Even the delicate silver frames, of French origin and gifted by my late husband, were gone.
My mother’s journal, given to the Marchioness Northampton at one time and gifted in turn to me by Lord Piers Everard Compton, no longer sat where I had left it.
It was as if I had never existed.
For the first time since leaving the Menagerie, tears threatened to break free of whatever obstacle denied me the release. My throat ached with them, an awful pain forming in my chest, squeezing my heart. If I could not feel sorrow, grief—if I could not mourn—then by God, I would feel pain.
A ghost, I had become, and as a ghost, I left my bedroom to enter Fanny’s. Like mine, it was empty of all personal belongings. The furniture had not changed, the mirrors covered all the same, but nothing of the woman remained behind.
From room to room, down the stairs and into the parlor, I searched for any sign of my staff.
I found none.
When I finally made it into the study—Ashmore’s study, Fanny had often reminded me, and I had long determined to make it mine upon inheriting—I felt as if a stern word might break me irreparably. I leaned against the door, fingers splayed as if it could catch me, and rested my forehead against the gleaming wood.
The house stood, furnished as it always had been, with pieces collected first by my father in his varied travels, then added to by my father’s executor. Ashmore had often sent pieces back, some large and some small, of Indian make or Chinese, African or Russian, Egyptian, Greek. So much history, so many memories wrapped in each piece, and yet, it was is if the heart had bled from the place.
What was a roof, what were things, without the people that had made it a home?
Everything ached. My body ceased to obey all will, and I hovered outside that study for so long, the light filtered through black crepe changed.
Finally, seizing what little courage I had left—or perhaps just resigned for the final nail to be hammered into the coffin of my devastation—I pushed open the study door.
More of the mourning crepe covered the windows, turning the light to ash. I had expected to find the whole wiped clean, emptied of the things that had made it so much Abraham St. Croix’s study, but it was not.
I stepped into the room, my breath held, desperately afraid to make a noise, lest a single sound shatter this dream and leave me standing among empty shelves. My head ached so badly, it was all I could do to focus through the pressure.
With one shaking hand, I reached out to touch a ream of books upon one shelf.
They did not vanish.
The heavy wooden desk was still in place, and upon it the things that had always been there. The papers were gone, but the globe remained, covered in a fine sheen of dust. The small boxes carved from cinnabar, the ivory pipes and large horn upon the mantle. An astrolabe beautifully designed and worked in copper and brass sat beside a telescope whose sheen had dulled without polish.
And among them all, spines of every color and size, some worn and some new enough for the gilt to catch what stray bits of light it could, the books remained.
A sob wrenched at my chest.
I did not allow it passage.
Instead, as my booted feet made no sound upon the Oriental rug, I crossed the study and tore the black shroud from the mirror hanging beside one shelf. The frame, carved with scenes of Russian stories, gleamed as the material slid to the ground. I stared up into the silvered glass and did not recognize the face that looked back.
My mother’s face, I’d been told. All the coloring with none of the Societal accomplishments to ease the sting.
Too much my father’s mind.
My eyes were large in my face, too wide, the green of them so very dark. I sported no bruises from my fight with the Bakers, and while that should have been a surprise, I felt as if I carried all the wounds upon the inside.
I reached up with a trembling hand, touched the glass. Perhaps I considered climbing through, like Alice in her backwards Wonderland, but the mirror did not bend.
Behind me, reflected in reverse and looking all the brighter for the mirror’s unveiling, the study that should have been mine waited in silent serenity.
I would never claim the books within. I couldn’t, for upon my marriage, everything I was to inherit passed to Compton.
When he died, it all turned to his heir—his father, whose wife despised me for slights I had never understood. The same woman my mother had gifted her alchemical journal to.
It seemed, no matter what I was or where I would go, I would always carry my mother’s ghost.
