Chapter Eight

She had to leave immediately. Get somewhere far away. Somewhere away from him. Maybe out of England itself. France or Germany, perhaps, or maybe America. They were always looking for skilled maids in America. But why stop at a maid? She could be a scientist, a lab assistant for Edison or some other researcher. She had a little experience and an aptitude for science, so it was not outside the realm of possibility, was it?

“Shirley!”

She was startled out of her thoughts as Griffin shouted her name. Had he been trying to get her attention? She looked his way and was horrified to see that he had gone deathly pale and his forehead was shimmering with sweat. “Can you help me to the kitchen? I believe Mr. Garland keeps some medical supplies down there in case his son hurts himself while cooking.”

For a moment, Shirley’s brain refused to process what he said. Then her eyes roved to the wound on his sleeve and the blood seeping out. Something clicked and she figured out what needed to be done. “Come on,” she said, pulling his unharmed arm over her shoulders and helping Griffin down the stairs to the second floor.

I can stay long enough to help him, she thought. Just long enough to get him patched up and make sure he will not die. But after that, I am out of here! I will go as far as the Punjab or even to China, if it’ll keep me away from that monster!

As they reached the second floor and hobbled towards the stairs to the first floor, Milverton and Lucinda appeared, coming up from the foyer, deep in what appeared to be a serious conversation. They stopped talking, however, as their eyes fell upon Shirley and Griffin, and the latter’s wounded arm.

Lucinda let out an ear-piercing scream. “Griffin! What happened!”

Indeed, what had happened? How could they tell anyone what had occurred upstairs in the library? Most of it seemed too unbelievable to be repeated. And even the part that was believable, the part involving him, Shirley could not bring herself to say aloud. She had been forced to drudge up those memories once already tonight. Why should she have to share them now with people she scarcely tolerated?

Thankfully, Griffin answered them before she was forced to come up with an explanation. “I was in the library and one of the electric lights shattered. Not sure how, exactly, but the glass cut me.”

“My word,” Milverton replied. “I’ve never seen any of the lights do that.”

Lucinda was in tears. “Is he going to die?”

From anyone else, Shirley might have been tempted to laugh. After all, it was only a cut, and not a very deep one at that. But this was Lucinda, the girl who had lost her parents just minutes after seeing them leave her childhood home for a social call.

“He’ll be fine,” Shirley assured the weeping girl. “But we need to get him to the kitchen. Mr. Garland has medical supplies down there. Mr. Milverton, would you please take Lucinda and call a doctor?”

Shirley had not asked anything of Milverton since being promoted to lab assistant. She had been too afraid of the contempt she might receive from the elderly man if she had. To think, a maid who had just come to be employed by him, giving him orders!

However, contempt seemed to be the last thing on the butler’s mind. Instead, he nodded and ushered Lucinda back into the foyer and down the hall to the room where the telephone was located.

Meanwhile, Shirley guided Griffin to the kitchen, which had gone quiet and cold since Garland and his son had left for bed. Sitting him in a chair in the corner, she rummaged around the kitchen and the pantry before finding the medical supplies in a metal case between the stove and the wall. Pulling it out and opening it up, she grabbed a length of bandage cloth and a bottle of cheap bourbon. She then pulled out the stopper on the bourbon bottle, soaked some of the bandages, and went back to Griffin.

“This is going to sting,” she warned him. She had not even finished her sentence before placing the bandages against the wound and applying pressure. Griffin hissed, but otherwise did not comment as Shirley held the soaked bandages to his wound and cleaned up the blood with the dry ones.

An awkward silence fell, and Shirley sought a way to break it. She glanced around the kitchen and said, “Lucinda’s not here yet. I guess Milverton’s keeping her from making a mess of things.”

“Who was that man?” Griffin asked her.

Shirley froze. “What man?”

“The man who chased us in the library, or wherever the hell we were,” he clarified. “You knew him, I could see it in your face.”

She kept her eyes trained on his wounded arm. “I do not know him.”

“Bullshit,” he replied, startling her. She had never heard anything close to coarse language come from Griffin Avondale’s mouth before. “Who is he?”

