A Hunt By Moonlight (Werewolves and Gaslight Book 1)

by Shawna Reppert

  Maxfield’s eyes narrowed, and his lips thinned into a snarl. “Bring him in then. By the look of him, he may die no matter what I do, and then we can all be damned together.”

  Maxfield unlocked a small door off from the shabbily appointed study, and led them into a makeshift surgery. “Get him up onto that cot, and then scrub your hands. You’ll be assisting. Others may laugh, but I hold there’s something to cleanliness in an operation.”

  ***

  Catherine woke when the maid came in to tidy the study.

  “Sorry, Miss Fairchild. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I can come back.”

  “No. No that’s fine. I must have dozed off.”

  She had fallen asleep waiting for Jones to return with Richard. Her back ached from her awkward position in the chair. By the light, it must be mid-morning. “Has Mr. Jones returned?”

  “No, Miss. Leastwise, his room is empty, and he hasn’t come down for breakfast. Will you be wanting breakfast now, Miss?”

  She had no appetite, but it was best to keep up appearances. Besides, she would only feel worse for an empty stomach. “Yes. Please tell the cook. Has the morning post come yet?” If it had been very late when their business had concluded, Jones might have taken Richard directly back to his town home and stayed in one of the guest rooms there.

  “Yes, Miss. No letters though. Just the paper.”

  “Will you have it brought to me in the breakfast room?”

  “Very well, miss.”

  Sun streamed bright into the east-facing breakfast room. Through the open windows came the perfumes of roses and lavender and the buzzing of bees industriously gathering pollen for this year’s honey. Catherine seated herself and, with shaking hand, picked up the London Daily Times.

  Doctor Death Dead! The headline screamed. Below, in slightly smaller bold typeface, Last Victim Found Alive, Names as Heroes Discredited Inspector and Vigilante Werewolf. And just below that, still in bold, Inspector and Werewolf Missing, Bloody Pawprints Found at Scene.

  The dryness of her mouth had nothing to do with the fact that her morning tea had not yet arrived at the table.

  Twenty-seven

  “I’ve stopped the bleeding and set the bones,” Maxfield told Royston. “The lung was barely nicked. I’d give him better than even odds, if he hadn’t lost so much blood. There were other wounds as well. Bite marks, large ones.”

  Royston heard the unspoken question—do we have a new werewolf on our hands? “The man who shot him had an attack dog.” Close enough to the truth. He was too tired to explain about automaton wolves, and they didn’t have to worry about Bandon being afflicted in the attack. Leaning against the wall of the surgery, Royston tried to forget the bits of the surgery he hadn't been able to avoid seeing as he'd handed instruments to the doctor. He wouldn't have survived as long as he had at the Yard if he'd been too squeamish, but that hadn’t quite prepared him for all the clamping and the stitching and the setting of bones.

  “But since he has lost so much blood?”

  “Are you a religious man, Inspector Jones?”

  Royston was too weary to correct the title. “Not particularly, no.”

  “Too bad. Otherwise I’d advise you to start praying because what this man needs is a miracle.”

  On the table, Bandon looked white as a corpse already. He deserved to live, but good people died ,and too many evil ones survived. The only justice in the universe was what men brought into it, and that was little enough.

  “Is there nothing else to be done?”

  The doctor’s mouth tightened. He looked away. “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  The doctor held his silence. Then, “It could kill him as easily as save him. There is no way of knowing which beforehand.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Blood transfusion.”

  Royston had heard of such things, in a case where the court had to determine proximate cause of death, the knife wound or the doctor’s care afterward. Alchemists and physicians supposed that there were different types of blood somehow, but none yet had discovered how to tell one type from another. Close family seemed most likely to be compatible by a statistically small margin, but race and class had not been predictive.

  Royston knew the danger. Friends he worked with had died hours or days later of gunshot wounds. Just because Bandon had survived the surgery didn’t mean he’d live to see tea-time.

