Her Dark Curiosity

I leaned against the butcher’s stand to steady myself. If I’d read Annie’s name in any other context, I would have been seething with anger, but the thought of her murdered by such violent means left me feeling strangely hollow and out of place, as though time was moving backward.

Was it coincidence that I’d known two of the victims?

‘These are the only murders? Annie Benton and Penderwick?’

‘Rumors of another one found just an hour ago. Unidentified body – so they claim,’ Joyce said. ‘I’d like to think there won’t be more, but Scotland Yard don’t have much to go on.’

The creeping sensation ran up the backs of my legs. My vision started to go foggy as blood pooled in my extremities. I gripped the butcher’s stand harder and accidentally brushed against one of the glassy-eyed pig’s heads. I jumped and cried out.

‘You feeling all right, lass?’

‘Yes,’ I stuttered. ‘Here – some coins for this package, and to keep the dog fed. I should go.’

‘I’ll see you next week for the usual order?’

I nodded before leaving, still clutching Joyce’s newspaper, along with the meat. It wasn’t until I was halfway to Highbury, and the sun had dipped behind the skyline, that I realized I’d taken the wrong road.

I’d wandered into the seedy end of Whitshire, where rats outnumbered the people ten to one and more gaslights were broken than not. The hair rose on the back of my neck, reminding me of my altercation with the girl thief earlier. I’d been lucky that time to escape unharmed. I might not be lucky again.

I took a deep breath as I mentally worked out a map for the direction I needed to go to get me back to a well-lit street. I hurried past a dress shop full of headless mannequins, taking care to avoid the open street, but a foggy feeling crept upon me.

Stay near the lampposts, I told myself. Stay near the light.

I turned the corner onto a shadowy street with only a single lamp glowing at the far end, and my heartbeat sped. After a few minutes I felt the neck-tingling sensation that I was being followed, and considered reaching for the knife in my boot. But as I strained my ears, I made out only the sound of little footsteps that stopped when I stopped, and when I whirled around to face my pursuer, the little black dog was behind me. He wagged his tail.

‘Oh, Sharkey,’ I gasped. He ran over and I gave him a good scratch. ‘You weren’t supposed to follow me! I haven’t time to take you back to the market now – I’ll be late getting home as is.’ I sighed. ‘Well, come on.’

It was a quiet evening, save for the wind that ruffled the strands of hair that had come loose from my braid. I hurried through the streets with Sharkey at my heels, though I hadn’t a clue how I’d explain him to the professor. Lock him in the garden, perhaps, until morning. It was impossible to think about anything but the murders, until I nearly stepped on a white flower on the ground in front of me.

I stopped.

A flower itself was rare enough in winter. I knew all too well how much care and tending they needed to stay as fresh as this one was. It lay all by itself on a patch of sidewalk wiped of snow as though someone had left it for me, creamy white petals radiating from a gold center, a delicate stem no thicker than a bootlace.

A tropical flower.

There was a rustle in the alleyway to my side – a rat, no doubt – and the dog took off after it. I knelt in front of the flower. Five petals, not unlike the ones that had grown on Father’s island. Montgomery had picked one, once, from the garden wall and tucked it behind my ear. The memory of Montgomery made the place around my rib throb with familiar hurt.

He loves me, he loves me not …

My heart twisted at the memory, and I turned to go. I should get home, before I was late for supper and the professor grew suspicious. But the flower was so beautiful, delicate as a whisper there in the snow, that I couldn’t leave it.

I pulled off a glove and reached down to pick it up.

As soon as I did, I knew something was wrong. My bare fingers touched a wet substance beneath the flower. I held my fingers up to the faint light from the lamppost.

Blood.

Blood spotted the back of the flower, as though it had been pressed into a pool of it. It was still fresh.

5

Flowers dipped in blood, Joyce’s voice echoed. That’s his mark.

In a blind panic I stumbled to my feet, screaming for Sharkey. His little face peeked out from the alleyway.

‘Come here, boy!’ I cried.

He took a few shaky steps toward me, and my eyes went to the tracks he left in the snow.

His paw prints were bloody.

