Page 19 of The Business of Blood
I had none of that. I had nothing but dashed hopes, responsibilities, and a creed.
Lex talionis.
The law of revenge.
The Latin phrase reminded me ofpittura infamante.
I was back to myself again. No longer divided, no longer standing apart in the safety of the light.
I stood in the arms of Jack the Ripper.
I’d joined him in the darkness. I had, in my presence, the man to whom I’d devoted the last two years of my life.
I was suddenly ravenous. A deep, dark void opened inside of me. Not in my stomach, but in my soul. I desired sustenance, but not in the form of food.
I wanted answers. Cravedinformation. I yearned for the absolution tendered by the response to the ubiquitous, tedious, but eternally pertinent invocation…
Why?
Why come back after all these years? Why seek me out on the Strand and not in Whitechapel, his preferred hunting grounds? Why kill a man and hang him upside down by one foot?Pittura infamante? If I were going to meet my maker, I’d do it with some revelations, so help me, God.
I loosened my jaw to ask him, and what escaped was, “Why Mary? Why did you do what you did to her?”
The questions stunned us both. A gust of his moist, odorless breath disturbed the wisps of fringe at my temple and cooled a warm tear I hadn’t realized had escaped down my cheek.
“She wasn’t like the others you carved. I’m not saying they deserved it, but you had to know she was different. Why did you take her from me?” I hated that I’d begun crying. My voice tended to thicken to downright raspy when I cried, and there was no hiding the weakness. It didn’t stop me, though. Nothing but the swipe of that blade could stop me now.
“Ilovedher. She was all I had left. And you took her. She was the last person I had, the only one who hadn’t abandoned me in some way or another. When I was destitute enough to consider working in the factory where my two cousins were killed, she procured me a job here in London. I was going to be awhore.”
I spat the word at him, though he was still behind me.
“That’s right, the very thing you hate. I was to work at one of the West End brothels where I could earn enough in a year to set myself up someplace nice and respectable. Even though she walked the dirty streets of Whitechapel, she wanted better for me. She wasgood. Her soul was good. So, you tell me. Tell mewhybefore you send me to Hell.”
I was nearly yelling now, and my blood flowed so swiftly in my veins that my skin became unbearably hot from it. I didn’t even remember to take care. I’d become my hatred. Had melded with it until it morphed into something tangible that I might wield as righteously as an archangel’s sword.
We stood in the darkness together, panting and still for a disquieting moment. I got the distinct impression I’d mystified Jack the Ripper, and a hysterical giggle threatened to belch past the fury burning in my stomach.
After an uncomfortably long while, he said, “At least you never became a whore.”
And with one swift movement of his hand, the darkness took me.
6
I see her stumble through the arched doorway at 13 Miller’s Court and I scream her name.
Mary!
She’s drunk, as she often was, and she’s singing sweetly, as she often did.
She opens the door wider. As wide as it will go. The devil behind her needs all that space to follow, for he brings as much evil with him as that minuscule room will encompass. More so.
When she turns to smile at me, it’s so excruciatingly lovely, I’m reminded how sometimes I hated her just as terribly as I loved her.
Aidan kissed her first, you see, and she hadn’t been the one to tell me. We were fourteen, and she’d been visiting for the summer from Wales. She’d a new dress, but wouldn’t enlighten me as to where she’d acquired it. We both knew it wasn’t from her destitute parents.
I didn’t press the subject but was acutely aware that my brothers and their mates commented on how fetching she looked in her new sunshine-hued gown.
I studied her, thinking yellow a rather silly color.
