The Ripper Affair

Chapter Twenty-Nine A Babe In Woods

The saying Foul as Limhoss breath was marvellous apt. Whitchapel had its own stench, and Limhoss no Scab, but in Archibald Clare’s considered judgment there were few places in Londinium to outdo the latter in matters of fragrance. Perhaps it was the Basin, or maybe the mariners who congregated in its dens and dosses, the tar of the ropes or the tight-packed press of alien flesh–for the Chinois population of the Isle was concentrated here, and their suffusion of odours was foreign as well as rank.

Ginger and spices, the starch of their rice and boiling of their odd oils, different fish than an Englene would eat, the dry rough note of raw silk, and an acrid smoke enfolded them. Even the fog was a different shade here, its billows assuming the shapes of their odd writing, their crouching, painted charter stones near the doors alive with weak saffron light so they could practise their native arts of minor charming without the risk of nasty side-consequences.

Aberline knocked twice at a collection of splinters masquerading as a door, which shivered and opened immediately. Perhaps he was expected, or perhaps, Clare thought as he ducked to pass through the tiny opening, anyone was expected after dark.

Down a close, reeking passageway and into a womblike dimness, the light turned red by the paper lampshades it passed through, and Clare realised it was a poppy den.

Long shapes reclined on bunks built into the wall, giving a rather nautical flavour to the room. A brown fug rose from winking scarlet eyes as Morpheus’s chosen flower carried its devotees into fantastic languor. The eyes were the bowls of the pipes, a beast with a thousand gazes.

“Your methods are indeed unusual,” he remarked, breaking the hush. Coughs rose in protest, weakly; he had not adjusted his tone for the confined quarters.

The bent, blue-garbed Chinoise who had bobbed ahead of them into the room made a shush sound, but not very loudly. Clare could not quite decide what age the crooked stick of a woman had attained, for her thinning hair was still lacquer-black–as were the few teeth she still possessed–and the skin of her face had drawn tight. She scuffed along in embroidered slippers, threading through those on the floor gathered around the long poppy-pipes, beckoning them along and bowing repeatedly to Aberline, who appeared a giant in a toy shop next to her.

“Nodders all,” Philip Pico muttered behind Clare. “Ripe for rolling.”

“Not here,” Aberline whispered. “Do be a good sport, little lad.”

Of course, the prickly little russet took offence. “I’m no nodder. Not with the filthy Chin—”

“Silence is good for your health.” Aberline cut him off, and Clare observed him handing the Chinoise a handful of coins. He received a key and a packet in return, and she pointed them up a rickety staircase.

“Surely there are more wholesome dens than this.” Clare found himself walking stiffly, avoiding the chance of the surfaces of this place brushing against his clothes.

“But here, dear sir, I am certain we will not be overheard.”

Is that a danger? “Are we plotting, then?”

“We are engaging in a method, Clare. Have you ever ridden the dragon?”

Philip caught at Clare’s arm. “She won’t like this, sir.”

Was it Annoyance Clare felt? He shelved it, stepping to avoid a limp hand lain along the floor. “It is a good thing she is not about, then. And really, this is no place for a lady.”

A slight cough from Aberline, but thankfully, the man restrained himself. He murmured to the Chinoise crone in what seemed a dialect of their strange tonal language, and she retreated past them, her loose trousers under a long, high-collared shirt fluttering forlornly. She gave Clare a wide obsequious smile, blackened stumps on display, and was gone into the red-drenched gloom below.

The heavy iron key fit a door in a high narrow hallway, which led into an equally high but not very spacious room. Still, it was quiet, the soughing of Londinium outside merely a suggestion of pressure against the eardrums.

Two low sopha-like things heaped with tattered bolsters, rather more in the style of the Indus than the Chinois, a wretched oil lamp Aberline put a lucifer to and turned down as low as possible, and four poppy-pipes on a small round table of glowing mellow brass and mahogany.

Clare took in the dust upon the table, the marks about the rim of one pipe, the dents in the upholstery and pillows on the far side, set where the smoker could recline and watch the door.

“You come here often, Inspector.”

“As often as necessary.” Aberline indicated the other sopha, and Clare found himself sharing a look of silent accord with Philip. It was a moment’s work to move the other divan to a more salubrious position, which manoeuvre Aberline watched with a tolerant smile. “I am afraid, little man, that there is only enough here for two.”

Philip bristled. “I am no nodder. I’ll take my laudanum like a civilised gent, thank you.” He rattled the door. “This wouldn’t stand a good beating.”

“It doesn’t have to with you standing watch, now does it?” Aberline settled himself on the sad wreck of furniture that was, Clare saw, a broken-backed chesterfield that could not even be salvaged for Eastcheap’s sorry hawking. Its just-moved companion was sturdier, but much dirtier. “Do sit, Mr Clare. You are about to view a marvel.”

It was not at all like smoking tabac.

A small amount to start, Aberline had said. We are not here to enjoy but to learn. To plumb the depths.

Perhaps the man fancied himself a poet.

A blurring across the nerves. A deep hacking cough. What did it smell like? Acrid, certainly, resinous. A faint amount of spice. Was he already…

The couch was quite dirty, but it was also comfortable. Clare leaned back, and the problem burst in upon him in all its dizzying complexity.

