![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grav_ityMeta and Chapter 1
Whispers on the Edge of Dark
Chapter 2
October seems unconscionably long. The weather stays cool, but not so cold as to drive people off of the streets. Gregory has written from Germany to say that he will be staying on another month, and Helen is not sorry for his absence. It is not because John has taken to calling more often, if anything the exact opposite is true. Rather it is that Helen spends most of her free hours meeting more humanoid abnormals that Mary Kelly had become acquainted with over the years. The housekeeper does not approve, but knows her place well enough that she will not write to Gregory and alert him to his daughter’s actions.
Despite her father’s absence, John’s distance has not decreased. Although she has made her own intentions quite clear, even to the point of saying the actual words, which is something they have always avoided before, he persists in bringing James or Nigel with him when he calls, or allowing the housekeeper to catch him late in the evenings and show him out. And he has not come to her rooms privately, even though she’s as much as asked him if he is still able to travel in that manner. If not for the ring on her finger, she would believe that he has changed both his mind and his intentions.
James has set his melancholia against a backdrop of cocaine. Helen is not sure if he is aiming to dull his awareness to the point where he forgets that he cannot solve the murders, or if he is hoping that the answer lies somewhere in his drugged haze. Nigel still patrols the streets at night, but Nikola has been distracted by some experiment or other, and Helen is so angry with him they haven’t spoken since the middle of the month. By the time October winds down, the Five have all but fractured, and Helen fears her own heart with be next.
The first eight days of November are like a dream after the loneliness of the two and a half months that preceded it. John does not visit, pleading business in Southampton, but every day some new trinket arrives on her doorstep, until at last even the housekeeper will smile at the mention of John’s name and admit that maybe he is at last doing things properly. On the morning of the eighth, there are two deliveries that whet her anticipation for the evening to arrive. The first is a card from John, saying that he will arrive this evening after dinner, which in their code means he will share a pot of tea, be shown the door, and then be waiting for her in her room when she gets there.
The second is a message from Mary Kelly, the one woman in London that might be safe from the Ripper. The message that had been delivered is verbal and brief, and barely makes it to her at all thanks to the scruples of her ever-vigilant housekeeper. The woman has come to tolerate most of Helen’s eccentricities without batting an eyelash, leastaways where Helen can see her, but if she views John Druitt as unwelcome after nightfall, she has equally strong feelings about unwashed street waifs at the breakfast hour. Helen had heard the ruckus and relieved the poor girl of her message, sending her on her way with enough coin to buy a hot meal every day for a week.
Helen spends the day organizing her files on the abnormals Mary has introduced her to during their association, which helps in some measure to calm her nerves. Most of her new acquaintances are fairly harmless to society, in fact most of them only seem to harm themselves, and Helen has been working to try to help them along in whatever way she can. More than once, she has found herself wishing for her father’s experienced advice, James’s assistance or John’s unprofessional yet no less heartwarming assurances that she is a capable physician for all she lacks the credentials to back it up, but she cannot deny that there is a not inconsequential thrill in knowing that she has done this entirely by herself.
Two hours before dinner, and some three before John’s arrival, Helen sends for a hansom cab, and bids the driver to wait when he arrives in Whitechapel. The man’s reluctance is clear across his broad features, that this is no place for a lady, but Helen assures him she knows where she is going, and it is not quite dark enough yet for him to be truly worried. He has only to wait for her return.
The streets of Whitechapel are not so well lit as those near her home, and the whispers of murder ring ever more loudly in her ears, but she is not afraid. She has faced a vampire and allowed herself to be teleported across the country in the blink of an eye. Additionally, she carries a loaded pistol in her bag and a knife is strapped to her leg in a tremendously unladylike, if somewhat convenient, location.
Mary’s rooms are not completely distasteful, but Helen is still grateful when her contact meets her on the street. The air is significantly cleaner, to begin with, and there are some things that Helen hopes to never smell again. Mary is dressed for work, her dress cut significantly lower than Helen’s own, and her hair and face are powdered to within an inch of her life. Tonight Mary’s hair is a shocking red that flares quite noticeably in the gaslights where the effect is not altogether unappealing, though Helen is still glad Miss Kelly could only read the thoughts of men.
