A/N: YES, it's a new D/G fic! vHere it is, a Victorian London D/G AU! Every detail is as accurate as I can make it, except when there's a reason why it isn't (there was no physical resemblance between the Ripper victims, for instance.) How much research was done for this? Let's just say that the last chapter is the bibliography, and …it's a long one. LONG. Enjoy, and if you have any questions, please ask them in the comments, and I'll answer them after the reveal.
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For most of Victoria's reign, journalists, social reformers, and Christian missionaries had been decrying the horrors that they observed in the East End…
Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper.
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Friday, August 31, 1888
2:00 a.m.
Whitechapel Road, East End of London
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"Yew aw the enney, ennysuckle,"
A woman's voice drifted through the thick, dirty air, loud and defiant. A raspy laugh followed, and a second voice picked up the song.
"Oi am ther bee… "
They joined to sing in raucous chorus.
"Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see."
The two unseen women were walking down Flower and Dean Street. Just off the larger Commercial Street, in the shadow of Christ's Church, the area was considered the worst of the worst in a place that already contained the most desperate, grinding poverty in all of London. The East End was bounded by the old city of London on the west, the square mile once fenced in by the Romans, on the north by Whitechapel Road, and on the east by a string of grey, monotonous suburbs. It held a handful of respectable streets clinging onto shabby gentility with scrubbed fingernails, a few nests of socialists who led protests in Trafalgar Square, and then, an endless slum. A warren of crooked, crazy streets; a choking pall of coal dust and gas fumes; a tangle of dilapidated buildings that had once been company housing for the weavers of Spitalfields, before the relentless iron hand of the Industrial Revolution had destroyed the handicrafts that had provided independence for the poor of the past.
Even during the wee hours of a Friday morning, the cobbled streets were filled with people, punctuated by brief lulls when one particular street or alley might be empty for a minute or two. There was no release from poverty but the brief forgetfulness of drink, so everyone imbibed. Drunken groups staggered in and out of pubs until the first street vendors' coffee stalls began to open and the first watercress sellers headed for the markets.
The two women turned the corner and passed George Street. One was young, red-lipped, and cheaply but showily dressed, a stuffed bird bobbing up and down on the red satin plate hat skewered to her glossy dark hair.
"'Ow much, love?" a costermonger asked her, pausing as he pushed a cart towards Commercial Street.
"More'n you can afford," she retorted.
He answered her with a roar of laughter. "Going straight, then?"
"No, but unless yer got the brass, piss off," was her elegant answer.
He laughed again and kept pushing the cart, swiftly disappearing into the fog.
"I'll go straight 'bout the same time yer do, Pol," the young woman said to her companion.
"So that'd be never, then? Mebbe you'll 'ave the chance, Cho. But for the likes o'me…" Polly, the older of the two, gave a shrug and a laugh. Her grey-streaked blonde hair straggled around her sculpted face, which retained the traces of youth and beauty as the dirty skies would still hold a ray of two of sunlight come morning.
"Doubt it. For us gay girls, why even bother givin' it a go?" Her friend waved a grimy hand in dismissal. Cho Chang was a pretty woman, many years younger than Polly, with a hard, exotic face. Half-Chinese, the bastard daughter of a British officer who had been stationed in the South China seas at the end of the second Opium Wars, she had the unmistakable air of one who has come down in the world and is no longer surprised by it, whose choices have long been narrowed to the brothel, the workhouse, or the streets.
"Right. When you been done wrong to, you been done wrong to," said Polly. "Go straight? 'Ood give us a second chance if we tried?"
Cho put a hand on Polly's shoulder and glanced to the left. The cluster of drunken women stumbled on, passing them both and leaving the two alone on the street for the moment.
"I don't know. But, Mary Anne—oh, all right; Polly, I don't think that using proper names makes a bit of difference either way, but all right- you really oughtn't to remain on the streets tonight." Cho's speech was instantly more precise, more educated, the Cockney accent completely gone. The truth was clear; the two women were constantly playing a part on the streets of the East End, hiding their true origins.
When Polly replied, she sounded much the same. "I suppose you're going to warn me about the Whitechapel murderer, are you? Well, one night or another, what's the difference, Cho?"
