Lay Down Your Hand

by Cherie Mitchell

  The man lifted his hand in dismissal without looking back and trudged on.

  Elliot looked around frantically, half-expecting Annie to step out of the shadows with a teasing smile on her face and mischief in her eyes but the street was now utterly empty in both directions. “Annie?” He ran past the factory, frantically peering into the laneways and doorways, and then he ran back the way he’d just come. “Annie!”

  His heart was a staccato beat in his chest and his stomach was a mass of knotted, agitated, squirming snakes. He called her name again but his own voice echoed tauntingly back at him. She must have have grown tired of waiting and gone home. She must have. I’ll go to her house and find her there. He attempted to rein in his agitation as he hesitated for several precious seconds, wondering which direction she had taken. When they walked home together, they took a languid path through the back alleys but when she walked with her friends, the girls kept to the main roads and the well-lit streets. She would’ve sensibly walked home via her normal route when she saw he wasn’t coming, wouldn’t she? Elliot hesitated for a few vital seconds longer before striding off down the deserted main road, almost certain that he’d catch up with her soon.

  Chapter Three

  His fear was a living thing now, a twisty, panting creature with a mind of its own and impossible to subdue. He’d swiftly walked the many blocks between the factory and Annie’s tenement in Whitechapel without seeing her and he knew in his heart that she couldn’t have made it all the way home yet, not unless she’d lifted her skirts and run like the wind. Why hadn’t she waited?

  He hurried through the door and up the creaking stairs to the rooms rented by Mr. and Mrs. Jones, hoping against hope that Annie would open the door and gently scold him for coming so late to fetch her. He could see the yellow bands of candlelight through the thin gaps in the wooden door as he lifted his hand to rap his knuckles hard against it. Annie, you have to be here.

  Henry, Annie’s six-year-old brother, fumbled the door open and looked out at him, the oval shape of his little face an exact replica of his sister’s. His eyes were dark and the hollows of his thin cheeks were highlighted with flickering shadows from the candlelight. Elliot didn’t bother with a greeting. “Is Annie here?” he demanded, his voice breathless and terse while his heart raced in his chest and the blood pounded in his ears.

  Henry solemnly shook his head. “Annie’s still at work.”

  Twelve-year-old Elizabeth, already a beauty with her large doe eyes and pale golden hair, walked up behind Henry and pulled the door open a little wider. The fragrant smell of baking bread and barley and turnip soup wafted out to meet him. “Hello, Elliot. It’s Tuesday. Why isn’t Annie with you?”

  “You haven’t seen her?”

  A shadow of fear crossed the young girl’s face. “No, not since she left this morning.”

  Elliot turned and loped back down the stairs, yelling frantic instructions over his shoulder to the two mute children. “If she comes home, tell her she must stay here until I return.” She must’ve taken the laneways, just as she would have done if he was with her. He stumbled back out onto the street, startling a couple who were walking past. The gentleman roared in fright and threw a protective arm across his female companion, who let out a squawk of her own. Elliot took no notice of them as he ran down the street and turned into the narrow alley where he and Annie sometimes lingered for a few minutes before taking the last few steps to her home.

  A tortoiseshell cat hissed at him from its spot on a high windowsill, its eyes glinting a spiteful green in the glare of the lamp light thrown from the street, but Elliot paid it no mind. He shouted out Annie’s name as he ran, stopping to speak to each person he came across to ask if they had seen a slim young woman with blonde hair and laughing eyes hurrying home for her supper.

  He made it all the way back to the factory in Bow without seeing her. He stood desolate and fatigued at the locked factory gates, wondering what he was supposed to do next. The hour was late. Annie would never stay out this long. Telling himself that she was probably safe at home by now, eating her simple meal and watching the door for his arrival, he slowly started to retrace his steps through the maze of alleyways, stopping often to check doorways and alcoves.

  “You looking for a warm body for a few minutes of fun, mister?” A woman with a broad bosom and a blank face stepped out of the doorway in front of him. “Only half a shilling for you, with yer strong young body and yer pretty face.”

