Jaclyn the Ripper (3 page)

After the guests had run the gamut of obvious titles, Amy had folded her hands over her chest and affected a swoon. “Heart!” cried Charlotte Shaw. Amy had nodded encouragement, then in a moment of inspiration had run to the switch and turned off the light. A puzzled silence. Then an inebriated Joseph Conrad had boomed, “Heart of Darkness!,” and the room exploded with laughter and applause. By the time H.G. felt his way through the literal darkness to the switch and turned the light back on, Amy had disappeared, but no one thought anything of it. In fact, Conrad was still hee-hawing with laughter, prompting George Bernard Shaw to say that if Joseph were any more potted, he'd be a parlor palm.

Soon after they'd all said good night, H.G. had started worrying seriously about his wife. It wasn't like her to miss saying good night to her guests; she was such a gracious hostess. Thinking she'd gone for a moonlit stroll as they used to when they were lovers, he went looking for her, but she wasn't in the gardens or on the beach. Then when he
didn't find her in the nursery putting the boys to bed he figured that she'd gone to the city with Dorothy—yet why wouldn't she have said something? When it was such a late hour?

The telephone rang. H.G. rushed to the alcove between the kitchen and parlor, but Mrs. Vickers got there first and lifted the receiver off its cradle on the wall. “061 Sandgate,” she said. He eavesdropped while she exchanged pleasantries with Mrs. Ford Madox Ford. As soon as he heard the drift of the conversation—that none of the Fords had seen Amy since last night either—he went to his study like a child to his room, sat backward in his desk chair and gazed out at the channel, the distant coastline of Picardy and Normandy lost in the haze. Combing his luxuriant mustache with his fingers, he didn't know what to think. Or do. He felt trapped in this, their treasure house by the seashore. Six years ago, he'd had it built for her, making sure the carpenters built it pleasant and spacious, and installed all the modern conveniences.

“Perhaps she went to Mass, Mr. Wells.”

He turned and scowled at Mrs. Vickers, who had come into the room behind him, a specter of false morality. “She left last night.”

“St. Matthew's has services at eleven,” she replied, as if she hadn't heard.

“The day my wife goes to church,” H.G. declared in his thin, reedy voice, “is the day Queen Victoria resurrects herself as a giant paperweight to sit upon men's minds for another half century!”

“Is that so?” Mrs. Vickers replied. “Well, maybe you don't know your wife as well as you might think, Mr. Wells.”

“Balderdash!”

He left his own study to get away from her stultifying presence, went outside for the fresh sea air that always restored his spirits. He knew Amy better than he knew himself. They'd been time-crossed lovers, hadn't they? She'd come back to the nineteenth century with him, and two years later they had married, vowing that there would never be any falsehood between them. As long as they were staying in Victorian England, they pledged to turn conventional morality upside down and expose its hypocrisy. Together they would be an explosion of moral light. H.G. and his fragile girl from the future who adored boating in
Regent's Park, cycling through smoky London for story ideas, wine and cookies before making love in front of the fire. His Venus Urania. Most definitely his lover-shadow.

And then on a rather ordinary day, after overhearing him tell the children for the umpteenth time to ask their mummy, she decided that he should call her “Jane.” He was shocked, yet didn't refuse, except my God, why on earth would she want to be “Jane”? He supposed his success had something to do with it, then shook his head, unwilling to blame himself. No one had told her to put her own life on hold for him. No one had insisted that she become secretary, typist, house mistress, exchequer, shopper, gardener, not to mention “Mummy.” He had always been willing to settle for her love and nothing more. She knew that, yet somewhere in their eleven-year marriage, she had changed regardless. True, she'd been ill on occasion, but so had he, and after settling in at Spade House, they'd both been disgustingly healthy. It hadn't mattered. She had withdrawn from him, never giving him a reason except to say they must “get on” with life and work.

She'd never said why, so he could only guess that it was his wanderlust, his need for trysts. The French called them “passades”—sex without love or guilt—which in lighter moments he likened to having a pint in a strange pub after a trying day. Except he had never been able to
not
feel guilty, for he truly loved and respected his Amy, and refused to lie to her. Ultimately, to save their marriage and her own self-respect, she had proposed a modus vivendi: In all matters they would remain steadfast partners. Except for sex. Should either of them have the urge to stray, they were free to do so and free to talk about it. So liberated, he had agreed enthusiastically.

