Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity . . .

  Now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come

  round at last,

  Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

  Malcolm’s favorite Yeats poem, “The Second Coming,” could easily have been written in prophecy of Malcolm’s own time, when mad cults multiplied like malignant mushrooms and insanity seemed to be the rule of the day. To be standing here, speaking with Yeats, before the poem had even been written . . .

  “I say, Mr. Moore,” Bevin O’Downett chuckled, shattering with a shock like icewater the spell of Yeats’ as-yet-embryonic power, “you might want to close your mouth before a bird seizes the chance to perch on your teeth!”

  Malcolm blinked guiltily. Then gathered his wits and composure with profound difficulty. “Sorry. I’ve just been trying to recall whether I’d read anything by this fellow you were just mentioning. Er, what’s his name, did you say? Anubis?”

  Yeats nodded. “Yes, but he doesn’t use that name any longer. The man’s a physician, actually, an accomplished mesmerist, Dr. John Lachley. Holds public lectures and spiritualist seances at places like the Egyptian Hall, but he keeps a perfectly ordinary medical surgery in his rooms in Cleveland Street, calls his house Tibor, I believe, after some ancient holy place out of East European myth. He’s quite a serious scholar, you know. An acquaintance of mine, Mr. Waite, invited him to join an organization he’s recently founded, and was absolutely delighted when Dr. Lachley agreed. He’s been awarded Druidic orders, at the Gorsedd, carries the Druidic wand, the slat an draoichta. Lachley’s been called the most learned scholar of antiquities ever to come out of SoHo.”

  Malcolm’s gaze sharpened. Waite? The famous co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn? Waite had helped develop the most famous Tarot deck in existence. This mesmeric scholar moved in most intriguing circles. “John Lachley, you say? No, I’m afraid I haven’t heard of him. Of course,” Malcolm gave the intense young Irishman a rueful smile, “I travel so widely, I often find myself having to catch up on months of scholarly as well as social activities which have transpired in my absence. I shall certainly keep his name in mind. Thank you for bringing his work to my attention.”

  “Well, that’s grand,” Bevin O’Downett smiled, visibly delighted at having introduced Malcolm to his scholarly young friend. “I say, Moore, you were just on your way up when I detained you. Have I interrupted any plans?”

  Malcolm smiled. “Actually, we’d heard there was to be a meeting here this evening, of Theosophists, and wanted to learn a bit more.”

  Yeats brightened. “Splendid! We’ll be meeting upstairs, sir, in a quarter of an hour.”

  Malcolm glanced at Conroy Melvyn, who nodded slightly. “Excellent! I believe I’ll tell my carriage driver to return rather later than I’d anticipated. We’ll join you shortly, I hope?”

  The two Irish poets took their leave, heading upstairs, and Malcolm turned towards the entrance, intent on letting the driver know they’d be longer than an hour—and paused, startled. Their party was one short. “Where the devil is Mr. Pendergast?”

  Conroy Melvyn, who had been peering up the staircase after the poets, started slightly. The police inspector looked around with a sheepish expression. “Eh?”

  “Pendergast,” Malcolm repeated, “where the deuce has he gone?”

  Pavel Kostenka swallowed nervously and said in a whisper that wouldn’t carry very far, “I cannot imagine. He was here just a moment ago.”

  “Yes,” Malcolm said irritably, “he was. And now he isn’t. Bloody reporters! We’d better search for him at once.”

  Within ten minutes, it was clear that Guy Pendergast was no longer anywhere inside the Carlton Club, because he had been seen retrieving his hat, cane, and gloves. The doorman said, “Why, yes, Mr. Moore, he left in a tearing hurry, caught a hansom cab.”

  “Did you hear him give the driver directions?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid I didn’t.”

  Malcolm swore under his breath. “Damn that idiot journalist! Gentlemen, I’m afraid our mission on your behalf will simply have to wait for another evening. Dr. Kostenka, Mr. Melvyn, we must return to Spaldergate immediately. This is very serious. Bloody damned serious. A reporter on his own without a guide, poking about London and asking questions at a time like this . . . He’ll have to be found immediately and brought back, before he gets himself into fatal trouble.”

