Chapter 26
Caroline opened her eyes.
Midmorning light poured across the peaked ceiling. She was in her gable bedroom, with the yellow quilt tucked tightly under her chin. She felt as though she had been hit by a train. But she was relieved to find herself here, although she could not remember why.
When the truth came to her in broken bits and pieces, she rolled onto her side and vomited.
She remembered very little of the night. There had been pain, and the sound of sobbing, though whether it had come from her or the men, she could not say. Her ankles and wrists felt burned where she had strained against the chains. Her head beat like a rung bell with every pulse.
She had led the Ripper to Mary Jane.
She had killed him. She had killed Sergeant Corbet.
And Charlie. Charlie was dead.
Again and again her stomach heaved; empty, rhythmic contractions. When it was over, when her body trembled and cold sweat soaked the sheets, she sobbed into her pillow until sleep pulled her back under.
—
“Miss Foster?”
Twilight. The window gray, the room cold. Mrs. Easton—her mother’s sister—stood at the foot of her bed.
“Miss Foster?” she said again, and then: “Caroline?”
Caroline did not move.
“Everyone is downstairs. They are waiting for you.”
Caroline opened her mouth to say she wasn’t hungry, but the act sent a blistering wave of pain down her throat. She only whimpered.
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Easton crossed to the bedside and sat down beside Caroline. She raised her cool fingertips to Caroline’s temple, stroked her blood-matted hair. Was the blood hers, or the policeman’s? It didn’t matter.
Charlie was dead.
Mrs. Easton hummed an old Welsh lullaby that Carys used to sing.
Deep the silence round us spreading
All through the night
Dark the path that we are treading
All through the night
Still the coming day discerning
By the hope within us burning
To the dawn our footsteps turning
All through the night
Caroline covered her face with her hands and let the grief roll through her.
For three days, Caroline did not leave her room.
Mrs. Easton—who quietly insisted she call her Viv—came and went every few hours with trays of porridge and broth and honeyed tea.
Caroline ate little. She lay in bed and waited for Scotland Yard to knock on the door, for them to take her away.
She stared at her throat in the glass, at the scarlet wheals in a perfect pattern of fingers.
And she remembered. She remembered Charlie.
She pulled blank pages from the drawer of her desk and filled them with every detail of her brother she could remember.
The shape of his eyebrows, the way he paused and turned on the path ahead to wait for her.
The expression on his face when he twisted a worm onto a fishhook or searched the branches overhead for a singing bird.
She stared at the portrait he had drawn of her, half-turned to the viewer, the trees rising thick and black behind her.
She recognized the wildness in her eyes now.
The angle of her chin, the dormant power in her slender arms. She was capable of great violence.
The knowledge was both terrifying and comforting.
When Caroline dreamed, her brother was no longer waiting for her at the edge of the forest. There were no blue-purple flowers, no monster at her back.
But she did dream. She was walking through the woods of Audley House.
The grass was springy beneath her boots.
The air smelled green, like the water in the stream, and although she was alone, she was not afraid.
—
On the third night, when the house was still and silent with sleep, Caroline turned the handle of her door and stepped silently onto the landing. A strip of light glowed beneath Rab’s door, as she knew it would.
She raised her hand and knocked.
A shuffle of papers. The backward squeal of chair legs. His feet, quick and quiet, as he crossed the room. She listened to the silence of his pause on the other side of the wood. She imagined him taking a breath. Arranging his face.
The door opened.
“Miss Foster.” His lips were pale, his eyes bloodshot. But he conjured a weak smile as he said, “Please. Come in.”
The room was unchanged. The walls papered in notes, the desk covered in blackened burners and glass beakers.
“Forgive the interruption,” she said. Her voice was raspy with pain and disuse.
“Not at all. I’m not getting much done these days.”
Caroline nodded. Her grief was a flood that drowned everything but itself. But she understood the desire for distraction.
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “I made incorrect assumptions about you. I called you a murderer, and you are not one. I assumed that you had something to do with my brother’s—”
Death.
“—disappearance.”
Tears pricked in her eyes. Rab took a half step closer, but she held up her hand and went on. “I was wrong. I’m sorry. But I have questions. And I believe you might be the only person in the world who can answer them for me.”
Rab nodded. “Where would you like me to begin?”
“At the very beginning.”
