Chapter 13
Time dripped away like blood from a wound.
The moon through Caroline’s window swelled from a slender crescent to a wide grin, and still, she had found nothing.
She eavesdropped as she stacked supper plates and swept up cinders, paused on thresholds and before shut doors.
She learned that Alfie Rodart would spend Christmas at the boardinghouse, to the dismay of his wife and children, that Pierre Toussaint had secured a coveted shipping contract, that Mr. Tythe was beside himself with excitement over the discovery of a new species of African beetle.
Only a handful of Dr. Hoffman’s pills remained, and Caroline took to crushing them with the handle of her penknife and dipping a licked finger into the dust. She waited for the weakness, for the faintness that came over her as sudden and strong as a summer thunderstorm.
But instead, strangely, she felt stronger.
There was a new brightness in her eyes, an apricot blush to her cheeks.
Her arms and legs had thickened, solidified; she traced the new lines of muscle under their blanket of milk-white skin.
She ate everything Mrs. Easton set before her, scraped the bottom of the bowl with her silver spoon, and asked for a second helping.
And she wrote.
Each night, when her tasks were finished and she was at long last seated in the scuffed leather chair before her desk, she dutifully pored over the day’s newspapers.
But as the days melted together and she discovered no new details of either the Whitechapel murders or her brother’s disappearance, she reached for blank pages and disappeared, again, into her imagination.
The story had its own feet now; its protagonist was like her and unlike her; the story was hers and not hers.
The men in the fictional society were more frightening, more threatening than any of the boarders now sleeping on the floors beneath her.
The shadows were darker, the rooms colder than they ever were at the Full Moon.
As she wrote, Caroline felt less like a sculptor trying to force life into dead clay and more like a hunter tracking her quarry.
She was unsure what, exactly, she was chasing.
But she followed, recording the path of broken branches, of depressions in the soil, and thrilled at the thought of coming face-to-face with the force of her creation.
At night, she dreamed of Charlie.
Charlie, catching fat August raindrops on his tongue. Charlie in November, carving a bull’s-eye into an oak trunk, whooping as Caroline hurled rotten apples at the mark. Charlie in February, with his hands in his pockets, stomping the ice at the edge of the stream.
Caroline’s memories of her brother were her most precious tender. Over the years she had handled them so often that their details were rubbed to a shine: the dress she’d been wearing, the weight of the air, the color of the sky.
But she had never dreamed like this.
Perhaps it was the withdrawal from Dr. Hoffman’s medication, or the physical exhaustion of her days. Whatever the reason, she began looking forward to sleep, so she might see Charlie again.
She dreamed she was chasing him down the street, but no matter how fast she ran, how she screamed his name, he did not turn.
She dreamed he was sitting on her bed, here in the Full Moon, reading to her from Carys’s book of Welsh fairy tales.
He was helping Mrs. Easton in the kitchen, laughing at the look of shock on Caroline’s face as she descended the stairs.
The detail was astounding. The creases of his eyelids. The uneven edges of his thumbnails where he’d torn them with his teeth.
Tell me, she pleaded into the empty darkness. Tell me.
But the Charlie of her dreams, just like the Charlie of her waking life, kept his deepest secrets from her.
—
In desperation, she volunteered to do all Mrs. Easton’s shopping.
She wandered the stalls at Covent Garden, haggled with the fishmonger, filled her basket with apples and velvety morels and pale wheels of cheese.
But all the while, she was watching for a dark, untidy head in the crowd, or a tumble of curls, or the gold uncovered glint of Mary Jane’s hair. All the while, she was listening.
“The Ripper’s fled to Paris, I heard. He’ll have his choice of victims there. Whores on every corner…”
“They’ve got the bloodhounds on him now. Only a matter of time.”
“He must step down. He’s the disgrace of the city, is Commissioner Warren. Four murders and naught to show for it. The Ripper is running circles round Scotland Yard. It’s an embarrassment!”
The newsboys kept up their cries—“Grisly contents of package identified! Half of Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney sent to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee!”—but there were no new murders. There would not be, Caroline was certain, until the next full moon.
The boardinghouse. The police commissioner. The full moon.
Charlie. Charlie, and Rab, and Mary Jane.
