Chapter 12
“Miss Huxley.”
Caroline started.
By the expression on Mrs. Easton’s face, it was not the first time she had called Caroline’s name.
“Mr. O’Riley’s out of wine.”
Caroline stared down at the silver jug in her hands, then back to the supper table before her. Mr. O’Riley was deep in a conversation with Mr. Tythe. The glass at his elbow was empty.
“I dunno,” the American was saying to Mr. Tythe as Caroline approached, shaking his head dubiously between bites of buttered beans.
“I don’t b’lieve them critters are the right type for stuffin’.
Gimme a bear or a wolf, any day. Hell, I seen a stuffed mountain lion at the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo, stands yea tall—” He held out an arm and nearly thwacked Caroline across the chest. As she leapt back, wine splashed up the sides of the carafe and dotted her sleeves.
“Ooo-ee! Sorry, missy. I almost got ya.” Mr. O’Riley peered up at her, his blue eyes unnervingly pale in his sunbrowned face. “You all right? You look like a turkey in the rain.”
“I’m fine,” Caroline said, although her nerves felt like fraying rope. “More wine, Mr. O’Riley?”
“Twist my arm.” He smiled rakishly and slid his cup toward her.
“P’r’aps you can solve the dispute, Miz Huxley.
Mr. Tythe here says you can stuff anything, and true as that may be, I hold to the sentiment that there’s some critters shouldn’t be stuffed.
The squishy ones, I mean. The snakes and frogs and whatnot. ”
“It is more difficult,” Mr. Tythe said excitedly, pushing his spectacles higher up the bridge of his nose.
“Amphibia in particular. The skin of the frog, for example, is porous and therefore does not lend itself well to the curing process. Some naturalists fill the entire specimen with resin. And exciting progress is being made with a substance derived from sea kelp.”
As Caroline poured, she thought of the pickled creatures she had seen in the naturalist’s room, staring back at her from the white sludge where their eyes once were, and kept her face carefully blank.
“See,” Mr. O’Riley said, “all that stuff ’bout poor-us skin just fortifies my point. I b’lieve it’s only the fuzzy ones really lend themselves to stuffin’. What do you say, Miss Foster?”
“I suppose,” Caroline said, raising the lip of the pitcher from the full glass, “that I must agree with Mr. O’Riley.” She looked down at the cowboy, who was grinning triumphantly up at her, a flash of gold glinting from a back molar. “The cold-blooded things make my skin crawl.”
—
In the three nights since she walked the church path with Sergeant Corbet, Caroline hadn’t slept much.
Her reflection was ashen, her appetite gone.
Mrs. Easton had noticed and kept insisting Caroline eat an extra chocolate biscuit, have another cup of tea, lie down in the lull between lunch and supper.
Not even when Caroline was at her most fragile had Carys been this kind, and she felt herself squirming under the sudden attention.
Rab, too, had noticed a change. Before breakfast that morning, he asked if she’d taken the medicine he’d left beside her door.
“You look pale, Miss Huxley,” he’d said between spoonfuls of porridge. “Take the Ner-Vigor compound. It will help.”
And perhaps it would. The label promised relief from symptoms of “Anaemia, Depression, Neurasthenia.” But she could not bring herself to peel off the bottle’s wax seal.
“You heard the missy, Jeremy,” said the cowboy now, turning triumphantly back to Mr. Tythe. “Only the fuzzy ones are right for stuffin’.”
Caroline topped off the other wineglasses and rejoined Mrs. Easton at the sideboard.
“More rain tonight,” the landlady muttered, nodding through the dining room windows. “Best pull the radishes tomorrow, or they’ll rot.”
The landlady fiddled with the keys on her belt as she eyed the steely sky over the back garden.
Caroline gritted her teeth against the bright sound of metal against metal.
If only she could steal the key ring, unlock the door of the second floor unseen, and discover, once and for all, what lay beyond.
She had combed through every inch of the guests’ rooms, flipped open every book, run her hands beneath every mattress.
She had pulled buttons and receipts from coat pockets and read half-written letters in desk drawers.
She knew where Mr. O’Riley kept a fat green stack of American dollars and where Senhor Perreira’s secret cache of wine bottles was stowed.
She had even, in a breathless act of bravery, entered John’s room while he was downstairs eating breakfast.