Some manner of sorcery, making me proof against an explosion. Proof against knives, and Time. My faculties will stay sharp. Yet the poppy had a distinct effect upon him. What would coja do? He had lost the taste for it, but he could experiment.

Later.

The walls, their dingy paper peeling, suddenly took on new breath and interest. Each rip and fleck, each bit of plaster showing, gave rise to a host of deductions. They split and re-formed, the history of this sad little room unreeling in a gorgeous play of light and shadow, logic and meaning.

Why, this is marvellous! The urge to laugh rose from his navel, but he set it aside. Irrational, messy, uncertain Feeling had no place here…

… but, still, the poppy blunted the painful edges and the outright sloppiness of Feeling, and he could consider the entire situation rather calmly.

Ludovico.

It was grief, of course, and the world became a mist of rose shot through with crimson. He had read of this, the welter of contradictory emotion when death struck; he had not felt it as a young man when his parents had succumbed to mortality. Had it been a blessing, that numbness? What was different now?

No, Clare. You felt it. He remembered the nights of working straight through, studying for the Examinations in his draughty, cramped student lodgings. Burying the Feeling, because it was a distraction, and after all, he was young and just coming into his faculties’ full bloom. After a long while the ache had retreated, because he was a mentath and Feeling was an enemy to logic.

Yet one must account for it, in all one’s dealings. How odd.

Aberline was speaking, but Clare could not distinguish the words through thick rosy fog. It was like Londinium’s vaporous breath, except it smelled of some sweetness. Spiced pear, smoke…

Emma. His faculties painted her image against the inside of his eyelids. Her soft face, steely with the force of her character or slack in sleep as he had seen it once. Her small hands, and the fire in her dark eyes. The way her footsteps echoed, and the brush of her skirts.

The images came one after another, tumbling in their rapidity. Emma bloody and battered at the end of some dangerous bit of business, her mouth set tight and determination burning in her gaze. Tucking a stray curl up into the rest of her complex hairstyle; she did so hate to be dishevelled. Poring over a broadsheet or two in the morning, making quite serviceable deductions, writing in her firm, clear hand at her morning desk in the solarium.

And finally, Emma at his bedside. I am loath to lose you, Archibald.

Grief for Ludovico, and the sweet sting that was Emma Bannon. It was the sting that wrapped crimson threads through the fog and pulled it tight.

Here, with the poppy smoke burning his lungs and rest of his flesh a loose soup, he could admit the waves of Feeling. He could let them slide through him and away, and when the poppy dream ended he would be whole–and rational–again.

Or so he hoped. His eyelids lifted, and Aberline was speaking again.

The inspector, instead of relaxing into languor, had leaned forward. He was still speaking, and Clare sought to grasp the words, but they slid away as well. There was a reply–Philip Pico, near the door, a light amused tone. Why had she bothered to engage such a person to look after him? If he was immortal now–but perhaps she feared not for Clare’s physical frame. Perhaps she feared for Clare himself, and what the double blow of grief and irrationality would do to him.

This is ridiculous. Preposterous.

Yet the idea had some merit. It was, he decided, a deduction taking into account a weight of Feeling, and not sinking in the process.

The glow was leaving, draining away too quickly. The crimson threads gave one last painless twitch and were gone, the rosy fog evaporating, and he became aware of a hammering sound.

Aberline had reached his feet. He swayed slightly, and Clare realised the man had been speaking of the murders. He blinked several times as Philip gave a curt command, None of that now, and Clare found himself on a broken sopha in the middle of a Limhoss poppy den, the world a sudden vivid assault after the rosy fog.

“Inspector Aberline, sir.” A whip-thin young man in a brown jacket, but his hair cut too short for a labourer’s. From the Yard, then, judging by his shoes, and out of breath. “There’s another one.”

Clare’s stomach turned over, queerly.

“Another murder.” Aberline nodded. “Yes, Browne. Hail a hansom, there’s a good man.”

The brown-jacketed Browne gasped, red blotches of effort on his sweating cheeks. There was a fog of smoke in here–how much had Aberline produced? The inspector was not only standing, but moving about. Clare gathered himself, an odd burning in the region of his chest.

Philip Pico’s face was a fox’s for a moment as he bent down over the mentath. The sharp black nose wrinkled, and his ears were perked, alert. “Come on, nodder.”

“You, sir, are a fox.” Clare’s flesh moved when he told it to. It was an odd feeling, thinking of himself inside an imperishable corporeal glove, his faculties simply observing the passage of time. There was a certain comfort in the notion.

“And you’re a babe in woods, sir, for all your bright-penny talk. Come along.”

Aberline glanced over his shoulder; it really was quite irritating that the man seemed so unmoved by whatever quantity of poppy he had smoked. Instead, he was merely haggard, drawn, the dark shadows under his eyes ever more pronounced. Soon they might swallow his gaze whole…

Wait. Clare searched through memory, grasping for whatever the inspector had said into the smoke-fog. He did something, something quite alarming. He spoke of… what?

The tantalising memory receded, and Clare’s head began to ache.

I suspect this was a very irrational event.