The Ripper Affair

… but, still, the poppy blunted the painful edges and the outright sloppiness of Feeling, and he could consider the entire situation rather calmly.

Ludovico.

It was grief, of course, and the world became a mist of rose shot through with crimson. He had read of this, the welter of contradictory emotion when death struck; he had not felt it as a young man when his parents had succumbed to mortality. Had it been a blessing, that numbness? What was different now?

No, Clare. You felt it. He remembered the nights of working straight through, studying for the Examinations in his draughty, cramped student lodgings. Burying the Feeling, because it was a distraction, and after all, he was young and just coming into his faculties’ full bloom. After a long while the ache had retreated, because he was a mentath and Feeling was an enemy to logic.

Yet one must account for it, in all one’s dealings. How odd.

Aberline was speaking, but Clare could not distinguish the words through thick rosy fog. It was like Londinium’s vaporous breath, except it smelled of some sweetness. Spiced pear, smoke…

Emma. His faculties painted her image against the inside of his eyelids. Her soft face, steely with the force of her character or slack in sleep as he had seen it once. Her small hands, and the fire in her dark eyes. The way her footsteps echoed, and the brush of her skirts.

The images came one after another, tumbling in their rapidity. Emma bloody and battered at the end of some dangerous bit of business, her mouth set tight and determination burning in her gaze. Tucking a stray curl up into the rest of her complex hairstyle; she did so hate to be dishevelled. Poring over a broadsheet or two in the morning, making quite serviceable deductions, writing in her firm, clear hand at her morning desk in the solarium.

And finally, Emma at his bedside. I am loath to lose you, Archibald.

Grief for Ludovico, and the sweet sting that was Emma Bannon. It was the sting that wrapped crimson threads through the fog and pulled it tight.

Here, with the poppy smoke burning his lungs and rest of his flesh a loose soup, he could admit the waves of Feeling. He could let them slide through him and away, and when the poppy dream ended he would be whole–and rational–again.

Or so he hoped. His eyelids lifted, and Aberline was speaking again.

The inspector, instead of relaxing into languor, had leaned forward. He was still speaking, and Clare sought to grasp the words, but they slid away as well. There was a reply–Philip Pico, near the door, a light amused tone. Why had she bothered to engage such a person to look after him? If he was immortal now–but perhaps she feared not for Clare’s physical frame. Perhaps she feared for Clare himself, and what the double blow of grief and irrationality would do to him.

This is ridiculous. Preposterous.

Yet the idea had some merit. It was, he decided, a deduction taking into account a weight of Feeling, and not sinking in the process.

The glow was leaving, draining away too quickly. The crimson threads gave one last painless twitch and were gone, the rosy fog evaporating, and he became aware of a hammering sound.

Aberline had reached his feet. He swayed slightly, and Clare realised the man had been speaking of the murders. He blinked several times as Philip gave a curt command, None of that now, and Clare found himself on a broken sopha in the middle of a Limhoss poppy den, the world a sudden vivid assault after the rosy fog.

“Inspector Aberline, sir.” A whip-thin young man in a brown jacket, but his hair cut too short for a labourer’s. From the Yard, then, judging by his shoes, and out of breath. “There’s another one.”

Clare’s stomach turned over, queerly.

“Another murder.” Aberline nodded. “Yes, Browne. Hail a hansom, there’s a good man.”

The brown-jacketed Browne gasped, red blotches of effort on his sweating cheeks. There was a fog of smoke in here–how much had Aberline produced? The inspector was not only standing, but moving about. Clare gathered himself, an odd burning in the region of his chest.

Philip Pico’s face was a fox’s for a moment as he bent down over the mentath. The sharp black nose wrinkled, and his ears were perked, alert. “Come on, nodder.”

“You, sir, are a fox.” Clare’s flesh moved when he told it to. It was an odd feeling, thinking of himself inside an imperishable corporeal glove, his faculties simply observing the passage of time. There was a certain comfort in the notion.

“And you’re a babe in woods, sir, for all your bright-penny talk. Come along.”

Aberline glanced over his shoulder; it really was quite irritating that the man seemed so unmoved by whatever quantity of poppy he had smoked. Instead, he was merely haggard, drawn, the dark shadows under his eyes ever more pronounced. Soon they might swallow his gaze whole…