Stolen Moments: A Victorian Time Travel Romance Page 16

  “Apologies, sergeant,” he said, much too cheerfully. “The missus isn’t well. Let me get her home to bed, but we’ll be waiting on that couch at four, yeah?”

  If he thought anything amiss between Stevens’s rough handling and the doting affection of his words, Hatman was careful to conceal it. “Let’s hope rest is just the thing.”

  “Hope, indeed. Come, pet. Lizzie.”

  The other woman grabbed her other arm, and together they led her across Commercial and into a narrower alley that cut between this and the row of shops on the next street over. Florrie stumbled, desperate for a breath that didn’t reek of gore and swallowing hard to keep her stomach down. Her knees kept buckling, her legs having all the stability of water. She kept seeing lights.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered. The echoing tromp of every footstep they took bounced off the brick walls of the alley, twisting in her ears until it became sharper. Harder.

  The glancing chopping cuts of a knife slicing into bone…

  Florrie doubled over so fast, he barely got her yanked into a nearby doorway and Lizzie just got her skirts out of the way before she vomited.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped, throat burning and eyes tearing.

  He’d ripped her heart right out of her chest…

  “Oh, I’ve had worse things on me, luv.” Stroking her hair, he patted her on the back. He waited patiently while she spat the taste from her mouth and then heaved her upright.

  “This is worth more than three shillings,” Lizzie grumbled. “Seven hundred pound, that’s what that Sergeant Hatman said, isn’t it? Seven hundred pound? I’d have a roof over me head and a hot meal every day for the rest of me life for that.”

  Florrie almost collapsed. Her head was spinning; her pulse racing, a battering ram that pounded at her ribs and thundered in her brain.

  “Come on,” Stevens grunted, dragging her arm over his shoulder and catching her around the waist, forcibly keeping her upright. “What have you been eating, luv?”

  No one goes hungry in a butcher’s shop…

  She clung to his shoulder, because it was either that or fall. Her head was spinning. She could see lights, swirling blue and white brightness like falling stars flying all around her. She could barely see the ground.

  “We could split the money,” Lizzie offered.

  “And how much would it take, do you suppose, to make you happy?” Stevens inquired, steering Florrie into the arched stone doorway of a rundown warehouse with the windows and most of the doors boarded up, including the one he propped her against. Two thick boards barred the way, but the latch was missing and the door itself was partly open, despite the notice nailed to it forbidding trespassing.

  Panting, more than a little frightened by the swirling of the lights, the smell of phantom blood, and now the sensation of stretching pulling at her, Florrie watched a woman pass them by. Her arms were laden with vegetables, cheese and several bread loaves. The woman looked right at them, her gaze sharpening on Stevens as he gave her a polite nod in passing before turning that smile back on Lizzie. Florrie must have looked as awful as she felt, because the woman stared at her only a moment before hurrying on.

  “I’m not greedy,” Lizzie said. “I’m also not stupid. I never would have got her away from that bloke without you, but you needed me too. So, we do it halves.”

  Her head was killing her, phantom sights, and sounds, and smells assaulted her, but she could hear them both just fine. Her head snapped up and she stared at them.

  She felt a low rumbling boom tremor through her bones and yet, it didn’t actually happen.

  She felt the snap as the memory of that stretching sensation suddenly released her, and like a tidal flood, it all came pouring back. She remembered her name, she remembered the locket. She remembered dropping into the darkness of Miller’s Court on that fateful night when she gave into curiosity’s draw and peeked through that broken window where she first smelled that gory odor now fading out of her nose. She saw the clothes on the fire, the flesh on the nightstand, the body that wasn’t even recognizably human anymore on the bed, and the man standing over it with his arm shoved up under the exposed ribcage while he jerked and ripped and finally tore the bloody heart free.

  She saw him turn around. She saw his face.

  She saw Jack the Ripper.

  And this was him, standing in front of her right now, having fearlessly walked into Draven’s butcher shop after enlisted Sergeant Hatman’s help in getting her back. Because he’d seen her too, and now he was going to kill her.

