Page 1 of Taken by the Ripper (Time for Monsters #9)

C

lara Thompson was one of the lucky ones.

She made sure to remind herself of it every day, especially when her eyes drooped, her back ached, and her feet screamed for a rest. But at least she had a place to call home, and she didn’t have to turn to the streets for a source of income like many others she knew.

She blew a strand of golden copper hair out of her light gray eyes as she bent over a patient—a young girl at the age of ten—sporting blistering scabs across her skin. Heat emanated from her frail body, her face flushed red.

Using a wooden stick, she pressed it against the girl’s tongue, only to find red spots dotting her mouth.

Smallpox.

“You can get through this,” she urged her newest patient, but the girl only blinked sluggishly.

“My mother and I caught the disease years ago.” She dipped her wash rag into a bowl of cool water and placed it against the girl’s forehead.

“My mother was left weak after giving birth to my youngest sister, Norma. She didn’t make it, but I did. And you can, too.”

A pang of regret echoed in the chambers of her heart at the thought of her mother.

She’d caught smallpox only weeks after delivering Norma and managed to spread it to Clara.

Her father, a doctor at the time, had quarantined them together, separating her from her sisters.

Those were grueling days of her father trying to keep baby Norma fed while separating infant from mother.

And poor little Mazie, her four-year-old sister at the time, hadn’t quite understood why her life had drastically changed, especially when their mother had succumbed to death.

A knock at the door startled her upright, and her gaze shot toward the sound.

“Clara, it happened again!” Mazie shouted through the door. “Come see!”

“Step away!” Clara warned, crossing the quarantined room in several strides over creaky wooden floorboards. “You know you are not allowed near this room.” Not when her sisters had never been exposed to smallpox before.

“But the Whitechapel Murderer has struck again!”

Everything else shamefully fled from her mind as she vigorously scrubbed her hands in the basin beside the door, barely managing to dry them in her haste, and slipped into the hallway.

Sure enough, Mazie held The Star newspaper in her hands, the pages rattling in tune with her excitement.

“Here it says they found her in an alleyway with her throat slit. But something wasn’t quite right about the body.

They’re saying the murderer is mimicking an animal attack.

But the wounds were so precise that it couldn’t be an animal at all. ”

When her sister’s trembling hands shook the newspaper enough to blur the words, Clara snatched the periodical from her and peered at the article in her own steady hands.

Her eyes flew across the page, jumping from line to line as she read the details of the most recent murder.

Another woman. A prostitute, just like the last victim.

“They are calling him Jack the Ripper now,” Clara murmured, brushing her thumb along the ominous name.

“You don’t suppose his name is actually Jack, do you?”

She gave her younger sister a pointed look, one similar to her father’s disbelieving stare when one of them had said something foolish. “It’s just an alias, Mazie. Besides, you should not concern yourself with such matters. This is not exciting. It’s horrifying. ”

She shouldered her way past Mazie and snatched a pad of notes from a nearby table, reviewing the symptoms of her patients as she made her way down the long corridor of the estate.

She’d grown up here, living in a privileged household.

At least until her father’s passing. Now it was her job to take care of her sisters, and there just wasn’t enough money to go around.

“Then you must have missed the part about the esteemed and handsome Claude La Cour hired personally to investigate the murderers. All the way from Paris.” Mazie waggled her eyebrows.

With a huff, Clara snatched The Star back from her sister and flipped the paper over to read the rest of the article. The article didn’t paint the local police in a good light at all, calling them lazy and incompetent, in need of a foreign detective from Paris to solve the case for them.

Due to his high success in catching criminals, Detective La Cour was widely known, even in England. But how hard was it to catch one murderer? If they were outsourcing La Cour, then surely the police really were as incompetent as the article depicted.

“You have no idea what the man looks like,” she replied, shoving the periodical back into her sister’s hands.

The stairs creaked as she lifted her skirts and made her way down to the main floor.

There in front of the unlit hearth sat Norma reading a book, oblivious to the world around her.

At the age of fourteen, her youngest sister had begun to show a womanly figure.

Clara was grateful none of them had to turn to prostitution to get by like many other women she knew, and she worked hard as a nurse to make it stay that way.

“Oh, but I do,” Mazie insisted. “I heard he was spotted at the train station yesterday, and I went to see for myself.”

Fear climbed up her body, forming slowly over her limbs like ice in the middle of a blizzard. But then the chill dissipated with a sudden crack as hot fury thawed her out. She spun on her sister, and judging by her wince, she realized she’d spoken poorly.

“You left the house?” Anger seethed with every breath through clenched teeth. “By yourself? Mazie! There is a killer on the loose. You cannot take such risks.”

“But I didn’t go alone! I brought my friend Emma along. And she agrees that the detective is just as handsome as people say.”

Clara closed her eyes and took a few calming breaths to appease her racing heart. Her father had done this on more than one occasion to deal with difficult patients, and she found it helped herself in similar stressful situations.

