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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 had some trouble. The gloves were hard to handle. She cut herself the first few times, getting them on in haste from the bag she carried. She had to learn the art of killing and not injure herself. That took practice. So while Elizabeth Mulloy worked in the day among the children at the mill, by night RakeHell Lizzie—the name I gave her, as the public only knew the title of the Spitalfields Murderess—walked the streets of Spitalfields, and so it began with that man who she thought looked so much like Broderick Robson. She made a fine mess of him. She learned to cut their throats first before they could cry out, and she learned also where the most blood would jump from so as to diminish the spatter on her clothes. That was a difficult thing for her and meant a lot of clothing stolen from clotheslines, but again … she learned.

She took down six of them. With the seventh, she was too confident and a shade slow. She took off the side of his face, but he was able to run screaming for help. He was the one who gave the law our description. After three months, they trapped her in a blind alley. Four constables who had come to track her. They took her to jail, to the court, and to prison. After two years behind bars we were removed by Doctor Firebaugh to the asylum at Highcliff where he was doing his experimental treatments on what was termed criminal minds. They even sold him the original gloves, to put in a museum he was planning to build there on the grounds.

I was not the only one at Highcliff, but a few of the others died from the drugs. I survived, and so did Lizzie. And even though she was contained, she was not dead.

Samson Lash brought his wife in. She had lost all knowledge of who she was and who he was. She could not dress herself, feed herself or anything else. She babbled and cried and made no sense. The doctor announced her as a hopeless case, but Samson returned to see her nearly every day. Eventually he and I began to talk, as I had been allowed to do some clerical work in the doctor’s office. I was as amazed as anyone might be when, after a period of some weeks, he paid the doctor to take me to his house, and also paid for a regular application of the drug.