He hadn't seen his lover-shadow since.

H.G. picked a daffodil from Amy's lush, abundant garden, absently put it in his lapel and started back to the house. Obviously, the modus vivendi hadn't worked. Obviously, Amy was fed up with a husband who attracted women like moths to a flame. Obviously, she was unhappy with a marriage that had unwittingly become a social experiment. Moreover, she probably wasn't thrilled to have a house with brand-new nineteenth-century appliances—antiques by her standards—though she never let
on. Sighing unhappily, he thrust his hands in his pockets. The conclusion was inescapable. Amy had left him.

I hereby swear never to call or even think of her as Jane again. She was Amy when we met; she was Amy when we were lovers; she will be Amy when I see her again or I will insist that she call me Herb, and we will go raise sheep in Suffolk.

Mrs. Vickers was in the kitchen helping the cook prepare lunch for the remaining weekend guests, who had bicycled off to Sandgate on a lark and would be back soon. Exasperated with H.G.'s presence, she told him that since he had driven his wife away, he'd better see to the boys in the nursery before they did something unspeakable as well.

“I've become a nanny now, have I?” He left the kitchen without waiting for her retort. Suddenly angry, he wondered why Amy would leave him when they had guests and, above all, without warning. Why now in these, their halcyon days of fame, fortune and notoriety? How many wives could boast of a husband who had published ten best-selling books and was becoming a prodigious thinker? And what about the boys?

They were playing quietly in the nursery upstairs, angelic in matching sailor suits, dividing the floor into countries without borders so their wooden trains didn't have to stop. He loved them intensely and was fiercely proud of their instincts. Almost five, Gip was dark and ebullient with limpid blue eyes, like him; at two, Frank was blond and more absorbed, like his mother. They looked up and grinned when they saw him, then went back to their trains and didn't speak until he sat down between them and began pushing a car and making “choo-choo” sounds.

“Where's Mummy?” asked Gip.

“She had some errands to run,” H.G. lied smoothly.

“On a Sunday?”

Surprised, H.G. couldn't think of what to say. “She's not having a passade, too, is she, Daddy?”

 

Shaken, H.G. dressed in his pure-wool tweed suit—the mark of a true progressive, so they said—and he, too, left without saying good-bye to his guests. He opened the doors to the new shed he insisted was a
garage, though everyone else, especially Mrs. Vickers, called it a carriage house. He paused, looked fondly at the Humber tandem he'd had made specially for them. They had crisscrossed the countryside on that bike, pedaling hard, stopping for tea or a pint, then pedaling easy, Amy laughing and saying downhill was better—it was like making love after a quarrel. He frowned sadly at the memories, the thought of Amy being the first to flee Spade House, the first to run from their domestic claustrophobia when she had always been the moral stockade to which he always returned. No, he wouldn't be taking the Humber today—no bobbing up and down on the bike like a boy, the seat behind him empty and forlorn.

Instead, he pulled a tarpaulin off the 1905 Triumph motorbike he had purchased just before his trip to America in April. He dutifully checked the oil and petrol, donned goggles and leather helmet, then pushed the bike out to the road and started it, the engine popping, making a tiny, turn-of-the-century roar. He took off for the Sandgate station and the one o'clock train, helping the single-cylinder engine accelerate to forty by pedaling hard, then relaxed, loving the wind that pulled at his suit and whistled past his ears.

He bought a ticket for London, sat alone in the parlor car and gazed out at the countryside, realizing the futility of his trip. He had no idea where to find her, especially if she'd gone to the city to be with a man. Suddenly, he raised his eyebrows, realizing that she didn't necessarily have to be engaged in a passade. Maybe she'd fled merely to be by herself. She had always spoken wistfully of having her own place, of being free to explore “Catherine,” her secret persona, that part of her which desired to write poetry and contemplate beauty. Maybe—at long last—she'd taken a flat and decided to
become
Catherine.
If so, it's a damned sight better than Amy
, he thought. Still, he wouldn't have any idea where to look for her. She handled their finances now. She could lease a flat or a villa and he'd never know if it was in London or France. Passade or no, his only chance of finding her was to start with her friends.

