Corroded tscc-3

by Karina Cooper

  “The Menagerie’s.”

  I had not expected the noise to suddenly go quiet again. Ishmael turned, slowly, as if he had all the time in the known world to level a look of flat regard to his crew. “Is this true?”

  Because he had been the man to begin the sortie, the rogue with the dark hair and spitting habit abruptly found himself in a widened gap of his mates. He thrust out his jaw, folded his arms. “Bartie’s a good bloke.”

  “If he has crossed the Menagerie, you know the law.” There was no room for wheedling against that tone. The rogue went pale. “You angling to take his place, Godger?”

  If possible, the one called Godger went even whiter, until his skin was nearly the same shade as the fog through my lens. I adjusted the protectives. “No,” the man admitted, but not willingly. It seemed pulled from him; from his pride, more like.

  Menagerie justice was not the kind of promise one easily accepted.

  “Then you know the outcome.” Ishmael turned to me, his jaw tight. “Talk with me.”

  I nodded, only just resisted the urge to make a rude gesture to the men who quickly faded back to whatever holes they might have come from—the laps of willing women, the interiors of pubs, even patrols taken to mind their own territory. More than one would need a slab of cold to take the sting away.

  The last to go was the man whose decision had not gone the way he’d planned. Godger glared at me as I turned away.

  I made no friends, but then, I’d only come for one.

  “Coventry will be delivered, but I can’t do it yet,” said Ishmael as he led the way across the lane and into a narrow doorway. He had to turn sideways to get in. Once past the doorjamb, the space beyond opened into a large, smoky pub. There were men and women alike inside, each as entertained by their own interests as they were curious of my arrival. There was a dip in the conversations, a lull in the rhythm of a good pub well-tended, and then it smoothed.

  Ishmael only had to look at a small table occupied by two lanky men, one no older than eighteen, perhaps. They quickly found other places to be.

  I was impressed. I knew Ishmael had some ranking among the Bakers, but I did not realize how much. He’d come up in the world.

  The chair he sat in creaked alarmingly. I followed suit. Mine did not so much and shift beneath my wait.

  “Why not?” I asked once we were seated.

  “Baker business, girl. I need him for a time.”

  “And after?”

  Ishmael did not look bothered. “After, I’ll deliver him myself.”

  “Does this have anything to do with the Ferrymen?” I asked him, and sighed when he only looked at me with the expression of one who was not intent on repeating himself. “Fine, fine,” I allowed, and withdrew a small swatch of black from my coat pocket. “Put this with him when he’s delivered.” Ishmael took it, pocketed with a simple nod. He’d do it. It was my calling color, as it were. Black from Miss Black. Hawke would know, when it came time to field the bounty.

  It may not matter to the Veil, but it did to me.

  “Why are you here?” he asked me, point-blank and with no preamble. A fine grasp of the Queen’s English he might have, but Ishmael was not one to waste words. “You’ve never attempted a collection on a Baker.”

  Rightfully so. I fingered my lip gently. “I need Baker help.”

  His near-black eyes were steady. “Funny way of showing it.”

  “You think they’ll be sore a female caused some damage?” I asked, raising my eyebrows over the goggles still banded about my face.

  “Among other things.” He leaned an elbow on the rickety, scarred table. “Help how?”

  “I’m hunting the Ripper.”

  Now, I watched his eyes widen, the black depths flashing more than a little concern. Heartwarming enough, but not at all the regard I needed from an ally. “Why?” he asked me, the yellowed whites of his eyes vanishing again as they narrowed just as quickly.

  To the point. I did enjoy Ishmael’s company so. “He’ll lead me to the sweet tooth.”

  He did not ask me why again, allowing the previous word to linger.

  “I’ve accepted commissions on both.” Not entirely the truth, but I could not admit so much. There was more I did not say than that which I did—that the sweet tooth had murdered my husband, that he was likely a collector, that Zylphia and the sweets demanded his turning over for Menagerie justice, or that the Veil had done the same—for very different reasons.

