Chapter 21
On the night the moon would again rise full and perfect over the broken roof tiles of Whitechapel, Caroline checked her reflection in the glass for the third time.
All week, as she helped Mrs. Easton with the preparation for tonight’s full moon supper, as she dusted the chandelier and stirred the crème anglaise and scrubbed the baseboards, she had felt like a lit dynamite wick. And now, suddenly, finally, it was time.
The guests had arrived, as they always did, with a groaning of floorboards and a chorus of male voices.
The sheets were freshly aired. The cakes were iced.
Senhor Perreira’s madeira was decanting on the sideboard, and up from the parlor floated a soft, feminine piano melody that reminded Caroline of the colors of a sunrise.
Her coppery hair gleamed in its intricate knot. Her cheeks were flushed, her expression wild. Never had she looked more like Charlie’s sketch: bright-eyed, sharp-featured. Feral.
She had tugged on her corset laces until it was difficult to draw a deep breath, and over that she had pulled—inch by inch, careful not to tear the seams—the russet silk gown.
It clung to her new curves and muscles like the skin over the flesh of a peach, and above the bold, scooping neckline, below the scraps of sleeves, her skin glowed white as a second moon.
It was a dress for August, not for December, and so, reluctantly, she pulled her mother’s crimson Kashmiri shawl from the armoire and draped it about her shoulders.
She slipped the penknife beneath the wide sash at her waist.
With trembling hands, she dabbed rose oil at her wrists, behind her ears. She tucked her mother’s ring into the bodice of the gown, let the gold chain draw a line from her throat to her breasts.
She felt like a lamb leading itself to the slaughter.
Briefly, she considered the pale pink slippers her father had bought her for her last birthday.
But they were insubstantial things, suited for the waxed parquet of a ballroom, not a flagstone kitchen.
Besides. She might need to run. So instead, she tied up her boots, took a last, long look at her room, and strode to the door.
She did not open it. She stood with her ear to the wood and her hand on the knob, waiting.
She had secreted any evidence that might betray her—Charlie’s sketchbooks, her notes and stolen newspapers, the Blevins family Bible—beneath the false bottom of the armoire in room 203.
As she laid the wooden slat into place above them, she thought of her father’s casket being lowered into the churchyard, of the other graves waiting beside. Her mother. Her dead sisters. Charlie.
He had told her once that were they to exhume his coffin, they would find nothing but the bones of a stillborn goat.
This was her final chance to discover what had happened to her brother. And it was an act of desperation.
As the door across the landing swung open, Caroline lifted her chin and turned the handle.
—
Rab was dressed tonight in a black velvet jacket that accentuated his wide shoulders and narrow waist. His shirt was a cream-colored calico peppered with forget-me-nots, his cravat the same bright blue. But Caroline barely noticed these details. All her attention was concentrated on his face.
She watched him turn, watched him take in the image of her standing in the doorway. The shining dress, the bloodred shawl, the white expanse of her chest. Her throat.
He swallowed. “You look…you look positively regal, Miss Huxley. Our guests will be confused as to why you are serving them instead of sitting in a parlor in St. James’s.”
Caroline’s blush deepened. “Thank you.” She dropped her gaze to the floor between them, hoping the effect was modesty. In truth, she could not bear to look at him. “It was my old mistress’s dress,” she lied, “and all my other gowns need washing.”
“Well,” said Rab, closing the door behind him and drawing the key from his pocket, “you’re certainly the best-dressed kitchen maid this side of Ermine Street.”
Caroline feigned a look of distress. “Do you think it’s too much?”
It was. It was entirely too much. Silk was a ridiculous material for anything other than standing still, and the shawl would trail on the guests’ plates and in the dishwater. But Rab said gallantly, “Not at all. You will raise the level of sophistication in the room simply by being in it.”
“Thank you. You look very nice, too.”
God, she hated herself. But as Rab locked the door and slipped the key back into his pocket, Caroline’s resolve deepened.
“May I put my name on your dance card, milady?” Rab asked, offering his elbow just as she’d hoped. “Fetch you a coup of champagne?”
Caroline laughed tinnily. She’d swallow a cup of straight gin at the moment, anything to dull the edge of her anxiety. “Certainly, Mr. Ripley. And between the waltz and quadrille, we might take a turn about the garden.”
