Mick passed the half-dozen guards he’d stationed at the front door and went out into the new morning. He glanced up at the grayish-pink sky and then studied his palace. It was a peacock cleverly disguised as a crow. There was no indication of what lay behind the deceptively simple plain wood door. One would never know from looking at it that the door was reinforced from behind with iron.
There was one other entry to the palace—a door leading to the small courtyard behind—and that was guarded, as well. From the outside, his palace appeared to be a dozen or more narrow row houses, built right next to each other. In reality, it was all one building inside and the doors to the house façades had been boarded up from inside long ago.
Mick grunted and turned to walk up the street. He might seem overprotected against attack, but then he had an unrelenting enemy.
A shadow moved in a narrow alley as he passed it and Mick whirled, a knife held ready in his hand. Lad emerged into the weak light, his ears laid back, his head down in submission.
“Jaysus,” Mickey breathed in disgust and shoved the knife back in the sheath strapped to his forearm.
He started down the street again and the dog trotted out happily and fell into step behind him.
The daylight people of St. Giles were already on the streets. The ones he passed now did honest work—more or less—porters, hawkers, chair men, night soil men, and beggars. They gave him a wide berth, careful not to meet his eyes. They knew him of course. He was their king and they were properly respectful. The river and the boats he lived on were to the east and he’d be nearer his work if he lived in Wapping or some other place in the East End of London. But Mick had been born and grown up in St. Giles. Had run the streets like a feral young wolf cub as a boy, had fucked his first woman here. Killed his first man. This was his home and when he’d made his fortune he’d built his palace in St. Giles.
And now there was one more thing that held him here.
He crossed a street and looked up. The spire of the new St. Giles-in-the-Fields loomed ahead. Mildew had destroyed the old church. Rumor had it that the mildew had fed upon the damp from the rotting plague corpses buried beneath the church flagstones. Certainly the air in the old church had held an evil stink. But no more. The modern church was clean and elegant, a far cry from the old building. Mick grunted. The new church had been built by nobles living outside of London City proper. He wondered what the locals—the ones who actually lived by the church—thought of the new building.
Mick skirted the church, coming upon the graveyard wall. A little way farther and the gate came into sight. He pushed it open. The graveyard was old, of course, the monuments moss-covered, some leaning as if the underground inhabitants had tried to push their way free from the earth. Mick made his way through the crooked rows, Lad padding silently behind him, and even though St. Giles lay just beyond a small wall, the clatter and hustle without was muffled. The graveyard held its own insulated atmosphere.
Mick watched carefully as he neared the grave he’d come to see, for he wasn’t alone in the graveyard.
The Vicar of Whitechapel stood looking down at her headstone and the freshly mounded earth. For a man who had terrorized the East End of London for the better part of a decade he didn’t look that intimidating. He was of average height, wiry rather than heavily muscled, his shoulder-length hair graying, and his features pleasant.
“She called your name,” Charlie said as Mick halted on the far side of the new grave. “As she was dying. Pity you didn’t see fit to visit her on her deathbed.”
Mick smiled widely, easily, as if the news that she’d called for him wasn’t a white-hot poker thrust through his chest. “Busy, wasn’t I?”
Charlie turned then, looking at Mickey full on, and revealing the horror that was the left side of his face. His skin had melted or burned off his face. The eye socket was merely a hardened gouge, his nostril destroyed, his lips pulled down into his chin. The ear was a melted rim and the hair on the left side of his head was in tufts as if most of it had been pulled out by the very roots.
Mick’s smile widened. “Yer gettin’ handsomer by the hour, Charlie.”
The Vicar’s expression didn’t change—but then many of his facial muscles had been destroyed. His remaining brown eye glittered with mad hatred, though. A wise man would step away from such vicious anger.
Mick leaned forward. “I’ll not let ye drive me from me home, old man.”
Charlie’s eyelid drooped. “What makes you think you have any say-so in the matter, boy?”
Mick’s smile hardened. “What makes ye think I don’t?”
Charlie shrugged one shoulder—the other had scarring. “Might be because I know you’ve got your babe hid in that palace of yours—along with a woman called Silence Hollingbrook. I find that interesting, I do. Seems to me that it’d be a fair trade: your woman for my own.”
Mick shrugged himself as if Silence didn’t matter to him, but his heart had begun to beat in triple time. Of course the Vicar had found out about Silence. Of course he’d know that she was different simply because she’d stayed when none of his other women had.
“I never took yer woman,” Mick said.
“Aye, but you tried to.”
Mick raised an eyebrow. Charlie wasn’t making sense, but then he’d long known the man was mad.
“And that babe?” The Vicar tutted. “I hear she’s a sickly thing. Like to die soon. That must weigh upon your heart most sadly.”
Mick looked at the Vicar. He was such a small man for all the malice he held inside of him. Long ago Mick had wondered why Charlie was made the way he was. What had carved away all sympathy, all respect for other men. What had made him the vicious, violent bastard he was.
But he’d learned to stop wondering. It made no never mind why the Vicar was the way he was. As well to ask why a viper struck and killed for no reason. It was simply the way of nature.
“Ye know as well as I that I lost whatever heart I once had long ago,” Mick replied without emotion, a simple statement of fact. “If the babe lives, or if she dies, it makes no difference to me. I’ll still eat sweetmeats on the morrow and taste the sugar on me tongue, still fuck women and feel the pleasure in me bollocks. And, Charlie—mark me well, now—I’ll still kill ye and laugh in yer ugly face as I do it.”