Gilded: The St. Croix Chronicles (5 page)

“I do
not
speak of love.” Another lie. But a narrow one.

“Then whatever can be the issue?”

“There was no word of a proposal,” I protested, pushing away my half-empty teacup with a distracted hand. “He was only making up the insult delivered by his family. Why on earth would you think that he intended to marry me?”

She hadn’t seen the kiss, stolen in the exhibit where my father had worn his disguise so well. Or heard the earl’s declaration of admiration.

Fat lot of good any of that had done.

These were things men did, weren’t they? I knew it better than most, perhaps. Certainly better than the wide-eyed young misses thrown to the cattle market that was the Season. I knew the fallen women who flaunted their wares in the East End. The sweets sold to the highest bidder for an evening’s entertainment.

Hadn’t I evaded Monsieur Marceaux’s auction tables by sheer perseverance?

I’d known, and still I nursed a silent hurt. Lord Compton fled London and could not be bothered to send word to me about it. I shouldn’t expect it. What was I but a minor distraction?

Someone he once owed an apology to.

He had delivered. I could expect nothing more.

I wanted nothing more.

“There are signs, my dove,” she said with a shrewd glint in her eye. One that suggested her thoughts mirrored mine.

“I am an heiress, Fanny.” An old argument. “An independent woman. I shall have no need of a husband when I come of age.”

China clinked delicately as my chaperone set her teacup upon its saucer. Each motion came sharp and controlled. I’d upset her. Again. “And what will you do?” she demanded of me. “What do you plan with all of your wealth?”

I rose, shaking out my skirts because it gave me something else to focus my attention on than her sharp gaze. “I will tour the world,” I declared. She scoffed, a dismissal. “I will hire a sky ship and travel to America and France. I will fund scientific inquiries and attend lectures.”

I would purchase opium in whatever quantity I desired. Fund the finest craftsman to make for me items I could use while I collected.

I would be
free.

“To what purpose?”

I hesitated, gripping the back of the chair. To what purpose, indeed?

Did I need one?

I shook my head, swiping the fringe of fashionable curls from my forehead with an impatient hand. “I need no purpose,” I told her.

Her smile surprised me. “Oh, my dove.” She sighed. “One day, you will understand.”

I doubted it. Rigorously. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said instead, picking up my paper with one hand and my gloves with the other, “I’ve letters to write.”

Her mouth thinned, and she once more reached for her tea. “Yes, of course.” A retreat, though a tactical one. “Do send Mr. Helmsley my regards.”

I fled before the conversation could once more bend around the subject of marriage and duty.

The idea was preposterous. The only reason I was on the verge of independence now came on the coattails of tragedy. A woman could inherit only if all other male relatives were no longer living. My father was dead, and I had no uncles, brothers, or cousins to take my inheritance from me.

Common law suggested that should I marry, all my intended wealth—the inheritance protected so carefully by my absent guardian—would belong to my husband. Entirely.

Not an ideal situation for any woman. Yet time after time, women fell to the trap of marriage.

I would not be one. There was nothing marriage could offer me that I could not attain myself.

And so I retired to the sitting room, and its delicate, feminine desk arrayed in one corner. This was my study, because I was not allowed in the actual study. Although it had once been my father’s, and retained much of his chosen decor, it was nevertheless Mr. Ashmore’s, and Fanny frowned on my presence there.

It was an argument I did not intend to pursue. Much like that of marriage.

I wrote to Teddy first. As one of my dearest friends, the Honorable Theodore Helmsley was a figure I missed terribly when he left Town for his family’s rural estate. Although he was the third son of a viscount, his prospects were as slim as mine. If he intended to get on in the world, he would be required to join Her Majesty’s service, master a properly respectable trade, or marry well.

Once, he’d considered asking for my hand, but I had little enough to offer him. Wealth, perhaps, and friendship, but I was not keen on marriages of convenience. Or marriages at all, for that matter.

He was my friend, and I was his. Most Wednesdays, we met here in the parlor to talk about the latest science periodicals. We theorized and debated, and I enjoyed my dear friend’s company immensely.

Even if I kept the secrets of my collector’s life from him.

I was certain he hid his own, for I knew rumor placed him often in the gaming hells below the drift, and frequently among the Menagerie sweets. In a way, I have long suspected that the break from Town was a way for his family to gather their strength for the Season next.

His father, Viscount Armistice Helmsley the Third, was a known hedonist, and encouraged all his sons to be the same. Teddy was a smart lad, brilliant in his own way and possessing a sharp sense of humor, but blood tells.

It
always
tells, doesn’t it?

The letter I wrote him said nothing of my current troubles. What could he do from so far away? Besides that, I knew that he received the same papers as I. Just a smidge later. He’d see the columns, know what they meant.

Instead, I included notations from the latest periodicals. I did not expound—we would have much to catch up on when he finally returned—but I informed him in no uncertain terms that his ongoing views on aether as the creator of all life were bollocks.

I included that word, underlined it with a flourish, because I knew it would make him laugh.

When I was done, I signed it, sealed it, and marked it with his family’s estate address. Then I turned my attention to the small stack of newspapers Booth left for me.

I did not bother reading them all. Instead, leaving my gloves off to better handle the thin pages, I rifled through each paper quickly and found what I sought in the
Leeds Mercury
. “
Two more women murdered
,” I read aloud, frowning at the bold print.
HORRIBLE MUTILATION
, the headline swore.

