counter, liberally laced with arsenic and strychnine.

  And Maybrick was so dull of mind, he honestly could not comprehend why he now suffered acute symptoms of slow arsenic poisoning! Grant me patience, Lachley thought savagely, the patience to deal with paying customers who want any answer but the obvious one. If he simply told this imbecile, “Stop taking the bloody arsenic!” Maybrick would vanish with all his lovely money and never darken Lachley’s doorstep again. He would also, of course, die somewhat swiftly of the very symptoms which would kill him, anyway, whether or not he discontinued the poisonous drug.

  Since the idiot would die of arsenic poisoning either way, he might as well pay Lachley for the privilege of deluding him otherwise.

  Lachley interrupted to give Maybrick the one medication he knew would help—the same drug he gave all his patients before placing them into a mesmeric trance. Most people, he had discovered, could easily be hypnotized without the aid of drugs, but some could not and every one of his patients expected some spectacular physical sensation or other. His own, unique blend of pharmaceuticals certainly guaranteed that. Success as a mesmeric physician largely depended upon simple slight-of-hand tricks and the plain common sense of giving his patients precisely what they wanted.

  So he mixed up his potent chemical aperitif, served in a glass of heavy port wine to help disguise the unpleasant flavor, and said, “Now, sir, drink this medicine down, then give me the rest of your medical history while it takes effect.”

  The drug-laced wine went down in two gulps, then Maybrick kept talking.

  “I contracted malaria, you see, in America, trading for cotton shares in Norfolk, Virginia. Quinine water gave me no relief, so an American physician prescribed arsenic powder. Eleven years, I’ve taken it and the malaria rarely troubles me, although I’ve found I require more arsenic than I used to. . . . Poor Bunny, that’s my wife, I met her on a return trip from Norfolk, Bunny worries so about me, dear child. She hasn’t a brain in her pretty American head, but she does fret. God knows I have tried to gain relief. I even contacted an occultist once, for help with my medical disorders. A Londoner, the lady was. Claimed she could diagnose rare diseases by casting horoscopes. Told me to stop taking my medicines! Can you imagine anything more absurd? That was two years ago, sir, and my health has grown so alarmingly worse and Dr. Hopper is such a bumbling fool. So when I decided to visit my brother Michael, yes, that’s right, Michael Maybrick, the composer, he publishes under the name Stephen Adams, I said to myself, James, you must consult a London specialist, your life is most assuredly worth the time and money spent, what with the wife and children. So when I saw your advert in The Times, Dr. Lachley, that you were a practicing physician and an occultist with access to the guidance of the spirit world for diagnosis of difficult, rare illnesses, and that you use the latest techniques in mesmeric therapies, well, I simply knew I must see you . . .”

  And on, and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, about his nux vomica medications, his New York prescriptions that Dr. Hopper had so insultingly torn up . . .

  John Lachley sat and smiled and thought If I were to jab my fingers into his larynx, I could put him on the floor without a sound, cut off his testicles, and feed them to him one bollock at a time. If he even has any. Must have, he said he’d fathered children. Poor little bastards. Might be doing them a favor, if I simply slit their father’s throat and dumped his body in the Thames. Wonder what Albert Victor is doing now? Christ, I’d a thousand times rather be swiving Victoria’s brain-damaged grandson than listening to this idiot. Dumb as a fence post, Albert Victor, but what he can do with that great, lovely Hampton wick of his . . . And God knows, he will be King of England one day.

  A small, satisfied smile stole across John Lachley’s narrow face. It wasn’t every Englishman who could claim to have balled the future monarch of the British Empir
e. Nor was it just any Englishman who could tell a future king where to go, what to say, and how to behave—and expect to be slavishly obeyed. Stupider than a stick, God bless him, and John Lachley had him wrapped right around his finger.

  Or rather, a point considerably lower than his finger.

  Albert Victor, secretly bi-sexual outside certain very private circles, had been ecstatic to discover John’s physical . . . peculiarities. It was, as they said, a match created in—

  “Doctor?”

  He blinked at James Maybrick, having to restrain the instantaneous impulse to draw the revolver concealed in his coat and shoot him squarely between the eyes.

  “Yes, Mr. Maybrick?” He managed to sound politely concerned rather than homicidal.

