did so, I opened a letter from the Missionary Society.
“This maniac will be caught soon,” she said. “He obviously can’t control himself. Someone is bound to notice him behaving abnormally.”
“Praise the Lord!” I exclaimed.
“I’d wait until he’s dangling in a noose before you do that.”
“No! This!” I waved the letter. “We’ve been given our marching orders. The Society is sending us to Papua New Guinea—we’re to depart next week!”
Clarissa put the newspaper aside. “Good! Good! I’ll tell you something, Aiden: you’re not the same man upon whose door I knocked when I was at my lowest ebb. That Tanner girl and the horrors of London and the Ripper have demolished you. You needn’t tell me how traumatic it’s been; I’ve seen it in your face and manner. But this—” She pointed at the letter in my hand. “This marks the commencement of your rehabilitation. Soon you’ll see that the malevolence you’ve experienced and witnessed is not endemic. The world is a wonderful place. It will rebuild you, and you’ll be a better person for it.”
“Perhaps so,” I mumbled.
I was eager to be off but felt little enthusiasm for the task that now lay before us. My missionary training had been desultory and inadequate. It was obvious that a prospective evangelist required little more than a thorough grasp of the Bible, a modicum of zeal, and the ability to endure the worst possible conditions. The first, I had. Zeal, I feigned. Endurance, well, where could be worse than Whitechapel?
It was a question I asked again five days later when the Society provided me with a Webley-Pryse revolver. Holding the thing gingerly, I showed it to Clarissa. “They told me the life of a missionary is sometimes perilous.”
“It’s an undeveloped land, Aiden. They are right. Who knows what we might encounter?”
So it was that I abandoned London, leaving it in the demonic grip of Jack the Ripper, and sailed away, a faithless priest with a faithful hunchbacked woman at his side.
Three different ships took us in a roundabout manner to Australia. The initial ten days at sea saw me confined to my cabin, my skin a bilious shade of green and my stomach squirming in my throat. Thankfully, I then gained my sea legs and, for the remainder of the voyage, the fresh winds and far horizons did much to dispel the miasmatic dread that had enshrouded me since August. By the time we reached Sydney—a little over two months later—my face and forearms were a deep brown and my blond hair had been bleached almost white. This weathering hardly made me a “man of the world,” though. On the morning we sailed into the harbour, when I examined my visage in a shaving mirror, I saw the same gaunt features and the same guileless pale blue eyes—the same dolt that Alice Tanner had so callously mocked. Yet I also noticed something different. The veneer of intellectualism that had for so long disguised my emptiness was gone. There was a new sort of honesty in my eyes, and it was terrible, for it made a blatant display of my deficiencies. I couldn’t hide. I was exposed for all to see.
After a week’s layover in Sydney, Clarissa and I sailed in a clipper to the Melanesian Islands and landed at Port Moresby. It was our intention to establish a Christian mission in one of the more remote regions of Papua New Guinea, as instructed by the Society, but within days of our arrival the German authorities disallowed the project. We twiddled our thumbs well into the new year while awaiting fresh instructions from London. They finally arrived in the second week of February, and directed us to instead establish a station on Koluwai, a humid hump that bulges out of the sea a thousand miles or so to the southeast of the principal island. Scarcely two hundred square miles in area, swathed in dripping jungle, and prone to particularly vicious seasonal storms, we found that it boasted one coastal town—Kutumakau—and a great many tiny villages, which, with an insane disregard for lightning strikes, were built in the treetops.
“It hardly seems worth the effort,” I commented as we unloaded our baggage and trunks from the little steamer that had transported us there, “but the Church insists that God’s work be done, even in far-flung corners such as this. What will the islanders make of us, Clarissa?”
“We shall be a novelty, at least,” she responded.
In that, she was correct, for most of the Koluwaians had