City of Darkness

by Kim Wright

But now, even though it had been her idea, Emma was staring down at her own bed and wondering if she were truly up to the tasks of housekeeping. She had done such a poor job of making the bed that the wrinkled sheets were visible through the dainty pink coverlet, like veins extending throughout a woman’s hand. She tried to smooth the wrinkles out, but abandoned the project after a few feeble tries and finally ended up lying down altogether. Perhaps she should rest a bit and then go to the market. Since she had not been managing the cupboards, the kitchen had fallen into such disarray that they had actually run out of tea at breakfast. Emma closed her eyes.

  Downstairs, Gage heard four loud bangs on the front door, only to open it and see not a soul. Granted, Gage had never been fleet of foot but it still struck him as odd that whoever had rapped was totally out of sight, not visible even when he went out on the stoop and looked first one way and then the other. Just as he was going in, he noticed a piece of paper lying at the doorstep, folded, sealed and with the words ‘Mistress Emma’ printed on the front in a neat hand.

  “Who was pounding so on the door, Gage?” asked Geraldine from the top of the stairs.

  “No one, Madame. Only this note lying on the door step. It has Emma’s name .”

  “That’s queer.”

  Gage climbed the stairs to the landing and handed her the note. “It says ’Mistress,’” he pointed out.

  “I can see that,” Geraldine said, turning it over in her palm. “Do you suppose it is some sort of cruel joke, a prank set in motion by someone who realized Mary was her sister?”

  “Shouldn’t she see it anyways, Miss?”

  “I suppose so,” said Geraldine, slowly. She walked up the stairs to Emma’s room and saw that the girl was napping. So she propped the letter on the bedside table and gathered up a few items of rumpled clothing from a chair. How long had it been since anyone had done the laundry, Gerry wondered, descending the stairs to the kitchen where, with a great deal of splashing, Leanna was washing dishes.

  “We have truly sunk to a new low, haven’t we?” Leanna said, noting her aunt’s expression. “But I’m not sure how much we can expect from Emma. I think we must face facts, contact that home for the unmarried mothers and have them send a girl over for a day or two. Perhaps one not too close to delivery. The stairs are atrociously dusty.”

  “Something else,” Gerry said, nodding but not really listening. “A letter just came for Emma.”

  “A letter? Who would write Emma?”

  “My thoughts exactly. Whole family deceased, at least as far as we know. But she kept her council about Mary and perhaps there are others out there too.” Gerry dropped the armful of clothing to the table. “You’re right about getting some help. The cupboard’s bare, the banisters are laced in dust, and we’ll all be naked by the end of the week unless someone does the laundry.” Gerry sighed. “And poor Emma is asleep again, stretched out like some princess who needs a kiss to awaken her. But where is that prince going to come from? It occurred to me as I saw her there on her bed that I’ve been very unfair to the girl. She’s young, as young as you are, but what are her prospects cooped up in this house with me and Gage? You’ve heard her speak. What shop lad would be brave enough to pay her court, and yet, on the other side, what gentleman would notice her in that little white apron? She’s in a social nether land, neither servant nor peer. Lost between the classes and I’m the one who’s put her there.”

  Leanna turned from the sink, wiping her hands on her apron. “I thought you didn’t believe in class.”

  “I believe in a pretty young girl having someone to marry.” Geraldine looked up to the ceiling, as if she could somehow see Emma sleeping far above them. “If she stays in this house, she’ll die a virgin and that isn’t a fate that suits everyone, is it darling?”

  “Um,” said Leanna, biting her lip as she untied the apron. “I didn’t know you believed in marriage, either.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Leanna. We’re talking about Emma’s life, not mine.” Gerry’s face softened with a sudden thought. “This letter. Perhaps she does have a secret friend. A beau.”

  “I take it you didn’t peek.”

  “It was sealed with wax,” Gerry said, glancing again at the ceiling.

  “The only person I know who still uses sealing wax is my brother Cecil,” Leanna said, idly sorting through the pile of Emma’s clothes on the table. “And he considers himself quite a swell with the ladies.”

