Free Tenfold More Wicked by Viola Carr Page B

deluded patients like that at Bethlem. Huddling in corners or under the bed, imagining themselves the target of nefarious plots and persecutions. They’re spying on me. They’re after me. It’s THEM.
    But that chilly strawberry sweetness lingered on her tongue, nagging, and she couldn’t escape this creeping unease. Like a sticky rut in the road, dragging her deeper the more she struggled.
    She toe-poked Hippocrates, who awoke with a jerk. “Hipp, pop along and wire Mr. Finch. Ask him what he knows about a pestilent Irishman named Professor Moriarty Quick. Oh, and same question to Inspector Griffin.”
    â€œFinch,” echoed Hipp sleepily. “Griffin. Professor.” She opened the front door a crack, and he scuttled out, whistling.
    Listless, she wandered back inside, flipping through the post. An account from her book-seller, another from her glove-maker. Always more bills.
    She tore open an unmarked envelope with her fingers. Since the business with Razor Jack, she’d avoided letter openers. She didn’t like to touch their smooth silver, recall that wickedly sharp edge.
    Inside lurked an antique-white invitation card.
    A P RIVATE V IEWING
    T HE R OYAL A CADEMY OF A RTS
    S UMMER E XHIBITION OF N EW W ORKS
    T HE N ATIONAL G ALLERY, T RAFALGAR S QUARE
    She turned it over. Confident, flyaway handwriting, but without a wasted blot of ink:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  Dr. J,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  In case you change your mind.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  Tomorrow night?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Remy
    Her smile quirked. Change her mind, indeed. The y ’s tail curled, a cocky swirl. Insolent use of his first name. He could wish they were so familiar.
    Stubbornly, she tossed the card onto her desk and sat. Notice from the dustman, advertisement for a new dress shop . . .
    Trembling, she picked up the last letter.
    Delivered by penny post, stamp pasted in one corner. Exquisite linen paper, the kind she wanted to smell or brush across her lips. Folded into three and sealed with crimson wax, the imprint of a tiny rose.
    Her name— Eliza Jekyll, M.D. —and address, in narrow left-slanting letters. No sender.
    But she knew the handwriting, the paper, the seal. Artist, escaped lunatic, wielder of a bloody straight razor. Murderer of seventeen people; at least, seventeen that the police knew about. The newspapers called him Razor Jack, but in herthoughts—her darkened, breathless dreams—he was always and forever Mr. Todd.
    Her fingers turned the letter, considering it. A faint chemical odor, memories of a wet midnight in Chelsea, and another, stormy one at Bethlem Asylum, the Chopper’s awful laboratory, rich with secrets and thunder. Todd had vanished into the rain that night, gone like a frosted breath. Her lips tingled, the echo of a murderer’s almost-kiss . . .
    She dropped the letter as if it burned her. It landed alongside Lafayette’s invitation, an unsettling unspoken question.
    Suddenly her situation suffocated her. She’d no money, not without accepting Mr. Hyde’s ill-gotten charity. No income, since she’d alienated Chief Inspector Reeve. Add this Moriarty Quick’s inscrutable demands . . . Either she found more work, or she admitted failure—and that, she would not do.
    She needed this new case. Even if it meant proceeding without Harley Griffin, whose career needed just as bitterly as hers to be salvaged. At least it was real police work, a case that mattered. And—she gritted her teeth on stung pride—lest she attract the Royal’s ire, she needed to keep on safe terms with Remy Lafayette.
    So he’d proposed. The dreaded M-word. What of it? He’d no right to pressure her into an answer. A husband—whoever he might be—would take her property, her income, her right to make business decisions. Everything but trinkets and the clothes she wore. English