Cho shivered. "Please—don't even joke about that sort of thing, Pol. Why don't you come back with me tonight to the Thrawl Street doss? I'm sure we could scrape up another half-shilling. Rose Potter still owes me a fair bit, if I can only find her."
"Don't trouble yourself about me." Polly looked at her friend wistfully, her blue eyes faded and bloodshot, her softening expression looking very much as if she wished that worry would do any good.
A drunk couple came out of the Brittania Pub and ambled along Flower and Dean, giggling. Absorbed in each other as they clearly were, they also were more than close enough to hear the two women. Polly's face and manner and stance hardened instantly, as did her manner of speaking.
"I'll soon get me doss money," she laughed. "See what a jolly bonnet I've got now?"
"Pol—really—" Cho began.
"Don't worry abaht yers truly!" Polly tipped her black straw bonnet mockingly to Cho, wisps of pale hair blowing from under the black velvet rim. Then she turned and sauntered away. Cho watched her leave for several moments, finally shaking her head and starting back towards Thrawl Street.
A young woman stood in the doorway of the Jolly Cat pub halfway down the street, her head turned back, screeching at some unseen tormentor.
"Enough o'that! Enough o'that then!" she cried, shaking off a stubby, hairy hand. "Oi'll get me money. See if I don't."
A bellow of goatish laughter followed her as she stumbled out into the street and into Cho, who instinctively put her arms round the other woman. Then her eyes widened in surprise as she recognized her.
"Rose Potter!" Cho said sternly. "Yer owe me ten shillings. Where is it? Give it to me, now."
"Don't 'ave it, Cho." Rose's words were slurred with drink.
Cho lowered her voice. "Then get it and get it now. I can still catch Polly if I hurry back."
"Polly?" Rose asked muzzily, her bottle-green eyes struggling to focus on Cho's face. She was a few years older than Cho and still a pretty woman, although between drink and hard living, she was sinking fast.
Cho gave Rose a shake. "Yes. Polly. You know." Her voice dropped further. "Mary Anne. I won't let her stay out tonight, not if I can help it. You know what happened to Martha and Emma."
Rose's parched, pink lips trembled. "I truly don't have the money, Cho."
"You mean you spent it on drink!" Cho's face hardened further.
"Well, what else is there to do?" Rose retorted. "What other option exists for any of us? I don't know what you expect from me besides. There's nothing else I can do."
Cho's dark eyes narrowed. "I don't want to hear your excuses. You're luckier than all of us put together. You could get out of all of this if you liked, Rose. You have someone who actually wants to find you, and help you as well. Why you don't just let Harry take you away and into decent lodgings, I'll never understand—"
A jovial, red-faced man with a brown walrus mustache and a battered bowler hat grabbed Rose by the hand, missed by several inches, and tried again. "'Ere, wot's all this abaht taking Rosie away? On a vy'cytion? To th' seaside, mebbe?" He laughed uproariously, reeling from side to side.
"'Allo, Tom!" Rose smiled and pulled away from Cho. Her Cockney accent appeared again. "Me bruvver 'Arry bin lookin' fer me again, that's all. 'Ee wants me to go straight. C'n yer imagine? The loikes o'me?"
Cho glared at the pair and seemed about to say something more. Rose ignored her, tucked a strand of raven-black hair behind one ear, and smiled up at the man. "Let's go on a right bender, Tom," she said, and the pair walked away without a second glance.
Cho bit her lip and kept moving towards Thrawl Street.
A few blocks away in the opposite direction, a man stepped out of one of the side alleys and laid a hand on Polly's arm. She looked up at him. Respectable enough, too much so for this area, truth be told; tweed jacket, polished boots, a bowler hat, a neatly barbered blond beard. His face was shadowed by the brim of the hat.
Without a word, she knew what he wanted.
She longed to push him away and hurry on to one of the sleeping hidey-holes she knew in a back street. She would be cold and damp come morning, but she could keep her dignity. Polly desperately wanted to hold onto a shred of self-respect.
"It looks like rain, wouldn't you say?" he asked.
The darkening skies threatened a freezing downpour, Polly knew. If she curled up in a cubbyhole behind a fence or wedged her aching body into a doorway for the night, she knew that she might easily wake up with pneumonia. In the world where she was now forced to live, there would be no cure. She wondered dully why she cared. The fluttering spark of life was impossible to quench, it seemed, and self-preservation won out. Loathing herself for the words, she spoke.
