Nine
Nine
“Oh, Uncle George, this is awful! Bend your knees at least... ,” I ordered him with kindness and concern as I dragged his
sluggish flesh into the carriage with me. Uncle George moaned, his mind addled with drugs. Of course, he’d gone back to the
same den, just as I’d predicted. Vale’s arrest had only validated every lesson his privileged life had taught him—that no
matter what wrong he committed, he’d never have to face consequences as long as his powerful family protected him—and they
would always protect him.
I was counting on that.
Rui stuffed the rest of him into the seat next to me. Our eyes met, but he said nothing. There was nothing left to say. We
both already knew the plan.
I let that lunk of an “uncle” tumble sideways onto my legs while Rui shut the carriage door and hit it twice, signaling the
driver. The horses began clopping down the street.
“Ugh...” Uncle George rubbed his sweaty forehead, not even having the decency to keep his hands off my arm afterward as
he tried to right himself. With his head on my lap, he peered up at me and squinted as if seeing me for the first time. “Miss
Scarlet?”
My blood ran cold.
“Miss Scarlet, that you?” His lips drooped into a randy, lopsided grin. “Never thought you’d make it to merry old England... Come just for me, did you?”
Miss Scarlet was a name I remembered from my days on the HMS Bonetta . As the Forbes brothers used to play cards with their crew above the deck, they’d talk about their sexual exploits—the native
women they’d conquered. From the sounds of the story George told that cold night, whatever Miss Scarlet gave to him, it wasn’t
given willingly. And he seemed quite proud of it. I doubted he’d even bothered to learn her true name.
It’s what explorers of “high standing and breeding” did on their travels across Africa, India, and beyond, quiet as it was
kept in the tales they told when they returned home to their families. But I was not Miss Scarlet. The sunken eyes in his
pale, dirty face were playing tricks on him. Good.
I was counting on that too.
“Uncle George,” I said as he began clumsily writhing his body like a peacock preparing to plume. “It’s me, Sally. It’s Sally,”
I repeated before he could grab my arms again.
He paused, his eyes wide. Then he grabbed my cheeks with his sallow hands.
“Sally? Sally?”
“I’ve come to help you, dear uncle.”
He gave a relieved sigh. “Oh, I see.” And when I pushed into his hands a folded piece of paper with white powder inside, he
dropped back against my lap with a languid smile.
“You won’t tell Mum and Dad about this, will you? I know I can count on you. Good girl, Sally, good girl. You’ve always been
such a good girl.”
His little triumphant chuckles were as addled as his mind as he sniffed the opiate.
I’d seen quite a few drug users in my time devising my plans and I’d come to learn something. In this rotten world, there were too many reasons to numb one’s pain and too many options to numb it. If not opium, then alcohol. If not alcohol, then sex.
Did Uncle George have pain to numb? If so, what was it? The loss of his love, Sibyl, too young for his advances anyway? Or
the death of the brother he would never measure up to? That I didn’t know. I didn’t ask. There was no need to. It was the
British Empire that illegally shipped opium to begin with, smuggling thousands of tons of drugs into China to fatten their
pockets despite the destruction and misery it wrought upon another country’s people. The wars Britain fought and won to keep
their illegal drug trafficking alive, to keep money and control flowing into British hands. How many lives did it ruin?
Was Uncle George high the day he killed Ade?
I’d learned once from my parents that one’s ancestors would always demand generational blood for wrongs committed. This was
recompense.
I must admit, I didn’t believe Rui when he told me he owned properties across London—including three here in Whitechapel.
But according to his men, he had deeds under a variety of false names. Well, if some could use crime to gain money and power,
why not him?
The carriage came to a halt in the top end of the street. We’d walk from here.
“Sally.” Uncle George resisted as the horse clopped off back around where they’d come because this particular street was too
narrow for the size of the carriage. “Sally, what are we doing here.” Uncle George could barely find his feet. But I could
tell he was uncomfortable for another reason.
“Uncle, we’re here for our appointment. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already.”
“Appointment?” He looked around. “Here...?”
Whitechapel in particular had a bad reputation. I knew many of the stories I’d been told were embellishments of the elite who held prejudice toward its residents—the poor, the immigrant. I felt no safer in Westminster, Marylebone, and the other “posh” areas of London’s West End than I did here in the East End.