Finally calm enough, she turned on her heel toward the patient rooms while Mazie followed at her heels. “I know Emma feels herself invincible with five brothers of her own, but you are smarter than this. I do not wish to see you become a victim of Jack the Ripper. ”

To her discredit, the name on her tongue sent a thrill shooting down her body, a desire to learn more and live in the drama, so to speak, like everyone else who found a morbid fascination with the recent terrible events.

She stamped down the strange excitement and schooled her expression as she entered the patient rooms. With nowhere else to go, not even to the nearest church with it already filled to the brim, many homeless either feigned injury, if only to find a place to lay their heads for the night, or they caught a sickness from their poor living conditions.

A rattling cough pulled her attention to a frail woman lying on the floor next to a feverish infant. All the other cots were filled, and she felt terrible about making them lie on the floor. But apparently the floor was better than the woman’s previous sleeping arrangements.

Open sores lined the woman’s shoulder, neck, and jaw from her “two-penny hangover.” How the homeless managed to sleep slung over a rope like that baffled her.

And with a baby to care for? She would not be surprised if the infant was the product of her late-night activities, as the father seemed suspiciously absent.

In hushed whispers, Mazie continued the argument with similar defiant eyes that she barely recalled witnessing from their mother. “I’m not a child, Clara. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m sure those poor women also thought the same of themselves.”

“It’s different.”

“How?” She checked the splint on a young boy of eight sitting against the wall with a faraway look in his eyes.

Grief clearly plagued him, as his mind wasn’t quite present.

But Clara took pity on him and allowed him to stay, if just for a short time, even though he was well enough to leave her care.

“I’m not going out at night.”

“I suppose I should congratulate you on your impeccable survival instincts.”

Her sister huffed and crossed her arms. “You are no fun to be around. This is the reason you have no friends.”

No, the reason why she had no friends was that she worked herself to the bone trying to keep her sisters off the streets. But instead of refuting her, Clara simply gave her a tight smile and adjusted the white nurse apron atop her dark blue dress beneath.

Nodding her head toward a patient lying on a cot across the room, she said in a lowered voice, “If you’re so confident in yourself, why don’t you go and fetch the police?

This one needs to be personally escorted off the premises.

He has been feigning a coma for a week now just for a place to sleep.

I don’t want to get involved in case things get violent. ”

“How do you know he’s not in a coma?”

“I picked up his arm and dropped it over his face. His reflexes caught at the last moment.” She tapped her dip pen on her charts and poured over them for the hundredth time. “In addition to wincing when I rubbed his sternum to check for responsiveness, I know he is faking it.”

It was sad to witness the lengths one would endure to battle the harsh realities that waited for them outside the door to her hospital. She loathed to send him back out into that world, but she wanted the extra cot for someone who actually needed it.

“Fine,” Mazie sighed. “I’ll fetch an officer.”

“Don’t go by yourself.”

“Yes, Mother .”

Clara rubbed her suddenly aching temples as she watched her sister leave the house. Her siblings had been much too young to remember their mother when she’d passed, and she knew she could never truly fill that role as a parent. But they had no one else. Therefore, she tried her best.

Over the next half hour, she cooled fevers with damp cloths, administered medicine to those with rattling coughs, and even quarantined another patient with smallpox in the same room as the other.

Personally, she wanted this disease far away from her sisters. But her father had never turned away a patient, and neither would she. She made sure to be careful to prevent exposure, nonetheless.

As she returned to the main floor, The Star sought her attention from where it rested on top of a table in the entry room next to the other periodicals about Jack the Ripper.

She picked them up and sifted through each one, comparing the mild descriptions of each murder scene. Both were depicted as similar to an animal attack but precise, which was confirmed to be a man when the Ripper had written a letter to the authorities to confirm their suspicions.

But…who could possibly do this? And why?

A knock at the door startled her into releasing a muffled scream into her hand, and she dropped the periodicals at her feet in her fright.

Her hand flew to her racing heart. Her pulse pounded through her head. And then her body temperature dropped several degrees before little by little, the warmth returned to her frozen limbs, and her unwarranted fear slowly subsided.

A self-deprecating laugh escaped her lips at her jumpy behavior. The Ripper only seemed to strike at night, and currently, it was the middle of the afternoon. She really needed to stop feeding into the morbid excitement she often told her sisters to avoid.

The person on the other side of the door knocked again, urging the rest of her body to thaw from her previous fright.

After setting the papers back onto the table, she smoothed down her apron and once more found her poise as she crossed the room and pulled open the door.

Her jaw slackened as she first found a pair of shiny, pristine black shoes. Her gaze traveled up a long pair of legs, a black, fitted coat, and then settled on a sharp, angular face with a swoop of blond bangs escaping slicked-back hair and brushing against a tall, intimidating eyebrow.

The man held a black top hat beneath one arm, and in the other hand he held an imposing cane with a silver-plated knob at the end.

And tucked into his side with her arm through his…

Was Mazie.

The man’s lips lifted in a grin almost as sharp as his outfit. “The name is Detective Claude La Cour,” he said in a heavy French accent. “I hope I’m not intruding.”