  The Ripper scholars were visibly furious at having their evening’s mission cut short, particularly with the meeting getting underway upstairs, but even they realized the crisis another missing up-timer represented. The Scotland Yard inspector at least had the good grace to be embarassed that he’d allowed the reporter to give them the slip so easily. The driver of the Time Tours carriage which had brought them to the Carlton Club hadn’t noticed Pendergast leave, either, and berated himself all the way back to Spaldergate House for his careless inattention. “Might’ve followed the bloody fool,” the driver muttered under his breath every few moments. “Dammit, why’d the idiot go and hire a hansom cab? I’d have taken him anywhere he wanted to go!”

  Malcolm had his own ideas about that, which were confirmed less than half an hour later, when they re-entered Time Tours’ London gatehouse. Guy Pendergast had returned to Spaldergate, very briefly. Then he and Dominica Nosette had left again, taking with them all their luggage and one of Spaldergate’s carriages—without obtaining the Gilberts’ permission first.

  Fresh disaster was literally staring them square in the face.

  Not only had they lost the tourist Benny Catlin, they had now lost two members of the Ripper Watch team, who clearly had defected to pursue the case on their own. Malcolm, operating on less than three hours’ sleep a night for several weeks straight, tried to think what Guy Pendergast might possibly have seen or heard tonight to send him haring off on his own, defying all rules set for members of the Ripper Watch tour. Malcolm had been so focused on Yeats, he hadn’t been doing his job. And that was inexcusable. Only once before had Malcolm lost a tourist: Margo, that ghastly day in Rome, in the middle of the Hilaria celebrations. It did not improve his temper to recall that both times, he’d been focused on his own desires, rather than the job at hand.

  Without the faintest idea where to begin searching for the renegade reporters, Malcolm did the only thing he could do and still remain calm. He stalked into the parlour, poured himself a stiff scotch, and started reviewing potential alternative career options.

  * * *

  Crossingham’s doss house smelled of mildew and unwashed clothes, of sweat and stale food and despair. When Margo and Shahdi Feroz stepped into the kitchen, it was well after dark and bitterly cold. They found a sullen, smoking coal fire burning low in the hearth and nearly twenty people crowded nearby, most of them women. There were no chairs available. Most of the room’s chairs had been dragged over to the hearth by those lucky enough to have arrived early. The rest of the exhausted, grubby occupants of Crossingham’s kitchen sat on the floor as close to the fire as they could manage. The floor was at least neat and well-swept despite its worn, plain boards and deep scuffs from thousands of booted feet which had passed across it.

  Margo paid the lodging house’s caretaker, Timothy Donovan, for a cuppa and handed it over to Shahdi, then paid for another for herself. “ ‘ere, luv,” Margo said quietly to the Ripper scholar, using her best Cockney voice, “got a cuppa tea for you, this’ll warm you up nice.”

  The tea was weak and bitter, with neither sugar nor milk to alter the nasty flavor. Margo pulled a face and sipped again. Recycled tea leaves, no doubt—if there was even any real te
a in this stuff. The demand for tea was so high and the price of new leaves so steep, an enormous market existed for recycled tea. Used leaves, carefully collected by housewives and servants, were sold to the tea men who came door-to-door, buying them up in bulk. The tea men, in turn, redried them, dyed them dark again, pressed them into “new” bricks, and resold them to cheaper chandlers’ shops scattered throughout the East End. There was even a black market in counterfeit tea, with leaves of God-alone knew what and even bits of paper dyed to look like tea, sold in carefully pressed little bricks to those unable to afford real tea often enough to know the difference in taste.

  Margo tucked up her skirts and found a spot as close to the fire as she could manage, then balanced Shahdi’s teacup for her so the scholar could sit down. Both of them carefully adjusted their frayed carpet bags with the irreplaceable scout logs inside, so they lay across their laps and out of reach of anybody with lighter-than-average fingers. Margo noticed curious—and covetous—glances from several nearby women and most of the men. Very few of the people in Crossingham’s owned enough goods in this world to put into a carpet bag.

  “Wotcher got in the bag, eh, lovie?” The woman beside Margo was a thin, elderly woman, somewhere in her mid-sixties, Margo guessed. She stank of gin and spilt ale and clothes too many months—or years—unlaundered.

