City of Darkness

Chapter FORTY-EIGHT

November 13

7: 20 AM





The man asks the woman to marry him.

It doesn’t happen exactly as she’d dreamed…. but then, what does? He is not on one knee, but instead bending over her on the bed. He may not speak of love, but he does promise to take her away and that’s all she ever wanted, really. She wants this man to be here with her, holding her hand, talking of a different place, where they can live a simple life and forget everything that has happened to them in London.

So Lucy says yes.

Severin had endured a very bad night. He sat until daybreak on top of a rum keg and for the first time in recent memory, he was frightened. The man from the bar, the tall dandy who threw around his money and rolled his pale eyes in distain, had stood no more than two feet away, staring at the knife in Severin’s hand. Drunk as he was, he had understood at once what he was seeing.

The man had glanced at the form of Maudy, had swayed on his feet a bit, and had then looked back at Severin. It was a strange moment, a sense of seeing oneself in a carnival mirror. Each had sensed from the start how much they were alike. Of course, Severin would never let himself go to drink in such appalling fashion and he didn’t know what manner of unsavory business this dandy was up to, but he knew they shared a certain way of looking on the world.

He genuinely regretted that he would have to kill him. Severin had never killed a man.

But when the air had suddenly split with sound and an avalanche of bobbies had come rolling toward the waterfront, the dandy had bolted. He ran into the street and when Severin tried to follow, he found himself caught in a swarm of rushing men. They rumbled past him, nearly knocking him off his feet, and the shrillness of their whistles was unendurable, like a woman’s scream. The one thing Severin despised above all else was the sound of a woman screaming.

He let himself be carried down to the docks with the wave of the crowd and he stood back while they dragged Micha from the water. Tied his hands and threw him into the back of a wagon, and when the thud of Micha’s great weight hit the floorboards, Severin had felt it deep in his own gut. Because last night was the very first time it occurred to him that someday he too would be caught. There were so many coppers when you saw them like that all together, swarming around with their clubs and lanterns, so many that you knew no man could escape forever, no matter how clever he might be.

Severin had stepped back from the crowd and focused on the figure in the middle of it all, Trevor Welles.

He had, of course, watched Welles for weeks. Setting up his ridiculous laboratory at the Yard, reading his reports from France, giving lectures to anyone who would listen, and imagining himself the great detective. The fat fool had even come into the Pony Pub to interview Lucy and had somehow failed to notice Severin sitting at the end of bar. So much for his self-proclaimed powers of observation. Severin had eavesdropped on Trevor throughout that whole night, as sickened by the man’s hypocrisy as by his arrogance. As it turns out, the hero of Scotland Yard likes his young whores just as much as the next man.

It had been such a game to mislead them. Sometimes when he was alone in the mortuary, Severin had interfered with Trevor’s experiments, poking a fork into one of the wounds on Mary Kelly’s leg, replacing the human hairs in his notebook with a few he’d plucked from a passing Whitechapel dog. Pulling an enormous skirt off a clothesline to burn in Mary Kelly’s fireplace, sending them kidneys plucked from bodies in the next room, scribbling messages about Jewes just to f*ck with that prissy Raylay Abrams. Stirring a bit of arsenic into Phillips’ tea - not enough to kill him, just enough to hasten the shakes. Watching them all search so earnestly for a scalpel that was – here’s the great joke – all the while within an arm’s reach. He had even left a button from a bobby’s coat on the roof of the Kelly house but they hadn’t found it, had they? How that would have set them spinning.

He had listened to every meeting, every conference, and at times it had taken the sum total of his substantial self-control to keep from laughing in their faces.

Yes, it had been easy to disregard and mock Welles for weeks but something in his manner last night had pulled Severin up short. Welles knew Micha was not the Ripper. He knew the minute they pulled him from the water and plopped him on the dock that Scotland Yard had caught a whale, but not a shark. Severin had watched as the detective’s shoulders sank with disappointment. Just a little, but enough that Severin had understood that Welles was not deceived.

This was going to be a problem.

