The Ripper Affair

Clare did not feel it quite proper to venture forth again that day, even though Miss Bannon was in no condition to attend dinner and would consequently care little about his absence. He was to visit another Yard, and he had an inkling of which, yet he could not leave while the sorceress, pale and so unconscious she represented quite a deadweight, was abed. Mikal carried her upstairs, and Madame Noyon fluttered about fussing at the lady’s maids to help tend their mistress.

Clare himself went straight for the smoking room and its heavy walnut sideboard. His hand shook slightly as he poured himself a very healthy measure of brandy, and he downed it with quite unseemly haste. It left a burning in its wake, and he had to suppress a rumbling of the rudest sort from his scorched throat.

So much illogic could unsettle even the finest mind, he told himself, and his, while acceptable indeed, was not of that calibre. He could have Finch send out to an apothecary’s for coja, and yet the thought of its deadly stinging did not soothe as much as it could.

No, the brandy was far better. He eyed the sideboard. This being Miss Bannon’s house, there was no stinting in quantity or

quality. Should he be so unfortunate as to feel a lack, no doubt any of the other liquids in crystal decanters would do, even the vitae. He had never drunk to excess–the consequent blunting of a mentath’s faculties was unacceptable–but he could at this moment bloody well see the attraction.

A rather awful day, all told. The sounds Miss Bannon had made–terrifying, wrenching cries, loaded with horrifying, illogical force. No doubt there would be a great deal of speculation over the burst of sorcery, and her carriage may have been remarked.

Dreadful indeed. The sound of earth hitting a coffin lid again, rattling through his skull vehemently, over a spatter of blood. Even he knew that for a sorceress to spill that most precious of vital fluids in such a place was dangerous.

“Eh,

mentale. Drinking to death now?”

Clare whirled. The room was empty, its heavy dark wainscoting and fancifully painted ceiling–cavorting satyrs and nymphs, perhaps Miss Bannon’s comment on a man’s ideas–just the same as they always had been. The billiard table, where sometimes the clack of heavy striking reverberated as he cogitated upon a particular matter and Miss Bannon sipped her rum, was just the same, covered with its loose canvas because he had not availed himself of its geometric soothing for quite some time.

His sensitive nostrils flared. A breath of dirt, the smoke of a snuffed candle. And the strong oiled-metal smell of a man who lived by violence, his wits sharp and his pockmarked cheeks sallow.

Impossible

. The silver globe-lights were not flickering. It was his eyelids, falling and rising with extraordinary rapidity as his faculties sought to discern the evidence of the real from heated phantasy. Simply impossible.

There was no Neapolitan lounging near the door, where he was wont to pause before edging in to select a cigar from the silver-chased humidor–long, slender, floral in taste, and utterly strange in his blunt, dirty fingers.

“Merely the strain,” Clare muttered, the words falling into dead, heavy air. He had never noticed before how close it was in this particular room without a woman’s light laughing questions, a muttered reply in Calabrian when a man forgot himself and the tone of his youth wore through his careful mask. Or the clack of the heavy billiard-spheres providing their own music, smoke hanging in the air before being whisked toward the fireplace with a charm-crackle. “A dreadful day. A dreadful week. A touch more brandy, and some rest. For my nerves.”

As if a mentath was prey to such a thing as shattered nerves. It was ridiculous to even suggest

.

And yet.

He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, turned back to the sideboard and poured another generous measure. No, not rest. Rest would not do him any good at all. Only work would cure this uneasiness, the feeling that the earth itself would cease obeying its laws of proper quiescence or motion and begin behaving as irrationally as sorcery itself.

“Experiments.” He gazed at the hand holding the tumbler of brandy, amber liquid trembling. Familiar as his own breath, that fleshly appendage, and the possibilities began to swirl inside his skull.

He did not realise, as he swilled the brandy and poured himself another, that he had left the crushed papers detailing Marta Tebrem’s injuries, and statements given by witnesses, in Miss Bannon’s carriage, where Harthell would find them and hand them to Finch without comment, to be placed upon Miss Bannon’s study desk. It was a shocking sign of absent-mindedness in so normally precise a man.