The Diabolical Miss Hyde Page 4

  But Eliza could not make a confidante of Molly, no matter how tempting. She could have no friends. If she were discovered—if that intolerable Captain Lafayette of the Royal had his way—her servants would suffer along with her.

  “Shall I help you undress?”

  “That won’t be necessary . . .” She sighed at Molly’s expression. Keeping up appearances was important. But so very tiresome. “Very well. Thank you.”

  She unlaced her boots and eased them off with a sigh, wriggling her pinched toes in the fire’s warmth. She fidgeted as Molly helped her with her gown, unclipping the dove-gray fabric and stiffened corset, and soon she stood in only her linen chemise, pale hair tumbling around her face.

  She peered at herself in the polished dressing table mirror. Her cheeks flushed pink, her hair hung damp. Shadows gleamed sickly beneath eyes aglow with fever. Her stomach ached as if she’d not eaten for days. And an ugly pressure swelled in her blood, beneath her skin, in the secret places between her legs. She wanted, hungered, thirsted for . . . satisfaction. Completion. A bold kind of . . . release, something urgent she didn’t fully understand.

  Escape . . .

  Molly reached for the hairbrush, but Eliza tossed her head impatiently. “I can do it meself,” she snapped, and flushed. “I mean, that’s all for tonight, Molly,” she amended hastily. “I shan’t need you again. Good night.”

  The girl’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded. “Good night, Doctor.”

  As soon as the door clicked shut, Eliza sprang to her feet. Turned the key in the lock, click-clack! and tossed it onto the bed, out of reach of prying fingers. Ran to the fireplace, grabbed the left-hand sconce, and yanked it downwards on its secret hinge.

  Clunk! Hot wax spilled over the back of her hand. She didn’t care. Thirst tore into her belly. The sharp-clawed beast had to be sated. Come on, come on . . .

  Agonizingly slowly, the section of wall beside the wardrobe swung outwards. Silently, without a whisper or a creak. She kept it oiled for that purpose. A dark passageway loomed. Her secret cabinet.

  Before the door had even fully opened, she dived in. On her knees, shaking, fumbling the little cupboard door aside. Yearning, sweating, trembling with anticipation yet gripped by terrible fear that she’d miscalculated, there’d be nothing inside . . .

  There it sat. Mr. Finch’s black glass flask, gleaming evilly in firelight. Bulbous at the bottom, narrow neck, flaring at the mouth. It seemed to snigger like a living creature, hungry for mischief.

  Yes. Her mouth watered, and her eyes drifted closed. She gripped the flask’s warm neck—always warm, this bubbling hellbrew, a vile heat of its own—and flicked off the cork. Pop! Tiny drops spattered, and that smell drifted out, intoxicating like opium, delicious like bitter chocolate, velvety and delectable and oh, so alluring . . .

  A desperate feather of reason tickled the back of her neck. Startled, she opened her eyes.

  The long mirror on the cabinet wall reflected her, stark and pale in her white chemise. Her reddened eyes were demented. She breathed deep, shuddering, sweating, the fever sprinting madly under her skin, a dread curse she couldn’t escape.

  She shouldn’t. She mustn’t.

  But she had to.

  She squeezed her eyes shut against the fire’s glare and tipped the flask to her lips.

  Molten gold, rolling down her throat. Thick salt stung her tongue, coated the inside of her mouth, sickening yet delicious. Thirst ripped her raw, and she gulped, mouthful on mouthful . . .

  Fire erupted in her guts, sweeter than any caress. She groaned in pure abandon. Spreading outwards through her belly, tingling along her limbs, a shivering shock wave of delight . . .

  Agony, hacking every nerve ragged. Muscles contorting, bones twisting, red mist descending like poison, it’s torture, it’s being dragged apart on the rack in some rat-infested Tower chamber, beyond endurance, no one can take this, no one. A scream crawls up her throat, she’s yelling, I’m yelling, she’s clawing at her face but it’s my face, my hands, my nails catching in her hair. We throw our head back, arching our spine, joints grating, our muscles shudder and squeal and thrash one final time . . .

  Suddenly, the pain falls silent. The red mist dissolves . . . and in the mirror, dark eyes flash, wicked and alive with intent.

  Sharp intelligent face, crooked seducer’s smile, a body with lush, dangerous curves. Long curly hair tumbles over the white chemise, no longer fine and blond but dark, lustrous mahogany.