  “Well there you have it,” Gerry said. “She’s received a note from a man, perhaps a lover from her past or someone who knows her only slightly but is stepping forward now to offer his condolences. Emma’s a healthy, normal, lovely woman and I’ve been foolish not to realize that young men would notice her. Sometimes we don’t see the things right under our nose.”

  “Hmmm…” Leanna said, staring down at a delicate lace collar in her hands while her thoughts rushed back to the image of Emma and Tom tangled in the sheets. She had always imagined that an act such as that would change a woman in an immediate and visible way, and yet Emma had been simply herself at breakfast. A bit quieter than usual, but seemingly without stain or guilt. It was obvious that Emma had been born into a home of quality but that at some point, through circumstances the girl would not confess, her life had cracked and fallen apart. And now Gerry was quite right - Emma existed in a sort of undefined and as yet unsettled moral territory, on a social strata which was neither servant nor equal. At what point had she decided that the rules of society no longer applied to her? When had she realized that the form of her previous life was so fractured that it was not worth preserving, that she was better off walking away from the ruins of her girlhood and starting anew?

  I don’t know Emma, Leanna thought, and then the gaze of her memory fell on the image of her brother’s bare back. Perhaps I don’t really know Tom either, or anyone at all.

  “It’s possible, is it not?” Gerry persisted. “That Emma has a beau?”

  “I suppose,” Leanna said, running a fingertip along the bodice of Emma’s dress. The cloth was courser to the touch than material used for her clothes. Is that how the shopkeepers could so unerringly discern a lady of means from a paid companion, a sort of genteel servant, by the texture of the cloth in her dress? Leanna held the dress up and to her and said “I’ve never noticed this before, which I suppose makes me sound very foolish, but look….a servant’s dress is designed with the buttons in front because she must do it up herself. A lady’s buttons are in the back because someone else fastens them for her. It’s one way you can tell, isn’t it? Part of the costume.”

  “I’ve never been a student of fashion, Leanna,” Gerry said, sinking into one of the kitchen chairs with an inelegant thud. “And I don’t know why you’re talking about buttons when I feel as if the whole world has gone loose in its axis. That letter for Emma….it could bring good news, or just another fresh horror and I don’t know if I should have taken it to her or not.”

  “You did what you had to do,” Leanna said. “And the only thing any of us knows for certain is that this household can’t go on much longer without tea.”

  11:50 AM

  At the sound of the front door pushing open, Tom sprang into action. Coming in from errands, he figured, could be noisy business. The clanging of the keys, the scraping of the door, the disposal of the coats and wraps. Tom calculated he had perhaps forty seconds before John was through the foyer and silence would descend on the house once again. No time to worry about whether or not he should remove the pen from the medical bag. Just time enough to close it and place it back, hoping John would not notice the armoire door left gaping open in the general dissemble of the room. Dragging his feet slowly across the rug instead of stepping – a trick he’d learned from his days playing hide and seek with Leanna among the creaky floorboards of Rosemoral – Tom made it to the window where he bent and tied the sleeves of the bloodied shirt into a little sack with the knife buried inside. Thank God for the briskness of the day. John would
have to remove his gloves, hat, scarf, and coat which gave Tom exactly enough time to step through the still-open window and out onto the roof. He pushed the window closed as quietly as he could, dropped the bundled shirt off the roof, then scrambled down the drainpipe after it. He dropped the last few feet, rolling an ankle as he landed, twisting it so badly that he had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out.

  All the yards were connected so Tom picked his way through them until he came to the end of the building. He was panting, nearly breathless, as much with fear and pain as with the exertion of climbing down from the roof. He stopped for a moment, leaning against the side of the last brownstone. A glance around the side of the building confirmed just what he feared. Trevor had indeed played surveillance on John, for a man, evidently a plainclothes policeman, was standing on the corner with a newspaper, glancing periodically at the house.

