The Ripper Affair

“No doubt.” Emma pointed at the bed. “And where was his body removed to?”

“Body? Warnt no body, Miss. This morning there’s an uproar, our sorcerer gone and his bed all drenched. Nobody heard a thing but, says I, we’re Blightallen, of course nobody hears a sodding thing. Still, he’s a magicker, and who can tell? His idearn’a joke, p’raps.”

Not likely. Emma absorbed this. “Is he much of a prankster, this Kendall?”

“Dour as the Widow, Miss.” The slattern’s mouth pulled against itself, a tight compressed line. Emma nodded, and Mikal produced a shilling. He offered it, and the landlady reached… but his fingers twitched and it vanished.

“Are you certain nothing was heard?” Emma enquired, sweetly.

The woman drew herself up, wrapping the shawl even more tightly. She darted a glance back down the darkened hall, and Emma was suddenly aware of the confining space. There was no window, and with the door shut it must have been oppressive. There was no space for even a Minor Work, and the walls held little trace of ætheric defences. Of course, the reverberations were so complicated and snarled, there was little she could tell without adding to the problem.

To compound the oddness, there was not a single fly to be found on the mangled, shredded, blood-soaked bedding. With no window for them to find their way in, it was not quite out of the ordinary… but still.

“Nuffink.” But the landlady’s voice had dropped. “I ent had time to come up and change the sheets neither–none of the drabs’ll touch it even for forgiving their doss-money. None heard a thing, mum, and first I knows of it was that sot Will Emerich come down to kitchen rubbing his eyes and complaining on the splinters in the hall. I’d’ve said he was dead drunk only Black Poll Backstearn’s room is next door, and she don’t sleep well. She ent been on gin for a month, and it shows. Whatever happened, was silent as…” She made the avert gesture with her left hand, tiny eyes almost lost in their pouches of darkened flesh narrowing further. “An’ that puts us all fair off our mettle, mum. Silent it was, and Kendall gone.”

Emma nodded again, and Mikal handed over the shilling. The woman bit it with her rotting teeth to test its truth, then glanced back over her shoulder again. “And now you visit,” she continued, “lady high and mighty, go straight for his room. It’s bad business, it is. Bad business all way round.”

“You may tell anyone you like that I appeared as a bird of ill fortune, madam.” Emma lowered her veil. A snap of her fingers, more for effect than for actual utility, and her jewellery warmed as she drew on its stored force. The blood-soaked bedding leapt into thin blue witchflame, spitting and hissing like a cat as the landlady shrank back against the shivered door.

“As a matter of fact,” Emma added dryly, “I would take it as a kindness if you would tell everyone that a woman in mourning was here, and what she did.”

With that, she brushed through the door as a burning wind, speaking the minor Word that would confine the flames to the traces of blood–and not so incidentally, sensitise her to the remainder of that vital fluid, wherever it might have been shed or come to rest.

Several unphysical strings tugged at her attention, most of them probably attached to a trap.

She was beginning to have a healthy respect for the canny nature of her quarry.

Mikal’s hand was at her elbow to guide her in the sudden gloom of the rickety hallway, and Emma realised she was shaking.

The Chapelease Leper was now a peeling crumble, clotted with whitewash applied indifferently every so often. Around it, the busy thoroughfare of Whitchapel Road throbbed, the Scab sucking at cart wheels, verdant even under the lash of fogbound sunlight as it crawled up pale walls.

Some held that it was here the Scab had been birthed, but not too loudly.

You never knew what she might take offence at, or catch wind of.

It wasn’t the peeling or the scabrous clots on the walls that made all give the Chapelease as wide a berth as possible, and had made the road divide around it as a rock divides a river. It wasn’t even the way the gaslamps that had been erected near it were warped and blasted by some unimaginable fury–or simply by a slow steady exhalation of malice.

No, those who could avoided the place largely because of its washed-clean, gleaming stairs.

Those stairs were wide and sharp-edged, capacious and sturdy, but they were rarely seen. They were, instead, crowded with huddled bundles of rags with fever-bright eyes ranked upon them shoulder to shoulder, with only a narrow ribbon of scrubbed brightness leading to the rotting-cream doors.

These were Thin Meg’s brood, and none dared touch them or move them along until there was a soft thud, and a stick-light body was rolled down into the road to be collected. None pointed at, jeered at, or spoke to them. They sat in their rags and watched Whitchapel Road go by, and only in the dead of night could a sound be heard from them.