And Daisy smiled, a very happy, confident little smile.
—
That evening Mrs. Bunting forced herself to tell young Chandler that their lodger had, so to speak, disappeared. She and Bunting had thought carefully over what they would say, and so well did they carry out their programme, or, what is more likely, so full was young Chandler of the long happy day he and Daisy had spent together, that he took their news very calmly.
“Gone away, has he?” he observed casually. “Well, I hope he paid up all right?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Bunting hastily. “No trouble of that sort.”
And Bunting said shamefacedly, “Aye, aye, the lodger was quite an honest gentleman, Joe. But I feel worried about him. He was such a poor, gentle chap—not the sort o’ man one likes to think of as wandering about by himself.”
“You always said he was ’centric,” said Joe thoughtfully.
“Yes, he was that,” said Bunting slowly. “Regular right-down queer. Leetle touched, you know, under the thatch,” and, as he tapped his head significantly, both young people burst out laughing.
“Would you like a description of him circulated?” asked Joe good-naturedly.
Mr. and Mrs. Bunting looked at one another.
“No, I don’t think so. Not yet awhile at any rate. ’Twould upset him awfully, you see.”
And Joe acquiesced. “You’d be surprised at the number o’ people who disappears and are never heard of again——” he said cheerfully. And then he got up, very reluctantly.
Daisy, making no bones about it this time, followed him out into the passage, and shut the sitting-room door behind her.
When she came back she walked over to where her father was sitting in his easy chair, and standing behind him she put her arms round his neck.
Then she bent down her head. “Father,” she said, “I’ve a bit of news for you!”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Father, I’m engaged! Aren’t you surprised?”
“Well, what do you think?” said Bunting fondly. Then he turned round and, catching hold of her head, gave her a good, hearty kiss.
“What’ll Old Aunt say, I wonder?” he whispered.
“Don’t you worry about Old Aunt,” exclaimed his wife suddenly. “I’ll manage Old Aunt! I’ll go down and see her. She and I have always got on pretty comfortable together, as you knows well, Daisy.”
“Yes,” said Daisy a little wonderingly. “I know you have, Ellen.”
—
Mr. Sleuth never came back, and at last, after many days and many nights had gone by, Mrs. Bunting left off listening for the click of the lock which she at once hoped and feared would herald her lodger’s return.
As suddenly and as mysteriously as they had begun the “Avenger” murders stopped, but there came a morning in the early spring when a gardener, working in the Regent’s Park, found a newspaper in which was wrapped, together with a half-worn pair of rubber-soled shoes, a long, peculiarly shaped knife. The fact, though of considerable interest to the police, was not chronicled in any newspaper, but about the same time a picturesque little paragraph went the round of the press concerning a small boxful of sovereigns which had been anonymously forwarded to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital.
Meanwhile Mrs. Bunting had been as good as her word about “Old Aunt,” and that lady had received the wonderful news concerning Daisy in a more philosophical spirit than her great-niece had expected her to do. She only observed that it was odd to reflect that if gentlefolks leave a house in charge of the police a burglary is pretty sure to follow—a remark which Daisy resented much more than did her Joe.
Mr. Bunting and his Ellen are now in the service of an old lady, by whom they are feared as well as respected, and whom they make very comfortable.
The Sins of the Fathers
SCOTT BAKER
Although born in Chicago, Scott MacMartin Baker (1947– ) was a longtime adult resident of Paris; after twenty years, he returned to the United States and now lives in California. His talent as a writer and master of the French language gave him the opportunity to cowrite the screenplay for Litan (1982), which won the Critics Award at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival.
His first novel, Symbiote’s Crown (1978), was science fiction and won the French Prix Apollo Award; most of his later work has been dark fantasy or horror. His story “Still Life with Scorpion” won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1985; three of his other stories have been nominated for the same honor.
His best-known work is Nightchild (1979, revised in 1983), a supernatural novel in which the protagonist is brought to serve as sustenance for a coterie of vampires but is found to be a vampire himself. A benevolent figure, he succeeds in bringing together humanity and the outcast alien race of vampires. The revised version of the novel begins a trilogy known as the Ashlu Cycle that also includes Firedance (1986) and Drink the Fire from the Flames (1987).
Baker’s other horror novels are Dhampire (1982), which later was so heavily revised that it was published as a new novel, Ancestral Hungers (1995), and Webs (1989), a complex tale that involved supernatural spiders.
“The Sins of the Fathers” was first published in Ripper!, edited by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper (New York, Tom Doherty Associates, 1988).
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
Scott Baker
Emma was awakened by a muffled rattling sound, like a tram going by some streets away. She opened her eyes, saw a vague blur in white wheeling a table made of steel tubes and black plastic trays past her. The table gleamed with knives and scissors and other sharp, hard metal things she couldn’t distinguish. She reached out, groped for her glasses with a hand so weak and heavy she could barely move it, though at least they’d taken the tubes out of her arms, but she couldn’t find them, she couldn’t even find the table they should have been on, just to the right of her bed, and for a moment she thought she was back in the operating room, they were going to have to cut into her again, open up her womb and scrape out more of the cancer that was eating her from within, like some monstrous cannibal foetus.
