Chapter 6
Dear Boss,
So they say I am a Yid when will they lern Dear old Boss!
You an me know the truth dont we. Lusk can look forever hell never find me but I am rite under his nose all the time.
I watch them looking for me an it gives me fits ha ha I love my work an I shant stop until I get buckled and even then watch out for your old pal Jacky.
Catch me if you Can
Jack the Ripper
Sorry about the blood still messy from the last one. What a pretty necklace I gave her
The next morning, Mrs. Easton awoke with a head cold and asked Caroline to serve breakfast.
“I can’t be sneezing into their oats,” she said, dabbing her red nose with a handkerchief. “Just keep your eyes to yourself. They don’t bite.”
Rab, who had not yet left for work, made a sound like a snort that turned into a cough before promising to bring the landlady a bottle of Godfrey’s Cordial when he came home from the chemist shop.
The stairs felt higher than normal. Caroline focused on not tipping the little porcelain pitchers of cream and blamed her pounding pulse on the effort.
But when she entered the dining room and the boarders looked up at her with unhappy surprise, the silver spoons jingled like bells in time with her trembling hands.
“Good—good morning, gentlemen.” Her voice sounded thin and high. “Mrs. Easton is—um—not feeling well this morning, and I—”
Monsieur Rodart, bless him, pushed his chair back from the table. “Allow me to assist you, mademoiselle.” He took the tray from her and began distributing the sugar pots. “Please give Madame Easton our wishes for a speedy recovery.”
It had been more than a week since the Frenchman had spoken to Caroline on the staircase.
Each time their paths had crossed since, he’d been nothing but pleasant to her, and she decided that whatever threat she felt had been entirely imagined; a reflection of her own anxiety when he caught her staring at the locked door.
Now Caroline flashed Monsieur Rodart a grateful smile as she opened the dumbwaiter, where the eggs and sausages sat smugly beneath their polished silver cloches.
“Where’s Viv?”
The voice was low and grated against the air.
Caroline turned back to the table.
John was staring at her. In his right eye, his good eye, the black pupil had contracted to a pinprick.
“She’s under the weather, John,” said Mr. O’Riley. Caroline had never yet seen the American without his wide-brimmed rancher’s hat. Her father would have had a conniption.
John’s mismatched eyes widened. “Viv’s sick?” Something rose inside him, something that made Caroline take half a step back. His gnarled fingers stiffened on the chair arms. He started to stand.
“It’s all right, John.” Mr. Toussaint, seated beside John, placed a wide palm on his shoulder, speaking in the low, even tone one would use to soothe a frightened child. Caroline couldn’t place his accent, but it was round and warm and made her think of white beaches and fields of sugarcane.
The tension in John’s body wilted like a sail without wind.
“Viv is fine,” Mr. Toussaint continued. “She’s downstairs.” He looked up at Caroline. His eyes were as dark as his skin, black and glossy. “Isn’t that right, Miss Huxley?”
“That’s right,” Caroline replied automatically. “Just a head cold. Sir. Mrs. Easton didn’t want to…um…sneeze into the oats.”
The Black man chuckled. He gave Caroline a nod, then turned his attention back to John, whose eyes had dropped from Caroline’s face and now rested, unfocused, on the tablecloth.
Caroline descended the stairs, nerves buzzing with the sensation that she had come close to something very dangerous.
—
The remainder of breakfast service went off without a hitch, except for the unnaturally fast progression of Mrs. Easton’s head cold. By the time Caroline cleared the plates, the Full Moon’s benefactress was pale and shivering despite the damp heat of the kitchen.
“You must go up to bed, Mrs. Easton,” Caroline said gently, as the older woman dragged a ten-pound sack of flour doggedly to the worktable.
The landlady mopped her sweating brow. “Who will take care of lunch? Supper?”
“I will fix cold cut sandwiches for lunch. There’s a ham in the larder for supper, and I’ll boil some potatoes.” Caroline was surprised by the alacrity of this plan. A week ago, she would have melted under the stress of preparing a meal alone.
Mrs. Easton shook her head, but there was no conviction in the gesture.
“Just lie down for a bit,” Caroline pleaded. “You’re not well, and you’ll only get sicker if you keep working.”
Mrs. Easton glanced about the kitchen, looking uncertain. “Perhaps I will lie down. Just for an hour. You’ll come get me if anything—”
“If there’s a kitchen emergency, yes.”
The landlady took a few unsteady steps toward the stairs. “Rab will be back at five with the cordial. That always stops a cold dead in its tracks.”
