The Constantine Affliction (8 page)

Her hair. All the models had long hair, of course. She went to the sea chest at the foot of the bed, though it was a futile hope. The courtesan she’d examined hadn’t been wearing a wig, after all, the hairs had been sewn into her scalp—

And yet, in the depths of the chest, beneath the frills and bits of leather, she found a blonde wig, a pair of ridiculously oversized high-heeled shoes, and a corset large enough to fit a gorilla. How odd. Clearly none of this clothing was made to fit the clockwork women, so whom—

A door nearby opened with a crash, so Ellie hurriedly pulled the wig over her own head, trying not to think of who might have worn the false hair last. She checked herself in one of the mirrors, adjusting the wig and trying not to notice her own nude body, something she’d certainly never perused in a looking glass before. Ellie was not as
bountiful
in her figure as the Delilah model, but some of the sketches had shown slimmer models, so perhaps she could pass.

After snatching up a flowing silk scarf and draping it around her neck and to cover her breasts, she hurried onto the bed, trying to remember how the courtesan in her room had been arranged. Not
too
lewdly, fortunately—it had been almost demure, like a sleeping woman, and she should pretend to be the same. She stretched on the coverlet, hoping the bedclothes were laundered between sessions but knowing they almost certainly weren’t, and rested her head on the pillow. Eyes open, or eyes closed? She settled for a sleepy sort of half-lidded gaze which allowed her to keep an eye on the door. The clockwork women appeared to breathe, and even to move, in imitation of life—now she would have to imitate their imitation. At least the alchemical light on the dresser was relatively dim.

As she awaited capture, she wondered how much of this she could put in her story. Precious little if Cooper insisted on using “A Gentleman” as a byline. He’d sell more papers if he let it be known a woman had done the report, but he would also risk being denounced in Parliament. The story skirted the edge of decency anyway. Perhaps if she wrote it as a fiction…

Keep your head, Eleanor
, she scolded herself. In times of extreme stress her mind tended to spin and whirl, addressing everything except the problem at hand. When she’d gotten word of David’s death in India, all her thoughts had gone to practical matters: how to assist the family with funeral arrangements, the difficulty of conducting those arrangements when his remains were impossible to recover, making sure his mother and sisters had all the support they needed, and so on. It was weeks after the services before the grief finally caught up with her, a wave of sudden loss that had had made her knees buckle in a millinery shop. The shopgirl had assumed Ellie was swooning. Alas, no. She was entirely conscious the entire time. That was the problem. Those who fainted in the extremity of emotion were lucky. Ellie was awake and aware to experience everything.

The door opened, and Ellie willed herself to lay still. Her concubine hadn’t reacted until Ellie touched it, so there was no reason she herself should react to the sudden entry of a lantern-jawed man in an ill-fitting suit—“Crippler” Crippen.

Crippen looked behind the drapes, but paid no more attention to Ellie than he would to an ornamental vase or an ottoman. He crouched and looked under the bed, and Ellie tensed, lest he discover the men’s clothing and false mustache and make the connection. But apparently a wad of discarded clothes was no reason for alarm in this establishment, for he rose to his feet and turned toward the door.

Then he paused, and looked down at Ellie, and grunted.

She did her very best not to tense, or to flicker her half-lidded eyes. Crippen leaned over her, openly ogling—and why not? She was a machine; she had no dignity or modesty to protect. That was the
point
. Still, his gaze made her skin crawl, and it was so much worse when he extended a hand toward her bosom—

“Here, now, no time to play with the dollies,” said a gruff voice from the hallway. “I checked all the rooms on the other side, and the bloke’s nowhere to be found. Must have slipped past the mechanical dollymops before we got upstairs. The old man’s going to be furious, he is.”

“Who cares if some toff’s poking a rubber doll anyway?” Crippen prodded Ellie in the ribs sharply with his forefinger, as if by way of illustration, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying out.

“What, you don’t know? That man with the funny goggles isn’t just any old knight of the realm, Crippler. He’s got the Queen’s ear.”