The streets were, as expected, overcrowded. Adults and children, chickens, horses and cattle—they all seemed to have somewhere
and nowhere to go at the same time, packed into a labyrinth of narrow roads and alleyways with barely any streetlamps to light
the way through the foggy night.
This was the result of the grand industrial revolution, the grand lie the British told themselves about their civilization,
a lie that could only live on ignoring the vast difference between the rich and the poor. With all their factories and machines
ever encroaching into cities too small to house them, with the residents here being worked to death, barely able to scrape
together food for the night. What was the point of so much ill-gotten wealth when the cost was too high?
If I were alone, I probably could have slipped by here unnoticed. I wore a dark shirtwaist and skirt that swept the filthy
streets where sewage waste carried unspeakable scents into the air. It was nothing to me walking these dangerous streets at
night. But what must it have looked to Uncle George, whose sunken, bloodshot eyes took in too many sights and too many smells?
Uncle George, the captain who shivered like a frightened rabbit when he bumped into a particularly burly costermonger?
“Oh, Uncle George, how has your mother been doing? Is she over her coughing fits?”
Idle chitchat was the best way to gauge someone’s mental state. Uncle George, with his teeth chattering and his eyes darting
around, clearly wasn’t doing too well.
“Wh-What? Sally, what was that?”
Uncle George nearly tripped over his own feet. I pulled him back up again and began patting his frock coat when the man muffled
his scream. I turned to where he was staring and could see what he did.
The lanky little boy with a black mask on his face. Harlequin, in the tradition of the Italian carnival. Rui certainly did
have a flair for the dramatic and the money to pull it off.
I turned to Uncle George with a concerned look. “Dear Uncle, what’s wrong?”
“D-Did you see that?” He pointed in the boy’s direction, but the boy had disappeared into the crowd.
I shook my head. “See what? Uncle George, are you quite all right?”
He searched around for a minute longer before giving up, but the fright the child had given him had sunk deep into his bones.
He would not so easily be rid of it.
“Come now, uncle,” I said, and began dragging him again. The street hadn’t stopped its rhythm. The specter was only George
Forbes’s to see. And that fact alone seemed to make him paranoid. He looked around him, his shoulders raised to his ears,
like a man lost in a dream.
“Sally, what... what was our appointment again?”
“Uncle, this was your idea.” I squeezed his wrist.
Smoke from men cooking raw meat on the street rose in wafts around our faces.
“It was?” He rubbed his nose. I could tell he wanted more of the very drug that made his mind slower to reason. “Was it...?”
I found Rui’s man in the middle of the street, his white face blackened by soot, sitting on a cage of chicks in a cluster, eating a morsel of bread, paying no mind to the chirps. There was one way to tell whose men were Rui’s: the tattoos over their left eyes that cut into their eyebrows for those who still had them. Some might mistake the crossing lines for an X . The men themselves probably didn’t know the curving lines stood for chi : the twenty-second letter of the Greek alphabet. Rui had probably meant for it to have double meaning. “Chi” had connections
to his heritage. In China, it was linked to traditional medicine. But it also symbolized to Plato the existence of the soul,
a force that connected all living beings. Proof that we were all connected. Through love.
Through hate.
“Let’s wait inside here,” I said, and pulled Uncle George inside a dirty red building Rui’s man gestured toward with a flick
of his head:
Mr. Potter
Taxidermist
Painted in silver on a blue-painted sign.
“Sally!” Uncle George suddenly screamed because there the child was again, beyond the cages of chickens, hiding behind a vending
both selling packets of tea. This child was wet. Water dripped from his hands and mask. The crowds were too busy to notice,
too enraptured in their own affairs to notice the child pointing at him with a gloved hand.
It was then that when I looked into Uncle George’s disoriented eyes, I saw that a memory was forming behind them. A memory
of a ghost.
The rise and fall of Uncle George’s chest quickened as the man stared at the goat’s head mounted on the brick entrance.
“You know I never liked these places,” Uncle George hissed as we walked inside.
“Did I?” I whispered, and closed the creaky door behind us. I certainly didn’t remember the story his mother loved to tell
of her little Georgie running from a social gathering in tears because of the bear’s head exposing its teeth in the family’s
parlor.
The tight room was filled with tools for gutting, skinning, cleaning, and mounting animals, and each of them looked like rusted instruments of torture. Body parts lay on the shelves next to drugs and liquids. Cleaned skins lay on the front table, on display like loaves of bread at a bakery. The lone lamp in the corner cast shadows across empty eye sockets.