Caroline glanced at the clock. It was barely eight. “I could fetch it.” The thought landed in her mind like a bird on a perch.
“No, no,” said Mrs. Easton, waving a shaky hand through the air. “You have enough to do today.”
There were only two dozen or so pills left in her medicine tin, and Mrs. Easton had given Caroline her first week’s wages.
The sky through the window was blue and clear, heralding one of the last fair days of autumn.
Other than her brief forays to the garden cesspool, she hadn’t been outside the boardinghouse walls.
Besides. It would be interesting to see where Rab spent his days.
“I need to get something for myself, actually,” she said, and when Mrs. Easton raised a gray eyebrow, she added, “I take a nerve tonic. For my weak constitution.”
“Well,” said the landlady, clutching the banister like a lifeline, “if you’re quite sure. Only tidy the rooms first, will you?”
Caroline promised she wouldn’t leave until all the chamber pots were emptied and the beds made. She watched Mrs. Easton climb the stairs, excitement and trepidation swelling in her chest.
When the landlady was safely ensconced in her first-floor bedroom, Caroline finished the washing-up and began cleaning the guests’ rooms. Senhor Perreira and Mr. Tythe were out, but Monsieur Rodart’s door was open, and Caroline knocked gently before peering around the corner to find him at the writing desk.
“Would you like your room tidied, Monsieur Rodart?”
The Frenchman glanced up from his letter. “No, thank you, my dear. You have enough work for three people with our dear Madame Easton indisposed. How is she?”
“Sleeping, I think.”
Monsieur Rodart whistled. “She must be very sick, then. In the twenty years I’ve been coming to the Full Moon, Madame Easton’s only spent two days in bed.
Once with a twisted knee that blew up like this”—he held his hands as though around a very large melon—“the other with influenza. John had to call a doctor.”
Caroline’s eyes widened. She could not imagine the mauled monster from the breakfast table out in the streets, pulling a physician’s doorbell.
“What happened to him? To John?”
The words were out before Caroline had thought them. Blood rushed into her cheeks, and she wished fervently she could pull the question back, unsaid. But Monsieur Rodart just considered her, his hazel eyes gentle.
“Factory accident,” he said after a moment.
“He’s lucky to be alive. And sometimes he…
stumbles, a bit. In his mind. When it was you at breakfast, he became confused.
But you have nothing to fear, Miss Huxley.
His countenance is disturbing, which is why he rarely leaves the house, but he is a gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt a dog. ”
Caroline nodded. She knew something of factory accidents.
When she was a girl, one of the groundskeeper’s sons had gone to Birmingham to make his fortune as a metallurgist. He returned the next summer a drooling, incontinent thing, with a pit in his skull the size of an apricot where a steel beam had pierced the bone.
But he was harmless as an infant. And Caroline knew in her marrow that John was not.
“Are you overwhelmed with work, today?” Monsieur Rodart asked, changing the subject. “I was about to leave for the Merchant Navy offices, but I could spare a few moments to help.”
“That’s very kind,” Caroline said, forcing a smile. “But the rooms are all tidied. And I promised Mrs. Easton I’d walk to Mr. Ripley’s chemistry to purchase a cordial for her.”
“Ah, yes,” Monsieur Rodart said. “Godfrey’s miracle drug. It does work wonders.” He reached for his hat, a smart tan derby trimmed with green. “I’m walking that way myself. I’ll accompany you.”
—
In the bright sunshine, with the Frenchman by her side and her first week’s wages jingling merrily in her pocket, Whitechapel felt like an entirely different borough than the hellscape Caroline had glimpsed from the hansom cab window.
Although a few pedestrians had stared at them as they descended the Full Moon’s front steps, elbowing one another or pointing surreptitiously, Caroline soon shook her sense of unease and lost herself in the mad bustle of the high street.
It was poor, true; poorer than any place she had been before.
Tenements leaned against each other like crooked teeth in a crowded mouth, beggars rattled alms cups, and the smell of sewage sat wet and heavy in the September air.
But there was a vibrancy to Whitechapel that Stafford, with its neat public greens and wide river, did not possess.
People called out greetings across the street; newsboys shouted headlines on the corners.
They passed a group of Jewish laborers, faces bearded beneath battered bowlers, and long after they were behind her, their language played in Caroline’s ears like strange, spiky music.
There were Sikhs, their turbans shining white in the mass of gray and black wool, ruddy-cheeked Irishmen, and seamen walking wide-legged in their blue uniforms, unused to steady ground.