  “Half,” the Ripper said, the thinness of his smile growing colder.

  “Half,” Lizzie confidently repeated, hands on her hips. “For that, you get me help and me silence when it’s done. What have I got to gain from talking at this point, but a sharp drop and dangle with a rope around me neck, same as you?”

  He glared at her, but she hiked her chin and folded her arms.

  Flora couldn’t imagine anyone being so reckless or so brave had they known exactly who his was. But it was broad daylight and this was not a secluded street. People were out and about and more than a few passed by them as they stood in the archway of this rundown building. A fact that might prevent Lizzie from getting her throat cut right here mid-argument, but which Flora had no doubt did not make either one of them safe.

  She couldn’t run. The dizziness had fast faded and with it, the pain in her head and that weird watery instability that had made it so hard for her to walk. Still, the only avenue of escape she had could only be gained by shoving past Lizzie and the Ripper. She wouldn’t make it two steps, and she already knew no one passing by was going to help her. It was midday and this was not an isolated alley, but this was also Victorian London and she was a woman that all the papers had advertised to the world had no memory. Well, she had her memories back, and she knew in an instant that these two could drag her kicking and screaming ‘This man is Jack the Ripper’ all the way through the streets, and no one was likely even to believe her.

  Shrinking back a step, she bumped into the two boards—one tapping at her shoulder blades and the other behind her knees. The fingers of one hand barely brushed the door, but it yielded ever so slightly to her touch.

  And still, Lizzie and the Ripper faced each other, even when she lifted her leg, pushing the door open even wider as she stepped between the boards.

  “I don’t care about the money, luv,” he said.

  Lizzie shrugged. “Then you won’t care if I take it all.”

  Neither one of them noticed as, moving slowly and silently, Flora ducked under the upper board and drew her other leg into the warehouse after. Silently, she closed the door as much as it would between them.

  There was no lock and no quick way for her to barricade it from the inside. The warehouse itself was long and narrow, and little more than a shell of burnt bricks. The second floor had completely caved in, creating an obstacle course of broken beams, boards, nails, trash, rotting furniture and rusting machinery. Even if the whole place didn’t smell like human excrement, giant holes in the roof let in more than enough daylight to make hiding in this debris impossible, but there was a back exit at the far end of the building with a door completely missing off its hinges.

  The Ripper’s laugh was little more than breath. “I might need you to keep playing the part of doting sister from time to time, yeah? She’s been in the papers, after all. She’s seen the maniac. People’ll have an interest in her for a while.”

  Grabbing her skirt to avoid getting caught on anything, Flora quickly and quietly began picking her way through the mounds of caved-in debris. She had to get as much distance as she could before they noticed her gone and it wasn’t long before they did. She was only halfway to the gapping back exit before she heard the door behind her bump open.

  “There!”

  She knew better than to stop and yet, Flora couldn’t help looking back in time to see the Ripper urging Lizzie to duck between the boards in swift pursuit
. He followed, and Flora’s own panic surged. The need for quiet now gone, she scrambled to get over the rubble of bricks and boards, running for the back door as fast as she could go. And yet no sooner had she breeched the top of the crumble she was on, then did she hear a ghastly burbling gasp behind her.

  Lizzie’s eyes were bulging. A curtain of red running down the entire front of her, spurting in ribbons that took Flora two startled blinks before her eyes would even recognize it as blood. She sank to her knees right there amid the rubble around the doorway, the heaviness of her now limp head falling back on her shoulders and revealing the gaping slice that cut her throat all the way to the spine. Wiping his knife on the back of Lizzie’s skirts, the Ripper wasn’t smiling anymore. When the other woman finally collapsed facedown on the trash heap, he simply stepped over her and broke into a run.

  Flora did too. For the second time since finding herself in this time and this place, she ran for her life.

