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CHAPTER 1
London: Friday, June 22nd 1590
It was no use. Clio Thornton had tried squinting, closing one eye, and glaring at the book lying open on the desk in front of her, but nothing made it look any better. The two rows of columns refused to add up to the same thing, or even anything, besides nothing. She was broke.
The squealing of door hinges interrupted her thoughts and she just had time to shove the ledger under her desk before a woman in a silver gown rushed into the room.
"Today is the day," the woman trilled. Her steps were being dogged by a monkey in a dark blue velvet doublet with two gold medals pinned to it. "Don't you dare say that word to me, Clio Thornton, that word you are always saying: impossible. I am completely sure. I, Princess Erika, have seen the portents in the bottom of the water jug."
Princess Erika set the jug down firmly in the middle of Clio's desk.
"Look for yourself," she offered, and Clio leaned forward. The monkey, having taken up a post on Clio's shoulder, looked also.
"It's cracked," Clio said. The monkey nodded.
Princess Erika, whose nation of sovereignty no one — including the princess — seemed to know, drew herself up to her full height and demanded, "Clio, what am I going to do with you? You call that cracked? That is a sign. A great sign. A very, very great sign. Today, this very morning, fortune comes knocking."
Despite the state of her finances, Clio received this news with great calm. During the two years that they had been neighbors, Princess Erika's prophesies had become legendary throughout London, because whatever she predicted could be counted on with certainty never to occur. In her career as a seer, Princess Erika had only once made a correct prediction, and that only by accident. Her reliability was held in great esteem by many — travelers had begun to frequent her rooms to receive her solemn assurance that they would die on their next voyage, and merchants sought her recommendations on which ventures she guaranteed to fail. But Princess Erika longed, more than anything, to be a true prophet, and she continued singing out her predictions, dauntless in the belief that if she just found the correct vessel for her portents, all would come out right.
This morning she had returned to the water jug, which explained her enthusiasm. Once, two years earlier, Princess Erika had looked in her water jug and correctly predicted that the heavens would shower diamonds over London. But since then — barring a wild prophesy about Clio's future, which was more poetic than predictive — the jug had remained silent. Despite its past success, Clio was not optimistic about its results.
Which was why, when at that moment there was a knock on the main door of the house, she was so surprised that she nearly fell out of her chair, sending the ledger thumping to the ground and disturbing the monkey who had settled in for a nap.
For an instant, all time seemed to stand still and the two women just stared at one another in euphoric disbelief. Then Snug, a former, highly unsuccessful, liberator of others' possessions, and now the head steward- gardener-cook-tinkerer-majordomo-housekeeper-fix-anything-man of Clio's household, showed their guest into the study.
Many people had come to Clio for help during the years she had lived in London, but none of them appeared less like a harbinger of good fortune than the dark-haired boy who now entered. He looked as though he were not merely unfortunate but almost anti-fortunate, as if he had not smiled in years and had no plans to do so anytime soon.
Above all, he looked hungry. Without waiting for him to speak, Clio rose and began to move quickly in the direction of the kitchen. But she had not taken three steps when she felt the boy at her side, tugging insistently on her arm. Clio remembered reading about boys that if you showed weakness once, they would never respect you. Although this boy was as tall as she was, he was only half her age, which Clio felt gave her the clear upper hand, and she determined not to go anywhere with him until he yielded to her superior authority and ate something. But to everything she suggested — a piece of bread, a bowl of jam, even a little meat pie (which Toast, the blue- velvet-clad monkey, indicated he would be willing to consume by snapping his fingers and pirouetting) — the boy simply shook his head and pulled harder at the fabric of her gown.
It did not take Clio's years of experience with people in trouble to realize that the boy was either unable or unwilling to speak. And that unless she went wherever he wanted to drag her, he was not going to leave off tormenting her sleeve until every thread on it gave way, which would not be long given that the gown was almost as old as the boy. With a sigh she persuaded him to come into the kitchen just long enough for her to stuff two meat pies into a cloth bag, thrust it into the boy's hand, and set out at a run behind him, trailed by Toast.
