The hitherto untold story of Mrs. Lovett
HELL’S a
Published by Hell’s Hundred an imprint of Soho Press Soho Press, Inc.
227 W 17th Street New York, NY 10011 www.sohopress.com
Copyright © 2025 by David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Demchuk, David, author. | Clark, Corinne Leigh, author.
Title: The butcher’s daughter : the hitherto untold story of Mrs. Lovett / David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark.
Description: New York, NY : Hell’s Hundred, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024042012
ISBN 978-1-64129-642-7
eISBN 978-1-64129-643-4
Subjects: LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Epistolary fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PR9199.3.D434 B88 2025 DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20240920
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024042012
Interior design by Janine Agro Interior images: Shutterstock/iStock
Printed in the United States of America
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EU Responsible Person (for authorities only) eucomply OÜ
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Inspector A—
As requested, this dossier contains the letters, documents, notebooks and miscellaneous papers gathered from Miss Emily Gibson’s rooms after her mother’s visit to Whitehall. The housemistress expressed surprise that Miss Gibson’s door was left unlocked and could not attest with confidence that the premises had remained inviolate in the days preceding. I detected no evidence of theft or foul play, no obvious sign of violence or struggle. Nothing of value appeared to have been taken. Many items that I would have considered among her prized possessions were in their proper places in plain sight, including a few coins and a small cache of jewellery on her dressing table near her bedside. None of the other residents could recall any recent visitors. They were unaware of any suitors, romantic involvements or close companions. This is a curious one! The rooms are now secured and will remain so until you approve the release of their contents to the family. Mind the feather.
—Dew
April the 3rd, 1887
Dear Miss Gibson,
I am in receipt of your three letters to Mother Mary Angelica, our Prioress, which had been held for consideration in the offices of St. Anne’s Priory here in North Hampstead. They have been released to me for reply. I see that you are a journalist, in search of Mrs. Margery Lovett—a wanton woman, a murderess, whose name we daren’t speak aloud for its profanity. A half century has passed since her dark deeds! You believe her to be secreted here at the Priory, working in the kitchen or as a housemaid or possibly as a nurse. What has led you to this conclusion? You do not say. You present a rough and unflattering description of her, which no doubt befits such a monstrous creature. You do not elaborate on your interest in her whereabouts or well-being, though given your occupation one can surmise the worst.
Three letters! You are persistent, I will give you that. I suppose it’s a vital quality in your profession and serves you well for the most part. However, we do not know your Margery Lovett nor do we know where she might be found.
St. Anne’s is a community of Sisters of the Church, living in quiet contemplation. I can assure you the pious women on these premises would have nothing to do with someone as
depraved as your Lovett, let alone provide her with shelter. A hundred and fifty gruesome murders! Baking human flesh into pies! Perhaps she was more diabolical than her vile confederate Sweeney Todd, that malevolent barber of infamy, for who could conceive of such a thing. The Sisters here are innocent of such horrible stories as are told to children to frighten them under the covers. They have no knowledge of these ghastly crimes, and they are better for it. One of our youngest, Sister Catherine with her fine and delicate hand, has been assigned to assist me in crafting this reply. Poor soul. The names of Lovett and Todd had never touched her ears until this moment. If only I could be as unspoiled as she.
I wish you had been here with me in the minutes just after dawn when I was out in the yard with the cook’s maid, gathering eggs from our three nesting hens. I take on such tasks as the need arises, and will sometimes top a plumped-up bird to make our Sunday supper. As we had our basket filled and our backs to the runs and were dithering with the kitchen door, a windhover lurking in our ancient oak saw his chance to strike and swept down to seize one of the hens. Unexpectedly, the old girl put up a tremendous fight, screeching and thrashing with beak and claw until the maid and I could grab our sticks and drive the creature off. The hen may yet die from her wounds, poor thing, but not without having torn a few feathers from her assailant. I know some of how she feels. Young as you are, and more fair than fowl, I wonder if you do as well.
Why don’t you turn your attention away from the gutter, to more worthy journalistic pursuits? I have read your inspiring piece in the Daily Post on the suffragist Helen Taylor, and your series of articles on the Malthusian League, abandoned mothers and unwanted children. Why seek out the worst of
women, when those who suffer legitimate injustices need your passion, when we need you to shine a light on the struggles we face in every turn of our lives, at every station, at every age? Even the Priory has faced hostilities over decades: accusations of succumbing to papacy and rejecting women’s natural obedience to men. You are not the first to write to us enquiring after vagrants, cutpurses, dissolutes, harlots and worse.
Ours is an order of Christian charity. I myself have suffered greatly, decade upon decade. I have endured many abuses, faced horrors at the very height of London society and among the very dregs. In these, my final years, I am grateful that the Sisters and the Prioress, Mother Mary Angelica, took pity on me and accepted me into their fold so that I could escape the turmoil of the world. Your time and effort would be better spent on noble works, on acts of bravery and benevolence, than on a ghoulish tale which has been glorified in penny bloods and gaffs. In any event, the last I heard of your Lovett was that she died in her cell at Newgate Prison, poisoned herself I believe, which by all accounts was the best possible outcome. Certainly, poisoning is more merciful than a hanging.
With this, Sister Catherine and I must leave you, as we are being called to dine before Vespers. This is a time of great unease for us at the Priory. The Reverend Mother, God bless her soul, was taken to hospital early yesterday evening; we understand her to be direly ill, and do not know if she will ever return. Our Sister Augustine is acting in her place, and is at sixes and sevens with her new duties, as you would expect. Might the Post consider a portrait in prose of the Reverend Mother as a beacon of benevolence in the capital? It would send an inspiring message to the populace, even as she lies on what may be her deathbed.
We wish you the best of luck in your endeavours, but please know this is not the right rock under which to look. Margery Lovett is no doubt at the bottom of a pile of bones in a pauper’s grave, and that is better than she deserves. Leave her to rest with the dead, if rest she can. You would be chasing phantoms. I enclose for you the windhover’s feather, speckled and striped. A memento between us.
Always look forward, never look back.
Margaret C. Evans (Miss)
OLondon Evening Post
monday evening , april 3 , 1887
10 pages—One halfpenny
HAMPSTEAD PRIORESS TAKEN ILL
Hampstead Heath, England: Mother Mary Angelica, age 71, of St. Anne’s Priory, fell ill unexpectedly last night, and was transported to the Royal Free Hospital where she is under careful watch in the Victoria Wing. Doctors suspect an inflammation of the heart. The Sisters of St. Anne’s request the prayers of our readers to hasten the Reverend Mother’s recovery.
April the 14th, 1887
Dear Miss Gibson,
Thank you for your kind enquiry after the health of the Reverend Mother. Sadly, she remains at Royal Free Hospital in a most desperate state, watched over day and night by the fine nurses in the Victoria Wing. Despite all our prayers, we are told that she is unlikely to recover. It is only a matter of time. Sister Catherine is beside herself with grief. She and the Reverend Mother had grown quite close in recent months.
As for your other queries, your determination is admirable but remains misdirected. We regret that we do not permit visitors to the Priory. Ours is an order of peaceful observance that benefits from being at a remove from the troubles that surround us. As the acting Prioress, Sister Augustine would be the one to receive guests on our behalf. If you have questions, she would be pleased to assist, though I doubt she has the answers that you seek. Even if your Lovett had been here in decades past, our files are unlikely to be of much use, and are not available for your perusal.
I do see though that we have piqued your curiosity about our order and Mother Mary Angelica. Allow me to take a
moment to tell you about the Priory. St. Anne’s was built as Hunt House, a huddle of mottled black brick and grey stone along the north-eastern edge of the cemetery. It was built by Sir Charles Marten shortly after the ascent of George I, and was so named for its proximity to the Bishop’s Wood, now known as Brewer’s Fell. He died fifty years after, leaving the house to the Church which first fashioned it as a convalescent home for those leaving hospital, and then as an attachment to the St. Milburga’s Abbey in North London. Our Sisters number twenty-nine at the moment, the eldest aged eighty-one and the youngest sixteen. To this, we add six lay workers who tend the kitchen, the refectory, the oratory, the dormitory and chapel, and the ice house; the Sisters and I tend to the chicken shed where we get our eggs, the small glass conservatory, the laundry, the garden and grounds. There is also the Prioress, may the Lord bless and protect her. And, of course, they also have me. When my strength is with me, I assist in the baking of altar breads between Matins and Lauds; these are offered up to churches throughout London. On the harder days, I join the elders in the parlour and embroider handkerchiefs, table linens and altar cloths, and help with the mending of socks and mantles and robes. One must strive to be useful in this life, and through usefulness find purpose. My loving Sister thinks I see the world queerly, and perhaps I do. While the women here are gentle with me and hold me among their number, it is at an arm’s length at best: I sleep and eat alongside them; I watch them as they rise and wash their bodies, pale and freckled and soft with womanly down; I listen as they chant and pray; but I am not of their realm, not truly, nor am I of the world beyond the gate. I admit I keep a certain distance
as well, and do not invest myself in their whispers and their tiny daily dramas.
Sister Catherine’s face is already flushing, she knows what I’m about to tell: yesterday after Terce, one of the youngers, Eleanor, went to fetch her sewing kit and found her thimble was missing, an enameled silver bauble set with tiny white beads. Eleanor came to us a merchant’s daughter, well-to-do, just turned twenty-one and twice as vain as she was pretty. She refused to surrender this token of her father’s affection and now it was gone: not in the basket, not under the bed, nowhere on the floor. Vanished. An hour of wailing while the others searched the dormitory; then one of the others, Estelle, two years older and two feet taller, she came in laughing from outside to say that she had tossed it in the sluice where we all dump our chamber pots, and no doubt was on its way down to the Thames. Eleanor ran out into the morning fog in just her tunic, hurried to the sluice and combed through the clots of muck with a stick until she saw the dainty item lodged against the iron grate in the Priory wall, stopping it from sliding out and down into the gutter. She scurried back in, sobbing and sniveling, flung herself down to the cellar and into the laundry, and washed and scrubbed the filthy object as best she could. Sister Augustine, meanwhile, took Estelle by the ear, pulled her up the stairs and confined her without meals to the bedchamber that we keep aside for those who are unwell. She remains in there at this hour, and likely through the night. As if all that would not suffice, one of the kitchen girls, a rude and ruddy sort, muttered to the others about “Sister Stinkfinger.” We were two twips away from a bare-knuckle brawl. None of this would have happened, of course, if the Reverend Mother
was well and with us. It is in our grief and fear that our tempers flare; pettiness takes hold of our hearts, and we lower ourselves to foolishness that would be frowned upon by bone-grubbers.
