Capturing the Devil

by Kerri Maniscalco

  H. H. Holmes and Jack the Ripper were now becoming as mythic and legendary as Dracula. They were scary stories told during tea, in bawdy halls and gentlemen’s clubs. How quickly fear could be replaced with laughter. It was always easier to laugh at the devil when we believed he’d been captured.

  I angrily swiped the paper off the mattress, flipping to the next ridiculous headline. Witches and vampires and werewolves were apparently having a war in Romania. Villagers blamed scorched plots of land, dead crops, and bloodless goats on the monsters. I sighed. It seemed the only true war was raging between fantasy and reality.

  “You’re upset.” Thomas gently touched my face, his expression soft. “Understandably, and I’ll stand by your side, fighting to locate any shred of evidence we can to convince the world who the real Ripper is. I will devote my life to the cause if it would please you.”

  I couldn’t help the smile that twitched across my lips. He was certainly dramatic. A trait that was wholly Cresswell. And I wouldn’t have him any other way. “I thought you wanted to start our own agency. Will that be our only case?” I shook my head. “We’ll starve. Though I suppose we can also go about proving vampires don’t exist.”

  Thomas took the paper from me, quickly scanning it as he set it aside, chuckling.

  “You know, I am quite talented with a sword, Wadsworth. I’ll hunt dinner for you. Or demons and werewolves.” The teasing slowly left his eyes. He picked up my hand, playing with the massive red diamond. He slipped it on and off my finger, almost absently. “Is that your answer, then? You wish to open our own investigative agency? I know we spoke of it…”

  My attention shifted to the headline again, and I hardened my resolve.

  H.H. HOLMES

  AN ARCH-FIEND’S RECORD

  “I don’t want to have another case like this one go ‘unsolved,’” I said. “With your deductions and my forensic skills, we will be quite a force to be reckoned with. Consulting on investigations—I can’t imagine a more fulfilling vocation. Our partnership and combined expertise will be beneficial to many. If they won’t listen to us about who Jack the Ripper is, we’ll keep searching for definitive proof, but we’ll also do our best to never allow another career murderer to go unpunished.”

  Thomas held the ring in his hand, squinting at it as if it might speak to him. After a moment, he bit his lip. One of the signs he was stalling.

  “Well?” I asked. “What sort of smart, witty remark are you debating?”

  “I beg your pardon, dear Wadsworth.” He drew back, holding a hand to his heart. “I was imagining our very own sign hanging above the door to our agency.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “And?”

  “I was trying to picture what we’d call it.”

  The tone he used was innocent enough, which indicated trouble on the horizon. I pinched the bridge of my nose. I was slowly turning into my uncle. “Please. Please do not suggest that combination of our names again. No one will take us seriously if we call ourselves the Cressworth Agency.”

  His eyes flashed with mischief. It struck me that that was exactly what he’d hoped I’d say, granting him the perfect opening for his real intentions. I waited, breath held for the truth.

  “What do you think of Cresswell and Cresswell, then?” His voice was casual; however, his expression was anything but. He held the crimson diamond up, never taking his attention from mine. Always and forever watching for the slightest hesitation. As if he would ever not belong to me wholly. “Will you marry me, Audrey Rose?”

  I glanced around the room, searching for any upturned bottles or signs of elixirs.

  “I thought I already agreed ages ago,” I said. “You’re the one who slipped the ring off my finger. I fancy it right where it’s been.”

  He shook his head. “I realized I’d never asked you properly. And then the debacle at the church…” His voice trailed off as he looked at the ring. “If you’ve changed your mind about taking my name, it won’t bother me. I only want you. Forever.”

  “You have me.” I touched the curve of his lips, my pulse racing as he playfully nipped at my fingertips. “Is it not enough that we’ve made the happiest of memories this past year? Traveling and living as husband and wife in every sense of the term?”

  “I do rather enjoy that part. Now if you’ll just drink too much wine and dance inappropriately, I will die a very happy man.”