  What a brilliant mess, thought Tom. The whole city is on alert for the Ripper so how am I supposed to stroll past a policeman carrying a bloody shirt and a six-inch knife? He could think of only one thing to do. He dropped the bundle, pulled off his jacket and finally, shuddering with cold, his shirt.

  It was, to put it mildly, an uncomfortable experience to pull a piece of clothing still moist with God-knows-whose blood onto his body and John’s shirt was entirely too large for him, the cuffs dangling past his fingertips and the shirttail hanging almost to his knees. But rolling up cuffs and stuffing in shirttails was simple enough and his coat, just as he’d prayed it would, covered the entire mess. He slipped the knife into his inner pocket and left his own shirt to billow across some stranger’s tiny yard. Then, taking a deep breath, Tom stepped into the street. Almost immediately, he winced. Now that the frenzied energy of his escape had begun to dissipate, it was increasingly evident he had landed much too hard on his ankle when he’d dropped from the drainpipe. Wonderful. Just fine. Now he had not only a knife and bloody clothes, but also a limp. If only I’d thought to bring an eyepatch, Tom thought, the effect would be complete.

  He tried to console himself that he had gotten the things he’d come for, but he was no longer certain as to what end those items would be used. Not to mention that in the upper rooms of the house he was passing just now, John was undoubtedly realizing his possessions had been ransacked and, just as undoubtedly, was finding enormous piles of proof that Tom Bainbridge was the man who had done so. Worst of all, any evidence associated with the shirt or the knife was being contaminated by their exposure to his own body, more so with each step he took, and thus in all probability would be deemed useless by Scotland Yard.

  It’s official, Tom thought, nodding to the bored policeman on the corner as he hobbled past. I am the worst detective who has ever lived.

  11:55 AM

  Leanna had enjoyed considerably more success with her own foray into espionage and was walking up the steps of Geraldine’s house with tea in hand and a smug smile on her face. No one had seemed to notice the fact that Emma’s dress revealed the ankles of the taller Leanna. She had walked eight blocks to find a grocer who would not know her and the man had treated her with a brusque directness that had thrilled Leanna because it had proven her theory. Men did not really look at women, they merely took note of the costume and setting and adjusted their behavior accordingly.

  The outing would have been a total triumph had her gaze not fallen on one of the newspapers in the shop. The three days since the Kelly killing had done nothing to dampen the public’s obsession with the case and Leanna’s eyes had darted over the cover of the paper, coming to rest on words like “dismemberment” and “evisceration.” Emma must never see these papers, even if it meant keeping her confined to Gerry’s house for a fortnight. To accept your sister’s death was one thing. To read a five-page account gleefully documenting every horrid detail was something else.

  As she turned the key and stepped into the house, Leanna was startled to find Emma herself was waiting in the vestry, ready to pounce upon her before she was fully through the door. “Listen,” Emma said, her voice rapturous. “Listen to this!” Leanna seated herself on the divan in the parlor, the package of tea still in her lap, while Emma began to read:

  Dear Mistress Emma,

  I am sorry about the loss of your sister, Mary. She was a dear friend and greatly missed by many. The reason I am contacting you is that your sister has a child, which we have been keeping since her death. We are a poor family and the extra mouth has been a burden. The baby is a girl and is as sweet as Mary. We call her Sarah, after you and Mary’s beloved mother, and you being the child’s only relative, we think it right you should have her. We only ask to be repaid for what it has cost to keep her up. I feel one hundred pounds would be fair. Please meet me tonight at the Three Sisters tea house on Hanover Street. Six o’clock. Take a table and when I am sure no one has followed, I will sit down and we will talk. NO POLICE. Don’t forget, bring the one hundred pounds with you. If you do not come, we will sell the baby to someone going to America and you’ll never see her.

  A Friend of Mary’s

  “Can you believe it? Mary had a child!”

  “Emma, are you sure such a thing is even possible? Wouldn’t John have known about a baby? He was her doctor, and he hasn’t mentioned a thing to us about a child. This sounds very odd. I mean, to sell a baby for a hundred pounds. What kind of people could do such a thing?”