I say all this to you, but to the others I say little. Sweet Catherine here has never heard me speak so much. Her eyes are wide as saucers! I keep to myself, and wisely so, and know my company is true. I am more alone here than I have ever been, yet I cannot claim to be lonely. I have never been safer than I am in here, yet my heart still quickens, seizes, at the thought of the dangers I’ve left behind. If you are reluctant to share the story of our Reverend Mother with the world, perhaps you would find something of interest in mine, here at the Priory or in my life before. I have come to virtue late in life. I enjoy a simple existence, and have ample time to reflect upon it. Your readers might do well to join in that reflection.
I wonder, Miss Gibson: Have I seen you at the gate, in those moments after Prime when we gather ourselves to break our fast, when the streets outside are calm and still? Have I seen you standing there, watching our windows, imagining our lives? I have caught a woman lingering there more than once these past few weeks. A smart, sharp, curious girl, perhaps from the village, imagining a life of solitude and service within these walls. Young and strong she is, cheeks aflush with the first light of dawn, a feathered green postilion perched above her auburn curls, emerald dress ruffled and pleated with a jet-black bodice, taffeta and silk, blouse clutched tight at the neck. Could this be you? Would you tell me if it was? Her soft black glove frothed with white lace at the cuff, she clasps one bar and then another, stares intently through the refectory
window, strains to see inside. Fleeting figures shuffling in and out of the shadows. Is that you watching, Miss Gibson? Have you seen us? Have you seen me?
Walk worthy of the vocation wherewith you are called.
M.E.
April the 29th, 1887
Dear Miss Gibson,
A fortnight has passed since your last letter. I fear that my tone has offended you, and for this I must offer my apologies. This was certainly not my intention. I have sat and stood by the window, morning and evening, day upon day. The strong young woman has not returned to the gate, at least not that I have spied. She may well have watched us and she may have seen enough, her fancies of a cloistered life dispelled by glimpses of the dull reality: a gaggle of geese clucking and squawking as they trundle from psalms and prayers to barley soup and potato bread. I know I shouldn’t talk this way, the Sisters have been very kind to me. But merely being alive is not much of a life. All that aside, it grieves me to think that I, or that we, might have frightened you off. We are barely kind to each other, no wonder they shut us up away from the likes of strangers.
Sister Catherine is here with me, as she is most days, wrinkling her nose at my rudeness and rightly so. She is delicate and fine and fair, where I am coarse and stiff like an old bristle brush. She comes to me in the afternoon between None and Vespers to help make my words pretty for you. She thinks I was born to tell a story, and that my tales would give your readers
at the Post a window through which they could observe our devotion and works of mercy. I wish I had her grace. I went for a few years to the charity school at St. George-in-the-East, near Ratcliff, where I was born and raised. My father was a butcher on the Row, and he needed me to be good with numbers and to read and write a little; to help my mother, who stood out front hawking while he worked in back salting and hanging and smoking and carving the meat. I only ever learned a little but I make use of what I did. My tender Sister has been so kind to me, and in such times of trouble. The Reverend Mother is still in care, her days are surely numbered, and we are all beside ourselves in despair. Young Estelle has left us; her nasty prank on Eleanor turned back upon her like a wave, all the youngers refused to sit with her or speak to her. Sister Eleanor remains, and has passed her silver bauble on to Sister Augustine for safekeeping. She uses a plain brass thimble like the rest of us now, every one the same as every other. Some of her vanity has been passed off as well. No longer a giggling girl, she sits alone most days, and at odd moments displays a quiet dignity. An improvement.
Have you found another avenue to pursue in your quest to unearth your murderess? I expect if we are to have newspapers then we must have them sold. Unlike the odious Lovett, I am alive and present, and would gladly unburden my soul to you if I thought it would uplift another, if only someone might listen. I doubt you’ve ever been to the Row. A different world for you. I can see you in a clean corner shop, picking out a neatly trimmed joint, getting it all wrapped up in paper and tied nicely with a length of string, tucking it under your arm as you step out into the sunshine. No stink, no filth, no vermin, no screams and squeals. You can forget that something’s throat was slit to make its flesh your supper.
Growing up as I did, I learned quickly about man’s place in the world, and the place of all our lessers. Meat was meat, you were lucky to have it, and you didn’t enquire too deeply whence it came. Life was not so precious then. Creatures lower in the natural order were beasts of burden, food on the table, and little else. They weren’t to be pitied, even though they led miserable lives and met gruesome ends. They were better off dead, all things considered. At least that’s what we tell ourselves. Little went to waste in our shop. There was barely a scrap left at the end of the day, apart from what fell to the floor. Every part was good for something, from the ends of the ears to the tips of the tails, blood, gristle and bone.
Each day I would awaken well before dawn to the bleating of terrified sheep being strung up and slaughtered, to the smell of blood and muck flowing out into the gutters. My father was always hacking and sawing big hunks of mutton and beef, striding about with a whole side of cow slung over his shoulder. I would watch him pierce the slabs with massive iron hooks and hang them by the window where they swung all red and dripping into the fresh sawdust strewn across the floor. Then he would sharpen his knives, saws, cleavers and skewers, and ready the buckets and bowls to collect the offal. My mother and I would don our aprons and wash down the butcher’s blocks, stained pink and slashed with deep knife cuts, and sweep the gore-soaked dust out of sight of the customers. Some mornings my mum would call for me to help her make short crust for rolls and pasties, stuffed with scraps that we had chopped and seasoned and baked into brawn. Then when we opened she would stand out front shouting the wares of the day: pork loin, side of beef, tender leg of lamb, a chant not unlike those you hear in the oratory. I’d hang back and watch
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18her without her knowing, to see how she dealt with haggling housemaids, belligerent hawkers, drunks and beggars and thieves.
In the last few years that we had the shop, we received carcasses that had been slaughtered elsewhere, but it was not always so. When I was a child, we had a steady stream of calves, lambs and piglets through our yard and shed that my father would kill and hang and drain and skin himself, or in exchange with Mr. O’Brien, who often needed help with his chickens and geese. I would help by collecting offal, picking it up with my hands off the killing shed floor, and dropping it into tin buckets to either be cleaned and washed and ground into sausages or, if it was poor or diseased, to be fed to the other animals. It was beastly, messy, smelly work, but I accustomed to it soon enough. I do recall one time, though, when I was just seven or eight years old, my father was in the shed with a stout young finishing pig, a thrasher and a biter. He was in the pen kicking and squealing and sending the other animals into a frenzy. My father shouted and I came running. He held the pig tight by the neck while I slid under and around and pulled the rope harness tight over his front legs, then up around the back of his head. He grabbed the rope and hoisted the creature about a foot in the air while I held its back legs still. He then tucked a blood bucket between its legs, grabbed his long, thin knife, and slashed the animal across its throat. The pig screeched once more as the blood spewed onto my hands and into the bucket. I still remember how it steamed in the freezing shed, the stench and the thickness of it. Once the animal was finally still, I wrung the blood off my hands into the bucket and then went into the back of the shop to wash myself while my father tied the hind legs together and raised the carcass onto a hook
for skinning and gutting. I caught a glimpse of my reflection on the side of a kettle. I looked like a mad murderous fiend: I raised my hands and clutched my fingers like claws, bared my teeth and growled, leaning in towards my distorted face, then giggled, having scared myself. My father hired Ned soon after, the O’Brien boy, as he was six years older than me and better suited for such things. I was very proud of myself though, that I had been so helpful when my father needed me. I would spy on Ned from time to time and watch my father teach him how to tie and stun and hang and bleed and split and dress an animal, things I already knew. It was only much later, once I was with the Sisters, that I thought back about the death we delivered to so many innocent creatures.
Life can end at any moment, for any of us. Cut short in one of a thousand ways. It can be cruel or merciful, painful or peaceful. Sometimes we choose our ending, oftentimes we can’t. If you had to choose your own end, Miss Gibson, what would it be? Do you believe in a divine saviour, like the Sisters around me? What sort of end does each of us deserve? Are we judged ultimately by all we’ve done in this life? I have considered these questions myself, and don’t yet have a good answer. This is that strangeness that Sister Catherine sees in me. I want to know my heart, yet there are times when it feels like it is wrapped in thistles and thorns, impossible to touch. Another day comes to mind, not so different from the ones before. I would have been just sixteen. I was out in front with Mum, selling chops and sausages, shooing away boys carrying sacks of onions and potatoes. Already carriages crowded the street, their muddy horses riding shoulder to shoulder with mere inches between their clattering wheels. The rhythmic clopping of their hooves blended with the cries
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of the costermongers and their rumbling carts. Cross sweepers and newsboys wound their way through the crowds of pedestrians streaming in every direction. Skinny, mangy dogs nosed through heaps of guts and refuse. The sky hung low and grey over the crooked rooftops, spitting and grumbling. A trio of gulls wheeled and soared above us, seeking out scraps to fight over, their cries scraping at our ears.
I saw it out the corner of my eye—a child, a boy, rushed out of one of the shops next over and chased a ball into the street. Quick as a flash, knocked to the ground, trampled by a carriage horse, pulled under the wheel, the screams, the screams were terrible. My mother and I, we were right there, we were the first to reach him. He was nearly a baby, just three or four years old. Not dead, thank God, but his leg was crushed and the bone-flecked blood poured out like water. We pushed our way through the gathering crowd, lifted and carried the boy into the shop, back to where my father was. A half-dozen men rushed in with us, jostling my mother as she waved back the women and the children and hurried back to the street to keep the thieves at bay. The tallest man, with a silk top hat and frock coat and silver-crowned cane, he was the one who had followed from the carriage, his face was as grey as the scarf around his neck.
My father had slaughtered countless lambs and calves, but when he had to save this screaming boy, he froze, he could not make a move. I hollered for him to hold the boy down on the wide wooden table while I tore a strip of waxed linen from the roll and tied it round his leg above the knee, pulled it tight and tighter still. The boy was bucking and thrashing, the tall man from the carriage pressed forward to join us, he stood with my father and held the boy down. I took the flesh-choked meat saw from the sink, wiped it across my apron, jumped up on the
table and, with one knee on his ankle, I dug the metal teeth into his flesh and dragged and pulled with all my might, six long hard strokes, until I felt the bone give way and the flesh tear off with a snap. At last, the boy was silent. Had I killed him? No, he was breathing still, eyes wide, trembling, in another world from our own. Behind me, someone spewed their breakfast on the floor. I called out for another square of waxen cloth, a length of twine. I wrapped the oozing stump like a mutton shank, leapt off and cried, “Hospital! Hurry!” My heart was pounding half out of my chest. The tall man seized the boy from the table, cradled him against his chest, and flew through the shop and out into his carriage, which roared through the street as if chased by the devil. The crowd untangled and withdrew. My father showed more emotion in that moment than he ever had. He wasn’t one for crying—no Englishman is. But he let out a heavy, hard, guttural sound. I realised he had choked back a sob, and turned away so no one could see his face. I stood there, staring at him, unable to speak, unable to comfort him. I raised a blood-crusted hand to touch him, but then thought better of it. He would not want to be comforted by me; it would humiliate him. I turned instead to the sink, plunged my hands into the pinkish water, scrubbed them clean, then wiped them dry on my apron. They were ruddy and raw and blistered and sore from the work I had done, but alive. So alive. I turned round and saw the boy’s severed leg on the table, blackened and oozing. So did my father. “Take that round the back,” he said quietly. I stripped off the tattered pants cloth and the single bloodied shoe and tossed them into the bin by the sink. I knew by dusk the dogs would have it. Meat was meat, after all, and they were none too picky about where it came from. What luck for them.
