Fearless (Scarlet Suffragette, Book 1): A Victorian Historical Romantic Suspense Series (38 page)

There was no us!

“But she was not unaware of what she was doing,” she went on, delivering her assessment like a physician of the highest order. “She emulated her father. The man who gave her life, but not his name. She taunted us. Me for her lover Drummond’s sake.” Oh, bloody hell. “You, for her father’s.” Revenge. “Three women, Inspector.” Would she never call me Andrew now? “Three innocent women. Such horrendous deaths.”

Oh, my sweet girl.

“Anna, calm yourself. We caught her.
You
caught her. Her father is already dead. Neither shall kill again.”

She nodded her head, shifting out of my grip. Tearing a part of me away with her.

“Right you are, Inspector,” she said, offering a small smile. My heart shattered. “I’d best see to my cousin.”

She took two steps before I found the wherewithal to speak at last.

“Can I call on you?” I blurted, closing my eyes at the impossibility. “I mean to say, can I call to see how your cousin fares? How you fare, as well.”

Anna stood with her back to me, her head cocked to the side listening. But she would not give me her eyes.

Panic engulfed me.

“I think not, Inspector,” she said carefully. “Some dreams are better left in our heads.”

I watched her walk away from me. I watched as my heart was torn out, leaving me utterly desolate in its wake.

So much had changed. So little remained as it always would.

Tell her!

No.

To tell her, would be to condemn her. Just as taking her would have been. Part of me wished wholeheartedly I’d claimed her as my own. But that part was selfish, a baser form of human nature that I could never allow to reign.

If Anna knew who Eliza really was, she would despise me even more than she already did.

And if Eliza May knew who Anna was to me, nothing in this world could save my Scarlet Suffragette.

There were things far worse than the Ripper.

The less Anna knew, the better.

My hand fisted on my thigh and I let out a ragged breath.

Epilogue

I Almost Said It

Anna

November 1891

Three months later

The fire crackled in the hearth, but I could not feel its warmth. Nothing heated me these days, despite the change of season and the longer sunlight hours.

Summer was coming, but my days seemed to be the longest.

The door opened at my back with a soft creak and my housekeeper appeared beside me a few seconds later, hands wringing nervously, as they had taken to do so only recently.

“Is it time, Hardwick?” I asked, standing from my chair, and reaching down for the letter I’d just been reading.

“Yes, miss. The brougham is out front and your trunks are all aboard.”

I nodded my head and took one last look around my surgery. My father’s surgery and now mine. This would always be home, but not again for a while.

“You will take care of it, won’t you, Hardwick?” I asked. “The home. This place.”

“Of course, miss. But you shan’t be gone forever. It’ll be waiting for you and Miss Mina when you return from your grand adventure.”

I smiled; I was sure it lacked for warmth too.

I slipped the letter into my reticule and walked across the surgery, my shoes clipping familiarly on the hardwood, breaking my heart. If my heart had been whole enough to shatter.

Wilhelmina waited in the hallway, cloak and gloves on, hat already hiding the scar that marred her hairline.

“Are you sure you wish to do this, Anna?” she asked, handing me my own cloak as if she already knew my answer.

“Of course, dearest,” I replied, forcing myself to offer a natural smile. “The final step.”

“The final step,” she agreed, not sounding as positive as I.

We turned together to say our farewells to Hardwick on the stairs. Franklin Street was awash in green leaves, a slight breeze fluttering through the branches of its many trees. They danced on the wind, saluting us on our voyage.

“Just think,” Hardwick was saying. “You might find yourself a dashing young Londoner, desperately seeking a young kiwi lass.”

Wilhelmina giggled, which made the heartache all the more sweeter.

“We are kiwis now, aren’t we, cousin?” I said.

“Absolutely,” she agreed. “This is our home.”

And it was, which made the leaving all the more difficult.

We climbed aboard the carriage and waved goodbye to our housekeeper, Wilhelmina chatting enthusiastically about all the places she wished to visit in London while I would be cloistered in school. The trip back to England was essential for more reasons than just one. Mina needed it. And so did I.

Every corner we rode past reminded me of him. Every street and road seemed to harbour a memory. The trip towards Queen Street Wharf did not take us past the police station, but I found myself looking back up the rise to Cook Street. I couldn’t see it, Custom House stood in the way. But I could imagine it. Even smell it. The lemon and vinegar used to clean the floors, the wood polish Chief Constable Davies liked to liberally apply to the front desk.

The surgery. Not mine. Never to be mine, I feared.

Chalmers had made his views quite clear on that fact, even after Drummond had embarrassed himself in court. No woman without a degree in medicine would work for the Auckland Police Force.

I was one step closer to the Degree, a mere ocean away, in fact. But being a woman would always work against me.

What had seemed the final step, now appeared more like any other on the long road to equality.

I nodded my head and commented when a comment was required, but I did not truly hear a word my cousin said. Instead my mind was on the trial.

Mrs Poynton had lost all semblance of sanity by the time she’d faced the judge. Too proud to admit guilt, every single fact had to be wrung out of her. The inspector had stood in the witness box, dressed so formally and so unfairly handsome, condemning the woman with screeds of evidence painstakingly pieced together.

Margaret Thorley had by chance witnessed an altercation between Mrs Poynton and the orphan, and had started to ask uncomfortable questions of our Suffragette leader. Ethel chose to believe that the ghost of her father had delivered a message; an opportunity for her to continue his works. She’d lured Margaret into that alley behind the deputy mayor’s stage prior to our Suffragette march and killed her. The first of her victims on New Zealand soil.

