A Study in Darkness (22 page)

But the staircase was blocked by the substantial form of Mr. Earls, the caretaker. With twin white stripes in his bristling black hair, he looked like a badger in suspenders and a neckerchief. “What are you doing here? You’re not on this floor.”

“I was looking in on Lacey.”

“You a friend of hers?”

“Not really. I was just concerned.”

He scowled. “She’s two weeks behind. She has to pay up or get out. That’s why I’m here.”

Evelina caught his arm. “Please don’t.”

“I have my orders. No charity.”

No, places like this were run for profit by owners who never set foot in this part of town. And when these old places outlived their usefulness, they were knocked down and replaced with nicer housing for higher rents that the regulars could never afford. And so the rooming houses that remained would be that much more crowded—as would any doorway or alley that offered a bit of shelter from the rain. A lot could be ignored for a four percent profit margin.

Evelina increased the pressure of her fingers, dropping
her voice so low that it was almost a whisper. “She won’t be a problem, I can promise you that.”

“How?” he said roughly. “Are you going to pay her rent as well as your own?”

She wished she could, but it wouldn’t be necessary. “I doubt she’ll live to see tomorrow.”

His face fell. “That bad, is she? That’s a shame and all. She was a pretty thing in her day.” He looked uncertainly at the door, as if remembering a time long ago. Of course, long ago in these parts could have been a couple of years. “I suppose morning won’t make much difference.”

Evelina let her fingers relax. “Thank you.”

“Someone with her?”

“Her friend Gareth is there now.”

“Friend? He’s her boy.” Nostalgia turned to disgust. “God only knows what he saw his mother do, night after night.”

“Her son?” Evelina exclaimed in a low voice. “He never said.”

Earls grunted. “Some won’t admit to their brats in front of the clients. Makes them look old. Keeping quiet becomes a habit.” He turned and trudged back down the stairs.

Her son. That explains so much
. Feeling as if she’d intruded on their privacy, Evelina followed after. She wondered if the dying woman had the same remarkable, heather-colored eyes as her boy.

She left the building and walked down to Commercial Street just as the church bells struck two o’clock. Still lost in thought, she was vaguely aware of a mizzling rain and the hubbub of the streets around her. A stone’s throw away were the worst places—doss-houses that made her cramped room seem palatial by comparison. Evelina always walked by with her knife or gun hidden in the folds of her skirt. She’d seen the men lounging out front of the crumbling facades. The lucky few got casual work on the docks. The rest lived by crime or starved, some selling even the clothes they stood in—too proud or afraid to go to the workhouses, where families were split asunder and not all lived to get out.

Keating’s coin was both a lifeline and a source of guilt.
Playing at poverty when she wasn’t truly poor felt disrespectful—and yet she didn’t dare let her mask slip for an instant. She could be robbed and killed in a blink. Survival meant never dropping her guard, not even when she slept. Especially when she slept.

And yet, not far the other way, there was plenty of money to be had. Spitalfields Market sold fruits, vegetables, and almost anything else one could want, and the streets were jammed with a steady procession of handcarts, horse carts, and still more spewing steam. Business was excellent. That was the contradiction of these neighborhoods nestled at the base of the Tower of London—poverty and commerce existed side by side, layered like the leaves of a book.

Evelina’s business lay down Fournier Street, past the fine Georgian townhouses where French silk weavers had worked until the Blue King’s steam-powered mills had put them out of business. At the far end of the street was the apothecary she knew would sell her something at a good price because she’d fixed the device he used to press his powders into neat round pills.

She’d been in Whitechapel nearly three weeks—and there was just a week to go before Keating’s deadline was up. The fact played like a refrain in her head, reminding her that if she didn’t find the Blue King’s maker, the life she had left behind would be a mangled ruin.

And yet her life in Whitechapel had proved far from an easy stroll, for all her ability to fit in. To learn what she could from the local makers, she’d picked up some jobs for herself, though not as many as she needed. She’d quickly learned that work was hard to get, and many didn’t want a young woman when there were men about with the same skills. In fact, if she hadn’t had Keating’s coin, she’d be starving by now.

