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Authors: Nancy Springer

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BOOK: The Case of the Left-Handed Lady
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Tomorrow I would take them to Fleet Street. Then, until Mum answered, there would be nothing to do but wait.
I detested waiting.
In regard to the daughter of Sir Eustace Alistair, again I must wait. I could not pursue that matter until tomorrow.
But I had to do
something
before I would be able to sleep.
So, getting up from my cosy seat by the fire, I began to dress. Again. But differently this time. Instead of ladylike underpinnings, I put on flannel unmentionables that warmed me from wrists to ankles. Then an old corset that had once kept a knife thrust from penetrating my person; I laced it only just tightly enough to keep it on, as I wore it not for vanity, but for defense. And also for armament. Where a steel “busk” had once made the corset’s front as rigid as a poker, I had substituted a slender fiveinch dagger sheathed in the garment’s heavily starched linen. This weapon – double-edged, razor-sharp – I could reach through a placket in the bosom of the garment I now put on: a very simple black dress I had sewed for myself in hopes that it would pass as the habit of a nun. I fastened my high collar, ribbed with whalebone to foil cutthroats. Over thick socks I put on my old black boots. Finally, I arranged a black cowl and veil to cover my head and face.
Such was the apparel of my nighttime life.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
 
SOFTLY I SLIPPED OUT OF MY ROOM. AS was her custom, Mrs. Tupper had retired early to her bedchamber, where, even if she were still awake, the dear deaf old soul could not possibly hear my careful tread as I exited. Since I kept my habit hidden in the bedstead, I felt quite certain Mrs. Tupper had no idea that a second person, so to speak, a rather gaunt, nocturnal Sister of Charity, was lodging in her spare room along with that nice young secretary girl Miss Meshle.
I had to feel my way down the dark stairs, for of course in this sorry house, nearly a hovel, there was no gas laid on. Fumbling for the keyhole in the dark, I unlocked the front door with my latch-key, stepped outside, relocked the door behind me, then walked quickly away to lessen the likelihood that any chance midnight watcher should discover where I lived.
At random, taking a different route than last night or the night before, I strode down shadowy, narrow “courts” ill-lit by gas street-lamps. Not for the East End were the carriage lamps and flambeaux of the well-to-do, nor the brand-new electric fixtures of the very rich. Here, the feeble and wavering lights floated, or rather drowned, in a sea of brown smut; London crouched frigid in its own peculiar, choking way. Here, midnight’s chill was made of chimney soot, coal fumes, wood smoke, and dank disease wafting up from the Thames; it was as if one swam in a fog colder than ice yet never frozen, forever soaking through one’s clothing and into one’s bones. Such thick and freezing weather had driven indoors all folk who had anywhere to take refuge. Even on the stairways of the lodging-houses one would find vagabonds sleeping. Poor folk who had no other fuel tonight were burning straw stolen from dung-heaps behind stables, and might not live to see morning.
When I judged I had left my own lodgings far enough behind, I stepped into a dark gap between houses and lit an oil lantern I had brought with me. Already stiffening with cold, my fingers could barely manipulate the match.
One might well wonder why a young lady of gentle breeding would go out under such circumstances. I myself did not fully understand why I felt compelled to wander the night. I am perhaps a bit of a monomaniac, driven always to quest, venture, search, seek, find. Find out, find things, find people – tonight, anyone who might need help to survive.
Into my habit, as well as the heavy wool mantle I wore over it, I had sewed many deep pockets, stocked with items I might need: candle stubs and wooden matches, shillings and pence, warm knitted socks and caps and mittens, apples, biscuits, a flask of brandy. I carried a homemade blanket over one arm. In the other hand I lifted the lantern.
Wearing black fur-lined gloves, I held my light high and began to search the back ways and byways, alert for any hint of danger, any sounds of angry altercation, or screaming, or footsteps behind me.
I listened also for the sound of anyone crying.
And before very long I heard it.
