Stolen Moments: A Victorian Time Travel Romance Read online

  The display case she wanted was the second closest to the stained-glass windows and it offered, without apology, a glimpse into the lives of non-U.S.-based women of the 1880s. Among the many items and articles Flora glanced over—a photo of Cora Crippen with newspaper clippings of her husband’s subsequent trial and execution, as well as the modern forensic evidence that cleared him of the crime more than a hundred years later; the Black Widows of Liverpool, Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins, as well as Amelia Dyer and several other baby farmers—was a copy of a newspaper article with drawings of Jack the Ripper’s supposed victims. Although long since whittled down to the canonical five, six newspaper sketches of gruesomely murdered women ran alongside a headline that screamed ‘London Maniac Strikes Again’.

  Flora was not a Ripperologist, not by anyone’s standards, but she did like to make sure the information in her displays was up to date and as correct as it could be. She had researched enough to put together a brief summary of the crime that had terrified the world and not just Whitechapel back in the summer of 1888. Where the newspaper reports on the victims turned them into little more than the horrifically slaughtered vehicles on which to maximize newspaper sales, Flora had tried to give them back their dignity. They were daughters, mothers and wives, and that was how every woman should be remembered, rather than simply as prostitutes and drunks.

  Spreading the parchment out on top of the glass case, she reread the note. Sixth victim… she studied each drawing in turn, but none of the dead women were wearing a locket like this. Which, she supposed, meant only that the newspaper sketch artist didn’t include it in his drawing. Frowning, she turned next to the women themselves. Who was the Ripper’s supposedly unknown target? Every one of these faces had a name. All had been identified by family members, and all given a proper burial. Even those who would eventually be dropped from the Ripper’s victim list, all of them were named. Not a single woman who died during that bloody summer went down in history (even briefly) as a Jane Doe. Which meant either this locket was being forged with a past it did not rightfully own, or the sender of the locket was mistaken regarding its origins.

  Or there was a victim history somehow forgot… a woman slain in a way that did not get tied to the infamous Ripper.

  Flora turned the locket over in her hands. It looked genuine enough, but then what did she know about jewelry? The paper definitely looked old. Well taken care of, but worn in ways that only lent credence to its potential authenticity. And really, forged relics were usually sold, not given away without so much as a name attached for notoriety.

  Drumming her fingers on the glass case, she checked her watch. What time was it in England right now, three… four in the morning? She would need to wait to call Pickering Kenyon until someone was there to answer her questions. The biggest one of which kept rattling in her head, why her?

  Hers was not a big museum with half a dozen financial backers in her pocket. She didn’t have the money to prove either the age of the locket, the paper, or even to do a trace on who or where it came from. Unless the solicitors had more information than what they’d sent her, all she had was a trinket and an unsubstantiated claim.

  Open only when you are alone.

  Why, Flora wondered. What could possibly be inside a locket this tiny that no one but her was supposed to see? And who had it really been intended for, because there was just no way the original author of this note could possibly have meant it for her.

  She fingered the tiny clasp. She also glanced over her shoulder, even though she knew no one else was in the building. Suspecting she was being silly, she pulled the drapes on the windows and quietly closed the Murder Room door. Feeling along the engraved edge until she found the clasp, Flora gently pried the locket open. It resisted as only something with hinges unaccustomed to movement would, but then, with a click, the stubborn hinge yielded. The locket opened, revealing the painted portrait of a woman who looked so much like herself, it was uncanny. Blonde hair, blue eyes, dark Victorian style dress buttoned all the way to her chin—she stared out at Flora, offering no answers, but definitely spawning more questions.

  “Unbelievable.” Closed though it had been for many years, a thin layer of dust had accumulated on the miniature portrait. Without thinking, she brushed it clear with her thumb, but the instant her skin made contact with the image, a sizzling jolt jumped through her jerking hand and up her frozen arm, thumping into the back of her head hard enough to make the room erupt in flashes of light.