Despite the fine autumn day, the curtains had been drawn, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she breathed the smells of old age and cleaning vinegar. The bed was neatly made, the floor recently swept. Mrs. Easton’s work, she was certain.
Other than the ashes in the fireplace, which had not yet been cleared, there was no sign of a person living in this room; no books, no trinkets, the desk bare of inkpot and paper.
The armoire contained two white shirts with starched collars and two black suits identical to the one John was wearing, as well as the slippers Mrs. Easton brought him when he sat by the fire.
The desk drawers were empty.
Nonsensically, the room filled Caroline with terror, and she practically ran back to the servants’ staircase.
The garden shed held nothing but trowels and spiders.
As the days in this strange purgatory turned to weeks, dread spread white roots through Caroline’s chest. Her brother loved her more than anything; more, she was certain, than the disparate male faces at the supper table, more than the golden-haired woman she had glimpsed in the street.
More, even, than the man who slept across the landing, whose golden eyes followed Caroline wherever she went and who, she felt in her strangled heart, knew more about Charlie’s disappearance than he was letting on.
A small voice spoke. A voice Caroline had silenced over and over again.
Maybe Charlie has not yet come, it said, because Charlie is dead.
“You look faint, Miss Huxley,” Mrs. Easton whispered to Caroline now. “Why don’t you lie down? I can finish up here.”
Caroline considered protesting. But the supper was all but done, the men moving about the last of their meatloaf or, in Mr. O’Riley’s case, picking his teeth with the tip of his butter knife. She would learn nothing new, she was certain, listening from the sideboard.
Besides. She did not know for how much longer she could keep the pleasant expression affixed to her face without screaming.
“Thank you, Mrs. Easton,” she said. “I do feel a bit tired.”
—
Upstairs, Caroline pulled the stack of yellowed newspapers from beneath her pillow and sat at her desk.
She had stolen them from the guests’ waste bins, and each night she pored over them until her eyes itched. As Sergeant Corbet predicted, the killer’s letter had been published. Caroline had read it perhaps a dozen times, but it still turned her stomach sour.
I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman and prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer.
Caroline slid the penknife from her stomacher—she had kept it on her body since speaking with Sergeant Corbet, poor weapon though it was—and placed it before her.
The blade was small but sharp, and it gleamed comfortingly in the lamplight.
She imagined the metal edge cutting skin, spilling blood.
What an unthinkable way to die, bleeding out like a pig.
What a terribly intimate way to take a life.
Caroline shuddered and opened the first newspaper.
It was hypothesized that the Ripper must have been interrupted when he killed Elisabeth Stride, for she had been found merely with her throat cut. But he had taken his time with Catherine Eddowes. He had flayed her thighs. He had opened her abdomen and wrapped her own entrails about her neck.
Caroline forced her eyes over the pages, conjured the appropriate horror that time and repetition had dulled.
But if she were honest with herself, it wasn’t just for the poor butchered women that she sat here, night after night, until her back ached and the words blurred.
She was searching for any mention of a dark-haired young man; any description—even in the “Criminal Wanted” section, even in the details of bodies pulled from the Thames—for a lanky, blue-eyed man.
For what less than imprisonment or death would keep Charlie from her?
On the floors beneath Caroline, the boardinghouse’s other inhabitants made ready for sleep. Doors snicked closed, masculine voices called good nights.
Rab’s assured step fell on the stairs. Caroline’s shoulders tensed as he paused on the landing. She imagined his yellow gaze on her door, on the strip of light beneath.
His door opened, then shut.
Caroline exhaled and returned to her grim reading.
Sleep did not call her. She knew she should rest, that another long day lay ahead.
But with each hour marked by the parlor clock—nine, ten, eleven—her restlessness grew.
She set the stack of papers aside with an irritated huff; she had discovered nothing new, no detail she had previously overlooked.
Hugging her arms across her chest, she walked to the window and looked out over the sleeping city.
The night was clear, the sky high and black and peppered with stars. As Caroline gazed out at the hungry curve of the moon, something caught in her memory like a hangnail.
Her fingers tightened on the casement. Caroline combed back through her carefully kept memories of Charlie until she found it, tucked between childhood and adolescence. The night Charlie had spoken about the moon.
There had been a new soreness in her budding breasts, a pain in her belly that had kept her in her bed half the day. “You’ll be accustomed to it soon enough,” Carys had said brusquely, bustling off to make Caroline a cup of lemon tea.