Free City of Darkness (City of Mystery) by Kim Wright Page A

others are my age or more.  We’ll probably seem to be hopeless fuddie-duddies
to a girl like you.  I do hope you won’t be disappointed.”
    Leanna grinned.  “I doubt very
seriously I’ll consider your friends to be fuddie-duddies,” she said, “But are
you certain about the purple dress?  I wouldn’t want to make a false step…”
    Emma excused herself and left the
table, several plates stacked deftly in the crook of one arm.  Gage had cleaned
the kitchen, leaving her only the last dishes to do and she lowered them into
the warm water of the basin and began to swish them about slowly.  The fact
that the Ripper promised to kill more prostitutes plagued her mind, and the
silly story of Gerry’s arrest had not distracted her as thoroughly as it
usually did.
    It had been four years since Emma had
seen her older sister Mary, but she thought of her daily and all the publicity
about this madman, this Ripper, was turning her concern into an obsession. 
Mary - pretty, saucy, and outgoing as she was - had been the idol of her shy,
bookish younger sister.  Their childhood in Dorchester with their brother Adam,
their gentle mother and their schoolmaster father had been idyllic, or at
least, Emma thought grimly to herself as she pushed her hair back with one damp
palm, it seemed that way in retrospect.  Their father had earned a
respectable-enough living.  Their mother was the angel of the county, so
compassionate and skilled a nurse that people called her in to deliver their
babies and comfort their dying.
    Then came the tuberculosis epidemic
seven years ago, which closed the school for three whole terms, leaving her
father without the only kind of trade he knew, and which ended with bodies
piled high in the local cemetery and few men strong enough to bury them.  Emma still
dreamed sometimes of the piles of shrouded corpses, stacked as neatly as
firewood.  Her mother, worn down from incessant nursing, was the first to join
them.  Her father died four months later, leaving behind three children ranging
in age from twelve to nineteen, a heavily-mortgaged home, and boxes crammed
full of books.
    But if the schoolmaster and his wife
had not managed to live to the age of forty, their children shared a strong
instinct to survive and a ruthless lack of sentimentality.  Within weeks Mary
and Adam had stripped the house of every saleable item, divided the paltry lot,
and begun to make plans to cope with an uncertain future.  Adam had a chance to
go the States - a former schoolmate had settled in Seattle and written that
there was opportunity for a lad who was young and strong and fearless.  It
would take everything he had to get there, but he lit out nonetheless,
promising to write and send money when he’d made his fortune.
    Mary had an idea she could become a
governess, so she packed up Emma and the two headed for London.  If nothing
else, their father had left them a level of education rare in girls, and Mary
quickly found work in the home of a prosperous tailor.  Grudgingly, he and his
wife agreed Emma could stay on too and the girls shared cramped space in the
attic, with Emma running errands and doing chores for the humorless housekeeper
while Mary drilled Latin into the unwilling heads of the tailor’s three sons.
    She hated her life.  Emma knew it,
could sense it, felt the desperation behind Mary’s quick smile.  Many women on
their own with a younger sister to support had done far worse, but she was
nineteen years old and the days droned on like the beat of a metronome with no
prospects of becoming richer, or fuller, or leading her out of the attic.  Emma
was powerless to help her sister and now, looking back, Emma could only marvel
that Mary had been able to stick it out for two years, so ill-suited was she
for the position of governess.  One day, shortly after Emma had turned fifteen,
Mary had simply disappeared, leaving a note and every pound she had managed to
save tied in a scarf on the flat little