My lashes lowered, heavy lidded with a fatigue so thorough, it took all I had to remain standing. In the back of my thoughts, a woman laughed—haunting memories, recurring dreams, from the night my father’s serum nearly ended me.
This had been my father’s study, a place so redolent of his tastes that I had spent many an hour hidden within, escaping Fanny’s searching and imagining that I could know my father through his things. I had spent so long among these items, associating them with a man who had not at all turned out to be anything like I had fancied.
As I dropped my hand, leaving a faint smear on the glass, my gaze fell upon a narrow book tucked between two larger tomes.
A thin volume, one whose beautifully tooled leather showed wear.
With trembling fingers, I extracted the book from the shelf. There was no gilt upon the spine, none at the front. Yet as I opened to the first page, a familiar elegant script greeted me.
For my dearest Almira. Love, your Josephine.
Whoever had removed my things must have considered the book belonging here. I idled through the pages, allowing my eyes to skim rather than indulge, to drink in the symbols, the prose, the penmanship that was Josephine St. Croix’s own hand.
Filled with theoretical concern and moral discourse, this was proof that my mother had shared in Mad St. Croix’s scientific mind. That she had been every bit as brilliant as she had been lauded for her salon accomplishments.
She had not allowed the world to strip her of her mind.
My father might have been driven beyond all measure by his wife’s untimely death, but he had not always been so. The rumors often spoke of his genius. It wasn’t until after his supposed death in a Scotland estate I had never seen did they call him Mad St. Croix—a moniker long since earned.
But not then. Not when he had her to love.
My mother must have chafed under the constrains of Society’s mores, and yet here, I held proof she did not allow any to stop her.
Not even a marchioness.
I snapped the book closed, looking up from its filled pages to stare hard in the mirror in front of me.
Frizzed tendrils of my dark red hair jutted out from beneath the brown street boy’s cap hiding the rest. There were traces of dirt and grime upon me, likely picked up from simply passing through the soot-streaked fog, but beneath, I saw the nose and chin that shaped the cameo of my mother. I recognized the cheekbones, the mouth. I was my mother’s child, I had no choice in the matter, but I would not be her shadow. I would not be the dog kicked aside for lack of better breeding.
Josephine St. Croix might have been an angel—an auburn beauty with innumerable talents—but I was not her. I would not rely on men to take my thoughts and make them a matter of discourse; I would not spread my wings in a gilded cage to sing for a Society who feared a woman’s intellect. I would not allow myself to be bullied into a path I did not choose.
No man could control me. No husband, no whip, no monster, no alchemical serum, no bloody secretive Veil.
I would not be defeated.
I pushed the journal into one of the large pouches at my belt, clicking my teeth together when the ache in my throat sharpened.
So my plans had fallen through. So my challenge had worked all too well. Lily would suffer for it all her life, and I would bear that for all of mine. Hawke might think my pride broken, but I would not bend—not for him, not for anyone ever again
. Foolish I might have been to consider he would help me—and more so for giving in to that manipulative temptation he was so famed for—but it was done. The milk had spilled, and I would shed no tears for it.
This was not over.
No more weakness. No more giving up.
Of all the options left for me, I had only one that I cared to follow. One that would place the sweet tooth in my sights. Jack the Ripper, vile fiend that he was, must be found.
I had no doubt that finding him would lead me to my rival.
I did not even turn to look behind me as I collected Maddie Ruth’s net-launching apparatus and left the shell of my empty house. I found my way to the docks, to turn south once I’d smuggled my way onto a ferry and sank once more below the drift.
If any part of me demanded to cry, a bite of spice-laden opium quelled the urge. There would be no tears shed. Not now, and not for anyone living.
The demands of the dead were already too heavy.
How many more would die before the Ripper could be found?
Chapter Nineteen
I made my way to Blackwall, and spent the rest of the afternoon with the Bakers. Once more resolved, the hardest part of this game began. I could not make a move until the Ripper once more played his hand.