  His wicked mouth pulled into a grin. He slipped out of bed, ring in hand, and went down on one knee. A sweet vulnerability entered his features as he presented me with the crimson diamond once again. Sir Isaac Mewton, who’d been tolerating our movements in bed thus far, flicked his tail and hopped to the floor. He offered us one annoyed look before dashing out the door. Apparently he was through with declarations of affection for now.

  “Audrey Rose Wadsworth, love of my heart and soul, I long to spend forever with you by my side. If you’ll have me. Will you do me the tremendous honor of—”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck, our lips brushing as I whispered, “Yes. A million times over, Thomas Cresswell. I want to spend forever adventuring with you.”

  My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

  My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

  The more I have, for both are infinite.

  —ROMEO AND JULIET, ACT 2, SCENE 2

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  BEYOND LIFE, BEYOND DEATH; MY LOVE FOR THEE IS ETERNAL

  CRESSWELL’S COUNTRY ESTATE

  ISLE OF WIGHT, ENGLAND

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Thomas and I waited, side by side, on the grounds of Blackstone Manor for the exact moment the sun turned the color of sleep. It was a drowsy pink—the kind of lazy shade that took its time fading into darkness. Thomas had charted the colors of the sky each night over the last two months, capturing each shade of tangerine or rose, calculating down to the minute how long we’d have before it collapsed into the purply black of night.

  Waves lapped at the shore, the mist rising around the craggy bluffs. It reminded me of spirits, and I wondered if our mothers had managed to bridge the gap between life and death after all. They were certainly represented in both my ring and the heart-shaped locket I wore.

  I heard a rather loud sniffle and fought a grin. I’d expected Mrs. Harvey to be sobbing into her handkerchief; I did not expect to see my aunt bawling with Liza’s arm slung about her.

  I met my father’s eyes and saw joy shining in them. Uncle sat beside him, trying to ignore Sir Isaac as he settled onto his lap. If I didn’t know any better, I’d believe a few tears had also slipped from his eyes. Daciana and Ileana sat together, their gowns sparkling like magic dust in the setting sun. Next came Mrs. Harvey and Noah, both dabbing at their eyes.

  The most surprising addition was Thomas’s father. The duke sat with my grandmother and gave us both a small nod, the action enough to inspire hope for cultivating a better relationship with him in the future. In the end, Thomas and I were surrounded by the people we cherished the most, the ceremony small and focused solely on love.

  Thomas kept his gaze locked onto the slow procession of the sun, holding his pocket watch in one fist. A peacock strutted down the path, its head bobbing in time with my heart. I grinned. The bird was his idea, unsurprisingly. Thomas flicked his attention to me, his expression softening. “Ready, Wadsworth? It’s time.”

  I inhaled the salty scent of the sea. “Finally.”

  I took his bare hand in mine, my heart fluttering like a bird in a cage of bone as he smiled back at me. Each shared memory flashed through my mind. From the moment I first saw him rushing down the stairs in my uncle’s laboratory, to the first time we made love, and every second in between our first adventure and today. He stole my breath now just as he’d done then.

  His suit was midnight black, edged with champagne whorls at his cuffs and collar to match my dress. My capped sleeves fluttered in the light ocean breeze and I flushed as Thomas slowly scanned me, his attention pausing ever so slightly
on my sweetheart neckline.

  This time, my gown was my own design—I chose a sheer white that bordered on a frosty blue, reminding me of sunshine illuminating a glacier. The bodice featured what resembled a golden butterfly with its wings spread wide.

  Delicate gold and champagne appliqués cascaded down my waist in thin tendrils before fading into the dreamy ice-blue white layers of my skirts. The bottom of the gown was my favorite part—the same champagne appliqués gathered en masse at the ground and carefully faded into the fingers of the smaller design. It was ethereal in all the right ways.

  We stood facing each other, wearing what I imagined were similar expressions of flushed excitement, as the sun slowly descended toward the horizon, turning my dress brighter shades of gold and champagne. The hour had finally arrived.

  This time, the priest we’d requested was more than happy for us to say our own words. “You may begin exchanging your vows now.”

  Thomas took a deep breath and stepped closer, his smile genuine and sweet. It was amazing to me, after these past few years of exploring the world and each curve of our bodies, that he might still appear so shy. So blissfully, beamingly in love.