He got off the train at Charing Cross, zigzagged through quiet Sunday-afternoon streets to the faded, peeling lodging house off Harley Street where Dorothy Richardson lived in attic rooms. A would-be
novelist still working as a secretary, Dorothy had befriended Amy in the Mornington Crescent days, had nurtured the friendship through the years, but was always looking over Amy's shoulder. At him. Though she was quite sensual, he was put off by predatory females and so far had avoided her. Despite his chronic promiscuity, he drew the line at Amy's friends. He recalled last night when Amy had been alone with W. K. Chichester. Dorothy pointed it out to him and suggested that they go for the proverbial walk on the beach, to which he replied, “She's merely practicing charades, Dorothy. Let's not become one.”

He stopped abruptly on the lodging house steps. Had Dorothy said something to Amy after that? Had she, thinking it might get her somewhere, concocted some desperate, imaginary tale about going to bed with her best friend's husband? He strode through the door, ignored the lodgers in the drawing room and ran up the four flights of stairs to her door. Out of breath, he knocked, waited, knocked insistently, waited, was about to knock a third time when the landlady called up the stairs.

“She's gone out, sir.”

“I don't suppose you'd know when she'll be back,” he said, coming down the stairs.

“No, sir.”

“Was there another lady with her by chance?”

“No, sir.”

“A rather petite gentlewoman with hazel eyes and blond hair arranged in a bun?”

“No, sir.”

H.G. left the lodging house without a clue. Going back to Sandgate wasn't the answer, but he had to keep moving or he'd go mad. He flagged down a hansom and told the cabby to take him to 7 Mornington Place—the house in Mornington Crescent near Regent's Park where it had all started. He'd built his time machine there and had been telling old friends from the university days of its existence when Dr. Leslie John Stephenson aka Jack the Ripper had stolen it and gone to the future. H.G., full of piss, vinegar and indignation, had followed, landing in San Francisco because by 1979
The Utopia
had been discovered in his bricked-up basement laboratory and was on a world tour.
He'd chased Jack the Ripper through that fair city and had almost been killed out of his own time. Needless to say, he failed to bring Leslie John Stephenson back for a nineteenth-century reckoning, but did succeed in sending the monster to infinity, a retribution all its own. Ultimately, his sojourn had been worth it. He had met Amy Catherine Robbins in 1979; she—and true love—had come home with him. A few years later, Queen Victoria was dead, and it was the dawn of the Edwardian Age. Long live La Belle Époque, Art Nouveau and the notion that anything was possible. So blessed, H.G. and Amy played hard at love, not to mention literature and new ideas. He smiled nostalgically. Those had been their true halcyon days.

At 7 Mornington Place, he got out of the hansom, paid the cabbie and stood at the iron gate. He gazed fondly at the tall, narrow brick house, its trim freshly painted forest green. Here, Amy had helped him write
The Time Machine
, insisting that he make it credible so the reader would become mesmerized. Along the way, he had immersed her in his time-travel theories, and she had proven a quick study. Ultimately, the book they sent to W. E. Henley was detailed and accurate enough to sell extremely well. Thereby—thanks in part to Amy—“scientific romances” had been born. His gaze rose to the bedroom window upstairs. They used to kiss in that window and then he'd hold her from behind so they could look out at the night and see the stars as one. How perfect, how magical she had felt in his arms. Alas, she had been Amy then.

They'd moved to Woking when Mrs. Nelson, the housekeeper, passed on, but H.G. kept the lease on the house. In 1900 after he had Spade House built for Amy, in a fit of nostalgia he purchased 7 Mornington Place outright, though he didn't need the space and hadn't used his basement lab in years. He blushed guiltily: Amy had assumed that he kept the old house as a shrine to their marriage, but as the years passed and their love cooled, it had become a rendezvous for his passades, he realized ruefully.

He unlocked the front door and let himself inside. He stood in the hall by the cupboard inhaling the old smells, letting the silence settle over him, then stepped into the drawing room he'd always insisted was
a library and swept his eyes over the worn, eclectic furniture, the books he'd left behind. Nothing had changed. The room reminded him of a museum, yet he knew someone had been here recently. He sensed it.