A low, dull sort of sobbing. Reflexive, as if the person had given up, weeping only to breathe. Guided by that lament – for my lantern showed me only a few paces of street-stone underfoot before all vanished into sooty fog – I found an old woman crouched in a doorway, trying to warm herself in a shawl that covered only her head and shoulders.
As I approached, as she heard my footsteps, she tried to muffle her weeping with her hands, afraid – but then she sobbed aloud again, this time in relief, recognising me. Many such folk knew me by now. “Sister,” she whispered, “Sister of the Streets.” One thin arm faltered towards me.
Mutely, for the Sister never spoke or made a sound, I swept down on her like – like a big skinny black hen on a chick, I suppose, wrapping her in the blanket I had brought along. A crude thing: I made my blankets out of hunks of old cloth sewn together, because any coverings of better quality would have been stolen from those who needed them most.
This woman’s face, lifted to the lantern light, was perhaps not elderly after all, only harrowed by hardship, her scrawny body stunted by rickets and hunger. Was she a widow or a spinster, turned away from a common lodging-house for lack of eightpence, or had she been driven into the night by a husband’s drunken blows? Knowing that I would never know, I slipped thick, knitted stockings over her bare feet, then brought out of one of my pockets an item I had, I believe, invented: a sizable tin tightly stuffed to the brim with wadded paper into which I had poured paraffin. Lighting a wooden match, I laid it atop this odd sort of portable fire and set it in the doorway beside her, where it started to burn, flaring, like an overlarge candle, putting off a good deal of heat. It would last only an hour or so, but long enough for her to warm herself.
And hidden enough, I hoped, so that it would not attract any unwelcome company to her.
I gave her an apple, some biscuits, and a meat pie that had come from a baker, not a street vendor, and therefore might be made of good wholesome meat not intermixed with dog or cat.
“Thank you so much, Sister.” The woman could not seem to stop weeping, but she would, I thought, after I went away. Quickly I slipped her a few shillings, money enough to buy her food and lodging for several days, but not so much that she was likely to be killed for it. Then, standing back, I turned away, hoping she understood that there was nothing more I could do for her.
“Sister of the Streets, God bless you!” she called after me.
Her gratitude made me feel like a fraud, a farce, unworthy, for there were many, too many like her, and I could never possibly find them all.
Striding on my way, I myself shivered with cold. And with fear. Listening.
Tipsy singing and drunken yells floated faintly to my ears from the next street. A public house, still open? I wondered how this was allowed. Surely the authorities – 7 My attention diverted, too late I sensed a presence behind me.
Some small sound, perhaps the chuff of shoe leather against the frozen mud and crushed stone of the street, perhaps the hiss of an evil breath – but even as I opened my startled mouth to gasp, even as I leapt to turn, something seized me around the neck.
Something unseen, behind me.
Fearsomely strong.
Gripping tight, tighter.
Not a human grasp. Some – some narrow doom, serpentine, constricting, biting into my throat – I could not think, and never even reached for my dagger; I only reacted, dropping my lantern as both my hands flew up to claw at the – thing, whatever it was, tormenting my neck – but already I felt my breathing cut off, my body thrashing in pain, my mouth stretching in a voiceless scream, my vision dimming to darkness, and I knew I was going to die.
 
It seems to me that I next grew aware of a light in the darkness – but not a kindly light; this was orange, dancing, diabolical. Blinking my way out of blackness, I felt the cold harsh street beneath me, and saw that I lay nearly in a fire. A pool of oil, leaking from my broken lantern, burned merrily. In that gleeful glow, three or four men peered down at me – very blurred, that memory. Blurred by night and fog, by my confusion and pain, by my veil. As blurred as their drunken voices.
“Is she dead?”
“What sort o’ cad wud garrote the Sister?”
“Mebbe one o’ them foreign Anarchists ’oo don’t like religion.”
“Did any of yer see ’im?”
