Chapter 1 #4
As the cabbie mounted the box and raised his whip, Caroline left her valise and steamer where they lay and climbed the boardinghouse steps.
The black lacquer door was chipped and faded. In the center was a brass knocker in the shape of a dog—or was it a wolf? And under that, in peeling gold letters, read:
The Whitechapel Full Moon Society
Voices carried through the closed door. A dozen or more, raised in animated conversation. Over the buzz stepped clinking glass and the bright plink of a piano.
A party. Charlie loved parties.
Caroline raised the knocker and let it fall.
The voices hushed. The piano stopped mid-phrase. A low murmur, then quick footsteps.
The door creaked open. Caroline caught a glimpse of glowing lamps and wood paneling before a woman’s face blocked her view. It was a kind face, somewhere north of fifty, Caroline guessed, with wide brown eyes and topped by thick gray hair that must have once been black.
“Sorry, miss,” the woman said in a light, pleasant cockney, glancing first at Caroline, then at the cab, rolling into motion in the street behind her. “We’re a men’s boardinghouse. And we’ve got no rooms, anyway.”
“Viv?” said a masculine voice. “Everything all right?”
The woman turned, and as she did so the door swung open a bit wider, allowing Caroline a view of the parlor.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but it wasn’t this.
Heads of great beasts hung above the fireplace, their glass eyes glimmering in the low lamplight.
Against the walls, papered in geometric black and gold above dark wainscoting, hung glass display cases whose contents would not have been out of place in the British Museum, and which seemed to give off their own light.
Here glimmered a necklace of beaten gold; here shone a crude breastplate inlaid with turquoise; here a collection of pinned butterflies glowed a dozen shades of iridescent blue.
Low leather armchairs squatted on the crimson carpet, each with its own table and shaded lamp.
And in every armchair, their faces swiveling toward the open door in expressions of irritation, surprise, and anger, sat a man.
Two men playing cards, one wearing a turban, the other a cowboy hat.
A stunted-looking man with a book open in his child-size lap, eyes comically large behind thick spectacles.
Another in a tweed jacket seated on the piano bench, fingers hovering over the keys.
A Black man with shoulders like a bull’s frozen in conversation with…
Caroline inhaled. With a man whose face would make a child cry.
Whose lips were frozen in a perpetual snarl, whose left eye shone white and sightless under a gouging scar.
But none of them was Charlie.
Caroline’s stomach plummeted.
“Not to worry, Rab,” the gray-haired woman said, as a tall man took up the space beside her, leaning coolly against the doorframe and shielding the room from Caroline’s view.
“It’s just a young lady.” She turned back to Caroline with a polite smile.
“Try Mrs. Stanton’s on the corner of Davenant Street. She’s always got space for one more.”
The young man was watching her. Boldly, nakedly. An animal thrum of warning rippled up her spine, but she met his gaze, forced herself to hold it.
He looked nothing like her brother. Charlie was all boyish angles, long legs, and sharp elbows, and this man was…
well. A man. He stood two heads taller than Caroline, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted.
Where Charlie, despite his dark hair, was pale as she, the skin emerging from this man’s sleeves and at the open neck of his collar was the color of browned butter.
His hair was a riot of black curls, cut short at the sides and falling over his forehead in an effortless spill.
But there was something about him—the unstudied quality of his movement, perhaps, the way he took up so much space without seeming to notice—that reminded her of Charlie.
His nostrils flared, and Caroline imagined the stale air of the train carriage hanging around her in a cloud.
“Perhaps a fine young lady like yourself would be more comfortable at an inn?” His voice was low and resonant, his accent—softer than the woman’s, the East End edges polished but not gone—identical to her brother’s.
She had never met anyone else who spoke like Charlie.
“There’s a nice tavern down on Brick Lane that lets rooms.”
“I’m not here to rent a room,” she said through the sudden dryness in her mouth. “I’m looking for Charlie Foster.”
The man cursed under his breath.
“He’s not here, love,” said the woman.
Caroline’s knees began to tremble. “He must be here.” Her voice sounded thin and strange. “Or…you know where’s he gone, certainly?”
But the woman was shaking her head sadly. “I’ll tell you what I told the last girl who came knocking for him. I don’t know where Charlie Foster is. He disappeared at the end of June, and no one’s heard a whisper of him since.”
June. When she received that strange, brief letter. But that was not the bit of information that turned Caroline’s blood cold.
“The…the last girl?”
No one answered her. But the man and woman glanced at each other, shared a look that Caroline could not decipher.
Caroline felt as though she was drowning. Charlie was not here. He was not here. And they did not know where he had gone, and the city was so much larger than she had ever imagined…
“Sorry, love.” The woman reached for the door handle and began to close it. “Best of luck.”
But Caroline stopped it with the toe of her boot.
“What about the advert?” she asked breathlessly. “Is the position filled? Do you still need a maid?”