Prologue
London, Autumn 1855
The devil’s breath was a persistent cold prickle on Cutter Morley’s neck. He’d awoken with a start in the wee hours of the morning, propped up against the doorway to St. Dismas where he’d taken refuge. Vicar Applewhite had fallen ill, and so the rectory was locked against vagrants today. More’s the pity. He’d not been able to scrape together enough money to afford a flea-bitten room for the night, but the fact that his twin, Caroline, hadn’t met him in the abbey courtyard meant she’d found a roof to sleep beneath.
Or a protector willing to allow her into the warmth of his bed for a pound of flesh.
She wasn’t a prostitute. Never that. She was just… desperate. They both were.
But not for long. He’d a plan—one he’d implement just as soon as he was old enough, or rather, as soon as he looked old enough.
He was so close. Just one or two more winters. One or two more inches. No one was right sure of their ages… maybe thirteen or fifteen. Probably not older, but his recollection of the first handful of years was cagey so he couldn’t be sure.
They’d no papers.
The slick of oily disquiet Caroline’s new sometimes profession wrought within him was a mild hum compared to the symphony of peril and impending doom sawing at his nerves.
It haunted him as he set off from Spitalfields to Shoreditch, increasing with every step until he lifted his grimy hand to swat at the itch and smooth the hair at his hackles back against his neck. He had a hard-enough time staying warm with only the moth-eaten jacket he’d filched from a rubbish heap, but something about this day frosted the marrow in his bones.
He thought to lose the disquieting demon in the Chinese tent city, hoping it could be distracted by inhabitants of the cloyingly fragrant opium dens just as easily as he was drawn by the sizzles and aromas of food cooked in the out-of-doors. His gut twisted with longing, but he found no opportunity to filch a breakfast. People were extra wary today. Perhaps they, too, felt whatever portent hung in the air.
He wandered through throngs of peculiar and elegant Jews, his ear cocked to the lyrical Crimean accents of those escaping the violence in Russia, Prussia or the Ukraine. He thought their industrious bustle would perhaps chase away this unfathomable sense of bereavement. But alas, he made it all the way down Leman Street with the healthy sense that calamity watched him from the shadows of the palsied, rotten buildings, waiting to strike.
It wasn’t a matter of if, but when. Or… no… perhaps it had already happened. The thing. The terrible thing. And the world held its breath waiting to suffer some awful consequence.
Turning down Common Doss Street, he loped up to number three, a ramshackle place mortared with more mold than grout.
Mrs. Jane Blackwell land-lorded over the only seven rooms free from vermin. At least, vermin other than that of the human variety. In Whitechapel, vermin were as inescapable as the toxic yellow fogs belched up by the Thames and thickened with soot from the refineries.
Cutter didn’t need an invitation to shoulder into the doorway of the Blackwell common house, he’d been doing it since he was a lad.
The sharp smell of lye cut through the noise and stench wafting from men and women of dubious nocturnal vocations who had already begun drinking beer for the day at half noon. It drew him to the back of the house where a square of garden was connected by several alleys cobbled with grime. Clad in a dark frock and a soiled apron, Mrs. Blackwell stirred laundry over a boiling pot.
“More discarded bastards in these sheets than in all of Notting Hill,” she muttered with a grimace. “I’m charging Forest extra if he’s going to wank all over me linens, bloody pervert.”
She glanced up when Cutter ambled over, her marble-black eyes crinkling with a good-humor quite lacking round these parts. In a place where most humans were anything but humane, where corruption was the only legitimate business and vice the only escape, Jane Blackwell was a warm, if rough-handed oasis of compassion.
Cutter would have given his right eye for a mum like her, or any mother really. She was a crass and vulgar woman, but he knew nothing else. She’d inherited these rooms from her father back before the pernicious poverty had taken over Whitechapel so completely, and an addiction to gin rounded out her inheritance. Or rather, drained it.
On top of her rents, she could charge tuppence a week more for her laundry services, and when she was of a mind to be dry, the money kept her and her son, Dorian, in luxuries like meat, cheese, and sometimes milk.
No wonder the lucky bugger was so tall and broad when they’d only dipped their toes into their teen years.
So long as Mrs. Blackwell kept her broken teeth—courtesy of Dorian’s missing father— behind her lips, she was still a handsome woman. Her night-hued hair remained free of grey, and curled from beneath her cap in the steam of her laundry. She’d clutched Cutter to her breasts from time to time in a fit of sodden sadness or effervescent good spirits, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy it. He enjoyed it twice when he got to rib Dorian about it until his best mate blushed and boxed him one.
“I’m going to marry your mum,” he’d taunt before dancing away. “Then I’ll raise ya proper.”
“Sod off,” Dorian would reply irritably.
“Don’t worry, I won’t make you call me Da.”
“I’ll call you worse than that, you poxy cock.”
At the thought of future scuffs, Cutter directed a half-grin at her, the one he knew made his cheek dimple, and he hefted what little sparkle he had left into his eyes. It was the first time he’d felt close to warm all day.
“Hullo,” he greeted. “Did Caroline breakfast here?”
“I ain’t seen her, Cutter,” Jane greeted with a noticeable slur and a lack of any T’s whatsoever.
He reached for the back of his neck and rubbed once again, even though little needles of gooseflesh stabbed at every inch of his skin by now.
“Dorian about?” he asked.
“In the kitchen fleecing doxies out of their hard-won earnings wif his dice last I checked.” She swiped at her forehead with the back of her wrist and wrinkled her nose at him. “I’ve a mind to boil your wee arse in my pot next, ya noxious goblin. I can smell you from here.”
Cutter’s testing sniff of his own person was interrupted by a strong arm around his neck as he was pulled in for a grapple choke that might have resembled a boisterous hug if one was feeling generous.
“Oi! I think you smell awright.” Dorian’s voice seemed to deepen by the day, though Cutter’s had changed over a year ago, much to Blackwell’s competitive consternation. “I’ve heard there’s a dead body or some such washed up at Hangman’s Dock.” His mate’s dark eyes gleamed with a greedy sort of mischief. “Wot say we go and work the crowd?”
Working the crowd was their language for relieving the distracted onlookers of their watches, coin, and pocketbooks.
“Maybe later.” Cutter rubbed at his chest as the dread that had dogged at him now bared its teeth and struck, wrenching at his heart with an icy pain.
Pain meant weakness. And one never showed weakness here, not even in the presence of those he knew the best. He always covered his pain with humor if not indifference.