Chapter 24
In the following silence, all Caroline could hear was the wheeze of air in and out through her crumpled throat.
The man who had been Sergeant Corbet lay sprawled before her on the black-and-white kitchen tiles. The skin of his face and scalp was raised in angry red wheals; his mouth hung open.
His fingers had stopped twitching, but the blood continued to spool bright and thick from his eye, spreading sticky fingers to where Caroline sat huddled in the corner, trembling like a flag in a thunderstorm.
She had killed him.
Her relief was bright and brief, replaced too soon by another flavor of horror.
Someone was running down the hallway.
“Sergeant Corbet!” It was a man’s voice. “Sergeant?” Closer now. “Are you all right?”
Caroline retrieved the penknife from the policeman’s eye with a terrible sucking sound and held it before her again as the greengrocer’s footsteps stopped on the other side of the locked door. His fists pounded the wood.
“Sergeant Corbet!” The handle rattled. “I heard shouting. Is everything in hand?”
She nearly slipped in the gore in her haste to leave the kitchen.
“Sergeant! Open up or I shall have no choice but to break the door!”
There was nowhere to go, no way out but the way she had come. Unless…
Her boots had tracked blood from the kitchen into the parlor. She bent quickly, swiped at the soles with her mother’s shawl. Then she limped down the narrow hallway into the bedroom.
It was as neat as the parlor had been. And out the little window—thank God—into the alley behind the house, stood a rickety wooden fire escape.
Caroline thrust up the casement with a grunt. But she froze with her hands on the lintel.
Charlie’s ring.
She forced her feet back to the parlor. The front door was splintering beneath the grocer’s boot. A few more blows and he’d be through.
There. On the mantel, beside the daguerreotype. A little enamel box.
Caroline snatched it and staggered back down the hallway just as the wood cracked in two.
“Sergeant Corbet!” the man bellowed.
Caroline scrabbled up on the bed, hooked a boot through the open window. Please, God, let him go first to the kitchen—
Two feet through. She nearly dropped the box as she lowered herself onto the landing. A howl of horror from the kitchen as the grocer discovered the policeman. But she was out, barreling down the stairs and into the dark street without a glance backward over her shoulder.
Night had fallen sharply as a curtain over Whitechapel.
For the first time, Caroline was grateful for the anonymity of the darkness. She stumbled down the street, her breath gurgling, her head pounding as though it would burst.
His blood was matted in her hair, on her gown, sticky between the edges of her fingers. She reeked of it, of salt and copper. The wind licked icy tongues down her bare arms, through the thin stuff of her gown.
She thought of finding a hospital but dismissed the idea straightaway. The man, the grocer, had seen her, might at this very moment be describing her to the police.
Her body howled. Her bones felt like slivers of glass, each muscle an aching, pulsing heart. Her throat was closing as it swelled, each breath a keening in her ears. Her eyes were too big for their sockets, boggy with burst blood vessels.
There was only one place she could go.
The full moon had just raised its face over the easternmost rooftops when Caroline lifted the boardinghouse’s bronze knocker and let it fall.
She was shivering violently, from fear as much as the cold. Sergeant Corbet’s blood had stiffened on her skin, in her hair, and the December night had its teeth in her.
If they turned her away, she would die. And why shouldn’t they? She had attacked Mrs. Easton, run screaming into the night with murder on her lips.
Footsteps fell in the parlor. The door handle turned.
“Oh!” Mrs. Easton took a step backward, closing the door between them. Her arm was bandaged where Caroline had slashed it.
“Mrs. Easton,” Caroline croaked, “I’m so sorry, I’m so—”
The sound of the dead bolt.
Caroline’s hope flickered and died.
Then the door drew fully open, and the landlady wrapped her arms so tightly around Caroline that she cried out in relief and pain.
“Oh,” Mrs. Easton said into Caroline’s blood-soaked hair, “oh, Caroline, thank God, thank God—”
“Let her breathe!” Rab’s voice. Rab’s hands, firm but gentle, peeling her from the landlady’s embrace, guiding her toward the fire.
“Fetch her some tea—”
“Tea? Look at her! Fetch her some brandy!”
“A damp cloth, please, Jim, if you wouldn’t mind, for the blood—”
All the guests were there, faces filled with concern, with relief. Senhor Perreira vacated his chair and ushered her into it; Alfie pulled the tweed coat from his shoulders and tucked it around her. It was still warm from his body.