  I was desperate to rob the fiend of his arrogance, his pride, but I could not stop there.

  These things would reveal too much, and allow for too many questions.

  I was not prepared to answer any, so I gave him the barest of facts.

  “The tooth carved up a number of sweets, and hurt one just recent. He’s wanted for Menagerie justice.” Bordering Limehouse meant that Bakers understood the politics. It was one reason they’d been allowed to flourish east of the Veil’s district.

  This seemed more than enough information. Ishmael leaned back, his thick lips loosely working as he mulled the knowledge. A spurt of laughter from a golden-haired twist set a riotous chortle among the men surrounding her, and I glanced once to find her in a man’s lap, his hand ‘twixt her thighs.

  I was grateful for the mask of the large goggles, for I wasn’t positive that my cheeks did not burn hotly at the wanton, drunken display. I turned back to my friend as nonchalantly as I dared.

  Finally, he asked, “What do you want of the Bakers?”

  “Eyes and ears,” I said readily. “Nothing more. You wander the whole of London low, still, yes?”

  A short nod, but no explanation. While the gangs remained true to their territory, there were many forays into other districts and boroughs. Not always for related activities, but the rules drawn between gangs were not widely known and I dared not pry. Baker business was not mine.

  “The Ripper operates most in Whitechapel,” I told him. “I need more eyes than I possess.”

  “For what?”

  That, I wasn’t positive. I had no description to give, and no certainties to share. I propped my elbows upon the table, folded my forearms over each other. “I am less sure of this,” I admitted. “He operates at random, but he prefers dark places and rooms occupied by a single fen at a time, rather than many.”

  I think my casual use of what little cant I knew tended to amuse Ishmael, rather than impress. He often let it slide without comment, as he did my use of fen for a dollymop’s profession.

  “I once ran across what I think was him in Dutfield’s Yard, just after a killing,” I continued. A shiver plucked icy fingers down my spine at the memory. Zylphia and I had interrupted the beast before he could do more than slit a woman’s throat. In a fury, he’d gone on to murder another—and do such terrible things to her body as defied sanity. “He’s quick to kill, fast to run, and knows the streets a good sight better than most.”

  Silence, pregnant with thought and anticipation, fell between us. The pub only became the noisier for it.

  Finally, he stirred. “I like you, girl,” he told me, seriously enough that I made no quip for it. “So I’ll be clear. You’re asking for carriers to look for things what have no real knowing.”

  He wasn’t saying that it was impossible. He was warning me that I’d owe for answers I may never get.

  “I know,” I said, shrugging helplessly. “All I can say is that your folk have the way of the street, and you might know when a thing is off enough.”

  “You sure you’re willing to pay?”

  “Yes.” Of that, I had precious little uncertainty. Whatever earned me the Ripper’s trail—the sweet tooth’s capture—would be worth the owing, especially to Ishmael.

  The thick ridge of his eyebrows furrowed deeply. “Then it’s done. We’ll keep ears and eyes on the East End.”

  “In return?”

  He shook his head, the pub lights glancing off his dark skin like a spark off the midnight river water. “We’ll de
al in blood for blood.”

  It wasn’t an indication of bodily fluids, not as such. I was not being asked to fight, spill blood, or die. The term indicated whatever service he’d ask of me, it was one I was already capable of providing. It could include helping him crack a particularly difficult case, or run with the Bakers for a specific goal. It may even include use of contacts, should he have need. A fair barter: his eyes and ears for my abilities, no more and no less.

  It was all I could ask. “Thank you,” I told him.

  “No thanks, girl. Just be careful.”

  “I will,” I said, but I don’t think that he believed me. His gaze did not soften, and the worry shaping his flat, broad features did not ease.

  I took my leave with no more words exchanged, aware that Ishmael could not show untoward friendship with a collector—especially one who had unwittingly gotten a young Baker kinchin slaughtered by that same rival collector I hunted already. That had been the first blow I’d suffered from my rival. Would that it had been the last.

