The Devil's Workshop

She took a quick glance around the rest of the room, then laid down her hoe and rushed to his side. He turned his head to watch her as she approached, but didn’t make any other movement. She hunched over his wrists where they were bound to the chair and her gnarled fingers worried at the knots, which had been pulled tight and small like hard little seeds. She shook her head and whispered to Mr Michael.

“Rheumatism,” she said. “Can’t move my fingers so well as I might have done once upon a time. But don’t you worry. You sit tight and I’ll be right back.”

She scurried away back to the hall and clucked her tongue at herself. She murmured under her breath. “Of course he’s going to sit tight, you silly old woman. Man can’t move if he wants to.”

She glanced up the stairs again as she passed them and went along the hallway to the kitchen. She tried to move quickly, but she didn’t want to be surprised by anything, so she stopped at the kitchen doorway and entered slowly, checking both corners by the door before she went all the way inside. Nobody was waiting for her there, but the back door was standing open. She went to it and looked around the empty garden before exploring the kitchen. It wouldn’t do to have someone walk in while she was distracted.

There was a knife block on the counter and the biggest knife was missing. There was a butt of ham and some bread crumbs on the butcher block. A honeybee sat on the ham. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and it buzzed around her head.

“Go on, little bee,” she said. “You don’t eat ham and I know you’re not gonna sting me.”

It lost interest in her and zee’d across the kitchen and zigzagged out through the open door. She selected the smallest knife from the block and ran her thumb along its blade to see if it was sharp. She nodded to herself and crept back down the hallway to the parlor, checked it carefully for new people, and then hurried over to the chair where Mr Michael sat in enforced patience, waiting for her.

The knife was very sharp indeed and made short work of the mailing twine. She rubbed Mr Michael’s wrists to get the blood moving in them again.

“Can you stand?”

Mr Michael nodded, but didn’t speak. Eunice looked at his mouth and then looked at the horrible tongues hanging above the hearth, and she blinked back tears at the thought of what the poor man must have endured.

She patted him on his arm and helped pull him up. He clutched the back of the chair and leaned hard against it, and they waited for the feeling to come back to his legs. When he could walk, she led him out of the parlor and turned right and guided him down his own hall to the door, which was still standing open. She was so anxious to leave that house that she practically pulled him out into the sunlight. He stood blinking in the tiny front garden while she pulled the door closed behind them. She didn’t hear it latch, but she turned and took Mr Michael by the arm and led him into her house and put on a kettle for tea. While she waited for the water to heat, she went and got a roll of gauze bandages, a little bottle of iodine, and the pint of rye that Giles had always kept in the back of the cupboard. Then she broke open her jar of pin money that she had saved from sewing work. She would need pennies to pay the neighborhood boys.

She was going to send out as many runners as she could afford. She was going to send them to Scotland Yard and she was going to send them to HM Prison Bridewell. She wanted every policeman and warder in London to come and look at the tongues hanging in the parlor next door. She would only feel safe when they had caught the Devil and sent him back where he belonged.

41

Jack was hungry.

He sat at a table, far back in the main room of the pub, ignoring what went on upstairs, and when the wench came to ask what he wanted, he tipped his hat forward, dropped two of Elizabeth’s coins on the table, and asked for as much as that would buy.

He sat and waited and watched the people interact. He felt nothing but a distant fondness for their messy flesh. They were his life’s work, and he hoped to someday understand them.