She took Rab’s arm and tried not to think of the warmth of his body against hers, the steady inhale and exhale of his ribs against her fingers.
The servants’ staircase was black as a tomb. With her free hand, Caroline felt her way to the familiar wood of the banister, Rab at her side like a radiant shadow.
They did not speak, but she could hear every sound he made—the quickening of his breath as they descended the topmost flight, the slide of his tongue over his lips.
Lord, she could smell him, the camphor of his tooth powder, the pomade in his hair.
And she felt his awareness of her, too, as though they were twin flames in the darkness, bending toward each other.
At the second-floor landing, Caroline paused.
“Sorry,” she said, “it’s just…this skirt is so narrow. I’m going to pull it up past my ankles so I can get down the stairs without breaking my neck. Do you mind if I lean on you a bit?” Her cheeks burned with shame and fear.
“Not at all,” said Rab. His voice was strange, hoarser than she had yet heard it. Caroline wrapped one arm over his shoulder, he moved his from her elbow to her waist, and she bent to raise the hem of her gown.
Now, she told herself. One chance.
As she stood up and seemingly found her balance, Rab’s arm loosened around her, and she stumbled artfully out of his grip toward the sickening drop of the stairwell.
“Oi!” Rab shouted, and then his arms were around her again, and her back was pressed against the wall, and his heart was thudding against her chest like a fist on a door.
She knew, in that moment, that he would kiss her. She closed her eyes, raised her chin, and felt a wave of relief that this part of her plan, at least, had fallen into place.
But she did not know that she would first feel the warmth of his breath on her face, then the tip of his nose brushing hers.
She did not know how soft and careful his lips would be when they finally found hers, did not know that in the moment after, as he drew away, as cold air rushed into the space between them, every nerve in her body would become a plucked harp string.
“Miss—” But before he could say her name, she took the lapels of his jacket in both hands and pulled him back to her.
For a moment there was nothing but torn breath, the fumble of fingers on shoulders, of lips on teeth. Then they found each other.
Rab’s hands were in her hair, on the back of her neck, holding her to him. He pressed his lips to hers with bruising urgency, pressed all of him against her. She made a sound when his tongue slid into her mouth, and he groaned in response, nipping his teeth around her lips.
Then, without warning, he pulled away. Caroline froze, thinking they were caught. But there was no sound in the stairwell save their ragged breath.
“Miss Huxley,” he whispered. “Forgive me—”
She felt the rush as he wheeled, as he stepped away from her, shut her eyes against the sudden brightness as he opened the door. She caught a final glimpse of him, silhouetted against the lamplight, before the door closed, and she was left alone in the dark.
Caroline gasped. She clutched her throat as though he had throttled her, felt her face, her chest, the pulse at her wrists.
And then she laughed. She was alive. She was untouched. Her plan had worked.
For curled between the fingers of her right hand, she held the silver key to Rab Ripley’s room.
—
Three minutes later, she stood on the garret landing.
There was no time to waste. He might have already noticed the key was missing; even now he might be climbing the stairs to find her.
She could still feel Rab’s hands on her, still feel the press of his body on hers. She shook her head to banish these ghosts. She slid the key into his lock and turned it.
The room was as she remembered it: the bed unmade, the table beside it stacked with teetering books.
Over the pattern of wrens and rose trellises, the walls were still papered in letters and dashes, interrupted occasionally by a magazine clipping of some foreign landmark.
And sitting between two complicated pincushions made of C’s and O’s, the strange poetry she had seen the first time she’d entered this room.
The curse is the cure.
But Caroline had eyes only for Rab’s desk.
Her instinct had told her that, if there was any evidence that would lead her to Charlie, it was here. The surface was covered with piles of papers, a few thick-spined books. A charred paste sat in Mrs. Easton’s tea saucer; her medication, Caroline guessed, destroyed with flame or chemicals.
The first drawer contained nothing but instruments: fine metal tools with sharp edges, thermometers, glass beakers and pipettes.
The second drawer was heavier and contained nothing but stoppered bottles. Caroline lifted one to the light from the landing: It was purple as amethyst, and at the sight of it, her stomach gave a nauseating little flip of remembrance. Rab’s poison, made from the aconitum in the garden.
In mild cases, ingestion causes dizziness, headaches, and confusion. In serious cases, paralysis, convulsions, and death by asphyxiation.