“Miss Magnus,” Mary says in greeting, her manners only marred by her accent. “I’m so glad you could come.”
“Thank you for sending for me,” Helen replies. “I assume that you have news?”
“I do,” Mary shivers, pulling her entirely insufficient shawl closer about her shoulders. “I must say, I’ve had a rather nasty fright of it.”
“What happened?” Helen’s concern is quite real. For all Mary is from another walk of life, she is still an abnormal and Helen has vowed, however privately, to protect her and all her ilk.
“I met him,” Mary says, her voice a whisper in the dark, a whisper that joins the others hissing murder up and down the street. “Last night while I was on my way home.”
“Dear God, are you all right?” Helen takes her by the shoulders and looks at her more closely, trying to see if the make-up is hiding anything besides years of hard living.
“I’m quite all right, thank you.” Mary seems both taken aback and flattered by Helen’s concern.
“Please continue,” is all Helen can think to say.
“I felt him coming, you see,” Mary goes on. “In my mind. Before, I always had to be touching a man, and then it was easy enough to pick up dirty secrets for blackmail or find out where in the house he had hidden his treasures. But with him, it was much more powerful.”
“Perhaps your own powers are increasing,” Helen offers, mostly in response to the hollow horror around the edges of Mary’s voice.
“I suppose,” she allows. “In any case, I led him a merry chase until I found a pub where I knew they wouldn’t throw me out for lingering.”
“Miss Kelly, does he know where you live?” Helen asks, concern creeping back into her voice. “Perhaps you should return with me to the Sanctuary.”
“I don’t think so, Miss Magnus,” the girl says. “Besides which, there are too many others I have to protect. I cannot leave them here alone on the chance he knows where my flat is.”
“I commend your bravery,” Helen says. “Did you catch a glimpse of him at all?”
“I’m afraid not, save that he was very tall,” Miss Kelly replies. “But when I came out of the pub, I found this on the ground where a man might have stood to look in at the window.”
She offers up a white handkerchief, fabric much too fine to belong to anyone who might live in the area. Helen feels a swell of excitement cresting through her. When she brings this to James, he will have to take her involvement seriously, and then they will be complete as they were before, all five of them working towards a single goal.
“I must go,” Mary says once Helen has carefully placed the handkerchief in her bag.
“Do be careful,” Helen says, feeling much, much older than she really is. “Make absolutely sure he cannot follow you home. If he suspects you have seen him, even as little as you did, you are not safe. If he should recognize you – ”
“They don’t tend to look at our faces, Miss Magnus,” Mary says almost wistfully, for her face is not unbecoming. “And I wear all manner of wigs to stop men from recognizing me.”
“That’s as may be,” Helen says, once again impressed in spite of herself, “but please keep me informed as to your whereabouts. You are welcome at the Sanctuary at any time.”
“My thanks,” Mary replies with feigned courtliness. She disappears into the night, and Helen does not know that is the last time she will ever see her alive.
Once safely inside the hansom and on the way back home, Helen wastes no time in examining the handkerchief as closely as the dark and the swaying lantern will allow. She cannot tell much, save her initial assessment that the cloth is fine, until her fingers skirt the edge of the fabric and she traces over three letters that nearly stop her heart. The shapes are familiar beneath her fingers, like old friends held dear. She has always planned on adding letters to her name, but these were the letters she had hoped to add to her heart. She’d stitched them herself, after all, as joke when he proposed.
She is suddenly and quite noisily sick all over the inside of the cab. The driver hears her and stops, coming to check on her with great concern. She apologizes for the mess, and promises him nearly four times the fare if only he will get her to Dr. James Watson as soon as humanly possible. As the carriage takes off again, she quells her stomach with ruthless determination, mind spinning beyond her ability to control it or to elucidate coherent thought.
She had known, accepted even, that the road to the Ripper would be laced with horrors and the stuff of her worst nightmares. She did not expect them to be so utterly personal.