Two days later, the tall man returned, on foot this time. He took my mother aside and told her that the boy had died on their way to the infirmary. Despite our efforts, he had lost too much blood. He had likely been doomed from the start. The man thanked and commended us, then proffered his card and told my mother that, if at any time I sought a servant’s position in a fine household, he wished to have me come and work with him. For he was a physician, north of the city, and was often in need of help in the kitchen and perhaps in his office as well. He turned the card over and drew a strange symbol, an eye enclosed within a triangle, then told us to take it to any cabman stationed at the corner of Commercial Road; whomever we asked would take us direct to Highgate without charge. Surprised and saddened at the news of the boy, my mother curtsied, bid him good day, and placed the card under the foot of the counter scale. It remained there for one year, until I turned seventeen, when we found ourselves with an urgent need to make use of it.
I do remember wondering that night, as I lay in my bed: If he was a physician, why hadn’t he helped us? Why hadn’t he helped me? Why did he just hold the boy down and watch?
It is time. We have been called to prayer. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. I do hope I will hear from you soon.
M.E.
Miss Gibson: I believe your father is Sir Hadley Gibson? The Reverend Mother was taken by his generosity toward the less fortunate. I will hold you both in my heart. Your servant in Christ. —Sr. C
OLondon Evening Post
saturday evening , may 6 , 1887
10 pages—One halfpenny
PRIORESS DEAD. BELOVED NUN PASSES AWAY –
London, England: A beautiful, saintly life ended at the London Free Hospital, Friday evening, 5th May. We are joined in grief at the passing of Mother Mary Angelica, 71, Prioress of St. Anne’s. We know that the Reverend Mother, in her gentle humility, would, if she could, forbid this loving testament to her memory. But, in our deep sorrow, we must allow ourselves a few words in tribute. Truly one of “God’s chosen” on earth, we confidently know she is with Him now in Heaven. She is fondly remembered for her kind, inexhaustive patience; devotion to her Sisters; and dedication to the betterment of the less fortunate. On the grievous night she was taken from us, she was struck down breathless after evening prayers. Despite the finest care these past four weeks, she has found her rest in God. May perpetual light shine upon her, O Lord. The well-attended funeral procession was held at St. Mary’s Church, Hampstead, headed by the children of the London Oratory School, dressed in white with mourning scarves, on Saturday morning following the Requiem Mass. Canon Arthur Purcell officiated, attended by the Rev. J. Evans of Archbishop’s House, Dundee; the brother of the deceased; and a large group of priests and nuns. Sincere and warm condolences are still offered daily to the melancholy community of St Anne’s; many are mourning with them from outside the Priory walls. Let our anguished hearts take comfort in the presence of our Lord. Blessed be His name. Amen.
Published by Hell’s Hundred an imprint of Soho Press
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New York, NY 10011 www.sohopress.com
Copyright © 2026 Leila Siddiqui All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-64129-701-1 eISBN 978-1-64129-702-8
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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PROLOGUE
It had taken Jane years to find her. She’d followed the river of gossip from London to Coventry, all those whisperings about an exotic and wealthy foreigner who, decades ago, had turned heads in London society for just a brief few weeks before mysteriously vanishing. A lifelong spinster, so it was told, who’d spent her life caring for her brother’s children, and, when they had grown, was taken in by an adoring niece to look after her grandnieces and nephews. Jane sat in the drawing room, waiting for her to appear.
The floor creaked behind Jane, and Mehrunissa Begum Hammersmith walked in, a thick gray-streaked braid swung over a shoulder, a matronly high-necked black dress on. She was graceful and soft as she made her way across the room, sat in a chair opposite Jane, and folded her hands in her lap.
“I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Shelley,” Miss Hammersmith said.
Jane doubted it. The woman neither smiled nor
frowned; she had an unreadable expression on her face. A thick knot formed in Jane’s chest. She could see, now, why her mother-in-law had been so taken by such a dignified creature. Slowly, Jane exhaled the breath she’d been keeping in and gathered the bundle of papers in her lap.
“I have begun the task of working on my mother-inlaw’s memorials,” Jane said calmly. “Both hers and her husband’s.”
“Tragic, how he died,” Miss Hammersmith said. “I read about it in the papers. So young, Percy. Lord Byron too. And . . .”
The woman before Jane appeared to lose her composure. But she took a moment, and a softness returned to her face. “And another man who was employed by him,” she continued. “A young doctor.”
Jane nodded. “You spent that summer with the most notorious man to ever have written a word in the English language. Have you ever wanted to—”
“No.” Miss Hammersmith shook her head. She smoothed her black dress against the tops of her thighs. “I prefer to forget that summer, Mrs. Shelley. It was as if I were never there.”
Miss Hammersmith stared hard at Jane, who realized this was not a request but a command. She would never speak of her time with the Shelleys. Jane had been gripping hard to the bundle. She let go, placed her hands on top of the pile, then cleared her throat. It was a while before the words materialized in her mind.
“As you may have heard,” Jane said, “Mrs. Shelley died a number of years ago. We were very intimate. She was like a mother to me.” She let out a deep sigh. She knew she hadn’t fully recovered from the loss, perhaps never would. “A few years after her death, I found the journals she had written with her husband.” She shifted in her seat, Miss Hammersmith watching her every movement. “And while I have tasked myself with putting together her biography, there are some things I . . .”
She found she’d been tapping her foot against the floor. She stopped, then finally stood and approached Miss Hammersmith. Jane held out the bundle of papers to her and, when she didn’t reach for it, laid it delicately in her lap.
“Pages from her journals, Miss Hammersmith. From that summer. She paints a very vivid picture of you. Of what happened to all of you in that villa. I cannot, in good conscience, include any of this in her memorials. I ought to have thrown it all into the hearth, to have destroyed it before my husband could see it.”
Tears sprang to her eyes, and she quickly wiped them away. “In my affection for my mother-in-law, I want you to have them. You can treasure these pages or you can burn them. They are yours to do with as you wish.”
“What about her sister Claire?”
“Miss Clairmont wants nothing to do with us.”
“Then what makes you think I should have them?” Miss Hammersmith asked.
“I do not know. I suppose she would not have minded that I shared with you.”
Jane sat back down and watched as Miss Hammersmith undid the twine around the bundle. When she’d found the journals, she and her husband had begun to read them together. She was consumed by this window into the youth of a woman she’d worshipped. As the events of Mary Shelley’s life took on a sad turn—of dashed hopes, death, depression—she hid them away from her husband, took on the sole project of consolidating it all into a biography of her beloved mother-in-law. But there were some lines, some passages, that she found herself scratching out completely. She was shocked at her own rashness and had to step away from the journals for a time. Young Mary had seemed bitter, hapless, and at times even irritating. It was not the woman she’d come to love as her own mother.
But she was still working through her grief and eventually returned to the task. As she read on, she arrived at the summer of 1816. Then it wasn’t just lines or passages she found herself blotting out but entire pages. She would rip them out, hide them from her husband in various parts of the house: shoved into desk drawers and within pages of other books, some even sprinkled in the garden. It took Jane weeks, months, to decide what to do with them. And even then, there were moments from them she wished she could tell her husband about. But it would be her secret to bear.
She had a duty to her mother-in-law, who was one of
the greatest women writers of the past century. Jane would ensure her legacy stayed that way. There were times she felt possessive of her brilliant mother-in-law. Mary had lost her husband at such a young age. Jane’s own husband, Percy Florence, was Mary’s only surviving child. Yet Mary’s delicate vulnerability had made Jane want her all to herself. To care for her, love her as a daughter might have. But the journal spoke of unbelievable things. Of obsession, prurience, madness, grotesque hallucinations . . . Jane shuddered to think about it.
Miss Hammersmith slid one page behind the other. She stopped to read, then glanced away, perhaps overcome with her own memories of that summer.
“You’ve read these pages?” Miss Hammersmith asked. Jane nodded. “It was quite a summer.” She leaned forward, hesitated for a moment before asking, “Is it all true?”
Miss Hammersmith moved the bundle to a side table.
“I believe she had a brilliant mind, though often troubled. She was far too young to have gone through what she did.”
Jane let out a breath. So it was true. Her mother-in-law had had a touch of madness that summer. It was no wonder, considering all she’d been through in her young life, that she had produced such a frightening tale. Perhaps the incendiary pages had just been a way to inspire her writing.
“After I heard about Mr. Shelley’s death, I dreamt about her often,” Miss Hammersmith said. “That she was freed of that man, the burden of his genius.”
“She never married again,” Jane said.
“Or perhaps could not.” Miss Hammersmith stared at a point on the rug. “Her devotion to him was like a religion. She entwined her full self in that man. I will never understand it.”
Jane felt the seconds tick by on the clock as she mustered the courage to ask her next question.
“Have you read Frankenstein?” she said at last. “You were one of very few to witness her inspiration.”
Miss Hammersmith had on a faraway smile, one that reminded Jane of her mother-in-law.
“I don’t have the courage to read her work,” she said. “Any of it. Is it not curious, that all three of the men we spent our summer with died only a few years after? And yet we women, cursed with life instead?”
Miss Hammersmith laid her hand on top of the bundle. “Thank you for the gift.”
Then she stood, moved swiftly across the room and into the hall. By the time Jane got there, Miss Hammersmith had the door held open for her.
Jane pulled a copy of Frankenstein from her pocketbook. It was one of a multitude she owned, multiple editions she couldn’t bear to part with. But this one would do. She opened the book and, since she’d previously underlined the passages, was able to find the page quickly.
“Safie is a young Arabian woman,” she said to Miss Hammersmith. “Beguiling, enchanting. She has an ‘angelic beauty,’ ‘shining raven black hair’ that was ‘curiously braided.’”
Miss Hammersmith held the door wider. “Mrs. Shelley—”
“And the way she sings. ‘Her voice flowed in a rich cadence, swelling or dying away, like a nightingale in the woods.’”
It brought tears to her eyes to read out this passage. She found the same was true for Miss Hammersmith.
“In her journals, she wrote about hearing you sing in the vineyard. This Safie, she makes quite an impression on the monstrous creature,” Jane said softly, pushing the book into her hands.