  He irritably shook his head. “I’m looking for my sweetheart, Annie Jones. She’s short and slender and she wears a bonnet and a knitted shawl in an unusual shade of dusky pink.” He knew the name of the particular colour of the shawl because the woman he’d bought it from at a stall down in the marketplace had told him.

  The crone in the doorway threw her head back and cackled, revealing her rotten stumps of teeth and covering him with a blast of her putrid breath. “That sounds just like me. You can call me Annie if you want to. I don’t mind one bit.”

  Disgusted, he hurried on. He detoured down a laneway where once Annie had let him hold her hand, slipping her slim fingers into his and warming his heart and soul with her coy glances. She’d hastily pulled her hand away when someone approached from the other end of the alley but the warmth and fullness in his heart had remained with him for the entire evening.

  He was back at the outer edge of Whitechapel now, almost back to the tenement building. Annie knew this area well. Her mother had birthed her in lodgings not far from here and she’d spent her girlhood there before the family moved to the house they lived in now. Elliot knew this because Annie had told him everything about her life, protesting and giggling when he said he wanted to know about every breath she’d made and every step she’d taken in the years before he met her.

  He smiled now, despite his worry and concern over her whereabouts. His life changed for the better the day Miss Annie Jones crossed his path. And she had, quite literally, crossed his path. In a rush to get to a job, he’d tripped on an uneven cobblestone and dropped his load of brushes. Cursing under his breath, he’d stooped to pick them up and found himself gazing at a small pair of feet clad in leather button-up shoes, the toes peeping out under the soiled hem of a long skirt and tapping impatiently. He’d looked up then and found himself gazing into the cross little face of the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

  Of course he’d tested his charms on her but she wasn’t having a bar of his lazy smile or his purposefully twinkling eyes. She’d primly asked him to move his sooty, dirty brushes out of her way as she was running late for work and she didn’t want her wages cut. He’d grabbed for his brushes then, not wanting to let her out of his sight, and followed her to the factory despite her embarrassed, blushing protests. He’d gone without his pay that day too, his job forgotten, while he waited outside the factory gates for many long hours for her to reappear. The rest, as they say, was history.

  He hesitated at the mouth of a particularly dark and narrow alleyway. He’d often warned Annie to stay away from here, telling her he had a bad feeling about this lonely place. That bad feeling intensified now as he stared into the murky shadows. There was something going on down there, a commotion of some kind. His bowels knotted painfully and a deep sense of dread flowed over him. Moving cautiously now, he stepped into the alley and made his way towards the excited crowd.

  As he reached the small gathering and pushed his way forwards, he heard as if from a great distance the anguished cry of a wounded animal. He remained unaware that the rough and ragged sound was torn from his own chapped lips but he knew as soon as he saw the limp hand, the ring finger bearing the simple silver band he’d chosen himself, and the fringed edge of the dusky pink shawl that it was Annie. He must have said something else, cried out her name or called her his beloved, because several onlookers turned to stare at him with expressions of sympathy, compassion, and curiosity pasted across their faces.

  “Come away. There’s naught you can do for he
r now. You don’t want how she looks in death to be your last memory of the poor misbegotten soul.” A burly gentlemen with ruddy cheeks, rolled-up shirt sleeves, and the acrid smell of cider on his breath manhandled Elliot away from the morbid scene and pinned him up against the wall with his thick, hairy forearm.

  Hot tears streamed unchecked down Elliot’s face. His knees wobbled and his legs sagged uselessly beneath him. He didn’t try to fight against his captor. He knew the man was right. That enormous pool of blood gleaming blackly in the faint light was more than enough to reveal the awful truth. “Who did it?” he mumbled wretchedly. “Who did this? I want her killer found and strung up by the neck until he is dead.”

  “You’re not alone in wanting that done,” the man said, his tone almost conversational despite the horror of the moment. He relaxed his grip slightly but he didn’t move away. “Seems the Whitechapel Murderer has struck again.” He whispered the first few words of the Lord’s Prayer under his breath, the verses laced with cider and fear.