James, for once, is home. She can see the light in his office and prays that he is alone. As soon as she descends from the cab, waving off the driver as he tries to offer his arm, she hears the violin and knows that he is indeed without company, and probably well into his evening’s cocaine laced entertainments, but she has no time to judge. She waits until the cab has pulled away and then begins hammering on the door until he opens it.
His eyes are red from the drug, and his usually impeccable attire is all out of sorts. He looks indecent, and there are a hundred different reasons why she should not be out of the eyes of the public with him, but one searing reason why she should, so she pushes past him backwards into his flat and drags him along when he hesitates.
Once she reaches his sitting room, her courage fails and she crumples in a faint for the first time her life. She sits on the floor weeping, skirts spread out around her like she is picnicking by the Thames and James shakes off the drug’s effects as he sits beside her.
“Helen, what on Earth has happened?” His voice is thick with concern and mesolimbics.
“I’ve solved it, James,” she gasps. “The Ripper.”
“Helen,” he starts, and suddenly she is inhumanly angry.
“Did you know?” she demands. She is mortified at the extent of her hysteria, but decides she has every right and strikes him across the chest as hard as she can. “Did you know and keep me in the dark because you were afraid it would break me?”
“Know of what?” James answers, hands catching hers and stilling them where she would have hit him again. “Helen, I’ve not had a breakthrough on that case since the day I began it. What do you know?”
“The Ripper,” she says again, voice soft and bereft of life. “The Ripper is John.”
+++
Chapter 3
Whispers on the Edge of Dark
Chapter 2
October seems unconscionably long. The weather stays cool, but not so cold as to drive people off of the streets. Gregory has written from Germany to say that he will be staying on another month, and Helen is not sorry for his absence. It is not because John has taken to calling more often, if anything the exact opposite is true. Rather it is that Helen spends most of her free hours meeting more humanoid abnormals that Mary Kelly had become acquainted with over the years. The housekeeper does not approve, but knows her place well enough that she will not write to Gregory and alert him to his daughter’s actions.
Despite her father’s absence, John’s distance has not decreased. Although she has made her own intentions quite clear, even to the point of saying the actual words, which is something they have always avoided before, he persists in bringing James or Nigel with him when he calls, or allowing the housekeeper to catch him late in the evenings and show him out. And he has not come to her rooms privately, even though she’s as much as asked him if he is still able to travel in that manner. If not for the ring on her finger, she would believe that he has changed both his mind and his intentions.
James has set his melancholia against a backdrop of cocaine. Helen is not sure if he is aiming to dull his awareness to the point where he forgets that he cannot solve the murders, or if he is hoping that the answer lies somewhere in his drugged haze. Nigel still patrols the streets at night, but Nikola has been distracted by some experiment or other, and Helen is so angry with him they haven’t spoken since the middle of the month. By the time October winds down, the Five have all but fractured, and Helen fears her own heart with be next.
The first eight days of November are like a dream after the loneliness of the two and a half months that preceded it. John does not visit, pleading business in Southampton, but every day some new trinket arrives on her doorstep, until at last even the housekeeper will smile at the mention of John’s name and admit that maybe he is at last doing things properly. On the morning of the eighth, there are two deliveries that whet her anticipation for the evening to arrive. The first is a card from John, saying that he will arrive this evening after dinner, which in their code means he will share a pot of tea, be shown the door, and then be waiting for her in her room when she gets there.
The second is a message from Mary Kelly, the one woman in London that might be safe from the Ripper. The message that had been delivered is verbal and brief, and barely makes it to her at all thanks to the scruples of her ever-vigilant housekeeper. The woman has come to tolerate most of Helen’s eccentricities without batting an eyelash, leastaways where Helen can see her, but if she views John Druitt as unwelcome after nightfall, she has equally strong feelings about unwashed street waifs at the breakfast hour. Helen had heard the ruckus and relieved the poor girl of her message, sending her on her way with enough coin to buy a hot meal every day for a week.