‘Sharkey!’ I raced toward him, scooping him up and checking his feet, his legs, his body for cuts, but it wasn’t his blood in the snow, and I set him back down. Whose blood was it? He must have tracked the blood from within the alleyway, and whatever he’d seen or smelled in there now made him shiver and bury his snout in the fold of my arm.

The light was dark, and I fumbled for a matchbox in my coat pocket. I knew I shouldn’t look, and yet it was impossible not to. I lit a match and took a step deeper into the alleyway, then another, and another, despite my every sense screaming to turn away. The match light caught on a dark pile of rags in the corner, splashed with blood that smelled sharp in the crisp air. A pale hand lay beneath the pile, missing a middle finger, heavily bruised as though it had been trampled.

I jolted with recognition – the girl who tried to steal my silver buttons not but an hour ago, now trampled and bleeding. Murdered.

I took in the crime scene in flashes of the flickering match, my mind whirling as I stumbled closer, then away, then closer yet again, my instincts caught in a frantic fight-or-flight, curiosity winning in the struggle. I could only see tears in her men’s clothing, smell the blood. In my delirium, it brought back too many memories from the island.

A crack of ice sounded behind me. I gasped, afraid I wasn’t alone, and broke into a frantic run with Sharkey at my heels. I raced through the snow, ignoring the burn in my lungs. Sweat poured down my back like oozing fear, and my strangled breath grew shallower the farther I ran, past the row of closed doors, past the dress shop with headless mannequins, into the wider street where lights shone like beacons of safety.

I collapsed in the doorway of a closed bakery and glanced behind to make sure I wasn’t being followed by anyone other than Sharkey, who trotted up beside me. Visions of the girl thief’s body haunted me. Steam still rising from the body, signaling a fresh kill. The murderer must have been there moments before – the murderer Scotland Yard was so desperately hunting. The man who had killed Daniel Penderwick. Annie Benton. An unnamed victim.

And now one more.

The wind blew cold enough to make my teeth ache. A rusty hinge groaned, and I jumped back into a run. It all threatened to overwhelm me – the thief’s body curled in the snow, the bloody flower – and I had to choke back a sob. At last I reached the church on the corner and turned onto Dumbarton Street, where I slowed to a jittery walk. Sharkey trotted beside me, still shivering. I picked him up and wrapped him in the folds of my coat as best I could, mindless of the blood getting on the fabric.

It wasn’t easy to climb the professor’s garden trellis with the dog tucked inside my coat, but I managed. The window had a keyed lock, but I had broken through that my second night in the house. Hydrochloric acid was easy to get from the chemist’s, and it dissolved iron even in small doses. After that it had been a simple matter of replacing it with a similar lock to which I held the key.

I eased the window up as quietly as I could and climbed inside. I wiped Sharkey’s paws with a handkerchief before setting him on the rug, then tore off my coat and stripped out of my dress and corset and all the trappings I was made to wear, leaving them pooled in the corner of the room.

Tomorrow I’d hide the bloody clothes from the maid.

Tomorrow I’d see things clearly again.

Today, though, all I could manage was to dress in fresh clothes and grab another coat, then climb back out of my window and return to the front door so the professor wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong. I smoothed my hair back, checking my hands one last time for flecks of blood, and then pressed a trembling finger against the door chime.

An eternity passed before Mary answered, drying her hands on a cotton towel, her face flushed from the kitchen fire. She had the smell of ginger on her and a streak of rust-colored cinnamon across her apron, but all I could think of was blood, and my stomach lurched.

‘Evening, miss.’ She barely glanced at me as she brushed away the streak of cinnamon. I had to force my body to step into the foyer. Close the door behind me. Lock it tight.

From the dining room came a half-strangled sound like a cat dying, and my nerves flared to life again. I should tell someone about the body. I must. And yet the police would have certainly found her by now. If I said anything, there would be questions: why was I in such a rough neighborhood, not at tea with Lucy where I belonged …

Mary sighed as another mechanical shriek came from the dining room. ‘It’s that clock of his,’ she whispered. ‘Broke this morning while you were out, and he’s gotten it into his head to fix it himself.’ Another strangled cry of the wood bird sounded. ‘Maybe you can convince him to take it to the clockmaker.’ She sniffed the air suddenly. ‘The gingerbread!’