She stepped out onto the concrete stairs and turned back to Miss Hammersmith. The older woman stared at the book in her trembling hands. She turned it over and over, touched the cover, her fingers brushing against a deformed caricature of Victor Frankenstein’s creature. Then, without a word, Miss Hammersmith handed the book back to Jane and swiftly shut the door.
On with the dance! let joy be unconfin’d; No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet To chase the Glowing Hours with Flying feet.
—Lord Byron, childe harold’s pilgrimage
CHAPTER 1
Forty-two years earlier 1815
Mehrunissa Begum leaned over the edge of the railing as the seawater churned below her. A spray of mist landed on her cheeks. It dried and itched like old tears. The ship gave a sudden lurch as it turned, and for a wild moment, Mehr thought she’d fall overboard and be forever lost to the waves, her journey a waste, her brother and father left waiting for her for the rest of their lives.
But she’d come too far now to fail her foolish mother’s dying wishes. She pushed away from the railing and stared up at the sky. The sun beamed down on her, and she shielded her eyes with her hand. There were two seagulls above, their wings moving in tandem. They veered away from each other and went their separate ways, one headed for land and one toward the sea. She followed the latter until it became a speck of dust in the air.
Then she glanced across the deck for the fifth or sixth time. She’d lost count. Waiting, waiting—it was the thing she hated to do most. But for him, she’d wait just a little
longer. Finally, she spotted him leaving the lascar section of the steamship, his ayah hidden in the shadows. Mehr turned her back to the sea and acknowledged the woman with a curt nod. But the ayah kept her eyes on the child as he skittered across the deck to Mehr.
Anand threw his arms around Mehr’s legs. She took a sharp breath in and shut her eyes. Her body froze. She could never find herself able to return the affection. To hold him would eventually mean letting him go. And she could not do that to herself again. She stared down at his wide brown eyes, so much like her brother’s that she found she could not linger on them for long. Before she could speak, he snatched the sketchbook from her hands and plopped onto the deck.
She’d been training him to sketch his pet dog, which he’d left behind in India. He missed the creature dearly. With what little physical characteristics he could accurately describe, they began the sketch together. It was his eyes they struggled with most. Mehr resisted the urge to take the pencil from the boy’s hands and draw them herself; her pupil needed to learn on his own.
Anand pushed the pencil deep into the page, his movements erratic as he filled in the fur around the dog’s face.
“Take your time,” she said to him in Urdu.
“It is all wrong,” Anand said. “I want him to be perfect.”
“He is. He always will be, because your memories of him are perfect.”
He colored in the body of the animal, the tip of the
pencil creating small tears in the paper. He stopped, stared blankly at the drawing in front of him. His little fingers gripped the sketchbook as he brought it closer to his face, touching it to his forehead. Then he ripped the page out. Before she could stop him, he flung it over the side of the ship.
“Anand!” It wasn’t the first time she’d had to raise her voice at him.
He slumped against the side of the ship, fighting back tears. Mehr’s eyes flicked over to the lascar section. She wondered if his ayah had been watching them all along.
“I do not need the picture, when I can see him there,” Anand said, pointing ahead of him.
Mehr squinted across the deck, but aside from a few passengers, she didn’t see anything else, much less a shaggy dog staring back at them.
Anand laughed. “You do not see him?” he asked.
When Mehr shook her head, he sat up straighter and pointed again. “There! There!”
The sea breeze whipped around them suddenly, and Mehr held tight to her dupatta. “I see nothing there,” she said.
Anand let out a frustrated sigh. “Because I miss him, I see him. He will always be with me until I cannot see him anymore.”
“Like a ghost?” Mehr said, feeling foolish for having asked a child such a question.
The little boy had a strange smile on his face as he
continued to stare at his phantom dog. “No, something else. Something as perfect as a memory.”
It had been only a few weeks since she’d met him. It was at the port in Marseille, after switching steamships, that her uncle had left Mehrunissa to travel on her own. He’d spared no expense for the journey, managing to book her with the British passengers on the upper deck. But in Marseille, as she headed up to her cabin alone, she’d been blocked by a pinched-looking pale-faced woman who managed to take up the rest of the space in the passageway with her disapproval. Not unlike the white women she’d encountered in India, carving out their comfort in a country that didn’t belong to them, with inattentive husbands that sometimes didn’t either.
“Are you lost?” she asked in an equally pinched voice as she glared at Mehr’s clothes. She’d been dressing in simple cotton salwar kameez for the trip, her lush, silky lehengas packed away in her trunk.
Mehr drew herself up to her fullest height. “I am searching for my room, madam.”
The woman stood in her way, arms crossed, severe chin pointed directly at her. Then she glanced at Mehr’s ticket and snatched it right out of her hand.
“This has been forged. How do you have a cabin beside me?”
Mehr snatched it back from her. “Beg your pardon, madam. That is none of your concern.”
The woman huffed past her, and before Mehr had even
touched the cabin door, she was apprehended by two large crewmen who hauled her back onto the deck. As she struggled out of their grip, a small voice cried out and the boy appeared out of nowhere. He threw himself at her, hugging her tightly around her waist. Mehr was taken aback, staring down at the child in as much confusion as the others.
“Oh,” the pinched woman said, taking in Anand’s small, tanned face, his almond-colored eyes, his freshly pressed and tailored clothing. The woman nodded to the burly crewmen.
“His ayah,” she continued. “Poor, confused creature.”
Mehr laughed out loud. Her? An ayah? She could never. But Anand had taken her hand and pulled her to follow him before she could correct the woman. She gathered her trunk and let the boy lead her away, around the deck to the lascar section, where the traveling servants and nannies of British families lodged. As the boy scampered down inside, Mehr stood on the shadowed edge, facing an older woman in a plain cotton sari.
The boy’s ayah gave her a knowing smile and Mehr realized she should thank her, but her tongue was baked dry in her mouth. The indignity of the experience was still with her, boiling in the pit of her stomach. The ayah hadn’t asked her where her employers had gone. She seemed to know, perhaps from Mehr’s noble bearing, that she was someone else under the plain clothes.
“Traveling alone?” the ayah asked, a tragic look in her eyes.
“My cabin appears to be unready. Is there a spare here?” Mehr peered down the staircase behind her.
The ayah smiled with an infuriating amount of tenderness. She beckoned her down the stairs into a dingy passageway, across to the last remaining room. When she threw open the door, Mehr stepped back and gasped. It was little more than a closet.
“No, no,” Mehr said, eyeing the room. “Something bigger.”
The ayah tutted, put her dupatta against her lips, and shook her head.
“I cannot stay in there.” Mehr waved at the tiny cot shoved against the wall, the complete lack of a window.
“Where else do you have?” the woman asked.
Mehr left the woman’s side and wandered down the hall, trying different doors, peeking into the kitchen, the pantries. The spare rooms were occupied, and she realized there was nowhere else for her to go. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, tasted the sting of blood, then returned to the room and placed her trunk beside the cot.
The ayah had warned her not to tell anyone she was traveling alone, to pretend she was traveling with a firangi family. No one would question her. And she was right. When she’d loiter on the deck by herself, before Anand would join her for his daily lesson, they saw her clothes, her skin color, the long, thick braid she swept over one shoulder, and placed her with an imaginary family upstairs. Being a young Indian woman, if she did not belong to
a father or husband, she could only belong to a firangi family, and nothing else.
Beside her now, on the deck, Anand had moved on from his phantom dog and begun another sketch. His little brown hand made carefree strokes, missteps he hardly noticed. He’d remember this voyage differently. Like Anand’s father, Mehr’s was a British officer, and her mother an Indian woman. After making his riches and building a large compound with his own zenana of women, Anand’s father was now taking his entire family back to settle in London. Mehr felt a twinge of envy in her chest, but it wasn’t the boy’s fault. He was entirely blameless, unlike her mother.
The horn blasted, and they both flinched. Anand gave her a sheepish smile, then stood on his toes and stared over the side of the ship.
“There it is! London!” He pointed wildly ahead of him. Mehr pulled herself up and squinted at the port as the ship pushed through the thick water. It had no particular distinction aside from the low, ugly gray buildings surrounding the dock. Beyond those were taller, even uglier gray buildings, crowned by needlelike spires jutting out like broken teeth. There was a formidable bridge in the distance, with dark water churning below it, spraying up ash-colored froth against its underside. The clouds lay low and heavy, the buildings cloaked in dark fog as if an idle hand had smudged its fingers across the city.
The sooty air crawled into the back of her throat and
made her cough. She braced herself against the side of the ship as it groaned and turned.
“You going home?” Anand suddenly asked in English. She knelt in front of him and spoke in Urdu. “To my family. My father and brother.”
Anand shook his head. “In English. I want to practice.”
The ship made a narrow turn, and she suddenly threw her arms around him. She felt his heart beat rapidly against her chest. “Do not be afraid,” she said in Urdu. She swallowed hard. These were the last words she’d said to her brother, James.
He pulled away and stared up at her, seeming unsure of what, exactly, he shouldn’t fear. He reminded her of James then, the last time she’d seen him. Small yet so sure of himself. It had been a decade since, and she wondered what those years had done to him. What they’d eventually do to Anand.
Behind Anand, his ayah stepped out of the lascars section. She waved her dupatta, beckoning the boy. While Mehr moved away from the approaching view of the city, Anand returned to peering over the side, his dark eyes glaring, engrossed. As his ayah came to collect him for the last time, Mehr stood between her and the boy.
“I want you to meet him.”
When the ayah gave her a questioning look, Mehr cleared her throat.
“My brother.”
The ayah politely shook her head.
“But you must meet him. A pukka sahib.” She gestured to Anand. “Just like he will be someday.”
The ayah’s smile faltered. She took hold of the boy’s hand and led him away.
“Farewell!” Anand called, waving behind him.
Mehr hugged her sketchbook to her chest. She had much more to say to him, but instead she gave him a short wave back as he was led away. She was already a distant memory to him, she realized. Overshadowed by the excitement of his arrival—the clanging of ships at the dock, the bellows of the lascars called into action after they had lain dormant on the ship, the cacophonous English voices that prevailed all around them now blending into one long note, and the oppressive odor of his new countrymen.
When the boat docked, Mehr moved against the tide of passengers and retrieved her trunk. By the time she was back on the deck, the crowd had thinned and she was able to see through them to the long, claustrophobic buildings lining the dock, like grindstones waiting to pull her in and fragment her into a million little pieces. She felt her breath hitch, thinking back to the endless fields around her uncle’s home that stretched as far as her eye could see. She looked for Anand one last time, but the city had already swallowed him up.
She could see nothing beyond the decay of the city. She looked up, followed the multiple craggy lines of smoke to the sky, where the sun shone through a thin layer of clouds.