The crowds grew thicker as they progressed down Knightrider Street, changing from dark-coated men of business to rowdier soldiers and sailors as they crossed Water Lane. Several people stopped to stare at the strange procession of boy-woman-monkey, but Clio did not notice, her mind completely taken up with wondering what this mad dash might mean. As they approached Alsatia — the quarter of London referred to by the respectable as Devil's Keep, and by its denizens as Little Eden in honor of the number of houses of pleasure located there — she had the sudden, sickening thought that perhaps the boy was one of Captain Black's minions, sent to waylay her. Just then the boy turned down an alley and stopped in a bare courtyard that fronted a tiny building, so small it looked like a child's play house. He stood next to the door, trembling, as if afraid to enter.
"You keep our visitor company out here," Clio instructed Toast, whose eyes never left the bag of meat pies in the boy's hand. Assured that her young charge was going to be closely watched, Clio pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Her stomach rose into her throat and she had to steady herself against the cupboard next to the door as the sight and the stench hit her like an invisible punch. A hundred hands stretched out toward her, a hundred eyes stared unblinkingly at her above red-gash mouths. A severed ear lay on the table in front of her, next to a nose, a golden braid, and what looked like it could have been a face. There were only empty sockets where the eyes should have been, and a large swath of beige matter showed where the ribbon hair had yet to be sewn on.
The dolls hung in rows along three walls of the room, the hooks in the backs of their gowns making them lean forward, leering, grasping, casting crazy shadows across the planked floor, but it was not these that made her knees sway and the knot in her stomach tighten. Beneath a window against the far wall there was a mattress. And on the mattress, dangerously still, lay a girl.
Clio felt a spasm of sadness and horror when she registered that the girl was dead, and then stopped feeling anything at all as her mind took over. This was not the first mysterious death she had been involved in — her solution to the mystery of Ellis Wittington's drowning two years earlier and her role in catching the notorious Butcher of Buckinghamshire that past April had earned her the two medals from the queen, which Toast now wore on his doublet — and she knew what to expect, but she never got over how clear her thoughts became in the face of tragedy. Unnatural girl, thrives on the misery of others, she heard her grandmother's disapproving voice say in her head. She pushed it aside and turned back to the task at hand.
Clio looked around the room, memorizing it. She noted the dolls, arranged by dress color, then the small statue of a saint at the foot of the bed, the worn-through boots, the bug-infested straw mattress covered with a patterned piece of fabric — no doubt to brighten the room — and the bouquet of flowers on the window sill, undoubtedly put there with the same end. She noted the two sets of muddy footprints on the floor, one made by the sort of small feet Clio had always longed to have and appearing to correspond with the boots next to the mattress, the other set larger but following the same path from the door to the bed.
Finally, when she had taken everything in and her nose had adjusted to the smell of death enough to keep from gagging, Clio crossed the floor and stood next to the body. Deep green bracelets of bruises circled the girl's wrists, but no other wounds were immediately apparent. Bending, Clio brushed aside the plait of dark hair that covered the girl's face.
She recoiled. Huge, glittering eyes stared out at Clio with an expression of acute terror and the dead girl's mouth gaped open in a silent scream. No. Clio could almost see the words forming the syllables. No, don't please no, NO.
Clio tried to close her own eyes but she could not. She could not free her gaze from the lifeless one of the corpse, and as she looked, she felt a prickling fear crawl over her. It started at her feet and swam slowly up, until her entire body was tingling. She heard a scream in her ears, in her head, and felt a line of clammy perspiration form down her back. Her heart pounded as she struggled to swallow, but she could hear it over the screams.
There was a noise behind her. The cupboard! She had not looked inside the cupboard, and he had been hiding there. The girl's face, her scream, had been a warning. There was something coming for Clio. She heard a board creak. The hairs on her arms stood up. She could smell his sweat as he moved up behind her. Another board creaked.
She wrenched her eyes from the girl's and swung around. A sound rose in her throat, then stopped. From every wall the dolls leered at her, grinning ghoulishly. But there was no one else in the room. She was alone. The door to the cupboard was closed. Her heart thudded. She had imagined the whole thing, there had not been anyone there. She was alone. Her heart slowed. Alone. She swallowed hard and turned back to the bed.
That was when she really knew terror. The hideous death mask of moments before had vanished. The girl was lying on her back peacefully. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were pressed together, and almost curved into a smile. She was still dead, and there were still bruises on her wrists, but there was no sign of the horror Clio had seen in her face.
Clio forced herself to breathe to keep from screaming. Breathe, think, breathe. It was a trick of the light. An illusion. It was nothing, a fake — it had looked so real — there was a logical explanation for it. There was, damn it — but the fear, the fear had been real. It had been the girl's fear, locked somehow in the air of the airless room. She knew it, the fear of someone about to die.