—
“Now, this is just a fairy tale,” Rab said, in the slightly sardonic tone that she now knew covered a deep well of feeling. “And I don’t give much credence to it. But here it is, more or less: A thousand years ago, there was a girl named—”
“Ciwa,” Caroline interjected. “I know the story.” She was seated on Rab’s bed, he in the desk chair. Her nose was full of his perfume: camphor tooth powder and cedar cologne. It covered the coppery smell of Sergeant Corbet’s blood that seemed to follow her.
“Right,” said Rab, glancing sidelong at her. “Well. Legend has it that Ciwa and her beast king had a whole litter of babies, and each of them was part-wolf.”
The torn page in his desk drawer.
And on nights when the moon was full, they would be bound to their beastly form until the moon set in the west.
“Like I said,” Rab went on, “I don’t buy it.
Curses and all that. But stories like this must come from somewhere.
And Mr. Tythe—he’s read every book on the subject—he says that the Welsh are the oldest tribe in Britain.
They were here before the Celts or the Gauls or any of the rest of them, and my theory is this: that they were the first people to carry the disease in their blood.
Then it spread, of course, like all diseases do. To every corner of the world—”
“Tiger men,” Caroline interrupted. Rab cocked his head at her. “Sergeant…” She couldn’t bring herself to say his name. “He told me. Before…you know. He told me he was attacked, in Burma. By men who…who changed.”
Rab nodded. “We’re called something different in every language. Tiger men. Luisón. Kitsune. But it’s all the same disease. The same pathogen.”
“Pathogen,” Caroline repeated. The word was foreign in her mouth.
“That’s right. Think of it as”—he screwed his face up at the ceiling—“as tiny barnacles, clinging to the water in your blood. It’s spread like rabies, by saliva in a wound. The full moon tugs at it, the same way it tugs at the ocean.”
“And what…what happens to us? On the full moon?”
Rab’s wry smile stiffened. “Madness,” he said. “Lunacy, to be more specific. We lose ourselves.”
She had wanted to run. She had wanted nothing more than to break free of her bindings and run. Scabs ringed her wrists and ankles. If it weren’t for the stultifying effect of Rab’s medicine, she might have gnawed off her own hands to be free.
“Are we dangerous?” she asked, then immediately wished she could withdraw the idiotic question.
Of course they were dangerous. She had killed a man, hadn’t she?
She had dredged up a fierceness that now, in the cold light of reason, she could not believe.
She had stabbed Sergeant Corbet through the eye.
In the moment, she hadn’t even been horrified. A part of her—a part of her with teeth—had enjoyed it.
Caroline shuddered.
“We certainly can be,” Rab said. “I think, back when Britain was just a few muddy villages and some standing stones, our kind just ran out into the woods on the full moon. Spent the night in the trees.”
She had wanted nothing more than to be somewhere cool and green.
“But now.” Rab shrugged. “There are so many people. And in cities like London there’s nowhere to run.
So we take the medicine, which dulls the effects.
Lock ourselves up. When I was little, before Viv reinforced the chains and the doors, John used to escape.
Mostly he’d just cower in the corner of the garden under the hydrangeas, but a few times he ran all the way to Bethnal Green.
If someone had gotten in his way, tried to stop him… ”
He unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve, rolled the fabric up to the elbow. Halfway up his forearm smiled the scar Caroline had seen the first night she had been in this room.
“Our deepest fear,” Rab went on, “all of us—greater than death, or being exposed as what we are—is making someone else like us.”
Without thinking, Caroline raised two fingers, dropped them to the half circle of white. It was an old scar; the skin around it had grown and stretched until it was a piece of Rab.
“You came here when you were a baby,” Caroline breathed, lifting her eyes to his. Dropped on my doorstep in a Moses basket, Mrs. Easton had told her. “Someone did this to you when…when you were—”
“When I was little, yes. Just six months old or so, is Viv’s guess.” Sorrow tugged at the edges of his smile. Someone had wounded him, had abandoned him, before he could walk. Before he could speak.
“I used to rail against it all. Curse whoever left me here. Now I consider myself lucky, in a way. I’ve never known another life. Never had to adjust to what I am. Most of the other men hurt someone they loved when they turned for the first time. Had to leave town, start over.”
The disparate men, asleep now on the floors beneath them. Mr. Bajwa with his quiet, kind eyes. Incorrigible Mr. O’Riley. Monsieur Rodart and Mr. Toussaint and all the rest.