The Ripper Affair

She remembered running, bare child’s feet slipping in thick Scab, bursting out into the whirl of Dorsitt Street on a late-summer evening, gold in the air and the rank ripe heat simmering all of Londinium on a plate.

The child-catchers had felt the ætheric disturbance, a powerful burst of untrained sorcery. Given chase, and finally brought her to bay in a blind court not far from here. How she had struggled, and bit, wild with terror, thinking only He has come to kill me too.

The door was locked. Emma cast a glance over her shoulder, then regarded the broken window for a few moments. A whispered charm, a breath of sorcery, and the lock yielded. She felt a twinge at her trespassing, set it aside. Foxfire light glimmered from her necklace, just an edge of illumination to show the dimensions of the sad little hole.

Where the dial spun, the starveling whispered again, and to Emma’s relief, the room was changed. A different bed was placed in an opposite corner, and the shabby hob had a cheapmetal kettle on it and nothing more. The floorboards were familiar, though a dark stain had been scrubbed away in one rotting corner.

She went unerringly to that corner. Knelt, her fingers just as deft as they had been in childhood. Perhaps, she thought, and her lips shaped a different word.

Please. Let it be gone, and me a fool.

If what she sought had vanished, she could call Marimat the Fallen’s whispers a feint, and retreat into her house’s safety. Let Clare think what he would, let Aberline go his merry way, and make to Mikal some manner of restitution for the display she had forced him to endure.

Leave Victrix–and Britannia–to her fate. At this juncture, such a thing would please her, and if she felt another murder within her frame, she would view it as a last unpleasant reminder that she had once served one who secretly despised her.

Magical whore, the mad sorcerer’s disguised voice sneered, and the term was so familiar. It teased at memory, but she set it aside. That was not the slice of the past she wished to consider at the moment.

It took a special pressure to lift the edge of the floorboard, and her hand wormed into the space underneath. Her fingers touched rotting cloth; she shut her eyes and fished the small thing out, settling back on her heels.

It was still wrapped in a scrap of cambric, the threads so rotted they fell apart at her gentle touch. Her skirts would no doubt collect all manner of dust and unwholesome things from the boards, but she did not care. Her fingers trembled as she brushed thin fabric aside, and the pocket-watch, its casing grimed with the passage of years under the boards, gave a slight gleam.

Its chain was short, and it was no doubt a corpsepicker’s bargain, but it had seemed so flash and fine to a young girl, once.

They had both been in a stupor when Emma’s fingers had relieved the man of his watch. She had slid it into the hiding place, intending to pawn it for perhaps enough pence for a pasty, or even a flower for her weeping mother.

But when he woke, he had noticed the theft, and threatened to beat them both to a pulp. The mother wailed that she had been next to him the whole time and her daughter said nothing, despite being prodded and her child’s shift searched thoroughly. Shivering, she had heard the man pronounce his doom: he’d get his pence back from a bawdyhouse, if they would take such a stick of a thing.

Then the cries, the red necklace, the fire.

Emma rose, a trifle unsteadily. The watch hung from its short chain, and she twisted her fingers to spin it, feeling the old childish fascination with its motion. If she wound it, would it work?

Who could tell?

Where the dial spun.

Old guilt rose, its edges sharp, and it was almost a relief to hear the soughing of air moving as the door drifted open.

She stood, very still, watching the spinning. Who cared how Thin Meg had known this secret? What mattered was that Emma had been brought to exactly the right place, and of her own will.

He approached, softly. Did he think her unaware?

When he was close enough, she drew in a sharp breath. “All in, all in,” she said softly, as if they were children playing the perpetual game of tag in the alley.

He halted for the barest moment. Approached, step by step. “Why have you ventured here, Emma?”

His voice, familiar, teased at her memory. She held very still. Come now. Stop speaking. I am offering myself; let it be quick.

“You are so clever, my love,” a dead man breathed in her ear, and he clamped a foul-smelling rag over her face. “Too clever by half.”

Emma’s body slipped her control for a moment, but any struggle was useless. The clot-thick vaporous substance on the rag filled her lungs, and the effect, purely physical, was perhaps the only one that would deprive a wary sorceress of her senses.

She felt, after it all, a certain relief.