The police had gotten very close last night. They had touched him, had jostled him, had shoved him and shouted “Step aside, damn you.” Much worse, there was a man out there somewhere who knew his name and had seen his face. Severin had walked back and forth among the crowd at the waterfront and when he had not found the man, he had stationed himself on his rum keg and watched each figure that passed. But the drunk dandy with the pale blue eyes had eluded his grasp.

And when the sun finally rose, Severin had known it was over.

So he had walked back to the rooming house where Lucy slept, had crawled through her window as he had so many times before, slipped into her narrow bed beside her. She had awakened with a start, almost crying out in her surprise, but he cupped his hand around her mouth.

Beneath his palm he can feel her muffled cry turn into a smile. She loves him. God knows why, but she does, and at long last her devotion might prove useful.

“You were right all along,” he tells her. “There was dreadful business in the streets last night and this is no city for decent people like us.”

Under his palm, she nods.

“I could learn to like the country life,” he says, removing his hand. “So yes, we’ll get married and we will go to your sister in Jersey.”

She laughs softly. “You don’t listen,” she says. “Men never do. My sister isn’t in Jersey, she’s in New Jersey.”

He frowns.

“New Jersey,” she repeats. “In America. You’ll still go, won’t you? You’ll take me that far away?”

“Oh yes indeed,” he says quietly, slipping his hand beneath her flimsy bedgown. “America is even better.”





7:34 AM



The household in Mayfair had managed to sleep a few hours but with the rising of the sun most of them were up too. Trays had been prepared for the girls and William had insisted on carrying up Leanna’s. What passed between the two siblings, he did not divulge, but Tom thought William seemed lighter as he came downstairs, relieved and full of appetite. Despite his own aches and pains Tom was ravenous too and the brothers sat together at the breakfast table with Geraldine. William did not seem surprised when Gage emerged from the kitchen with his own plate. Instead he slid his chair a little to make more room for the man, and began to tell them all his plans for getting a degree in estate management.

“Will you release the funds for the tuition?” William asked Tom, his mouth crammed full of toast and jam.

“With great pleasure,” Tom said. “Leanna will be thrilled when you tell her.”

William smiled shyly. “She was. She said it would be a great load off her mind and I have the impression she doesn’t see herself returning to Rosemoral to live. Is something keeping her in London?”

As if on cue, there was a rap at the back door and John Harrowman entered.

“Take a plate, John,” Geraldine directed. If the household had been casual before, Tom reflected, this Ripper business had turned them into absolute bohemians.

“No time,” John said briskly. “I wanted to check on the girls and then I need to see Mrs. Byrd, the woman Tom helped me deliver last night.”

“Dear Lord,” said Geraldine. “Do doctors ever sleep?”

John grinned, grabbed a roll from a serving plate, and kissed her on the cheek. “Not often,” he said, and then turned toward the stairs.

“He’s a saint,” Geraldine said.

“And I think he’s going to be our brother-in-law,” Tom said to William, who gazed thoughtfully toward the staircase. “Now, what’s this business about Cecil?”

“Do Gage and I need to give you privacy?” Geraldine asked, but William shook his head and took a gulp of tea.

“The time for pretending is long past us,” he said and then proceeded to tell them of Cecil’s last disastrous night at the tracks, the missing pounds from his pocket, the notable absence of Gwynette’s opal and diamond brooch.

Tom groaned. “Where do you think he’s headed?”

William turned up his broad palms. “I could only think he came here, to beg funds from Leanna, but now I’m at a loss.”

Another rap at the back door, this time Trevor Welles. He looked as if he had slept about the same amount as John, but he had at least changed out of his wet clothes.

“Trevor,” Geraldine said. “Get a plate.”

“No time,” Trevor said briskly. “I just came by to check on Leanna and Emma.”

“John’s up with them now,” Tom said. “This is our eldest brother, William.”

Trevor extended a hand, surprise on his face. “I’m not sure I knew there were two older brothers.”

“Congratulations, darling,” Geraldine said. “It came at a high price, but we have our Ripper at last.”