As she fled to the kitchen, I undid the buttons of my coat, glancing up the stairs toward my bedroom where the little dog was hidden from the world along with the bloodstained coat. My fingers felt stiff, my limbs like wood. I entered the dining room like a ghost, and I must have looked the same, but the professor was so occupied by the broken clock that he didn’t do more than glance at me as I sank onto one of the straight-backed dining chairs at the table.

I wanted to rest my head in my hands. I wanted to tell him everything.

‘Blast these tiny parts,’ he muttered, holding up a spring no larger than his fingernail. ‘They were made for nimbler fingers.’

The wooden clock sat upright on the table, its insides laid out as the professor performed his mechanical autopsy. He hadn’t practiced surgery in over a decade, but his skill was apparent in the way he cataloged the clock’s parts, testing each one methodically for faults. I kept my hands clasped under the table, my mind still too numb for words.

Mary brought out a plate of gingerbread cut into star shapes, warning us not to eat too many and ruin our appetites, though that hardly stopped the professor. I couldn’t yet face returning to my room, to the dog who had trod in a dead girl’s blood, and to the stains on my coat. Besides, watching the professor work calmed me. He was careful and attentive, but he paused for bites of cake. So unlike my father, who had been so serious. So unlike me, too.

I stayed up quite late to avoid the secrets stashed in my bedroom, long after Mary left for the day and the professor retired to bed. Then, by the light of a lantern, I worked on the clock myself, using an old book of mechanics to repair the broken gears that were too small for the professor’s arthritic old fingers. At last I replaced the final screw and closed the clock’s wooden door. When the professor woke in the morning, it would be to the god-awful squawk of that blasted bird he loved so much. It wasn’t much to repay his kindness, but it was something.

At last I climbed the stairs with weary limbs and closed myself in my bedroom. The fire had long since gone out. When I called Sharkey, he came out from under the bed, blinking, and something broke inside me.

I grabbed him and slid between the covers, my body wracked in shivers, and pulled the little dog against me. We shivered together under the expensive duvets and sheets, neither of us belonging in so fine a house.

There was no sleep for me that night. I tried to picture the alleyway again, to remember exactly what the thief girl’s wounds had looked like, but the match light had been so faint, and my fear had been a distorting lens. Certainly it wasn’t strange that a girl who’d tried to rob me had later ended up dead. She was a criminal, after all, and she’d been in a dangerous neighborhood. Maybe she’d tried to pick the wrong pocket, or gotten in a brawl, or someone had found out there wasn’t a man’s body under that clothing.

I let these dangerous thoughts unfurl in my head, exploring them cautiously, feeling their weight. After some time, when I was certain the professor was fast asleep, I climbed out of my warm bed where the little dog snored softly, and relit the fire. Once it crackled to life, I knelt by my pile of crumpled clothes, ready to burn them. I could smell the blood on them, along with something more fragrant – pollen.

I dug through until I found the flower. Why had I kept it? I should have thrown it to the street, but for some reason I’d slipped it in my coat pocket instead.

I could still get rid of it. Burn it in the fire. Throw it out the window.

Instead, I kept the flower separate and burned my bloody coat and dress. With trembling fingers, I carefully placed the flower within the pages of my journal. I don’t know what instinct made me keep such a bloody memento of a murderer. Call it sentimentality. Call it curiosity.

Just don’t call it madness.

6

In the morning, the previous day’s adventures seemed as unreal as nightmares, and yet the flower pressed within my journal was real enough, as was the sleeping dog beside me.

All trace of my bloody coat had burned in the fireplace except for the silver buttons, which I slipped into my pocket. I wasn’t looking forward to telling the professor I’d need a new one. I pulled out Jack Joyce’s newspaper and reread the article again. The familiar names of the victims stared at me from the page, as did another name – Inspector John Newcastle. Lucy’s ambitious young suitor had been chosen to lead the investigation into the Wolf of Whitechapel, and I wasn’t certain whether this news was welcome or not; as much as I loathed the idea of seeking information from the police, Inspector Newcastle might be able to give me more clues about the murderer and his victims. But how could I possibly explain my interest to the inspector? Well-bred seventeen-year-old girls weren’t fascinated by murder suspects, as a rule. If I said three of the four victims had personally wronged me, I’d become the prime suspect.

