The Diabolical Miss Hyde (3 page)

Eliza swatted his big hand away. “Kindly cease contaminating my crime scene, sir.”

“Contaminating? What do you mean, pray?”

She sighed. Crime scene science was new and mysterious. Few understood it. “Every contact leaves a trace. Our villain, however careful, has unwittingly sprinkled the scene with clues. Clues I am unlikely to unravel once you've smeared your clumsy paws all over them.”

He flashed her his smile, a half-sheathed weapon. “Clumsy? Ouch. And I've such a reputation for elegance.”

She held up her slim hands, which she'd encased in white cotton gloves.

“Ah! I see. My apologies, Doctor.” He peered at the wounds
on the body, this time careful not to touch. “What would you say about the time of death?”

She'd already opened her mouth to retort to some snide remark of his about lady doctors and their hysterical fancies, and her cheeks warmed. “I'm sorry, did you just ask for my opinion?”

He grinned, full force this time, charming as any swell ruffian. “I'm a Royal Society investigator, madam, not an ignorant. Show me science, not detectives' guesswork.”

She glared over her spectacles. “Your flattery is wasted on me, sir.”

“Is it?” His blue eyes sparkled. “What a shame. It's the part I'm so good at.”

His good humor was infectious. She refused to contract it. “Then kindly flatter yourself with an explanation. What, pray, is the Royal's interest in this case?”

“That remains to be seen, doesn't it? Time of death?”

She looked around for Griffin, but he was studiously keeping his distance. “Ah . . . well, the body temperature in these outdoor cases is notoriously unreliable. But from the clotting and lividity? Not before two o'clock this morning.”

“The very hour of our famous arc-pistol shot.”

“Legal medicine is not an exact science, Captain—”

“
Science
is an exact science, Dr. Jekyll. Material results must have material causes. For an arc-pistol shot to sound, someone must fire an arc-pistol.” He inspected the corpse, tugging the bodice's fabric with one finger. “Yet we have no wound. Ergo—”

“The killer must have missed,” she suggested. “Or someone else fired the pistol.”

“Well? You're a doctor, madam, not an ornament.”

A back-handed compliment, if she'd ever received such. Chastened, she rummaged in her bag for a test for gunflash. An arc-pistol would leave a tiny charged carbon residue on the wielder's palm. She adjusted her optical and swabbed the corpse's hands. “Nothing,” she reported. “She was almost certainly not the shooter. Which means . . .”

“Do you smell that?” Abruptly, Lafayette strode to the stone wall, three feet behind the corpse, and glared about in the shadows, lifting his nose to the stagnant air.

How peculiar. She rose and followed, Hippocrates trotting in her wake. “Smell what?”

“That.” Lafayette's nose twitched, and he bent to the ground, sniffing. “Like a storm. Or . . .”

“Electrical discharge,” she finished eagerly. “Yes! I smell it, too. But where . . . ?”

He pointed to a patch of ground, close beside the alley wall. “What's this?” he demanded. “Can you identify?”

She crouched. A small pile of black particles, like coarse dirt. Luminiferous aether, burned by electrical voltage. A large quantity. Too large for a pistol.

She traced a fingertip up the wall, where the stone was . . . melted. In a jagged line, dripping down like glass. As if extreme heat had been applied. She'd never seen anything like it outside a raging house fire.

Inside her, shadows stirred. An alchemical drug. And now this strange heat. How dangerously fascinating.

“Gunflash,” she reported, trying to cover her excitement. “Or something similar. Your pistol, sir, if you please.”

“I'm sorry, are we under attack?”

She stepped back. “One shot, there, beside that mark. Medium range.” He cocked that arrogant eyebrow again, and she smiled sweetly. “
Nullius in verba,
Captain. ‘Take nobody's word for it.' You're an investigator, not an ornament.”

“Touché,”
he murmured, and fast as a wild-frontier gunslinger, he drew his pistol and
crack!

Eliza gasped, her hand flying to her chest. Jagged blue voltage sliced into the stone. Static crackled in her hair. Steam hissed, a swirl of blue-burning aether and the sharp scent of thunder. Hippocrates yelped and scuttled away.

The burning purple coil in Lafayette's pistol glimmered and died. Neatly, he holstered the weapon. Not exactly a flourish, but he didn't need one. Everyone was already staring at him.