“Is she breathin’?”
Bending over me, one of them lifted my veil.
I think he looked at my face for a moment before I struck his hands away. Before my shock at such impropriety roused me from my – swoon? No, one can hardly say I had tumbled down in a faint, not in any delicate-lady sense of the word. Surely if one is strangled half dead, one cannot be accused of fainting.
In any event, blinking my way out of unconsciousness took a moment or two, which I remember imperfectly. I believe I struck out at the man who was lifting my veil, yanking it back down over my face again as I rolled away from the fire and wavered to my feet.
“ ’Ere, missus, wot’s yer ’urry?”
“Steady on, old ’orse.”
“Watchit, Sister, ye’ll fall.”
Hands reached towards me. But rejecting their offers of help – for they were staggering drunk, whereas I was merely staggering – I fled.
I retreated, as the military would say, in bad order. Without ever having drawn a weapon. In a panic of dry sobbing. Indeed I hardly know how I blundered my way back to my lodging. But somehow, eventually, I reached my room, where, trembling, I lit every oil lamp, every candle, and stirred up the hearth fire, wastefully throwing on wood and coal until I’d roused a blaze of warmth and light in the night.
I threw myself into my armchair and sat trying to stop panting, for each breath hurt my throat. Closing my mouth, I swallowed again and again, trying to swallow my humiliation as well as my pain.
Despite the fire, I still felt cold with more than just night’s frost, chilled to the marrow of my soul. I needed to get into bed. Staggering up, I began to unbutton my high collar –
My trembling fingers felt something hanging around my neck.
Some alien presence, long and smooth, supple – it was as if a snake clung there. Despite the pain to my injured throat, I cried out as I snatched and clawed at the thing, fumbling it off of me and flinging it to the floor.
There on my hearth-rug it lay.
The garrote.
I had heard that they were made of wire, but this one was fashioned instead of some sort of smooth, white cord knotted to a stick of wood.
Caught in that knot I saw a cluster of brown hair – my own. Wrenched from my head as the garroter had twisted the device tighter and tighter around my neck.
Swaying where I stood, I had to close my eyes for a moment, realising that only my high collar, stiffened with whalebone, had kept me alive. London’s constables wore high-collared tunics for the same reason. How astonishing, and fearsome, to think that such a simple device could terrorise an entire metropolis, even the police.
Fearsome also, and shameful, to realise that not any courage or wit of my own had saved me. Forgetting my weapon, like a bumbling fool I had kicked and clawed, no better than any other preyedupon female. Collar or no collar, I might be dead had those drunkards not happened along. Yes, I decided, indeed, they must have interrupted the garroter. Why else would he have left his lovingly fashioned apparatus around my neck?
Trembling badly, I forced myself to open my eyes again, studying that loathsome device.
Lovingly fashioned, indeed. The stick, of polished malacca wood, might have been taken from a gentleman’s cane. Hardly the sort of implement one would expect of a street thug. And the cord –
A stay-lacing.
That is to say, the lacing from a lady’s
corset.
Sudden sickness lurched through me, and with it, a blaze of anger. Snatching up the foul-minded, insolent thing, I flung it into the fire.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
 
FOR TWO DAYS I STAYED IN BED, CONVEYING to Mrs. Tupper by signs, as I could barely speak, that I had a sore throat – a common enough ailment at the time of year; I am sure she thought nothing more of it. The high ruffled collar of my nightgown hid my bruised neck.
It could not, however, comfort my bruised and ruffled feelings. While accustomed to physical pain – often enough as a child I had fallen from a bicycle, a horse, a tree – I found myself not at all accustomed to being hurt by another human being in such an offhanded way. It was not only my sore throat that prevented me from eating the soups and jellies Mrs. Tupper offered me. It was the malice of what had happened that made me sick.
Malice, and impropriety – no, far more than impropriety. Some – some
evil
I could not yet name.
BOOK: The Case of the Left-Handed Lady
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