The whole bed came adrift under Jenna's back. She found herself a foggy stretch of time later floating in a grey haze while Noah very gently removed her clothing and eased her into a nightshirt, then replaced the blankets. Jenna slowly focused on the detective's haunted eyes. "Three years?" she finally whispered, her foggy mind catching up at last. "My God... Even if we find her... Ianira's little girls won't even know their own mother. And poor Ianira... God, three years of their lives, gone..."
"I know." Quiet, that voice, filled with regret and hushed pain. "Believe me, we wanted there to be some other way. There wasn't." The detective kept talking, voice low, giving Jenna a lifeline to cling to while her world swung in unpredictable circles all over again. "We've been in London for nearly two-and-a-half years, now. Waiting for you. I showed up at Spaldergate tonight, hoping to catch your attention, but... You know how that ended."
The shock, the misery of what Jenna had caused, was too much. She squeezed shut her eyes over hot tears. What else could I have done? Could any of us have done? They could've brought the girls through with Ianira, at least. But Noah'd been right to guess hit men would be sent through both gates after them. If they had brought the little girls through with Ianira, none of them would have escaped the Picadilly Hotel alive. There really hadn't been any other choice. Knowing that didn't help much, though, with Ianira missing somewhere in this immense city, in the hands of God alone knew what kind of madman, and those beautiful little girls downstairs, unable to remember the mother they'd waited three years to meet again and deprived of her once more by violence and death. None of them had expected Marcus and the children to have to stay down time in Denver long enough to catch up to the Britannia Gate.
The knowledge that none of them were safe, yet, after everything they'd already been through, was a pain too deep to express. So Jenna just lay there, staring blankly at the stained ceiling, waiting for the doctor to arrive while Noah slipped a hot water bottle under the blankets to warm her and brought a basin full of hot, steaming water that smelled strongly of disinfectant to wash the gash in her head. She was grateful that Noah Armstrong had managed, at least, to set up a hiding place in London, ready and waiting for her. Outside, lightning flared and thunder rumbled through the dismal streets of Spitalfields as rain poured from leaden skies.
Their safe haven was at least well hidden by grinding poverty. It was probably the last place on earth her father's hired killers would think to look for them. London's violent and poverty-stricken East End during the middle of the Ripper horror...
When Dr. Mindel finally arrived, he praised Noah's "nursing" and sutured up Jenna's scalp, then fed her some foul-tasting medicine that left her drifting in darkness. The final awareness to impinge on her exhausted mind was the sound of Marcus in the hallway, talking quietly with Noah, with the cold and granite sound of murder in his voice as they made plans to find his missing wife.
Then she drifted into pain-free oblivion and knew no more.
Malcolm tilted his pocketwatch toward the light of a gas lamp on the street corner, putting the time at half-past eight when he alighted from his hansom cab at the corner of Bow and Hart Streets. Clouds, shot through with lightning, swirled in thick drifts and eddies above the rooftops, muting the sounds of a boisterous Thursday evening with the imminent threat of more rain. Although they were past the official end of the annual London social season, cut short yearly when Parliament adjourned each August 12th, not everyone was fortunate enough to escape London immediately for their country homes or the rural estates of friends. Business matters had to be wound up and some gentlemen remained trapped in London year-round, particularly those of the aspiring middle classes, who had acquired the tastes and pursuits of the wealthy without the means of fleeing London at the end of the social season.
As a result, cultured male voices the length of Bow Street could be heard discussing theater and dinner plans, birds they planned to shoot on favorite grouse moors up in Scotland now that grouse season had opened, or the ladies who inhabited the country houses they would visit during the fall's leisurely hunting seasons, beginning with grouse, graduating to partridge and pheasant, and ending lastly—but perhaps most importantly—with the noble fox.
Also drifting through the damp night came the light laughter of women Malcolm could not actually see, whose carriages rattled invisibly past in the murk that was not quite rain but not quite fog, either. The jingle of harness and the sharp clopping of horse's hooves struck the lime-rock gravel bed of the street with a thick, thumping sound, carrying the hidden ladies off to bright dinner parties. Carefully orchestrated affairs, such dinners were designed to bring together eligible young ladies and equally eligible gentlemen for the deadly serious purpose of finding suitable spouses for the unmarried daughters of the house.
It being a Thursday evening, many such dinner parties throughout the ultra-fashionable west end would be followed by musical and other soirees, theater or the opera, and after that, the final, few elegant balls of the year, at which silk-clad young ladies still unmarried and desperate would swirl across dance floors and sip wine with smartly dressed young gentlemen until three in the morning, with a fair number of those young gentlemen equally desperate to find an heiress, even from a fortune made in trade, God help them all for having to stoop to such measures, just to bolster the finances of blue-blooded but cash-poor noble houses.
Above the jingle of harness as carriages rattled past, filtering through the sounds of gay laughter and merrymaking, came other, more plaintive cries, the calls of flower girls and eel-pie vendors hawking their wares to the genteel folk who frequented this fashionable district on such evenings. Malcolm could just make out one such girl, stationed beneath the nearest street lamp where she would be most visible in the drizzle and murk. She held a heavy tray of carnations and pinks suspended from cords around her neck. Her dress, damp in patches from the raw night, was made of cheap, dark cotton, much mended and several years out of fashion. The toes of the shoes peeping out from beneath her skirts had been cut open to accommodate the growth of her feet.
As Malcolm watched, three gentlemen emerged from the darkness and paused briefly to purchase boutonnieres for their lapels. They strolled on toward Malcolm, nodding and smiling as they passed, locked deep in conversation about the best methods of cubbing the young foxes and adolescent fox hounds once cub season opened. Malcolm nodded in return, wishing them a pleasant, "Good evening" as they crossed Bow Street and moved past the looming edifice of the Royal Opera House down Hart Street in the direction of Covent Garden Theater.
Then he was alone again on the pavement, turning over in his mind everything the Spaldergate staff had learned about Mr. Benny Catlin's disappearance. Foul play was now the major fear consuming everyone at Spaldergate. Catlin's abandoned luggage, the corpse in Catlin's hotel room, and the wounded Time Tours carriage driver had led police constables straight to Spaldergate House, asking about the body at the Picadilly Hotel and a second grisly corpse found outside the Royal Opera. The police, comparing witness descriptions, had concluded that the Picadilly Hotel shooting and the Opera House shooting had been committed by the same desperate individual.
The Time Tours driver injured at the Piccadilly Hotel had, thank God, arrived at the gatehouse unconscious but still alive, driven by one of the gatehouse's footmen dispatched to fetch him back. Catlin's luggage had been impounded, but the footman had managed to secure Catlin's bloodstained gloves from the room before police could arrive, giving the Spaldergate staff at least some chance of tracing Catlin with bloodhounds. Weak from shock and blood loss, the wounded driver had barely been alive by the time he'd been rushed downstairs to surgery.