Chapter 23
“Miss Foster?”
Metallic panic flooded Caroline’s mouth.
She heard him hang his coat by the door, imagined him surveying the parlor, frowning at her empty chair. “I’ve secured the room upstairs for you.”
Caroline looked about frantically. She was trapped in the kitchen without so much as a window to escape through. The only way out of the flat was through the front door.
“I have the key here. Mrs. Thompson agreed to bring you up some supper.”
A knife. She needed a knife.
“She’s not much of a cook, I’m afraid—”
He was walking toward her, cool and confident. And she was holding the box containing Catherine Eddowes’s kidney. She dropped it on the counter and opened the closest drawer. Spoons and forks. Butter knives.
“But the food will be hot, and mostly edible.”
He was steps away. Steps.
Please, she prayed. Please.
She opened the next drawer. A cheese grater, a potato peeler.
And a chopping knife.
She wheeled toward the door with the knife clutched in both hands.
Every hair on her body stiffened. Sergeant Corbet was standing on the threshold.
She watched him take in the sight of her. His lips parted; his eyes widened in alarm as they moved over her face, over the brandished knife, which, she saw now, was rusted and chipped.
For a moment, giddy relief ran through her. She was wrong! Not even the world’s greatest actor could feign this reaction—the shocked mouth, the creased brow—
But then he grinned. It was a slow grin, breaking over his face like a terrible sunrise. And in that moment, Caroline knew he would kill her.
The policeman’s eyes flicked to the box on the counter, then back to Caroline’s face.
“Finally figured it out, did you?” His voice was cold as the night outside. “Took you long enough. You’re even stupider than your brother.”
“What did you do to him?” she demanded. Sergeant Corbet took another step, and Caroline thrust the knife into the space between them. Her entire arm trembled. “What did you do to Charlie?”
He shrugged. “What do you think, foolish girl? I killed him. Chopped him up, spread him out over a few different culverts. He’s long gone now, washed out to the North Sea.”
Dread soaked her spine. Charlie. Charlie.
“What about the ticket?” she asked desperately.
He huffed a laugh. “There was no ticket. I typed it up myself, stamped it with an inspection seal.”
“Why?” Her voice cracked, and his smile widened. Caroline thought, ridiculously, of the monster from the legend of Saint Ciwa, with its long jaw of sharp teeth. “Why did you kill him?”
“He took something that was mine.”
Her mind raced. What did Charlie possess that had belonged to this man, this lunatic?
And with a sudden, nauseating drop, she knew.
“Mary Jane,” she breathed.
The cold glint in his eyes was all the answer she needed.
Fury welled within her. It was he who had killed the woman her brother loved. He who had skinned her belly, her legs. Sawn off her breasts. Destroyed her beautiful face so that she would have been unrecognizable but for the fact that she had been mutilated in her own home.
Caroline opened her mouth to ask why. But she knew. She already knew.
“You were the man she was to marry,” she whispered. “The one who went to war.”
His limp. It’s an old wound, he had told her. A musket ball in Burma.
Caroline’s fingers tightened around the knife handle. “The one who beat her.”
A shadow crossed his face at that. “Don’t speak of things you don’t understand, Miss Foster. What happens between a husband and wife is no one’s business but theirs.”
“But you weren’t married,” she sneered. She was feeling reckless, emboldened by her grief. “And when my brother came along, and treated her like a lady, and stole her heart with his kindness, you couldn’t stand it, could you?”
The poor but neatly kept flat in Miller’s Court. The baby who might have lived, if Mary Jane’s heart had not been broken. If this man, this hateful, blackened man, had not killed Charlie.
Sergeant Corbet stepped over the threshold.
“Oh, Miss Foster,” he said softly. “You really have no idea, do you? I didn’t kill your brother because he stole Mary Jane from me. At least, not only because he stole Mary Jane. I killed him because he, like every guest in that boardinghouse, carries a filthy infection in his blood.”
Caroline’s mind reeled. “Infection,” she repeated blankly. “What infection?”
A growl of irritation. “My God. Graced with neither beauty nor brains. The disease, you stupid cow. The one that turns them mad on the full moon. They drink some magical elixir and lock themselves up until sunrise. Your brother told me all about it before his heart finally stopped. If I were contaminated by some foreign illness, I’d blow my brains out.
