The Ripper Affair (Bannon and Clare) (6 page)

^“
D
ear heavens,” Clare repeated, vainly trying to smooth his wild, greying hair down. His blue eyes were blood-shot–he knew as much–and he was in no fit state to be before royalty. “I had no–mum, I mean, Your Majesty—”

“Sit down.” Miss Bannon was at his elbow. She all but dragged him across the drawing room and pushed him firmly into his wonted chair, a walnut affair with high curved arms he tapped thoughtfully when a complex case had his undivided attention.

“In front of the
Queen
?” He sounded genuinely horrified, even to himself.

“I care little who is present, sir,
sit down
before you collapse.”

She held an empty glass, and his sensitive nose discerned the odour of rum.

Her nerves must be frayed, indeed
.

The remarkable fact that the Queen of the Isles was on the settee, without a guard or a minister anywhere in evidence, impinged upon his consciousness as well. It did not bode well at all, and thankfully gave him something new to busy his faculties with. “What dire news is it this time? The dynamitards, have they struck again?”

“No, indeed.” Victrix essayed a pale smile. “It is quite a different danger, and I am begging our redoubtable sorceress’s aid with it.”

“Begging? Nonsense. Miss Bannon is always more than happy to…” He blinked up at the lady in question, whose expression had shifted a few critical degrees. “I say, Emma, I am well enough. Do tell me, how may I be of service?”

“You may sit where I place you, and cease being ridiculous. Mikal–yes, thank you.” She pressed a snifter of brandy into Clare’s willing hands, and the amber liquid suddenly seemed the best remedy in the world for his pounding head. “And–yes, very good.” She lifted her replenished glass of rum, and tapped it against his. “Come now, sir. Chin up, buckle down.”

“And devil take the hindmost.” The familiar refrain, usually uttered when an affair they were pursuing had reached a breaking point of urgency and strain, comforted him. “I am sorry, Emma. I was dashed brutal about Valen—”

“Let us not speak of that.” She eyed him for a long moment before straightening and glancing at Mikal. The Shield’s face was a bland, closed book; he did not even
spare a moment’s worth of attention on Clare. “Now, stay there.” She turned, regarding the Queen with a level, dark-eyed gaze.

It was odd to see such a childlike face so set and pale, the tiny diamonds on the crêpe band about her slim throat ringing with sorcerous light. The Queen, round and stiff in her mourning–the Widow of Windsor’s sorrow was rather a mark, Clare thought, of a certain calcification of character–wore more jewels, and certainly more costly, but they did not seem as expressive as Miss Bannon’s oddly matched adornments.

He noted the tremor in Queen Victrix, the hectic colour of her cheeks and a fresh scratch on the outside edge of her laced boot. Gravel, meaning she had hurried into a carriage, most likely on a wide walkway. And there, behind the careful mask of a middle-aged matron’s face, was a flash of Feeling.

He peered more closely, disregarding the rudeness of staring, to verify the extraordinary evidence of his senses. Yes, he was certain he could identify that flash.

Fear.

“I shall investigate these occurrences,” Miss Bannon said, formally. “If possible, I shall remove the danger to Britannia. I shall require every scrap of information there is to date; running after every murder in Whitchapel will only muddy the issue.”

Whitchapel? Murder?
Clare’s faculties seized upon the extraordinary words with quite unseemly relief.

Victrix’s mouth compressed. “The first body was buried
a-pottersfeld, the second is at Chanselmorgue. Her name was Nickol, I am told. More I cannot speak upon here.”

How very odd. It galls her to request Miss Bannon’s services. Miss Bannon has not stepped forth on the Crown’s business for… quite a long while now, really.
He had become accustomed to such a state of affairs, he supposed; Accustomed was a set of blinders where Logic and Reason were concerned. Just as befogging as Assumption and Comfort, and just as dangerous.

The tastes of bile and brandy commingled were not pleasant, and his head still ached abominably. But the storm seemed to have passed for the moment, and Clare had a rich vista of distracting new deduction before him to embark upon.

It would serve quite handily to push the distressing news, distressing
events
, firmly away.

“Did you view the bodies yourself, Your Majesty?”

Miss Bannon… was that a flicker of a
smile
hiding behind her steely expression? Had he not been so thoroughly acquainted with her features, he most certainly would have missed it.

She was enjoying Victrix’s discomfiture, it seemed. Highly unusual. His estimation of the relationship between queen and the sorceress was incorrect. Perhaps said relationship had shifted by degrees, and he had missed it? For Miss Bannon did not speak upon the Queen much, if at all. Especially since the Red affair.

How very intriguing.

“We did, witchling.” Soft and cold. “And now
you
shall.
Do not fail Us.” The Queen rose on a whisper of black silk and colourless anger, and Clare scrambled to his feet. Neither woman acknowledged him. Victrix stalked through the drawing-room door, which opened itself silently to accommodate her passage. Miss Bannon’s fingers did not twitch, but Clare was suddenly very sure that she had invisibly caused the door to swing itself wide. Mikal slid through after the Queen’s black-skirted, sailing bulk.