  But the transfusion could kill him as well. And Royston would be responsible. Here was one toff that the world would most emphatically not be better off without, and Royston would be responsible for killing him.

  Or letting him die, if he did nothing.

  He had to be honest with himself. It wasn’t just Bandon he worried about. He had spent the better part of his career trying to keep his blood where it belonged, thank you very much. He would risk death for Bandon, but would he risk lycanthropy? True, it took the saliva of a wolf to do the turning, saliva in an open wound. Blood contact wouldn’t do it—but so far as he knew, no one had tried to introduce a generous quantity of werewolf blood directly into the veins of a full human. Yes, the blood transfusion was supposed to go one way only, that was the whole point, but could there be a backwash?

  No matter. He couldn’t live with the knowledge that he had let the brave, ridiculous toff of a werewolf die out of superstitious and possibly groundless fears.

  He would risk himself if he had to. But did he have the right to risk Bandon?

  “Do you think you could wake him? Just for a moment? It should be his decision.”

  “Between the chloroform and the shock and the blood loss, he won’t be capable of a coherent decision for hours. If ever.” The doctor paced, two short steps one way, two back, like a cornered animal. “Besides, I have not agreed to perform the procedure. If he dies, there will be no way to hide my involvement short of dumping his body in the Thames, and even that’s chancy. So far nothing I have done is controversial. I could be prosecuted for practicing without a license, but that’s all. If I do a transfusion and he dies, it’s manslaughter at best.”

  “What would be the odds, if you did the transfusion?” Royston asked.

  “Fifty-fifty. Weak as he is, maybe worse.” Clutching at his thinning white hair, Maxfield paced the surgery. “No. I can’t. You can’t make me.”

  If he had his pistol, he could. And absolve the doctor of guilt at the same time. But deciding he knew best how someone else should use their special skills was how this had all started.

  Maxfield checked Bandon’s pulse and frowned. He retreated to a hard wooden chair in the corner, folded up in it, knees to chin, looking like—not a child, he’d seen too much of the world for that. Like some sort of an elf or fairy that had outlived all of his kin and was alone and friendless in the world. “It’s not my fault. I can’t, I won’t.”

  “I’m not making you do anything,” Royston said.

  “Oh, but you are. You are. You brought him here, and he’s dying. He’ll die if we don’t. He may die if we do.”

  The man’s time in the workhouse had left him fragile in more ways than one. With no sure course, what right had he to force the doctor to anything? “We’ll go, if you like.” If he could get the bloody horseless to start again after it had been sitting so long. He wasn’t Miss Fairchild, and he had no idea how much fuel he’d gone through. “I’ll try to keep your name out of it, and I’ll see you get paid, regardless.” Should he take Bandon to his townhouse? To Fairfield Manor? Perhaps Miss Fairfield could work some sort of miracle with her alchemy.

  “No.” The doctor stood, and Royston saw suddenly the competent, proud professional he had been. “No. Moving him would kill him. There’s really only one choice, after all. Will you consent to be the donor?”

  ***

  Royston caught one glance of his own blood running through the translucent tubing made of sheep’s intestine and looked away quickly when the room started spinning.

  “Make a fist, squeeze and rel
ease, it’ll speed the process,” Maxfield said. “There’s a good lad.”

  “How can you tell how much is enough?” Or too much?”

  “No way to tell, really. Not like this. Doctor’s intuition.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “A few times. Years ago, when I worked in a hospital. Before they took my license away.”

  Royston wasn’t sure how much time passed before the room started going hot and cold by turns and his vision blurred a little at the edges.

  Eyes closed, he felt the doctor remove the tubing and press cotton against his skin to stop the flow of blood. The doctor drew him to his feet and led him away. It seemed like too much of an effort to open his eyes, or to do anything about his vague concerns about being separated from Bandon. Maxfield pressed him down to a bed. The man’s own bed. The blankets looked like they had been tossed back when Royston pounded on the door. There was a glass on the nightstand holding what might be the dregs of a toddy, a medical journal open beside it, and on the wall a faded, framed photograph of a group of young men in academic robes.