“I would rather not talk about it.” Shirley mumbled, avoiding his eyes.

“Well, you are going to talk about it, because I was cut trying to defend you from him!”

“No!” Shirley was on the verge of tears again. She stood, ready to bolt, but Griffin grabbed her arm and held her firm. When she stopped struggling, he gently turned her face towards him with his injured arm. His expression was kind but stern.

“Shirley,” he asked again, “who is he?”

He would not let her go until she told him, she could see it in his eyes. But how could she say it? How could she say the dark truth that had tormented her in the darkest corners of her mind for six whole years?

Tears fell down her cheeks as her breath caught in her throat. When she was finally able to speak again, her voice sounded alien to her own ears. “His name is Thomas Hayne Cutbush. You know him as Jack the Ripper.”

Griffin’s eyes went as wide as dinner plates. “Jack the Ripper?” he repeated. “As in the Jack the Ripper?”

“Is there any other?” she replied icily. “I saw him kill two of his victims. I saw his face. He saw mine. Yes, I’m fairly sure he’s the Jack the Ripper.”

Griffin’s mouth fell open as he beheld her in a new light. Shirley was not surprised: even six years after the murders had ceased, the whisper of the man who had killed five women, and maybe many more, in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts of London could bring back waves of memories. Crowds of police and private citizens searching the neighborhoods for the murderer; letters published in newspapers, one of which came with what might have been a real human kidney; and of course, the bodies of those women. The poor women who had been slaughtered, their necks slashed, their bodies mutilated. Even the photos of those women on the mortuary tables, or even just the illustrations, were enough to send people into fits of terror or dead faints.

Only in Shirley’s case, she had a more personal connection to the murders. Not only had she lived in the area when the murders took place, but as she had just revealed to Griffin, she had a front row seat to some of the carnage. And it had forever scarred her.

For a moment, Griffin’s mouth still hung agape. Then he closed it, coughed, and said, “Tell me everything.”

“Why?” she asked, suspicious. She had never pegged Griffin Avondale to be the morbidly curious type, but one could never be sure.

“Because he cut me not twenty minutes ago,” Griffin replied, his eyebrow raised. “And I can tell you’re terrified of him.”

Well, at least he was not displaying a morbid curiosity. Shirley had to give him that. However, she was still reluctant. She had kept these memories hidden deep within herself, fighting tooth and nail to keep them deep inside her so she could live her life. The last thing she wanted was to bring them back up to the surface, let alone share them with someone.

“Shirley,” said Griffin then, his tone as serious as a funeral. “I promise not to tell anyone. I just want to understand how you know Jack the Ripper and how that led to the incident upstairs.”

“I do not know him.”

“You know what I mean.”

Shirley groaned. She thought for a moment, then said, “If you tell a single soul—!”

“I give you full permission to sue me for every pound I am worth and pursue any other avenues to soothe the injury I have caused you,” Griffin interrupted. “Now, are you going to tell me this story or not?”

Shirley groaned again. “Fine, I’ll tell you. How much do you remember reading about those days?”

“I remember most of the details,” Griffin replied. “I was away at school during most of the murders, but we got the news even in Eton.”

“Well, I remember quite a bit more. Back in eighty-eight, I was a little girl living with my mother in Whitechapel. My mum was a drunk, and she often drank away whatever she managed to earn by—”

“Prostitution?” Griffin guessed.

Shirley glared at him so intensely, she was certain her eyes would set him on fire if she stared any harder. Griffin flinched, which she supposed would have to do.

“My mother was many things,” she growled, “but she was not a prostitute. Just because a woman is fallen does not mean she was a prostitute. I know plenty of people think they are one and the same, but they are not. Understand?”

“I’m sorry!” Griffin replied, his voice rising an octave. “I didn’t mean to imply—!”

“Well, you did!” she spat. “And let me tell you something, it’s a false implication! One that men and high-society ladies who know nothing about those who have had to work from birth are all too happy to make!”