My fingers clenched the newsprint. If only Montgomery were here, he’d know what to do. He had always been better than me at these things: investigating, tracking, lying. For the longest time I’d thought him a terrible liar, and yet in the end, he’d fooled me well enough. I could still remember his voice: You shouldn’t have anything to do with me. I’m guilty of so many crimes. He’d warned me plain as day, and yet I’d still fallen in love with him, believed we had a future … and now here I was, alone with ink-stained fingers, only a dog for company and an old man who didn’t begin to know the truth about me.

I skipped over Inspector Newcastle’s name and let my gaze linger on the last line of the article, a line that I’d barely glanced at in my hurry yesterday: ‘The bodies are being kept in King’s College of Medical Research until autopsies can be performed to shed light on the exact nature of the deaths.’

King’s College – I knew those dark hallways only too well. I’d scrubbed blood from the mortar there, dusted cobwebs from between skeletons’ bones. That was where Dr Hastings had decided a simple cleaning girl wouldn’t dare refuse his sexual advances, and I’d slit his wrist. I still remembered the crimson color of his blood on the tile.

The last thing I wanted to do was return to those hallways.

And yet the bodies there called to me, promising to tell me the answers buried within their cold flesh.

It was a call I couldn’t resist.

I dressed and came downstairs with a lie prepared about needing to do some Christmas shopping in the market. To my surprise, I heard sounds of arguing and found the professor in the library with a visitor, a stout man with stiff waxed hair and thick glasses whose face froze when he saw me standing in the doorway.

‘Ah, Juliet, you’re awake,’ the professor said, rising to his feet. His mouth was still tense from their argument, but he forced a smile as he pulled me into the hallway.

‘Who’s that man?’ I asked, trying to peek around his shoulder.

‘Isambard Lessing. A historian, one of the King’s Club men. No need to concern yourself with him; he’s here to inquire about some old journals and family heirlooms. Did you need something?’

‘I was thinking of going shopping. This close to Christmas—’

‘Yes, yes, a fine idea,’ he said, herding me toward the stairs. He fumbled in his pocket for some bank notes and pressed them into my hand. ‘I’ll see you back here for supper.’

I muttered a silent prayer of thanks that he was distracted and wasted no time hurrying from the house with Sharkey. I took the dog to the market and firmly deposited him with Joyce, so by the time I got to King’s College – wearing an old apron over my fashionable red dress – classes were already in session for the morning. I entered through the main double doors into the glistening hallway with polished wood-inlay floors and wall sconces bearing electric lights. My boots echoed loudly in the empty hallways. I’d never felt comfortable on this main floor, the realm of academics and well-off students from good families. Grainy photographs lined the walls showing the illustrious history of the university and its construction. One brass frame bore the crest of the King’s Club with the motto underneath: Ex scientia vera. From knowledge, truth. I thought of stiff Isambard Lessing and his red face. I paused to look at the date on the frame’s inscription.

1875. Four years before I was born. The photograph documented the King’s Club membership at the time, two lines of a dozen male faces wearing long robes and serious expressions. Lucy’s railroad magnate father, Mr Radcliffe, was among them, his beard much shorter, standing next to a stout man I recognized as Isambard Lessing himself, and with a shudder I recognized a young Dr Hastings. I also found the professor’s face among them, decades younger but with the same wire-rim glasses and a hint of a smile on an otherwise stern face. On his left was a young man whose face I knew all too well – my father.

I shifted in my stiff clothing. The professor had mentioned they’d met in the King’s Club, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the photograph Father had dark hair cut in the fashion of the time, and his eyes were alert and focused, so unlike his wild-eyed, gray-haired visage I had known more recently. The face in the photograph was the face I knew from my earliest memories, when I’d idolized him, before madness and ambition had claimed him.