  “You have been wounded as well,” Maxfield said.

  Oh. The bite on his leg. The one he was trying not to think too hard about. The pain had receded in the face of other concerns, but it pushed itself to the forefront now.

  “Bite,” he said. “Same beast that got my friend.”

  “You’d best let me see to it.”

  Iodine in the wound burned like fire, but the doctor was gentle in the bandaging. He must have lost consciousness for a while, because the next thing he remembered was an arm around his shoulders raising him, and a cup of hot tea, weak, milky, and extra sweet, being brought to his lips. Realizing a desperate thirst he hadn’t noticed, he drank. When he was done, the presence— the doctor, it had to be, eased him back to the bed and he slipped into easeful darkness once again.

  By the angle of the shadows when he woke again, a few hours had passed. Maxfield sat by his bed and possibly his entrance was what had woken him in the first place. Royston sat up carefully, but the room seem disinclined to rotate. Maxfield handed him a glass of water, and he drank greedily.

  “Your friend is awake,” Maxfield said. “He’s asking for you.”

  “He’s going to make it?”

  “Looks like. He has the constitution of a horse.”

  Not a horse, but a wolf. Royston knew he was grinning like an idiot but didn’t care.

  “Your name is in all the papers today. The Yard is looking for you.”

  With a dead man in a warehouse and a missing girl let off near the Strand in her underdress, he didn’t wonder. He started wondering what charges would be brought.

  “The Commissioner’s daughter says that you saved her life, though the story’s a bit confused. Something about a werewolf that attacked the killer and then ran off after it got shot.”

  Royston felt lightheaded again, and it had nothing to do with bloodloss. The doctor wasn’t stupid; he’d been a fool to think they would be able to keep Bandon’s secret under these circumstances.

  “The rest of the girl’s story makes even less sense. Something about a masked stranger in a black carriage drawn by four black horses arriving to escort her to safety while you pursued the ’wolf to see that he was cared for. Only the stranger couldn’t allow himself to be recognized, and so he let her off close to somewhere she could easily summon help.”

  That was what Miss Chatham had come up with? Creative, he had to give her that, but clearly she had spent too much of her time reading literature entirely unworthy of her.

  “Doctor Death is dead, that much of the girl’s crazy story has been corroborated by the Yard. It would seem that you are a hero.”

  Royston flushed and looked away.

  “I mean that in all sincerity,” Maxfield said. “However frightened the rest of London was, Lambeth was terrified. The girls who worked the streets and had no choice but to go out every night, wondered if their next client would be the killer. Parents worried every time their daughter was a little late coming home from her shift in the mills. Miss Chatham may have won him more attention from the press—and I daresay from the Yard—but our girls were his regular prey.

  “I didn’t see you here, and therefore I have no idea who your friend is and could care less. But on behalf of those that made me welcome after London society cast me out, I thank you. Both of you, whatever the role of the patient I’ve never met.”

  Maxfield generally could be trusted. But with a secret this large? Royston could only hope. If the man didn’t read the society papers, he would have no reason to recognize Bandon, and the toff had never looked less than himself than he did right now, at least not unless the full moon was in the sky.

  Still. The more people who knew a secret, the more likely it would come out. No help for it now.

  Twenty-eight

  Royston could not get the horseless to start again. From what he could decipher of the gauges, the fuel that heated the boiler had finally run out. In the end, he had to send a telegram to Miss Fairchild. She came not as herself in her barouche with its flashy, high-stepping chestnuts, but as Mr. Foster in a modest dog-cart driven by a man she introduced as George.

