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RMS ETRURIA
7 JANUARY 1889
Wind bit at my face, stinging my eyes and making them water as I hurried along the abandoned deck of third class. At this hour, the sun was a mere gash on the horizon, tinging the water a crimson black as it spilled across the waves. I shut images of bloodbaths from my mind, moving as quickly as I could to the temporary laboratory. A noticeably pale servant had delivered a note from Uncle that had stated “You’re needed in the laboratory. Straightaway.”
I’d thrown on a simple muslin dress and stuffed my feet into the first shoes I could find—dainty little silk things that would have to do, though Thomas would certainly raise a brow at them as he’d done in the past. His teasing didn’t matter; swiftness did.
There was an aura of urgency in the air, and I couldn’t help but inhale it in great gasps, setting my limbs in motion. I didn’t need to possess Thomas’s skill in deductions to know a body had been found. Uncle wouldn’t send for me this early if it were about the severed limb. A thorough dissection had already been completed, and in truth, there wasn’t much else we could do with it.
This was something worse. Much worse.
Another blast of arctic air barreled through the corridor, forcing me to bury my nose into my fur collar. The storm that had been threatening was almost ready to wage its assault. My steps rushed over the deck, the wooden slats cold as the winter air frosting the railings. A prickling sensation between my shoulder blades brought me to a halt, glancing back down the empty deck. At least I believed it remained vacant. This early in the morning, before the sun actually rose and the sky was somewhere between blood and shadow, it was hard to tell who might be lurking against the wall.
I stared a beat more, then turned and continued on. When I came to the entry to the stairs, I paused again, listening for any sound of pursuit. Waves steadily lapped the side of the ship. Wind howled low through the tunnel-like deck as it gusted. Steam hissed far above from the funnels, or smokestacks, as Thomas called them. No footsteps, though. I was alone with my conjurer of an imagination.
Without thinking, I touched the blade hidden on my thigh. No matter how tired or in a hurry I’d been to forgo finding proper shoes, I’d made sure to not leave without a means of protecting myself. One fact remained: a person on this ship was snatching victims as if they were pearls plucked from oysters and stringing them up in horrific ways.
I’d not be taken without a fight.
Satisfied I was alone, I plunged into the dim lighting of the narrow stairs, beads of perspiration already beginning as I descended deeper into the overly warm belly of the ship. New sounds emerged. The loud machinery of the boiler, constantly being refilled to power our journey across the sea. A horribly familiar scent also unfurled its fingers, beckoning me to the source the closer I drew. The sweet stench of human rot permeated the space, made worse by the heat of the boilers. I thought of Mephistopheles’s plague masks, wishing I had some herbs to smell now.
Anything would be better than a nose full of decomposition.
I finally reached the bottom of the stairs and nearly ran down the corridor, slipping as I swung into the laboratory. Uncle glanced up, his face grim. As I’d suspected, a shrouded body lay on the examination table before him.
“Uncle,” I said by way of greeting. I took a breath to steady myself and entered the room. Thomas hadn’t arrived yet, though I imagined he’d be joining us soon enough. It took a moment, but the strong odor of death settled into an uncomfortable backdrop, hardly occupying space in my thoughts.
“Prepare for the postmortem. I want to examine the heart, stomach, intestines. Or what’s left of them, at least.” Uncle handed me an apron. “We’ll begin soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
I strode over to Uncle’s medical bag, removing the tools needed for this full examination one by one and laying them out in a row on a tray. Bone saw, toothed forceps, rib cutters, scalpel, enterotome, skull chisel, just in case, and a Hagedorn needle to sew the corpse together.
“The hammer with hook is in the side pouch,” Uncle said, tying his own apron and rolling up his shirtsleeves. I nodded, setting about retrieving it while he scrubbed his hands and arms with carbolic soap. We were creatures of habit, he and I, both finding peace in our postmortem rituals.
A set of hurried footsteps brought my attention up as Thomas practically leapt into the room. He hadn’t bothered with a jacket, and his white shirt was rumpled and mostly untucked as if he’d fallen asleep in his clothes. Even when we’d been investigating the secret tunnels below Bran Castle, I hadn’t seen him so disheveled. From the look of him, it didn’t appear that he’d been in bed for too long before being roused. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what had kept him preoccupied.
A muscle in his jaw ticked as his eyes lifted from the covered corpse and met mine across the room. We’d known it was only a matter of time before another body turned up, but it didn’t make it easier to deal with. I offered him an encouraging nod, hoping he’d read the sadness in my own expression. Our chosen field of study showed the dark side of life; it was difficult to not be pulled into its void. The day death became easy to accept was the day I needed to set down my blades. Judging from the expression on his face, Thomas felt the same.
“I apologize for the delay, Professor.” He produced a notebook and pen, situating himself near the examining table. “Miss Wadsworth.” He tipped his chin in formal greeting. “What have I missed?”
“We’re just getting started,” Uncle replied, moving to stand over the cadaver. “They found the body in the cargo hold approximately thirty-five minutes ago. It had been stuffed into a wooden crate.” He removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. “The smell drew the attention of a crew member, and he alerted the chief officer. This one is a bit different from the others. Prepare yourselves.”
I swallowed the bile searing up my throat.
Uncle had been taking meticulous notes for more years than I’d been alive, adding to theories and scientific findings of other doctors, such as Dr. Rudolf Virchow, who’d developed standardized postmortem protocols. Both men had found putrefaction in the air occurring two or three days after death. Intense odors, such as that from the corpse in this room, would be present by the fifth day. Meaning Miss Crenshaw might not have been the first to die after all.
“Let’s begin.” Uncle pulled the shroud down, revealing a discolored female body, naked except where he’d covered her with strips of cloth. It was one of the last decencies she’d been shown; her murderer certainly hadn’t been kind or careful with her person.
My gaze swiftly traveled down in assessment, then froze. Slashes were apparent on her throat, and her torso had been split open. More precisely, she’d been ripped open. I held in a gasp at the brutal state of the victim. Uncle was right—this murder was unlike the others. The previous victims, while horrid in
their own right, had been slain quickly. Their bodies sustained the most damage post mortem. This woman had been stabbed and slashed while she was still breathing. It almost seemed as if an entirely different person had attacked her. Which couldn’t be.
Everything in the warm room suddenly became too hot to bear. I took a few breaths, hoping to steady the erratic beat of my heart. Jack the Ripper was dead. There was no way this crime was done by his hand, yet the similarity of the wounds was striking. Part of me wished to toss the medical tools on the table and run. Run far away from this corpse and these violent murders that never seemed to end.
But on this ship, in the middle of the great Atlantic Ocean, there was nowhere to escape.
Death didn’t disturb me; memories of the Ripper case were a different matter altogether, though. Thomas bent near. “It’s an equation, Wadsworth. Find the clues and add them together.”