Helen spends the day organizing her files on the abnormals Mary has introduced her to during their association, which helps in some measure to calm her nerves. Most of her new acquaintances are fairly harmless to society, in fact most of them only seem to harm themselves, and Helen has been working to try to help them along in whatever way she can. More than once, she has found herself wishing for her father’s experienced advice, James’s assistance or John’s unprofessional yet no less heartwarming assurances that she is a capable physician for all she lacks the credentials to back it up, but she cannot deny that there is a not inconsequential thrill in knowing that she has done this entirely by herself.
Two hours before dinner, and some three before John’s arrival, Helen sends for a hansom cab, and bids the driver to wait when he arrives in Whitechapel. The man’s reluctance is clear across his broad features, that this is no place for a lady, but Helen assures him she knows where she is going, and it is not quite dark enough yet for him to be truly worried. He has only to wait for her return.
The streets of Whitechapel are not so well lit as those near her home, and the whispers of murder ring ever more loudly in her ears, but she is not afraid. She has faced a vampire and allowed herself to be teleported across the country in the blink of an eye. Additionally, she carries a loaded pistol in her bag and a knife is strapped to her leg in a tremendously unladylike, if somewhat convenient, location.
Mary’s rooms are not completely distasteful, but Helen is still grateful when her contact meets her on the street. The air is significantly cleaner, to begin with, and there are some things that Helen hopes to never smell again. Mary is dressed for work, her dress cut significantly lower than Helen’s own, and her hair and face are powdered to within an inch of her life. Tonight Mary’s hair is a shocking red that flares quite noticeably in the gaslights where the effect is not altogether unappealing, though Helen is still glad Miss Kelly could only read the thoughts of men.
“Miss Magnus,” Mary says in greeting, her manners only marred by her accent. “I’m so glad you could come.”
“Thank you for sending for me,” Helen replies. “I assume that you have news?”
“I do,” Mary shivers, pulling her entirely insufficient shawl closer about her shoulders. “I must say, I’ve had a rather nasty fright of it.”
“What happened?” Helen’s concern is quite real. For all Mary is from another walk of life, she is still an abnormal and Helen has vowed, however privately, to protect her and all her ilk.
“I met him,” Mary says, her voice a whisper in the dark, a whisper that joins the others hissing murder up and down the street. “Last night while I was on my way home.”
“Dear God, are you all right?” Helen takes her by the shoulders and looks at her more closely, trying to see if the make-up is hiding anything besides years of hard living.
“I’m quite all right, thank you.” Mary seems both taken aback and flattered by Helen’s concern.
“Please continue,” is all Helen can think to say.
“I felt him coming, you see,” Mary goes on. “In my mind. Before, I always had to be touching a man, and then it was easy enough to pick up dirty secrets for blackmail or find out where in the house he had hidden his treasures. But with him, it was much more powerful.”
“Perhaps your own powers are increasing,” Helen offers, mostly in response to the hollow horror around the edges of Mary’s voice.
“I suppose,” she allows. “In any case, I led him a merry chase until I found a pub where I knew they wouldn’t throw me out for lingering.”
“Miss Kelly, does he know where you live?” Helen asks, concern creeping back into her voice. “Perhaps you should return with me to the Sanctuary.”
“I don’t think so, Miss Magnus,” the girl says. “Besides which, there are too many others I have to protect. I cannot leave them here alone on the chance he knows where my flat is.”
“I commend your bravery,” Helen says. “Did you catch a glimpse of him at all?”
“I’m afraid not, save that he was very tall,” Miss Kelly replies. “But when I came out of the pub, I found this on the ground where a man might have stood to look in at the window.”
She offers up a white handkerchief, fabric much too fine to belong to anyone who might live in the area. Helen feels a swell of excitement cresting through her. When she brings this to James, he will have to take her involvement seriously, and then they will be complete as they were before, all five of them working towards a single goal.
“I must go,” Mary says once Helen has carefully placed the handkerchief in her bag.
“Do be careful,” Helen says, feeling much, much older than she really is. “Make absolutely sure he cannot follow you home. If he suspects you have seen him, even as little as you did, you are not safe. If he should recognize you – ”
“They don’t tend to look at our faces, Miss Magnus,” Mary says almost wistfully, for her face is not unbecoming. “And I wear all manner of wigs to stop men from recognizing me.”