“Afraid not,” Trevor said, sitting down with a sigh. “Maybe I will take a few sausages,” he said, as William slid the platter toward him. “What we have is one Micha Banasik, a hired killer who, thank God, is not very skilled at his craft.”

“Hired?” Geraldine said with a gasp. “So this wasn’t a random crime? Are you saying he was after Emma?”

“Leanna was his target. Just as you said last night, Tom, someone who knew she had money.” Trevor looked pointedly at Tom and then William, but did not elaborate, and they both seemed to understand there was something he wished to discuss with them later, truly in private. “So no, Geraldine, we don’t have our Ripper. Not yet. But I think we came very close.”

“Close enough to scare him off?” Tom asked.

“That’s exactly what Davy Mabrey thinks, that Jack may move on somewhere of his own accord. I envy you younger men your optimism, and who knows, perhaps you’re right. But here’s the thing. Whether the Ripper is in London or not, I fear he has opened up some sort of door that others will now walk though. He will always be with us in some form or another, just as Jesus said about the poor.”

“The criminal of the future,” Tom said.

“Precisely. A modern man. Death for the sake of death and this is uncharted territory for the Yard, a sort of new world order.” Trevor thoughtfully chewed his sausages. “So yes, the next time I fall into my bed, which may be months from now, I will take a moment to send up a prayer asking God to please let young Tom and young Davy be right. That we have frightened Jack off and that we have – if not a conclusion, at least an ending. And if that ending is not entirely happy, it is at least one we can all live with precisely because we all lived.” He looked at Geraldine. “Emma and Leanna are better today, I trust?”

“They both took breakfast.”

“Good. I will give them my best before I go.”

“Trevor, what would we do without you?” Geraldine said.

“Gad, Auntie, that’s precisely what you said to John last night,” Tom said, as Trevor left the room. “You’re quite the coquette, are you not? Going from one man to another, declaring you can’t live without any of them. Oh, and there’s an equally good chance he might be our brother-in-law,” he said to William, who turned again to look up the stairs.

“They both seem all right,” William said.

“But it’s true,” Geraldine went on, setting down her teacup with a clatter. “We don’t have a practical skill among us and Trevor and John have held us up during this whole appalling mess.”

“I beg your pardon,” William said, smiling. “But very soon I shall have any number of practical skills.”

“Well she’s right enough about me,” Tom said, smiling too. “I was a detective for precisely one day and managed to sprain my ankle, dislocate my shoulder, and be knocked to my arse by a stampeding mob.”

“It’s lucky that we’re rich,” Geraldine said, with a sigh. “Come, Gage, I’ll help you clean up in the kitchen. Don’t look at me like that. You heard Trevor. There’s a new world order.”





7:45 AM





Trevor met John on the stairway, coming down. The two men looked at each other for a moment and then John dropped his bag and sat down on one of the steps.

“Congratulations,” he said. “Your path is clear. All she could talk about is where Trevor could be, when Trevor is coming, how profusely she must thank Trevor.”

Trevor shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

“Isn’t it? What chance do I have now?” John Harrowman was staring up at him, mixed feelings evident on his face. “You’ve saved her life, for which I am abundantly grateful….”

“In the line of duty.”

“Perhaps, but in the process you’ve become the dashing hero.”

“If I saved her, I saved her for you, as you must surely be aware.”

“You don’t intend to court her?”

“No. I don’t think I ever really did,” said Trevor, realizing as he said it that it was true.

John awkwardly pushed to his feet. “I suppose you think I’m an ingrate, speaking like this after you’ve done so much.”

“What I think is that you’re exhausted and suffering from delayed shock, as are we all. No apologies are necessary. We simply go forward. You’ll see to your patients and I’ll see to my criminals, which we both have in endless supply.”

John nodded uncertainly and walked down the stairs and out the front door. Trevor finished climbing the stairs and stood first in Emma’s doorway, then Leanna’s, speaking to each of them in turn. Leanna’s voice was raspy and he waved her silent when she tried to thank him, and Emma had been nearly asleep, so Trevor kept the visits brief. There was nothing left to say to Leanna, not really, and the things he needed to tell Emma would wait for another day. He dallied just long enough to give John time to leave the house and to make sure Geraldine and Gage were busy in the kitchen, then he went down the stairs where Tom and William were still sitting at the breakfast table.

