Authors: Dark Desires
Darcie reached for the candle.
“No!” Mary cried, her fingers closing about Darcie's wrist with surprising speed, stilling her movements. “No light.”
“Are you ill, Mary?” Darcie repeated her earlier question.
“Ill of heart. Ill of soul.”
Easing further onto the bed, Darcie lay down next to her friend and gathered her into her arms. “But sound of mind?”
“Yes,” Mary whispered.
“And sound of body?”
There was a dreadful silence as Mary pondered the question, and in the silence, Darcie read the answer.
“What's been done to you, Mary darling?”
“Please, I cannot—” The girl's voice broke on a sob. “I cannot say.”
Darcie swallowed as tears filled her own eyes. Her friend had been damaged in some unspoken way. She could feel the pain emanating from her shaking form like bilious smoke from a smoldering fire.
“Don't leave me,” Mary begged.
“I won't leave you, Mary. Sleep now. The dawn will be here before we know and we'll be up and about once more.” Darcie tightened her arms about her friend, greatly saddened by the other woman's pain. Forcing a bright tone, Darcie chattered aimlessly, hoping her mundane prattle would ease her friend's nerves. “I'm sorry you have to do my share of the work, Mary. I wonder that Poole hasn't hired another girl yet. Perhaps he hopes that Dr. Cole will find fault with my drawings and send me back to my other chores.”
She felt Mary stiffen in her arms, apparently dismayed by her words. Frowning, Darcie made soft soothing noises and held Mary until her posture eased and relaxed. She wondered what had caused the other girl's unease, the mention of work, the mention of Darcie's drawings, or the mention of Dr. Cole.
At length, Mary fell into a restless slumber, her shallow breathing punctuated by soft whimpers and cries. Slowly, Darcie eased from the narrow bed. Mary shifted but did not waken.
Seeking her own rest, Darcie slid beneath her covers once more, her senses tuned to Mary lest she wake and need comfort. The minutes stole past, and still Darcie lay awake in the darkness. Frustrated, she tossed the covers aside and sat up in her bed. She could barely see over the lower ledge of the small window above her cot, but she knew it overlooked the cobbled rear drive and the carriage house beyond.
She wrapped her arms around her bent knees, hugging herself as she stared out at the canopy of dark sky. Then a sound carried on the still air, penetrating the glass of the small window. It was a high, keening cry that was cut short with abrupt finality. Her blood chilled. A bird, she told herself resolutely. An owl, perhaps.
Darcie shifted position, kneeling on her bed and raising herself up to better see the world beyond her attic room. There was a light in Damien's laboratory window, on the second level of the carriage house. Losing all sense of time, Darcie knelt on her bed watching Damien's silhouette move intermittently across the drawn shade of the carriage house window until at last he snuffed the flame.
Waiting in the dark, she didn't mark the time as it passed, didn't care to. At length, Damien came into view, crossing the cobbled drive. He stopped halfway to the main house and drew something from the pocket of his coat.
Darcie moved closer to the glass panes, her eyes trained on the doctor's dark form, her senses alert. Her heart began to thud heavily in her chest as an ill wind crept through the cracks and chinks in the wall, making her shiver. She pressed her face against the glass, watching Damien with intense concentration, trying to discern what it was that he held.
From the way he moved the object in his hands, she could see it was cloth. The color was light, white perhaps, or a pale shade of gray.
He shoved the cloth back into his pocket, and then grew still. Darcie held her breath as he tipped his head and his gaze sought her window. She inched back, but refused to allow herself to leap away. Twice before he had looked unerringly towards the spot she had stood hidden. Twice before she had felt this strange attachment as though their thoughts connected, and he knew she was there.
The first occasion had been the night she went to his study with the intention of ripping the page from the sketchbook in order to hide the evidence of her trespass. Then, as now, his gaze had unerringly sought the place where she stood, watching. The second occasion had been the night she had watched him undress, met his eyes in the mirror above the washstand, and known he had sensed her presence.
