Chapter Text
Harrow lurched back, just in time to avoid the spray of water kicked up by the passing carriage. She had managed to avoid staining the fabric of her dress with ink or chalk for hours; it wouldn’t do to soak her skirts mere moments after stepping out the door.
Despite the inconsiderate coachmen, she was glad to be free of the dimly lit rooms of the Quinn-Pent residence. Sir Magnus and Lady Pent were very kind, and Jeannemary and Issac were intelligent children, if not always attentive, but she was always bone-weary by the end of the day. It was the same routine day in and day out, wake up, breakfast, walk several blocks, geography, mathematics, awkward luncheon, the natural sciences, English, politely but firmly decline supper, leave for home to do as she pleased. Right now, Harrow wanted no more than to curl up at home with a complicated textbook, but today was Wednesday and Alecto would be expecting her.
They were to meet at a corner roughly halfway between their two residences. It had been their meeting place since their childhood. With Harrow tutoring at the Pent house for the time being, it was a bit more of a walk for her than before, but Alecto had never seemed to realise this, nor had Harrow’s pride allowed her to bring it up herself.
Regardless of the distance, it was a good corner for two bored girls—now women or soon to be—to while away the hours. When they were children, the most important building was the bakery in front of which they met. They would both make sure to save some pin money to buy sweets without their parents’ knowledge. Every time she had gone home with a patch of sugar dusting her dress, their servant Crux had grumbled about how she would ruin her appetite for dinner, but would still brush her off so her parents wouldn’t see. Later as adolescents, the pub across the street drew their eyes. Not because they were allowed in—two girls? It was unimaginable—but it was popular with the local university students. They watched the young men come and go. Harrow wondered what it was like to have the kind of companionship where one could jest and roughhouse with someone. Not that she was overly physical, but she still felt the absence of the option.
Alecto had always been more interested in all of the above than Harrow. Harrow was curious about the world, but it was in a detached, observational way. How people worked was an amusing topic because she could use it to get what she wanted, not because they themselves were fascinating. They were all rather similar to each other, in reality.
Alecto wanted to actually get to know other people. She loved to start conversations with strangers about inane subjects. It was maddening, sometimes, to be trapped a step behind Alecto as she chattered away, Harrow attempting to avoid eye contact with the stranger.
When it came down to it, however, Alecto was there for Harrow. She held little regard for the whims of high society, so while her parent’s former business partners and alleged friends looked down their noses at Harrow and gossiped behind her back, Alecto moved closer. Harrow was still invited to all of Alecto’s many social gatherings—though she could only stand so many hours of constant rejection—and she never cancelled plans, despite the fact there must be many people vying for her attention. Alecto was a genuine friend, a rare find among their class of people.
Harrow reached the corner right as the church tower a few blocks away began ringing the hour. The last of the six faint clangs faded with no sign of Alecto. It was fine. There was no logical reason for the odd clenching in her stomach. Her doctor would have said it was a sign of a nervous complaint—the name for hysteria when it presented itself in a woman of means. Her doctor also said that germ theory was an attempt by hospitals to privatize surgery. Regardless of the cause of her irrational concern, she would wait. Alecto was probably just on the other street, having been held up by traffic or an engaging conversation.
Fifteen minutes passed.
Fifteen entire minutes arrived, lingered, and slipped away, six quickly becoming only a memory and yet there was still no sign of Alecto. As a rule, Harrow was not prone to unnecessary worry. She was fully aware of how much and very little time fifteen minutes was, and it was entirely too long for someone like Alecto not to arrive. Fifteen minutes early, perhaps, if she was already in the area, however in the seven years Harrow had known her, Alecto had never been even a minute late.
It left her in quite the predicament. On one hand, if she left and Alecto arrived late for some inane reason, she would never live down the jokes about her impatience. On the other, the feeling in her stomach was growing and festering into the idea that something was very, very wrong.
Feelings were not the most solid foundation on which to build a theory, though, and Harrow prided herself on her intelligence and ability to discount simple emotional reactions. However, in this specific circumstance she found her feelings and reasoning were slowly aligning as more time passed.
She waited another five minutes. Nothing. She was beginning to get annoyed, a clear sign she was properly worried now. She gave another glance around to her surroundings.
Reflecting upon the day afterwards, Harrow couldn’t recall what exactly drew her attention to the alleyway. From where she was standing it was not overly prominent, nor had she walked past it one her way to their rendezvous, therefore she hadn’t noticed anything down it earlier that piqued her interest. It was only that unfortunate instinct that she could point to for why she started walking towards it.
It was an alleyway against its wishes. It would have been quite happy to house a building, however whoever had planned the street had neglected to leave enough room for any size of building, even by London’s standards. The ground was not even paved, as if it did not even deserve that much attention. The building on either side leaned towards each other, as if wanting to be rid of the unused area. The walls wobbled and warped their way towards a grande finale of a brick wall, blocking any escape. No light filtered in from where the walls pressed against each other. Harrow blocked much of the light from this street as well, which is her only excuse as to why she didn’t notice the shape right away.