—
On the day the moon would be halfway full, Caroline walked home past Rab’s chemistry.
She had passed this way before, although she had stuck to the opposite side of the street and only hazarded a few furtive glances at the shop from beneath the rim of her bonnet.
But the windows were papered with advertisements for Emerson’s Bromo-Seltzer and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, and she saw nothing.
So today, Caroline gathered her courage around her shoulders like a shawl and walked right past.
She was so nervous that she barely raised her eyes from the paving stones.
At the last moment, before the windows turned to brick wall, she lifted her head and peered in.
There were three customers in the store, two of them women.
Rab, in a white apron, was standing behind a counter and holding up a brown bottle, clearly explaining its contents.
She watched for as long as she dared before someone jostled her out of the way.
The next day, she was bolder.
The street was busy with afternoon foot traffic, and Caroline thought herself safely anonymous in the crush.
She sidled up to the windows, feigned interest in the brightly lettered advertisements.
When she hazarded a glance through the glass, her heart stopped.
Rab stood again at the back counter, arms across his chest, brows knit in an expression of distaste.
And before him, hands open and upturned, stood a woman.
She was tall and shapely, dressed in a simple black frock that augmented the angle between her waist and hips. And her golden head was bare.
Caroline turned her back to the storefront. Blood pounded in her ears.
It was Mary Jane.
She could not hear what they were discussing, but the language of their bodies had been clear as words. Mary Jane entreating, Rab refusing.
Caroline blinked hard against the gray light. What wouldn’t she give to become invisible? To slip through the door unobserved and listen to their conversation?
She took a deep breath, held it, and stole another look.
Mary Jane’s back was still to her, but Rab had taken a step to the side and her head swiveled to follow him, illuminating her face in profile. Her cheeks were full as apples, her nose lifted at the tip.
And Rab—Rab was looking right at Caroline.
She wheeled back to the street, panic coursing through her like cold water.
He might not have recognized her. She could have been any woman in Whitechapel, peering in through the chemistry window with her pale face and dark bonnet. And even if he had recognized her, it was no crime to walk past his storefront. No crime to read the advertisements.
Caroline was halfway down the block before she realized she had started walking.
She considered turning back, or concealing herself in a doorway until Mary Jane appeared. But to what end? The woman’s uncovered hair and uncloaked gown proclaimed her to all the world as a prostitute; were Caroline to approach her, speak with her, she would only draw unsavory attention to herself.
And Rab. Rab, who was always watching her, who had asked her, that night in his room, how she had met Charlie Foster. Who already, she felt certain, suspected her of being someone other than who she had claimed to be.
Caroline readjusted the straps of the grocery bags on her shoulders and walked briskly toward the high street. She could not risk being caught. Not yet.
—
At supper, she served Rab’s haddock with a steady hand and met his eyes as she asked, “More wine, Mr. Ripley?”
“Yes, please, Miss Huxley.”
She felt his gaze on her bent neck like the blade of a guillotine as she poured.
“Did you go out today, Miss Huxley?” he asked, raising the glass to his mouth and taking a long, slow sip.
Her pulse tripped. But she kept her voice light, casual, as she responded, “I did. I went to the market for Mrs. Easton.”
“I thought I saw you. Outside the chemistry.”
Caroline pursed her lips as though trying to remember. “I did walk home through Brick Lane. So many fine storefronts! It’s a wonder you come home with any money at all, Mr. Ripley. My salary would walk itself right out of my pocket, if I worked in such a street.”
“Were you looking for anything in particular?”
“No, just looking.” She forced herself to hold his eyes, curled her mouth into an insipid smile. The yellow rings around his irises burned, and she thought of the story she was chasing, the scribbled pages waiting for her on her desk. Suddenly, she was not certain she wanted to catch it.
That night, like every night, she dreamed of Charlie.
They were back in the grounds of Audley House, standing in the fallow field beyond the apple orchard. The sky was steeped in the purple-blue of twilight. And it was spring, for the earth was covered in flowers the same impossible hue as the sky.
Her brother was smiling. But there was something mournful about the smile. It did not quite reach his eyes.
Cat, he said.
The syllable echoed like a bell.
Cat…Cat…Cat.
I have something to show you.