  Flora tried to drop the locket, but her hand would not obey her. She tried to jump back, to distance herself from the flashes of blue-white light dancing in front of her face, but though her knees verged on the unsteady edge of buckling, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. Her whole body was locked in the embrace of an electrocution without any conceivable source, and all she could see was the dancing of the lights growing bigger and brighter, becoming swirls that cast the periphery of the room into shadows as they churned all around her.

  They engulfed her like a vacuum, sucking the air from her lungs and jump stopping every electrical impulse that kept her alive. Her heart stopped beating. Flora felt it, the faltering flutter and the utter stillness, and in those few seconds she absolutely knew she was going to die.

  That anonymously-sent locket had just killed her.

  Chapter 2

  Swirling light wrapped her, shooting past and through her, hurting eyes she couldn’t make herself close, filling lungs that screamed for breath that she couldn’t draw. And just as the thought crashed through her mind that this was it, she was passing out, a bone-shaking subsonic boom rattled her museum.

  It shattered every glass display case in the Murder Room. She felt shattered too, but more terrifying was the frenzied swirling of those blue and white lights, right before they swallowed her. She was wrenched, caught in the strangest twist of vertigo that pulled her into the center of those lights like the slow stretch of saltwater taffy.

  She felt that pull in her skin and her bones. Her lungs, frozen mid-fight for air, stretched. So did her petrified heart until all she could feel was the inevitable snap reverberating through her in every tautly pulled sinew and nerve. Another thunderous subsonic boom ended the stretching and she fell, dropping a foot or so onto the damp cobblestone street, where her unsteady legs collapsed her sideways into the soot-stained bricks of a tall building.

  The light vanished, the cool pitch-black of night engulfed her, and with a chest-pulsing thump, her heart and her lungs both lurched back into the rhythm of normal function.

  Flora gasped, sucking to fill grateful lungs with breath after breath of damp, smog and sewer foulness. Blind, seeing only the ghostly echoes of those swirling lights and robbed of all grasp on which way was ‘up’, Flora pushed off the building only to stumble. She grabbed the wall again, the rasp of her own ragged breathing now deafening in the sudden silence of her own ears. It took several minutes, filled only by the wobbling of her knees and the panicked pounding of her heart, before gradual awareness of her surroundings filtered in.

  The air was thick, damp and foul. Piano music and the raucous laughter came from somewhere behind her, but she couldn’t see anything. Not until her bright-blinded eyes adjusted to the darkness, and then it was a shock to find it wasn’t as dark as she’d thought. The amber glow of a distant gas lamp caught everything in this short, narrow courtyard within its light. Two- and three-story buildings surrounded her. Only a tiny patch of black, starless sky could be glimpsed beyond the roof rafters high above. A dozen windows looked out on her, all but three of which were dark. The window bare inches above her head was lit less vibrantly than the other two, but its soft glow nevertheless bathed the dingy gray of closed curtains. It was too high for her to see inside, but when she heard a hoarse cough and the shuffling of heavy feet, she decided she really didn’t want to.

  Were these tenement houses? Eight doors spanned barely a hotel room’s distance apart. She turned in a shaky half circle
, reaching out reflexively to catch the water pump, her knees dipping and knocking but at least her legs stayed under her. Where in hell was she? Not in her museum or anywhere in New Orleans, for that matter. The buildings were all wrong. Gone were the colorful and historic Creole grandeur she was used to. In their place stood brick structures more British Baroque and aged Georgian in architecture, and how could that be? Was she dreaming? Had she touched the locket, fallen, hit her head? Was she lying passed out right now on the floor of the Murder Room, where no one was bound to discover her until Amanda came to open up Monday morning?

  God, her head hurt. Flora pressed two fingers to her temple, certain now that had to be it, because the only other logical explanation was time travel and that was… well, that was just ridiculous. She was dreaming. All of this, it was fantasy spinning out like a movie in the labyrinth of her mind. Eventually, she was going to wake up and when she did, real as this all seemed right now—the hardness of the bricks at her back, the cold metal of the water pump in her palm—all of this would just disappear.

