City of Darkness

Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

November 12

7:05 AM





Leanna was up early the next morning. Tiptoeing into the hall, she saw that both Emma and Gerry’s doors were still closed and, at the top of the stairs, Gage’s was likewise sealed. Tom’s was slightly ajar, as she’d noticed with approval the night before. He had gone to bed before they’d returned from Tess’s house, which was not terribly surprising considering the condition he’d been in when she left, but at least he’d shown enough responsibility to keep his door cracked so he could hear Emma if she called.

No telling what shape he’d be in this morning, Leanna thought. Her father had required a strange potion to bring him back from the brink of a bender. Raw eggs shaken up with Worchester sauce, if she recalled correctly. She crept quietly to Tom’s door and knocked.

The door swung open, revealing a disheveled bed. Leanna frowned. The household had gone to bits without Emma’s guidance, and for the last few mornings everyone had made their own bed. None of them had the experience to be really up to the task, but Tom’s efforts had been especially inept. The only laughter the household had heard in days was the gentle chuckle she and Tom had shared when he’d invited her into his room the morning before to show off his housekeeping skills.

The bed looked exactly the same now as it had then. There were two possible explanations. Tom had either risen before anyone else, once again made his bed badly and departed on an early errand, or….he hadn’t slept in the bed at all.

Leanna felt a growing sense of alarm. When they had come in the night before they had found the empty glass on the parlor table, the open medical book, the small plate with the crusts of toast. Leanna had carried the glass and plate to the kitchen, a little ashamed that she had been so snappish with her brother earlier. He’d come the moment she asked him, had he not? He had spent weeks fighting for her, had he not? A drunken afternoon was not exactly unheard of in a man of his age. As she had wiped the dishes and put them away she had vowed to be kinder to him in the morning,

But here it was morning and there was no Tom to be kind to. Was it possible he could have slipped out in the night? Would he really have been so completely irresponsible as to leave Emma alone?

Emma. Now Leanna’s dread was growing. What if something had happened to Emma? Running lightly, still reluctant to frighten Aunt Gerry if it turned out all was well, Leanna ascended the stairs two at a time and, without knocking, threw open Emma’s door, where she was greeted with the sight of Tom and Emma sprawled across the bed as if they’d both been dropped there, naked, from a great height.

“Mother of God,” she exhaled, sinking back against the doorframe and involuntarily averting her eyes. The sight of the human body did not upset Leanna unduly; she had seen enough of Leonard Bainbridge’s anatomy books and models to know how it was constructed. But this particular scene was so without modesty or indeed, even consciousness, that she was momentarily ashamed.

It’s just Tom and Emma, she said to herself, partly to give herself courage, partly because in the dim recesses of her mind she recognized the ludicrousness of the situation. She had to have them up and dressed before Gerry and Gage awakened, so she gamely ventured toward her brother and dropped a nearby pillow over his hips.

“Tom,” she said sharply, bending low and shaking him. “Tom, I don’t care how badly you feel, you simply must get up.” He remained immobile, his arm a dead weight when she tried to lift it.

Perhaps she would have better luck with Emma, who at least, in the worst case, she could probably lift. “Emma,” she said pleadingly, crawling over Tom in an undignified manner and slapping Emma smartly on the face. “Emma, do you hear me?” She was rewarded with a slight stirring. Spying a water glass on the bedside table, Leanna picked it up and splashed it in Emma’s face. To her great relief, Emma’s eyes began to blink.

“Darling,” Leanna said, helping the girl sit up. “Try to focus. Do you know where you are?”

Emma shook sleep from her eyes and pulled herself into an Indian position. Her eyes grazed across Tom, then to the overturned hassock at the foot of her bed and finally to her muslin gown, discarded in a corner and - not too surprisingly, Leanna noticed - smeared with a faint trace of blood.

“Oh my God,” she said, nearly sinking down again, but Leanna caught her behind the shoulders.

“You’re going to have to put your gown on help me get Tom back to his room.”

“What….?”

“You don’t remember?”

Emma looked vaguely around the room and then at Leanna. “I remember.”

“Perhaps it’s not what it looks like?”

“It’s just what it looks like.”

“I’m sure Aunt Gerry would under –“

“No,” Emma cried out, with such ferocity and such clarity that Leanna jerked back. “We must get him back to his room. What time is it?”

“Just past seven,” Leanna said.

“Gage will be up any minute,” Emma said, and the girls sprung into action, Leanna moving quickly to gather up the strewn articles of Tom’s clothing and Emma behind her, far less steady on her feet but just as systematic. She pulled on her gown and, grabbing Tom’s shirt, began to push one of his hands through the sleeve.

Leanna shook her head. “No time for that,” she said. “My mother always said it’s impossible to dress a drunk. If we can just get him through the door of his room it won’t matter that he wakes up naked.” She piled Tom’s clothes on his chest and took his hands in hers. “The top half of a body is the heaviest,” she said. “If I can carry this end, can you carry the other?”