But not that lot. They’re proud of what they are. ”
In a distant room in Caroline’s mind, pieces were falling into place. The manacles. The flowers—the wolfsbane—growing in the garden, coloring the liquid in Rab’s medicine. The missing page from Saint Ciwa’s story.
But the lady, being a vengeful sorceress, cast a final curse: All the children of Ciwa and Ciaran would be half beast.
Caroline pressed these thoughts to the corners of her consciousness. Sergeant Corbet was enjoying her confusion, and if she could keep him talking a bit longer, perhaps she could work out a plan to escape.
“They were always kind to me,” Caroline said. He thought her stupid; she would act it. “The men. They did not seem dangerous.”
“The chicken does not fear the ax until it smells its own blood.”
He took another step toward her. His right knee trembled as it took his weight.
With a sudden jolt of clarity, Caroline asked, “Did he hurt you?” She pointed at his lame leg. “Is that why? You told me it was a musket ball. Did my brother—”
The policeman held his hand up, and she fell silent.
“I told you that I was wounded by a musket ball in Burma. That is true. But I did not tell you that I was shot by a man in my own brigade.” His eyes flicked over the rusted knife, the windowless room behind her.
She saw him realize that there was no scenario in which she survived him.
She watched him decide to tell her the truth.
“Our mission was to occupy Mandalay. My battalion was sent along the bank of the river, on foot, to sneak up on the Burmese southern flank. They let us off near Toungoo. We made our way north, razed a few muddy villages, lined up the natives, and shot them like fish in a barrel. I thought we’d gotten them all.
But we hadn’t.” He shook his head: a small, jerky movement, like a tic.
Caroline blanched. Gotten them all. There would have been women. Children. Whose only sin was existing on land that the British Empire had decided to claim.
“So there we are, sitting in the jungle under the full moon, waiting for the firefight to start on the northern end, when out of the undergrowth all around, these men—these monsters—appear. We hadn’t heard them coming.
They were on us like wolves, killing us with their hands, with rocks.
No guns. No knives. My mate fired his musket at me when one of them sunk its teeth into his neck. You’ve never heard such screams.”
The knife began to tremble in Caroline’s hands.
She could nearly see it: A mess of limbs and faces.
Gore glowing silver in the moonlight. And a hot, wild piece of her smiled.
For these men—these butchers of innocents beneath the Union Jack—had deserved what they had gotten, hadn’t they? And so much more besides.
“When I came to,” Sergeant Corbet went on, “I was lying in a pool of blood, and every single man in the battalion was dead. Throats torn out. Bellies split. Flies crawling on their eyes. A Burmese fisherman was dragging the boots off the corpses of my friends. Nearly pissed himself when I called out to him. Raised a machete, called me seua saming. But I held out my Saint Christopher medallion to him—it was gold, worth more than his house—and he couldn’t turn it down.
He bound my hands before he cleaned the musket wound, though, kept glancing up at my face as though I’d turn into some fiend before he was finished.
When he finally drew the bullet free, he laughed with relief.
They hadn’t bitten me, you see. Thank God, they hadn’t bitten me.
“I spent two days in that fisherman’s shack before a British steamer passed.
When they brought me on, I told the officers what happened, but no one believed me.
Put it down in the records as a guerrilla attack.
But I knew what I’d seen. I’d seen men who were not men.
Men who killed like rabid dogs. Sua saming, the fisherman had called me.
In the hospital in Rangoon, I bribed a Burmese orderly to tell me what it meant. Tiger man, he said.”
Caroline’s skin prickled into gooseflesh. The manacles. The long, toothy smile of Saint Ciwa’s beast.
On nights when the moon was full, they would be bound to their beastly form until the moon set in the west.
“When I came home, I tried to press on. Live a normal life. Really, I did. But the nightmares didn’t stop.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I started asking questions, discreetly, in the most unsavory streets.
And bit by bit, whisper by whisper, I learned that, in every corner of the world, the story of these creatures existed.
And more than that—there was a safe house for them, right here in London, right under my nose. ”
His smile grew wider. Colder.