  And not a minute too soon either, she thought, as a gust of wind pushed through the courtyard and the slat-wood door just across from her opened partway. It thumped closed as the breeze died, but what few seconds that it had been open was enough to release the unmistakable stench of a privy. Her already queasy stomach rolled. She turned away, but that only made her dizziness worse and she stumbled. She caught the threshold of the tenement door directly in front of her to keep from falling. She jerked back when it suddenly swung open.

  Perhaps she bumped it, perhaps the man now staring down at her in wide-eyed surprise was simply heading to the privy to answer the call of nature. Whatever the reason, he staggered back a step, swaying unsteadily on his feet before snatching the cap off his disheveled bald head. His drink-flushed features melted into a crooked grin. In a heavy British accent, he said, “Are ye sellin’, girl? A suck fer a gin?”

  He belched, releasing the great foulness of a sour stomach and booze.

  Gagging, Flora lost the fight to keep her stomach contents. She bent, falling away from the wall before vomiting all over both the stoop, her skirts and his shoes. The drunk seemed not to notice.

  “Ah there, luvy.” He thumped her twice on the back while she spat to clear her mouth. “Get it all up now. Lor’ knows, I couldn’t hold me own me first try out. Try ‘n try again,” was his sage advice, imparted with a hiccup and a wink before he plopped his cloth cap back on his head and off he went, slipping out past her and up the courtyard toward the only exit, a long tunnel-like passage that emptied onto the street beyond.

  Easing herself upright, Flora scrubbed her wrist across her trembling lips, but it was only as he passed through the glow of that single street lamp that something awful caught her attention. His clothes—brown trousers and white button-down shirt, dark vest (something she’d barely noticed when she’d been facing him, but which now was completely hidden) beneath his shabby brown coat. That high collar… that cloth cap—wide brimmed and looking like felt—she knew that fashion. She knew it in the same way anyone who watched historical movies would know it. It was working-man Victorian wear, clean but definitely poor. Something a man straight out of Sherlock Holmes might wear.

  Where was she? What had that locket done to her?

  “Just a dream,” she whispered shakily. She wasn’t really here. She was lying on the floor of her museum, passed out. Probably drooling. She might even have peed herself, but she was there. Safe and sound. This wasn’t real.

  It wasn’t. It—the locket!

  Startled, Flora looked down at her empty hands. Oh! Oh no, no, no! She crashed to her knees where she was, searching the grooves of the cobblestones. Her desperation to find the thing was at instant odds with what she felt when her fingers stumbled upon it. She lifted it by its chain. Her flesh crawled, sizzling with the echoes of what had felt like electrocution while it had been happening. The locket must have snapped shut when she’d dropped it, which suited her fine. Dream or not, she wasn’t about to open it again, but nor did she want to lose it. Not until she—her stomach clenched, cold as ice—woke up.

  A dull thump from across the courtyard made her jump. She caught the locket in both hands. Her heart in the back of her throat, she looked around, but apart from the water pump and a dustbin, the narrow courtyard was empty. The gas lamp showed neither movement nor shadows in which anyone or anything might hide. The dark tunnel that joined this courtyard with the fairly busy street beyond, was the only source of shadow and that was black as pitch. So black that even the gas lamplight seemed reluctant to enter. She looked at the privy door, but there was no breeze now and it was fully closed when she heard it, twice now—a wet, distinctive, blade-on-bone punching sound.

  The fine hairs prickling up on the back of her nape, Flora looked to that dark tunnel just as a flash of shadow passed across one of the two well-lit windows there at the corner of it. Why did those windows, with the gas lamp directly across from it and the apartment door right around the corner, look so familiar to her?

  The fine hairs prickled up on all the rest of her as Flora eased up off her knees. She’d seen horror movies. The last thing she wanted to do was go any closer and yet her feet, in total rebellion against every chill warning now shrieking though her brain, ventured forward. She froze when she heard another ‘thump-thump’ followed by the low guttural grunts of a man exerting strength. A shadow length, perhaps an arm, strained across the upper portion of the larger window’s closed curtains. It looked like pulling, with an obvious jerk at the end when whatever was being pulled came abruptly free. The shadow vanished, but not before she heard the wet heavy slap of something being dropped. A wet sheet perhaps. Or a towel, sopping wet from cleaning up a spill before being tossed into the bottom of the tub. Yeah, a dripping wet towel might make a sound like that, her brain tried to tell her. So did chicken fat being tossed from the cutting board into the sink.