Mehr followed the crowd of servants and lascars ahead
of her. A young lascar, seeing Mehr struggle with her trunk, offered to help, but she recoiled, shaking her head. She was to meet her brother, James, at the dock—her uncle had written him ahead of time, made sure of it—and she didn’t want anything getting in between them.
There was an unusual chill in the air. She wrapped her dupatta around her head and tightened it against the breeze. She stood on her toes and glanced above the many heads of the departing passengers, but she couldn’t see anyone who resembled her brother.
With a start she realized she blended in too well with the others, especially in her plain clothes. She moved over to a bench and stood on top of it, the better to see over the crowds. She watched as families were reunited, tears were wiped from cheeks, loaded carriages tottered down the road, heavy with their burdens.
As the crowd thinned, she took a seat on the bench, loosened the dupatta around her head and draped it over her shoulders so James could see her face while he searched for her. As she adjusted the cloth, a shadow fell over her. She brightened and looked up. But instead of James, it was a cheerful-looking woman in a high-necked dress. The apples of her cheeks were dark pink, and her gray-streaked auburn hair was severely pulled back and knotted at the nape of her neck.
“Speak English?” she asked.
Mehr nodded. She could speak and write in three other languages, but she didn’t say this aloud.
“Are you Mehrunissa Begum?”
She sat up straighter. “Where is my brother?” she asked.
“My name is Miss Christy. I run the home here.”
“Where is James?” Mehr asked again.
The woman chuckled nervously. “He asked me to retrieve you from the ship. He was not able to come here in time. Something about your father’s health.”
Mehr’s heart lurched. Was their father ill?
“What do you want with me, then?” Mehr asked.
“I am to take you to a home, my dear, until he can receive you.”
“A home?” Mehr stood from the bench. “I have a home.”
Miss Christy moved a stray hair from her face, glanced back at the line of carriages slowly being taken by the departing families. “I know you do, dear. I have created an institution for solitary Indian women, like you. Ayahs, coming here in droves with their masters and mistresses until their services are no longer needed. It is where your father placed your own ayah—”
“He sent her away?” Mehr asked. “But she took care of James. Of both of us.”
“They simply did not have use for her when James grew into a man. We looked after her and helped her find a new family.”
Mehr suddenly remembered she had her father’s address, and put down her trunk. She had scrawled it into her sketchbook when her uncle had given it to her in Marseille
before leaving her to take the rest of the journey on her own. She pulled open her trunk and dug inside.
“What are you doing?” Miss Christy asked, glancing again at the carriages.
Mehr retrieved her sketchbook and flipped through the pages, but could not find it among old sketches and lazy scrawls. Anand. She’d watched him tear a page out and fling it off the ship just hours before. She stared back out at the sea. It was gone forever, the address crashing among the waves, floating farther and farther away from her.
The sketchbook shook in her hands. She could sit on her haunches and swear damnation on the child, but she didn’t have the time to spare. The woman gave a look of pity that made Mehr feel a sickness bloom in her stomach.
“I will wait here for James,” Mehr said.
Miss Christy let out a nervous laugh. “He said he will not be long. Days, perhaps, and then he will take you home.”
Mehr shut her trunk and sat down on the bench. Her confusion and anger suddenly gave way to something else. An emotion she loathed to feel. Hopelessness.
“I said I will wait for him,” Mehr repeated.
Miss Christy sat down beside her. “You do not want to be here after dark.” She pulled the collar of her dress tight against her neck. “I know you have come a long way. Would not you like a hot bath? A warm meal? While we wait?”
Her stomach growled. Mehr wouldn’t look at her, but she nodded. “Not long, you say?”
“Not long at all,” Miss Christy said with a smile.
Mehr picked up her trunk and let the woman lead the way to the line of carriages. The driver helped them inside and stowed her trunk atop the coach. They rattled along in silence, Mehr putting distance between her and the woman, who stared at her through the ride and hummed under her breath. It was a while until the carriage pulled around a tight corner and then stopped outside of a nondescript building.
She had called it a home. Mehr could have laughed at the word. Though it was a tall brick building, inside it felt horrifically cramped. She thought of the long, sweeping halls of the zenana as they moved through the rooms together. Mehr was dismayed to see that the house was equally as lifeless and unfeeling as its exterior. In colors of gray and white.
“My brother and I created this home,” Miss Christy said as Mehr followed her through the carpeted hall. “We took in a stranded ayah from a cousin who had brought her over from India with his family. It was fate! Our cook had just left us. And she already knew how to cook our foods.”
Mehr pressed her lips together and thought of Anand’s ayah, wondered if she was snug and warm in her new home as she held Anand in her arms. Wondered if his ayah understood how temporary it all was. She nearly shook her head to chase away her thoughts.
Miss Christy went on. “I thought to myself, How many other women, good, strong, hard-working women, needed
a benefactor? Someone to provide them with work. A purpose. This is what I do.”
“You are very charitable,” Mehr said, and was surprised that she meant it.
Miss Christy flushed, a proud little smile on her face. They stopped in a sitting room, where several brown women were seated in a circle, enjoying cups of tea and laughing over something. They immediately quieted when Mehr walked in. She averted her gaze to the windows, which were small and tight, unlike the wide curtained ones she’d left behind, the ones that had let the soft Lucknow breezes flutter into her room. As Miss Christy led her out of the room, she heard their chatter resume and wondered what they would say about her when she was out of earshot.
Miss Christy led Mehr her into a drab sitting room, motioning for her to take an armchair. It looked both lumpy and unforgiving, and she did not understand how the English could stand to be so uncomfortable in their own dwellings. The furniture was scratched at the ankles, like mice or insects had battled over the living room. The walls were tinged with yellow, the carpet dull with age. Mehr resisted the urge to shudder in front of the woman. She wrapped the dupatta tighter around her.
“Tea?”
Mehr shook her head and took her seat. The cushion sank underneath her, and she held on to an armrest to hoist herself back up. She locked her eyes straight ahead, stared around the room, anywhere but at the woman.
“We will take good care of you, my dear. Just as we did your ayah. What was her name?” Miss Christy asked. Mehr flushed and hesitated before answering. “I do not know.”
“Oh.” Miss Christy’s voice was small. “I am quite certain we will find her. Somewhere in our records.”
Mehr looked out the window as a sudden rain began pouring. Her reflection stared back at her, muddled by rivulets of water. For a moment, she thought she saw her mother’s face too. But it was only a trick of the rain.
the captive kit Burgoyne HELL’S
Published by Hell’s Hundred an imprint of Soho Press 227 W 17th Street
New York, NY 10011 www.sohopress.com
Copyright © 2025 Kit Burgoyne All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-64129-728-8 eISBN 978-1-64129-729-5
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America
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As Cam puts the van into reverse, Luke and Rosa force Adeline onto her knees, up against the side of the van, so they can zip-tie her wrists behind her back. They practised this over and over with Cam standing in for the target, but it’s different with a big pregnant belly in the way. Luke tries not to be too rough, but Rosa doesn’t hold back.
“Hey, you don’t need to do that,” Adeline says. “You don’t need to—hey—”
It finally seems to dawn on her that she is not, after all, being rescued. And she starts to struggle. But it’s too late. The zip tie is already tight around her wrists, and now Luke slips a black drawstring bag over her head. As Cam takes a corner at high speed, the three of them nearly topple over together, but Luke manages to grab one of the cargo straps hanging from the wall. As they reposition her, pulling her down onto her side, Luke isn’t sure if they ought to be supporting her belly the same way they’re supporting her head, and anyway he’s hesitant to put his hands on it—though when he does he finds that Adeline’s jumper is probably the softest object he’s touched in his life, like a fleece sheared from the ghost of a goat. Lastly, they zip-tie her ankles as well, and Luke sees that one of her suede sandals must have come off during the scuffle.
The whole routine goes smoothly, or about as smoothly as you could hope for in the circumstances. But when Luke sees the result—a pregnant women curled up on the floor of the van, hood over her head, wrists and ankles bound—the image wallops him like that punch Rosa threw at the assistant. At that moment what he’s feeling does not at all resemble triumph.
So he’s not ready for it when Rosa pulls down her mask and pulls down his too and then kisses him, kisses him as if she wants to fuck right there in the van. He’s so surprised he freezes up, and after a moment she detaches, frowning. They aren’t supposed to talk too much in front of Adeline, but he wants to tell her that it’s premature to celebrate, because it’s not like they’ve got away yet. Not even close. And anyway his mind is racing, trying to work out what this development means for them.
Isn’t this going to look terrible? Aren’t people going to be horrified? Obviously the kidnapping was going to alienate a good chunk of the public no matter what, but what about the people in the middle, the people who are supposed to be shocked out of their complacency, the people who are supposed to come over to their side? How is this going to look to them? Taking an enemy prisoner is an act of war, but kidnapping a woman who’s just about to have a baby—doesn’t that feel a bit like a war crime?
“Who are you?” Adeline says, her voice muffled by the bag. “What is this?”
“We’re the Nail,” Luke says gently. “We don’t want to hurt you. Do as we say and in a few days we’ll give you back to your family.”
“But I don’t want that. I don’t want to go back to my family.”
Rosa says, “Where’s your phone?”
“I haven’t got a phone.”
“Don’t lie.” With absolutely none of the reticence that Luke has been feeling about the softer parts of Adeline’s body, Rosa starts frisking her from head to toe for electronics.
“I’m not. I haven’t got a phone. I’m not allowed one.”
“GPS tracker? Panic button?”
“On my left wrist.”
Rosa unclasps from Rosa’s wrist what looks like an expensive fitness tracker, with a shiny black face and a rose-gold strap. She passes it up to Cam in the driver’s seat and he tosses out of the window.
“Is that everything?” Rosa says, still patting her down.
“Yes.”
“Anything you don’t tell us about, I’ll find it anyway. I don’t care if it’s up your fucking fanny, I’ll find it. So give it up now, because if I find it and you haven’t told me, there will be consequences.”
“That’s everything, I promise you.”
The van’s back windows are covered so it’s only by feeling cobblestones under the tires that Luke knows they’ve pulled into the mews off Devonshire Street. Cam parks and gets out of the van. Luke hitches up the bottom of the black bag so that Rosa can put a strip of duct tape over Adeline’s mouth, then pulls it back down and tightens the drawstring under her chin. As they’re wrapping a big tartan blanket around her, Luke hears a garage door being hiked up. Then Cam bangs on the roof of the van: ready.
Luke slides open the side door, then grabs Adeline under the armpits as Rosa takes her ankles. “Don’t squirm or we might drop you,” she says.
Along one side of the mews is a row of garages that have been in limbo for a long time because some developer bought them hoping to build houses but then Westminster Council wouldn’t allow it. So they’ve been sitting there empty behind their garage in constant use signs, until last night, when Cam broke into one and left a second van inside. Like the first van, it has a fresh set of cloned plates, ordered from a company in Jersey where they don’t ask too many questions.