“Ha. Just her ear, then?” Crippen said. “None of her other parts? Maybe he comes here because Vicky doesn’t satisfy—”

To Ellie’s surprise, the other man stalked over to Crippen and snarled. “Here now, don’t go disrespecting our sovereign. She’s our mum, ain’t she?”

“She’s got nine children, but I’m not one of them,” Crippen said. “I didn’t know you loved her so.”

“Just watch what you say,” the man said darkly, and stormed out of the room. Crippen chuckled and pulled the door closed after them, leaving Ellie alone.

She’d survived that, at least.

Now what?

***

“Charles!” Ellie bellowed, slamming open a door, and startling the man inside. He was in his fifties at least, pale as a fluffy cloud, and with a similarly amorphous body shape. He fell off the clockwork woman he’d been riding and landed on the other side of the bed, where he cowered. Ellie stomped on to the next room, brushing a length of blonde hair out of her face. She’d done the best she could, dress-wise, though the most modest thing she’d found to wear in the courtesan’s room was a satin evening gown better fitted to a ballroom than a boudoir, and there were a few small stains on the skirts she chose not to contemplate too deeply. Who knew the fantasies of men were so
elaborate
? The dress didn’t fit her terribly well, and she had entirely the wrong undergarments, but it would stay on her body, and any disarray would likely be overlooked given her obvious state of agitation.

She flung the next door open. “Charles, I know you’re here, you debased animal, you wretched philanderer—”

“Madam!” The man who’d admitted her to the establishment earlier rushed down the hall toward her, and Ellie had a twinge of fear that he would recognize her, but he saw what he was meant to see: a furious woman, looking for her husband.

“I wish to see my husband at
once
,” she said icily.

“Madam, I’m terribly sorry, no one by the name Charles is here this evening, I can assure you. If you’d like, I can make sure a message reaches him if he—”

“As if I would trust a message to someone employed in this… this den of iniquity!”

He winced. “Madam, please, I understand your distress, but you are quite correct—this is no appropriate place for a lady.”

Ellie made a great show of calming herself and controlling her emotions. “Yes. Fine. I’m sure you are quite correct. I should… Perhaps I should go.”

“Please, allow me to escort you out.” He took her gently by the arm and led her toward the stairs, which would take her to the first floor and, blessedly, the front door. “If I may ask, madam, how did you obtain entry to the premises?”

“I knocked at the door, and no one answered. I tried the knob, and it opened. I heard shouting upstairs—I gather there was some commotion here?”

He colored. “Yes, madam. One of our guests suffered a mishap. Nothing serious, I assure you.”

Ellie said nothing as they proceeded to the front door. The man touched the doorknob, then paused, and Ellie was afraid he’d recognized her after all. But he merely looked at the ceiling, and said in a low, solicitous voice, “I hope madam will forgive me for saying so, as it is hardly my place, but… men have certain needs. Surely it is better for your husband to sate those needs here, in a safe, clean establishment, where he will not suffer any… ill effects… than to seek satisfaction in less salubrious circumstances?”

“I will thank you to keep your opinions about my husband to yourself, sir,” Ellie replied in her best icy matron’s voice. The man sighed, nodded, and opened the door.

Ellie stepped out, walked in stately dignity toward the nearest alley, and, once she made sure no one was watching, slipped into the shadows and shrugged off the dress. She was wearing the suit Mr. James had provided her underneath, with the jacket tied around her waist by the sleeves. She shoved the dress into a heap of rubbish, along with the wig, though she hesitated over the last; it was good quality, and her hair
had
been cut terribly short. But better to erase any connection between herself and the brothel. She had not re-bound her breasts, and though the cut of the jacket was generous enough to keep her from looking too obviously feminine, she still worried the ruse was unconvincing. Her mustache would not reattach to her face, the adhesive of pine tar and alcohol having lost its efficacy. She pulled her hat low, looked down at her feet, and walked in as straight a line as she could manage in the direction of Mr. James’s shop so she could recover her own clothes. She would not tell her dear uncle of her dangerous experience, nor would she tell her editor—at least, not yet.

Ellie had gone in search of a bit of risqué fluff for the newspaper. In the process, she’d stumbled onto a mysterious link between the brothel’s apparent owner, the notorious criminal Abel Value, and Bertram Oswald, the Queen’s closest confidant. She could scarcely imagine a more unlikely pairing.