  Margo made herself smile, despite the stench. “Me owd clothes, wot I’m aimin’ to pawn, soon’s I got a place to sleep. That an’ me lovin’ father’s shirts, may God send ‘im to burn, drunken bastard as ‘e is. Was, I mean. They ‘anged ‘im last week, for ‘is tea leafin’ ways.”

  “Never easy, is it,” another woman muttered, “when the owd bastard thieves ‘is way through life ‘til ‘e’s caught an’ ‘anged, leavin’ a body to make ‘er own way or starve. Better a live blagger, I says, than a dead ‘usband or father wot ain’t no use to anybody. Nobody save the grave digger an’ the bleedin’ worms.”

  “Least ‘e won’t black me face never again,” Margo muttered, “nor drink me wages down to boozer. Good riddance, I says, good riddance to the owd bastard. Could’ve ‘anged ‘im years ago, they could, an’ I’d ‘ave been that ‘appy, I would, that I would ‘ave.”

  “You got a job, then?” a girl no older than Margo asked, eyes curious despite the fear lurking in their depths. She reminded Margo of a rabbit hit once too often by a butcher’s practice blows.

  “Me?” Margo shrugged. “Got nuffink but me own self, that an’ me mother, ‘ere.” She nodded to Shahdi Feroz. “But we’ll find something, we will, trust in that. Ain’t afraid t’ work ‘ard, I ain’t. I’ll do wot a body ‘as t’ do, to keep a roof over an’ bread in me Limehouse an’ a bite or two in me ma’s, so I will.”

  A timid looking girl of fourteen swallowed hard. “You mean, you’d walk the streets?”

  Margo glanced at her, then at Shahdi Feroz, who—as her “mother”—cast a distressed look at her “daughter.” Margo shrugged. “Done it before, so I ‘ave. Won’t be surprised if it comes to the day I ‘as to do it again. Me ma ain’t well, after all, gets all tired out, quick like, an’ feels the winter’s cowd more every year. Me, I’d sleep rough, but me ma’s got to ‘ave a bed, don’t she?”

  Over in the corner, a woman in her forties who wore a dress and bonnet shabby as last summer’s grubby canvas shoes, started to rock back and forth, arms clenched around her knees. “Going to die out there,” she moaned, eyes clenched shut, “going to die out there and who’d care if we did, eh? Not them constables, they don’t give a fig, for all they say as how they’re here to protect us. We’ll end like poor Polly Nichols, we will.” Several women, presumably Irish Catholics, crossed themselves and muttered fearfully. Another produced a bottle from her pocket and upended it, swallowing rapidly. “Poor Polly . . .” the woman in the corner was still rocking, eyes shut over wetness. Her voice was rough, although she’d clearly had more education than the other women in the room. Margo wondered what had driven her to such desperate circumstances. “Oh, God, poor Polly . . . Bloody constable saw me on the street this morning, told me to move on or he’d black my eye for me. Or I could pay him to stay on my territory. And if I hadn’t any money, I’d just have to give him a four-penny knee-trembler, for free. Stinking bastards! They don’t care, not so long as they get theirs. As for us, it’s walk or starve, with that murdering maniac out there . . .” She’d begun to cry messily, silently, rocking like a madwoman in her corner beside the hearth.

  Margo couldn’t say anything, could scarcely swallow. She clenched her teeth over the memories welling up from her own past. No, they didn’t care, damn them . . . The cops never cared when it was a prostitute lying dead on the street. Or the kitchen floor. They didn’t give a damn what they did or said or how young the children listening might be . . .

  “I knew Polly,” a new voice said quietly, grief etched in every word. “Kinder, nicer woman I never knew.”

  The speaker was a woman in her fifties, faded and probably never pretty, but she had a solemn, honest face and her eyes were stricken puddles, leaking wetness down her cheeks.

  “Saw her that morning, that very morning. She’d been drinking again, poor thing, the bells of St. Mary Matfellon had just struck the hour, two-thirty it was, and she hadn’t her doss money yet. She’d drunk it, every last penny of it. How many’s the time I’ve told her, ‘Polly, it’s drink will be the ruin of you’?” A single sob broke loose and the woman covered her face with both hands. “I had fourpence! I could’ve loaned it to her! Why didn’t I just give her the money, and her so drunk and needing a bed?”

