The thick ridge of his eyebrows furrowed deeply. “Then it’s done. We’ll keep ears and eyes on the East End.”
“In return?”
He shook his head, the pub lights glancing off his dark skin like a spark off the midnight river water. “We’ll deal in blood for blood.”
It wasn’t an indication of bodily fluids, not as such. I was not being asked to fight, spill blood, or die. The term indicated whatever service he’d ask of me, it was one I was already capable of providing. It could include helping him crack a particularly difficult case, or run with the Bakers for a specific goal. It may even include use of contacts, should he have need. A fair barter: his eyes and ears for my abilities, no more and no less.
It was all I could ask. “Thank you,” I told him.
“No thanks, girl. Just be careful.”
“I will,” I said, but I don’t think that he believed me. His gaze did not soften, and the worry shaping his flat, broad features did not ease.
I took my leave with no more words exchanged, aware that Ishmael could not show untoward friendship with a collector—especially one who had unwittingly gotten a young Baker kinchin slaughtered by that same rival collector I hunted already. That had been the first blow I’d suffered from my rival. Would that it had been the last.
I did not envy Ishmael the delivery of the large Mr. Coventry, but if anybody could achieve a victory, I would put my pounds on my friend.
I was quite proud of myself, for I’d managed to fool Ishmael into looking beyond my personal well-being and focus instead on the task I’d laid before him. Leaving him mulling over his part in our agreement, I made my way through the loud, cheerful pub and into the street. Eyes watched me depart, and there were more along the path I walked to leave Baker territory, but they left me alone. Small favors, and I would take them.
The Bakers were rather more agitated than usual. I suspected a conflict on the horizon. Too bad for Limehouse, trapped between them. I’d tried to warn Hawke and earned nothing but trouble for my efforts. So be it.
I’d do the rest of this on my own.
Chapter Twelve
The remnants of my opium calm wore off at a rapid pace.
I first recognized the signs when my fingers began to shake, and my throat began to ache despite the respirator I re-affixed over my mouth. What I’d considered an ague seemed instead to be directly correlated to the amount of opium I had eaten recently, and how long it had been since I last indulged.
This was concerning, but not a trouble I could mull over while I was so focused on the task at hand. There would be time to worry later.
Or so I assured myself as I made my way out of Poplar and into Whitechapel.
According to the brass pocket watch I found myself checking at too-often intervals, it was half past one and long past the time when sensible working men and women found their beds.
Fortunately, much of Whitechapel claimed residents neither sensible nor working. Or at least working for an honest wage. Prostitution had not seen much of a decline since the Ripper’s deadly antics began, and though the dollymops attempted to stay beneath the lamplight, men who paid were men well worth following.
I witnessed more than enough opportunity for the Ripper to strike simply by walking along a main thoroughfare.
I was left alone, solicited only by the most daring of the doxies, and usually with a teasing tone that suggested they expected no response—a type of contest, to see who among them was brave enough to solicit a collector. Many were too thin, some with hair that had been pulled loose from pins by prior arrangements seen to in the dark, and others shivered in the cold. October was not a kind month for the hungry. It would only get colder each day. Many was the soiled dove who would freeze to death come winter.
Were it not for my own collector’s profession, I could have been among them. The marchioness had already tried to imprison me once, delicate a widow’s cage though it was.
Were I truly forced to choose—trapped in that cage or walking the streets—I believe I would have chosen the latter without once looking back.
Only here I was, and I found myself looking back often, didn’t I?
I rubbed at the corset plating over my heart, which had taken to aching when I considered anything at all but the goal I’d laid for myself.
The Ripper would make his move, but perhaps I could gain a little ground, first.
Mr. George Lusk was, by all accounts, a respectable man. Named often in the newspapers after his appointment to chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, he appeared to have about him a stalwart sensibility and soft-spoken demeanor.
I had never met the man, and I had not considered what I would do when I did.
With a strategy only half formed, I easily located the address of Mr. Lusk and made my way there.
He would, I was quite certain, be long since abed.
While the fog clung to the face of the squat, plain housing reserved for them what lived here—a somewhat more respectable front than the doxies and profligates naught but a handful of streets over—most were black and empty.
To my surprise, one revealed a bit of nearly smothered light trapped by the yellow lens over one eye, and I crossed the narrow lane towards the first residence. I found lamplight flickering from a single window, muted as though blocked by screen or curtains.
Was Mr. Lusk awake? Was he entertaining?
I could not recall the details listed in the articles I had read. Was he married?
Would it matter? Perhaps he was entertaining a dollymop of his own.
A part of me conceded that to interrupt such a tryst may be the height of rudeness—to say nothing of his wife’s feelings on the subject, if he had one to offend—but I could ill afford to play the understanding guest now.
A glance at the rest of the flats, each melded to the next, showed no signs of stirring.
Shrugging—as if this would cast off the guilt I nursed, or the wariness I felt as I climbed the small landing to his door—I reached out a newly gloved hand and tapped gently upon the door.
There was no answer. In truth, I’d expected none. The man was like as not abed, light or no light, and I did not know one who would open his door at near two in the wee hours without prior arrangements made.
I tested the doorknob, and found it latched.
Naturally.
Just as naturally, I had come prepared. Fishing a pin from my hair—such blasted useful things—I bent, inserted the tines, and probed the mechanism by which much of London considered themselves safe.
Fools, really. As Ishmael could attest, even a halfway decent rum dubber could pick a lock. The best ones could do so quick as spit. I was somewhere in between the two; perhaps if one was a slow spitter.
I muffled a chortle at myself.
As the metal tines clicked against the iron tumblers, my heart stalled. Something changed—something nearby shifted, a presence I imagined turned to cold and malevolence. My innards seized.
Before the sound of my amusement died to nothing, I jerked up from my ministrations, my back to the door and my wide, glass-covered eyes fixed on the fog swirling around the lampposts beside the lane.
What watched? What waited?
A fog of coal-streaked yellow kicked and frothed, as if a mad sea churned up by the passing of some great ferry in the sky. My heart thudded uncertainly, slamming at irregular intervals until I believed that I could hear its echo in the murky haze.
With shaking, frigid fingers, I fished that bit of tar from my pocket.
The lock waited patiently. Fine lock it was. I would tend to it, just as soon as I nibbled off this corner of the medicine that would ease my heart once more. Soothe my worries.