  “I was wondering when you might be able to perform the mesmeric operation?”

  Lachley blinked for a moment, then recalled Maybrick’s request to be placed in a mesmeric trance in order to diagnose his disease and effect a “mesmeric surgical cure.” Maybrick was blinking slowly at him, clearly growing muzzy from the medication Lachley had given him.

  “Why, whenever you are ready, sir,” Lachley answered with a faint smile.

  “Then you do think there is hope?”

  Lachley’s smile strengthened. “My dear sir, there is always hope.” One can certainly hope you will pass into an apoplectic fit while in trance and rid the world of your unfortunate presence. “Lie back on the daybed, here, and allow yourself to drift with the medication and the sound of my voice.” Maybrick shifted from the overstuffed chair where he’d spent the past hour giving his “medical history,” moving so unsteadily, Lachley was required to help him across to the daybed.

  “Now, then, Mr. Maybrick, imagine that you are standing at the top of a very long staircase which descends into darkness. With each downward step you take, your body grows heavier and more relaxed, your mind drifts freely. Step down, Mr. Maybrick, one step at a time, into the safe and comfortable darkness, warm and cozy as a mother’s embrace . . .”

  By the end of twenty-five steps, Mr. James Maybrick, Esquire, was in deep trance, having been neatly drugged into a state of not-quite oblivion.

  “Can you hear my voice, Mr. Maybrick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good. You’ve been ill, Mr. Maybrick?”

  “Yes. Very ill. So many different symptoms, I can’t tell what is wrong.”

  Nothing new, there. “Well, then, Mr. Maybrick, what is it that is troubling you the most, just now?”

  It was an innocent question, completely in keeping with a patient suffering from numerous physical complaints. All he was really interested in was narrowing down which symptom troubled the fool the most, so he could place post-hypnotic suggestions in the man’s drugged mind to reduce the apparent levels of that symptom, something he had done successfully with a score of other patients suffering more from hysteria and nervousness than real illnesses. He had been following the work of that fellow in Vienna, Dr. Freud, with considerable interest, and had begun a few experiments of his own—

  “It’s the bitch!”

  John Lachley nearly fell backward out of his chair.

  Maybrick, his drugged face twisting into a mask of rage, snarled it out. “She troubles me! The goddamned bitch, she troubles me more than anything in the world! Faithless whore! Her and her whoremaster! I’ll kill them both, I swear to God, the way I killed that filthy little prostitute in Manchester! Squeezed the life out of her with my own hands, thinking of that bitch the whole time! Wasn’t pleasurable, though, damn her eyes, I wanted it to be pleasurable! I’ll squeeze the life out of that bitch, I swear I will, I’ll cut her wide open with a knife, goddamn Brierly, fucking my own wife . . .”

  Stunned, open-mouthed silence gripped John Lachley for long moments as he stared at the raving cotton merchant, for once completely at a loss as to how he ought to proceed. He’d never stumbled across anything even remotely like this homicidal fury. What had he said? . . . killed that filthy little prostitute in Manchester . . . squeezed the life out of her with my own hands . . . Lachley gripped the upholstered arms of his chair. Dear God! Should I contact the constabulary? This madman’s murdered someone! He started to speak, not even sure what he was going to say, when a frantic knocking rattled the front door, which was situated just outside the closed parlour. John Lachley started violently and slewed around in his chair. In the hallway just outside, his manservant answered the urgent summons.

  “Your Highness! Come in, please! Whatever is wrong, sir?”

  “I must see the doctor at once, Charles!”

  Prince Albert Victor . . . In a high state of panic, too, from the sound of it.

  John Lachley glared furiously at the ranting cotton merchant on the daybed, who lay there muttering about ripping his wife open with a knife for sleeping with some arsehole named Brierly, about keeping a diary some servant had almost discovered, nearly ending in a second murder, and something about a room he’d rented in Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, so he could kill more filthy whores, and hated James Maybrick with such an intense loathing, he had to clench his fists to keep from shooting him on the spot. The crisis of his career was brewing outside and this homicidal maniac had to be dealt with first!

  Outside, Charles was saying, “Dr. Lachley is with a patient, Your Highness, but I will certainly let him know you’re here, immediately, sir.”