  He looked upon me today the way he’d done from the moment we both knew there was no turning back, no fighting our fate. He and I were two stars in the same constellation, destined to shine brightly together each night of forever.

  “My dearest Audrey Rose.”

  Thomas gazed unabashedly at me, as if his soul was speaking directly to mine. Tears threatened to choke his words before he could get them out. I gently ran my thumb over his hands, my own eyes glistening.

  “You are my heart, my soul, my equal. You see the light in me when I’m lost within darkness. When I’m cold and distant, you’re as warm as autumn sunshine, bathing me in your glow. If I am the night, then you are the stars lighting up my endless dark.” His voice broke, wrenching my heart. “My best friend, the absolute love of my life, now until forevermore, I call you my wife.”

  This time—with just the gilded clouds and autumn-colored tree branches swaying in the soft twilight breeze, along with our joyous families on this private estate—there was no one to interrupt Thomas as he slipped the wedding band over my finger.

  “Beyond life, beyond death,” he whispered, his breath warm against my ear, “my love for thee is eternal, Audrey Rose Cresswell.”

  My breath hitched. The priest turned to me, his voice kind and encouraging. “Do you accept this man as your husband, to have and to hold, until death do you part?”

  I gazed at Thomas, seeing a range of emotions that were entirely him; mirth, love, adoration, and a wicked gleam that promised a lifetime full of surprises and adventure.

  I placed the ring on his finger, never taking my attention from his; I didn’t want to miss one second of this moment. His lips quirked crookedly and I knew, without a doubt, that he’d read the same promises in my face. I could not wait to spend forever with my best friend, the dark prince of my heart.

  “I do.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Before I wrote Stalking Jack the Ripper, I read a jailhouse confession written by Herman Webster Mudgett, aka Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, or H. H. Holmes, the con man dubbed “America’s first serial killer.” His book started the all-important “what if?” scenario my muse craves. There are many theories and arguments about who Jack the Ripper really was, but there was something about Holmes that always made me wonder if he was indeed the infamous serial killer who terrorized London.

  There were a lot of puzzle pieces that seemed to fit nicely with the “Holmes as the Ripper” theory—the personality, the medical background, the fact that he was in London at the time of the murders, his handwriting closely resembling Ripper letters sent to police, an eyewitness claiming an American was the last person seen with a Ripper victim, and more.

  For those of you who enjoy details: Holmes actually traveled on the RMS Etruria, the setting I chose for Escaping from Houdini, before he began building that labyrinthine murder castle in Chicago. He was a con man and opportunist, much like Mephistopheles, which gave Audrey Rose the much-needed lesson in dealing with sleight of hand and its many applications before this final showdown.

  One of the more interesting things that emerged about Holmes being the Ripper came from his great-great-grandson—Jeff Mudgett—after he’d read two of Holmes’s private diaries (Bloodstains, 2011). One theory claimed Holmes had trained an assistant to kill the women in London, and that his true mission was to harvest their organs so he could make a serum to increase his life span. Whether this is true or not was never confirmed.

  That possible motive was where the idea of Nathaniel harvesting organs to cheat death came from. Speaking of Nathaniel—one of the reasons I made Frankenstein his favorite novel was because Holmes’s most trusted associate—Benjamin Pitezel—had been called his “creature” in real life. I used this detail and played with their roles in the Ripper killings in Stalking Jack the Ripper, and once again when the truth behind Nathaniel’s involvement is revealed in Capturing the Devil. Benjamin Pitezel was not included in these works of fiction, but he was part of the inspiration behind Nathaniel’s character.

  Another rumor circulated about this infamous killer calling himself “Holmes” as an homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, which also planted the kernel of an idea to give Thomas Sherlockian deduction skills to track this predator.

  Now, I’m not fully convinced Holmes is the Ripper, but it certainly gave me lots to work with while crafting this series. One of the best parts about any mystery is researching and coming up with your own theories. Who do you believe Jack the Ripper was? Maybe one day we’ll finally have an answer to that question. For now, I’d like to imagine that Audrey Rose and Thomas solved the crime, only to be thwarted—once again—by the slick con man, who burned their only evidence the way he incinerated bodies in his murder castle.

