tried to imprison me once, delicate a widow’s cage though it was.
Were I truly forced to choose—trapped in that cage or walking the streets—I believe I would have chosen the latter without once looking back.
Only here I was, and I found myself looking back often, didn’t I?
I rubbed at the corset plating over my heart, which had taken to aching when I considered anything at all but the goal I’d laid for myself.
The Ripper would make his move, but perhaps I could gain a little ground, first.
Mr. George Lusk was, by all accounts, a respectable man. Named often in the newspapers after his appointment to chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, he appeared to have about him a stalwart sensibility and soft-spoken demeanor.
I had never met the man, and I had not considered what I would do when I did.
With a strategy only half formed, I easily located the address of Mr. Lusk and made my way there.
He would, I was quite certain, be long since abed.
While the fog clung to the face of the squat, plain housing reserved for them what lived here—a somewhat more respectable front than the doxies and profligates naught but a handful of streets over—most were black and empty.
To my surprise, one revealed a bit of nearly smothered light trapped by the yellow lens over one eye, and I crossed the narrow lane towards the first residence. I found lamplight flickering from a single window, muted as though blocked by screen or curtains.
Was Mr. Lusk awake? Was he entertaining?
I could not recall the details listed in the articles I had read. Was he married?
Would it matter? Perhaps he was entertaining a dollymop of his own.
A part of me conceded that to interrupt such a tryst may be the height of rudeness—to say nothing of his wife’s feelings on the subject, if he had one to offend—but I could ill afford to play the understanding guest now.
A glance at the rest of the flats, each melded to the next, showed no signs of stirring.
Shrugging—as if this would cast off the guilt I nursed, or the wariness I felt as I climbed the small landing to his door—I reached out a newly gloved hand and tapped gently upon the door.
There was no answer. In truth, I’d expected none. The man was like as not abed, light or no light, and I did not know one who would open his door at near two in the wee hours without prior arrangements made.
I tested the doorknob, and found it latched.
Naturally.
Just as naturally, I had come prepared. Fishing a pin from my hair—such blasted useful things—I bent, inserted the tines, and probed the mechanism by which much of London considered themselves safe.
Fools, really. As Ishmael could attest, even a halfway decent rum dubber could pick a lock. The best ones could do so quick as spit. I was somewhere in between the two; perhaps if one was a slow spitter.
I muffled a chortle at myself.
As the metal tines clicked against the iron tumblers, my heart stalled. Something changed—something nearby shifted, a presence I imagined turned to cold and malevolence. My innards seized.
Before the sound of my amusement died to nothing, I jerked up from my ministrations, my back to the door and my wide, glass-covered eyes fixed on the fog swirling around the lampposts beside the lane.
What watched? What waited?
A fog of coal-streaked yellow kicked and frothed, as if a mad sea churned up by the passing of some great ferry in the sky. My heart thudded uncertainly, slamming at irregular intervals until I believed that I could hear its echo in the murky haze.
With shaking, frigid fingers, I fished that bit of tar from my pocket.
The lock waited patiently. Fine lock it was. I would tend to it, just as soon as I nibbled off this corner of the medicine that would ease my heart once more. Soothe my worries.
And yet, as the bit Turk’s resin touched my tongue, I found myself straining. Listening. Eager to hear it.
A whistle in the dark.
It did not come. Instead, as I replaced the mashed globule of tar into my coat pocket, the latch clicked open behind me, and the door swung wide.
“Now I must be quite firm,” said a quiet voice, soft-spoken for a man but irritated beyond. “I already told you—”
What he’d told me went unsaid, for he looked into my collector’s mask—the cracked lens held by a strip of leather, the respirator protecting my lungs, my coat and trousers—and promptly amended his reprimand to a face gone pale as soured milk and a strangled, “Help!”
I had no clues as to how to behave, save that if he did not cease his haranguing, his neighbors might soon gain enough interest to come looking.
I pushed him inside his own home, shut the door hard behind me, and yelled over him, “Please cease your shouting, Mr. Lusk!” Muted though as it may have been behind my crafted vents, the intent appeared to have worked.
Mr. Lusk halted, mid-grasp for one of two large candlesticks set upon a narrow table beside him, and stared—open mouthed, no less. Finally, he found his tongue. “Who are you?”
A fair demand, for I’d just invaded his home.
He was not an imposing figure, fairly average in every way. He appeared a man of fifty, stern-featured, with a full mustache framing his mouth that still bore more pepper than the salt his thinning hair displayed. His prominent nose was faintly reddened at the tip—age, perhaps, or drink—and where I expected to find a man in his nightclothes, he appeared instead to have shed his outerwear and rolled up his sleeves. As if I’d only caught him after a long day’s work.
“Sorry for the pushing,” I said, making certain to maintain as much of my low street dialect as I dared without straining the bounds of understanding. “I’m a collector, here about your notice.”
He finally lowered his hand. I noted stains upon the fingers, primarily forefinger and thumb. I’d wager his other hand would show the same about the tips, where he’d test the blotted ink after it dried.
A working man, in ways wholly different than Hawke. Different even than the earl’s—that is, Cornelius’s... Oh, damn. A knot of pain plucked at me, and I fisted my own hands, forcing myself to finished the thought.
My late husband’s hands had been roughened a touch, by what I assumed was his time in Her Majesty’s Navy. I’d had no opportunity to ask him about it.
Fair, because he’d not asked me of my own. I could only imagine what he’d think of the scabbed mess I’d made of them now.
Mr. Lusk cleared his throat rather loudly, a polite and emphatic sound.
I shook myself hard, mentally more than anything. I did not want the man to think me a lunatic. Any more than he already did, anyway, as he asked with the patience of one who has already asked it in the seconds before, “Are you here for a reason, sir?”
I did not address the subject of my sex. Forcing myself to consider only the task at hand, I answered, “There’s enough rumor to fill the rags for weeks on end and run the printers out of ink. I’ve come for the source.”
His expression did not soften so much as ease out of wary lines. I noted creases about his eyes, time and wear taking a toll, but no longer did I see the tension that had possessed him the instant he’d opened the door. Instead, gesturing to me, he turned and led the way into the small home. “I apologize for the untowardness of my behavior,” he said, a sight more polite than I’d expected. “It has been a busy evening. Please, step into my study.”
This was the lamp I’d seen from outside. His study was smaller than the one I was to inherit—a study that had passed from my father to my executor, and from Mr. Ashmore to my husband upon my marriage.
So many things I’d intended to do with my Cheyne Walk home, and now I would do none of them.
Bloody fool, I was. I gritted my teeth behind the mask. It seemed I could not shake my own ghosts tonight, no matter how often I licked the resin I carried.
This would not do. I required focus.
I took a slow breath, silent enough so as not to alert my unwitting host to my troubles. “I don’t want to take
