The Ripper Affair

The poor, crowded together here, needed little enough reason to strain against the bonds of decency and public order.

The wonder, Clare reflected, was that they did not do so more often.

Underfoot was slick and treacherous. Clare kept to the building side, but gave alley entrances a polite amount of space nonetheless. Darker shapes began to coalesce through the fog.

Between that vapour and the choking slickness under his soles, there was precious little for his faculties to fasten on except the noise.

Slip-sliding footsteps, scurrying tip-taps. Excited babble, and rougher exclamations as some took advantage of the confusion to perform a deed or two best attempted in such circumstances. A seashore muttering, another crack of breaking glass. The fogbound shadows became more distinct, and a clockhorse’s excited neigh cut through the cacophony. A hansom drawn by a weary roan nag lumbered past, its driver perhaps thinking to escape the unpleasantness brewing behind him as metal-shod hooves struck the Scab with muffled splorching sounds. To be plying his custom so early, the driver was probably a gin-headed muddle, desperate for—

“Watch yourself, squire.” Pico jostled him, not roughly. Clare returned to himself with a jolt, and found that they were now in the fringes of a crowd. Hike-skirted slatterns with frowsty hair, gin-breathing flashboys with their Alterations gleaming dully, barely respectable workingmen in braces and heavy boots, a kaleidoscope of sensation and deduction pouring into his hungry faculties.

The entire population of Whitchapel seemed to be awake and moving. Rumour and catcall bounced through the mass of people, and the going quickly became difficult.

Aberline shouldered through, brushing off no few enticing offers from the ladies–if one could call them such–and rough Watch yerselfs from flashboy and workingman alike. Clare followed in his wake, more than once pushing away fingers questing for his pocket-valuables. Pico shoved through after him, and it was probably the lad’s care and quickness that kept Clare from being more troubled by said pickpockets and thieves.

If Miss Bannon were present, she would no doubt find some more efficient way of working through the crowd. Clare winced inwardly. Could he not keep the damn woman out of his head for more than an hour?

“Leather Apron!” someone bawled, and the crowd stilled for a breath before…

Chaos, screams, Clare was lifted bodily as the mass surged forward. Pico’s fingers dug into his shoulder once, painfully, before being ripped away, and Aberline vanished.

Oh, dear.

His jacket was torn and his foot throbbed where a heavy hobnail boot had done its best to break every bone in said appendage. Somewhere in the distance a clockhorse was screaming, equine fear and pain grating across the rolling roar. Clare slid along the wall, a splatter of warm blood already traced with thin green tendrils of Scab splashed high against the rotting bricks.

He coughed at the reek, consulted a mental map, and edged forward. Cast at the edges of the crowd like flotsam, Pico and Aberline nowhere in sight, he found the Scab underfoot thinning and eyed the buildings about him once again.

Logic informed him that he was near the ancient boundaries of the City, its oldest municipal heart. Under the Pax Latium, Londinium had been merely a trading village burned to the ground by one of Britannia’s early incarnations.

The spirit of the Isle’s rule had not looked kindly upon the Latiums. Still, the legions of the Pax could not be denied, and they rebuilt the town to make a replacement for Colchestre. Londinium’s sprawl since then had been sometimes slow–and at other times marked by fire, not to mention rapine and plunder–but, on the whole, inexorable.

One could call the green filth that hugged Whitchapel’s cobbles a similar inexorable creeping. For it seemed to be spreading, thin curling threads digging into the valleys between the stones, hauling hoods of slippery green film over the tiny hills. He followed in its wake, leaving the noise and crush behind, meaning to skirt its edges. Between here and Berner Street lay the bulk of the crowd. There was no penetrating its raging at the moment, but perhaps he could hurry along and come at the site from another angle.

As Clare was comparing his internal map and compass to the fogbound glimpses he could gather, he found that he had come too far, though there was a passage likely to take him in the direction he needed to—

A wet, scraping sound intruded upon his ruminations. He turned, peering through the damp blanket of Londinium’s yellow exhalation, a raw green edge to its scent that reminded him of mossy sewage, if such a thing were possible. He supposed it was, in a dark place–what botanical wonder might grow from such rich, if foul, nutrition?