Ripped (28 page)

“Kind of. Sort of.” Katie groaned, realizing she couldn't explain her reasoning and was only digging herself deeper into a hole. “Look, you guys. You need me because of where I'm from and who I am and what I know about the world that you don't. I'm better equipped to . . . er . . . solve crimes.”

“I see. That's logical,” Toby said.

“Precisely. By the very nature of where I come from, I'm more logical . . . less . . . naïve.”

Collin fell backward with a thud of his shoulder blades against the leather seat and clamped his hands theatrically to his heart.

“
Naïve?
God's eyeballs, Katherine! Call a man a gutter snipe, call him a son of a boar, call him a scoundrel, but
never
call a British bloke
naïve!
Might as well call him the village idiot, or a lily-livered coward, or a simpering
girl
. It's beneath an Englishman's dignity!”

“Oh,
puh-leeze
!
” Katie harrumphed.

Toby looked amused. “You'll stay in the carriage, Miss Katherine. And this time you will do as you're told. I'll have your promise, pet, or we'll press home and unload you at Twyford Manor where Lady Beatrix and the Duke can play nursemaid to your tantrums.”

His face grew serious. “I don't owe you an explanation, but I'll give it to you just the same. I didn't want you in the slaughterhouse for your own safety. I'm responsible for you, and I don't want you harmed. Johnny Brisbane is a dangerous man, capable of great cruelty. He once snapped his own dog's neck, then tore half its hide off with his bare hands because the dog lost in a ratter's fight.

“Give me your promise, lass. You will stay in the carriage when Collin and I talk to Dora Fowler. She's got until the first of December to live, if your visions are trustworthy.”

“That's exactly why I need to go!” Katie pleaded, hating the high-pitched wail in her voice.

“That's
exactly
why you're staying here. I don't doubt you believe you're well versed in the vast ways of the criminal world,” he chuckled at the absurdity of the statement. “But I
will
have your promise on this.” He shot her a hard-as-stone look.

A hollowness filled Katie's chest. Toby's piercing gaze didn't compel her to obey. Quite the opposite. She hated being left out. She was here to catch Jack the Ripper, not obey insufferable orders from an arrogant jerk who had no clue how to track down a serial killer.

“
You
'
ll get my promise when hell freezes over
!
” she muttered under her breath.

As it turned out, hell froze over five minutes later.

Chapter Thirty-two

Farthings and Fate say the Bells of Ludgate

W
h
en the four-wheeler
came to a full stop half a block from Clavell Street, between Charlotte and Commercial Road, the horses shifted, prancing in place, making the carriage sway.

“Let me be blunt as a dull knife, Katie. You will
not
follow us. Give me your word on this, lass.” Toby smiled. Or we'll leave you home next time. And don't give me that pouting face. This is a flowery dell of your own making.”

“Flowery dell?” Collin raised an eyebrow.

“Prison cell.”

“Good one, old chap!” Collin clapped enthusiastically. “Mark my words, Katie. Disobey our orders and you'll be doing needlework in a rose arbor, or some such thing.”

“Mustn't paper bag her, Collin,” Toby chuckled, then swiveled to Katie. “What's it to be, lass?”

Katie folded her arms across her chest. She had a childish urge to stick her tongue out at both of them, but glared hard at Toby instead, hoping to convey the frosty promise that she wasn't about to back down. Her father's words flashed in her mind.
“
When backed into a corner, Kit-Kat, never concede, only negotiate.
”
Her father had been a litigator before he switched careers to become a classics professor. And he always called her Kit-Kat.

“Okay. Here's the deal.” Katie dragged her eyes from Toby's and stared out the window at a toothless man standing on the corner selling canaries from a cage attached to a shepherd's staff. The smell of cider vinegar and horse sweat reached her nostrils and she scrunched up her nose.

“I'll promise,” she snapped, “under one condition. When you return, you swear to tell me everything. Every last detail. Whatever Dora tells you, whatever Dora says, whatever Dora does, I want to hear it. A full recounting. Everything. Every last—”

“Even if she bats them beautiful mince pies at me?” Toby teased, sunlight slanting across his face highlighting the scar on his cheek.