She caught her breath, indignant. He'd done that on purpose. But my, he was fast. Accurate. Dangerous. She'd barely seen him move.

He grinned. “Impressed yet?”

Apparently, also an insufferable show-off. Behind Lafayette's back, Griffin rolled his eyes. She could almost hear the inspector grumbling
. Bloody Royal show ponies, all flash and no fire . . .

“Entertaining as well as decorative,” she remarked coolly. “Perhaps you should consider joining the circus. Shall we take a look?” She slotted her magnifying lens and peered at the resulting scar on the wall. Just a faint charcoal smear. Certainly no melted stone. She pointed to show Lafayette. “As you see.”

“Hmm. Then what could have carved this furrow? Is it a new kind of weapon?”

A trick question? Uneasily, she thought of nice Mr. Faraday, burned in the shadow of St. Paul's for his insistence that luminiferous aether was a fallacy, that light required no medium, that unseen lines of force held the universe together. He'd never been able to prove it, and the creaking ancients at the Royal sniffed dismissively at his experiments and dragged him away to the Tower.

The Royal didn't use burning as their execution method for religious reasons, as in days gone by. They cared nothing for cleansing the soul. It was merely a horrible death. A warning. Defying their authority was treason, and traitors burned.

Distantly, she recalled her father's secret laboratory, the smell of hot metal, electrical coils glowing in glass globes. His chemical apparatus, bubbling and smoking: retorts; pipettes; flasks of gleaming liquids, green and blue and violet. And little Eliza, just a tiny girl in dusty skirts, blinking short-sightedly under the table. A lonely child, left to her own devices in the big old house with its secret passages, dusty clerestories, and concealed rooms.

She'd listened wide-eyed to his clandestine midnight meetings, arguments, cursing in German and French as well as English, the rapid squeak of chalked equations on a blackboard. She'd understood little of it, of course. Faraday was young, then, barely educated but brilliant, his plain face shining with ideas. Magnetism, electricity, the secrets of the stars, the radical experiments of Volta and Lavoisier, Lamarckian evolution, alchemy and mesmerism and the search for eternal life.

All scientific and political suicide, naturally. Faraday was burned, her father nearly twenty years dead and disgraced.
She'd not discovered the elixir until later, in her adolescent years, when the shifting longings drove her to desperation, and a mysterious man hid behind the curtain at midnight in her flickering firelit parlor and offered her a strangely warm, bitter drink . . .

All of which was no concern of Captain Remy Lafayette, IRS. No matter how charming his address or skilled his handiwork.

“Doctor?” Lafayette's question hung.

“I've no idea,” she replied shortly. “What a fascinating conundrum.” She peeled off her cotton gloves, heedless of baring her fingertips in public. “Sergeant? I'm finished here. Kindly transport the remains to the morgue.”

“Very good, Doctor.” Griffin's plain-clothes sergeant signaled to his constables, and two men began to wrap the body in linen.

She tugged on her plain gray day gloves and adjusted them with a snap. “Come along, Hippocrates. Captain Lafayette, I'm due in court. How nice to make your acquaintance. Good-bye.”

And she jammed her optical into its leather case on her hip and swept away.

O
N NEW OXFORD STREET, THE TRAFFIC CLOSED IN
around her. Clanking metal and whirring gears, brass wheels turning and blue sparks showering. Hansom cabs pulled like rickshaws by frantic two-legged clockwork runners careered madly between top-hatted gents and ladies in crinolines and corsets. Black was the predominant color. Mad Queen Victoria had put on mourning for her beloved Prince Consort (murdered by sorcerers, indeed; more likely the poor man died of typhoid fever, but hunt for witches and witches are what you'll find), and fashionable ladies liked to follow suit.

Real horses, too, and donkeys plodded along, pulling carriages or sellers' carts, ears twitching at the noise. Wheels squelched in their refuse, and beneath the carriages scuttled crossing-sweepers, tiny ragged children who scraped up the dung and darted away before they could be flattened.

Eliza was late, and hurried along, clutching her bag to her hip. She was used to traveling unescorted—good gracious, how scandalous—but no need to take chances on being robbed. Amongst the well-dressed gentlemen and ladies
lurked the swell mob: professional thieves in disguise, with elaborate ruses and fingers deft enough to rob tie-pins, brooches, even earrings without the wearer knowing.