“Are you hurt?” Rab, kneeling beside her. “Caroline, are you hurt?”
Her throat throbbed. Her skull felt like a struck bell. But she shook her head, immediately regretting the movement.
“Who did this?” Mrs. Easton’s hands fluttered about her like anxious moths, sponging the blood from her hair, unwinding the clotted shawl from her shoulders. “Who did this to you?”
But Caroline was spared the agony of answering. For the landlady froze with the scarlet cashmere in her arms, holding it as though it were a body.
“Helen,” she breathed. “This belonged to Helen.”
Through the pain, through the shock of her body and her brain, Caroline found Mrs. Easton’s eyes.
The tenderness in them welled, split open. Tears ran unchecked down her cheeks. Then Caroline was crushed to the landlady’s chest, her breath a happy-sad sob against her ear. “It’s you!” she cried. “Oh, it’s you. Rab told us, when you left, but I didn’t believe—”
“Viv!” Rab’s voice sounded very far away. “Viv! Give her space!”
But Caroline did not want space. She wanted to melt into this embrace, into the warmth and heartbeat and inhale and exhale of another person, a person who, she was certain, although she did not yet understand why, loved her.
Mrs. Easton reluctantly pulled back, surveyed Caroline’s face as though seeing her for the first time. She swiped at the blood streaking Caroline’s cheeks, tucked a rogue strand of hair behind her ear.
“You favor your father,” she said, nearly to herself. “But Helen’s in you.” She brushed Caroline’s sharp cheekbones. “Here,” she whispered, “and here,” touching her chin, “and here,” placing a palm on the center of her chest, over her still-pounding heart.
Caroline’s eyes widened. “You’re Rose,” she managed to say in a painful whisper. The Blevins family Bible. The name beside her mother’s. “Rose Silvia. You’re my mother’s sister.”
Mrs. Easton nodded, fresh tears spilling down the tracks of the last.
“What’s that?” Rab’s voice, sharp.
Caroline forced her eyes from her aunt’s, followed Rab’s gaze to her lap, where a pink and white enamel box glowed innocently against the russet folds of her skirt.
The joy and relief she had felt under Mrs. Easton’s embrace evaporated.
In answer, she handed the box to Rab.
The guests gathered round him, Mrs. Easton at his elbow, as he opened the lid.
Caroline had not checked what it contained, in her mad dash to leave that blood-soaked flat, the nightmarish body in the kitchen. For a moment, foolish hope lifted its head. Maybe he was lying. Maybe Charlie is alive—
Then Rab held up a scrap of metal, and Caroline did not recognize the animal sound of grief that came from her mouth.
Rab passed the ring to Mrs. Easton, who stared at the engraved gold with such vocal sorrow that Caroline cried out again. She passed it to John, John to Monsieur Rodart, he to Mr. O’Riley, he to Mr. Bajwa and Senhor Perreira and Mr. Tythe and Pierre Toussaint.
The Barbadian held it out to Caroline. It was dwarfed in his huge palm, and as Caroline reached for the ring that had been her brother’s, Mr. Toussaint’s warm fingers grasped hers. She looked up into his face and found a mirror held up to her own sadness.
“Miss Foster,” Rab said, in a voice thick with waiting tears. “Miss Foster. There’s no time now. No time to grieve and no time to explain. But you need to come with us.”
Caroline looked at Mrs. Easton, a question in her face.
“That’s right, dear,” said the landlady with a feeble smile. “Rab will explain everything in the morning. But now it’s time.”
Caroline glanced at the Dutch clock in the corner. A quarter past ten. The men stood in a half circle around her, their eyes overbright, their hands in fists.
And through the pain and the exhaustion, through the soreness of her muscles and the pooling bruises on her neck, Caroline felt something rise within her.
Something old, and fierce, and wild.
“Drink this.” Rab again, with a snifter of the purple poison. She shrank away, but the others nodded encouragement. “We’ve all already taken it.”
Caroline shook her head, but Rab did not lower the glass. “Miss Foster,” he whispered. “Please trust me.”
Rab’s hands in her hair, on her waist. Rab’s breath in her mouth.
Rab’s face, over and over again, on the pages of Charlie’s sketchbook.
Her fingers closed around the cup.
It burned as it slid down her ragged throat. But in its wake there was a pleasant warmth that blurred the edges of her pain. She looked up at Rab, at the rest of them, and found them all watching her with expressions of soft affection.
“Come,” said Rab, holding out a hand. “Come with us.”