“That’s as may be,” Helen says, once again impressed in spite of herself, “but please keep me informed as to your whereabouts. You are welcome at the Sanctuary at any time.”
“My thanks,” Mary replies with feigned courtliness. She disappears into the night, and Helen does not know that is the last time she will ever see her alive.
Once safely inside the hansom and on the way back home, Helen wastes no time in examining the handkerchief as closely as the dark and the swaying lantern will allow. She cannot tell much, save her initial assessment that the cloth is fine, until her fingers skirt the edge of the fabric and she traces over three letters that nearly stop her heart. The shapes are familiar beneath her fingers, like old friends held dear. She has always planned on adding letters to her name, but these were the letters she had hoped to add to her heart. She’d stitched them herself, after all, as joke when he proposed.
She is suddenly and quite noisily sick all over the inside of the cab. The driver hears her and stops, coming to check on her with great concern. She apologizes for the mess, and promises him nearly four times the fare if only he will get her to Dr. James Watson as soon as humanly possible. As the carriage takes off again, she quells her stomach with ruthless determination, mind spinning beyond her ability to control it or to elucidate coherent thought.
She had known, accepted even, that the road to the Ripper would be laced with horrors and the stuff of her worst nightmares. She did not expect them to be so utterly personal.
James, for once, is home. She can see the light in his office and prays that he is alone. As soon as she descends from the cab, waving off the driver as he tries to offer his arm, she hears the violin and knows that he is indeed without company, and probably well into his evening’s cocaine laced entertainments, but she has no time to judge. She waits until the cab has pulled away and then begins hammering on the door until he opens it.
His eyes are red from the drug, and his usually impeccable attire is all out of sorts. He looks indecent, and there are a hundred different reasons why she should not be out of the eyes of the public with him, but one searing reason why she should, so she pushes past him backwards into his flat and drags him along when he hesitates.
Once she reaches his sitting room, her courage fails and she crumples in a faint for the first time her life. She sits on the floor weeping, skirts spread out around her like she is picnicking by the Thames and James shakes off the drug’s effects as he sits beside her.
“Helen, what on Earth has happened?” His voice is thick with concern and mesolimbics.
“I’ve solved it, James,” she gasps. “The Ripper.”
“Helen,” he starts, and suddenly she is inhumanly angry.
“Did you know?” she demands. She is mortified at the extent of her hysteria, but decides she has every right and strikes him across the chest as hard as she can. “Did you know and keep me in the dark because you were afraid it would break me?”
“Know of what?” James answers, hands catching hers and stilling them where she would have hit him again. “Helen, I’ve not had a breakthrough on that case since the day I began it. What do you know?”
“The Ripper,” she says again, voice soft and bereft of life. “The Ripper is John.”
+++
Chapter 3
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 05:52 pm (UTC)TL;DR TIMELINE-OBSESSED FAN IS CONFUSED.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-21 05:58 pm (UTC)I have some rather personal reasons for hoping that Ashley was conceived before the Ripper thing started, but since they were more complicated than the fic allowed for, I just left it out entirely. I know, I'm a terrible cheater. ;) In my mind, she's about 10 weeks along at this point (hence getting sick in the cab), but she's not really thinking about it so she hasn't noticed that she's missing her cycle (which I realize is a stretch, but she's busy and stressed and I'm exercising my right to stick my fingers in my ears and sing really loudly.) :P
If it makes you feel any better, it's bugging me so much that I'm already writing another fic that explains it better.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 12:20 am (UTC)Ah. Well, hey, whatever makes it easier to get the words on paper/in type.
Hey, some people don't have regular periods *cough personal experience cough*.
I mean, I didn't feel *bad*, but hay cool yay :D.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-22 12:22 am (UTC)There's that too. I thought about including something in the next chapter (I actually thought I did, but then when I was editing found out I hadn't), but it seemed more simple to just let the story go and worry about it later. ;)