  Like Audrey Rose in this final installment, I have a chronic condition. It was important for me to write a character who also wasn’t able-bodied, in hopes that others might see themselves, too. I believe it’s invaluable to see characters with all different backgrounds and abilities starring in their own stories. I based most of Audrey Rose’s symptoms on my own, and am so proud that a cane-carrying, scalpel-wielding goth girl in STEM defeated the ultimate villain.

  In order to continue Audrey Rose and Thomas’s story without a large time lapse, I took some liberties with historical timelines. Here are a few:

  The World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World’s Fair, opened in 1893, not 1889, and more than twenty-seven million people visited it. The Paris Exposition Universelle also hadn’t opened until May of 1889, though Audrey Rose references the Eiffel Tower.

  H. H. Holmes began working on the World’s Fair Hotel, his infamous murder castle, in early 1887. In 1888 he was sued by a company he’d fired (and hadn’t paid) to build part of it, and fled to England briefly that autumn.

  The murder of Carrie Brown took place on the night of April 23, 1891, not January 22, 1889 and her body was discovered on April 24, 1891. Many details of her autopsy scene were kept quiet, mostly because the police didn’t want people to panic at the thought of Jack the Ripper stalking American streets. The interior of the East River Hotel described in my story is fiction.

  Frenchy Number One and Frenchy Number Two were both real suspects, and police did arrest Ameer Ben Ali. All of the evidence that Audrey Rose points out is historically accurate—there were no bloodstains leading to his room or anything other than the slightest circumstantial evidence tying him to the case.

  Thomas Byrnes was really an NYPD chief inspector who didn’t think highly of Scotland Yard after Jack the Ripper slipped from their grasp.

  As with all good mysteries, there are still many debates about the actual body count for both Jack the Ripper and H. H. Holmes. All of the victims mentioned in this story were real or suspected victims. I gave some of them their own back
grounds, mixing fact and fiction. For instance, Holmes was known to take ads out in newspapers, hoping to hire young women to work in the shops below his murder castle. Once they were there, they usually didn’t survive. Mr. Cigrande was not really anyone who yelled about demons or who was an eyewitness to the Holmes crimes, but his daughter was one of the suspected victims. Minnie Williams and her sister were both thought to be murdered by Holmes. Minnie was said to once be an actress, which is why I made her part of Mephistopheles’s Shakespeare play. (She also really was hired by Holmes to be a stenographer.)

  Queen Elizabeth did grant peerages to a few Indian families, though only one family was granted a hereditary peerage plus the title of baron in 1919. It was the first and only baronetcy awarded.

  The wedding and engagement practices mentioned are all historically accurate, though as Audrey Rose points out, their brief engagement period was unusual.

  H. H. Holmes fled Chicago in July of 1894 and was going to build another murder castle in Texas when he was arrested and jailed briefly. While there, he told a fellow inmate of an insurance fraud scheme and inquired about a lawyer he could trust if he faked his death. The scheme failed, but Holmes was undeterred. He tried again with his partner in crime Benjamin Pitezel, but instead of pretending to kill him, he actually murdered his longtime associate and collected the ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy. Frank Geyer, a police officer from Philadelphia, hunted Holmes as he traveled from Detroit to Toronto to Indianapolis with Pitezel’s children. (Holmes ultimately killed them—Geyer discovered their bodies in the various locations where they’d stayed.)

  The Pinkertons finally tracked Holmes down and arrested him in Boston in 1894. He was executed in 1896. (Though rumors circulate that he pulled the ultimate sleight-of-hand con and convinced someone else to die in his place.)

  Alas, his murder castle wasn’t destroyed in the fiery battle with Audrey Rose, but in the summer of 1895 police did investigate the building, horrified when they discovered greased chutes that dropped to the basement, an incinerator that reached three thousand degrees, vats of acid, soundproofed rooms and vaults, and gas pipes that Holmes had control over (amongst other horrors). A fire did gut the building in 1895 under mysterious circumstances. It was ultimately torn down in 1938. For readers who may be interested in visiting the site: a post office now sits where the World’s Fair Hotel once did.