  Bandon’s servant, Royston realized, watching the mixture of diffidence and scolding with which George got Bandon ready to travel. Devoted, from the worry that lined his face. With Royston’s help, George got Bandon into the dog cart. He drove away, leaving Royston with Foster and the horseless, which Foster got refueled and running with a minimum of fuss.

  “Miss Fairchild expects you back at the estate.”

  Weird to hear Foster speak of his true identity in the third person, but Royston had become accustomed to weird, and they were on the street where anyone could hear.

  “The Commissioner wishes to speak to you, and Miss Fairchild feels it best if the solicitor is also present.”

  Royston climbed into the passenger seat of the horseless. He might as well get the inevitable over with. He’d freed Miss Chatham and found the killer, yes. But he’d also worked a case he’d been explicitly removed from, and after being fired, no less. And everyone knew that he was Willie Godwin’s best friend.

  With the car moving fast enough that they could not be overheard, Foster asked “You have read the papers?”

  “With Miss Chatham’s account of the stranger in the black mask?”

  He nodded.

  “Unfortunately, I think you’ve no choice but to go along with the story that silly girl concocted. It blows just enough smoke to obscure the real circumstances. Speaking of which, what really did happen?”

  He told her everything, from the automaton wolf guarding the warehouse to Willie’s diabolical ‘test of friendship’ to Bandon’s act of heroism.

  By the time he finished, they were at the Fairchild Manor. They passed two unfamiliar hansoms in the courtyard on the way in the garage.

  Tired and still weak from the transfusion and feeling the ache of the automaton’s bite on his leg, Royston wanted only to crawl into a bed and sleep for a week. The Commissioner could arrest him or hang him after that.

  Miss Waters met them before the car had come to a full stop. “The solicitor is here as you requested, and the Commissioner is here looking for Mr. Jones. Apparently he did not take kindly to your note suggesting he wait on Mr. Jones’ leisure.”

  Miss Waters slipped up a back stair after Foster, no doubt to help assist in the change back into Miss Fairchild. Miss Fairchild must have paid a pretty penny for a trigger-glamour that she could turn on and off at need. Tied to the pocket watch, maybe. Foster wore little in the way of jewelry.

  In any case, he had been left to face his fate alone. Or, alone except for the solicitor, who was practically a stranger and not truly in his employ, so Royston wasn’t sure he counted. He limped through the foyer and into the sitting room. There, he regarded the lovely, embroidered furniture and then his trousers which were stiff with blood, not all his own, and liberally
dusted with the accumulated filth of an abandoned warehouse and wondered if he should sit. Under the combined stares of the solicitor and the Commissioner, he made an ineffectual attempt to brush himself off.

  This was not going to be a short interview, and passing out in the middle of it would not help his case. After what he’d done to Miss Fairchild’s horseless carriage, not to mention her fiancé, damage to a chair would make little difference.

  “If this is to be an official interrogation of my client, I insist that you wait until he has had a chance to bathe and rest,” Northrup said.

  The Commissioner looked affronted. “Interrogation? I am merely debriefing one of my men. And offering a commendation, albeit an unofficial one. The official one will follow. A public ceremony, of course, with the mayor.”

  Perhaps Maxfield had taken more blood than he had realized, and it was affecting his reason. None of the Commissioner's words made any sense.

  “It was my understanding that my client was not only suspended from his duties, but actually fired.”

  It clearly wasn't making sense to Northrup, either.

  “A misunderstanding,” the Commissioner said. “All a misunderstanding, already rectified.”

  He’d heard the Commissioner use that same tone of unctuous false affability to others before, but the man had never thought him worth the effort. Obviously, there must be something to Maxfield’s claim that the papers had hailed him a hero. A star for Chatham to hitch his wagon to, at least until he faded out.

  “Does that rectification include a restoration of rank?” Northrup asked.

  “Certainly. This man is wasted as a constable. There’d be a public outcry.”

  A bit more of the picture revealed. The Commissioner had restored him because he felt he had no choice. He’d be biding his time to revenge himself for having his hand forced.