The Ripper Affair

The vegetables arrived, and the sorbet. Dessert, and the savouries were savoured. Clare grew quieter and quieter, and Aberline saw no reason to draw him out. It might have been quite a companionable meal, had Miss Bannon been there–and the inspector absent.

It was not until he had entered the smoking room afterwards, its familiarity somehow smaller and more confining, that Clare realised he had been quite a buffoon, and Miss Bannon…

… was gone.

Oh, bloody hell.

Chapter Thirty-Six Where The Dial Spun

Under a thick woollen blanket of vile buttery fog, Whitchapel seethed. The great hazy bowl of Londinium’s sky had darkened rapidly, yet the Scab had not come creeping out. There was oddness about, of late. From Kensington to the Dock, Caledonia to the Oval–and beyond each of those landmarks–the great smoky-backed beast was curiously… hushed.

As if it dozed.

Yet the shadows in Whitchapel were darker than ever. Ink-dark, knife-sharp, and even those who spent their brief violent lives using every scrap of shade to pursue survival felt a cold breath upon their napes. The Scab always came out at dark; it was like Tideturn or bad luck. Since there was no escaping, one made merry in the face of the reek, downed what passed for gin to soothe the sting, and snatched what one could.

To feel the absence of that familiar terror was to feel worse than uneasy.

She kept to those cold, sharp shadows; a short slim woman with a shawl over her head. Oddly, she passed unmolested through the darkness. The flashboys never bothered to catcall or demand a toll for passage; the young, unAltered blades seemed not to notice her. Once in a while an unfortunate glanced at her, taking her for one of the sisterhood braving the thoroughfares and alley-ways early to earn a few pence for doss or gin, or more likely, gin and more gin, and one last customer before staggering to a narrow bed if one was lucky.

If not, well.

Leather Apron, they whispered to each other, and each time they did, the shadows deepened. As if the fear and trepidation, the passage of rumour, somehow… fed that darkness.

The glamour should not have been so difficult to maintain. Emma was weary, disciplined Will alone kept her upright. Tideturn would be soon, she could already almost-hear the approaching, brassy thunder. The dozing beast of Whitchapel drew her in, a tiny particle in its vast pulsing, and she was quite content to pass unremarked.

Finding and engaging a hansom had been the difficult part. Now that she was here, a minnow in deep waters, it was…

Well, it was as if she had never left.

It was marvellous, how the intervening years fell away. Struggle, striving, experience, all of it so many shed garments, dropping away from the nakedness of memory.

The starveling’s words, of course, had made a mad manner of sense. Where the dial spun, where the beggar burned. How did Marimat know?

More importantly, who might have paid her enough–and in what coin–to divulge such things? Of course, the Scab witnessed black acts every night in Whitchapel. What might it whisper to the fallen creature in her pit?

Was her opponent Diabolic after all?

Emma put her head down. Tideturn grew closer, and she moved slowly because the rushing had filled her ears. Without Mikal, she would be blind and vulnerable when the golden flood from the Themis filled the city.

A sorceress, even a Prime, could vanish into the sinks of the Eastron End; but once, long ago, she had not feared these streets. Did a fish fear the water it breathed? The danger was simply air or rain, and when she had been plucked from it by the Collegia childcatchers she had suffered the gasping every fish performed when torn from its habitat.

Where the beggar burned.

She remembered, oh yes. A sweet-roasting stink, the crowd’s laughter, flames. After that, her mother–was it correct to call that poor creature a mother? She had fallen far, the woman who birthed Emma Bannon; her respectable husband’s death in a fire started by a drunken brawl meant poverty, shame, hopelessness. The men she gave herself to, while her youth lasted, had perhaps been kind enough. Some of them even spoke of marriage again, but it all came to naught.

Emma, grown weedlike and stunted in the Scab’s blight, learning to scurry and steal. Learning the cant and argot of the flashboys and the unfortunates, cuffed when she was noticed and learning to be watchful. Inside her, a spark of ruined pride, and the deeper flame of sorcerous talent.