Page 89 of The Business of Blood
Eventually, because of everything I’d seen, I’d stopped praying altogether.
Everything my mother had said made sense now. Just as there was danger in darkness, there was safety, too. If your eyes were closed, you could believe that things could be different. That they might be better than they were. You could paint your own reality on the backs of your eyelids and look to it with all the hope your imagination could conjure.
It was too late for me now. Faith was something you had to learn early, something you could build with bricks of anecdotal evidence and pure, ecstatic hope mortared by unmitigated emotion.
I should have closed my eyes, I thought, watching the merriment bleed onto the streets. The laughing people, the gay revelers. They lived with their eyes closed. With their gazes down.
I should have closed my eyes.Maybe God would have found me in the dark…
Instead of the Ripper.
“You’ve something in your hair.” Before I could stop him, Croft reached into my disheveled coif and plucked from it a small shard of glass. It winked and sparkled like a diamond in the soft light of the coach, distracting me from my grim contemplation of the night.
“I was caught up in the riot today in front of parliament,” I answered his unspoken question. “My carriage was overturned by the mob. Both windows broken.”
“You were inthatcarriage?” he thundered, pocketing the glass. “It was dismantled. The driver is inhospital. Jesus Christ, they found severed fingers inside.”
I shrugged with a great deal more nonchalance than I felt. “I was able to escape the worst of it.” With a wince, I remembered I hadn’t the opportunity to properly thank Aramis Night Horse for his protection. He’d used his body as a shield for mine, and not an easily camouflaged one, at that. In any proper, pale British crowd, Night Horse was something of a conspicuous target.
I’d expressed my gratitude to the Hammer—to Jorah—over dinner. And while we were drinking ancient wine and enjoying succulent lamb, Night Horse had been the saber point of a militia charge.
I swallowed an absurd bubble of worry for the assassin.
“Christ.” Croft repeated, his lip pursed into a caustic curl of disbelief. “You have nine bloody lives.”
I began to wonder if Croft’s outward displays of ire didn’t stem from a more profound and primitive emotion. His skin stretched white over his knuckles as his hands curled into fists. A vein pulsed just below his hairline.
In my experience, anger followed quickly on the heels of something more vulnerable. Hurt, perhaps. Or fear.
I’d not want to meet whatever made a man like Grayson Croft afraid.
“Did they ever discover what caused all the madness this afternoon?” I prodded. I wanted to talk about—tothinkabout—anything other than Thaddeus Comstock, Jack the Ripper, or the letters addressed to me that I’d left in police evidence.
Croft shook his head, staring out the windows with a blatant misanthropic cynicism that might have matched mine. “Madness is contagious. It spreads like a disease. Like wildfire. All it takes is tinder. And the entire world is just a pile of kindling waiting to catch on a spark.”
“Is that what happened today?”
He dipped his grizzled chin in a sharp nod. “A mob turns reasonable men into animals, and no one knows why. They’re just swept up in the firestorm. But I’d bet my life that the spark was provided by the Hammer. I’m going to retrace his every step today. I’m going to find where the match was struck and burn him with it.”
It occurred to me that I should be alarmed by this, given the Hammer’s steps intersected with mine for several hours today. Still, my inner alarm seemed to be broken at the moment. Like someone had cut the clapper from its middle so the bell swung wildly but made no sound.
“The Hammer,” I echoed. “Aberline mentioned at the station that he had a hand in squelching the riots, not starting them. Do you disagree?”
“No, the Syndicate was there to scatter the rats. But I wouldn’t put it past the Hammer to have organized the riot just so he could be seen resolving it. It’s a masterful show of force within a city he intends to control.”
I didn’t like the part of me that felt defensive of Jorah.
I didn’t like the part of the Hammer that made me as suspicious of him as Croft. Did I believe him capable of such deviousness as to incite a dangerous riot only to further his own ambition?
Absolutely.
“He’s the key to all of this,” Croft hissed. “I can feel it in my bones.”
“Is that what you’re basing your suspicion of him on? Sensations in your appendages?” I raised a dubious eyebrow at him. He’d have to do better than that to convince me.
Not that I didn’t have my own reservations.
“As a detective, you learn to trust the reactions your guts and bones have.” He pinned me with that hard, emerald glare of his.