The sound of the front door, shut with a thunderous snap, was a whip’s cracking over a clockhorse’s heaving back.

Miss Bannon turned to the mentath, and she wore a most peculiar smile. Tight and unamused, her dark eyes wide and sparkling, colour rising in her soft cheeks.

He downed the remainder of his brandy in one fell gulp, and grimaced. Medicinal it might have been, but it mixed afresh with the bile to remind him that he was not
quite
himself at the moment.

That is ridiculous. Who else would you be?

“Emma.” He wet his lips, swallowed harshly. “I am sorry. I should thank you for your pains, and apologise for my behaviour.”

The sorceress shook her head, and her little fingers came up, loosened her veil. “It is of little account, Clare. I expected you would be angry. But you are alive to feel such anger, which is what I wished.”

“And Ludo?”

“Do you think he would have thanked me for such a gift?” Another shake, settling the veil firmly. Her features blurred behind its weave, yet Clare’s quick eye discerned
the tremor that passed through her. Only one: a ripple as subtle and dangerous as the shifting of rocks heralding an ice-freighted avalanche. “No. Death was Ludovico’s only love, Clare; he would not have been happy to have her snatched away.”

Yours was the name he spoke when she came calling, Miss Bannon
.

There was no purpose in telling her so. If a sorceress could keep secrets, so could a mentath. Were he a lesser creature, he might feel a certain satisfaction in the act of doing so. As it was, well… “I deduce your torpor has been shaken, Miss Bannon.”

“Certainly my leisure has been disrupted. Would you care to accompany me? I am to view a body, it seems, for our liege.”

What was the sudden loosening in his chest? He decided not to enquire too closely. “Certainly. Do I have a moment to change my cloth? I am a trifle disarranged.”

“Yes.” She paused. “I rather require another glove, I should think.”

“I shall make haste, then.” And, to complete his cowardice, Clare escaped while he could.

C
hanselmorgue’s spires pierced the waning daylight, thick ochre fog gathering about its walls as it was wont to do in the afternoons. It had been a Papist church long before, one of the many taken by force in the Wifekiller’s time and pressed into service in the most secular ways possible. There was rumour of scenes within its walls during that uncertain time that verged upon the blasphemous, but the Sisters of Chansel kept their archives locked. They still had a convent or two tucked in an inhospitable locale, moors and unhealthful swamps where children and young women of a certain regrettable condition were sent to meditate upon their sins–usually of resistance in some fashion to their disappointed elders. Or, truth be told, if there was an inconvenience in the matter of their drawing breath while an inheritance was in question.

A Chansel Sister was a formidable creature, if only for the chainmail she was suspected of wearing under her habit. Not to mention their particular set of charter symbols. Of all Papist orders, only they and the Templis openly and regularly admitted sorcery’s children. Oh, some of them made it clear they would not turn away a sorcerer or above possessed of the requisite wealth and connections. The Domenici and the Jesuiri were remarkably accepting where filthy lucre or influence was involved, and the Franciscis and Clairias made it a practice to accept the sorriest wretches they could. For most of them, though, the workers of wonders and their defenders were
quite
beyond the pale.

Feared, respected, allowed to survive in most countries… but beyond.

Chanselmorgue was a four-spired hulk now, with sheds sprouting from its backside in the manner of the huge bustle fashionable some few years ago, like a ridiculous growth. One could still remark the
tau
, with a writhing corpse nailed to it, worked in the stone over the front doors, and also see the chisel marks where blasphemers had taken advantage of the Wifekiller’s feud with the Papacy to wrench bits of coloured glass and other shiny objects from the facing.

Apparently Emma was expected–perhaps Victrix had been certain of tempting her into action, or had she thought Emma would crumble in the face of a personal visit? Did Victrix have that high an opinion of her own persuasiveness, or of her erstwhile sorceress’s pride?

Do I care? Whatever she thought, I did not agree to more than “If possible”. I wonder if she noted as much.

In any case, it took very little time for a narrow-eyed barrowmancer and a hunched, scuttling morguelrat to guide them to the shed containing the body in question, as well as five others.

As soon as she stepped inside the enclosure–waiting for Mikal’s nod, and followed by a pale Clare holding a handkerchief under his long, sensitive nose–she had no difficulty discerning which one was Nickol.

The barrowmancer–a milk-cheeked young man with greasy dark hair and long fingers, the traditional red stripe on his trousers and his slouched hat pulled low–nodded as she halted, her eyes no doubt widening.

“Aye,” he said, a broad nasal Cocklea accent reverberating around the shed’s flimsy walls. “Enough to put a sour in ye belly, ennit? Doctor co’nae feel it, but he the skullblind. Wasn’t til I saw ’er that anyone realised muckie’d been æther’d aboot.”