  And here I stand.

  THE ART AND SCIENCE OF EVIL

  I LET OUT A LAUGH, RICH AND RAUCOUS, AND I HAVE TO cover my mouth or they’ll hear me. Wouldn’t do to make a fuss.

  Then again? To hell with it. My blood’s up. The rage burns like venom in my belly. My muscles are strong, my body’s alive and hungry and full of fire.

  Lizzie’s out, my friends. And she intends to make the most of it.

  I unhook Eliza’s spectacles—my eyes is just fine, thank you—and toss ’em away. The empty flask is still in my hand, and I fling it aside. It hits the floor and smashes, but no matter. Eliza can clean it up later. This elixir lasts only a few hours. No time to lose. I flick the cabinet lamp on—fancy electric lights, this house of ours—and head for the wardrobe.

  My wardrobe, that is.

  I hang my clothes in here, behind the locked secret door where the servants won’t see. Eliza can keep her drab gray doctor’s frocks, her high collars and chest-flattening stays. Me? I like to stand out. I flick through my dresses, frowning. The red, the scarlet, the crimson, the ruby, the cherry, the claret, or the rose?

  I settle on the cherry, a flounced satin thing with a deep lacy neckline, and pull on my corset, the one that hooks in front and shows off my womanly advantages. Oop, suck it in, shove ’em up there, yep, that’s it. I snap the last hook, pull on the dress, petticoats ’n’ all—I don’t go for no stupid crinolines, that’s one thing Eliza and me has in common—and button it up.

  That’s better. I wiggle my toes into silky black stockings and tie them at the top with a lacy pair of garters. Some boots—shiny dancing ones, that is, with pointy toes and buckles and proper heels that make me tall, not the clunky sensible things she wears—and I’m done.

  I check myself in the mirror and grin my saucy grin, tilting my half-bared shoulders. I say, Miss Lizzie, you’re a fine-looking woman. I clip on my favorite necklace, a beaded jet choker, and pin my hair up loose under a little red hat. None o’ that actress face paint for me. Just ask the flash gents down at Seven Dials, and they’ll tell you, so they will. I’m far too classy for that.

  Sweet. I shove a fistful of coins in the secret pocket deep in my skirt and toss a long black cloak around me. Wouldn’t do to be seen around here, after all, not in Eliza’s snotty neighborhood where the crushers strut by every hour and chase away anyone who don’t look rich enough to breathe their air.

  Last of all—best of all—I slide open a drawer and pull out my little darling.

  She sparkles in the firelight, four inches of shiny stiletto steel on a blackwood handle. Hello, sweet sister. I give her a kiss, and she’s cold on my lips. My breath frosts on the metal for a moment, then vanishes like a ghost.

  I hike my skirt above one knee and snap her into my garter. Sleep now, sister. Won’t be long.

  And down the dusty back stairs like the red satin harpy of vengeance I prowl.

  It’s cold outside, the late winter night closing in, and I wrap the cloak tighter and walk on. Down the back alley, where rats lurk in the nightman’s wagon tracks, and out onto Southampton Row. Moonlight drenches the smoky sky with blood, and mist drifts, a yellowing specter that haunts the blue-glowing electric lampposts and iron fences.

  A cold finger trails down my spine. I whirl, in case anyone’s following me . . . but ain’t no one there. Just shadows.

  It takes me a good quarter hour to walk to New Oxford Street. Carriages and hansoms rattle by, electrics flickering purple and green in the night with the stink
of thunder and hot iron. Costermongers yell their wares—sweet strawberries, ripe!—and expensive whores strut like duchesses in fine gowns and feathered hats. Beggars of all ages weep, bleed, shake with faked palsy. Children ramble and scatter, selling matches, picking pockets, dancing like hurdy-gurdy monkeys under spinning carriage wheels.

  Square-rigged gents in fine coats and gloves stroll in pairs and threes, flicking their canes and tipping their lids to ladies. Unless you’re like me and have an eye for these things? Ain’t no telling who’s quality and who’s the swell mob, stalking through the crowd to relieve ’em of their purses and jewels and fancy tie-pins.

  On a corner, an Irish ballad-chanter sells his latest tale of woe, scraps of paper with the words printed on jabbed onto his pointed stick. “Gold watch, she picked from his po-cket, and shyly placed into my hand . . .” He tips his hat to me as he sings. “The hair hung down on her shou-l-der . . . tied up with a black velvet band . . .”