  The man’s muttered words floated uselessly around Elliot’s head. He watched through a blur of pain as more bobbies arrived, alerted by the shouts and the rapidly spreading news. Elliot’s unsteady legs finally gave way and the man removed his arm to allow him to slump down onto the dirty paving stones, where he lay sprawled on the ground alongside the spot where Annie had drawn her last breath. Annie, whatever possessed you to leave the factory without me? How am I supposed to go on without you?

  Chapter Four

  Six Months Later

  Rumours were rife. Some people suggested that the perpetrator could be one of the lunatics from Peckham House Asylum, or one of those foreigners, the ones from the western quarter who spoke funny and whom no one trusted. The murderer had a name now, a name that had stuck. Jack the Ripper they called him, and the female victims who the law suspected had succumbed to his depravity and violence now numbered nine.

  Nine innocent women dead through means both vile and disgusting. It hardly bore thinking about but violent death was all Elliot had thought about since the night of Annie’s murder. His friend Robert had told him just yesterday that love can do strange and wonderful things to a gentleman born and maybe it was time to find someone new to love. Perhaps Robert was hoping in his own way that his sentiment would lift Elliot out of his depression and help him move forward, but mere words weren’t strong enough to shift the frightening, claustrophobic darkness that enveloped him for nearly every hour of every day.

  Elliot didn’t work much these days. He had no reason to make money, save for the few coins that were necessary to buy a meagre bowl of watery barley soup, a tankard of beer, or a rough, thin mat to lie on for a night in a doss house. He’d sold his brushes to some young lad keen on making a name for himself among the chimney pots of London and now he served as a labourer on the docks whenever the need for ready cash drove him to it.

  He’d worked today, helping to unload a barge alongside a gang of other men roped in for a few hours’ of work. He’d kept to himself, as he always did nowadays, keeping his conversations brief and his replies minimal. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the day when the shadows stretched long and cold across the docks that he found himself caught with his arms full of heavy crates as he walked beside a talkative stranger hell-bent on striking up a conversation about the murders.

  The man had leaned in close, his eyes glazed with a thin sheen of either madness or horror, as he shifted his own load of crates in his sinewy sun-browned arms. “They say she was slashed from her thorax to her abdomen and her throat cut so severely that her head was hanging clean off.”

  Elliot had felt the bile rise in his throat then, bitter and sharp. He’d abruptly turned away, hurriedly adding his crates to the stack, lengthening his walk into a run and making a distance between them before the man could say another word. He hadn’t needed to avoid the man after that because the man went out of his way to avoid him.

  And now he was here, at Chaney’s Tavern, a fitting venue for the homeless, the hopeless, and the weary. Elliot lifted his tin tankard of beer and sipped glumly at the suds. He wasn’t a big drinker before Annie’s death but the loss of his heart’s ease had driven him through the desolate doorways of places he would never have considered in the past. He sat the tankard back down on the scarred wooden table top and allowed his head to fall down onto his arms, the weight of his cares and worries too much for one man to bear.

  “Elliot? Elliot Cinder?”

  He didn’t bother to lift his head. He knew he was a person of interest, an oddity to point at and whisper about. He was the man who had lost his love to the filthy hands of a murderer, an object of curiosity and fear. Why fear? Because if it could happen to him it could just as easily happen to the person behind the pointing finger.

  “Cinder.”

  It was no longer a question. Elliot sighed bleakly and shifted his head just enough to allow himself a view of the enquirer. A bright-eyed man with a bald, pink head surrounded by a fringe of luxurious white hair like the tassels on an Oriental rug met his gaze. “I knew it was you from the instant I saw you. I’ve been searching for you.”

  “Is that so?” Elliot sunk his head back down into the protective shelter of his arms. Unless the stranger was offering to buy him another tankard of beer, he wasn’t interested in talking.

  “I have a proposition for you,” his uninvited companion continued. “An errand that I think might be worth your while.”

  Elliot pushed his empty tin mug toward the man without raising his head. The mute gesture was at once a suggestion and a brush off. Buy me another drink or be gone with you.