  I did not envy Ishmael the delivery of the large Mr. Coventry, but if anybody could achieve a victory, I would put my pounds on my friend.

  I was quite proud of myself, for I’d managed to fool Ishmael into looking beyond my personal well-being and focus instead on the task I’d laid before him. Leaving him mulling over his part in our agreement, I made my way through the loud, cheerful pub and into the street. Eyes watched me depart, and there were more along the path I walked to leave Baker territory, but they left me alone. Small favors, and I would take them.

  The Bakers were rather more agitated than usual. I suspected a conflict on the horizon. Too bad for Limehouse, trapped between them. I’d tried to warn Hawke and earned nothing but trouble for my efforts. So be it.

  I’d do the rest of this on my own.

  Chapter Twelve

  The remnants of my opium calm wore off at a rapid pace.

  I first recognized the signs when my fingers began to shake, and my throat began to ache despite the respirator I re-affixed over my mouth. What I’d considered an ague seemed instead to be directly correlated to the amount of opium I had eaten recently, and how long it had been since I last indulged.

  This was concerning, but not a trouble I could mull over while I was so focused on the task at hand. There would be time to worry later.

  Or so I assured myself as I made my way out of Poplar and into Whitechapel.

  According to the brass pocket watch I found myself checking at too-often intervals, it was half past one and long past the time when sensible working men and women found their beds.

  Fortunately, much of Whitechapel claimed residents neither sensible nor working. Or at least working for an honest wage. Prostitution had not seen much of a decline since the Ripper’s deadly antics began, and though the dollymops attempted to stay beneath the lamplight, men who paid were men well worth following.

  I witnessed more than enough opportunity for the Ripper to strike simply by walking along a main thoroughfare.

  I was left alone, solicited only by the most daring of the doxies, and usually with a teasing tone that suggested they expected no response—a type of contest, to see who among them was brave enough to solicit a collector. Many were too thin, some with hair that had been pulled loose from pins by prior arrangements seen to in the dark, and others shivered in the cold. October was not a kind month for the hungry. It would only get colder each day. Many was the soiled dove who would freeze to death come winter.

  Were it not for my own collector’s profession, I could have been among them. The marchioness had already tried to imprison me once, delicate a widow’s cage though it was.

  Were I truly forced to choose—trapped in that cage or walking the streets—I believe I would have chosen the latter without once looking back.

  Only here I was, and I found myself looking back often, didn’t I?

  I rubbed at the corset plating over my heart, which had taken to aching when I considered anything at all but the goal I’d laid for myself.

  The Ripper would make his move, but perhaps I could gain a little ground, first.

  Mr. George Lusk was, by all accounts, a respectable man. Named often in the newspapers after his appointment to chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, he appeared to have about him a stalwart sensibility and soft-spoken demeanor.

  I had never met the man, and I had not considered what I would do when I did.

  With a strategy only half formed, I easily located the address of Mr. Lusk and made my way there.

  He would, I was quite certain, be long since abed.

  While the fog clung to the face of the squat, plain housing reserved for them what lived here—a somewhat more respectable front than the doxies and profligates naught but a handful of streets over—most were black and empty.

  To my surprise, one revealed a bit of nearly smothered light trapped by the yellow lens over one eye, and I crossed the narrow lane towards the first residence. I found lamplight flickering from a single window, muted as though blocked by screen or curtains.

  Was Mr. Lusk awake? Was he entertaining?

  I could not recall the details listed in the articles I had read. Was he married?

  Would it matter? Perhaps he was entertaining a dollymop of his own.

  A part of me conceded that to interrupt such a tryst may be the height of rudeness—to say nothing of his wife’s feelings on the subject, if he had one to offend—but I could ill afford to play the understanding guest now.

  A glance at the rest of the flats, each melded to the next, showed no signs of stirring.

  Shrugging—as if this would cast off the guilt I nursed, or the wariness I felt as I climbed the small landing to his door—I reached out a newly gloved hand and tapped gently upon the door.