  “Poor people, that’s who. I don’t care about the money. I’ve saved much more than that. It’s my sister’s baby, Leanna, the only blood I have left in the world. I have no other choice.”

  “They didn’t even sign their name, Emma. Can we trust anyone who’s willing to sell a baby? And the tone of the letter changes so fast. It starts out sweetly, then becomes a bald threat in the end. I think we should show this to John. Or Trevor. Let’s send a note to Trevor and have him accompany us.”

  “No! You heard what they said. No police. They’ll sell her away and I’ll never see her. I’ll go by myself if I must. Hanover Street is safe enough and I’ll be home by eight. Geraldine will – “ Emma looked around wildly. “What will Geraldine do?”

  “Dote on little Sarah as if she were her own granddaughter. Do you even need to ask? But she will also lock us in our rooms and throw away the key if she hears anything of this plan.” Leanna sat back on the couch and studied Emma’s face, which was more animated than it had been since the day she met her. Was this baby really the child of Mary Kelly? In the final analysis, did it really matter? “But someone has to go with us, and I refuse to yield the point. Perhaps you’re right, Trevor’s profession wouldn’t allow him to stand by and watch us purchase a human being like a tin of tea. But John could come along. Or even Tom.”

  “We can’t take that chance, Leanna. If the person who wrote this letter looks in the window and sees a man at our table, he might bolt and take Sarah with him. Even allowing you to come is risky enough, although I don’t think a woman would scare him off quite so–“ For the first time, Emma paused long enough to really look at Leanna. “Why are you wearing my dress?”

  “An experiment,” Leanna said. “And one rather apt to our mission tonight. All right, Aunt Emma, you’ll have you way. At least to a point. As you say, Hanover Street is safe enough and there will be plenty of people about at the hour. We will dress simply, very much so. I doubt that any displays of privilege will work in our favor. And I’m sending notes to both John and Tom telling them where we’ll be. Not why we’re going there, since we can only hope that baby Sarah proves winsome enough that anyone who sees her will cease to worry about exactly how she came to live in Mayfair.”

  “If she’s like her mother, she will be able to charm the birds from the sky,” Emma said softly. “Mary was beautiful.”

  “I know,” Leanna said, just as softly. “And none of us can help what happened to her. But we can see that her daughter has everything the world can offer. Come. Gerry keeps bags of clothing to be donated to the poor in the attic. Let’s choose some prope
r outfits, let me write my notes, and we shall plot our path to Hanover Street. Anything the baby needs for now we can get from the unwed mother home. Lord knows they should loan us a few nappies and a nurse in exchange for all that Aunt Gerry has done for them.” Her mind rolling, Leanna cocked her head. “And at least let me provide the a hundred pounds. You were lying when you said you’ve saved that much, weren’t you?”

  Emma ducked her head. “I’ll pay you back in time, I promise.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Leanna told her. “You get the clothes and baby supplies, I’ll go to my bank and find a messenger boy.” Emma nodded and sprinted up the stairs.

  So I spent the morning dragging my naked brother about and now I’m off to buy a baby, Leanna thought. Life in Leeds was never like this. She picked up the letter from the table and read it again, slowly. The author had a lovely turn of hand and the paper was heavy, hardly the sort of stationery a poor family would have at the ready. Very little there to support the writer’s claim he had known Mary Kelly, save from the use of her mother’s name, but there was no stopping Emma from this mission and the more Leanna thought about it the more merit Leanna could see in the plan.

  For, after all, how many times has salvation come in the form of a baby? Whether or not the child in question was truly Mary Kelly’s, the very thought of becoming an aunt was already returning Emma to life and who knows, it might shake the rest of the household from their dreadful doldrums as well. Leanna imagined Gerry proudly pushing the pram through Hyde Park alongside of Tess and her twins, announcing to everyone that she had taken on a young ward. Folly, yes. But sometimes folly saves. Leanna had already decided to hire three message boys – one for Tom, one for John, and one for Trevor. Hanover Street was a respectable area and the hour was early, and Emma was probably right about their safety. But in times like this, a girl couldn’t be too careful.