Skeeter started to laugh; then felt a chill, instead, straight down his spine.
Margo was not keen to watch the murders of Stride and Eddowes. Rather than join the Ripper Watch Team in the Vault, she changed clothing, requested a cup of hot tea from one of the Spaldergate House maids, and curled up beside the fire in the parlour. There she stayed, sitting on the floor in front of the hearth, chin on knees, watching the flames dance across the coals. Malcolm came in shortly after two A.M., looking for her. He paused in the doorway.
"There you are. Well, it's over, down there. Maybrick turns out to be the one who chalked the graffiti in Goulston Street. And you'll never guess who we caught on tape? Those idiot reporters, Dominica Nosette and Guy Pendergast. They're following Maybrick and Lachley. Shadowed Maybrick to Goulston Street and photographed the graffiti after he left, then started trailing him once more."
"Great. We should've staked out the murder sites, ourselves, and waited to nab those idiots."
"Perhaps, but the chance is gone now. We've sent out Stoddard and Tanglewood to try to locate them, but they'll be long gone before either man can get close, I'm afraid." Malcolm crossed the parlour toward her, navigating his way around heavy furniture and tables full of bric-a-brac. "Whatever have you been doing, sitting here alone in the dark?"
"Trying not to think about what's going on in Whitechapel."
He settled on the carpeted floor beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "You're trembling."
"I'm cold," she muttered. Then, betraying the lie, "You don't think I'm too weak for this job, do you? Because I can't watch?"
Malcolm sighed. "There's a fairly large difference between running slap into something you're not expecting and going out of your way to watch something grisly, particularly when others are on the job to do it, instead. No, I don't think you're too weak, Margo. You extricated several people from that street brawl at the examination of Polly Nichols' remains, didn't you? Doug Tanglewood said he'd never been more thoroughly frightened in his life, yet you pulled them safely away, even Pavel Kostenka, when that lout was intent on beating him senseless."
"That wasn't so hard," Margo shivered. "I just charged in and did the first thing that came to mind. He wasn't expecting Aikido, anyway."
"Then you did precisely what a budding time scout should do," Malcolm murmured, stroking her hair gently. "Between the Ripper Watch and searching for our missing tourist, I haven't had the time to say how proud of you I've been. You've nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all."
She bit her lip, wondering if now was a good time to talk about the past, which had been troubling her ever since she'd come to London. Her mother's descent into prostitution had been Margo's shameful secret for a long time, one she'd feared at first would drive Malcolm away; but she'd had time to think about it and wondered now if she'd misjudged him, unfairly assigning to him the same prejudices she'd encountered in Minnesota. He knew about her being raped by a gang of fifteenth-century Portuguese, after all, and still wanted to marry her. Surely he wouldn't mind what her mother had done to make ends meet, if he didn't mind the other?
Malcolm lifted her face, his expression deeply concerned. "What is it, Margo?"
She leaned against his shoulder and told him. All of it. Her father's drinking. Her mother's desperation to pay the bills, when her father spent his paycheck and her mother's both, buying the booze. What her mother had done... and what her father had done, when he'd found out. "I never meant to say anything, because it would kill Kit, to learn how his little girl died. But I thought you ought to know. Before you married me."
"Oh, Margo..." His voice shook. "I wish to God I could go back and undo it all. No wonder you fight the world so hard. You've had to, just to survive..." He brushed his thumb across her cheek, across her unsteady lips. "You're so beautiful, so full of courage, it makes my heart stop. If your father hadn't died in prison, they'd have to hang me for him."
Margo's mouth twisted. "They don't hang people anymore, Malcolm."
Then he was holding her close and nothing else in the universe mattered.
Dominica watched in astonishment as James Maybrick unlocked the door of a filthy hovel in Wapping and disappeared inside. Gas light appeared briefly through the windows and a ferocious barking erupted, then subsided just as abruptly. A moment later, the gas went out, leaving the house dark again.
"What on earth?" she wondered aloud, startled. "What d'you suppose should we do now?" she whispered.
"I'm going 'round the back, see if I can get a look inside."
"Be careful!"
Dominica waited impatiently while her partner vanished into the inky blackness. Rain spat at her, cold and miserable. She huddled deeper into her coat and shifted from one foot to the other, trying to keep warm. She'd been waiting for perhaps five minutes when snarls and savage barking erupted again from the house. A single gunshot split the wet night.
"Guy!" Dominica ran across the street, just in time for the front door to be thrown wide. Guy snatched her wrist and pulled her inside. "Come on! There isn't a moment to lose!"
"What—"
"Shh!"
He dragged her through the dark house into a central, windowless room where a gaslight burned low. A massive black dog sprawled across the bare wooden floorboards, dead in a puddle of spreading blood; Guy had shot it through the skull. In the center of the floor rested a heavy trap door, which Guy pulled up cautiously. Beneath, they found steps leading down into a cellar. "He's nowhere in the house," Guy whispered urgently. "He had to go through here. There's nowhere else he could have gone."
Dominica dragged out her own pistol, aware that she was trembling violently.
"There's no lantern," she muttered, eying the black hole uneasily.
"He had one. Must have. It's pitch black, down there, but we'll hear him at the very least, follow the sound."
Yes, she thought, and he'll hear us, as well. But they'd come this far and she wasn't giving up on the story of the century so easily. She gripped her pistol with damp fingers and followed Guy into the cellar, which proved to be no cellar at all, but rather a tunnel through the sewers beneath Wapping. So this is how he did it! Simply popped home to Wapping and vanished beneath the streets! Then, faint with distance, they heard it: the splash of footfalls through the filth in the tunnels. She and Guy, pausing at the base of the stairs, exchanged glances. Then Dominica hiked up her skirts and waded cautiously forward.
She was going to get that Carson prize. And all that lovely money, which her video would fetch in the up-time world. Dominica Nosette intended to be the world's most famous photojournalist ever. And nothing was going to stop her.
Chapter Nine
John Lachley had just finished burning Elizabeth Stride's letter in the flames of his altar beneath the streets when a woman's high, ragged scream echoed out in the sewer. A man's angry snarl and a volley of gunshots roared through the tunnels, followed by a thud of colliding bodies, a grunt and sudden masculine cry of pain. Then James Maybrick's voice, maniacaclass="underline" "Lipski!"
Over and over again, "Lipski!Lipski!... Lipski LipskiLipski..."
The ragged chant jerked Lachley across the room and out through the open iron doorway. The Liverpudlian was on his knees in the muddy water, his lantern thrown aside, hacking and stabbing at a motionless form. The thing lying on the sewer floor had, before Maybrick's violent assault, been a man. Blood had spurted and sprayed across Maybrick's face and chest. It dripped and spattered down his chin and hair from the arterial bleeding Lachley had warned him against when stalking the prostitutes. But a more terrible sound, by far, than the slam of Maybrick's knife into dead flesh came to Lachely's ears: running footsteps, receding into the blackness, unsteady and desperate.