“I’ve got your glasses on the table right here, Mrs. Blackwell.”
She recognized the voice, turned her head, managed to make out another blur who must have been that young doctor who had always been so patient with her. He was standing just to the left of her bed. She liked to think her own father might have been like Dr. Knight once, when he was still young and freshly ordained and studying medicine so he could become a medical missionary in Africa. Before he’d given that all up for her mother and become just another small-town doctor to support her, and she had destroyed him.
“Dr. Knight?”
“Yes. Here, let me help you.”
He held out her glasses. Her hands were trembling so badly she dropped them, but Dr. Knight just picked them up and handed them to her again, let her try a second time without making any attempt to do it for her, allowing her to preserve her dignity. This time she managed to get them on. Dr. Knight came into focus, broad-faced and reassuring. Behind him she could see someone dark-skinned in a white uniform, the young Porto Rican nurse who’d been so kind to her when the pain got too bad. She had a push-table with her, but now that Emma had her glasses on she could see that the things gleaming on it were just knives and forks, glassware. Her dinner. She wasn’t back in surgery after all.
But the room still wasn’t right. The walls were white, not yellow, and she could see a sort of partition down at the far end, the kind they used for separating patients who had to share a room. “This isn’t my room,” she said.
“We’ve put you in another room for a while, where we can keep a better watch on you until we’re sure you’re ready to go back,” the doctor said. “How are you feeling?”
“Better?” She hated the way her voice quavered, made a question out of it. “How should I be feeling?”
“Better.” She thought he nodded. “All you need is some rest and then in a few
days you can go back home.”
“All I ever do is rest. Anyway, I don’t have a home anymore. I live here, in the other wing.”
“Of course. What I meant was, go back to your room, and your friends.”
The nurse—Maria? Conchita? Emma was ashamed that she couldn’t remember her name—came forward with a needle, gave her a shot.
“Here. This will help you sleep.” So the dinner hadn’t been for her after all.
Emma had wanted to be a nurse too, when she was a girl, so she could help her father. She’d always read everything she could find in the papers about Florence Nightingale, and once, about a year after they’d moved to London, she had even managed to sneak out of their rooms over the Britannia Tavern, where her father kept her locked up during the day while he ministered to the beggars and lunatics at the Lambeth Workhouse, to go hear her speak, though Father had found out and thrashed her for it afterward.
Father had never approved of women spending their lives outside the home like that, no matter how much good they thought they were doing. There had been a time when he’d believed her mother was the exception, that it would be all right for her because she was working with him…until 1887, when Emma had been twelve, and her mother had abandoned them both to run off to Cleveland with that lawyer with the red face and ginger-coloured moustache, the one who’d always been trying to get her father to become a Freemason and come to his lodge meetings.
Father had started drinking heavily after Mother left, putting himself in a drunken stupour every night, until the day when he’d suddenly realized that everything that had happened since he’d met her mother, all his pain, had had a purpose, that it had been no detour after all but had instead been pointing him towards his ultimate ministry. She remembered when he’d told her that God had destined him, not to bring the faith to the savages in Africa, as he’d once thought, but to combat Freemasonry. And so he’d sold his practice and brought Emma to England, where he was convinced Freemasonry had its stronghold, to establish his ministry in Whitechapel—there to work with the poor and shiftless, the drunkards and the whores, heal their bodies with his medicines and surgeon’s knives while bringing their souls to Christ and saving them from the insidious temptations of the Freemasonry that he was certain had already corrupted the British ruling classes and their puppet Church of England.
For the first year it hadn’t been too bad. She’d help him sometimes during the day with his patients at the work-houses, or passing out tracts in the streets. She wanted to be with him all the time, prove to him that she wasn’t like her mother, that he would always be able to depend on her. But he’d been too proud to admit how weak he was, that he could ever need help from someone, even after he’d started drinking again. On days when he couldn’t keep himself sober she’d wait for him all day alone, with nothing to do after she finished cleaning their rooms but read his tracts and medical books over and over again, until it was so late at night that she finally knew once again that he wasn’t going to be coming back, and that she would be forced out into the streets looking for him once again…to find him, when she found him at all, drunk in some tavern, buying drinks for squat, diseased whores with rotten teeth, and calling them all by her mother’s name.
She’d drag him back to their rooms then—she’d been strong, and bigger than any of the sickly English girls she saw on the streets, even if she was only thirteen—and put him to bed, watch over him, only to have him wake up the next morning hating himself, so sick with self-loathing at the memory of the women and the way he’d been pawing them, what he’d done with them, that he’d stagger over to the wash-bowl and vomit convulsively until there was nothing left in his stomach. And even then he’d keep trying to retch up more, as if he could tear the memory of his weakness out of his entrails and vomit it up with the gin and half-digested food. He had hated Emma, too, whenever she found him and brought him back still sober enough to be able to remember the next morning how she’d dragged him away from the whores he’d been too weak to resist, hated her for witnessing his humiliation and forcing him to remember himself as he really was.