Among the debris that had collected in the nooks and crannies, there was a mound of something discarded about two thirds down the alley. Harrow shifted to allow more light to fall on the pile, and caught the glimmer of metal among the dark material. She couldn’t see more from this far away.
She took a step into the alley. The moment she stepped off the street, all sound became muffled. It was uncanny how well the simple brickwork held out sound. Or. perhaps, held in. She was still not close enough to make out more details, though as her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, Harrow thought she could make out a paler area among the dark material.
Step by step, Harrow brought herself closer to the mound. After each step she paused, hoping not to get closer to an unknown thing than was necessary. It was large enough to conceal an animal and she did not want to be within range of any animals tough enough to survive alone on the streets.
A few steps in, she stopped worrying about stray animals. Mere feet away, hidden among the street litter, was a woman’s hat. It was as if an essential piece had been slotted into the puzzle and her entire perspective was altered. The dark pile of material became the silk of a women’s dress, the pale oval among it her face. The glint she had seen earlier must be some type of jewellery.
Harrow froze. For a fleeting moment she had the comforting notion that the woman was simply injured or even asleep for some bizarre reason. She forced herself to discard it. In the several minutes she had been observing the woman, she had seen absolutely no movement. She had heard none either. This must be a body.
She breathed in and breathed out. And again. And again. She had to tell someone. She had to get the police. It was expected of her.
But she couldn’t walk away. Some confounded part of her psyche refused to follow reason. She could not leave this unfinished. Perhaps she was wrong and it was not a body. What would happen if she returned with a constable and the “body” turned out to be a discarded mannequin?
She refused to be the girl who cried wolf. It wasn’t mere curiosity, it was a logical step to take before sounding the alarm. She must confirm it was, in fact, a body. She had seen drawings of bodies in the medical textbooks she had collected over the years. This couldn’t be much different.
She took another step, and then another and another. Quicker, as to prevent herself from stalling. When Harrow was halfway down the alley, the pale oval shape contrasted against the dark silk of her garment finally became clear enough to be recognized as a face. Familiarity tapped at the door of her consciousness, but the pallor and slackness muddled her memory. The eyes, though. She would remember those eyes for as long as she lived. A haunting amber, the colour only discernible among the shadows because she knew how they appeared in the sunlight. Alecto.
The world went sideways. Harrow had thought that was just an expression, as even the night Crux had broken the news of her parent’s accident she hadn’t experienced it. Now, however, she found herself putting a hand out to the slimy brickwork to support herself. Her ribs strained against her corset and she felt lightheaded. In her seventeen short years, Harrow had disproven time and again the medical opinion that women were emotionally feeble and incapable of handling stress. She was not about to prove the theory right.
She forced herself to look back at the body. A new thought came unbidden and unwelcome, was this scene truly in front of her, or was she looking at something that only existed in her mind? She chased it away. This was rather an extreme leap in logic. She may have an—active—imagination, but creating an entirely new scene such as this was unusual.
Despite this rationale, the thought returned, sinking its claws into her grey matter. Was it truly unthinkable that her imagination could connect the face of her friend with the kind of bloody lacerations she had seen when the police had brought her in to identify her parent’s bodies? It was far-fetched, however she could not completely reject the theory.
Even with her doubts, Harrow could not physically bring herself closer to the body. Logic fled in the face of death. She was half-concerned if she lifted her foot, instead of moving forward she would run from the scene.
This would not do. She was not her parents. She would not shrink from harsh reality. She—
“When I picture a murderer, you’re not the kind of person that comes to mind.” The voice was casual, but far too close for comfort.
Harrow clamped her jaw shut against a scream, but couldn’t prevent a sharp intake of breath. She spun around to face the newcomer. Her fists clenched at her sides, though what she could do with them was laughably little.
At a glance, Harrow had assumed the stranger was male. They were dressed in men’s clothing after all: coal-smeared shirt, ill-fitting vest, and well-worn trousers tucked into very muddy boots. No hat covered their short hair.
When they stepped closer and spoke again, however, she realized that the newcomer was in fact a woman, albeit a young one. “Maybe I was wrong, though.” The stranger made a show of scrutinizing Harrow’s face. “You’ve got some bitter eyes. You look like you’re plotting my murder right now. And you’re rather too close to a corpse to be respectable, despite your clothing.”
“Who are you to judge me from a single moment?” Harrow knew defensiveness was not the wisest reaction, however, there was something in the tone of the stranger, the angle of her smirk that kindled a rage in Harrow she had not felt before. “You, who steals your brothers or whoever’s clothes and wanders down alleyways to converse with strangers you find standing over corpses. Do you not realize that if I were a murder, stepping closer to me while we are in a dark alley is not the wisest move? How am I to know you are not the murder, making a pathetic attempt to frame me?”