Hippocrates trotted beside her, clucking, his tiny brass head at the level of her thigh. Cogs whirred inside his boxy body, and his hinged legs pistoned up and down. “Time,” he grated in his electric voice. “Old Bailey, one o'clock. Make greater speed.”

“Thank you, Hipp, you're a great help.” She dodged a young dandy on a speeding two-wheeled scooter and tripped over her skirts, barely keeping her feet. The dandy's umbrella twirled above his head on a tall stick as he swerved along.

“You're welcome.” Hipp's
happy
light twinkled. Blue for happy, red for sad. She should install one for smug. No doubt it would flash constantly.

As if to remind her, a distant clock tower chimed a quarter to one. She'd never make it in time along the crush of Holborn to the Old Bailey, not on foot.

“Dr. Jekyll!” A hand tugged at her elbow, that familiar, hyper-energetic voice. “Just the lady I wish to speak to. Quite a mess, wasn't it? What's your opinion of the victim's condition? What kind of madman do you think the killer is? Is it the Moorfields Monster?”

She sighed and turned to see the young writer in the red waistcoat, whom Griffin had unceremoniously ejected from the crime scene. “Mr. Temple,” she said pleasantly, “truly, you are the worst kind of pest. Whoever said the murderer was a madman?”

“Isn't he? How many people must one kill and dismember in this town before one qualifies?” Matthew Temple grinned,
and it split his pointy face in half like a puppet's. Ragged autumn-leaf hair stuck out from beneath his cap. Under one arm he clutched a sketch pad and a boxy brass clockwork recorder. “I'll have to think of a name for him. The Ballet Beast, perhaps. The Footlights Fiend. Or . . . The Chopper!” He sucked in a theatrical gasp of horror. “What do you think?”

“Matchless. Verily, we have a new Shakespeare in our midst.”

“Walpole, surely. King of the gruesome Gothic! And such wonderful material you provide, Doctor. Razor Jack killed seventeen. The Monster has dispatched five so far. Do you think this killer will match that?”

“First, Mr. Temple, we have only circumstantial evidence that there
is
a ‘Moorfields Monster.' A few slashings do not a rampant beastly killer make. And second—” She cut him off with a raised finger as he started to interrupt. “Second, sir, I find your enthusiasm for multiple murderers disturbing. The only answer I have for your bloodthirsty questions is ‘clear off.' Print
that
in your sordid dreadfuls.”

“Clear off,” echoed Hipp, and danced a saucy jig, his blue light flashing.

“Oh, come, madam.” Temple winked, cheerful, her insults washing off like dust. “You're one of my most popular characters! The pretty lady doctor who caught Razor Jack, both intrepid crime-fighter and damsel in distress—”

“I am not a ‘lady doctor,'” she interrupted coldly. “I am a doctor, no more and no less. And if you persist in pestering me, you'll be the one in distress. Good day, sir.”

She hailed an electric omnibus, and it squealed to a halt, sparks spitting from the engine's purple-glowing coils. She
clambered on, squeezing in amongst black-frocked serving maids and clerks in threadbare suits. A mustached fellow at the end smoked a cigar, and the fug clogged the small cabin.

Hippocrates sprang onto her lap, folding his legs, and she absently petted him as the omnibus lurched onwards. He clicked like a cricket, contented, his lights twinkling, and she felt a small twinge of envy.

If only
she
could be made content so easily. Fatigue tugged at her limbs, and her breath felt too warm in her throat. Her pulse was elevated, the beginnings of an all-too-familiar fever. The air in the omnibus was stifling, smoke and hot breath and sweaty skin. She pulled the window sash down a few inches, but it didn't help.

Temple's idiotic questions, his cheerful disregard for the victims' dignity, only irritated her more. And Captain Lafayette's sly insinuations—his very
presence
in her world, with his smug Royal Society attitude and poorly veiled threats—still itched under her skin like a parasite.

Were the Royal onto her? Or was it just an unhappy coincidence? And why had they sent a flesh-and-blood investigator when an impassive mechanical Enforcer would do?

She thought back to the last time she'd visited Mr. Finch, several days ago now, at his utterly respectable Mayfair pharmacist's shop. Naturally, alchemy was forbidden by the Royal. The Philosopher himself had long ago concluded its aims to be futile. There was no
aqua vitae,
no vital force that held the universe together and sparked life into lifeless matter. Alkahest, the so-called universal solvent, did not exist. You could not make gold from lead, and eternal life was an impossible dream.