Reason argued that it was only coincidence that he looked upward now, that his glance rested on the place where she pressed her face near to the glass. Surely each of the other instances had been coincidence as well. But reason’s arguments were not enough to make her heart stop pounding. She could feel the throbbing of her blood pumping through her veins. Then Damien Cole turned his face away, and she watched him disappear into the shadows.
A dreadful sense of menace seemed to fill the small chamber, laughing cruelly at Darcie's pitiful attempts to stave it off. Mary's anguish could have nothing to do with Damien, she reassured herself silently. Still, she could not help herself as she lit the candle and moved across the space that separated her from Mary's bed.
Lifting the light, Darcie stared down at the sleeping form of her friend. Her tossing had dislodged the covers, revealing that she yet wore her work clothes. She had come to bed without changing into her night things, exhaustion, or perhaps despondency, disrupting her regular routine.
Mary shifted in her sleep and Darcie saw that her smock had been torn at the shoulder, leaving the jagged edges of the fabric gaping wide, as though a section of material had been rent from the whole.
Darcie moved a step closer, her gaze traveling over Mary's restless form. She held the candle up just a bit higher, and the flickering flame fell across Mary's face and throat.
With a gasp, Darcie stepped back, her hand falling instinctively, nearly upsetting the candle from its holder. Shaking, she held the light aloft once more, staring in horror at the sight revealed by the meager flame. There, low on Mary's neck, near her collarbone, were the faint purple-brown smudges of five oval bruises.
Raising her hand, Darcie studied her own fingers, and then slowly curled them into a fist. Her gaze returned to the bruises on Mary's neck. They were precisely grouped, four on one side, a single bruise on the other, positioned in such a way as to make her think...
“My collar will hide them.”
Darcie jumped at the hoarse sound of Mary's voice.
“Mary, they aren't—” Darcie shook her head and tried again. “I mean, are they...did someone...” Helplessly, she looked down at her fingers, uncurling them bit by bit, before forcing them to relax.
Mary sat up and caught Darcie's free hand, pulling her down until she sat on the edge of the bed.
“Never speak of it,” Mary whispered. “We'll never speak of it. Something terrible was—” She blew out a breath, then leaned forward and rested her head lightly against Darcie's shoulder.
Together they sat, each lost in their own thoughts.
Darcie pulled back to stare at the torn edge of Mary's smock, and in her mind she saw Damien turning the scrap of cloth in his hands.
Words churned in her throat, begging for release.
Looking into her friend's eyes, Darcie blurted, “Did Dr. Cole—”
The question was cut short by Mary's soft cry.
“Please. I cannot—” Mary swallowed. “It would mean my death.”
Darcie winced at both the expression of pain that crossed the other woman's face and her words.
“Something terrible was done to me.” Mary raised her hand, gingerly touching her fingers to her throat. “Not just the things you can see, but...other things. Unnatural...May God forgive me.”
“You've done nothing that needs forgiving.”
Mary met Darcie's gaze, her normally bright green eyes bruised and dull. “Tell no one. Promise me.”
Something in Mary's expression made Darcie think of her sister, not as she had been as a girl, but as she was now. Mrs. Feather. The woman hardened by life. The woman without hope.
“Promise,” Mary insisted, her voice strident.
“I promise,” Darcie whispered fervently, wrapping her arms around her friend. “I promise, Mary.”
o0o
Morning brought no respite from Darcie’s disquietude. Damien had already informed her that he would be working in his surgery in Whitechapel, and she did not expect to see him that day. Her heart was heavy, her thoughts filled with images of Mary, her bruised throat, her anguished face.
Abruptly Darcie stopped mid-stride, drawn up short by the memory of Damien standing on the back drive in the moonlight, turning the scrap of cloth over and over in his hands, and overlying that was the image of Mary’s torn smock. She stood immobilized, confusion creeping through her thoughts. All was not right in this house on Curzon Street. There was an evil, an aberration snaking through the shadows. She tried to rationalize away her bewilderment and concern, tried to tell herself that the dead body Damien had transported that first night had not been robbed from a grave. That the missing maid, Janie, had merely found a better position or had run off with a beau. That the men who dragged the chest across the back drive in the dark of night were neither nefarious nor suspect.