The stranger blinked, grin fading briefly before coming back full force. “Well, well, well, she’s got claws. I never would have guessed. To answer your accusations, this style is entirely my own, thank you very much. I also don’t truly think you the murdering type; too frail. I saw pictures of some of the other girls and they could have crushed a little consumptive skeleton such as yourself. Lastly, I’m flattered that you have such a high opinion of my intelligence that you believe I could think of such an elaborate framing scheme.”
“It was not meant as a compli—whatever can you mean by ‘other girls’?”
“Don’t your lot read the news? Yeah, more bodies than usual have been cropping up all over this area. It’s been a proper epidemic of girls getting themselves knifed in dark alleys for the past few weeks.”
Harrow frowned, stomach giving a lurch. “Is that not a rather insensitive way to put it? Those were people once.”
“That’s to be expected of my class, innit?” the woman grinned. “I thought people of your class were supposed to have manners. ‘S the only skill you’ve got that anyone bothers to mention, yet here you are, being rather rude yourself.”
“When have I—”
The woman gestured grandly around them. “Here we are, standing over a corpse and having a rather interesting conversation, yet you haven’t bothered to introduce yourself, nor ask my name before you start insulting my manner of speech.”
Harrow was stunned into silence.
“I’m Gideon, by the way.”
“Miss Gideon—”
Gideon laughed. “It’s my first name, and no, like my clothing I did not steal it from a brother. I think the presence of a corpse means we can skip the formalities.” She paused. “Now’s the time you respond with your name.”
“My name is none of your concern.”
“Interesting name. Is it German?”
Harrow silently counted to ten. “I have had one of the worst days in my life, and your presence is not exactly remedying the situation. Short of the murderer, I could not think of someone I would rather be forced to interact with. Furthermore—”
Her tirade was cut short by a faint high-pitched sound that echoed from the street. Having had little experience with crime, it took Harrow a second to place it; a police whistle. Good.
Harrow drew herself up, spine instinctively becoming ramrod straight. Dusting off her dress, she began walking towards the mouth of the alley to meet the policemen before they saw the body. As Gideon had pointed out—rudely but not inaccurately—being discovered stooping over a corpse was not the most innocent position one could be found in.
It was only when she passed Gideon that she realised the other woman was not moving. Harrow paused, looking back at her. Gideon returned the look. For the first time the smile was completely wiped from her face and there was alarm in her eyes that spoke of past experience. It was off-putting.
A whistle sounded again, closer this time, and Gideon snapped to attention. She relaxed again, rocking back a bit on her heels, and cast a faux casual glance over her shoulder down the alley. Away from the noise and bustle of the street.
“Stay here, then, if you are too craven to face the law.” It was harsh, but Harrow was in no mood for manners. She left the strange woman where she stood.
Harrow found the source of the whistle about a block away. Apparently, there had been a young ruffian attempting to steal bread. The constable had used the whistle to chase off the would-be thief, however didn't bother to pursue the boy more than a few feet before considering it too much effort.
He didn’t turn as Harrow approached and stopped a few feet away, obviously intending to speak to him. “I need the aid of a policeman at once.”
“What’s the problem, miss?” The constable didn’t even feign attention. He continued to face away from Harrow, eyes wandering across the food carts, likely thinking more of his supper than the girl asking for help.
“I have discovered a corpse.” Harrow kept her tone even and businesslike.
The constable frowned at her, more confused than concerned. “What?” At least she had more of his attention now.
“There is a dead woman down an alley. As a concerned citizen, I am reporting it to you. At your earliest convenience—which I strongly suggest is now—I will lead you to it.”
“Right,” the policeman still sounded skeptical, however he followed her without complaint. “Lead on, girl.”
Harrow turned sharply and strode back to the alley, keeping a smart pace that forced the constable to walk quicker than he probably preferred to keep up. She could hear him wheezing his way behind her. Good. Keeping up with her would keep his attention on her and not the street wares.
She reached the mouth of the alley and turned back to the constable. There was a stormy look brewing on his face. She ignored it. “Here,” she offered, gesturing as she spoke. She looked down the alley at the same time the constable did. A quick glance showed her that it was down a body—the living one. Alecto was where Harrow had last seen her, but Gideon had vanished without a sound. Not even a shower of pebbles denoted which wall she had had to climb to escape the dead-end alley.
It took Harrow off guard for some reason. Gideon had not seemed the flighty type. Then again, Harrow had known her for all of five minutes and as such did not have the best estimation of her character.