“Indeed.” Emma stepped past Mikal, who examined the body of what appeared to be a costermonger laid on a chipped, traditional marble slab, hands and feet pierced with true iron and the gashes scorched with charter symbols to ensure the corpse’s peace. The heavyset man’s mouth was pried open, the funnel for pouring salt or wine into the cavity laid aside. No flatscraper for pitch to seal the spirit away, so the barrowmancer judged him unlikely to have died by violence. “The report?”

“Ah, yes, will fetchit. Ye’re nae gon swoon?”

“I think I may be able to avoid swooning, thank you. In any case, I have plenty of assistance.”

“Aye.” He paused, studying Clare, then shot a dark glance at Mikal. “Ye’re nae gon turn a fillian?”

“I most likely will not be calling her spirit forth to answer questions, never fear.” She tried not to sound amused. “And in any case, I would not do such a thing
here
. I am not so irresponsible.”

“Well, tha’s mun fair.” He nodded, and touched his hat. “Will fetch tha report, then. Mind you, she’s not decent.”

“Corpses rarely are, sir. Thank you.”

He hurried out, followed by the morguelrat, whose filmed gaze betrayed precious little excitement. Of course, morguels were taken from the workhouse’s lowest strata, since a self-respecting beggar would hesitate to spend his days with the dead. For all that, they had room and board, if they did not mind sharing it with said corpses, and the peculiar blindness that struck after a few years of such work did not seem to bother most of them. Perhaps by then they had seen enough that sightlessness was a blessing.

Odd, how barrowmancers were not feared, though their Discipline was only slightly less Black than Emma’s own. To shake hands with morguelrats was considered just slightly less lucky than with chimneysweeps.

“I do not think I shall ever become accustomed to that,” Clare muttered darkly.

“To what, sir?” There was much in the current situation she herself did not wish to become accustomed to.

“To how casually you speak of bringing a shade forth to answer questions.”

“I have never done it in your presence for a reason, Clare.”

“And I appreciate your restraint.” He all but shuddered, smoothing his jacket sleeves. The black armband, secured with a pin-charm, was a mute reproach.

As if she needed more than the weight of her own mourning-cloth. She did not fully indulge in a widow’s bleakness; perhaps she should the next time she was forced to see the Queen. Although perhaps Victrix would likely take little notice of whatever Emma chose to wear.

“Are you quite well, Clare?” It was not like him to show such discomfort.

“Quite. I…” He shook his head, arranged his hat more firmly upon his head. Mikal, giving the costermonger’s body a thorough appraisal, appeared to ignore them both. “It has been rather a trying… yes, rather a trying week.”

She was about to reply, but her attention fastened afresh on the body she had come to view.
How very curious
.

The æther trembled around it, not the quiver of a living being producing disturbance and energy or the low foxfire of soul-residue. She stood, head cocked to the side, and took in what she could with every sense, physical or otherwise, she possessed.

Mikal appeared at her shoulder, his hand closing about her upper arm. He had noted her sudden stillness, and was ready to act as anchor or defence.

The corpse in question was a middle-aged woman, heavy and inert on a discoloured marble slab. Her mouth was
open, and one could see the stubs of rotten teeth, as well as the searing from the preparatory mixture of hot caustic salts that preceded sour pitch.

Clare stepped to the side, his head cocked at a familiar angle. When he had gained all he could from observing the corpse’s face, he reached for the ragged sheet covering her and glanced at Emma.

She nodded, a fractional movement, but one his eyes were sharp enough to discern. They had examined other bodies; it was, still, not quite
routine
. Ritual, certainly, though neither of them stood overmuch on ceremony when bodies were involved in an affair such as this.

She closed away
that
distracting line of thought. Attention was called for.

What is that? There, and there, it moves very peculiarly. And there. Most interesting. I wonder…
She extended a tendril of non-physical awareness, delicately, and recoiled swiftly when the æther over the body trembled.

Mikal said nothing, but his awareness sharpened.

Clare twitched the sheet down to the woman’s hips. The marks of a brutal life were clearly visible and the sewn-up gashes from autopsy–and the attack that had killed her–were livid. He folded the sheet with prissy carefulness, then took its edge and uncovered the rest of her, tucking the neat package of cloth at her feet. Her knees turned outward, and the ragged aperture between her legs oozed dark, brackish corpsefluid.

“
Most
peculiar,” he murmured. “And she was Respectable once, or at least well-fed. Hrm.”

Though the skin hung loosely, and one could see the marks of violence and hard living upon her, there were none of the deformities associated with childhood want or neglect.

She had afterwards fallen far, as Emma could clearly see from the wooden box containing the deceased’s effects. Workhouse cloth, though mended neatly, her boots sprung-sided, and even through the varied reeks of a charnel-house Emma could discern a faint thread of gin. The woman’s round face had begun to blur with drink during life, and a shiver worked its way down Emma’s spine.

A horrid gash in the throat. The marks of frenzied stabbing over the entire torso were vicious too, but the cluster of open, gaping wounds about her parts of privacy were the most worrisome.

That is where the attack was centred, and that is where the disturbance issues from. Her womb.

Emma’s entire body went cold.

This was gruesome news indeed.