Katie wrenched her gaze from his scar and glowered. “
Especially
if she bats her eyes at you.” Why had she said that? Katie wondered. “Er . . . not that I care,” she added. “But it might be part of her M.O.”

When both boys looked puzzled, Katie quickly explained, “
Modus operandi.
That's Latin for mode of operation—”

“Don't you mean
modi operandi
?” Toby corrected. “
Modes
of operation? Dora Fowler has more than one method of maneuvering. She's got a temptress bag full of tricks at her disposal.”

“Whatever.” Katie rolled her eyes. “Just report back everything.”

Chapter Thirty-three

Gargoyles and Canaries say the Bells of St. Mary's

R
e
lieved to have Katie
well away from him, Toby accelerated his stride down Clavell Street, Collin barreling along close behind.

With the church spire of St. Mary's to the west and blue sky above, London Hospital rose up in the distance like a grim mausoleum, and Toby could well imagine that on its rooftop consumptive patients were stretched out on cots taking the sun cure, just as his mother had.

The only redeeming feature of the hospital, Toby knew, was its roof on sun-drenched mornings. Otherwise, the pain and poverty inside those stone walls was intensified by fog and rain and bitter cold, with nary a bottle of medicine in sight. It was a beggar's hospital, dismal as a prison, where the poor were shuffled off to die.

Toby stared at the hospital's jagged façade, remembering a freak show performer who was a patient there. Joseph Merrick, nicknamed the Elephant Man, had confided in Toby that his greatest desire was to be taken to a sanatorium for the blind so that he might meet a woman who wouldn't be repulsed by his deformities. Someone who would love him for his watch and chain. His brain.

But was such a thing possible? Toby wondered as he and Collin continued down the street past a shriveled old man with puckered skin begging at the crosswalk. Was it possible to find a girl—
a wife
—who cared only for your mind, not for the accident of your birth or the deformities on your face?

Toby wasn't vain. He cared little for his appearance, hardly giving it a thought. Yet he wondered whether Katie felt repulsed when she looked at him so challengingly, so openly, at the sight of the scar on his cheek, or his pugilist nose. Did she mind that the Duke had called him the son of a whore? Toby pushed such thoughts away. What cared he for Katie's opinion? She was the Duke's goddaughter, not some Cockney lass he had any right to lust after. Toby would never be a gentleman, never be accepted into the society that was her birthright.

He cursed himself for his lack of discipline. He was acting like a besotted schoolboy who alternately wanted to kiss the twist 'n' swirl and strangle her.

At the slaughterhouse, he had wanted the latter. He had seethed with a blind fury when he realized Katie had followed him into the maggot-infested barn. It had taken all his self-restraint not to drag her out kicking and screaming, but that would only have drawn attention to the situation. And one slip of that accursed tongue of hers, one argument from those bee-swollen ruby lips, would have exposed Katie for the girl that she was—a porkpie thrummer with nary a blemish to her skin, nor crooked tooth in her smile.

Damn her eyes!
She was the devil's own daughter disguised as an angel sent to torment his every waking moment.

But she had courage, Toby had to admit. Katie wasn't some simpering highborn aristocrat, ready to swoon at sights that might fell a grown man.
Yet she was bloody exasperating!
Determined, too, and hopelessly enthusiastic about tracking down a crazed killer.

Toby fervently wished that Katie were mad. Marbles and conkers. Bonkers as a lunatic at full moon. But if her premonitions were right, if other girls were destined to be butchered by a man named Jack, Toby had to do everything in his power to stop it. Even if that meant spending more time with the most maddening ham shank he'd ever met.

A thought occurred to him. He could easily determine if Katie was daft as a barn owl. Why hadn't he thought of it before?
He
'
d take her to Traitors
'
Gate
.

Clavell Street Market, better known as Bird and Feather Alley, wasn't a market at all but a cobbled lane spanning several blocks of brick tenements where stalls of bird sellers stretched all the way to Commercial Road.

Toby and Collin pressed past a man auctioning cockatiels, another selling starlings, still another peddling smelling-salts made from macaw beaks, in little brown bottles.