The orphan, for his part, had been picking pockets in the dark den. A den Ethel had established with a small bequest her father had left her in his will. She’d been using the dens as a place to test her concoctions, and the orphan’s presence had meant the possibility of the inspector - her father’s nemesis - investigating and ruining her ruse. She’d set about refurbishing the opium house to the glory we’d witnessed, in order to cull the cutpurses out. Increased security and improved clientele had meant the gangs in the dockyard couldn’t risk trespassing there.

No pickpockets, also meant no police. Until I’d insisted we check there.

Mary and Helen had been a continuation of her cause. Her father’s cause. Her own need to be accepted. And the Suffragettes had indeed been easy targets. The more Ethel had walked this dark path, the more she’d grown to feel comfortable in it. Losing herself to her alternate consciousness. Finding additional reasons to pick off the Suffragettes one by one.

It did bring us notoriety, but not the way she’d intended.

Drummond’s evidence had been far and away the most damning, though. His close association with a murderer painted him in a dark light, and he had been desperate to step out from under it. But the man was no different from the rest of us. Fooled by a mind far more complex and devious than ours. A sick mind, clouded with drugs.

The doctor’s night time admissions whilst sharing the murderer’s bed, however, explained so much. He knew Ethel Poynton better than any one, and the inspector had ensured that he divulged it all under oath.

Drummond was the one with the connections. Highly admired in the upper echelons of society, he was privy to much inside information otherwise not available to a woman such as Mrs Ethel Poynton. Sales of buildings - Entrican’s brokering of the Upton Family Trust’s warehouse to the council, for example - were just one avenue for her to explore. She’d had a list of suitable properties to move the dark den to that could have kept her business housed for years to come.

Mobility meant less chance of detection. Less chance of the police finding out about her scheme.

Until I’d insisted we check there.

Much of Ethel’s lineage had been on display in that court room, too. Newspaper reporters with affiliations back in England had sat glued to their chairs as Sir William’s deeds were discussed and dissected. Ethel had spoken with pride; a pride that did nothing for her sentencing. But with the man suspected of being Jack the Ripper dead, little further could be achieved. Save Inspector Kelly’s role in the Whitechapel murders becoming public knowledge. He had a past not many in Auckland had been aware of. A past that was touched on during the trial, but not completely revealed.

The inspector still had secrets.

Let him keep them. I was done.

From there it was a short deduction to ascertain Ethel’s access to Kelly’s barracks. The Police Force had three of the old army barracks to themselves. One was given over to Inspector Kelly. One to the chief surgeon for the storing of additional medical equipment for civil emergencies. And the last to the filing of reports and cases and whatever else the police required to store in an empty, dark place.

One key opened each and every door.

Ethel had used Drummond’s key.

She was in Mt Eden Gaol now. Locked up with the men. The equality she’d sought awarded her in the end.

I should have been pleased. No more Suffragettes would die at her hands. Instead I felt old. Broken, but not beaten. Never that.

The carriage pulled up beside the steamship Ionic, its vast hull and chimney stack dwarfing those on the wharf beside it. The dock was bustling, men loading the vessel with passenger trunks, women and children huddled together waiting for their husbands to direct them aboard the steamer, workers of all descriptions hurrying about their tasks before the ship set sail.

The activity soothed me somehow, making the world brighter and the prospect of what was to come so much more appealing. The voyage would take sixty days. But it would be two months closer to proving who I finally was.

My father should have been here to see me off on this final step; he would have been so very proud. But when I climbed down from the carriage, it was not him I saw, but Kelly. Standing so still and solemn in the middle of a raging storm. People flowed around him, never jostling him, but parting like waves. He stood head and shoulders above most men, his long coat fitting his broad frame to perfection, his necktie matching the bright blue of his eyes.

And those eyes were locked on mine.

Wilhelmina spotted him before too much longer, but it was as if I had been drawn to him from the moment the brougham halted. I walked through the throng, leaving my cousin to deal with our luggage, as if pulled towards the man. A magnetic attraction, a visceral response. One I had no hope of denying.

He was not mine, and yet he
was
mine in every single way that truly mattered.

“Anna,” he said in his deep voice when I came to stop before him.

“Inspector,” I replied, barely above a whisper. But he’d heard; his eyes closing as though in pain.

I ached along with him.

“I had word you were leaving,” he announced, once the dark blue gaze had locked on my face again.

“Not forever,” I found myself saying, a repeat of Hardwick’s words.

Kelly looked toward the steamship. “London?” he asked. Then, “Is it because of me?”

Of all the things he could have said, I had not expected that.

“I…no…I…” I managed and then he smiled, stilling my words completely.

“Not everything is because of me, I am aware,” he said companionably.

I smiled too; it felt so natural, despite it being the first true smile in months to grace my face.

“No, Inspector,” I murmured. Then reached inside my reticule and pulled the letter out. I handed it to him.

“The London School Of Medicine For Women,” he read. “Anna!” His smile was blinding. “You’re getting your degree.”

How could such enthusiasm cause so much agony?

“I am,” I said simply.

“Darling,” he said, “that’s fantastic.”

My heart broke apart and left only slivers.

He realised his faux pas immediately and cleared his throat, staring off down the wharf as though unable to look at me.

I would always love him, I realised. No matter what had happened in his past, I would always love him.

But he was not mine.
She lives. She does exist.