Griffin flinched again, which mollified Shirley a little. She had met plenty of so-called “fallen woman,” women who had either left, been driven away, or lost their homes, husbands, and children. These women would fall on hard times and have to find alternate means to get by. Some found menial or odd jobs, others begged, and yes, a few did rely on prostitution. However, most of society seemed to think that fallen women were the same thing as prostitutes, meaning that whatever happened to them was deserved.

Given that her mother was a fallen woman, and many of the women Shirley had known growing up were as well, through no fault of their own, she tended to get a little angry when people automatically assumed all women like her mother made their living through whoring. Even if some did, it was often the only way they could afford to get by. Why did they then deserve to be treated like dirt? It was something that Shirley never understood and that just made her all the angrier.

Normally, she was good at keeping this anger in check. However, tonight was like no other night and all bets were off.

“I-I’m sorry,” Griffin repeated, then coughed. “I mean, please forgive me for my ignorance. You obviously know more about this than I do.”

“Obviously,” she replied. “And just so you know, most of the women the Ripper killed were not prostitutes. For one thing, I knew Polly Nichols. She was a drinker, but I never knew her to whore. Odd jobs or begging or pawning her things off, sure. Anything to keep out of the bloody workhouses, but never whoring. And if you look at some of the statements from people who knew the other women at their…what do you call them? People who knew the deceased talked to judges.”

“Inquests?”

“Those. Anyway, people who knew most of those women said they never whored. Not that the police or the newspapers ever cared for accuracy. Once they knew where those women were from and that they were fallen women, they thought they knew everything. And so far, nobody’s bothered to correct them.”

“I had no idea,” said Griffin. “I will have to read those inquests someday.”

“Please do,” said Shirley. “Anyway, my mum and I lived in Whitechapel, but we moved around a lot. By that, I mean we usually had a different place to stay every couple of days. Any place we could find a bed for the night, or on the street if we couldn’t. The only places we never went were the workhouses, because—well, you know.”

Griffin nodded, which impressed Shirley. Apparently, he had some idea of how the world worked outside his own social class.

“Well, when Mum was sober,” she continued, “she would give me what money she managed to earn and have me get a bed at one lodging house or another. Her job was to go buy us some cheap food for dinner. Of course, most of the time she would just disappear and end up drinking at one place or another, leaving me to go out to find her and bring her back.” She paused, then added, “It’s because I went out searching for her that I saw the Ripper kill two women: his first victim, Polly Nichols, and his last victim, Mary Jane Kelly.”

Shirley paused long enough to remember the Whitechapel of her youth—run down, desolate, full of people with hungry bellies and hollowed-out eyes—then took up the thread again.

“It was August, and well past midnight when something outside woke me up. A cat, I think. I saw that Mum hadn’t come back yet, so I got up to get her. On the way out, I told the guy behind the desk I was going out and not to let my room out to anyone—though I doubt he would have let me back in if I had come back unless I paid for the room again, it was that kind of establishment—and left. I looked all over Whitechapel that night, all her usual haunts when she went drinking, and then all the unusual places. You know, places she might pass out but wake up a bit more comfortable than other drunks. Even when stone drunk, Mum knew how to find the best places to pass out.

“Around three, I ended up on Buck’s Row. I was just wandering around, hoping to find her, when I heard snoring from a stable yard. The gate inside had been left unlocked, so I peeked in and saw a woman sleeping against the wall. At first, I thought it was Mum, so I went to go wake her up, but as I got closer, I saw it was Polly Nichols. She and my mum sometimes worked together to get coin. Since it wasn’t Mum, I was going to leave, but then I heard the yard door open. You didn’t let yourself be found by unknown people in Whitechapel at night, not even before the murders, so the moment I heard the door, I went and hid.”

Shirley took another deep breath. “And that was when he showed up. Thomas Hayne Cutbush, though I didn’t know his name at the time. I’d never seen him before, either. I also had no idea what he was going to do. I thought he might work at the stable yard, or maybe he was a friend of Polly’s looking to bring her home. You know, like I was looking for my mother.”

“Did he look like he did…you know?” Griffin tilted his chin upwards towards the library.