“Here y'are lad, four a penny.” A man so bald his head glistened in the sunlight stepped toward Collin, holding out duck eggs in a leather pouch.

Further along, an old woman in a straw hat with a tame rat on her shoulder claimed to be selling nightingale powder that relieved warts in less than three minutes. Toby tugged Collin along by the sleeve.

They made their way past tier upon tier of cages hung on the brick sidewalls, filled with cockatiels, macaws, ducks, doves, canaries, blackbirds, turkeys, swallows, and screaming parrots. The crooked lane was a cacophony of chirps, warbles, honks, and squawks cleaving the air like a chorus of discordant bells.

Toby glanced around. Although he much preferred this crooked lane of bird sellers to the slaughterhouse, he didn't take pleasure in seeing so many caged creatures.

Not so Collin, who seemed to be immensely enjoying the loud squawking, preening, and bobbing heads of so many birds.

“I say!” Collin beamed. “Rawther like the avian arcade in Regents Park, only tenfold as loud! When we tell Katie what she's missed, she'll be madder than a wet”—He glanced up at the roosters perched high above on the window sills.—“chicken.” He laughed. “Jolly good show, this.”

Toby threaded through the crowd, making his way toward a middle-aged woman surrounded by parakeets in wicker cages. Mrs. Fowler, Dora's mother, was seated beneath a striped awning, and to Toby she looked like one of her crimson-fronted birds. As she cocked her head and winked, Mrs. Fowler's beaklike nose poked out from a narrow face; and her hair, dyed a garish purple-red, hung in a low swoop across her forehead, dwarfing her features. Next to Mrs. Fowler's, Collin's ginger hair seemed almost subdued.

Toby tipped his cap and asked Mrs. Fowler where her extremely pretty daughter, Dora, could be located. Mrs. Fowler, beaming at the compliment, pointed to a parrot stall a block away. “That's Dora's kit over yonder, across the way from the rhubarb man.”

Toby thanked her, and he and Collin shot down the street. The air was so chokingly thick with molting feathers and bird droppings it was hard to breathe. To their left, St. Paul's Cathedral perched like a great broody hen at the top of Cannon Street. Toby chuckled at the image of the most famous landmark in London appearing like a hen. But the images of birds, including that of Mrs. Fowler, were pervasive, the street being chock-full of them. Great ones, small ones, exotic ones, and ordinary ones in all colors of the rainbow.

Shadows bounced off the brick tenement walls behind the bird stalls, swooping overhead like birds of prey. Lengthening his stride, Toby counted seven black-lead boot-scrapers set into the door stoops until he came to the rhubarb-hawk man across the street from Dora's parrot stall.

As they approached, Dora began batting her dark, silky lashes above enormous velvet-brown eyes, the lids of which shimmered with a paint-pot full of pigments, making them appear brilliant and alive, and as colorful as her birds.

At the inquest Dora had worn the merest hint of makeup. Today she had dabbed on too much rouge, lip-salve, and a thick eyebrow penciling that, together with her sparkling eyelids, made her look like a gypsy queen about to dance below a harvest moon.

“Tobias!” Dora squealed, glancing from Toby to Collin and batting her lashes. She made a delicate attempt at clearing her throat, the air was so thick with bird dander.

“ 'Morning, Dora.” Toby grinned.

“A pleasure, I'm sure,” Dora continued in a cooing voice, the spongy layers of her hair, beneath her large plumed hat, bobbing up and down. “What brings you to me humble place o' business, Tobias? You being such a grand toff these days. La-di-da. But then, I'm a lady if ever there was one. Saw yer oglin' me at the inquest.” She cleared her throat again, then, forgetting ladylike manners, coughed loudly and spat onto the street.

“Come on, now. Rest yer plates of meat.” Dora flashed an amiable smile and patted the stool next to her.

With lightning speed, Collin plunked himself onto the stool and stared at Dora like a lovesick calf. Stretching out his lanky legs and clasping his hands behind his head, he gave a half-whistle in appreciation of Dora's beauty. Several caged parrots returned his whistle in kind, but the sound was disgruntled and shrill.

Toby raised an eyebrow at Collin, then began to converse with Dora in a flirtatious tone, trying to wheedle information about Mary Ann Nichols. Behind them, a large parrot in a domed cage made sounds like a purring cat.