Caroline held the bottle to her chest. She was about to close the drawer when something caught her eye.
It was a folded paper, tucked against the long edge of wood. She reached in with two fingers, careful not to let the bottles clink, and drew it free.
The parchment was brittle, the font old-fashioned. Caroline knew what it was before she opened it. Before she saw the curling blue flowers in the margins.
The final page of the legend of Saint Ciwa.
No time, she silently scolded herself. It’s not important, there’s no time—
But already, she had read the first interrupted sentence.
take me as your husband, and rule beside me as my queen?”
Ciwa agreed, and the two were married in the spring. Together, she and Lord Ciaran drove the evil Lady Angharad from her father’s lands.
But the lady, being a vengeful sorceress, cast a final curse: All the children of Ciwa and Ciaran would be half beast, in payment for the death of her son, and on nights when the moon was full, they would be bound to their beastly form until the moon set in the west.
Caroline stood still as a doe.
This was a different ending than that in Carys’s story. Half-formed thoughts fluttered through her head like flakes of snow.
You will lock your door and not open it until the following morning after the sun has risen.
No. No, there was no time—
Caroline shoved the paper back where she’d found it and opened the third and final drawer.
The vials here were much smaller, the size of perfume bottles, their corks stoppered, drenched in a thick coat of wax. She pulled one free at random and held it up between her thumb and second finger.
The substance inside was viscous and dark. It was crusted on the surface and on the curves of the glass. She turned it to the light and saw, on the opposite face, a neatly written label.
Mary Jane Kelly
Caroline’s vision blurred.
It was blood. It was Mary Jane’s blood.
“Miss Huxley?”
A cold finger touched Caroline’s heart.
Slowly, she turned.
Standing on the threshold, black against the light, was Rab. As her mind raced, he took a slow, careful step toward her, his hands held out.
“Miss Huxley,” he said quietly, “you tricked me.”
Caroline had the mad urge to laugh. She clutched the vials to her chest with one hand and with the other pulled the little knife free from her waist.
“I tricked you?” she spat. “You’re the murderer! The Ripper!”
“Give those to me before either of us does something we regret.” His voice was level, infuriatingly calm.
“No!” Caroline shrieked, brandishing the penknife like a rapier. “You killed Mary Jane, and all those other poor women—”
He was feet away now, his arms still out, his feet silent on the carpet. She slashed violently through the air between them, and he took a step back.
“Miss Huxley,” he said, with infuriating calm, “or should I call you Miss Foster? I think we can both agree, the jig is up—”
“Where’s Charlie?” she shouted.
Something like sorrow flashed across his face, replaced quickly by a mask of neutrality. But not before Caroline saw it. Named it.
A terrible, sinking panic seized her. “What did you do to Charlie?”
“Caroline—”
“If you take one more step I’ll slice your nose off, Rab. Don’t think I won’t.”
He smirked. “You’re going to kill me? With a penknife?”
In answer, Caroline cut the knife through the air. Rab flinched backward, toward the bed, and Caroline did not hesitate. She ducked past him onto the landing.
She heard his shout of surprise as she ran, but she did not stop, even as she nearly tripped down the stairs in her blasted skirt.
She rounded the second-floor landing, then the first, Rab thundering just behind, calling out for her to stop.
And then she was at the top of the parlor stairs, knife out, glass bottles clutched to her chest.
Her mind didn’t register that there was piano music until it stopped.
A dozen sets of eyes stared up at her.
“Miss Huxley,” said Mrs. Easton, her eyes wide as saucers, “what in the name of—”
But Caroline did not so much as pause. She barreled down the stairs, splitting the crowd of men like billiard balls, her eyes fixed on the front door.
“Don’t let her go!” Rab shouted from the stairs behind. “Stop her!”
The landlady stepped between Caroline and the front door. “Miss Huxley,” she shouted. “Please—”
But Caroline did not stop. She flashed the knife again, catching Mrs. Easton’s forearm and tearing through the midnight-blue fabric of her sleeve.
She was distantly aware that her blade had drawn blood, a good deal of it, for Mrs. Easton shrieked and John roared.
The wild slash of her blade had made her drop one of the vials, but she had no time to retrieve it, no time to think.
She was through the door, down the steps, and out into the street before the landlady had fallen to her knees.