“I suppose,” Emma said, too surprised by Leanna’s rapid-fire barrage of information to argue. She grabbed one of Tom’s ankles in each hand and with the deep exhalation of a dockworker, started to pull him off the bed. When his body came to the edge of the mattress and dropped the girls nearly lost their grips but they readjusted their hand holds and managed to lug him to the door.

Leanna opened the door and peeked out. Gage’s room was directly opposite Emma’s and she could only hope that the thud caused by Tom’s fall to the floor had not been audible in Gage’s room or, far worse, awakened Gerry sleeping below. But Gage’s door remained shut and Leanna turned back to face Emma.

With a nod, Leanna reached down again for her brother’s hands and Emma took up the feet. They moved awkwardly out the bedroom door and toward the stairs. Leanna started down first but it was immediately apparent that if she preceded Emma, Tom’s head would hit each step during their descent. Which served him right, as far as she was concerned, but Emma had immediately frozen and indicated through a jerk of her chin that they should switch positions, allowing her to go first. Leanna leaned against the railing to let Emma pass her, which Emma could only do by pulling Tom’s legs around her waist and bringing her pelvis up against his own. Leanna shut her eyes and tried to persuade herself that she would laugh about this someday. That someday she would be an old lady and the memory of this morning would be amusing indeed. But for now all she could do was press into the railing, looking first up at Gage’s closed door and then down at Gerry’s, praying that neither would open while Emma inched her way around her. The clothes piled on Tom’s chest fell off during the transfer of positions, but there was nothing to be done about that. Both girls simply looked down at his nude body with dismay and Leanna kicked the garments aside. Then, with Emma moving backward and Leanna forward, they managed to turn on the landing and make it down the final flight of stairs. Leanna’s arms felt like they were breaking by the time they reached Tom’s door and dragged him through. The bed was impossibly high so they abandoned him on the rug. Emma sprinted out, presumably to fetch his clothes from the stairwell and Leanna stood gazing down at her brother.

“If you ever gain consciousness,” she said aloud. “I’m going to kill you.”

“I suppose you think I’m dreadful,” Emma said, entering with the clothes which, after a second of thought, she dropped back on top of Tom.

“No,” Leanna said. “I don’t know what I think, but I know it isn’t that. He never should have – “

“Tom was blameless. Truly. I seduced him. Come on, they can’t find us here.”

They returned to the door, looked both ways and slipped out, both going down the stairs toward the kitchen. Leanna was trying to figure out what the word ‘seduced’ meant. The only thing that made sense was that Emma was saying that she was the one who had initiated something. I’ll look it up later, Leanna thought. She couldn’t admit to Emma she had never heard the word.

“Emma,” she did say, turning into the kitchen. “Why are you even awake?”

Emma used both hands to lift the tea kettle. “I stopped taking the medication yesterday. John used the injection needle the first two days but then he started leaving powder for me to mix in my tea. And I mixed a little less than he said and then a little less again.”

Leanna stared at her. “You don’t trust him?”

“Of course I do. It’s just I know he would have let me sleep forever and a woman has to wake up eventually, wouldn’t you say?”

There were a thousand things Leanna wanted to ask Emma. This odd morning, she thought, it’s made us closer friends than we’ve ever been, but where do I begin? Her sister, my brother, the morphine, the Ripper, or the fact that she has done a seduce and I don’t even know what that means? Women have to wake up eventually but girls…girls can apparently doze forever. Emma was waiting, tea kettle in hand.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Leanna. “But you should sit down. The strangest thing has happened in the last four days. You won’t believe it and you’ll take it as undeniable proof that we truly have come to the end of one world and the start of another.”

“Really?” Emma said, and little hiccup slid through her lips. “Please tell me.”

Leanna moved toward the stove. “I’ve learned how to fry an egg.”





8:20 AM



They were a subdued party at the breakfast table. It was the first time Emma had joined them for a meal in days and both Gerry and Gage were very careful with her. Gerry was even whispering. For weeks the breakfast routine had included a pile of the daily papers but of course they were now verboten, and in their absence the conversation lagged. If it were not for the sounds of Emma’s fork scraping against her plate as she ate with the slow and steady pace of a convalescent, there would have been times when the room was completely silent.

Tom entered at some point, wrapped tightly in his dark blue bathrobe. If he had been surprised to awaken on the floor, utterly naked, with his clothes tossed across his chest, his face didn’t show it. He smiled at Emma and Leanna and told Gage he would only take toast.