The gap between one van and the other is just a few feet, and they’re overlooked only by the spindly fire escape of a building on Weymouth Street, so there’s nobody to see them transfer their big lumpy cargo. Also, there are no CCTV cameras in this mews, which is the reason they chose it.
However, the wider neighbourhood has plenty of them. It’s so central, just a quarter mile south of Regent’s Park, and as well as the clinics for the rich there are embassies around here, consulates, high commissions. It was mad, actually, to do this in W1. But they didn’t have a choice. The Woolsaws so rarely come into the light. Even for four paces.
It means, though, that when the police comb through all the CCTV footage from the area, they’ll probably be able to connect one van to the other. Meaning that this change of vans is not an escape, it’s just a way to buy time. If they really want to cover their tracks, they’ll have to go a lot farther afield. So Cam takes them west.
By now Luke is not running on adrenaline so much as a slow-cooked stew of anxiety hormones, and periodically a skin
forms over the stew when nothing happens for a little while, but then the van stops and the stew erupts again because Luke is absolutely certain they’ve been caught even though it’s really just a red light. After several rounds of that, it’s a relief when he feels the van decisively speed up, because that means they’re past Marylebone Road and up onto the Westway. Cam hasn’t said a word since well before the kidnapping. But that just means everything’s going according to plan.
About twenty minutes later, the van comes down off the motorway. They must be in Park Royal. The largest warehouse district in Europe, a city-within-a-city here beside the railway sidings. Wholesalers of double glazing, wheelchairs, baklava. Lots of it perfectly respectable, but not all of it: squeezed into the smaller, odder-shaped lots, the little triangles and rhombuses, you find the more fly-by-night operations, the dodgy wrecking yards and the fake handbag importers.
There, you can nip up a ladder and disconnect the CCTV cameras, and nobody will notice for weeks. Which is exactly what Luke and Cam did two nights ago in a little patch of nothing-much between a warehouse and a body shop. And Park Royal has a constant flow of white vans just like this one, hundreds every hour. If you switch vehicles in a blind spot, then you can just disappear into the herd.
So in this down-the-back-of-the-sofa zone with the dead hedge and the wheelie bins and the rotting stack of shipping pallets, they go through it all again: waiting until Cam gives them the all-clear, then carrying Adeline across to yet another van, this one silver and still decaled with the logo of the heating company it used to belong to. But they don’t leave right away. Instead, they wait, nobody talking, Rosa holding
Luke’s hand, Cam still up in the driver’s seat so he can keep lookout, Adeline lying there on her side. She must be wondering what’s happening.
What’s happening is that they’re leaving a buffer. Yes, this corner might be a blind spot, but the police will be able to piece together a lot of footage from the cameras nearby, and you don’t want them to be able to say “At 11:31 a.m., this van entered Park Royal, and at 11:34 a.m., this other van left Park Royal.” That makes it easy for them. Instead you hold on as long as you think you can risk it. Every minute that goes by, that’s more vehicles leaving Park Royal, more decoys, more chaff, more innocent catering vans the police will have to chase up before they ever get to you. In any other circumstances watching a clock makes time goes slower, but Luke finds the wait so unbearable that staring at his Casio actually helps, the seconds winking by a reassurance that the universe hasn’t just completely ground to a halt—
Adeline groans through the duct tape.
Luke looks at Rosa. And Rosa shrugs to say they shouldn’t pay any attention. All the same, he plucks at the fabric of the bag to make sure it’s not blocking her nostrils.
Then they hear the helicopter.
It doesn’t sound that far off. Once again, Luke looks at Rosa. And this time, she doesn’t look as relaxed.
“Cam,” Luke says.
“Chill out,” Cam says. “Nothing to do with us.”
“Should we get going anyway?”
“No. Parked is good. We’re just another van. If they were looking. Which they aren’t.”
But then, as if to express her disagreement, Adeline groans
again. Luke sees her hands clench into fists—and sees, also, a dark patch on her leggings that wasn’t there before.
The helicopter is definitely getting closer. Luke’s bowels have been thrumming at various frequencies ever since Harley Street and this just adds one more. “Cam,” he says again. But this time Cam doesn’t answer.
Adeline is knocking on the floor of the van with the one sandal she still has on. Not thrashing around but knocking like she’s trying to signal to them. Knock knock knock. Knock knock knock.
Luke can’t take it any more. He goes to the back windows of the van and pulls back one corner of the blackout cover.
Right away he sees it. A flash of blue and green.
From here he has a view down the alley between two warehouses, and at the other end of the alley there’s another access road, and that’s where it was, just for a moment, about a hundred yards away. He’s certain. That fluorescent chequerboard pattern on the side of police cars.
“Cam,” he says. “Police.”
And at the same time he becomes aware of a smell inside the van, not strong but definitely new, a sort of sweet, bleachy smell.
Adeline’s still doing it. Knock knock knock. Knock knock knock. So Luke loosens the drawstring of the bag again and pulls the tape off her mouth.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Rosa says to him.
Before he can answer, Adeline says, “I’m fairly sure I’m going into labour.”
Chapter 3
“Ithought you’d pissed yourself,” Luke says.
“I wish it were just that,” Adeline says.
“You’re saying that’s your waters breaking?” Rosa says. “I thought it was like emptying a bucket out?”
“Sometimes it’s more like a little leak in the bucket,” Adeline says. “Look, this is my second time. I know what it feels like. It feels like this. I’m sorry if this isn’t a good moment but it’s really not up to me.”
Luke gets a bit claustrophobic any time a barber so much as drapes a hot towel over his eyes, yet somehow Adeline is conversing in a relatively normal way even with most of her face still covered by the bag. Luke doesn’t understand how she can stay so calm. And on top of that, he’s wondering what she means about this being her second time. Because it can’t be, can it? She’s only twenty-three, and in all their research on the Woolsaws, which has been pretty fucking thorough, there’s never been any mention of a grandchild.
All Luke knows about the beginning of labour is something a friend once told him, a friend who had kids pretty young, about how for her it was like when you’re just starting to come up on MDMA, not euphoric yet, just a whooshing change
in your sense of everything as your brain is flooded with new chemicals.
He peeks out past the blackout covers again, and sees two more police cars whip by.
And then they hear a siren.
A siren is really, really, really bad. Because a siren means the police aren’t even worried about tipping them off. It means they’re confident of having them cornered. It means they’re just trying to get more backup here as fast as they can.
In hindsight all the worry Luke felt up until now was like a hot-towel wrap compared to the dread that swallows him at this moment.
Cam is exposed up at the front, so he now squeezes past the seats to join the others squatting beside Adeline in the back.
“How the fuck did they get here so quickly?” Rosa says. She gives Adeline a hard cuff on the arm. “What didn’t you tell us about?”
“There’s nothing else. You saw the tracker. Where would I hide another one of those?”
“I don’t know, maybe you have a chip in your ear like a fucking dog!”
“What I have is a surname which makes things happen quickly. Sometimes much more quickly than one would ever believe.”
Adeline could be right, Luke thinks. Maybe all it takes is the word “Woolsaw” going out over the radio and instantly the entire policing apparatus of Greater London converges like a single organism. Maybe somewhere near here there’s a bloodspattered spree killer wearing only one handcuff because the arresting officers ran off halfway through. Cam was sure
the Met couldn’t react fast enough to track the vans in real time, and Luke trusted him, but what if every CCTV control room in London was drafted at once? Luke begins to wonder why they ever thought they could pull this off.
There are unmistakably at least two helicopters overhead. The van feels even smaller now that they’re all here in the back together, foxes in a den as the hounds draw closer. Cam goes to the back windows to take a look himself.
“Cam, what are we going to do?” Luke says.
Adeline is doing what sound like breathing exercises, but she keeps losing the rhythm, the long, regular, serene breaths breaking down into short, shaky, grindy ones.
“I don’t know,” Cam says. And to hear Cam say that is almost worse than the sirens. Those words are doom to Luke. Because Cam’s been through everything several times over. Cam always, always knows what happens next.
“Can you see anything?”
“Yeah. There are guys getting out of a van. They’ve got guns.”
A noise on the roof of the van. A tapping. Rosa lets out a little whimper of surprise, then claps her hand over her mouth.
“That’s just hail,” Cam says. “It’s started hailing.”
Which is odd, because even a few minutes ago, when they were switching vans, the sky was a perfect blue. But the tapping doesn’t stop.
Luke watches Cam, wondering what’s going through his mind. In the planning stages they talked about worst-case scenarios. About what they would do if it ended this way. And one point they agreed on was that they weren’t going to bother with the Quebec thing.
The Quebec thing is saying to the police “Put us on a plane to a non-extradition country or we’ll kill the girl.”
The reason they call it “the Quebec thing” is because, as far as they can tell, that’s the only time in history it’s ever worked: Quebec in 1970, when five Quebecois separatists took the British trade commissioner hostage for two months. The night the police found their hideout, they tossed a note out through the window saying they’d murder the trade commissioner at the first sign of a raid and demanding that the Canadian government fly them to Cuba in exchange for his release. And the Canadians actually obliged. The next morning, a police escort accompanied the kidnappers and their hostage to an old World’s Fair pavilion in Montreal, where they handed him over; then a Royal Canadian Airforce helicopter took the kidnappers to the airport; and from there an RCAF plane took them to Havana. The head negotiator apparently described the atmosphere on the flight as “relaxed, quiet, and subdued.”
Maybe it could only have happened in Canada. Much more commonly, when people tried something like that, it was more like Munich two years later, the authorities just playing along until they could shoot the kidnappers dead on the runway.
So the Quebec thing was out. They weren’t chumps. But what they would do instead—well, that they never entirely agreed on. A few weeks ago Rosa said that, hypothetically, if they ended up killing Adeline Woolsaw after everything went to shit, then at least they would have struck a blow. If they were going to prison for a long time anyway, at least it would show the world that you could fight back, tooth and claw. The
bastards would feel fear after that, not just the Woolsaws but all the others of their kind.
Cam didn’t say he agreed with her. But it didn’t seem like he really disagreed either. Sometimes Luke thinks he should have walked away as soon as he found out that was on the table. But he didn’t. He’s here. And what is Cam thinking right now when he looks at Adeline?
The hail is getting louder. “Can someone take my jumper off, please?” Adeline says, her cheeks flushed and sweaty. Luke hesitates, but then a wave seems to crash through Adeline, and she cries out, writhing on the nonslip mat. He has to do something for her, and the jumper is loose enough that even with her wrists behind her back he can pull it up off her torso, although he has to reach through it, her jaw moist against his wrist, to make sure he doesn’t also pull off the bag as he’s stretching the neckline over her head—
Rosa taps him and mouths, “What the fuck are you doing?” Because there was never anything in the plan about keeping the hostage nice and comfortable.