A quick read told me what I’d feared.

Two more dead in the East End, but I’d known of only one. It spoke of the woman, identified as Annie Morris, found exactly where we’d left her to chase her killer. Zylphia had proclaimed her dead; the papers confirmed the tale. Yet it seemed that murder was not by itself enough.

The killer—perhaps unfulfilled by my interruption of his work—had found another victim. Another unfortunate character.

How he must have been furious to be so disturbed.

The second victim, this time uninterrupted by the likes of me, was found half of an hour later, throat cut. Body terribly mutilated.

I shivered upon reading the details. With a few grotesque descriptions, I was no longer seated in my elegantly furnished parlor, no longer warm and dry.

Instead, shuddering, it was as if I could smell the pungent damp, feel the choking fog as it slipped through my nose and mouth. I heard the bubbling noise of what I now knew to be a throat cut in the dark.

That was his first stroke; the point where the nub of his disturbed conscience began his signature. The mutilations, the ghastly acts performed upon each body, became his flourish.

Each act an art, each stroke a laugh.

Taunting us?

No. There was a difference between this man and the collector I chased. The latter truly fancied himself an artist; perhaps he even was, and his canvas was the world as he saw it. Brilliant or simply mad; the two so often came hand in hand.

This murderer was nothing so elegant.

Elegant?
I shook myself free of the fanciful turn my thoughts had gone, inhaling gratefully the fragrance of the wood in the fire and the aromatic, dark tea Booth continued to bring me.

Whatever this creature was, he was a man, and he would bleed like one.

As he boasted like one.

A rustle of fabric behind me warned me of company. Too harsh a sound for Fanny’s silk and velvet day dress, and accompanied by neither the clatter of a tray nor Mrs. Booth’s near-constant murmur.

Zylphia, then. “He sent out a letter,” I said aloud, glancing up. Clad in a demure day dress, gray relieved by a stark white apron and her head covered by a white cap, Zylphia looked nothing like the sweet she’d once exclusively been.

Or like the assistant she had become.

Her head tilted, cleaning cloths in hand. “The sweet tooth?” Her name for the collector, given he’d been offing sweets at the time.

I shook my head. “Leather Apron. Tend your duties, I’ll read it to you.”

She wasn’t as efficient as her predecessor had been, but even in severe gray and white, she retained a certain grace impossible to ignore.

The Karakash Veil—the mouthpiece, anyway, by which I’d received my orders—had suggested she came not just from mixed stock, but from a
useful heritage
. I didn’t know what it meant.

I wondered, sometimes, if the Veil had only upsold her value to ensure my agreement. He needn’t have bothered.

“
Dear Boss
,” I read, returning my attention to the paper, “
I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits
.”

“Charming bloke, isn’t he?”

“I’d say he knows his letters, but there’s errors,” I said slowly, scanning the rest of the text. Grisly, to be sure. “A dictation, perhaps?”

“Or some minor schooling.” Zylphia bent to her task, polishing the grate in front of the fire. “There’s some what say this murderer’s a lord in disguise.”

I smiled briefly, suddenly amused by the dichotomy we presented. Each with a second life, one in Society, one below.

But it faded. “Doubtful. If ’tis true, then he writes very poorly.”

“Unless it’s a trick.”

A fair point. “He goes on.
I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope
. He considers himself charming, anyway.” He’d written
ha, ha
after the joke, but I wasn’t laughing.

The collector, may his soul rot once I caught up to him, had used blood when he’d written
me
a note. The same letter that warned me he’d kidnapped Betsy Phillips, my last maid and as dear a friend as I’d ever had.

Eager for attention
, the collector had sneered. So it seemed. Of them both.

“So who wrote it?” Zylphia demanded, her hands busy polishing but no less intent on me than she was on the chores that kept her busy by day.

I studied the transcribed text, my eyebrows rising. I’d never mastered the art of lifting just one. “Jack,” I read.

“What?” My maid scoffed loudly, snapping her polishing cloth into the air in easy dismissal. “Spring-Heeled Jack’s nothing more than a legend.”

I lowered the paper, mouth twisting into a grim slant. “Not Spring-Heeled Jack,” I said softly. “Nothing so fanciful.”

“What, then?”

“Jack the Ripper.”

My maid fell silent.

The name—false, though it may be—rang like a death knell in my parlor. It was a name that would grip London with fear, I was sure of it.

Jack the Ripper.

Perhaps I’d two murderers to hunt this time.

Suddenly filled with a sense of urgency, I set aside the papers I’d perused and rose to my feet. “I’m off to change,” I declared, and left her to tidy behind me.

All I wanted at that very moment was to travel below and begin to retrace the steps I’d taken through Dutfield’s Yard. To ask questions of the witnesses, to visit the Menagerie and make inquiries among the sweets.

Unfortunate
though they may be, the sweets knew things that most would never let on. Clients talked. I needed to know if they’d heard any word of this Ripper.

If Hawke would even allow me the chance.

Blast. I had no choice in the matter. It was all moot speculation. As I seized my poplin skirts in one hand and hurried up the stairs, passing the large wooden lions carved at the foot, I knew I’d have to wait.

Much as I dreaded social events, I could not pass up an invite from Lady Rutledge. Not if I intended to survive Society’s demands long enough to enjoy my own forthcoming independence.

The widow was my only ally of any standing.