She nodded. “Right down to the muttonchops and mustache. And he wore that same long coat. Anyway, he went to Polly and stared at her for a while. I thought it was strange for someone to just stare at a sleeping woman like that and wondered if I should say something to him. Before I could, however, he punched her in the neck! No warning, not a sound! He just punched her! And then he did it again! He punched her twice from both sides with both fists. Polly woke up, but she was too drunk and confused to understand what was going on. She just sat there, moaning.

“Then Cutbush reached into his coat and pulled out a knife.” Shirley gave Griffin a pointed glance as she said, “Do you know what the sound of a throat getting cut sounds like?”

When he shook his head, she said, “It’s like the sound of shears cutting leather, followed by water gushing out of a pipe as the blood rushes from of the neck. I’ll never forget that sound as long as I live. Nor will I ever forget Polly Nichols waking up to find her neck slit, or the sound she made as she noticed Cutbush standing over her with a bloody knife. Like she was trying to ask him a question, but her throat was too filled with blood to ask.

“But that wasn’t the end. Before she could properly die, he pulled her by the hair so she lay on the ground, sat on her, and started stabbing her! Over and over and over! Plunging the knife into Polly with such anger, such hate, as if she had murdered his mother! Every stab shook her body, and it was so intense, Polly’s skirt fell up from her ankles to her waist. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it myself.

“And after he finished stabbing her, he stood up, posed her sitting up like she was a doll, and put the knife back in his coat. Then he spoke. I didn’t catch all he said, but I did hear one word clearly. ‘Poisoner,’ he said. Then he ran and jumped over the wall. He jumped! That wall was taller than him, but he jumped over it anyway. Up, over and out of sight, like a circus acrobat or something!”

Shirley sighed. “I didn’t see him again for almost three months after that. And I thank God I was too scared to even scream when he murdered Polly, because I’m not sure I would be alive today if I had.”

“What did you do afterward?” Griffin asked.

“I got out of there as soon as I was sure it was safe to do so,” she replied. “Obviously! And a good thing too, because not twenty minutes later someone found the body and the whole neighborhood was filled with police. Meanwhile, I found my mother with a friend, both drunk and singing in a tavern. They took me upstairs to a room they’d rented and slept off the drink, while I stayed quiet after what I’d seen. I never even told Mum about it.”

“Why? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“Because I was scared!” Shirley answered. “I was only ten! I was afraid if I told anyone, the man with the knife would find and kill me. And besides, I didn’t think anyone would believe me. Mum would say I’m making stuff up and that I couldn’t possibly have seen a murder, not with my eye.” She pointed to her lazy eye, nearly poking it with her vehemence. “And I’m sure the bobbies would’ve thought Mum was putting me up to it as well, because they would’ve said the same thing. I mean, who would ever want to believe a little girl with a funny eye from Whitechapel, brought in by her mother who would need a couple of pints before taking her to talk to the police!”

“But your eye doesn’t keep you from seeing things,” Griffin pointed out. He did not dispute the rest of her description of herself or her mother.

“Try telling that to Mum and the bobbies,” Shirley scoffed. “Try telling that to everyone I’ve ever met. Even Nellie, as well as your mother and your sister, didn’t believe I could do my job until they actually saw me at work. All people see is my eye, and they decide I must be a useless cripple! They’re always so surprised when they find out I’m good at what I do.”

“I see. So, what happened then?”

Shirley shrugged. “The murdered woman was identified as Polly Nichols. People talked. Some thought a gang had killed her, others pointed a finger at a Jewish bootmaker named John Pizer, who was nicknamed ‘Leather Apron.’ But people died all the time, and I guess they thought life would move on.

“That is, until Annie Chapman died a little over a week later, and people started talking about a murderer in Whitechapel. And then Elisabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered on the same night. And then people started calling the murderer by a name: Jack the Ripper, after what he’d signed his name as in a letter to The Star.”

“Do you think this Cutbush fellow wrote any of those letters?” Griffin asked.

Again, Shirley shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible. I know one of the letters that went to the Vigilance Committee had half a human organ in a box it came in, but I cannot be sure Cutbush sent them. All I know is, after Stride and Eddowes were killed, the murders suddenly stopped. And as months passed, people started hoping Jack the Ripper was done killing and tried to move on.