Uncle George didn’t know where to look. He searched for some reprieve from the macabre nightmare, finding a little cellar
door in the leftmost corner. But in a place of death like this, where could that door lead? Only deeper into hell. He stayed
close to me.
“Sally,” Uncle George said in barely a whisper, his hands trembling. “Do you have any more of the... the—”
Drug. He was too ashamed to speak it, but the twitch of his body and the way he batted at his ears erratically said enough.
When I didn’t answer he looked around.
“Where is the shopkeep?” he asked.
Gone. And paid handsomely for his troubles.
I made my way through the rusted steel instruments and animal bones to the lamp, pinching out the flame of the candle while
Uncle George was preoccupied with the skulls that reminded one of the heads of demons. Casting us both into darkness.
“The light has faded,” I said.
Uncle George whipped around. “Sally?”
“Wait here.”
I hurried out of the shop. And while Rui’s man blocked the door so Uncle George couldn’t escape, I slipped around the back
so I could watch the show from the little window by the display of bird skeletons.
The doorknob began rattling. Uncle George was trying to get out. That’s why he didn’t hear them coming up the stairs.
Five skinny boys in devil’s masks and black gloves, soaked from head to toe. Water tracked from their wet shoes and their mouths, which gargled nonsense words. Five boys who chanted a name he must have thought he’d never hear again.
“Ade...”
They wore the wet, ragged clothes of street orphans. The same clothes the Forbeses had given to Ade when taking him aboard
the HMS Bonetta . The same clothes he died in as he drowned in the ocean. Their shoes slurped and squished with each step they took toward
him.
“I’m seeing things.” Uncle George sluggishly rubbed his eyes. “This isn’t real.”
“You’re a murderer, George,” said one boy, tilting his head.
“You killed me.”
“How could you kill a child?”
“Stop it!” He pressed his back against the floor, but the drugs in his system left him bare of his usual motor skills. Trying
to reach for the doorknob, he fumbled and slipped to the floor instead. And beyond the devil boys he would have seen them—the
dead animals strewn across the room. The horned skulls staring at him judgment.
“Child murderer.”
“Monster.”
“No!” Uncle George pushed through the boys and ran toward the desk, squealing with fright as he bumped into sharp instruments
hanging from the low ceiling. “No!” His hands slipped upon a carcass in his bid to find a weapon to fend them off. As his
knees knocked, finally, he picked up an abandoned candlewick and began swinging it wildly at them as if it were a weapon.
“Stay away from me!” he cried, and swung so wildly he lost his balance and dropped to the floor. “I’m a hero of the Crimean.”
His red eyes were bulging. “You can’t do this to me!”
A pause. The boys raised their right arms at the same time, each accusing finger pointed at him.
“You will not see heaven.” I whispered it at the same time as they did.
Screaming, Uncle George ran to the cellar door in the corner and stumbled downstairs.
It was there, in that dark den of dead rats, that I locked him for the next twenty-four hours.
Some may understand me. Others won’t. Sometimes, I wondered if I understood myself.
I certainly didn’t understand the world of the British elite. Their skewed and cruel notions of what can cause shame and humiliation.
The way they had turned hiding from view what they considered to be “shameful” into entire institutions. The way they had
criminalized sickness.
I didn’t understand the world of the British elite, but I knew how to turn their grotesque preoccupations into weapons to
use against them.
Rui’s man released the old navy man only once his senses had completely gone. Uncle George was shoved into the streets, his
drug withdrawal in full swing, and by the time members of high society found him, he was wandering Trafalgar mumbling about
dead boys.
“No, don’t leave me alone, Mummy.” He clutched at his mother’s pearls as the doctors tried to restrain him in his bed. He’d
already attacked her once inside, which prompted the old woman to call for more security. The private hospital inside Queen
Street, Edinburgh, certainly could provide it. But the drugs he pleaded for they could not provide.
“Do what the doctors say, Georgie,” ordered Lady Forbes sternly, dressed in her full attire because even in this utterly humiliating
moment she needed to show off her wealth and prestige.
“How long am I to stay here?”
And when Lady Forbes refused to answer, Uncle George let out an anguished wail.
I stood at the door, as still as Ade’s specter as Lady Forbes cried into a handkerchief. Uncle George had committed many crimes. I didn’t consider becoming addicted to drugs one of them. But his family did. The shame of it all for Lady Forbes—shame that had been on full display on the city streets before she and her husband had had a chance to hide it from their friends. Rumors were already running rampant. First the indignity of the Vales and now this. How was she to hold her head up at tea parties?
