Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles (3 page)

“If you’re sure,” she said slowly.

I was.

“Come, then,” I told her, and hurried to make the Whitechapel connection.

Chapter Two

A
city gripped by fear is an eerie place. Since the first prostitute was murdered in August, all of London below the drift has held its collective breath. Workers tended to their labor, the doxies of Commercial Road plied their trades from the dilapidated corners of haunted Whitechapel to the Limehouse district so named for its lime kilns, yet there seemed over it all a sense of waiting. Of watching.

We passed through the yellow- and black-tinted streets, painted luridly by gas lamps lit at irregular intervals and the damp that infested every cobble and corner. Zylphia said little, and I did not encourage conversation. My mind scattered along paths that held no promise of answers.

I was trapped. There would be no rescue, no saving me from the hole I’d dug unwittingly for myself. The fact of the matter was, I owed the criminal enterprise that ran much of Limehouse’s Chinese population. Whether I liked it or not, they did save me from my father’s serum.

Or, more precisely, Micajah Hawke saved me.

The methods by which he’d done so haunted me, but in the intervening month, I’d managed to shove those memories into a tiny compartment and had no intentions of inspecting them any closer.

Now, I only recalled the feel of his mouth upon me in the darkest part of the night, and I looked to the laudanum I had not been taking for those.

With my collecting coin cut so short, I could not afford the opium grains I had grown accustomed to. I rationed them dearly; and I keenly felt the loss.

It took careful use to balance my need with my supply.

I needed distractions. I needed, in some unconscious way, to exhaust myself, and I believed Zylphia knew that. This is why she went out with me most nights, despite the lengthy hours she kept by day acting as my housemaid.

The time, almost one o’clock of the morning, would allow for an easy bounty, assuming there would be one to collect. I would split with Zylphia just before we crossed into Limehouse, meet her at the West India Docks with—I hoped—information of that wayward collector and a handful of collections to perpetuate. At least one would need to be for coin, the rest for the Menagerie.

I had hopes that every Menagerie-funded bounty I turned in, but did not get paid for, would chip away at the debt the Veil held over me. I doubted it, but I needed leverage.

Raucous singing pierced the fog, the hoarse laughter of men and women deep in their cups echoing eerily through the darkness. Beyond the alleys we navigated, St. George-in-the-East played host to all manner of folk. The singing I heard told me we were near the International Workingmen’s Educational Club; a front for immigrant anarchists, as well a favored social center.

I’d been inside once or twice, on the search for the rare Jew hauled up on the bounty boards.

That put us practically on top of Dutfield’s Yard. “We’ll go through here,” I murmured, by habit as well as an overabundance of concern. My voice is a feminine one, and most footpads see females as easy sport.

That made individuals foolish and groups more than dangerous, but it would also waste my time. Without my respirator, I erred on the side of caution.

Zylphia, no stranger to the dangers of these evening streets, only nodded.

Dutfield’s Yard is one of many ways to travel from back alleys to main streets. A narrow strip of yard between the club and Berner Street, it had seen my passage before and would probably do so again. Few bothered to pay much attention to the comings and goings of the bodies that traipsed through the gates. The large gate should have been closed this late, but rarely was.

The shadows clinging to the interior of the yard were thick as treacle and deucedly difficult to see through. Black as pitch, and this even with the lights from the surrounding tenements struggling to pierce the pea souper.

I was used to dark places, and I thought nothing of it as we passed through the four-foot-wide gate left open to the alley behind us. Already, as my feet navigated a path I knew by rote, my mind lingered over the many troubles weighing upon my shoulders.

It was Zylphia who scented the disturbance first.

I felt her stiffen beside me. Then a hand, reaching perhaps for my shoulder but missing in the dark and colliding with my back instead. I grunted a surprised exhale, the sound slipping into the yard and taking wing.

But the echo that came back was not something the dark crafted alone.

A gurgle, strangled as if a breath struggled to escape through mud or worse, and an intake of air. Nearly a growl.

We were not alone.

I froze, eyes wide and painful as every sense desperately tried to carve a swath through the foggy night.

In that single breath of silence, weighted by what seemed an eternity of sudden, crushing fear, a sonorous melody lifted across the sky.

The clock tower at the peak of Westminster Abbey, whose chimes could be heard far as the Menagerie on even the thickest of soot-ridden days, sang a lilting warning.

The first and only bell gonged, one o’clock, and the darkness shattered.

I felt it come before it reached me, but I was too slow. A warm body slammed into me, a man’s body, impossible to see but heavier than me and broad enough to send me careening into the side of the club.

My shoulder rebounded off the rough brick siding, sending stars of pain shooting through my vision, and I heard Zylphia cry out as the same figure crashed into her. But this time, I also heard the tangle of feet, a scuffle, a grunted impact with the ground. He hadn’t expected two of us; he must have tripped over Zylphia as she floundered.

I pushed off the wall, blind but determined, ignored the frightful pain in my shoulder to run for the same narrow gate we’d only just entered. I heard the
clip-clop-clip
of hooves on the cobbled road across the yard.

Someone was coming, and that alone was permission enough for me to give chase. Whoever manned the pony and cart I heard entering from Berner Street could tend to the body I suspected had made that terrible bubbling sound; I had a footpad to catch.

I don’t wholly understand myself at times. I am a collector. By very definition, I have no reason to give chase if I do not have the coin promised.

Yet something about that night—that dark enclosure and the bulk of the man who slammed into me—demanded I chase him. So I obeyed the instinct to follow and sprinted out of the pitch-black yard, through the gate, into the narrow street that was little more than an alley.

