Fearless (Scarlet Suffragette, Book 1): A Victorian Historical Romantic Suspense Series (15 page)

I sweltered under my cloak, but refused to remove it for fear of showing too much skin. The darkness of my clothing blended well with the shadows, but my pale flesh would have been more a lamp light in the distance calling sailors home to a safe port.

I did not feel safe. Even with Inspector Kelly standing stoically at my side. The brutality on display, applauded and revered by an audience of greedy gamblers, was enough to induce fear. Shouts of encouragement drowned out the sounds of someone’s next bet. Cries of dismay and anger rose up as a blow was landed and the receiver stumbled to one knee. A bell sounded. The crowd growing more wild, rather than taking the opportunity to calm themselves as the fighters returned to their respective corners of the square “ring.”

Brows were mopped. Blood wiped clear. A foul looking substance used to cover cuts and gashes was liberally applied. I feared it was not sterile in the slightest and would only lead to infection in due course. The swelling bruises were ominously left to their own devices, though. I could just imagine the state they’d be in when the battle ended.

I jumped when the fight began again in earnest. Fists thrown in measured punches through the heated air. The crowd’s voice rose collectively, like a siren announcing the onset of an inferno. It crackled and burned, flared and flickered with mounting desire. A desire, I was certain, for blood.

If the murderer was not here, I would have been very surprised.

“There is order,” Kelly said loudly, his lips to my ear.

Even though he’d raised his voice, I could barely hear him. And no one else in the room took any notice of his deep timbre, so his words had not carried farther then my prickling earlobe.

“For the most part, they follow Queensberry rules,” Kelly added. “Each round is three minutes in duration, with a one minute rest between. Twelve rounds altogether. But this is not a championship ring. This is not sanctioned or even legal in the eyes of the Police Force. This is boxing at its most elemental. Bare-knuckled. Ten second knock-outs. Last man standing wins.”

“Sounds barbaric,” I managed, but he would not have heard me. Right then one of the fighters spun in an impressive arc across the ring and crumpled into a mess of blood soaked clothes and heaving breaths. His eyes were closed. His mouth open and slack. His chest rising and falling too quickly for a person having been made unconscious by a naked fist.

The need to go to the felled man was relentless. It was only Kelly’s arm on my sleeve that prevented me from moving from the shadows. The noise in the room became deafening, then, but still I heard his firm words in my ear as he spoke.

“He may well have earned his keep tonight. Enough to feed his whole family. Don’t pity him,” he pressed. “And for God’s sake, don’t help him. A fighter’s honour is based on how well he recovers on his own from a knock-out.”

And indeed twenty seconds later the fallen boxer began to stir, lifting his head in a dazed fashion to the roar of delight from the crowd. My heartbeat sped up, my palms became sweaty. And I realised, reluctantly, that the exhilaration I was experiencing had nothing to do with the danger around me, and everything to do with the excitement of seeing a man overcome such dire odds.

He stumbled to his feet and my entire body jumped up and down on twitchy toes. My hands coming together and joining in on the applause the fighter was receiving. I expected him to leave the ring then; he’d suffered a head injury that would require several days to recover. But the bell sounded out again, and the opponent he’d previously been facing pushed off from the ropes at his corner and lifted bloody knuckles in preparation for another round.

I stilled; my heart in my throat. One gloved hand up to my mouth in horror, and I admit, anticipation. I was not a blood thirsty person. I’ve seen my share of blood, I don’t hunger for more. But there was something about this room, this space. This melting hotpot of excitement and fervour, danger and daring. The rational part of me thought the entire episode barbaric. Some other part, as yet unnamed, thought it thrilling.

Would the fighter overcome his injury and deliver an equally quelling blow to his nemesis?

He swung, and Kelly made a disgruntled sound, as if he expected better. The dazed fighter missed his shot, passing by the face of his opponent and receiving a swift punch to the solar plexus. I winced. The crowd roared. Half in celebration, half in encouragement.