“By the time November rolled around, Mum and I had moved out of Whitechapel and were living in Spitalfields. Mum wanted to get away from the murders and all the fear. I think she was afraid it was having a bad effect on me. And she was not wrong: women had died, and I had seen one of them die, though I kept quiet about it. And like everyone, I was scared of another murder happening, even as I wanted to think it was all over.

“But then one night I had to go out and find Mum again. She had made some friends around Miller’s Court on Dorset Street, so I went there first to look for her. But I never even got that far, because as I was passing by Miller’s Court, I saw him on the other side of the street looking out a first-floor window! No mistaking it, it was the man I’d seen kill Polly Nichols, just gazing out the window and onto the street. Then, as I recognized him and gasped in shock, he closed the curtains so nobody could see inside.

“And I knew right then, I knew there was going to be another murder.

“For a moment, I did not move. I had no idea what to do. Should I run? Go find help? Confront him? But then I heard a woman’s laugh, so loud that I could hear it across the street. He was with someone! So, I crossed the street and peeked through a gap in the curtains to see who he was with. What I saw was a naked woman in a bed near a roaring fire. And then Cutbush approached the woman. I think she was expecting him to do…well, you know. But then he pulled out the knife.

“I remember how the woman’s face fell, and how she sucked in breath to scream. But before she could, Cutbush cut her throat!

“And then I screamed. I couldn’t help myself. I screamed. And that was when Cutbush saw me. He turned around and saw my face through the gap in the curtains. The look of rage in his face—!” She shuddered. “I screamed ‘Murder!’ and tried to run, but he ran out the door to the woman’s room and caught me before I’d gotten ten paces. Then he dragged me into that room and…forced me to watch.” She shuddered again as tears ran down her cheeks. “He spent over an hour with her. Destroying her. Making her no longer a woman, but a—a display! A piece of art out of hell! Some sort of tribute to his hatred of women and his sick ideas of revenge!

“A-And I was sitting in a chair there, tied down by a ripped length of fabric from one of the woman’s dresses, and gagged with more fabric! And if I tried to close my eyes or look away, he would turn around and threaten me with the knife, so I-I watched all of it. Everything he did. Every single thing.”

There was silence for a while as Shirley tried to collect herself again. When she began again, her voice was steady, though she noticed a sob at the back of her throat threatening to escape, and she was sure Griffin heard it, too.

“When he was done, he was covered in blood, and he had the biggest grin on his face. Like he’d achieved something great and noble! He turned to me then, and I was sure this would be the moment when I would die, when he would stab me and make me into a display just like his other victims. Instead, he untied me from the chair, threw what remained of the dress and the pieces he’d torn off in the fire and, after making sure the coast was clear, threw me over his shoulders and carried me out of there!

“I was so shocked and scared, I didn’t struggle or scream or even move. I would realize years later that he was using me as cover, pretending to be a father carrying his little girl home or some ruse like that. I’m sure if I’d fought, the jig would’ve been up and he would’ve been caught, but I was sure if I so much as twitched a finger, he would cut my throat!

“When he finally put me down, we were far from Miller’s Court. We were so far away, I didn’t even recognize where we were, though I don’t think he knew that. He bent down in front of me so we were eye-to-eye and said, ‘I had to kill her. I had to rip her up. Do you know why, girl?’

“I shook my head, too scared to speak. ‘Because she was a poisoner,’ he said. ‘She and her bloody kind poison men, good men like me. I’m sick because of women like her. I had to send a message to her poisoning friends. That’s why she and all those other women had to die. Understand?’

“I nodded my head. I was crying and sure he would kill me, even if I agreed with everything he said. Then he smiled and said, ‘Good girl. Now, you be good and don’t grow up to be a poisoner. If you do, I’ll come find you and rip you up.’ And then he kissed my forehead! I remember feeling how cold his mouth was, the scratch of his mustache, and the smell of blood. God, that smell! It clogged my nose and made me unable to smell anything else for days!