All the same, he finishes pulling the jumper inside out around Adeline’s shoulders until it’s dangling off her by the sleeves, which is the furthest he can get with her wrists still tied. She has a white vest on underneath and Luke feels renewed amazement at how big her belly is. He realises he can bunch the jumper up like a pillow under her head, which has a pale grid down one side from being pressed into the mat—
The sound of glass smashing, outside the van, some distance away.
Luke thinks of a sniper on some high floor knocking through a window to make way for his rifle barrel.
But then they hear shouting too. A car alarm going off. Then another.
It has to be the hail, which isn’t a tapping any more but a pummelling louder than the helicopters.
Cam is still at the back windows, so Luke pokes his head between the front seats, staying as low as he can, so he can get a look through the windscreen.
The clouds are so thick and dark it feels like dusk, and they’re hurling polar quantities of ice at Park Royal. It’s the most furious hailstorm he’s ever seen.
And they aren’t even getting the worst of it, here in the van. He can see broken windscreens, creased bonnets, dangling wing mirrors. One of the cameras they so carefully disabled has been torn off its bracket. At the edge of the scrapyard there’s a skip heaped with bulging waste bags, and the waste bags are quivering around and spurting out their insides like somebody getting shot to pieces with a chain gun.
He sees a lot of police—some in full tactical gear with carbines slung across their chests, others in the normal black vests and white shirtsleeves—but none of them are even looking at the van any more, they’re all just huddled in whatever shelter they can find, one beneath the open lid of a wheelie bin, another in the cab of a forklift. Out in the road, two of them are carrying a third to one of their vehicles as if she’s a battlefield casualty.
There’s a continuous shattering sound of ice breaking on the asphalt, and it’s difficult to make out any individual hailstone amid the glinting shingle, but where Luke can, he sees there’s something strange about these hailstones. They’re not round, like any hailstone he’s seen before. They’re long and pointed. Like icicles. Or daggers.
A flash of movement in the sky. He looks up. It’s one of the helicopters. Falling.
“Oh fuck—” he hears himself say. “Oh fuck—”
It twirls as it falls, and even just the twirling is sickening to see, knowing there are passengers inside that cockpit as it spins on its axis like some unspeakable fairground ride. But, even worse, the helicopter is skidding through the air on a long diagonal towards the roof of a warehouse—and now, as Luke watches, it crashes straight through. Out of sight. So he doesn’t see it hit the ground, but he hears it, a thunderous impact with a fading aftersound as the steel walls of the warehouse reverberate over the hail.
Immediately, several cops come sprinting out of their shelters, heading for the warehouse. Luke cannot imagine there could possibly be any survivors, but clearly they feel they have to check. Behind him Adeline lets out a guttural wail.
Then Luke sees blood. A spray of it from the neck of one of the sprinting policemen. And he sprawls forward onto the icy ground, carried along by his own momentum.
For a moment Luke wonders if it was a hailstone—but no, that’s crazy, a hailstone can’t do that to someone, it had to have been a bullet—there are plenty of guns around, so maybe in all the confusion—
But then a second guy drops. And this time there’s no denying what happened, because as he lies prone you can see the hailstone sticking out of him, a chisel of ice in his calf.
Before long, the entire rescue party is on the ground, punctured in one place or another by hailstones. And of course it doesn’t stop when they’re down. The storm keeps hitting them,
chewing at their bodies like the needle of a sewing machine, spike after spike.
By this point Luke can see only two cops still alive. One is dragging herself back towards the shelter of a loading dock, but then an enormous hailstone, eight or ten inches long, plunges straight through the small of her back. She goes limp.
And another, less than a hundred feet from the van, is shielding himself under a metal signboard that the hail has knocked loose from a fence, big orange letters advertising mot testing. He’s trying to curl himself up as small as he can, but the sign isn’t big enough to protect him properly.
“There’s a guy out there,” Luke says. “We could help him.”
“What guy?” Rosa says.
“A cop.”
“Are you taking the piss?”
She’s got a point. They are, after all, in the middle of a kidnapping. But even if they don’t want to pull him inside the van, Luke thinks they could just drive over there, nose the front bumper carefully over the cop so that he could crawl underneath.
The keys are still in the ignition. He could just get into the driver’s seat and do it. Instead of sitting here and watching while the storm hacks at this guy’s extremities.
But before he can make up his mind, it’s too late.
Because, impossibly, the blitz gets even heavier. For a few seconds the hail comes down so hard you can’t see anything else, just a staticky boil of ice unbroken in any direction, the roar of its impact drowning out all thought. How can the atmosphere even manufacture this much solid matter? By now the windscreen of the van ought to be in smithereens, but
they must be parked right in the eye of the storm, because it’s almost as if the hail is avoiding them.
Then the crescendo ends. Rapidly the storm begins to ease. The hailstones are diminishing both in size and in number, so that before long the sound is once again a clatter of individual impacts rather than an undifferentiated hiss. Until it’s coming down on the roof no faster than the tapping that startled them all at the beginning.
What’s left, afterwards, is an apocalypse. An eroded, punished landscape. Broken windows, fallen drainpipes, limbless trees. Garage doors and car panels pitted and gouged. The canopy of a bus stop has collapsed onto the people sheltering under it. They lie there motionless, blood pooling on the ground, which is as crystal white as fresh snow but with a much bumpier surface, like a billion packing peanuts spilled out of a box.
The mot testing guy is lying on his back, the signboard resting halfway across him. His face and hands look like raw meat. There is a long spike protruding from his eye socket.
Luke realises he can smell vomit. He turns to see that Adeline has thrown up on the mat. Good thing they took the duct tape off, although a little bit got on her hair and on the drawstring of the bag. She’s not twisting around or gritting her teeth any more. “Adeline, are you . . .” He doesn’t know what question to ask. “Is it still . . .”
“The contractions have just calmed down for a bit,” she answers. “They’ll come back. May I please have some water?”
They have a couple of litre bottles in the corner. He props her head up so she can drink. He wants to wipe the vomit from the corner of her mouth, but there’s nothing at hand
to do it with, so in the end he uses the hem of her cashmere jumper. The world’s most expensive puke rag.
“We should get going,” Cam says, climbing back into the driver’s seat.
At first the words hardly mean anything to Luke. The idea of escaping feels like something from another life.
But Cam is a pragmatist. Always. So it doesn’t matter that they’re all still gaping at what they’ve just been through. It doesn’t matter that the plan collided with something utterly inexplicable. All that matters is what’s next.
“She’s right,” Cam says, nodding at Adeline. “When it’s the Woolsaws, they don’t hold anything back. They would have sent everyone they had from miles around. And I don’t know if any of them survived that. Plus every camera’s in bits. If we get going now, we could be well away before the second wave arrives.”
So they reverse out of the yard, tires crunching over the hailstones. And nobody stops them. Because there’s nobody left.
BLOOD LIKE OURS STUART NEVILLE HELL’S
Published by Hell’s Hundred an imprint of Soho Press 227 W 17th Street New York, NY 10011 www.sohopress.com
Copyright © 2024 Staurt Neville All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-64129-722-6
eISBN 978-1-64129-723-3
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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FERAL CHILD, THE news report said. Rebecca had turned on the TV hoping the noise would drown out the storm that had been raging inside her skull when she woke. It didn’t work. She had let it play while she lay on the bed, staring at the stains on the ceiling. The motel room’s myriad odors melded and separated, clawing their way into her head, bringing waves of nausea. The low scents of the thousands who’d lain on this bed before her, and whatever they’d left behind to soak into the mattress. She rolled onto her side and retched, spilling a mouthful of thick blackish-red liquid. She might have slept some more, she couldn’t be sure, but the newscaster’s words grabbed her attention. Rebecca sat upright, her head swimming at the sudden movement. On the TV screen, dry mountain scrub, a mobile home. A kettle grill on its side, a folding chair collapsed flat on the dirt. Words slid across the ticker at the bottom of the screen: feral girl sighted, family attacked.
BLOOD LIKE OURS • 27
Rebecca forced herself to focus on the images, to listen to the voice of the reporter. She crawled to the foot of the bed and onto the floor, dragging bloodstained sheets with her, then crawled to the dresser and the television that rested upon it. Rebecca brought her fingertips to the screen, felt the crackling static electricity against her skin.
“. . . while the father suffered minor injuries, believed to be dog bites. Commander Emil Perez of the El Paso Police Department, Westside Regional Command, played down reports of a young girl living in the mountains above the city.”
The news report cut to a middle-aged man wearing a black and blue uniform. A single microphone hovered beneath his chin. Dark out when it was recorded.
“Coyote attacks are incredibly rare, but they do happen from time to time, particularly when members of the public stray from the designated campgrounds around the park. That’s why we recommend visitors to the Franklin Mountains use the facilities provided. If folks do that, then they have no need to fear the local coyote population.”
The microphone ducked out of view, and a woman spoke.
“We’re hearing reports that there was a young girl with the pack of dogs. Since this isn’t the first such sighting, can you comment on that?”
As the microphone returned to the police officer’s mouth, it picked up the withering tail of his sigh.
“Listen, we’ve conducted several searches in several different areas, us and the Combined Search and Rescue crews, and we’ve found no evidence of a child wandering the mountains.”
“A source in the department told us a child had fled the scene of the killing of FBI agent Marc Donner ten days—”
“No,” Commander Perez said, his voice sharp, his dark eyes burning. “That’s simply not true. Obviously, that’s an ongoing case, so I can’t comment beyond advising you not to repeat that kind of wild speculation.”
“But we’re hearing rumors of a child fleeing a murder scene in El Paso only a few days ago, followed by sightings of a girl in the mountains overlooking the city. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”
The police officer shook his head.
“I’m not going to waste my time or yours on this kind of nonsense. Again, we have conducted several searches and found no trace of a child in the park. That’s all I’m going to say on the matter.”
The report cut back to the studio, and the anchor woman addressed the camera, assuring the audience she would share any new information that came to light.
Wheels turned inside Rebecca’s head. Since she’d become aware in the morgue, a cold, tiled room—how many days ago?—she had been putting herself back together, piece by piece. Her consciousness had slammed into being in one blinding instant of pain but brought with it no memory of who she was or who she had been. That came back in dim shadows over the following days, images floating through her mind, some taking shape and solidifying while others faded and dissolved into nothing. The first thing had been her name. That, and the gnawing hunger.
The first night, she had walked the damp, cold
BLOOD
corridors of the building—something like a hospital, but not quite—naked, wandering in circles, ducts and pipes above her head. Itching, burning pain drew a line from her chest to her back, memory of a wound. That was the first thing that came back to her: a flash, a booming explosion, then something piercing her. Then there was no air, her breath bubbling and wet in her chest until she drowned. Someone leaning over her, holding her, begging her not to go. A girl. Rebecca had tried to bring the girl’s face into focus, but it remained a blur.