I tore myself away from the old photograph and hurried for the stairs to the basement, where I felt instantly more at ease. The morning cleaning crew was already hard at work scouring the stairs leading to the basement hallways. I recognized my old boss, Mrs Bell, as her rounded body stooped to scrub the treading. A woman who used to watch out for me when no one else did. When she stood to refill her bucket, I grabbed her hand and pulled her around the corner.

‘Mercy!’ she cried, putting a hand over her heart. ‘Juliet Moreau, is that you? My, but you gave me a fright.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bell. I wondered if I might ask you a favor.’

‘You aren’t wanting your old job back, I hope,’ she said, then cocked her head at the fine dress beneath my apron. ‘No, I suppose not …’

‘It isn’t about that. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a change in fortune, and it’s only right for me to share.’ I fished in my pocket for the silver buttons and pressed them into her hand before she could object. ‘I just need to know if you’ve already cleaned the hallways on the east side.’

The buttons jangled in her callused hand. ‘Heading there next, right after we finish these stairs.’

I bit my lip, glancing at the two other cleaning girls. ‘Could you start on the west side instead? It’s a long story … a student friend of mine thinks he might have dropped some cufflinks there and I’d like to look for them.’

She gave me a stern look, and I half expected her to ask what the real story was, but luckily for me she just threw her hand toward the hallways.

‘Have at it, girl.’

I started past the steps, where a rail-thin cleaning girl was polishing the brass handrail. Her basket sat beside her, filled with a collection of cleaning tools that were all quite familiar to me. How many hours had I spent on hands and knees on this very floor, sleeves hitched above my elbows, scrubbing so hard my knuckles bled? What a lonely life that had been, with only my memories to keep me company. How easily I could be back there if not for the professor.

The skinny girl turned around when she saw me staring at her basket. Her eyes went to the dirty apron that didn’t quite match my fine dress – an incongruity only the poor would notice.

‘Can I help you … miss?’ she asked.

‘Oh no,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. My mind was wandering.’

She nodded, still looking at me strangely, then returned to work. Once her back was turned, I bent down to pretend to lace my boots and secretly grabbed one of the brushes out of her basket, a soft-bristled one meant for cleaning fabric. If I ran into anyone here, I might need it as disguise. I hid it in my apron and hurried down the stairs into the basement.

The electric lights were on, buzzing and clicking, spilling artificial light over the tiles. Fresh sawdust had been sprinkled on them to soak up any blood fallen from patients or bodies. I wound my way down another corridor and paused at the closed door to the storage rooms where they kept cadavers for autopsies.

I peeked through the keyhole to make sure the room was empty. Unwanted memories returned of a night a year ago when Lucy and I had come here on a dare, only to stumble upon medical students dissecting a live rabbit. My arm twitched, just as that rabbit’s hind leg had, and I clamped a hand over my arm to keep it calm, hoping the rest of my illness’s symptoms wouldn’t soon follow. Through the keyhole, I spied cold tables draped with clothes.

Voices came down the hall, making me jump.

‘Old coot doesn’t know his head from a hole in the ground,’ one said.

Whoever they were, their footsteps were headed my way. I pulled the soft-bristled brush out and stooped to hands and knees on the sawdust-covered floor just as two medical students rounded the corner.

‘You can’t expect him to—’ The one speaking paused when he saw me, but then continued. ‘You can’t expect him to graduate you when he couldn’t even pass the exams.’ The two students stepped over my arm as I pretended to scour the floor. One glanced back briefly, but I made sure to keep my face toward the ground. Cleaning girls weren’t worth anything to boys like them except a quick glance to see if they were pretty.

They neared the corner and I started to let out my held breath, until I heard a third voice behind them, clearly belonging to an older man.

‘Bentley! Filmore! Stop right there.’

My spine turned to ice. I knew that voice, even without looking at its owner. Dr Hastings – the professor who had attacked me last year and caused me to flee London. I fought the urge to panic and forced my hand to move rhythmically over the tiles, pretending to clean the mortar with a useless soft-bristled brush. As his footsteps neared, I cringed.

‘Yes, Doctor?’ one of the boys said, considerably more polite now.

Dr Hastings came to stand beside me. I glimpsed his silver-tipped shoes before quickly looking away.