You see, that’s all these people cared about. Not life or death. Humiliation. Lady Forbes didn’t ask about her son’s health.
Only that the doctors kept what they did to him in the confines of the hospital a secret.
Disgusting. But what else could I expect from Queen Victoria’s kingdom? An unequal, unjust society filled with absurd ideologies.
Perhaps delivering Uncle George to this place made me just as unjust, but I didn’t let myself indulge in anything akin to
guilt. All I could see was Ade in my mind’s eye, smiling at me. Telling me to embrace the moral gray.
Even if it meant I would one day be hated.
“Sally.” Uncle George, now completely wild from his drug withdrawal, finally noticed me in the room after his mother had left.
“I’m sorry, Uncle George,” I said, clasping my hands against my chest, faint from the horror of it all. “I had to tell your
mother about everything. I had to help you.”
By now his mind was still playing tricks and his memory was faulty. He wouldn’t have been able to put the pieces together
even if they’d fallen into his lap.
He struggled against the doctor’s hands. “Tell them, Sally. You were there. You were on the ship—a good little girl. Tell
them, I didn’t kill anyone.”
I stared at him, a child murderer in denial, more desperate for a fix of drugs and validation than justice for the life he’d
stolen so callously.
“But I was there, Uncle George.” I bent down and whispered in his ear out of everyone’s earshot, “I was there when you murdered that little boy... when you drowned him in this ocean. When I learned that there was no such thing as a ‘savior’ in this world. Do you deny this?”
He breathed in. He breathed out. His eyes glazed over and in that moment I knew he could see the shadow of that boy’s face.
His expression as his body sank below the ripples of the waves. But he shut his eyes again and shook his head, more forcefully
this time. He shut himself to the truth. He showed no mercy. And so neither did I.
Cruelty was the point.
I parted my lips. “ Ibi redibis non, morieris in bella peribis .” I didn’t translate it. If he knew his Latin, then he already knew what I’d said.
Here you will never return. You will die in this war.
He was screaming my name even as I left the room. Screaming, cursing, and begging for a fix. The doctors had their hands busy.
Neither they nor Uncle George noticed the card slipping from my hands and onto the floor. The Queen of Spades.
“You were ruthless, as expected,” Rui told me that night when I met him at the West India Docks. We watched the steam rising
from the ships, the sea breeze ruffling clothes.
I smirked. “And your boys did their part.”
“They were only too happy to oblige—with a bit of payment, of course.”
They made more that night than they would have pilfering pockets, that was for sure.
“And now it’s time for you to do something for me.” Rui reached into his black jacket and pulled out a small piece of paper.
Squeezing it between two fingers, he handed it to me.
I looked at it suspiciously.
“You remember the deal we struck,” Rui said, putting his hands into his pants pocket. “Remember, this isn’t a one-way street.
I help you. But I require something in return.”
“I’m well aware of that,” I said, snatching the paper from his fingers. Only a name was written there in messy cursive.
John Brown
“Who’s this?” I looked up at him, an eyebrow raised, but Rui didn’t answer. “Not the abolitionist John Brown?”
“No. This John Brown is an old servant of the late Prince Albert. Use your connections to get him to London by any means necessary.
Into the Queen’s court.” Rui’s black hair fluttered against his forehead. “Once I’ve confirmed he’s arrived, I’ll continue
bankrolling your reign of terror.”
“Terror.” I laughed a little when I said the word. But then Rui grabbed my hand and pulled me toward him. He raised my fingers
to his lips, kissing them lightly before looking up into my startled eyes.
“But isn’t that precisely what you want, little princess?” He slipped his arm around my waist, pressing the small of my back
with his hand. Forcing me to him.
Yes. I wanted terror. Chaos. And maybe a little more than that. My body flushed as Rui’s mouth brushed my neck.
“Get him here within one week.” His breath prickled my ears. “You can do that for me at least.”
“That’s a tight timeline. Is he another man of yours in secret?” I asked, annoyed at myself for how breathless I sounded.
I couldn’t catch my breath. Not with his body against mine.
“That’s for me to know.” He pulled away from me, rubbing my cheek with a finger before stepping away. “I’ll be waiting.”
Rui was right. This really was a dangerous game.
An excited inhale passed through my lips as I smiled.