"'Ello, luv. So it does, and nasty wevver too," she said. "Lookin' for some company?"
"As a matter of fact, I am," he replied in a flat, colorless voice. Not quite posh, but not Cockney either. Her mind made a swift calculation as to how much she could ask for.
"Three shillings should buy yer as much as y'want," she said, hoping that he would give her the rather high price. There might be a bit of bargaining next.
He nodded. "Very well. Will you walk with me? I know a place."
"As yer like," Polly replied, taking his arm.
He seemed well enough, and she knew that she had no choice. He offered a few shillings, enough to get her a bed for the night in one of the doss houses. Perhaps she'd return to Thrawl Street for it, although then again, perhaps not. She was in one of her darkest moods, when she did not wish to see anyone who reminded her of the world that cast her out—and people like Cho Chang did exactly that. Rose Potter too. She herself could go to the Flower and Dean doss, maybe.
It was the darkest part of the night, and as close to silence as the East End ever came. They walked down Old Montague and passed the pungent smell of the stables and soap works. A large, overgrown field stretched to their right.
"Do you know what that is?" he asked, breaking the silence.
"Ol' burial ground, I think," said Polly.
"Yes. It's no longer used, and I imagine developers shall build on it at some point, but I happen to know that no-one's moved the bodies. Imagine standing in the middle of that graveyard at about this time of night…"
He was an odd one, all right, she thought.
They passed the Palace Theater, dark and silent, and the Quaker graveyard to the north. To Polly's intense relief, the man had no more to say about unmoved bodies or unquiet graves. At last, they reached the narrow, cobbled Buck's Row, where he stopped just in front of a gated stable entrance.
Why had he wanted to walk all this way only to end up in a courtyard behind a stable, she wondered. The area was boxed in and gave an illusion of privacy, but she could see a row of well-built terrace houses just opposite, the sort that usually were occupied by the better class of tradesmen. She wondered if he might be taking her into one of them, but he made no further move to keep walking. There must have been quite a number of people asleep in the houses, or working in the warehouse opposite, who might hear them or happen upon them. There was likely a night watchman at the nearby boys' school. She could even hear the clatter of the Northeast Railway Line nearby, at the Whitechapel Station.
Might almost as well be in the middle of the high street, really, she thought. Well, as long as he paid, she couldn't afford to care. Most likely he wanted a knee trembler up against a wall, and for some odd reason, this location appealed to him.
He leaned closer to her. She waited to have her breasts fondled, or her skirts raised. Instead, his mouth touched her ear.
"Mary Anne," he whispered.
She stiffened. "Ow d'you know my real name?" He must have overheard Cho talking to her; she was always trying to tell that girl that she needed to be more discreet about saying anything at all that might lead to the discovery of their true identities.
"Not only your first, but your last," he went on, his voice hissing in her ear like a pleasant, treacherous snake. "And far more about your history than you imagine."
She sucked in her breath, the sound horribly loud in the still dank air. Something was wrong, a wrongness that she could not mistake, that she felt in her bones.
"Like knows like," he said. His smile showed under the shadow of the bowler hat.
What she was seeing was not his true appearance, she knew. His face kept shifting, somehow. And the face peeping out behind the false façade looked familiar.
For the first time, she felt a twinge of real fear. Swiftly, her eyes darted from side to side, seeking an exit. Oh, for a peeler to come along now!
"Oh, yes. I know a great deal about you, my dear…" He moved closer so that she felt the warmth of his body against the chill morning, lifting her hair to whisper even more closely in her ear. "You call yourself Polly Chapman. But your real name is Mary Anne Longbottom. Isn't it? And no need for the false Cockney accent with me."
She opened her mouth to scream. It would get her in a deal of trouble if a copper found them, but she no longer cared.
He reached up suddenly, one strong, slender hand spreading swirls of a dark streaming vapor around her face. The fumes smelled like roses, sweeter than any scent she'd known in years, and she could not stop herself from breathing them in. Then she could not scream, or speak, or make any noise at all.
