The Devil's Workshop

The cell was well furnished. His captors had left behind the key to his shackles. They had left the barrel of water from which he drank every day and a paper bag with three dry crusts of bread. Jack looked at these things and held them in his mind, knowing that he only needed to endure the present pain in order to enjoy the riches before him. Most of all, his eyes focused on the black satchel, the medical bag, which the doctor kept there in the cell. Jack thought about the doctor, tried to recollect any clues he might have heard to the man’s identity, as he concentrated on everything but the pain in his wrists and ankles. The fool Cinderhouse had used the left-behind key and was working at the shackles now, the shackles that Jack’s skin had healed around and grown over. Jack thought about the black bag and the doctor who left it each day, and he imagined that the doctor had a life up there with a wife who worried over him and might ask about an extra bag. The bag was safer here, safer left in the place where the doctor used it, where the doctor cut Jack the way that Jack had cut all of his ladies: Nichols and Chapman and Stride, Eddowes and Kelly and Tabram, oh my. So many ladies. Jack, you lucky boy.

The doctor had left his bag so that his own lady would not question its purpose. Which meant that all Jack had to do was survive the shackles and the bag would be his.

The things he might do with all those lovely silver tools that lay within!

Cinderhouse mistook Jack’s cry for a cry of pain and he stopped. He backed away from the shackle around Jack’s left ankle as if he’d been burned.

“No,” Jack said. His voice was barely a whisper. “Don’t stop.”

Cinderhouse said something that Jack couldn’t hear above the red roar in his ears and went back to work. The iron had dug deep, had buried itself under a warm layer of flesh, and the bald man was now on his hands and knees tearing it away from Jack’s bones.

Jack glanced down at the red river of blood that trickled between his toes into the dirt, into that soft, malleable clay beneath London, and he smiled and he screamed again and he returned his gaze to that beautiful black bag and its dreadful instruments of instruction.

14

Day spotted Adrian March outside the prison walls, squatting on the curb and staring at a spot in the road. Day held out a hand to stop Hammersmith, and they waited until March stood back up before approaching him.

“What did you find over there?” Hammersmith said.

“Nothing,” March said. “Well, something.” He waved his hand abstractly at the road and the empty field and the train tracks nearby as he walked toward them. “Just something left behind by children.”

“I can’t imagine children out here.”

“Did you discover anything inside Bridewell?”