Nothing had been as simple as she had thought it would be. Her carpetbag held the train case with the equipment she used to repair clockwork. In the interests of blending in she’d bartered some of her other possessions—a shawl, a pair of stockings, and so on—for tools made for larger jobs, like fixing the brothel’s generator. Paying that much cash up
front would have attracted attention. And, in turn, no one had cash to pay her back. She’d done at least half her jobs for trade and, in a few cases, for nothing because she couldn’t bear to take anything more from desperate people.

Yes, she remembered how to fit in, but she’d forgotten or never known many of the hardships the adults around her had sheltered her from. No matter what else happened, she’d realized how large a debt she owed their memory.

She neared the tiny shop with its narrow doorway and faded sign. A trio of children chased a spotted dog down the street, shrieking at the top of their lungs, nearly careening into a man selling hot pies. The pies smelled so good, Evelina started to drool.

The apothecary’s was shut. “Gone to see his aunt, he did,” said the pie man. “She’s got a complaint with her belly. Like she ate bad fish, but it never stops.”

Which was more than Evelina had wanted to know. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Course everyone thinks it’s that madman with a knife if someone don’t show up where they’re supposed to be.”

“What madman?”

“Eh, you been hiding under the bed these last weeks? Every soul in the place is talking about what happened to those poor women. I knew Annie, I did!”

Evelina blinked. She had been so preoccupied finding a place to live and getting to know where the local makers congregated that she had spared no time for newspapers. “Is there another place to buy medicine?”

The pie man made a sale to a man in coveralls coated with brick dust, wrapping the pies in old newspaper. “They sell this and that round the corner at Mistress Skinner’s, but I say you have to want it something bad to go there.”

Evelina thanked the pie man and left. She found Skinner’s Trusted Elixirs down an alley so narrow she could touch either side with her fingertips. In one of the rooms above, a baby was crying. A rusted water pump stood at the dead end, probably supplying all the buildings around it. Washing hung from the windows above, endangered by a flock of roosting pigeons. Skinner’s was squashed between an old
clothes shop and a barber’s, and none of the businesses inspired confidence. A rat the size of a terrier eyed Evelina from a hole in the brickwork.

She opened the door to the shop cautiously, unsure what she was about to find. It was gloomy and small, with a dark wooden counter crowded with jars of every size and shape. Shelving jammed with more containers lined the place, leaving little room to actually get inside. The door set off a bell that gave a muted tinkle.

Evelina waited. A curtain behind the counter parted and a tall woman took her place behind the fortress of jars. “How may I help you?”

Evelina blinked, every sense suddenly alert. The woman was perhaps fifty, tall, black-haired and dressed entirely in loose, gauzy black garments that looked like a combination dressing gown and shroud. A necklace of pale, dangling objects rattled as she moved. Evelina shifted from foot to foot, fascinated but not sure staying there was a wonderful idea.

“Mistress Skinner?” she asked politely.

“The same. And who are you, my dear?” The woman’s voice was husky and cracked.

“Evelina,” she said, even though she hadn’t meant to. There was something about Mistress Skinner that was hard to refuse.

“Ah, the girl who fixes things. I’ve heard about you.” She leaned forward, peering at her. “You don’t look the part. Where did you learn the art of gear and wheel?”

“My grandfather.” He had fixed the mechanical wonders at Ploughman’s Paramount Circus—from the clockwork fortune teller to the Swiss orchestrion with its dancing shepherdesses. “He let me help him from the time I was just old enough to hold a pair of pliers.”

“How charming,” she said, her long-nailed fingers stroking the counter with a whispery rasp. Silver rings coiled like snakes over her knuckles, linked to each other with fine loops of chain.

“If you need anything fixed …”

“No, I don’t, but the puppet theater might. He has no end of machinery, more than any one man could ever hope to fix.
But he must be clever, for King Coal brings him work to do, although his machines are of a different sort.” She said the last with a curl of the lip. Evidently, Mistress Skinner didn’t approve of the Blue King, and didn’t care who knew it.