I realised, as the two grappled in a more and more unseemly fashion, that on the whole the atmosphere was upbeat and positive. There was anger when a fighter didn’t perform as expected. Even disgruntlement when a round was cut short before the observer was ready. But most of the cries and shouts were for more, for harder, to get up, to fight back. To keep going.

I shook my head, mystified by the collective incitement laced with positive reinforcement in the room. The men watching lived every single blow. Eyes glued to the battle, bodies held at the ready for the next move. Anticipation written all over their façades. It was spellbinding to witness. A scarily vivid tableau. I could easily understand mob mentality when seeing so many men join together in such synchronous savagery.

And yet, the bell sounded out at regular intervals. When the men came together and wrapped their arms around each other for too long, the referee pulled them apart. If one fell, the other stepped back and waited in his corner until they recovered; he did not attack when his fellow fighter was down. There were rules to this barbarity. A strange sense of honour in amongst the cruelty.

And every man in this room knew them, respected them. Lived them.

I glanced around the spectators, taking in the faces of the crowd, and ignoring the match underway. I’d seen enough of prizefighting to determine I could have a hunger for it. Perhaps not to the degree or in the fashion of those men in this room, but certainly for the championing of a fighter who chose to pit himself against a stronger man. To fight and not give up. To get up again and again and again.

There was something immensely rewarding watching a man face his demons and survive.

I suddenly doubted our success in finding the murderer here.

He was not a fighter, not like these men. His battles were taken out against weaker opponents, in dark corners and dirty alleyways, not under hot lamp light and eager eyes. He liked an audience, yes, but only after the fact. His message delivered in the final presentation, not in the act of facing his demons and making it out alive.

Our murderer was not a survivor. He was something entirely else. But what?

A second fight began, and still I could not see a face in the crowd that I recognised. This was an area of our society I did not traverse. Even if some of my work led me to locations quite off the map, I had never stepped foot in the Parnell pugilist arena.

The building we were in wasn’t necessarily off limits. Recently expanded, from a modest public house to this grand rabbit warren of an establishment, it was a popular enterprise. The Swan Hotel a favourite amongst the workers of the brickyards and flour mills and rope walks of Mechanics Bay. Just a small distance away via Constitution Hill.

I could have easily been called here, but for the fact that my surgery lay across central Auckland on completely the other side of Queen Street. There were surely closer physicians than I. But that wasn’t what made this room so alien. So fearfully foreign. It was the fighters. The ring itself. The environment of a pugilist had never featured as a training ground in my past.

Perhaps it should have. Injuries seemed prevalent at least today.

I forced myself to concentrate further on the spectators. Cataloguing each man before moving off to do the same to his neighbour. Kelly remained silent at my side, watching the fight, or the crowd, or me, I couldn’t be sure. But as time stretched and a third fight sounded out in the ring, I began to have doubts.

And then I saw him. Across the room, drinking from a foaming mug in one hand, his other wrapped around the neck of a buxom wench who straddled his thighs. His eyes were all for the current fight, the occasional sip from his tankard the only break of his routine. The woman may as well have not been sitting there, pressing her ample cleavage against his coarse button-down jacket. For he paid her little attention, his focus almost solely on the boxing match in the ring.

Except he was watching another man off to his side surreptitiously, aware of every word he yelled at his customers and every cent he took as they placed their bets.

“You’ve seen someone,” Kelly said loudly in my ear, his hot breath making me jump slightly, unexpected as it had been. A large hand came down on the small of my back to calm me, sending heat unfurling through to my belly.

I sucked in a deep breath of air to settle myself, forgetting the stench of the place and the foul haze to the air. I stifled a cough and nodded my head, watching as Kelly’s eyes followed the direction I’d previously been looking at.

“Dressed as a Militia Guard,” he commented. “One of the men at Margaret Thorley’s scene?”

