Page 2 of Taken By the Ripper
She stamped down the strange excitement and schooled her expression as she entered the patient rooms. With nowhere else to go, not even to the nearest church with it already filled to the brim, many homeless either feigned injury, if only to find a place to lay their heads for the night, or they caught a sickness from their poor living conditions.
A rattling cough pulled her attention to a frail woman lying on the floor next to a feverish infant. All the other cots were filled, and she felt terrible about making them lie on the floor. But apparently the floor was better than the woman’s previous sleeping arrangements.
Open sores lined the woman’s shoulder, neck, and jaw from her “two-penny hangover.” How the homeless managed to sleep slung over a rope like that baffled her. And with a baby to care for? She would not be surprised if the infant was the product of her late-night activities, as the father seemed suspiciously absent.
In hushed whispers, Mazie continued the argument with similar defiant eyes that she barely recalled witnessing from their mother. “I’m not a child, Clara. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m sure those poor women also thought the same of themselves.”
“It’s different.”
“How?” She checked the splint on a young boy of eight sitting against the wall with a faraway look in his eyes. Grief clearly plagued him, as his mind wasn’t quite present. But Clara took pity on him and allowed him to stay, if just for a short time, even though he was well enough to leave her care.
“I’m not going out at night.”
“I suppose I should congratulate you on your impeccable survival instincts.”
Her sister huffed and crossed her arms. “You are no fun to be around. This is the reason you have no friends.”
No, the reason why she had no friends was that she worked herself to the bone trying to keep her sisters off the streets. But instead of refuting her, Clara simply gave her a tight smile and adjusted the white nurse apron atop her dark blue dress beneath.
Nodding her head toward a patient lying on a cot across the room, she said in a lowered voice, “If you’re so confident in yourself, why don’t you go and fetch the police? This one needs to be personally escorted off the premises. He has been feigning a coma for a week now just for a place to sleep. I don’t want to get involved in case things get violent.”
“How do you know he’s not in a coma?”
“I picked up his arm and dropped it over his face. His reflexes caught at the last moment.” She tapped her dip pen on her charts and poured over them for the hundredth time. “In addition to wincing when I rubbed his sternum to check for responsiveness, I know he is faking it.”
It was sad to witness the lengths one would endure to battle the harsh realities that waited for them outside the door to her hospital. She loathed to send him back out into that world, but she wanted the extra cot for someone who actually needed it.
“Fine,” Mazie sighed. “I’ll fetch an officer.”
“Don’t go by yourself.”
“Yes,Mother.”
Clara rubbed her suddenly aching temples as she watched her sister leave the house. Her siblings had been much too young to remember their mother when she’d passed, and she knew she could never truly fill that role as a parent. But they had no one else. Therefore, she tried her best.
Over the next half hour, she cooled fevers with damp cloths, administered medicine to those with rattling coughs, and even quarantined another patient with smallpox in the same room as the other.
Personally, she wanted this disease far away from her sisters. But her father had never turned away a patient, and neither would she. She made sure to be careful to prevent exposure, nonetheless.
As she returned to the main floor,The Starsought her attention from where it rested on top of a table in the entry room next to the other periodicals about Jack the Ripper.
She picked them up and sifted through each one, comparing the mild descriptions of each murder scene. Both were depicted as similar to an animal attack but precise, which was confirmed to be a man when the Ripper had written a letter to the authorities to confirm their suspicions.
But…who could possibly do this? And why?
A knock at the door startled her into releasing a muffled scream into her hand, and she dropped the periodicals at her feet in her fright.
Her hand flew to her racing heart. Her pulse pounded through her head. And then her body temperature dropped several degrees before little by little, the warmth returned to her frozen limbs, and her unwarranted fear slowly subsided.
A self-deprecating laugh escaped her lips at her jumpy behavior. The Ripper only seemed to strike at night, and currently, it was the middle of the afternoon. She really needed to stop feeding into the morbid excitement she often told her sisters to avoid.
The person on the other side of the door knocked again, urging the rest of her body to thaw from her previous fright.
After setting the papers back onto the table, she smoothed down her apron and once more found her poise as she crossed the room and pulled open the door.
Her jaw slackened as she first found a pair of shiny, pristine black shoes. Her gaze traveled up a long pair of legs, a black, fitted coat, and then settled on a sharp, angular face with a swoop of blond bangs escaping slicked-back hair and brushing against a tall, intimidating eyebrow.