Dora extended one gloved hand and placed it on Collin's thigh, but kept her eyes fastened on Toby. “Yer sly as a fox, Tobias. Don't be trying to sweet talk me. Even clever boys like you ain't no match for the likes of me.”

Across the street, the rhubarb man sat eating tea biscuits and bawling out the price of his hawks over the heads of the people walking past.

“T'weren't trying to sweet talk you, Dora,” Toby laughed.

Just then, a portly man in a bowler hat strolled into Dora's stall. “You got any talking parrots, little lady?” he asked in an American accent.

“Yes, sir! Right here, sir.” Dora directed his attention to a scarlet parrot perched in the nearest cage.

“Hello, Polly,” Dora sing-songed, waggling a gloved finger at the bird. “And how are you on this here fine morning?”

With the skill of a circus performer, Dora began to bluff the customer by imitating parrot talk. “
'
joyed me breakfas this mawning.
‘
joyed me breakfas
.”

Dora swiveled back to the man. “Pretty Poll says she enjoyed her breakfast.”

“
Hello. Hello
.” The bird seemed to squawk, but it was really Dora throwing her voice with the skill of a ventriloquist.

“Listen to Pretty Poll!” Dora cried in feigned amazement. “Pretty Poll? What's yer name? Tell this nice gent yer name.”

“
Pretty Poll. Pretty Poll
,” the bird seemed to screech. “
Take me home ter the Missus. Pretty Poll! Pretty Poll
!”

Toby flashed Dora a wide grin. Dora's voice trick, Toby knew, was made easier due to the large bonnet she wore, the ribbon beneath her chin hiding the warble of muscles up and down her throat. Most Cockneys learned to throw their voices at an early age, but Dora had perfected the art. She barely moved her lips.

“Splendid!” cried the American man. “I'll take her. It's providence that this bird should know that my wife has been after me for a talking bird. The missus wants company. And now she'll have it. How much?”

“Ten bob. Twelve wiff the cage, sir.”

“Twelve shillings is a bit steep.” He frowned and shook his head.

“Well, sir! She's expensive because she talks. Can't do better than Pretty Poll. Comes direct from deepest Africa. A rare find, she is. And seeing as she's me favorite . . . if yer promise to treat her kindly, yer can have Polly wiff 'er cage complete for eleven bob. Ain't none of me birds as talkative as Pretty Poll, ain't that right, Poll?” Dora turned to the bird.

“
How d
'
do, I
'
m Pretty Poll. Take me
'
ome to the missus. Take me home. Take me home.
”

“Delightful!” cried the man, counting out eleven shillings, plus sixpence for seed. “A true bird of paradise.” He clasped the cage and ambled away, talking to the bird all the while. “Hello there, Pretty Polly. Say how d'do to daddy. Say hello. Don't be shy.”

“Eeeeeekkkkkkkkkkkk!” squawked the parrot all the way down the lane.

Toby roared with laughter and took off his hat to Dora, a true Cockney compliment.

Dora giggled.

Collin rubbed his chin, watching Polly and the man disappear down the street. “You must be sad to see her go. Takes time to train a bird like that. She went cheap at eleven shillings. You'll need to be a shrewder bargainer in the future, Dora.”

“Blimey! Not a bit of it!” Dora swatted her hand playfully against Collin's sleeve. “That bird's good for nothink 'cept plucking. Can't say a blessed thing. Dumb as a doorpost. Got six of 'em, I has, what can't say a word.” She motioned to her birds. “Me smart one over there I calls Prudence, on account of it's me favorite name.”

“Mine, too!” Collin seemed overjoyed at the happy coincidence.

Toby glanced at the stall next to Dora's, stacked with yellow cardboard boxes, each holding a dozen newly hatched chicks. In the stall to the left, Minorcas and Leghorns were selling at seven shillings a box.

Toby took a deep breath. Through a combination of flattery and wheedling, it took him several minutes before he got Dora to open up about the murdered girl.

“Me poor Mary Ann was quite a beauty afore Mad Willy knocked her teeff out.” Dora dabbed at her sparkly eyes.