at my blistered hands. “Perhaps if I throw myself into this training?”
“Yes! Physical activity!”
“If I’m up to it. I’m already a wreck.”
“I’m sure a hot bath will help. You relax here while I light the fire and put some buckets of water to heat.”
While Clarissa fussed around me—and almost certainly to stop me dwelling on my fears—she talked about the estate she’d been given. It was comprised of the house we were in, a farm just outside the city, a manufacturing plant on the first level, and a block of dwellings on the second. The residents of the latter would be her workforce when she decided what her factory should produce.
“Some mechanical contrivance or other,” she said. “I have no idea how long we’re going to be here. It may be for the rest of our lives, so I might as well make myself useful.”
“Contrivance?”
“Hmm. I’ve been thinking about those long avenues. They’re ridiculously steep. It occurred to me that they might benefit from cable trams, like the ones they’ve been constructing in San Francisco.”
“Judging by the number of spills I saw on them earlier, I’d agree.”
My bath was soon ready. Among the new items in the bathroom, I found a cut-throat razor crafted at my companion’s behest by one of the city’s knife makers. After some work, I was finally able to liberate my chin from its outrageous beard. My hair, on the other hand, was almost down to my shoulders and I felt oddly disinclined to cut it. Having shaved, I thankfully gave myself up to the tub’s steaming water, its heat penetrating my sore muscles all the way to the bone.
Maybe Clarissa was right. I wasn’t the Whitechapel killer. But still I could feel that black something inside of me. I wanted to know it. I needed to be sure it hadn’t committed the acts I attributed to it. Cautiously, with my eyes closed, I mentally probed inward.
I sank into shadows.
Nothing. For a long time, nothing.
Then, as if hands were reaching into me to dredge the images from the depths of my mind, I saw the sword, the blood, and Polly Nichols, torn, gutted, dead. Her eyes were looking up into mine. The two deep lacerations in her throat worked like mouths. They chorused: “You think I might find happiness with a dusty old bookworm? A tall, thin dullard? A bundle of sticks bound together in last century’s clothes? Why, I would rather be alone for the rest of my life than be bonded to a wretched scarecrow like you!
She spat. Her blood splashed onto my boots.
I opened my eyes. My jaw was clenched. My fingers were white, gripping the sides of the bathtub.
“Damn you!” I hissed. “Damn you, Aiden Fleischer!”
After remaining in the water until it had cooled to tepid, I dried myself, returned to my room, and dressed in a loose shirt and fairly shapeless trousers.
As I was descending the ramp, there came a knock at the front door. Clarissa stepped into the vestibule behind me just as I opened the portal to find a cabbie on our doorstep.
“Come to take you to the barracks, chum,” he said.
I turned to my friend and slapped a hand to my forehead. “Already? Am I to get no respite, Clarissa?”
“Apparently not,” she replied.
° °
While I was occupied with my second painfully long training session, the Yatsill built their first printing press and opened a newspaper office. I knew nothing of this, and even had I been told wouldn’t have digested the information, for I didn’t possess the capacity to train and think at the same time. Such was the strain on my body that my brain simply shut down in order to avoid the pain. I remember only the flashes of the sword, the thuds of metal on wood, the clashes of metal on metal, and Colonel Spearjab’s voice insistently demanding that I do more, work harder, stop slacking, chop, guard, slice, riposte, dodge, thrust, fight fight fight!
Again, the cab ride home made no impression on me. So weary was I, the colonel could have launched me there by catapult and I wouldn’t have known it. My awareness ceased entirely at some point before I left Crooked Blue Tower Barracks and didn’t return until I was woken up by a loud voice below my window.
The absurdly titled New Yatsillat Trumpet had launched with a sensational headline.
“Read all about it! Read all about it! Parliamentarian murdered! Read all about it! First murder in New Yatsillat!”