Page 11 of The Business of Blood
I started when he touched my cheek, as I’d been too busy inspecting the darkness to notice his hand move. “Either way, it isn’t a place for you. I don’t want you involved in all of this—”
I slapped his hand away and jabbed the fork into the air between us. “You don’t get to tell me my place, Aidan Fitzpatrick.” There was no Irish fire in my tone this time, only ice. “I believe Mrs. Sawyer is waiting for her things.” I adjusted my spectacles with my clean hand and turned back to the basin, summarily dismissing him.
He stood behind me for a moment, motionless and silent. I could hear every word ever spoken and unspoken between us spilling onto the ground at my back.
“I understand what the years have done to you, Fiona. I know all the reasons you do what you do.” The pity in his voice summoned a scream from deep, deep in my soul, and I swallowed three times to keep it from escaping. “I appreciate that you have to be cold sometimes. But have a care this profession of yours doesn’t make you heartless.”
Heartless.
Struck by an idea, I frantically searched until I found Frank Sawyer’s heart in the center of the basin. An unceasingly strong muscle upon which one’s entire existence depended. I counted four chambers. Four valves. I stared hard, unblinking in the wan light until Aidan’s retreating footsteps plodded away.
I’d never found Mary Kelly’s heart.
Every single part of her had been catalogued in all its exposed and grotesque exactitude. But not her heart. Jack had taken that, along with her life.
I searched for the palpitations to prove Aidan wrong and found them, faint and fluttering, against my ribcage.Istill had a heart, even though he owned pieces of it. And yet, I’d stood over too many corpses of those I loved, each time expecting my bleeding heart to just…stop. It should, I think. When a heart was broken as many times as mine, it shouldn’t work anymore. But somehow, it still did. It kept going.
And so long as it beat in its chamber, I’d search for the Ripper.
4
As it turned out, I identified all of Frank Sawyer’s organs without enlisting aid, and in short order. I tossed a canvas over the basin of innards and managed to look busy as Constable Hurst and Aidan ushered the frail Mrs. Sawyer toward Baker Street.
The yearning to seize upon Mrs. Sawyer and interrogate her about her husband caused my fingers to curl and bite into the meat of my palms. Where had he been during the Autumn of Terror? Who did he know? What were his sins, his proclivities, his nocturnal desires?
Did he do anything that might have angered the Ripper?
If anyone would know of or suspect a connection of any kind, it would be the woman who shared his life. His bed.
I asked Mrs. Sawyer nothing.
The poor widow’s capabilities seemed stretched to their limits by the task of placing one foot in front of the other.
She’d be useless to me now. To anyone.
I should know. I was intimately acquainted with the weight of the loss curling her shoulders forward. I understood the defeat echoed in every trudge of her work-worn boots. I sincerely hoped she had kind relatives with a warm hearth and a place where she could fall apart for a time. It would be difficult for her to return and face the home where she’d lost her family.
I’d never been able to. I’d left my entire island behind, and doubted I’d ever return.
Aidan paused as he passed me, his doe-brown eyes full of grace and sorrow. “I’m going to accompany Agnes to her sister’s in Lambeth. If you hear anything, Fiona…”
I nodded a silent promise to keep him informed, even as I searched for something else to gaze upon. Anything but his perfection.
Hao Long stood at the cart, mixing a solution of sodium bicarbonate to battle the deep stains in the porous wood.
Constable Fanshaw seemed chummy with the coroner’s carriage drivers if his level of absorption with their conversation were any judge.
I glanced over to the door of the common house and found it momentarily free of a guard.
As stout as the men were, no one dared shut a door through which the stench of death escaped on a crosswind.
I drifted away from Aidan and his sad charge and moved toward said cross breeze, which carried the solemn tones of Inspectors Croft and Aberline. I leaned against the brick under the guise of patiently awaiting permission to conduct my business.
As the fifth of seven children, and the only girl, I’d perfected the dubious art of eavesdropping at an early age. I posted myself against the wall adjacent to the door, taking care not to cast my shadow upon the scene.
“…position of the corpse that confounds me.” I identified Aberline by his East End accent filtered through his impressive mustache. “The grisly way he was done does mirror a Ripper murder. His throat slashed twice by a thin knife, sharp as you please. But that’s not what killed him, was it? There’s no arterial spray in the room.”
“Think you he was strangled first?” Croft speculated.