  ***

  “Get on out of here!” Draven shouted, shooing at the line of lingering money-hungry people with the whole of his arms. At least he wasn’t hitting anyone. Stung all the way to his soul, it was a near thing, especially when an old man held up a piece of newspaper and pointed at Florrie’s sketch and demanded to see his daughter.

  Grabbing the sketch out of his hand, Draven sent the man scurrying with nothing more than a glare. He’d have slapped his lying mouth if the man hadn’t gone.

  “Oi!” a woman shouted in the distance.

  On the verge of shouting himself, Draven grabbed the cleaver off his butcher’s block, practically right out of the hand of the Fat Man’s son. “If you’re not buying, piss off!”

  He’d never been much of a patient man. He doubted if any of his regular customers would describe him as anything other than curt, especially if they hadn’t known him until after Elise had passed on. God, that feeling was back. That utter emptiness that came with knowing he was once more alone.

  Strange, how much sharper the pain felt now than it had before. He’d known from the start that Florrie wasn’t his. He should have remembered that. He should have kept her at arm’s length, been polite, supportive, comforting, and kept his cock in his damn trousers. Had he done that, she’d still be gone right now, but at least he wouldn’t have this pang of loss digging into his chest so brutally deep that it felt impossible to breathe.

  He hadn’t known her anywhere near long enough to be suffering like this.

  If he dropped everything and ran after her right now, apart from making a colossal fool of himself, he might just… what? Take her back from her rightful husband? And with babies at home, waiting on their mum with wounded innocence too young to understand what was going on? He could never take a mother from her children. The thought of living here, in the flat above his shop surrounded by silence for one more day much less three more years, was crushing him.

  “Oi!”

  Draven dropped the cleaver back on the block.

  He’d got awfully used to taking care of someone else. He’d got used to fixing her sausages and making sure she was all right. Simply having someone there for him to talk to. Combing his fingers through her hair…

  “Oi, George!”

  “That’s mum,” the young man beside him said, just as that familiar cry cut through the hustle and bustle of a busy Butcher Row once more. “Lor’, I ain’t seen her run like that since last she tried putting Da on a diet.”

  Following the sound, Draven spotted the Fat Man’s wife, dashing from the alley and across Commercial Street. She was puffing with exertion, her face flushed and her arms laden with groceries bought a few blocks over.

  “Oi!” she shouted, but instead of running to her husband’s butchery, located next to his across the mouth of Harrow Alley, she veered and came straight to Draven. “What are you knobs doing?” she demanded, startling everyone.

  “Missus?” Draven almost didn’t duck the loaf of hard bread she threw at his head.

  “That poor girl!” she snapped, pointing back the way she’d come. “If I’d known you were going to give her to the first pervert what came knocking, I’d have took her home to this lot!”

  “Oi,” her son said, offended.

  Grocery basket balanced in the crook of her arm, she knuckled her free hand into her hip and fed him a withering stare. “Like I don’t wash your socks.”

  The young man flushed bright red.

  Draven was less concerned with adolescent socks than he was with figuring out what she meant. Apparently, so too was Sergeant Hatman, who Draven had thought was gone until he melted back out of the crowd around the Fat Man’s shop with an ear cocked to what Mrs. White was telling him.

  “That man,” she said, giving him the same withering look and pointed behind her. “The one you gave the girl to.”

  “Hesill Stevens,” the sergeant informed her. “That man is the girl’s husband.”

  “That man,” she hotly argued, “is the blighter I saw peeping in Mr. Grey’s window the other night. What do you want to bet he’s the same bloke what’s been skulking about here all week, ever since poor Florrie luv landed on our doorstep?”

  “No,” he stammered, his face paling. “Not possible. He told me he didn’t know where she was until he saw this morning’s paper.”

  “He lied,” Draven said, a wave of cold falling all the way through him.

  “No,” Hatman insisted. “He had her locket. He had her picture.”

  “Because he took it off her,” Draven said, icy panic folding his guts in its fingers and squeezing. “That was Jack the Ripper.”