I counted down the hours as I waited in brittle impatience from within the pub the Bakers had set up keep. The Fish-Eyed Lady was not known for its fine ale or even for its choice of brews, but the proprietor was the father of a Baker and saw no harm in the protection afforded by becoming a favored establishment.
For the most part, I was left alone. Only Ishmael, arrived shortly after I’d collared a kinchin cove to run a message for me, kept me company.
We did not speak beyond the formalities. “Any word?” I demanded upon his arrival.
“None.”
I thought of Black Lily, and the bloody wound marring her face. “There will be.”
We wiled away the time playing faro. Ishmael won more often than not. I’d never been particularly good with cards.
Food was offered, but I declined. I hadn’t been hungry for days, it seemed. When my head began to pound, I calmed it with the tar Maddie Ruth had given me, and the Bakers looked on and said nothing.
I no longer felt shame. I waited, with a patience I did not recognize, and tried not to think of the fact that I waited for one of two murderers to strike again. To make a mistake, maim another living soul so that I might find him.
I had no surety that the Bakers would be successful, but I had little else to depend upon.
I was held hostage by my rival’s upper hand. I simply chose not to give in.
As the hours dwindled into early evening, the fog thickened outside the papered windows. The men inside the pub doubled, then emptied as they departed on whatever tasks they held important. More came, and stayed this time. We all waited. The stench of Blackwall turned bitter with the peasouper’s encroach.
As I prepared to win only my third hand in as many hours, a Baker bantling burst from the door.
“Communion! Communion!” The boy, red-faced and drenched in sweat, was filthy as a sewer rat and gasping for breath. The men jostled him along, until he staggered into the small space afforded around our table.
Ishmael clapped a hand to him, steadying him on his newspaper-wrapped feet. “Breathe a moment.”
The youth sucked in great gobs of air, but his grimy fist unclenched enough to drop a filthy scrap of parchment on the table.
Ishmael picked it up first. His thick, blunt fingers unfurled the note to find it nearly shorn in half. His eyebrows furrowed deeply, a beetled mask of concern. “A notice.”
I took the note from him and smoothed it out upon the table. “‘Tis Jack the Ripper’s collection notice,” I said, and did not have it in me to worry when my tone was as nonchalant as if we spoke of something much less bloody; what I’d taken to be grime was not.
The bantling heaved in a breath and exclaimed, “Sommat shivved Coventry!”
The curses, growls and shouts this engendered turned far too much attention on me. I scowled. “I was here,” I pointed out, refraining from calling them on their lack of obvious reasoning. “And the collection for him is living, not dead.”
Ishmael leaned forward, resting an elbow on his large knee. Ignoring the crowd now looming around us, he focused instead on the child. “Breathe up, Jim. Where’d the note come from?”
The boy shot me a look from hooded green eyes. One was fiercely red, as if he fussed at it often—a supposition confirmed when the kinchin lifted the back of a dirty hand and scrubbed at the irritated eye before answering. “Was s’posed t’meet Coventry at the foot o’Baker’s Row, so went footin’ it.”
The street was north of the railyard, as I recalled. Nothing to do with the gang, despite the name. Well, save that it seemed Bartholomew Coventry had been enshrined there.
I twitched the collection note, separating the halved fragments until the narrow margin holding them together tore.
It was the original note, all right. Sliced by my blade.
So I was right. The collector was afoot. And he started by killing a man I’d already plucked a notice for. He obviously wasn’t aware of my dealings with the Veil. As far as he knew, if I’d ever hoped to garner that coin, it wouldn’t happen now.
What a right bastard, he was.
“Near broke me arse fallin’ on ‘im,” the boy added. “Stiffer’n a choker at th’ ‘At.”
If he was at all disturbed to have found his mate dead, there was nothing of it about his personage. That was simply a fact of living in London low. A shame, but what irritated me was the point of pride behind his storytelling.
Wasn’t every day that a bantling stumbled upon a big man like Coventry brought low.