  Aye. You fell for a pair of pretty diamond eyes, and got yourself transported to the colonies for seven years. Such is life.

  I duck along a narrow street beside a broken churchyard wall, where crumbling gravestones loom and the shadows reek and thicken with weird. Down a twisting alley, beneath an overhanging doorway, and suddenly I’ve left civilization behind and I’m deep in the Holy Land.

  People teem, filthy dresses and torn coats, feet bare on the freezing cobbles. Blank eyes slide over me and away. In a shitty gutter, two dirty children gnaw on the same bone. A skinny girl soaked in gin burps loudly in my ear and hitches up ankle-cut skirts to show me her goat’s feet.

  Yells and drunken laughter chime through the night. All kinds of accents; Irishmen, to be sure—it’s where the name Holy Land came from—and these days they can hang your sorry carcass for an Ave Maria but it still ain’t no crime to be Irish. Scots accents, too, Welshmen and Geordies and guttural Rom, Chinamen and Turks and the dense dialects of navvies and coal diggers.

  Everyone comes to London, desperate for a better life, and when they get here there’s no work and no food and cruel monstrous winter is always on its way, the hungry chill that never quite leaves your bones again, no matter how much rotgut gin you choke down your throat.

  I walk on, and the streets get darker. Shadows and flame flicker, a single taper in a window. Guttering blue and yellow lights, glimmering from some drunken Romany conjurer’s fire tricks. The stink is grotesque, crawling under my clothes to lick me like a hungry dog at a corpse.

  The crowded maze of the rookery is even more crowded now. When the slum-clearers tore down a swath of tenements to build New Oxford Street, they didn’t find this grubby lot aught else to live in. They just moved ’em on, jammed ’em tighter into what remained. Now they’re five and six and ten to a room down here, where makeshift plank bridges lead from window to window, dank tunnels crawl beneath the streets, hidden doors lead into flash houses and slop houses and low lodging houses, where you pay a penny to scrounge a few hours’ sleep on the floor or a shared bug-infested bed in a freezing airless shithole with no light. And in monstrous factories and power stations, workers inhale deadly cotton fibers, and dip matches in jaw-rotting poison, and shovel coal into hungry generators until they die.

  And all in a world where they can hang you for stealing tuppence, and the price of bread’s kept artificially high so the rich can get richer. Things matter more than people. It’s enough to make you sympathize with them Frenchies chopping off their king’s head and dancing around his bleeding corpse.

  Heh. Nosy prickfaces like that idiot Temple should write about this in their fool pamphlets. Except, poor people dying slowly don’t sell no papers. Never did. Never will.

  I sidestep a wooden sewer trap, what looks like a sturdy cover only it’s not. Step on that, and you’ll fall to your death in a stinking pit. Traps like these—spring-loaded spikes, deadfalls, trip wires—are everywhere. If the crushers chase you in here, they might never come out. The Royal’s fancy Enforcers, with their dumb clockwork justice? They don’t dare even come here.

  So everyone piles in, freaks and fortune-tellers, the fey and the fell, idiots and opium-eaters and them what’s touched in the head by the weird. Some tell of a secret den called the Rats’ Castle, a magical underground place where strange folk can go. Pish, says I. If it’s real, I ain’t never found it. Ain’t no true fairy folk left, that’s what I reckon, leastaways not in London. Years of witch-finders, greedy bounty-hunters, and plain bloody-fingered murder finished ’em off or drove ’em into hiding long ago.

  But plenty of people can still claim fairy ancestors. If you’ve magic in your blood? The rookeries are where you hide. It’s a laughing lunatic’s idea of hell.

  I cross Broad Street, where outside the bright-lit gin palace, an impromptu street fair is going on, a giggling riot of color. The crowd is a dirty rainbow, mismatched duds snatched from washing lines and pawnshops, the cast-off finery of dandies and high-born ladies. A mad fiddler in a crooked green top hat plays a raucous reel, competing with a bloke on a box who’s hollering fine treasons about voting and workers’ rights and how them bloodsuckers in the Commons don’t stand for nobody nowhere.

  “God save the Queen!” I yell, and a few people cheer. It ain’t Her Majesty they’ve got a quarrel with.

  Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers roam, and acrobats flip and tumble on long whippy limbs. A dwarf with a scaly face frightens passers-by for a penny with his cage of freaks. A pair of sinister carnies work an erotic shadow-play show, string puppets in silhouette behind a sheet doing all manner of dirt. On the corner, cheering folk circle around a cock-fight, and the stupid birds squawk and shed bloody feathers in clouds.

  A change from the drab streets above, where everything’s gray or black or cat-shit brown, and people toff about with noses held high. Here in hell, at least we know how to have a good time.

  I shoulder through the smelly mass, heading for the Cockatrice public house. Ahead, a pregnant Irish girl dances drunk in the gutter, singing about Molly Malone and her wheelbarrow. “In Dublin’s fair cityy . . . where the girls are so prettyy . . .” I join in the chorus. “Cockles . . . and mussels . . . alive, alive-OH!” She grins at me, sharp-toothed. Her skirts are rucked up above her bare ankles, and a long tail like a rat’s curls from under the hem.

  A boy runs up to me, a dirty cap pulled down between his tiny sharp horns. He tosses blue fireballs from hand to hand, making them dance. “Penny for the flame, miss?”

  I toss him tuppence. He scrambles in the shit for it, and I kick aside his accomplices trying to pick my pocket while he’s distracted me and walk on.

  In the shadow of the brewery’s red-brick tower, a carved emblem of a winged dragon with a rooster’s head crows down at me from a crooked stone lintel. I push the cracked door open and step into a blast of heat, stale breath, and liquor. Sawdust crunches under my boots. The fug rolls at eye level, cigar smoke and hashish and blacker dreams.

  I spy a bloke I recognize at the bar, so I elbow my way over, kicking some lushington who gropes my behind and pushing away a drunken dolly who thinks I’m some fine Sapphic gentlewoman looking for a bit o’ rough.

  No thanks, sweetheart. Only one bit o’ rough interests Lizzie tonight, and his name is Billy fucking Beane.

  The Cockatrice is what they call a flash house, a place where criminals of all kinds congregate. Cracksmen, magsmen, coiners and fakers, card sharps and forgers, snakesmen and canaries and fencers of stolen goods. They all come here to swap information, soak their sorry arses in gin, and show off, to whatever girl or boy or blue-spotted sheep takes their fancy.

  Sly little baby-raping pimps, too, like Billy the Bastard Beane, not-guilty-your-honor-if-I-say-so-meself and the new fuck-the-coppers king of Seven Dials, at least for a few hours. Hang about here long enough, I’ll bet my garters you’ll see Billy here tonight, deep in his cups, drinking on his newfound fame while it lasts.

  I squeeze up to the bar, and a wiry, sharp-eyed cove with
a lurid purple coat and tangled black hair shoves a pewter cup into my hand and splashes it with gin. “Care for a tipple, madam?”

  “Don’t mind if I do, Johnny.” I slap my cup against his, and gulp. Gritty fire spills down my throat and explodes, and holy Jesus, I just came alive. Eliza ain’t one for the demon liquor, and she won’t thank me in the morning, but sweet lord, Miss Lizzie likes a drink.

  I clunk the cup down and burp, and my handsome gent pours me some more.

  “Lizzie, my darlin’, where have you been these dark and lonely weeks?” His words slur, and he flops a long arm around my shoulders and tosses me a glocky grin. Wild Johnny—so called because he raises hell—Johnny might act the fool, but his crooked eyes are quick, and like usual, he ain’t near as plastered as he makes out. “When will you abandon your licentious ways and marry me?”

  I wipe my mouth, artfully shrugging his arm off. Our Johnny’s what country folk call fey, which is to say he’s touched a bit odd. His eyes are a little too far apart, and his sharp-nailed fingers wrap further round that cup than they’ve any right to, and he smells uncanny sweet, of laudanum and rose petals over warm male skin. “You already got yourself a dolly, John.”

  He don’t seem discouraged. “Yes, it is true,” he pronounces dramatically, waving his cup in the air. “I am affy-onced, as they say on the Continent. Woe is me, my innocent heart caged like a dove by a vertible . . . a veritable shrew.”

  I wink along the bar at the shrew in question. Jemima Half-Cut, Johnny’s squeeze, a gangly fifteen-year-old in a buttoned blue off-the-shoulder dress and shawl. So called because she usually is, though it beats me why a tart rolling in gin should be a matter for remark around here.