  There was no answer. In truth, I’d expected none. The man was like as not abed, light or no light, and I did not know one who would open his door at near two in the wee hours without prior arrangements made.

  I tested the doorknob, and found it latched.

  Naturally.

  Just as naturally, I had come prepared. Fishing a pin from my hair—such blasted useful things—I bent, inserted the tines, and probed the mechanism by which much of London considered themselves safe.

  Fools, really. As Ishmael could attest, even a halfway decent rum dubber could pick a lock. The best ones could do so quick as spit. I was somewhere in between the two; perhaps if one was a slow spitter.

  I muffled a chortle at myself.

  As the metal tines clicked against the iron tumblers, my heart stalled. Something changed—something nearby shifted, a presence I imagined turned to cold and malevolence. My innards seized.

  Before the sound of my amusement died to nothing, I jerked up from my ministrations, my back to the door and my wide, glass-covered eyes fixed on the fog swirling around the lampposts beside the lane.

  What watched? What waited?

  A fog of coal-streaked yellow kicked and frothed, as if a mad sea churned up by the passing of some great ferry in the sky. My heart thudded uncertainly, slamming at irregular intervals until I believed that I could hear its echo in the murky haze.

  With shaking, frigid fingers, I fished that bit of tar from my pocket.

  The lock waited patiently. Fine lock it was. I would tend to it, just as soon as I nibbled off this corner of the medicine that would ease my heart once more. Soothe my worries.

  And yet, as the bit Turk’s resin touched my tongue, I found myself straining. Listening. Eager to hear it.

  A whistle in the dark.

  It did not come. Instead, as I replaced the mashed globule of tar into my coat pocket, the latch clicked open behind me, and the door swung wide.

  “Now I must be quite firm,” said a quiet voice, soft-spoken for a man but irritated beyond. “I already told you—”

  What he’d told me went unsaid, for he looked into my collector’s mask—the cracked lens held by a strip of leather, the respira
tor protecting my lungs, my coat and trousers—and promptly amended his reprimand to a face gone pale as soured milk and a strangled, “Help!”

  I had no clues as to how to behave, save that if he did not cease his haranguing, his neighbors might soon gain enough interest to come looking.

  I pushed him inside his own home, shut the door hard behind me, and yelled over him, “Please cease your shouting, Mr. Lusk!” Muted though as it may have been behind my crafted vents, the intent appeared to have worked.

  Mr. Lusk halted, mid-grasp for one of two large candlesticks set upon a narrow table beside him, and stared—open mouthed, no less. Finally, he found his tongue. “Who are you?”

  A fair demand, for I’d just invaded his home.

  He was not an imposing figure, fairly average in every way. He appeared a man of fifty, stern-featured, with a full mustache framing his mouth that still bore more pepper than the salt his thinning hair displayed. His prominent nose was faintly reddened at the tip—age, perhaps, or drink—and where I expected to find a man in his nightclothes, he appeared instead to have shed his outerwear and rolled up his sleeves. As if I’d only caught him after a long day’s work.

  “Sorry for the pushing,” I said, making certain to maintain as much of my low street dialect as I dared without straining the bounds of understanding. “I’m a collector, here about your notice.”

  He finally lowered his hand. I noted stains upon the fingers, primarily forefinger and thumb. I’d wager his other hand would show the same about the tips, where he’d test the blotted ink after it dried.

  A working man, in ways wholly different than Hawke. Different even than the earl’s—that is, Cornelius’s... Oh, damn. A knot of pain plucked at me, and I fisted my own hands, forcing myself to finished the thought.

  My late husband’s hands had been roughened a touch, by what I assumed was his time in Her Majesty’s Navy. I’d had no opportunity to ask him about it.

  Fair, because he’d not asked me of my own. I could only imagine what he’d think of the scabbed mess I’d made of them now.

  Mr. Lusk cleared his throat rather loudly, a polite and emphatic sound.