long. This indicated the collector, the sweet tooth, knew more than I of the ground we had both walked.
Or that he was truly a master of disguise.
This I already suspected, for he’d gotten quite close to me on at least one occasion. He’d appeared an old man with a gruff voice and magnificently barbered whiskers one night, just another face in a smoky room.
How he’d taunted me with that knowledge.
I needed to out the man—dangle before him bait that he could not refuse. The challenge of a race, to find and capture the Ripper first, would suffice. More than suffice, for the Ripper had become something of a thorn, I think. A man glutted on the infamy of his barbarism, while an artist such as my rival would find himself overshadowed. Ignored.
Intolerable.
That I was able to consider these things said quite a bit more for my state of being than any physical act I could have committed, yet I did not stop to think too greatly on the ease with which I understood my opponent.
The Ripper was only a man. A madman, to be sure, and one whose evil demanded his attention fall on them what could not defend themselves, but such a madman would make mistakes. I needed eyes on Whitechapel—on the Ripper’s haunts.
I needed Ishmael Communion’s help.
I left the main thoroughfare, no longer surrounded by the din of the active evening roads near Limehouse. As I approached the East India Docks—not far from the West India Docks where I once would make my way home—the pall that fell over the area became a noticeable heaviness.
I did not imagine that my passing had gone unmarked, but I had not yet considered how I would make my needs known to Ishmael if I could not find him. As a collector, I was given a certain amount of leeway, yet I was still not of the crew. Loyalties ran deeply in such matters.
I was not made to wait long before finding my passing challenged.
“‘Alt,” came a gruff demand, subsequently followed by three men stepping out of the fog.
Even through the respirator I wore, I could scent the acrid stench of fish from the decaying Thames just south of us. The Isle of Dogs tended to reek of the stuff, what with being surrounded by the fetid river on all sides.
I obeyed, but did nothing to make myself appear harmless. “Collector business, lads,” I said, my voice muffled and flattened by the mask I wore. It did not appear overly feminine, and my repaired coat did much to soften those lines. “You’ll want to step out of my way.”
In a gang such as the Brick Street Bakers, there were ranks of men, from the highest rufflers to the lowest abrams.
There were females among the crew’s number, naturally, but their rankings were of somewhat less clear origin to me; many fell along definitions of prostitution, beggary and bait.
Of the three men who faced me now, I placed two as whip jacks—them what pretended to be sailors fresh from a wrecking and eager for begged coin to get back to port—and perhaps the wiry one as more of a ruffler. He had the look of a soldier’s mark about him, unkempt enough that any passerby might think him made daft by war and unable to tend to himself.
Beggars, the lot, but dangerous all the same. And none too pleased to find a collector in their midst.
The jack in the middle, a broad-shouldered man, folded his arms over his chest and sneered. The other, whose hair was dark in my yellow lens and his eyes narrow and set close together, spat upon the ground and said, “We know why’s y’ere. Don’t got no truck wif c’lectors.”
“I see.” My fingers twitched, so suddenly that the motion surprised even me. Yet as they did so, a curl at my sides, I found a slow, humorless smile pull at my lips. “Well, mates,” I told them, “I’ve got truck with you.”
The ruffler shifted uneasily. “It’s a collector,” he pointed out, just in case his crew had misheard that fact. “Maybe we oughter—”
“Shut’cher gob,” growled the speaker of the three. “Bartie’s done tow’d us ’bout that c’lector bird on ‘im. ‘S’her.”
Bartie told them what about me?
Oh, for the love of all things nonsensical and crass. Bartholomew Coventry, that bloody fool. Of course he’d tell his mates of the collector on him, and I doubt he’d leave the bit out about my sex.
“I’m not here for him,” I said, flicking that away with a dismissive hand. “It’s Communion, I want—”
Would that I’d minded my words much more clearly. At that bit of revelation, all three men glanced at each other, and then at me. I had no other warning before the talker snarled, “Gotcher.”
I had not intended this moment to go to loggerheads, but it seemed I was unable to avoid it. Once decided, I no longer cared to try. A brawl they wanted, a brawl I would deliver.
After all, I was bleeding invincible.
The beauty of the moment was not lost on me. Mired as I was in the lingering grasp of sweet bliss, I could admire the ease with which they broke into motion. As though time ebbed to a slow, distinct focus, I watched as a bead of sweat pearled on one man’s grimy temple, while the other shoved his hat askew with the force of his movement.
Two of them came at me as one. I noted in the corner of my vision that the ruffler darted back into the street, his shoulders pumping with effort.
I smiled. No fear filled my belly, no anxiety or concern. Given wing by the resin Hawke had fed me, I embraced this moment with all the glee of a pugilist eager for a bout.
Though I was not prepared to square against two larger men than I, at least they hadn’t counted on my skill. There was something about being a woman that tended to put a larger man at greater ease. As if he were convinced that I would be so much less effort than a collector of a different sex.
I took great delight in proving them wrong.
A large fist came for my fog-preventatives, open-handed as if he would tear them off. I simply stepped back, a precise pace that forced him to over-extend his reach. Catching his meaty wrist in my hands, I turned and pulled him hard against my back, then over in a move taught me by a faceless man I sometimes met in my dreams. A memory of the good monsieur’s influence, I think.
Wherever it stemmed from, the maneuver had served me well.
The jack sprawled across the damp street with a grunt—shame, I think, surprise and anger—and allowed me the opportunity to duck the other fist aimed for the back of my head.
I danced to the side, but this took me closer to the second assailant, and this surprised him, as well.
I believe that neither man was used to the concept of a woman fighting with any more skill than claws and words. They ought rather to be grateful I kept my blades sheathed.
I rammed my elbow into his chest, danced around him so gracefully that I briefly entertained a shaft of dreamy amusement that the Society vipers I’d left behind could not see me move with such talent now, and drove my foot into the back of his knee. He pitched forward, cursing with great enthusiasm.
I laughed. I should not have. It was unwarranted, and more than a little mean-spirited of me.
I did not care. Nothing about this moment seemed quite right. I was eager for the fight, itching to spill blood, and that was not the type of collector I had always chosen to be.
Yet here I was, with my booted foot pulled back.
I allowed myself no sympathy. No warning as to what bounds I flirted with. I simply acted.
Blood gushed, painted black through the yellow lens.
“Get ‘er!” shouted a new voice, an angry one, and I heard the raised answer of more as men of several builds, ages and ranks in the canting crew stepped from the shadows like ghosts of the fog made flesh and blood.
Anger undercut the echoes of pain in my head, and I forced myself to my feet.
Hysteria, the likes I had never before entertained, filled me. It was not the screaming kind, or the likes which culminated in tottering laughter.
