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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

She smiled, showing her teeth. “She is never at bay. She only chooses sometimes to be quiet, and to wait. With the drug, she is put back into her bottle after a killing or two, which she needs as others need air to breathe. Without the drug … well, I don’t dare think, because it’s been so long since she’s been …” She paused, finding the word. “Unchained,” she said.

“Hm,” said Matthew, who felt rather uneasy along the spine with this young woman so near to him, Black-Eyed Broodie or not. He shifted uneasily in his seat, and Elizabeth Mulloy gave a soft laugh.

“Fear,” she said. “It tingles the back of my neck.” She leaned forward. Matthew saw that her brown eyes seemed to have gotten darker and there were cinders of red in them, just like Cardinal Black’s. “We have time, dear brother,” she told him. “Dear brother Broodie. Though I think you have lived a life so different from mine that this brother can never fathom his sister. Yet we shall attempt it. Would you care to hear my story?”

Matthew’s first response would be No, prefaced by the word Hell. But he thought better of it, for it appeared his sister wished to tell the tale, and as they were travelling in the same direction for any number of hours it might be wise to listen, and heed the warning that was sure to be in it.

Thus Matthew settled back in his seat, as the coach’s wheels crunched along the snowcast road and the wind made little whines and shrieks past the portholes. She gave him a smile that was not really a smile but more of a grimace, like she was about to open a door that led to a chamber where grotesque figures of the damned danced and capered at a party far beyond Matthew’s understanding of good and evil.

Her smile faded. Her face became a blank, and though she was still a lovely young woman Matthew thought there was something horrific in that empty stare, and he wished to look away but he could not, for he had an inkling that this was part of how she lured men into alleys and tore them to pieces: she looked so lost, so innocent, so needful of a guiding hand.

“I will begin,” she told him, and the Spitalfields Murderess opened that dreadful door to the party.

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Six

The first one I killed, she said, bore a remarkable resemblance to the man who murdered the only mother I ever knew and raped me at the age of ten.

But … I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me go back a distance.