  Walk away, her brain said. It’s a dream. Nothing good could possibly come from getting any closer to that window.

  The punching-thumping sound returned, only now it reminded her more of chopping. In the distance, raucous music played in cheerful contrast to the ominous tickling growing up her spine as she edged up to that smaller window. Why did this look so familiar? She couldn’t see the broken pane of glass until she got right up to it, and yet somehow she knew they were there.

  Because it was a dream, her brain insisted. People know things they shouldn’t in dreams all the time. And yet, the closer she drew, the more haunting those windows became until a peculiar buzzing once more invaded her skin, tingling through her nerves in the most dreadful sense of déjà vu.

  Don’t look in the window.

  But her back bent anyway, one sweaty palm bracing on the sill as she reached in through the broken glass to catch the edge of the curtain. Every instinct she had was screaming not to when she peeled the curtain back, only an inch, only just enough to peek inside. God… the smell. It hit her—shit and piss and vomit; the combined contents of slashed intestines all pooled together in a singular assault that made her gag. Had the horror of it not seized her by the throat, choking it off, she might have lost her stomach all over again. As it was, the taste of bile hit the back of her tongue, spreading through her mouth like the blood spreading across that bed.

  The room was well-lit by nothing more than a single candle on the table and a raging fire, burning hot on coal and clothing, lighting every corner of that room as the man made his cuts on the remnants of something she barely recognized as human. A woman, though he’d removed her breasts, her sex, all the flesh from her belly, thighs and even her arms. A woman, though he’d removed her eyebrows, cut her cheeks, her lips, her nose, leaving no part of her face unmarred. A woman who had been strangled in her bed before that first cut slit her throat all the way to the bone.

  This woman was Mary Kelly, and Flora knew that in the same way she suddenly realized how and where she knew these windows
. She had photographs of both in the Ripper display case in her Murder Museum. Which meant the man now standing over her, with one arm shoved up under her ribcage, was the Ripper himself, dressed in black trousers, coat neatly folded over the back of a nearby chair, white crimson-stained shirt rolled up past the elbows of both heavily bloodied arms. He hadn’t taken his waistcoat off, it remained fully buttoned and glistened wet where blood had soiled it. The dark fabric hid the stains, though glints of firelight caught in the wetness as, like every newspaper from The Daily News to the East London Advertiser would report in hues and cries, the Ripper cut his victim to pieces.

  She couldn’t watch this. She couldn’t look away, either. All she could do was shake, her gut tightening in horror when he turned and, the lines of his strong forearm bunching and flexing, ripped the dead woman’s heart right out of her ribs. Oh God, oh God… Flora couldn’t breathe. It was as if those were torn chunks of her own lungs, dangling now between his grasping fingers.

  Wake up, her brain begged, but something went wrong. Though she hadn’t felt her mouth move and though never, ever in a million years would she have let herself say anything such a man as this might overhear, she must have made some sound. Some gasp, some squeak, something that made his head snap around the way it did just then. The Ripper looked right at her. The fireplace at his back cut his face into shadowed sections, but she still saw his eyes. She saw the bridge of his nose, the flat of his mouth, and the line of his jaw ending at the dip of his dimpled chin.

  It's just a dream, her brain begged, but Flora didn’t believe it. And neither did the Ripper. Both stood frozen, staring into one another’s eyes for what felt like an eternity of thundering heartbeats and trembling knees. When at last movement came, it came in an explosion. The Ripper lunged, first for his knife, then for his coat, and as if that movement on his part were the permission her trembling body was waiting for, at last Flora found she could move. She bolted, the hard soles of her recreated period boots hammering out the most horrible echo all down the length that separated her from the main of Dorset Street.