Footsteps echoed, splashing through puddles from every direction, but longtime familiarity with the streets of London below allowed me to discern the pattern. I turned right, followed the uneven, heavy tread. Through the yellow lens of my goggles, I picked out a shape—broad, like I’d already deduced, wrapped in a heavy overcoat. Too dark to see more than the silhouette of a man and his hat, but enough.

Nobody ran unless they were guilty of something.

I heard Zylphia’s voice behind me, but I ignored her in favor of the chase. Sweat gathered across my shoulders—I came to regret the man’s coat I wore over my rigidly plated collecting corset, but I didn’t dare pause to shed its weight. My shoulder ached fiercely; I feared I’d twisted the joint or something just as unfortunate, yet I could not stop.

“Halt!” I shouted, my voice rebounding across the narrow cobbles.

He did not. They never did.

As I ran, I became aware that the footsteps grew fainter. But the shouting of voices behind me, somewhere in the direction of the yard I’d left behind, grew louder. Shriller.

Finally, I burst out of the alley onto Commercial Road, my hair clinging to my sweat-damp cheeks and my breath rasping in my lungs. I bent over, gasping, a fierce knot of raw agony stitched in my side, and realized that while I’d plenty of strange looks from the knot of women lounging by the alley mouth beside me, I had no more quarry.

The fog swirled in the street, streaks of gray and white and lamp-lit gold turned filthy by soot.

I sucked in a hard breath, straightened with effort. My ribs burned against my corset; my shoulder throbbed, and I clutched it in my right hand. “A man,” I gasped.

One of the women, a dumpling of a thing with a sour face, laughed outright. “Wot’s yer type?”

I didn’t bother with censure. These were prostitutes; one of many soiled doves working the streets. “Broad, dark overcoat long enough to flap as he ran. Out of breath?”

I received only blank stares for my trouble.

Bloody bells and damn.
I turned, peering down the narrow corridor, but I saw nothing. Heard nothing more than the mild din of an uproar farther up the road. And a voice, I realized. Coming closer, shrill and fearful.

“Oh, bother,” I muttered.

“Murder!”

The women started, three of them sending up a shriek piercing enough to wake the dead. “Oh, it’s ’im!” one cried. “ ’E’s found ano’ver!”

It seemed that way.

The murderer known through the broadsheets as Leather Apron had already slashed the throats of two women. One in late August, one in early September. The things he’d done to their corpses, to their organs, were the stuff of nightmares.

I could not blame them their fear. Especially since I knew, or at least had been reassured, that there were two such killers in London, and more victims than had been printed in the papers. One, the collector working at the behest of my father. His victims—midnight sweets, all of them—had never made it into public awareness. The Menagerie made sure of that.

The other was this Leather Apron.

Talentless lout
, the collector had snarled when pressed for answers.
Eager for attention.
Such derision in the words.

Did I interrupt the very same killer this night?

I watched as the women hurried away across the street, into the well-lit interior of a shop whose upper floors likely provided lodging. Watched still as a man, eyes wild and voice already tearing, sprinted past me. “Murder, murder! Fetch the rozzers!”

With that sort of ruckus, the constables would find him first.

I leaned against the brick facing, forcing myself to breathe, to collect my composure once more, and waited for Zylphia to find me.

I’d taken a right good knock. My shoulder ached clear to my elbow, snaked around my ribs. Whether it was that pain or something triggered by it, my lungs burned. Ached with every breath.

It’d take some time before I’d be able to tell if I’d done myself in, but I wasn’t sure if I should risk a bounty as I was.

My companion would have me turn in; I knew it.

She wasn’t wrong, either. ’Twas dangerous work I chose, and an injury could so easily compound into something worse. As I waited, I gingerly unfolded my arm, bent it at the elbow. It wasn’t until I attempted to raise it at a perpendicular did agony tear through the tender joint.

I hissed in a breath, clapped my bent arm to my chest. The rotter. How could I have been so clumsy?

Zylphia didn’t take long to find me. As she approached, I tipped my head and led the way up the street, in the opposite direction of the morbidly curious hurrying to the scene I’d left behind. She was silent as she matched my pace. Only once were we well out of hearing of any constables or curious ears did she offer explanation. “There’s a dead twist in Dutfield’s Yard.”

A woman, then. “And?”

Her gaze, shockingly blue even behind her glass protectives, met mine. “Couldn’t tell much else in the black before the cart near ran me down, but—” She held up one hand, the gloved fingers saturated nearly black to the first joint. “There were a lot of blood.”

I rubbed at my face, anger curling like a fist in my throat. I had him dead to rights, chased him halfway up Commercial Road, injured myself in my haste, and for what?

Had I just lost the Whitechapel murderer?

T
he journey home passed without incident, and the sky ferry manning the West India Docks carried us up from the fog-drenched streets to the clear, chilled night above the drift. My shoulder ached fiercely as I disembarked, worrying me.

How would I hide it?

Captain Abercott of the
Scarlet Philosopher
, a rotting canoe barely worthy of calling itself a sky ferry much less a ship, was no closer to the title than I was to declaring myself a duchess. He was often sotted, and always eager for ready coin. I paid him to take me from upper London to lower, and he rarely asked a word.

Abercott was a thick man, portly yet surprisingly spry for it. He’d lost most of the hair on the top his head, which he made up for by donning a sailor’s cap and cultivating a disheveled trimming of stringy fringe around it.

He had taken a strange dislike to my new companion, which gave me a privacy I’d had little of before. Once wary of his quick hands, now I left Abercott to Zylphia to handle.

She settled with the captain rather more quickly than I’d have ever expected, and we moved out of the docks.

Fortunately for my already mildly tarnished reputation, much of London’s to-do had long since arrived at the various soirees and gatherings held from one end to the next. Although the best of the Season was all but over, there were those who remained in town come sun or snow, and the best way to remain solvent in fashionable reputation was to be seen.