Chapter 22 #2
Caroline cast a glance through the window. Night was rising like a dark tide. Quickly, she warned herself. Leave nothing out, but do it quickly.
She told him. She told him everything she knew, from the very beginning, starting with Charlie’s disappearance after their father died. Her brother’s strange, final letter. Her arrival at the boardinghouse, the motley mixture of men who made up the clientele.
She omitted the bits about finding Charlie’s notebooks.
About the legend of Saint Ciwa ringed with aconitum flowers, the matching blooms in the garden, on her mother’s ring, in the Blevins Bible.
The missing page of the fairy tale hidden in Rab’s drawer.
In this warm, neat flat, those details felt childish.
A little girl’s hunger for mystery and magic.
Sergeant Corbet listened, still as a hunter, as she told him of her conversation with Mary Jane, of the night Rab forced her to take the tonic and she fell asleep trying to listen at the dining room door. How she had discovered the hanging manacles on the east wing of the second floor.
His fingers tightened on the chair arm when she described stealing Rab’s key, luring him into the stairwell, letting him kiss her.
She did not tell the policeman how she had kissed him back, how her body had leapt like a flame against his, even though she already suspected the terrible truth.
The shame of it colored her words, and Sergeant Corbet leaned forward as though he would interrupt.
But he held his tongue until she had reached the very end, until she had described the vials of congealed blood in Rab’s half-open drawer, each with its neatly lettered label.
“It’s him,” he breathed. “Miss Foster. You’re right. It’s him.”
Relief washed over Caroline. “You believe me.”
“Of course I do. Robert Ripley is the man who calls himself Jack the Ripper. He killed Mary Jane Kelly, and all those other women, and many more poor souls, it seems, who we haven’t even heard of.
He kept their blood as sick trophies. I’m certain, if you had had more time, you would have found the other half of Catherine Eddowes’s kidney somewhere in his room. ”
He reached out, touched only the very tips of his fingers to Caroline’s bare forearm. The contact sent a ripple of sensation up to her throat, down her spine.
“And I believe that you are the bravest woman I’ve ever met.”
Caroline swallowed. She wanted to drown in the expression in the policeman’s eyes. They were wide and soft and full of gentle admiration. Only Charlie had ever looked at her like that.
But night was falling fast.
“Sergeant Corbet,” she said, “I believe he will kill again. Tonight.”
The policeman’s fingers retreated from her skin.
“I’ll go straight to the station. Straight to Munro, the new commissioner.
But first, we must ensure your safety.” His lips pressed into a tight line as he thought.
“I could ask if Mrs. Thompson has any rooms for let—I think she does; the flat above this one, in fact—”
At Caroline’s expression, he interrupted himself. “Or perhaps you don’t want to be left alone? Would you prefer to accompany me to Leman Street? The furnace is broken, I’m afraid, and the benches are hard, but you would be safe there…”
Caroline had the terrible urge to cry. Never again would she sleep beneath her yellow quilt, with the moonlight spilling across the ceiling.
Never again would she eat breakfast at the scrubbed wooden table in the cellar kitchen, or hang the laundry on the garden line with Mrs. Easton, or walk the hallways of the boardinghouse beneath the watchful foil gaze of the wallpaper birds.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said, forcing the words out, “asking your landlady if she has a room available. I haven’t any money, I’m afraid—”
“Don’t think of it,” Sergeant Corbet replied, with a gesture like shooing a fly. “When we have Robert Ripley behind bars, we can speak about what is next for you. What is right. But you’ve had a shock, Miss Foster. You need a strong cup of tea and a good night’s sleep.”
He stood, lifted his coat and hat from the stand beside the door. “I’ll only be gone a moment,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”
As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, Caroline was on her feet. Her skin felt itchy and hot as a hairshirt; anxiety whined in her ears.
What had happened in the moments after she left?
She had left Mrs. Easton collapsed and bleeding, the guests looking on in horrified confusion. And Rab, Rab barreling down the stairs.
How long had he chased her before returning to the Full Moon to hide the evidence of his crimes?
She imagined him carrying an armful of glass vials down the servants’ staircase, stoking the kitchen fire as the blood blackened and the labels smoked.
How many names would be lost before the police apprehended him?
Caroline pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until all she saw was white light.
And Charlie. Was one of the vials labeled Charlie Foster?
No. No. Don’t think of it. Not yet, not yet…
She dropped her hands, opened her eyes, and tried to distract herself from the screaming in her head by inspecting Sergeant Corbet’s parlor.
The title of the book, abandoned pages down on the table, was A Study in Scarlet. Caroline hadn’t heard of it. The red lettering turned her stomach.
On the mantelpiece was a framed oval daguerreotype of a family—a pretty woman who, Caroline guessed through the blacks and whites and grays, shared Sergeant Corbet’s light coloring, a square-jawed man who had passed on his bone structure, and two children.
The girl was four or five, and pretty like her mother, with pale curls.
The boy was seven or eight, Caroline guessed, and stood before his parents with his hands clasped, shoulders back, eyes trained on the man inside the camera obscura.
Already, there was a preternatural seriousness about him, and Caroline wished she could step through the plate and take his hand, teach him to climb a tree or wade through a stream, as Charlie had done for her.
The teakettle whistled. Reluctantly, she turned away from the image of Sergeant Corbet’s family.
The kitchen was as neat as the parlor. Beside the empty teapot—unadorned, inexpensive bone china—sat two matching cups on their saucers. Caroline looked about for the tea leaves.
They were in a labeled tin right in front of her, beside a matching tin of sugar and another of biscuits. She dropped three scoops of leaves into the pot, lidded it, and opened the icebox for milk.
It was nearly empty. With a hollow ache, Caroline thought of the Full Moon’s packed larder, the glistening hams and iced cakes, the links of sausages and casks of wine.
Here there was nothing save a glass bottle of milk, a plate of anonymous cold cuts, and a little cardboard package.
The box was the color of cream, with scalloped edges and twining roses printed along the borders. A bakery box.
It was the exact sort of box Charlie sometimes brought when he visited.
In the spring or summer, when the weather was fine, he’d be waiting in the perfumed cypress grove or beside the stream with a little white box beside him.
Caroline always wanted to open it immediately, see what sort of confection he had chosen for her, pink or green marzipan crowned with candied oranges or sugared rose petals.
But Charlie made her wait until they had found just the right spot: a flattened boulder that served as a table, a fallen log, a sun-warmed bit of grass.
And then they would sit, and Charlie would open the lid like a jewelry box, and the two would tear at the carefully layered cream and cake with their bare fingers until there was nothing left but smears of powdered sugar.
Something fluttered in Caroline’s chest as she imagined the buttoned-up police sergeant ordering an expensive piece of cake from a teahouse to eat alone before the fire.
It was as though Charlie was reaching out to her, giving her the gift of this memory when she needed it most. Smiling, she opened the box.
It took her a moment to comprehend what it contained.
A small, raw piece of tissue, a scrap of offal the size of a guinea. Shrunken and toughened by time, cemented into the cardboard. It smelled like rotting meat. Caroline shut the box, then stood for a moment, stock-still, heart pounding.
It was half a kidney.
On the other side of the parlor, the door of the flat creaked open.