It had looked so bloody real.
Clio shook her head, shaking away the feeling that she was lying to herself. She had never had a premonition in her life, she did not even believe in them, but she knew with unwavering certainty that something horrible had happened in this place. She concentrated on focusing her thoughts, on pressing the chilling vision down into the darkest corner of her mind. It had been so real. She would consider it later, rationally, logically, objectively. Right now she had work to do. She still had no idea of how the girl had died, she reminded herself, let alone who she was. Work to do. Seizing on this, Clio moved her eyes from the serene face. Behind the girl's head, wedged in the corner between the mattress and the wall, was what appeared to be a dark blue silk kerchief, similar to one Clio had at home, its fine fabric looking startlingly out of place in the humble room. Clio reached across the dead girl's body to finger it —
And froze.
What stunned her was not so much what she saw, but how unsurprised she felt seeing it. It was as if she had known — had known even as she mistook shadows on the girl's face for a scream — what she would find. She blinked twice, just to be sure, but this time there could be no trick of light. Just at the point where the woman's neck met her collarbone, on the smoothest, purest part of her neck, were two dark brown dots, slightly larger than pin pricks, but much, much more deadly.
Although Clio had never seen anything like them, she knew instantly what they meant. The Vampire of London was back.
"Impossible," Clio whispered to herself. She had been in Nottingham looking for the missing daughter of a baronet when the vampire first made his appearance three years earlier, but she remembered the stories and had the news sheets about his crimes in her files. Twenty-four London women died that summer at the vampire's hands, and scores of others perished indirectly by being forced to sleep with their shutters closed in airless rooms during the long, hot months. Families bankrupted themselves buying mirrors when the belief that a vampire could not bear to see his reflection gained popularity, and herbologists got rich selling "secret essences" guaranteed to be anathema to demons when applied to the neck. The behavior of vampires past was closely analyzed by the leading lights of Oxford and Cambridge for clues as to his method of selecting his victims, but the London fiend's preferences remained a mystery. He seemed to strike indiscriminately, preying on women of all complexions and social classes. Their only common denominator was that they were all young and smallish in stature. The inanimate figure lying on the bed in front of Clio was both young and diminutive, so it was not any lack in the victim that had made Clio whisper impossible. Nor was it because she had never really credited that the vampire existed. It was quite simply because the Vampire of London was dead.
Or supposed to be. He had been killed three years earlier, shot down in broad daylight as he tried to escape pursuit by stealing a boat and making off down the Thames. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw the first shot go into his thigh, saw him waver, and then watched as the second shot went directly into his heart. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw him look toward his assassin with surprise, saw him stretch his throat to yell, "You'll be sorry Dearbourn," and saw him fall backward into the swirling rapids of the Thames at the base of London Bridge. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens saw the body pelted against the strong supports of the bridge once, twice, three times, until it was sucked into the powerful vortex of the river and disappeared entirely. No one had ever survived a fall that close to the bridge's supports — even the most seasoned boatmen avoided the rapids at all cost — but the river was dredged religiously anyway, for three months, without a sign of the vampire's body. Two hundred Upstanding Citizens swore that the vampire was dead and the entire city of London rejoiced.
But Clio knew something that the Upstanding Citizens did not know, a detail that had been kept secret by the special commission the queen dispatched to look into the public menace. She knew that next to each corpse had been found a pure, white gardenia. And now, looking at the windowsill next to the mattress on which the dead girl lay, Clio saw what she had failed to see before. There was not a bouquet of flowers there. There was a flower. A white gardenia.
Two hundred Upstanding Citizens, Clio thought grimly, were wrong.
Clio, rational and unafraid and not at all having trouble keeping her breathing steady, rose from the bed and crossed the floor. She looked more closely at the larger set of footprints now. The previous night's short rain had been the first London had seen in over two weeks, which meant that both the girl's muddy footprints and those Clio tentatively assigned to the vampire had been made last night, between an hour before midnight when the rain started, and three hours afterward, by which time the ground would have been dry. Clio filed these observations away clinically, as if she had never seen a dead woman scream, and was about to leave when her eye fell again on the cupboard.
The door was not quite closed. It had been closed — hadn't it? — when she looked before, but now it hung open, just a crack, just enough for someone to be watching her, just enoug —
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lady Killer"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Michele Jaffe.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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