“I pissed myself then, but I don’t think he cared. Instead, he walked over to a high wall and jumped over it, leaving me there alone. I didn’t move until the sun came up, and a bobby found me in the alleyway. He asked me if I was alright and if I’d been injured. I didn’t know it at the time, but Cutbush had left blood on my forehead when he’d kissed me, and the bobby probably thought it was my blood.

“The bobby then smelled my piss, noticed my eye, and decided I was an idiot, because from then on he treated me like one, and would only touch me by holding a bit of fabric from my dress between two fingers. Like he thought idiocy was catching.

“Mum found me around evening. She got me out of the police station and beat me so hard for making her worry. I took it. I didn’t care. I was alive. And by that time, they had found the woman he’d killed, Mary Jane Kelly, and I was so glad I did not wind up like her. Dead. Murdered by Jack the Ripper, who thought women were poisoning him.

“Ever since then, just hearing about the Ripper, or about the women he killed, is enough to give me fits. I even saw a book about the Ripper on the day your parents died, and I almost couldn’t breathe! And now he’s here, and I—!”

“How did you find out his name?” Griffin interrupted.

“Huh?”

“He never told you his name, did he? How did you know his name?”

“Because Cutbush was caught and put away for other crimes,” Shirley explained. “I saw it in the paper three years ago. He stabbed some women in their backsides. Got sent away to an asylum in Broadmoor for it. The article I read showed a sketch of the man. I swear I nearly fainted when I read that article, because that sketch was a dead ringer for the man I saw kill Polly Nichols and Mary Jane Kelly. And right under his picture was his name. Thomas Hayne Cutbush, 26, convicted of stabbing two women in the buttocks. That’s when I knew the Ripper’s name.”

She smiled a cheerless smile at Griffin. “So yes, I know who Jack the Ripper is. And you are the first person I’ve ever told, Griffin. Consider yourself lucky, I guess.”

“Good Lord,” he whispered. Then his eyes lit up. “But you can tell people now, can you not? I’m certain if you told someone now, a reporter or a policeman—!”

Shirley laughed, but her laugh was as mirthless as her smile had been. “Oh, that would be nice! To tell people about Cutbush!” She turned scornful eyes on him. “I’m not the only one who figured out who the Ripper is. A couple of months ago, The Sun put out a bunch of articles saying Cutbush was the Ripper all along!”

Griffin stared at her. “The Sun said that?” he replied, aghast. “That new newspaper Father sometimes read?”

“The one and the same,” Shirley replied. “For a paper barely a year old, I guess it has some smart people on its staff, to have figured it out when no one else did. But guess what? It didn’t do anything! The police responded and said there was no way Cutbush could have been the Ripper. Even Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector said it couldn’t have been him!”

“Why did they say that?” Griffin asked, aghast. “How are they so sure?”

“Because his uncle’s a policeman too!” Shirley revealed. “Charles Cutbush, Police Superintendent.”

Griffin’s face fell as her words sank in. He understood that this went beyond ordinary police corruption or incompetence. Many still said Scotland Yard had done a terrible job of chasing the Ripper and blamed the police for the murders going on as long as they had. If it was proven that a relative of a police superintendent had been the murderer this whole time, the resulting scandal would have ruined the entire police force for years to come. So, of course, they would defend the murderer. They had no choice.

“That’s why I can’t tell anyone else about this,” Shirley said with an air of finality. “And now that you know, you should probably leave the country.”

Griffin blinked. “Leave the country?”

She nodded. “It’s what I’m doing. After all, now that he’s here—”

“Hold on a minute! We don’t know that he’s here.”

“He just cut you upstairs!” Shirley pointed out.

“Yeah, in a dark maze that suddenly appeared in a library!” he reminded her. “Listen to me, Shirley. I have no idea what actually occurred upstairs, but I doubt we really had a visit from this Cutbush fellow. You said yourself he is locked up in Broadmoor, correct? That’s over a day away on foot! If he had actually escaped Broadmoor, it would have been front page news, and everyone would know his face. How could he get all the way here without anyone noticing? He certainly could not take a train!”