Now all she had to do was uncover the nature of that link. Despite her attempt to mimic a masculine stride, she found herself almost skipping as she walked. She should have been afraid, she supposed, but—oh, there was a story here. The spinster Eleanor Skyler might have been afraid… but the writer E. Skye loved nothing better than a good story.

Deductions

“A
map,” Abel Value said, and then puffed his cigar with an air of thoughftulness. Pimm wasn’t thrilled at spending the morning in this man’s office, especially given the beastly headache he’d cultivated the night before, but it was better than having the criminal in his own home again. Abel’s lair of the moment was a room above a cobbler’s shop—cramped and crammed with tottering heaps of paper, except for the surface of the large desk, which was peculiarly clean. That neatness made Pimm wonder what papers had been hurriedly swept aside and hidden in advance of his arrival. Big Ben loomed in one corner, seeming to fill about a third of the room’s available space.

“I don’t know,” Value mused. “Someone could do me harm with that information. It’s not the sort of thing one does in my line of work. Drawing a map for a man with connections to the police.”

“You sought my assistance,” Pimm said. “I cannot help you without adequate information. If I don’t know where your… female employees… ply their trade, how can I hope to prevent more of them from being harmed?”

Value grunted, reached behind him, and found a rolled-up map of London. “This is Stanford’s map,” he said. “You’ve seen it? Indispensable for men of industry, shows every railway line, and every street.” He rolled out the map, which filled most of the table, and Pimm leaned forward, his interest piqued despite himself. At first the map seemed just a riot of lines and letters, but the twisting ribbon of the Thames allowed him to orient himself. “The city looks so much more orderly pinned down on paper, doesn’t it, than it does when you’re out walking the streets? Still a messy place, though, streets thrown down every which way, the present built on top of the past, and the future just lying in wait for its own turn. I do love it so. I have business interests south of the river, of course, in Southwark. I also have a few girls working in the West End, late—it can get positively raucous around Leicester Square, you know.” Pimm, who’d stumbled out of the music halls there with a bellyful of gin to join the merry-making crowds on more than one occasion himself, merely nodded. “None of the women have been killed in those areas, though. The one’s who’ve died have all been north of the river.” He tapped the map, indicating a portion of that far-from-respectable region known as Alsatia. Pimm was surprised. He’d heard the area was much improved since the installation of a police station in the vicinity some years previous—but he supposed such improvements were relative.

Value fished a shilling, a penny, and a few florins from his trouser pocket and scattered them on the map, then began arranging them with deliberate care, leaning close to the intricately-detailed map to read the street names. “Molly.” He put down a shilling. “Letitia.” A florin, perhaps an inch farther away. “Juliet.” Another florin. “Abigail, we called her ‘sweet Abi,’ you’d think she was a choir girl until she put her hands down your trousers.” The penny for her. “And the latest, Theodosia, you saw her remains today.” The final florin.

“When did the first one die?” Pimm asked.

Value glanced at Ben. The big man said, “Twenty-seven days ago, m’Lord.”

“Mr. Value. Five murders in a month? Someone is trying to make a point, and most forcefully.”

“I can’t say I care what that point might be. I just want the killings stopped. Can you do that?”

“Have you posted men to keep watch in the area?”

“Of course. But the girls go off with men, find a nice alley, and… well, we can’t watch all of them, all the time.”

“Where have you placed your watchmen?”

“Near the sites of the killings, of course.”

“Near the site of the
last
killing?” Pimm said. “Understandable enough, but attempting to stop a crime that has already occurred is a poor substitute for attempting to stop one that will happen in the future. We should place watchmen where the killer will strike
next
.”

Value snorted. “And how do we know that? Are you an occultist, too, sir? A gypsy fortune teller?”

“Hardly. But the killer has been proceeding east along the river through Alsatia, traveling approximately half a mile with each murder. I suspect he’s moving along just far enough to avoid your ever-expanding sphere of watchmen, sir.”

Value leaned forward, frowning. “But how would he know where we’re watching?”