“A different sort?” Evelina prompted.

“King Coal likes what the puppeteer makes, although he doesn’t understand the cost.”

Evelina filed that tidbit away, cryptic though it was. Had she just stumbled on the Blue King’s maker? With only a week left to find him, she wasn’t turning away even the slimmest clue.

Mistress Skinner’s nails tapped impatiently against the countertop. “But the clock is ticking. What may I do for you today?”

“There is a sick woman in my rooming house,” Evelina said, and described what she knew of Lacey’s condition.

The woman listened, her face impassive, then filled a tiny stoppered bottle with a liquid the color of dark whisky. “A few drops under the tongue. Any more and it will certainly kill her, but that much will ease her pain.”

Evelina stepped forward. “Is it laudanum?”

“Yes, though it is stronger than some.” She snatched the bottle off the counter, holding it out of reach. Her necklace, Evelina saw, was made of yellowing finger bones. “And it costs a bit more. I use nothing but the best Turkey opium.”

Annoyed—and revolted by the necklace—Evelina lowered her hand. Laudanum was cheap, which was why so many used it for everything from chronic pain to quieting a fussing child. But in this case, strong was good. “How much?”

A look of satisfaction melted over Mistress Skinner’s sharply boned face. “Your ailing friend will bless you, little Evelina.”

Lacey would likely never know she existed, but in the end, Evelina left after parting with a threepenny bit. That was a quarter of a shilling and she paid four shillings a week for her room. A month ago it wouldn’t have seemed like much, but now she was forcibly reminded of just how much
every penny was worth. If she had been anyone else in this neighborhood, that small compassionate gesture would mean skimping on food for herself. And with work hard to get, it might mean the difference between a room and a doorway to sleep in.

Evelina walked slowly back toward Fournier Street. The baby in the rooms above was still mewling, hiccupping sobs that made her chest hurt. She stopped, unable to move until she heard a woman’s voice hushing it. She still wasn’t used to living in such close quarters again, where every drama felt like your own. Relieved, Evelina moved on.

Three pence
. She didn’t like to think that way, counting out every halfpenny like a miser, but a place like this made it impossible not to think of survival first. Now that Evelina had enjoyed a taste of champagne and ball gowns, she understood why her gently bred mother had wept every night. The harsh, spare life at Ploughman’s must have seemed a prison sentence. Hardy as she was, Evelina couldn’t wait to get back to clean sheets and a hot bath.

Even the thought of a steaming bathtub lifted her spirits—a bathtub, and Assam tea, and fresh fruit. No one here could afford oranges, so she had to walk by them as if they were beyond her reach.

She might be getting closer to those imagined luxuries. She was definitely going to investigate this puppeteer at her earliest opportunity. She turned onto Fournier Street, glad to be out of the narrow alley. The rain had stopped and the sun was trying to break through the clouds, turning the sky to polished silver.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” asked the pie man.

“Maybe.” She spent another precious penny on two pies.

He wrapped the pies in old newsprint, one page around each to keep in the heat. “Eh, I always wear a rabbit’s foot going past that shop. They say she has the evil eye.”

Evelina wasn’t going to argue. She walked back toward her rooming house, eating one of the greasy pies. The pastry was tough and salty, but the gravy inside was filled with onions and herbs. She gulped it down greedily as she
mounted the steps to Lacey’s room, reading the grease-splotched newspaper as she went. It was dated the first of the month.

Was this what the pie man had been talking about? Hadn’t he said Annie? According to the rest of the article, this woman’s name had been Nichols—Mary Ann or Polly, people seemed to call her both. Seeing it in print, though, triggered another memory, another newspaper article she’d read about a murder victim back at Baker Street. That crime had been only a stone’s throw away from here. The Nichols murder was a few blocks away, but still too close for her liking.
Throat cut ear to ear
.