“Yes, and quite an excitable one.” The volunteer Guard had been most enthusiastic in his role of keeping the scene clear for the police. But he had also been most entranced with the notion the body found had in fact been murdered.

What had he said?

Just “
Murder.
” But it had been the delivery which stayed so firmly inside my head.

“He has an East London accent,” I advised the inspector and watched on in fascination as his whole body stilled.

I hadn’t thought to make the connection. But the Ripper had performed his atrocities in that particular quarter of the city. Perhaps the inspector’s former colleagues suspected he’d been from around those parts as well.

Kelly found Sergeant Blackmore in the crowd then and indicated the Guard with a nod of his head. The sergeant, for his part, moved off swiftly and surely through the tightly packed throng of agitated and animated men.

The bell rang in the ring. Smoke wafted up from a pipe somewhere before us, as people shouted and hands were raised as pound notes were traded at the end of the fight. I couldn’t see the Guard any longer and I quickly lost sight of Sergeant Blackmore, too.

“Come on!” Kelly shouted, turning back towards the hidden hallways we’d used to find our way inside. “He’ll herd him toward the front entrance,” he added. “I wish to be there to greet him.”

I started to follow behind his large frame, getting immediately jostled from one side to the other. An elbow suddenly connected with my shoulder. A booted foot came from nowhere and landed hard on my toes. Someone’s mug of ale was sloshed over my cloak, running in rivulets down toward my stockinged feet. The smell of rancid breath plumed around my face when a man leaned down to get a look beneath my bonnet. In less time than it took for Kelly to turn away, I was in danger. I barely had time to breathe, let alone scream.

A hard hand wrapped around my bicep, another pulled me firmly towards a sweat glistening face. “Well, what ‘ave we ‘ere?” the foul smelling behemoth exclaimed, making several other men turn from their entertainment of the moment, finding a far more interesting prospect in me.

“Unhand me, sir!” I demanded, trying futilely to raise my parasol from its useless station at my side. But there simply wasn’t enough space to achieve it; precisely as the inspector had indicated. Chagrin coursed through me at my blatant error.

I let a frustrated growl out, preparing to drop the umbrella, no doubt losing it in amongst the solid legs and thick soled shoes all around me, and pull out my switchblade.

But suddenly there was room enough to breath. To lift my hand and push hair back off my damp face. To right my hat, which had fallen quite askew, and straighten my cloak, dusting down my skirts in the process. I finally noticed that my parasol was elevated from its former home, but not yet unfurled. Lying completely forgotten in trembling fingertips.

I wasn’t sure what angered me more. The fact that I hadn’t used the damned thing or the fact that Inspector Kelly was throwing punches at the men around me as though he’d stepped into the pugilist ring itself.

I made to shout a warning, or a curse, I was unsure of what would leave my mouth in that exact moment, when he spun on his heel - having delivered a particularly nasty roundhouse punch to the side of my former captive’s head, felling him in that one final blow - and gripped my hand in his larger one, hauling me off into the night.

We’d made it several feet down the dusty, disused corridor, climbing over crates and dodging large, fearsome looking rodents, when he rounded on me, eyes over my shoulder to check the way was clear and we weren’t being followed, and then ducking down a stormy blue gaze directed at my face.

“I turn my back for one second. One second!” he exclaimed, chest rising and falling swiftly with his laboured breaths. “How could you get into trouble when we were right by the entrance to these hallways?”

It was a talent, to be sure.

I straightened the sleeves of my cloak, frowning down at the large stain spread across the bottom half.

“Anna!” Kelly all but shouted. “Damn it!” he added.

And then because I simply couldn’t stand another loud retort so soon after such a violent episode, I stepped toward him, closing the distance between us and coming up on my toes to press my lips to his.

Within a heartbeat he had me pushed up against the wall of the narrow corridor, his chest to mine, his heat wrapping around me and finally warming the chill that had invaded my bones. I hadn’t realised I was so cold, so quickly after facing off against those men. I hadn’t realised how hot Kelly could be.