He chuckled aloud and could have kissed the fateful letter in his gloved hand.
Tonight, he promised Polly Nichols. We meet tonight.
When Margo arrived at the Britannia Gate's departures lounge, Victoria Station had taken on the chaotic air of a tenting circus in the process of takedown for transit to the next town. Not a cafe table in sight, either on the Commons floor or up on one of the balconies, could be had for less than a minor king's ransom and it was standing room only on every catwalk and balcony overlooking Victoria Station. If many more spectators tried to crowd onto the concrete and steel walkways up there, they'd have balconies falling three and four stories under the weight.
Besides the ordinary onlookers, the loons were out in force, as well, carrying placards and holding up homemade signs. Delighted news crews filmed the chaos while Ripperoons and assorted lunatics gave interviews to straight-faced camera operators about how Lord Jack was going to appear through an unstable gate created by a passing meteor and step off into the open Britannia amidst a host of unheavenly demons charged with guarding his most unsacred person from all earthly harm...
It might almost have been funny if not for the handful of real crazies demanding to be allowed through, tickets or no tickets, to serve their lord and master in whatever fashion Jack saw fit. Margo, jockeying for position in the crowd, trying to get her luggage cart through, stumbled away from one wild-eyed madman who snatched at her arm, screaming, "Unchaste whore! Jack will see your sins! He will punish you in this ripping time..." Margo slipped out of his grasp and left him windmilling for balance, unprepared for someone who knew Aikido.
Security arrived a moment later and Margo waved at Wally Klontz as the nutcase came after her again. "Wally! Hey! Over here!"
"What's the prob—oh, shit!" Wally snatched out handcuffs and grabbed the guy as he lunged again at Margo and screamed obscenities. More security waded in as a couple of other frenzied nutcases protested the man's removal. Violence broke out in a brief, brutish scuffle that ended with Margo gulping down acid nervousness while security agents hauled away a dozen seriously deranged individuals—a couple of them in straightjackets. Standing in the midst of a wide-eyed crowd of onlookers and glassy camera lenses, Margo brought her shudders under control and shoved her way past news crews who thrust microphones and cameras into her face.
"Aren't you Margo Smith, the Time Tours special guide for the Ripper Watch—"
"—true you're training to become a time scout?"
"—give us your feelings about being accosted by a member of a ‘Jack is Lord' cult—"
"No comment," she muttered again and again, using the luggage cart as a battering ram to force the newsies aside. If things were this bad on station... What was it really going to be like in London's East End, when the Ripper terror struck?
And what if it'd been one of those madmen who'd grabbed Ianira? As a sacrifice to Jack the Ripper? It didn't bear thinking about. Margo thrust the thought firmly aside and turned her luggage over to Time Tours baggage handlers, securing her claim stubs in her reticule, then lunged for the refuge of the departures lounge, where the news crews could follow her only with zoom lenses and directional microphones. It wasn't privacy, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances and Margo had no intention of giving anybody an interview about anything.
Once in the Time Tours departures lounge, she searched the crowd, looking for her new charges, Shahdi Feroz and the two journalists joining the Ripper Watch Team. She'd made one complete circuit of the departures area and was beginning to quarter it through the center when the SLUR-TV theme music swelled out over the crowds jamming Commons and a big screen television came to life. Shangri-La's new television anchor, Booth Hackett, voiced the question of the hour in booming tones that cut across the chaos echoing through Commons.
"It's official, Shangri-La Station! Ripper Season is underway and the entire world is asking, who really was Jack the Ripper? The list of suspects is impressive, the theories about conspiracies in high-government offices as convoluted as any modern conspiracy theorist could want. In an interview taped several hours ago with Dr. Shahdi Feroz, psycho-social historical criminologist and occult specialist for the team..."
Margo tuned it out and kept hunting for the Ripper scholar and wayward journalists, who should've been here by now. She wasn't interested in what that ghoul, Hackett, had to say and she already knew all the theories by heart. Kit had made sure of that before consenting to send her down the Britannia. First came the theories involving cults and black magic—hence Shahdi Feroz's inclusion on the team. Robert Donston Stephenson, who had claimed to know the Ripper and his motives personally and was at the top of several suspect lists, had been a known Satanist and practitioner of black magic. Aleister Crowley was on the cult-member suspect list, as well, although the evidence was slim to non-existent. Neither man, despite individual notoriety, fit the profile of a deranged psychopathic killer such as the Ripper. Margo wasn't betting on either of them.
She didn't buy any of the Mary Kelly theories, either—and some of them were among the weirdest of all Ripper theories. Honestly, Queen Victoria ordering the Prime Minister to kill anyone who knew that her grandson had secretly married a Catholic prostitute and fathered a daughter by her, guaranteeing a Catholic heir to the throne? Not to mention the Prime Minister drafting his pals in the Masonic Temple to re-enact some idiot's idea of Masonic rituals on the victims? It was just too nutty, not to mention the total lack of factual support. And she didn't think Mary Kelly's lover, the unemployed fish porter Joseph Barnett, had cut her up with one of his fish-gutting knives, either, despite their having quarrelled, or that he'd killed the other women to "scare" her off the streets. No, the Mary Kelly theories were just too witless...
"You are looking very irritated, Miss Smith."
Margo jumped nearly out of her skin, then blinked and focused on Shahdi Feroz' exquisite features. "Oh! Dr. Feroz... I, uh, was just looking..." She shut up, realizing it would come out sounding like she was irritated with the scholar if she said "I was looking for you," then turned red and stammered out, "I was thinking about all those stupid theories." She nodded toward the big-screen television where Dr. Feroz' taped interview was still playing, then added, "I mean, the ones about Mary Kelly."
Shahdi Feroz smiled. "Yes, there are some absurd ones about her, poor creature."
"You can say that again! You're all checked in and your luggage is ready?"
The scholar nodded. "Yes. And—oh bother!"
Newsies. Lots of them. Leaning right across the departures lounge barricades, with microphones and cameras trained on Shadhi Feroz and Margo. "This way!" Margo dragged the scholar by the wrist to the most remote corner of the departures lounge, putting a mass of tourists between themselves and the frustrated news crews. As Margo forced their way through, speculation flew wild amongst the tourists milling around them in every direction, eager to depart.
"—I think it was the queen's grandson, himself, not just some alleged lover."
"The queen's grandson? Duke of Clarence? Or rather, Prince Albert Victor? He wasn't named Duke of Clarence until after the Ripper murders. Poor guy. He's named in at least three outlandish theories, despite unshakable alibis. Like being several hundred miles north of London, in Scotland, for God's sake, during at least one of the murders..."
A nearby Time Tours guide in down-time servant's livery, was saying, "Ducks, don't you know, just everybody wants it to've been a nice, juicy royal scandal. Anytime a British royal's involved in something like the Ripper murders or the drunk-driving death of the Princess of Wales, back near the end of the twentieth century, conspiracy theories pop up faster than muckraking reporters are able to spread ‘em round."