"That's better," he said, almost tenderly. "I can guess all that you wish to say to me at the moment, or demand of me. So I shall forestall your words, knowing that you cannot speak your questions. Yes, your fears will come to pass. No, I do not plan to use an Unforgivable."
Once, she had been a part of that world in which everyone knew what those words meant. She had left that word, or more accurately, had been forced out. But she still knew the meaning. Mary Anne sobbed, but she could make no sound. She understood, now, what was to come, and would have understood whether this man had said the words or not. For all of her flippant words to Cho Chang half an hour earlier, she found that she did not want to die, that she was not ready. But there was no way to say the words.
"This part will go quickly. You will feel no pain—I promise that much." He caressed her weatherbeaten face, his grey eyes scanning her features, as if searching for something that he already knew he would not quite find. "I bear you no personal grudge, Mary Anne."
She gathered the last of her strength. "Then why… why me…" she managed to choke out.
He only shook his head. Then he laid her onto her back, his hands almost gentle. She saw the gleam of metal at his belt as he moved.
He sat back on his heels for a moment. "I believe," he said musingly, "that the other two might have felt more satisfied if they'd only known the identity of their killer. I do wish I'd been able to offer that much, and I supposed it would have made no difference at all if I had. I shall do so for you, Mary Anne Longbottom. Revelo."
He passed a hand before his face, and his features shimmered, shifted, and changed into their true form.
And she did know him.
From some last reserve of strength, of lost magic, she found her voice one last time.
"I know you," she croaked. "I remember you. You are…"
And then she spoke his name, and she named him correctly. But it did not matter. The effort had taken the last of her strength, and she was beyond speaking secrets to any living being.
He looked down on her prone body in the street. "Poor little bitch," he said, almost pityingly. "It's a bit of a shame, really. But you will serve as perfect bait." He knelt down next to her. "Even better than the others…"
Then he got out his knife, and he went to work.
He was as careful and painstaking as the surgeon he had always longed to be, had his station in life not prevented him. True, he did not have quite enough time to be as thorough as he would have liked; at three-thirty in the morning, he heard footsteps approaching. He was under an invisibility spell, the fool police or a passer-by could walk right past him and never know he was there, as he had proven last time- but he disliked taking chances.
Still, he was satisfied enough. This was the first murder he had the time and the leisure to do at all properly.
He stayed long enough to make sure her body was found in the little recess leading to the stableyard. Amidst the tumult of shouting and shrieking and running footsteps and demands for justice, he was hard put to it not to chuckle. Ashterah forgive him, but he did so love a reaction to his work.
Still under the Invisibility spell, he watched the Muggle police inspector force his way through the crowd, which had now taken into its collective head that the local Jews must have been responsible for the crime and were making dark threats. Edmund Reid, he believed this officer was called, a shrewd, tough professional beneath a bland exterior. A man that he himself could almost have respected—were he not a Muggle.
Reid cleared the passage of sightseers. "All right; stay out of it," he loudly told the crowd. "No-one's coming in here until the body's been examined by the divisional surgeon, and he's been sent for. Thicke, find the new man, Potter, get him to send telegrams to Abberline and Swanson to inform them of what's happened."
A man in the front wearing a greasy jacket screwed up his red face and yelled. "We already know wot's happened! But the Jews are the men wot won't be blamed for nuffink!"
"I don't want to hear that any local Jews have been abused or threatened," Reid said sharply. "It'll be the worse for you if I do. Now get out, or I'll arrest the lot of you!"
Since several officers had joined Reid and his companion, the crowd dispersed, muttering and jeering. The windows of the houses on either side of the yard opened, scores of faces craning out, but the police ignored them. Reid thoroughly searched the ground, directing the other officers to help him and pick up the various items that had ended up scattered over the yard. He also covered the dead woman with a piece of sacking, being careful not to disturb her body in any way.
Behind the invisibility spell, the killer raised his eyebrows in reluctant admiration. The man knew his business, and no doubt about it.
At last, Reid stood up. "There's nothing more we can do at the moment. We'll need to wait until the surgeon arrives," he said to the officer he had addressed as Thicke, who had returned from his errand. "The East End ought to be a bit more mollified when word gets out that Searjant Johnny Upright's on the case, eh?"
"Don't know about all that, sir, but I always do my best," said Thicke.