Emma smiled back, but fleetingly, and her gaze soon returned to her eggs. Geraldine, who had never been able to bear prolonged silence, began some rambling story about the newborn twins while Leanna, glancing from her brother to Emma in what she hoped was a nonchalant manner, struggled to evaluate the situation. Unless Tom was a consummate actor, which she knew he was not, he had no memory beyond passing out in front of the fire and awakening in his own room. And Emma was doing absolutely nothing to jostle his recollections. In fact, she was completely playing the part of a woman straight from her sickbed, a patient still trying to shake off the last effects of morphine.

He doesn’t remember, Leanna thought. And she doesn’t want him to.

Earlier that morning, when Leanna had found Emma and Tom in bed together she had said that Geraldine would understand. And Emma of all people must have known that Leanna was right, that Geraldine’s big heart would have expanded around the idea of Emma reaching for Tom in a dark hour, of him tumbling into the temptation. It had never been Geraldine’s disapproval Emma feared, Leanna saw that now. Emma had simply not wanted Tom to know of their night together.

But why? Leanna frowned down into her tea, trying to sort it all out as Aunt Gerry droned on, Emma ate steadily, and Tom accepted a plate of dry toast from Gage. If she had given herself to John Harrowman only to find that the next morning he did not remember the event she would have been crushed, but Emma seemed almost to have designed the evening this way. She is already slipping it back into some secret pocket of her mind, Leanna thought. She’s tucking it away to pull out and reexamine at a later time, some evening when she’s lonely, some morning when she needs a bit of private comfort.

It suddenly occurred to Leanna that Emma might love Tom, that she could have loved him for months. It was a painful thought.

So, if this was true, why would Emma do a seduce when Tom was barely conscious? Perhaps it was a matter of class, just one more thing that the circumstances of her birth doomed Leanna to never understand. Emma was a schoolteacher’s daughter, had lived for years under the protection of Gerry’s roof, and had most likely been, if the red smear on her gown was true indication, a virgin. Yet she had chosen to surrender that virginity in a situation that would not lead to love and marriage, would not even lead to a shared memory between herself and the man.

Her quest for John had certainly suffered some setbacks but at least their union was in the realm of social possibility and Leanna couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to love a man you knew you would never have. Would you try to tamp down the emotion? Scold yourself for going outside your station? Divert your desire onto the corner greengrocer or some more likely target? Or would you find a way to get at least a little of what you craved, to pull a few tattered pieces of satisfaction though the iron bars of the class system? Leanna remembered once, a Christmas back at Rosemoral, when she had looked up from the blessing at the holiday table and seen the servants clustered in the hallway, waiting for the signal to enter with their dishes. They had evidently been standing with their platters and tureens for some time, for the village parson tended to overpray, especially whenever he found himself dining in the homes of the wealthy. Leanna had opened her eyes in the middle of his prayer and looked around at the scene – the holly and red roses spilling down the center of the table, the gleaming silver, the frosted panes, and the servants waiting in the wings, their own heads bowed as well. She had happened to see one of the girls – had her name been Agnes? Abigail? - run her index finger swiftly along the rim of a platter and lift it to her lips for a quick taste. Leanna had clamped her eyes shut quickly, as if she had been the guilty one. It was much the same feeling she’d had when she stumbled across Emma and Tom this morning, the sense she was seeing something she had no right to see. She didn’t blame the serving girl. There was such bounty all around her and yes, she would have access to the remains later, after the family had spooned though the dish and eaten all the good parts. But who could blame her for wanting just a little taste now, when the food was so lovely and hot and those who considered themselves better than her were all pretending to pray?

And perhaps this was just what Emma had done on the previous evening. Taken a bit of something she wanted while the family’s attentions were devoted elsewhere. Considering it like that, Leanna thought, it makes a kind of brutal sense.

“….two fine boys, both plump and healthy,” Geraldine said, finishing her story with such a note of triumph you would think she’d given birth to the twins herself.

“When were they born?” Tom asked.

“Friday nignt,” Leanna answered, with a calculated glance at Emma. She did not have to add “The night Mary was murdered,” for Tom understood her meaning at once.

“How did the mother fare?” he asked mildly.

“Oh, a long labor to be sure,” Geraldine said. “But Tess praised John Harrowman to the skies. She said he arrived at her daughter’s bedside at nightfall and was still there at dawn…..”

There, Tom thought triumphantly. Let the envious Detective Welles put that in his pipe. John Harrowman spent the entire evening of the Kelly murder attending the delivery of a prosperous Mayfair matron. And I bet there’s a way to prove that the murder weapon wasn’t even a surgical knife. Tom was beginning to feel a little better, with a slow glow of energy and optimism rising in his chest. God knows he had drunk too much the night before, and there was no telling how he’d gotten himself upstairs, but the toast was helping and through the windows the sun was coming out. It showed promise of a cold and clear day, perfect for the task at hand, and even if he had not slept long, Tom had the sense he had slept well. Fragments of dreams had been coming back to him all morning. Odd dreams, but very pleasant.