  The man was quiet for so long that Elliot thought he’d made his decision and gone. He tipped his head to one side and opened one eye to see that the stranger hadn’t left. “What do you want?” His question held neither warmth nor friendship but he didn’t care. All he wanted was to be left alone with his misery.

  “I was hoping for a conversation.” The man scooped Elliot’s empty tankard up into his hand. “Same again?”

  Elliot grunted and rested his chin on his arm so he could look around. The tavern was crowded now, the cramped and narrow space filled with working men seeking to drown their sorrows or discover new ones.

  The man returned a few minutes later with a full tankard and a plate of bread and cheese. Elliot stared dully at the food before gulping at the beer. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and gazed at his companion with tired disinterest. He noticed the man hadn’t bought a drink for himself. “How do you know my name?”

  “It’s in my best interests to know the name of the men with whom I plan to do business.” He thrust out his hand for Elliot to shake. “Darcy Darcel at your service.”

  Elliot thought the man had probably made up his name but he nodded anyway. “What kind of business are you talking about? I don’t sweep chimneys now but I’m available for haulage work.”

  Darcy inched the plate containing the simple but filling meal closer to Elliot’s elbow. “Eat up. A man needs to boost his strength after a day spent lifting crates on the docks.”

  Elliot narrowed his eyes, made suspicious by the man’s knowledge of the day’s activities. “What do you want?” he said curtly.

  Darcy sighed, as if Elliot had inadvertently asked the wrong question when he’d hoped for something else entirely. “I think we can help each other.”

  “I don’t need anyone’s help.” Suddenly aware that he was starving, Elliot took a wedge of cheese and bread while he did his best to ignore his unwanted new friend.

  “Let me rephrase that. I think you can help other women from suffering the same dire fate as your beloved Annie.”

  Elliot shoved himself away from table with as much force as he could muster. “What do you know about Annie?” he growled.

  Darcy raised his hands in front of his chest to protect himself from Elliot’s fury. “Don’t go getting defensive now. I know of her but I never had the pleasure of meeting the y
oung lady during her short life. We all know of the terrible happenings in Whitechapel and I think I’ve found a way to assist.”

  “You think you can do what the law has been unable to do?” Elliot glared at him scornfully. “Take your ramblings elsewhere, you old fool.”

  “Hear me out.” Darcy assessed him shrewdly, his intelligent gaze hinting at a myriad of clever thoughts spinning behind those knowledgeable green eyes. Eyes as cunning as a cat’s. The thought danced through Elliot’s head and then was gone again. “Would you agree that there’s nothing left for you here now that Annie has gone?”

  Elliot grunted. There was no need for him to answer that question when the answer was already plain for anyone see.

  “In that case, I think you’re the perfect man to send on a task that I’ve recently been made aware of. Your other fine attributes have helped with the decision, of course.”

  Elliot chewed and swallowed before replying. “The bobbies are already thick on the ground on every street and laneway in Whitechapel. I’m don’t know what I can do when they can do nothing.”

  Darcy settled his elbows on the table, beamed happily, and somehow managed to look completely sane as he said, “Your help, if you decide to take me up on my offer, is not needed here. I’m talking about a time more than one hundred years into the future.”

  Chapter Five

  Darcy Darcel lived in a respectable-looking semi-detached house in Lambeth, a moderate hike from the tavern through yet another labyrinth of inner city lanes and streets. A thick mist covered the city now, making for a miserable time for anyone forced to stay out on the streets overnight.

  It had taken Elliot a further tankard of beer and another half an hour of conversation and musings before he’d agreed to leave Chaney’s Tavern with his strange new companion. As he saw it, he had nothing to lose and at least Darcy had promised him a dry bed for the night in one of the many spare rooms of his house. Besides, he was interested in what the man had to show him and it had been a long time since anything had piqued his interest like this. The man was obviously a contender for the lunatic asylum but so far, he’d woven a tale containing enough intrigue for Elliot to agree to come along – for tonight at least.