She decided to put the mysterious women out of her mind for the moment, instead focusing on the issue of the corpse of her friend. Before she tucked the other woman away in her mind, her earlier accusation made itself known; could she have truly been the murderer? She had deflected with humour, but in reality there was no reason for her to be wandering down a random alley in London. There were many reasons against it, actually, it was a great way to get—get killed.
The police officer had been examining the body—grumbling all the while—though thankfully he had scraped enough brain cells together so as to know not to touch it. Now he was examining Harrow, the beginnings of suspicion forming on his dull face.
Harrow crammed her wandering thoughts in the first corner she found. “Can I help you?”
“Dunno. D’you know if anyone in this area might know who she was?” His tone was bored, bordering on insolent.
Harrow raised her chin. “There is no need, I can identify her myself.”
“Oh?” Suspicion was now clearly written across the officer’s face. “By all means.”
“She is—was—Alecto Lee Laurie,” Harrow supplied. Anticipating his next question, she added. “I was a friend of hers, Lady Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Lady of Drearburg.” She despised using her title, but this man was inept enough to attempt to arrest her, ergo it was necessary in the given circumstances.
The effect was immediate. The officer’s spine straightened unconsciously, and he tugged at his uniform. “I see. Do you know what the victim may have been doing in this area, madam?”
“As a rule, she did not frequent dilapidated alleys,” Harrow said drily. “However we commonly frequented the corner a few feet over.”
“So it’s possible someone could have called her over and gotten her to follow them down this alley? Maybe someone she knew?”
Harrow hoped this man was not exemplary of the entire London police force. “As amiable as she was, Alecto was not an imbecile.”
“I didn’t mean to imply she was,” the officer rushed to assure her. “However, If she was lured to even the mouth of the alley, she could have been easily overpowered and forced further in.”
“That is…possible.” If Alecto had undergone a lobotomy and an extreme shift in personality.
“I promise you, ma’am, that Scotland Yard will do its best to put this crime right.”
“I am glad to hear it.” Harrow clasped her hands together to prevent them curling into fists. Put it right? Her friend was dead, nothing could be done to make this right. The most she could hope for was the discovery and execution of her murderer. Alecto would still be gone.
“Well, someone might call on you later if we’ve got any more questions, but right now you’re free to go.” The policeman made a show of tucking his notepad back into his jacket pocket.
“Thank you.”
When Harrow didn’t move, the policeman shifted uncomfortably. “Well, ma’am you’d best be off. I need to stay here to guard the body.” It was a clear dismissal.
Harrow had no intent to push her luck—much of it must have been used to prevent her arrest earlier—but as she made her way back to the street, another thought came to her. Her steps slowed to a stop.
“If you would be so kind,” Harrow called as she turned back around, “as to keep me informed of your progress. I would greatly appreciate it.” Regardless of her faith in the police force, it would be useful to know the direction they were taking. Perhaps she would be able to subtly connect some dots for them as they went.
The policeman doffed his cap. “Of course, ma’am. I know where to find you.” His eyes darted around at the walls, the asphalt, anywhere but her face. He then doffed his cap again, this time in dismissal, and completely turned his back to her, likely to ward off further interrogation.
“He could at least attempt to be a believable liar,” Harrow muttered as she stepped back onto the street. A glance around showed the foot traffic was rapidly thinning as the sun sank lower in the sky.
Repining her hat, Harrow set a smart pace for home. As she walked, Harrow reflected on the slack jaw and glazed eyes of the police officer. The only way he would solve the case is if he stumbled into the answer, which then confessed to everything and arrested itself.
It would not do. Alecto deserved more than to be a simple statistic, a name in a list in some forgotten drawer collecting dust, an example of the depravity of the city.
Harrow knew her own strengths. Medical textbooks and complex calculations had never proved a challenge to her. She also had the motivation to get to the bottom of the murders. Yes, for Alecto’s sake, but also for the multitude of girls that strange woman had alluded to who had been deemed so unimportant that they didn’t even deserve a mention in the newspaper. She would be a conduit for them and allow them to rest easy when the truth was discovered.
She reached her address and regarded the peeling facade. It was not the kind of house one expected a lady to inhabit. A title held social influence, but was never guaranteed financial power. After their fall from grace, her family had been forced to downsize to simpler lodgings on the outskirts of Park Lane.
Far from decrepit, the house nevertheless had an air of neglect. The roof kept out the rain, yet the shingles had more gaps than a prize fighter’s smile. The ivy that crept along the walls bordered on choking, though they covered any uneven bricks. The door and shutters were in dire need of repainting.
If this was the kind of place she could afford on her extremely lacking means, what kind of place did a woman like Gideon live in? She dressed like a dock worker and ran from the police, so it couldn’t be much to look at. There was little chance that it could be considered safe by any stretch of the word.
Harrow shook off the train of thought. It was unlikely that she would ever see the other woman again. However, she mused as she mounted the stairs, unlikely events had been happening all day.