“We must talk,” he said quietly.

“Indeed,” said Tom. “We’ve been waiting. Who on earth hired that creature to kill Leanna?”

Trevor pulled up a chair across from them and fumbled for a way to begin.

“Micha’s confessions are not the easiest to understand. His English is suspect under the best of circumstances and last night he was raving with rage and shaking with cold. He will stay in jail a long time on the charges of assault and attempted murder, so there’s a chance we’ll get more out of him at a later date. He claimed it was not his idea, which is probably true, and then he told us a tale that originally I found a bit hard to believe. But we’ve done some checking, and it seems his statements were accurate.”

Trevor took a breath.

“Go on,” Tom said, suspicions beginning to grow in him. William had still not looked up from his plate.

“Micha claimed he was hired by two men, one of them a local named Georgy. We had no trouble locating him, and this Georgy, in turn, claimed not to know the name of his co-conspirator. But he was quite sure of one thing. When the time came to pay Micha this second man had gotten the money by pawning something of value. Georgy lead us to the pawn shop first thing this morning and the owner did indeed remember the transaction. Not only are items of this quality a rarity in the East End, but his customer, he said, insisted upon a written receipt.” Trevor reached into his pocket, withdrew his notebook, and pulled a folded piece of paper from the pages.

“You see the signature,” he said, pushing the receipt toward the brothers. “Looks as if he started to write a ‘C’ and then thought the better of it and changed it to an ‘E.’ Do either of you know a man named Edmund Solmes?”

“Edmund Solmes is our brother Cecil’s solicitor,” William said, sinking back in his chair. “But I assure you, he wasn’t the one to sign that receipt.” Trevor nodded and William put a fist to his lips. “I knew Cecil had come to a desperate point but I swear to God I never thought – “

Trevor shook his head. “No one’s suggesting that you did. I took the liberty of redeeming this item, which I believe belongs to your mother.” He extracted a folded handkerchief from his other pocket and carefully unwrapped the opal and diamond brooch. The sight of it shattered the last remnants of Tom’s composure.

“I can hardly believe it,” he said. “Cecil is vain and lazy, yes, but to picture him as a murderer - “

“You only say that because you haven’t been home these past months,” William said. “His decline has been swift enough to rival a character in a Greek tragedy and I’m the one to blame for not seeing where he was headed. So,” he added, looking across the table at Trevor. “Cecil has almost killed our mother with worry and has now attempted to murder our sister outright. Please tell me you can find him.”

“We’ll certainly try. But I must warn you that, given his proximity to the docks the odds are he’s already fled. Does he have a favorite place, friends on the continent? Somewhere he might try to go?”

“He likes Paris,” William said bitterly.

“I have a colleague there I will contact,” Trevor said. “But since finding him is, in the language of the tracks, a long shot, there’s one more thing to discuss. Should we tell Leanna?”

“She thinks it was the Ripper,” Tom said. “A random attack.”

“It will come out soon enough that the man we caught isn’t the Ripper,” Trevor said. “But she still might accept it was a random attack. A robbery attempt, a scam built around the lie of Mary Kelly’s child. That is what she is primed to believe and we could let her rest in that belief.”

“And so we shall,” William said decisively. “She doesn’t need to hear this story and neither does our mother. Cecil always spoke of going abroad to seek a rich wife. America, isn’t that where all the fortune hunters go? They’ll accept that explanation for his absence readily enough.”

Tom nodded at Trevor. “William’s right. Mother and Leanna needn’t know. “

“It’s an infuriating image,” William said. “Cecil in his deck chair, sailing for America.”

“If he’s sailing, he’s hardly in a deck chair,” Trevor said, turning the receipt back toward them. “Did you notice how much Cecil got for your precious family heirloom?”

Tom and William leaned toward the paper and then both erupted into laughter.

“Perfect,” Tom said. “I bet he pissed his pants.”