The young policeman whom Reid had sent to dispatch the telegram returned, walking up to them both. "Johnny Upright, sir?" he asked, his brow furrowing.
"Ah—Potter," said Reid. "Harry Potter, correct? I forget that you're new to the CID. It's a nickname given to Thicke by a criminal in the dock. He's an incorruptible, you see."
"Very good, sir." Potter lapsed into silence.
"This is the third one, innit?" asked Thicke. "Or the fourth?" His voice was more refined and educated than the local East End Cockneys, but he still slipped into lower class accents from time to time.
"I should say this poor woman is the fourth victim at the very least, although not everyone in the division agrees with me. Far too many, at any rate." Reid sighed. "I don't know if we're going to find anything here. We'll question the locals to find out if anyone saw the murderer, but I can't help feeling that this will turn out the same as the others. There's nowhere that he could have gone without someone seeing him- and yet no-one will have seen him."
Thicke grunted in response.
"I don't know what we're going to do once the papers get hold of this," said the Inspector. "But we will need to take drastic action soon. Of what sort, I cannot say."
"What d'you suppose we'd do that we haven't already tried?" asked Thicke.
Reid was silent for a moment. "I have heard whispers and strange rumors of other police forces. Ones we have not yet contacted. They may have access to information that we don't, and methods that we cannot imagine."
"Sounds like magical rubbish to me," said Thicke.
"Odd that you should mention magic," said Reid thoughtfully.
"What d'you mean by that, sir?"
"I cannot say. I wonder, sometimes, if there are forces other than those which we fully understand—Potter?" Reid turned to the third officer. "Are you all right? Have you seen something?"
"No." The young man shook his head vigorously. "Only a cough." His bottle-green eyes glittered strangely in the faint light, but he said nothing more.
Thicke's face looked sickly pale in the near-darkness. "Sir, I am a firm believer that there are some things what mortal men weren't meant to know."
"Well—perhaps. But needs must, when the devil drives," said Reid. He straightened up. "Never mind for now. I think I hear the surgeon approaching. We'll get this poor woman to the morgue, and tomorrow morning, I'll speak to Inspector Abberline. He'll let Sir Warren know about this evil work that's been done tonight by a madman. Then—we will see."
The killer had now heard all he needed to hear. Chuckling inwardly—because one could never tell what sort of sounds might get past an Invisibility spell; they were far from flawless in that regard—he walked to the nearest Apparition point. It was in the abandoned graveyard he had passed with Mary Ann Longbottom a short time earlier. As he felt himself begin to Apparate away to his favorite hiding place, he felt the familiar rush of clarity in his thoughts. Reid had called him a madman, but he knew how logical he really was. Each step he took was part of a carefully laid plan. He would give them all a bit of time to consider, to think, after this murder. Things needed time to develop.
Yes, I will wait a bit, he thought. Let the hysteria in the populace build up. Let the demand for answers grow. Then, I will make my next move. It will take a great deal of pressure to bring about the right conditions to involve the Ministry of Magic in Muggle affairs. Another murder will most likely be necessary before action of the sort I want is taken. Then a letter sent to the police… yes, I think that will do the trick, sent at precisely the right time.
The killer smiled. He would lure them all into his trap, and then, at last, he would capture the Right Honorable Draco Malfoy in his web.
Both revenge and justice, after all, were dishes best served cold.
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A/N: "Gay" in reference to women meant that they were prostitutes, not lesbians.
All the names of people involved in the Ripper cases, details, descriptions, etc., are historically correct, except when… they're not. Such as Harry Potter being on the force. 😉 Anti-semitism was extremely common at the time and led to many in the Jewish population being targeted.
Hannah's Prompt 2
Basic premise: There's a serial killer on the loose in Britain, and they're killing wizards. The twist? The victims have all been killed non-magically.
Must haves: D/G romance. Strong suspicions that the killer is Muggle, and all the implications that come with that (e.g.: Upsurge of Pureblood propaganda? Coverage of the murders in Muggle media? Subsequent Muggle theories of magical existence in the world?).
No-no's: Gore/torture/etc. for the sake of it.
Rating range: Any.
Bonus points: Ginny as an Auror. Draco is working with Ginny on the case, though not necessarily an Auror himself. Extra bonus point: Draco throws a tantrum.