  Lachley bent over Maybrick, gripped the man’s shoulders hard enough to bruise, hissed urgently, “Mr. Maybrick! I want you to be quiet now! Stop talking at once!”

  The drugged merchant fell silent, instantly obedient.

  Thank God . . .

  Lachley schooled his features and stilled his hands, which were slightly unsteady, then crossed the parlour in two hurried strides, just as Charles knocked at the door.

  “Yes, Charles? I heard His Highness arrive. Ah, Your Highness,” he strode forward, offering his hand to the visibly distraught grandson of Queen Victoria, “welcome back to Tibor. You know my house is always open to you, whatever the time of day. Please, won’t you come back to the study?”

  Charles bowed and faded into the back of the house, his duty having been discharged. Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward was a tall, good-looking young man with an impressive dark moustache, a neck so long and thin he had to wear exaggeratedly high collars to disguise the deformity, and the dullest eyes John Lachley had ever seen in a human face. He was twisting expensive grey kidskin gloves into shreds. He followed Lachley down the corridor into the study with jerky, nervous strides. John closed the door carefully, guided his star client to a chair, and poured him a stiff shot of brandy straight away. Albert Victor, known as Eddy to his most intimate friends—and John Lachley was by far the most intimate of Eddy’s current friends—gulped it down in one desperate swallow, then blurted out his reason for arriving in such a state.

  “I’m ruined, John! Ruined . . . dear God . . . you must help me, tell me what to do . . .” Eddy gripped Lachley’s hands in desperation and panic. “I am undone! He can’t be allowed to do this, you know what will become of me! Someone must stop him! If my grandmother should find out—dear Lord, she can’t ever find out, it would destroy her good name, bring such shame on the whole family . . . my God, the whole government might go, you know what the situation is, John, you’ve told me yourself about it, the Fenians, the labor riots, what am I to do? Threats—threats!—demands for money or else ruination! Oh, God, I am destroyed, should word leak of it . . . Disgrace, prison . . . he’s gone beyond his station in life! Beyond the bounds of civilized law, beyond the protection of God, may the Devil take him!”

  “Your Highness, calm yourself, please.” He pulled his hands free of Eddy’s grip and poured a second, far more generous brandy, getting it down the distraught prince’s throat. He stroked Eddy’s absurdly long neck, massaging the tension away, calmed him to the point where he could speak coherently. “Now, then, Eddy. Tell me very slowly just exactly what has happened.”

&nbs
p; Eddy began in a shaken whisper, “You remember Morgan?”

  Lachley frowned. He certainly did. Morgan was a little Welsh nancy boy from Cardiff, the star attraction of a certain high-class West End brothel right here on Cleveland Street, a boulevard as infamous for its homosexual establishments as it was famous for its talented artists, painters, and art galleries. Hard on the heels of learning that his ticket to fame and fortune and considerable political power was banging a fifteen-year-old male whore on Cleveland Street, he had drugged Eddy into a state of extreme suggestibility and sternly suggested that he break off the relationship immediately.

  “What about Morgan?” Lachley asked quietly.

  “I . . . I was indiscreet, John, I’m sorry, it’s only that he was so . . . so damned beautiful, I was besotted with him . . .”

  “Eddy,” Lachley interrupted gently, “how, exactly, were you indiscreet? Did you see him again?”

  “Oh, no, John, no, I wouldn’t do that, I haven’t been with him since you told me to stop seeing him. Only women, John, and you . . .”

  “Then what did you do, Eddy, that was indiscreet?”

  “The letters,” he whispered.

  A cold chill slithered down John Lachley’s back. “Letters? What letters?”

  “I . . . I used to write him letters. Just silly little love letters, he was so pretty and he always pouted so when I had to leave him . . .”

  Lachley closed his eyes. Eddy, you stupid little bastard!

  “How many letters, Eddy?” The whiplash of his voice struck Eddy visibly.

  “Don’t hate me, John!” The prince’s face twisted into a mask of terror and grief.

  It took several minutes and a fair number of intimate caresses to convince the terrified prince that Lachley did not, in fact, hate him. When he had calmed Albert Victor down again, he repeated his question, more patiently this time. “How many letters, Eddy?”