He would beat her then, forbid her to ever go back into any of those taverns looking for him again, tell her she’d end up contaminated and diseased like the whores if she did. That had been when he’d started saying that she couldn’t come with him and help him during the day anymore. He’d even begun talking about sending her away, back to some girl’s school in Illinois where she would be protected. But he didn’t have any money left, it all went for the gin and the whores, and so he would lock her up when he went out, though she’d taken the key from him and had a copy made once when he was too drunk to know what she was doing.
Yet he still spent his days unselfishly, trying to heal those poor souls who were too poverty-stricken and ignorant for any other doctor to interest himself in them, trying to bring them to Christ. Trying, too, to save them from the Freemasonry that he had come to England to combat, but which seemingly had vanished, though he knew that it must still be there, hidden from him where he would never be able to confront it directly—in Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the gentlemen’s private clubs to which he would never be admitted. He knew that it was Freemasonry that was behind the squalour and misery all around him, that the men and women of Whitechapel were kept ignorant and corrupted and sodden with cheap gin so that their sons could provide cheap labour for the docks and the rich Freemasons’ mills and factories, so that their destitute and debased daughters would have no choice but to offer themselves as whores to those richer and more powerful than themselves, to take their turn as replacements for their mothers, grown old and repulsive before their time.
Then the whores had started dying, and Inspector Abberline had come to question Father about their deaths in his polite, soft-spoken voice, not suspecting for even a moment that Father might himself be the Whitechapel Fiend…just hoping that with all the time he spent ministering to the worst of Whitechapel’s human refuse, he might know something about somebody who could have done it, or have heard or noticed something suspicious. And then—
No. She couldn’t allow herself to think about that. She tried to remember what had happened later, all the happy years afterwards, when she’d gone back to Illinois to live with her uncle on his farm and had met Nathan at that tent meeting outside Naperville, how happy she’d been with him, how good her life had been from then on…but the shot the nurse had given her was making it impossible for her to lock the memories back into the little sealed room where she’d kept them for so many years. She couldn’t shut out the way her father had looked when she’d found him hanging from the rafter, with his tongue protruding and his face all swollen as if with rage, but white, dead white, not the red it had always been when he was drinking. She remembered her impotent, helpless fury, how she’d burned the note he’d left for the police telling them that he was the Whitechapel murderer, and that he’d ended his life as the only way to stop himself from killing again, but that he was not committing the sin of suicide: he was a surgeon performing an ablation on himself, cutting a diseased element out of society before its corruption could spread any further.
She’d climbed up on the chair he’d used, taken one of his scalpels from his bag and tried to cut him down. But he’d fallen on her when she tried to catch him, knocking her off the chair so that she’d been pinned there on the floor beneath him, with his dry, swollen tongue pressed against her cheek and his dead popping eyes staring blindly into hers, and she’d screamed and screamed and screamed, but nobody had come to help her…
The injection must have finally put her asleep then, because when she opened her eyes again she was back in her own room and her son Teddy was there, his silhouette recognizable like his father’s, though Teddy was portlier and more pompous than Nathan had ever been. Nathan had always had his own unique dignity—that had been what had impressed her so much about him, even when she first met him and he’d been only twenty years old. His natural dignity, and his k
indness. Not like Teddy, who looked like exactly what he was: a moderately honest, moderately selfish, moderately successful businessman.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Hello, Teddy.” He was Nathan’s son, her only child; she wished she could have felt something more than duty towards him. “Did you bring Mary with you?”
“Here I am, Grandmother.”
“Mary?” She could make her granddaughter out now, a vague blur half-hidden behind her son. She tried to sit up.
“Let me help you, Mother.”
Emma had always been a strong woman, had always hated to accept anything from anybody, but she was still too weak from the operation to refuse.
“Get me my glasses, Teddy,” she told him when they’d managed to get her propped up in place. “They’re over there, on the bedside table. Just far enough away so I can’t get to them myself.”
She managed to stop him before he could actually push them onto her face, made him let her do it herself. Her hands seemed steadier now than when Dr. Knight had helped her put her glasses on. One glance at Teddy was enough to convince her that he was no different than ever—he just got a little stouter, a little jowlier and redder-faced every year—but Mary was growing up so fast it was always a shock to see how much she’d changed since her last visit.
Mary was twelve, just as Emma herself had been when her father had taken her to London. But where Emma had been tall and broad-shouldered for her day, more like girls were nowadays, Mary was slight and slender, as though Mary were the nineteenth-century girl and Emma had been the twentieth-century one. They all looked so much stronger and healthier today, yet their lives were so much easier, so much safer, despite all the nonsense people said about crime and violence and how it wasn’t safe to walk the streets at night.
Father had loved Mother more than anything in the world, with the same all-consuming love Nathan and Emma had later had for each other. He would have given up anything for Mother, but she had been a cold, grasping woman who had never returned his love, and when she had left him and destroyed him, he had tried to devote himself to helping others, though he had failed at that, too. Yet unlovable, even contemptible, though Teddy was in so many ways, Mary would still have a better life with him than Emma had ever had with her own father, for all that she loved her father in ways no one could ever love Teddy. Mary would never have to live through anything like Whitechapel, Father’s hopeless spiral down into degradation and death.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 89