And what of Mary? Darcie had seen the horrifying bruises with her own eyes.
With a shiver, she tried to thrust her dark thoughts aside as she pushed open the door entered Damien's study.
Sinking into the chair by the desk, she opened her sketchbook and glanced at her drawings. In a way, she was glad for the time apart from Damien. His presence was overwhelming. Enticing. She needed distance and space to gather her thoughts and bring herself back to a place where she could see him as her employer and nothing more. She knew that no good could come from her mad infatuation. She was a maid. A girl he had rescued from Whitechapel. There could be nothing between them. She could not trust in the illusion of his affection.
She tapped her fingertip rhythmically on the desktop, lost in contemplation. According to her sister, Damien had secrets, and if Abigail Feather thought those secrets were frightening, then how much more wary ought Darcie to be of Damien Cole's hidden depths. True, he had shown her only kindness. But more than once he had also shown her a glimpse of his more primitive nature.
He had kissed her. Tasted her. She ran the tip of her tongue across her lips. Even thinking about the things he had done made her shift restlessly on the chair. Memories of his hands running the wet cloth over the glistening skin of his naked chest, golden and kissed by firelight, brought a sharp ache, intense and knifelike, to the pit of her belly.
Her mind occupied by sensuous recollections of Damien, Darcie reached for the small bottle of ink that sat on the corner of the desk. Clumsily, she knocked it over. With an exclamation of dismay, she jumped to her feet, watching the dark blotch spread across the neatly folded newspaper that lay on the desk. She righted the bottle and heaved a sigh of relief as she saw that the stain was contained to the newspaper and had not spread to the dark wood of the doctor's fine furniture.
Moving around to the side she shifted the paper, intending to fold the corners to contain the spill and remove the mess from the room. But the solid black letters, neatly aligned on the page, caught her eye and she bent to read what was written.
Another murder of the same cold-blooded character as those recently perpetrated in Whitechapel was discovered early yesterday.... London will talk and think of nothing else except this new proof of the continued presence in our streets of some monster in human form, whose desperate evil goes free and undetected by force of its own dreadful audacity, and by an as-yet-unrebuked contempt for our police and detective agencies. The series of shocking crimes perpetrated in Whitechapel culminated in the murder two nights past of one Sally Booth, who is connected with the other victims only by her miserable mode of livelihood. All ordinary experience leaves us at a loss to comprehend the cruel slaughter of three, possibly four women. The single male victim is now believed to have been the recipient of an unrelated attack.
Darcie stood, swaying, her hands clutching the side of the desk for balance as the import of the last sentence sank in. The single male victim. Steppy. They knew that someone other than the monster who stalked the unfortunates of Whitechapel had killed Steppy. Deliberately, she looked down and traced the scar on her hand. Of course,
she
had known all along that it was no nameless, faceless villain who had stolen Steppy's life. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to block out the image of her once-beloved stepfather, ragged and broken, his blood pooling on the dirty floor. So much blood.
Chapter Eight
A sound carried upward from the entry hall, boot heels crossing the tiled floor. Darcie folded the ruined newspaper, mindful of the wet ink. Furtively, she hurried from Damien’s study and scurried to her bedroom where she hid the paper under her bed. She couldn't explain her certainty that she must return to the article and read it in its entirety. There was something in those written words that called out to her, something about the murdered woman.
There was no time now, but later…She would revisit the pages later. Conscious of her duties, she descended the stairs once more and returned to find Damien standing by the desk, idly flipping through her sketchbook.
“I'm sorry, sir,” she blurted as she skidded to a halt just inside the door.
He turned to her, his expression perplexed. “Sir? I thought we had long-ago established that my name is Damien.”
Darcie felt a hot blush stain her cheeks. There was a distance, a certain amount of protection in maintaining the formal address. Calling him by his given name was so personal; it drew her in, made her acknowledge their ever increasing intimacy. She looked away, focusing on the curled leg of the side table.
“And sorry, Darcie? Sorry for what?” he asked.
“I spilled ink on your copy of the
Daily Express.
I'm afraid it was ruined.” Her gaze slid back to his. She read no censure there.