“And the note?” I asked.
“Was ‘angin’ from ‘is mouf,” he said to me. “Like he was t’ swallow an’ di’n’t.”
“Good work.” Ishmael clapped him on the shoulder, the way he might another man, and the boy’s thin chest swelled beneath his threadbare, too-small jacket. A palliard, unless I missed my guess. Born to a beggar who was himself born to a beggar. Palliards learned early how to navigate the city, and many knew the secret paths to the mysterious Underground. This kinchin had likely grown up knowing how to make his way unseen through the streets.
I put the two halves of the notice together, lining up the faded text. Nothing had changed, save the blood tingeing the edges—and the remnants of dried saliva and still damp sweat, apparently.
“Wossat say?” shouted a Baker from the far corner.
I ignored the call, leaving Ishmael to deal with the men.
Carefully, I turned the parchment over.
Brown script, still faintly red in places, stained the two halves. I squinted at the cramped, deeply slanted handwriting.
My blood turned to ice.
Tick tock, Miss St. Croix.
I stood so sharply, my chair skittered back. “I must go.”
“You know where you’re going?” This from Communion, who had not stood, but still could look me in the eye from his seat.
“I know where.” The phrasing was too familiar. Too obvious. Tick tock, Miss St. Croix. The last I’d seen this handwritten warning, he’d held my Betsy hostage at the Whitechapel railyard.
This was quite obviously a summons, and this time I would not be caught unawares. I bent, lifted the net-launching device from beneath the table I’d stored it under, and shouldered the heavy brass case.
“Right.” Ishmael’s deep voice broke through my grim contemplation. Flattening a large hand atop the table, he lifted his heavy bulk from the chair straining to hold his massive size. “Then we shall—”
“No.”
The men shouted, varying disagreements with my brisk temerity.
I stepped around the table, closer to him—close enough that eager ears could not so easily listen. Looking up into his yellowed eyes, I laid a hand upon his forearm and said urge
ntly. “This is a summons to come alone. Anyone I bring will be in grave danger.”
His scowl was a fierce, belligerent thing. “Girl, that just means we go in numbers.”
“No. Ish, please,” I pleaded. “He’ll know you’re there, he’ll know we’re friends. It’ll be you he goes for, and even if all the Bakers in London rend him limb from limb, it’ll be you who dies first. He’ll stop at nothing to ensure it.”
Ishmael’s shoulders squared, like a mountain shrugging. “Even more reason.”
“Even more reason for you to stay,” I insisted, and this time, I did not hide the naked fear I felt. To look into his bullish features, imagine seeing them slack in death, was a pain that sheared through ice and emptiness. “I have lost too much to this monster. Friends, a husband—”
Surprise pulled at his expression.
I barreled on before he could ask. “I will not lose another. I know he took from you a man, and I will avenge him. I will avenge them all.”
“Menagerie justice.” It was a flat question, one that was not delivered as such.
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I spoke the truth. Regardless of anything I felt for Hawke, for the Veil, Menagerie justice was the worst I could envision. If I brought him to the Veil’s own doors, would the collector answer for his crimes against Midnight sweets?
I had to believe he would. If not...
If not, I wasn’t sure what I would do.
I opened one of my pouches, pulled out the journal. Within its pages, I placed the drawing Maddie Ruth had done of the cameo’s bits, and added the cloth-wrapped bit of glass with the remnants of the serum. “I need you to keep this safe, Ish.”
He did not argue as his large hands engulfed the precious remains of my life. But he did ask, “Why?”
“Because I’ll need that when I come back,” I said with a brevity I did not feel. “You’re the only one I trust to hold it.”
The only friend I had left, for all that.
“And I’ll owe you the value of your man’s life,” I added. “Coventry wasn’t to die.”
“You do owe it.” His other hand came down upon my head, flattening over the street boy’s cap I still wore. “We’ll ring the Chapel.”
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