Shirley’s train of thought crashed to a halt as she considered that possibility. “True…”

“And there’s been some…other odd things happening at the Lodge,” Griffin went on. “Besides the maze in the library, I mean. The other day, I—well, it doesn’t matter. The point is, not everything is as it seems here, so I would say it is a little too early to be leaving the country. Let me at least make inquiries at the asylum and make sure Cutbush is still there. We should have a better understanding of the man’s situation, as well as of what occurred upstairs, before we do anything drastic. Can you just wait until I have done a little investigating, Shirley?”

Shirley thought for a moment. She thought of the strange occurrence in the water closet last month, when those hands had reached out of the toilet bowl for her. She had heard Cutbush’s voice then too, had she not? Was there some sort of connection? Something that did not have to do with Cutbush getting out of the asylum and coming after her? She should at least stay long enough to find a common link and come up with a theory using the Socratic method. That was what Sir Joseph, as well as the other great scientists she had become acquainted with since becoming a lab assistant, would do.

She sighed. “Fine. But if he’s not there—”

“I’ll grab you and Lucinda, and we’ll leave for America as fast as possible. We can get married on the ship if you like.”

“Why are you so obsessed with marrying me?” she asked with another sigh, not in the mood at all for Griffin’s antics. “What did I do to earn your ardent love and devotion?”

He smiled at her, the first smile he had given her all evening. “The first time I was home and you were working for my parents, I came up the stairs to get something from my bedroom. And there you were, cleaning my window while the sun shone down upon you. You looked like an angel right then. And when you finished and surveyed your work, you were so proud of your work, of having completed a job well done. And yes, I saw your eye. But I did not care. To me, in that moment, you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. And you still are.”

Shirley’s face became hot. She glanced away from Griffin and noticed the bandages she’d been holding to his arm had fallen to the floor. “You’re obviously delirious from blood loss!” she said, going to grab fresh bandages. “Where is that doctor? I should ask him if blood loss causes madness.”

Griffin began to protest that he was not mad or delirious when they heard the sound of feet on the stairs. Sir Joseph, Lucinda, Milverton, and a man Shirley assumed was the doctor burst into the kitchen. The doctor quickly went to examine Griffin, while Shirley gave a bewildered Sir Joseph the same lie she and Griffin had fed Milverton earlier that evening.

“My goodness,” Sir Joseph said. “I didn’t think electric lights could cause injuries like that. Not unless you fell into one, that is. I must speak with the manufacturer and get to the bottom of this before I have a new light installed. And in the meantime, Lucinda—!”

“No!” Lucinda cried petulantly. Under normal circumstances, Shirley would have rolled her eyes and thought of Lucinda as a spoiled brat. However, the anxiety and terror in the girl’s eyes told Shirley what was really going through her mind. “You cannot make me! I want to stay with Griffin!”

“Do what Uncle Joseph says, Lucinda,” Griffin told her. “He only means well.” The look on his face suggested he did not really mean what he said, but Shirley did not think anyone else cared.

“But—!”

“Lucinda,” Shirley interjected, an idea coming to her, “how about I go up and spend the night with you? That way, you will have someone to wait with until we know if Mr. Avondale is alright.”

“Oh, call me Griffin!” Griffin interjected. “You were fine calling me that a moment ago, were you not?”

Lucinda perked up a little at Shirley’s suggestion and allowed herself to be led out of the kitchen. On the way out, she procured promises from Milverton and Sir Joseph that they would let her know her brother’s condition as soon as the doctor was done with him. Shirley said nothing, not wanting to spend another minute in the kitchen. Not after what she had confessed to Griffin and what he had then confessed to her.

And she would have to be careful not to call Griffin by his given name again. That was a slip that would not do if it happened in mixed company. Some might even allege they were having an improper relationship and point to her using his given name as proof.

As she and Lucinda made their way upstairs to the latter’s bedroom, Shirley was glad for the younger girl’s presence. Being there to comfort her while they awaited news of her brother’s condition would be tiring for the both of them, but after the events of tonight, Shirley needed someone nearby as much as Lucinda did.

And besides, if Cutbush did appear in the halls or in Lucinda’s bedroom, two women could scream louder than one, could they not?