  He was running before he knew he was moving, parting the crowds of Commercial Street as he went. Everyone who saw him grabbed their companions and got out of his way. He was partly down the alley where the Ripper had taken Florrie before he realized he had his cleaver back in his hand and a boning knife in the other. There was no doubt in his mind either.

  He was going to use them.

  Chapter 13

  The doorless back exit emptied into a fully enclosed courtyard, hemmed in on three sides by buildings and a massive brick wall with a coal chute on the other. There was no way she was getting over that wall or crawling through the chute. The other two buildings had exits into this same small courtyard. She found the first door locked, but the second yanked open the minute she grabbed the knob.

  She’d have locked it behind her, but it required a key to do so. So she ran, tearing down the hall without another soul in sight. This building was empty too, and the floor sagged and creaked beneath her weight as she dashed from room to room, looking for a way out. What few windows she found were nailed shut and so was the front door. Not all the yanking or pulling budged it. Though she could hear people passing on the other side, when she pounded and yelled, no one answered.

  And then she heard it. The bang of that distant back door and a few running footsteps that immediately grew silent. The Ripper was in the building. He was listening for her. She froze. She even tried not to breathe, the ragged panting sound of it abnormally loud to her own ears. The staircase leading up offered the only avenue of escape.

  Somewhere down the hall a floorboard creaked, giving away his creeping movements.

  Slowly, sticking close to the wall, Flora inched toward the stairs. The very first one groaned under the weight of her foot.

  The clump of heavy footsteps came running up the hallway from the back of the building.

  Flora tore up the stairs. She needed a place to hide.

  Failing that, she needed a weapon.

  ***

  “Murder,” an old man rasped, staggering down the street. He was dirty, bald, unshaven, drunk, and he stank as if he’d gone days if not weeks without changing his raggedy clothes. Passersby gave him a wide berth. Some even turned and went back the way they’d come rather than let him stagger too close to them, but not Draven. When he saw Draven coming, he veered straight for him, reaching out to grab his shirt. “Murder!”

 
“Where?” Draven whispered back, terrified he was too late.

  The old man pointed to the old abandoned wallpaper factory. It had been ten years since the ever-present arsenic dust or fumes from the painting presses had exploded, killing twenty and burning the whole place down. Everyone who came in contact with the building got sick. Even those sleeping rough knew better than to seek shelter inside, and yet it was to that building at the far end of the alley that the old man pointed.

  “Inside,” he hoarsely rasped. “Just inside the door.”

  Somewhere down the street behind him, he heard the shrillness of a policeman’s whistle, calling every peeler near enough to hear it. The old man turned toward the sound. Letting him stagger on in search of the sergeant, apparently following in his wake, Draven approached the building.

  As if they knew something awful lay inside, those passing up and down the alley went about their business giving it the same wide berth that they’d given the old man. The door stood open, despite the two boards nailed across the jamb. As he passed from sunlight into shadow, he caught glimpse of pale cloth and a foot. In the very next heartbeat, he realized that wasn’t the dress Florrie had been wearing when she’d left him. That wasn’t her shoe either, and that could only mean it wasn’t her motionless foot currently filling it.

  He pushed the door open and looked at Lizzie, lying on a decade’s worth of trash, dust, rot and debris with a collar of coagulating blood soaking into the floor around her. Stepping over the lower board and ducking under the upper, he searched the mounds of cave-in, up the length of the long building and down to the far opposite end. Nothing was moving, not even along the narrow stretch of what little bit of upper-level flooring remained, sticking out like jagged teeth along the wall at the top of the rickety staircase. Just as his gaze reached the gaping doorless exit on the back of the warehouse, he heard glass shatter right before a rusty doorknob came crashing down into the cobblestone courtyard.

  It was the only sound and movement he had and Draven charged over the three separate mounds of debris that stood between him and the open exit into a tiny bricked-in courtyard. The broken second-floor window wasn’t hard to spot. Neither was the familiar face looking down on him just behind that dirty pane of splintering glass. Hesill Stevens… Jack the Ripper… Draven didn’t care what he called himself.