  A nearby woman put an arm around her shoulders. “Hush, Emily, she’d just have drunk it, too, you know how she was when she’d been on the gin.”

  “But she’d be alive!” Emily cried, refusing to be comforted. “She’d be alive, not hacked to pieces . . .”

  This was Emily Holland, then, Margo realized with a slow chill of shock. One of the last people to see Polly Nichols alive. The two women had been friends, often sharing a room in one of the area’s hundreds of doss houses. How many of these women knew the five Ripper victims well enough to cry for them? Twelve hundred prostitutes walking the East End had sounded like a lot of people, but there’d been more students than twelve hundred in Margo’s high school and she’d known all of them at least by sight. Certainly well enough to’ve been deeply upset if some maniac had carved them into little bits of acquaintance.

  Margo gulped down acrid tea, wishing it were still hot enough to drive away the chill inside. At least they were gathering valuable data. She hadn’t read anywhere, for instance, about London’s constables shaking down the very women they were supposed to be protecting. So much for the image of British police as gentlemen. Margo snorted silently. From what she’d seen, most men walking the streets of Great Britain tonight viewed any woman of lower status not decently married as sexually available. And in the East End and in many a so-called “respectable” house, where young girls from streets like these went into service as scullery maids, the gentlemen weren’t overly fussy about taking to bed girls far too young to be married. It hadn’t been that long since laws had been passed raising the age of consent from twelve.

  No, the fact that corrupt police constables were forcing London’s prostitutes to sleep with them didn’t surprise Margo at all. Maybe that explained why Jack had been able to strike without the women raising a cry for help? Not even Elizabeth Stride had screamed out loudly enough to attract the attention of a meeting hall full of people. A woman in trouble couldn’t count on the police to be anything but worse trouble than the customer.

  Shahdi Feroz, with her keen eye for detail, asked quietly, “Are you cold, my dear?”

  Margo shook her head, not quite willing to trust her voice.

  “Nonsense, you are shaking. Here, can you scoot closer to the fire?”

  Margo gave up and scooted. It was easier than admitting the real reason she was trembling. Sitting here surrounded by women who reminded
her, with every word spoken, exactly how her entire world had shattered was more difficult than she’d expected it would be, back on station studying these murders. And she’d known, even then, it wouldn’t be easy. Get used to it, she told herself angrily. Because later tonight, Annie Chapman was going to walk into this kitchen and then she was going to walk out of it again and end up butchered all over the yard at number twenty-nine Hanbury Street. And Margo would just have to cope, because it was going to be a long, long night. Somehow, between now and five-thirty tomorrow morning, she would have to slip into that pitch-dark yard and set up the team’s low-light surveillance equipment.

  Maybe she’d climb the fence? She certainly didn’t want to risk that creaking door again. Yes, that was what she’d better do, go over the wall like a common thief, which meant she’d need to ditch the skirts and dress as a boy. Climbing fences in this getup was out of the question. She wondered bleakly what Malcolm was doing, on his search for their unknown co-killer, and sighed, resting her chin on her knees. She’d a thousand times rather have gone with Malcolm, whatever he was doing, than end up stuck on the kitchen floor in Crossingham’s, trying vainly to ignore how her own mother had died.

  As she blinked back unshed tears, Margo realized she had one more excellent reason she couldn’t risk falling apart, out here. Kit might—just might—forgive her for screwing up on a job, might chalk it up to field experience she had to get some time. But if she came completely unglued out here, Malcolm would know the reason why or have her skin, one or the other. And if she was forced to tell Malcolm that she’d messed up because she couldn’t stop thinking about how her mother had died, he was going to discover the truth about that, too.

  Try as she might, Margo simply could not imagine that Malcolm Moore would be willing to marry a girl whose drunken father had died in prison while serving a life sentence for murder, after beating to death his wife in front of his little girl because he’d discovered she was a whore. Far worse than losing Malcolm, though—and Margo loved Malcolm so much, the thought of losing him left her cold and bleak and empty—would be the look in her grandfather’s eyes if Kit Carson ever found out how and why his only daughter had really died.