Someone she loved, she knew that much.
As she turned another corner in the winding bowels of the building, Rebecca had heard something along the corridor. There, a door held open by a fire extinguisher. A whirring and rumbling within. She entered the room, the floor wetting the soles of her feet. Before her, banks of machines, bed sheets rolling inside. To one side, a basket against the wall. Above it, a handwritten sign read: for incinerator. She went to the basket and reached inside, digging through the clothes. They were packed in tight, so she tipped the basket over, spilling clothes onto the wet floor. Soon she wore a bloodstained sweatshirt, a pair of torn jeans that were too big at the waist, and thin-soled slippers.
There was a metal door on one side of the room, painted dark green, an illuminated sign above it saying emergency exit. Rebecca pressed the bar on one and it swung outwards. A high electronic alarm sounded somewhere close by. She covered her ears and stepped out into the night.
Rebecca had walked until the sky turned from black to
deep blue, then burnt orange. When the sun edged above the buildings, she felt the prickling on her skin. She had spent the night in fear, but now the fear became sharp like a blade, an instinct taking hold of her. By the time she found a pile of garbage and cardboard in an alleyway, as she was burying herself beneath it, her hands had begun to redden, a crushing pain swelling behind her eyes.
She had lain awake through that first day, hiding in the filth from the enemy sun, riding the waves of her fear. Her mind threatened to come loose and fly away from her grasp, and she might have let it go but for one thing: the girl who had held her and begged her not to go.
That one thought, that one image, had remained in her mind these strange days and nights since she woke on a steel table. The rest of herself had coalesced around the girl who bit into her own wrist and let her blood drip onto Rebecca’s lips, her teeth, her tongue. The taste of her.
She had spat out what she could, rejected it, but enough had remained to change her, to wake her long after there should have been no more waking.
A girl Rebecca knew was a part of her, had always been. Pale skin, dark eyes, and a shock of wild black hair. And love, so bright and searing hot that she could feel it still, all these days after.
Now, amid the low and churning odors of this motel room, Rebecca watched the television as a policeman denied any knowledge of a feral child roaming the mountains. A reporter pressed him, described numerous sightings of a girl running with a pack of dogs, but the policeman wouldn’t yield.
Rebecca backed away from the television, her legs still
BLOOD LIKE OURS • 31
tangled in the sheets, and leaned against the foot of the bed. A name formed in her mind. Not a proper name, not something you would call a person, but a name nonetheless. She said it aloud, feeling the shape of it in her mouth as it became real. And again. “Moonflower,” she said.
ADARK AND bloody dream stirred Moonflower to waking as light faded from the mouth of the cave. By the time she had become fully aware, the dream had faded into shadows, but a phantom taste lingered on her tongue, cloying and acidic, and a murmur of words in her ear.
You should’ve taken them, the voice said.
Your belly would now be full, and you would sleep deep and long.
Moonflower told the voice to hush, she would not listen.
The dogs huddled around her in a warm mass of fur. The Patterdale sighed and huffed then burrowed further into the space between Moonflower’s thighs and stomach. The dogs had eaten well the night before. Moonflower had opened each of the packaged steaks and brought the deep red flesh to her mouth. She mashed the meat between her lips, dragging out the hemoglobin until the
BLOOD
steaks felt dry and stringy on her tongue. She then threw each one to the dogs in turn, Sweeney the Patterdale getting his first because he had tracked the campsite down. Brave little man.
It hadn’t been enough. Moonflower had slept little. Every time she had dipped into slumber, the grinding in her stomach woke her. It hurt like a twisting blade, knotting her insides. And with every twist came the voice, telling her what she should’ve done, how good it would’ve tasted, how it would’ve filled her up till she was brimming over.
Shush, she told it.
Moonflower didn’t know how she’d lasted so long without feeding, how she’d kept the run of herself. For the first week or so, the thing inside had remained in the depths of her, only surfacing in her jagged and bloody dreams in the few snatches of sleep she’d been able to claim. Perhaps it knew the futility of rising, that it would find nothing but the mountain scrub and this pack of dogs. And she would not let it take one of them; she would die first.
But now it crept to the surface, whispering its poisonous words to her.
Shush.
The temperature fell, the breeze from the mouth of the cave carrying the night’s early chill. Moonflower sat upright, disturbing Sweeney. The Patterdale tumbled onto his back, righted himself, then pushed his head into Moonflower’s belly, seeking her comfort. She scratched him behind the ears and told him, Shush.
Her stomach growled, frightening the dog. She reached
for him, telling him it was okay, not to worry. Moonflower stood and climbed to the mouth of the cave. Sweeney followed, pressed himself against her leg.
The cave rested in a hollow, a single path leading between two high slopes. The path channeled the wind, carrying dust, piling sand at the cave’s threshold. Sweeney sniffed at the breeze. So did Moonflower. She found nothing in the air’s currents. Neither did Sweeney. He lay down at her feet, resting his snout on his paws.
“Should we go out?” Moonflower asked.
She looked down at the dog as if he might reply with a reasoned answer. He glanced up at her, huffed, and returned his chin to his toes.
Last night, they had gone too far. The dogs, and her too. Just a family out camping, and they had made them afraid. The little boy hiding under the motorhome: That image had been playing in Moonflower’s mind through every wakeful hour since. Moonflower knew fear; it clawed at her to have inflicted it on someone else. Someone who didn’t deserve it.
She thought it had been ten days and nights, but she couldn’t be sure. Ten days and nights since Mom had died in her arms. Moonflower had begged her not to go, but she went anyway. Anger filled Moonflower’s heart, shoulder to shoulder with the sorrow. She couldn’t tell which weighed more, only that it was all she could bear.
Moonflower had bitten into her own wrist, through skin and vein, until she tasted her red self. Then she had held her wrist over Mom’s open mouth so that she could take it, swallow it, and change.
But Mom had spat it out.
BLOOD LIKE OURS • 35
Moonflower had given her a chance to live, but she had refused it. That thought haunted her more than any other. A question nagged to be asked. A part of her, one buried deep inside where the hunger lived, knew the answer. She could not stand to hear it.
The hunger clawed at her stomach once more, and she almost dropped to her knees. Sweeney shot to his feet and nuzzled her ankles as if he could cure what tormented her by touch alone. She would have to feed soon. The thing inside would only wait so long. She had never had to choose for herself. Mom had always done it for her. Men, mostly, who had done bad things. Or planned to do bad things. Mom had ways of finding the bad men. They involved smartphones and social media accounts, and Moonflower had neither of those. And even if she did, she feared that she wouldn’t know the bad from good. When the hunger took over, when the thing inside rose up and took control, how would she choose? What if the hunger had taken her last night? What if she had listened to that whispering voice and dragged the little boy out from under the mobile home?
She tasted him now. The idea of him. His blood filling her mouth, her throat, her stomach. In her mind, she fed hard, drained him, left him limp and empty. His parents too. Gorging herself, her belly so full she couldn’t move.
Should’ve, the voice said.
No, she shouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have. No matter how hungry she might be. Those people didn’t deserve it.
But who did?
Moonflower sat down, her knees up to her chin. Sweeney tried to climb into her lap, but she pushed him
MCGRATH’S NEXT, AND last, interview was two days after she met with Holstein. She’d been on leave but got a call at eight that morning telling her to report at ten to a room in the lower levels of the Hoover Building, beneath the parking lot. She didn’t question it. She showed up exactly five minutes early. The room stood at the end of a gray corridor whose concrete floor was damp with water dripping from the ducts above. The air had the taint of being recirculated too many times, the faint stink of mildew, of damp corners and dark recesses. There was no waiting area, nowhere to pass the five extra minutes, so she knocked on the door. A man opened it immediately, his tie loose, his shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. Middle-aged, tall and broad-shouldered, trim at the waist, dark hair with a neat side parting, smelling of a recent shower. He gave her a terse greeting and a courteous nod.
“Thank you for coming in,” he said, stepping aside
“You gave me your name, but that’s not what I asked. You’re not Inspection Division. You’re not OPR. Who are you?”
He balanced the notepad on his knee, readied his pen.
“Agent Visconti,” he said. “I told you already.”
McGrath stood.
“No,” she said. “I’ve been through enough bullshit without this.”
“Sit down,” he said, pointing at the chair she’d just vacated. His voice carried the weight of a man who wasn’t accustomed to being disobeyed.
“No,” she said.
He looked up at her with eyes full of weary patience.
“Agent McGrath, I want you to listen to me very carefully. You asked me who I am, so I’ll tell you. I am the last line between you and your summary dismissal from the Bureau. Your next interview will be with the Inspection Division. They will butcher you, then present you to the Office of Professional Responsibility. The OPR will discard you like yesterday’s trash. You’ll be out of a job, no severance, no pension, nothing.”
She went to speak, but he raised his right index finger, silencing her.
“That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, someone, somewhere upstairs, will try to pin this mess on you. You had knowledge of Agent Donner’s mental state, his delusions, his obsessions. You could have gone to your superiors with your concerns. When he came to you after he’d been placed on administrative leave, when he asked for information, you could’ve reported him to your superiors, but you didn’t. You helped him.”
“You sonofabitch,” McGrath said.
“You fed him information, you helped him track down that woman. If not for you, he wouldn’t have wound up in that old auto shop, he wouldn’t have shot Rebecca Carter dead, and those cops wouldn’t have killed him.”
“Fuck you,” she said, the words choking her.
He smiled.
“Yeah, okay. Sure. But either you talk to me, honestly, nothing held back, or I feed you to the OPR, let them grind you up and spit you out. Your life ruined, over, nothing left. Nothing, not for you, not for Cara, not for your son. If they let you keep him, that is.”
“What?” McGrath asked, but the word barely escaped her mouth. She had no air left in her chest. She slumped back down into the chair.
“You know how difficult adoption is for same-sex couples. And the way things are going, it’s only getting worse. You think a criminal prosecution against you is going to help matters?”
Visconti leaned forward, gripping his notepad in both hands, pointing it at her for emphasis.
“Let me make this real simple for you. Right now, you’re almost certainly going to be charged as an accessory to your partner’s crimes. It’s very likely that you will be arrested before the end of the week. You will be charged, tried, and even if you’re somehow found not guilty, you’ll lose everything, including your little boy. I can prevent that, but only if you talk to me. If you talk to me honestly, if you hold nothing back, you can be at your desk within the hour, getting on with your day’s work. That’s your choice. You hold back from me,
you lose everything. You talk to me, all your problems go away.”
“You can’t do this,” McGrath said.
“Oh,” Visconti said, smiling, “yes I can.”
She looked down at her hands, her fingers knotting themselves in her lap.
“Decide,” Visconti said. “Now.”
She told him everything.