A/N: So this is the Sherlock KC AU no one asked for until I started tossing headcanons around on tumblr, and now...here we are. I wasn't supposed to write this, but, alas, I'm weak.

There are too many references to the original canon to list them all; just know that the majority of the deductions are taken from ACD's stories. The descriptions of Scotland Yard's interior are actually based on the game Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments for plot reasons. Also, obviously Inspector Lestrade did not head the Ripper investigation, considering the fact that he never existed. I will mention several of the detectives who were actually involved in the murder investigation, but for the most part the police force will be populated by ACD's inventions.

Caroline is the hardest character for me to write in a historical setting because her speech doesn't suit it nearly as well as the Originals'. But the point in writing an AU is to take the same characters we know and love, drop them off in another setting, and somehow manipulate everything so that they're still the characters we know and love. Caroline's diction is a part of that, so I've mostly preserved it; I hope that isn't too jarringly anachronistic.

All newspaper article excerpts/any document excerpts whatsoever are taken directly from real reports; I didn't write them.

This will be at least two parts, probably three, knowing my propensity for blathering on about Historical Eras That Give Jenn a Boner.

Tim cameo for Kirythestitchwitch. Enzo is dedicated to clonemaster-general.

Also, for some reason this site decided not to save a chunk of edits in the middle of this fic; I've gone back through it, and hopefully caught the things that for some reason weren't saved. If you find any typos, I sincerely apologise; I don't know why it did that. It was very odd; some passages had the changes I made to them, and yet other edits were missing from those same passages even though I saved at multiple points throughout the editing process. Anyway, eat my dick, . And fuck you for forcing me to break up your url like that; it looks ridiculous.

Title is from a Shelley poem called 'Queen Mab'.

In 1892 London decided upon an extraordinarily wet spring, and the mud retired from its banks to holiday upon the streets. Man is given to melancholy in such weather, having no light save that which is bled from those anaemic clouds, when even those gay heralds of winter's demise have drooped sadly from their branches, and God, it seems, has overturned his palette in favour of mourning crepe. What thin offering the gas lights poke into the corners of his heart is no consolation when, having ventured one tremulous adventure above these canals which once might be classed as boulevards, it sinks with nary a blink once more beneath its waters.

I have had some fortunate occasion to record the prior feats of a singular individual with whom you will have acquainted yourself earlier in these musings, and in now looking out into this mist of foam and flotsam, which the waters have carried from all corners of the world and deposited here in Belgravia, where it seems even I am not immune to these fits of common grief, I find myself compelled to elaborate upon one of the more remarkable events of His career.

In dipping our pen into that biographical inkwell, we are compelled to add a few fleur-de-lis to even the most accomplished of men. And yet none are here required; He alone stands above the stage of man with its petty failures and mean human inconsistencies. He had, you will recall from former entries, no equal.

However, in the fall of 1888, history, as so often it will, decided to blot onto the record of this Caesarean titan a single stain; a speck, and yet one dust mote may disable the entire eye, and so vanquish even a Cyclops.

London was then in similar throes, a dreary Atlantis, toiling under its seas, and in divesting itself of one grey afternoon, immediately afterward donned another. In August there occurred a murder which put the gazettes on their tiptoes, and strained the throats of every paper lad and which, as with every London slaughter, irrespective of brutality, had the good grace to bury itself soon afterward, to make way for fresher scandals. You might say we perform a remarkable…slayed offhand in this city where crime is but a mere Tuesday.

Let us wander back on patient tiptoes, then, and through what humble gifts of my pen I may have the pleasure of providing, peek from these pages into near pasts, and let the fogs close behind us, vanquishing every trace of the candle by which you make out this page, and the fireplace where those stoked coals melt December, ever hot on our heels, from your toes.

At an hour such as this, when our narrative commences, you will find London one long avenue of fog. Figures are conjured from this mist; in its depths whole buildings are assembled and thrown up with haphazard glee: here you are surprised by a tenement, there a butcher's. The fog itself seems to speak when from out of its turmoil, unseen, there drift the sounds of hooves and men, and, turning, you are startled to find these apparitions suddenly within arm's reach. Man is never more surprised to find himself not alone than in streets such as these.

But in turning again, in following the natural inclination of London to twist back on itself, to wind, not along the main boulevards, but through these grimy side alleys where indeed the mist is a sole companion, where the gas lights dare not a finger, and the coppers merely flash their lanterns, here you will find Him, dashingly (if I may venture such an aside) clad, and carelessly whistling. Here are the forgotten avenues, the respite of beggars and blackhearts, here the untouched corners, where the fog settles comfortably, unchallenged by sun or gas, here the rubbish, the refuse, the cast-offs which society has set adrift.

Here all the gathering of all the hells which stalk this naked world, cloaking neither its calluses nor its vulnerabilities.

Here, baying at His heels, everything which gathers in such alleys, in such fogs, and with that unstoppable force inertia, swells, swells, and will, with only that feeble wall humanity to hinder it, scatter into the morning.

You may recall some amusing accounts which, pale beside His own, nevertheless offer some wonderment for smaller minds, and which centre round a name with which you perhaps have already acquainted yourself.

Here is where he turns, then, from the alleys once more onto the streets, and once again into a little boulevard called Baker Street.

Outside, London is sleeping beneath the fog.

You can hear the tock tock tocking of the horses and somewhere the foghorn lowing, out over the waters to the ships which glide soundlessly to port on these muffled waves or founder out at sea, a mournful sort of seeking, the kind you send out in one human moment to a blind dumb world where no one cares to receive it.

She listens to the hissing of the gas light, and cocks her head.

Kol has stolen her freaking 'M' encyclopedia again, she realizes, standing with 'L' in hand.

She leaves him a note on the sofa: 'Either my perfectly organized bookshelf is put back to exacting alphabetical flawlessness by 3 o'clock this afternoon, or I take two body parts of my choice. GUESS WHICH.'

There's a clatter of boots on the stoop downstairs. She shelves the 'L', and stands listening for a moment to the fog, the horses, all these slow and lumbering wakings of the city. The boots have left the stoop, hurried away down the street, and then returned to pace beneath her window.

They do that sometimes.

They think, but it's only a girl, and stand for so long trying to decide whether to ring or fade back into the city.

She opens the window and sticks out her head.

The man below her window starts, looks up, takes off his hat.

Maybe twenty-seven, blonde, clean-shaven, young in the way that beggars are not, but dressed in a worn coat, and with patches on his pants, so, once prosperous, fallen: it's all she can tell from here; in the fog, in the flashes of hansoms which raise that distant thunder struggling up through so many layers of mist to reach her he is vanished at intervals and then reappears with that hat squashed in his hand, and his face awkwardly crumpled.

"Come upstairs. It's 221B," she says, and shuts the window again.

He's 26, near tears, a minor clerk, childless, intelligent but careless of it, as most 26-year-olds are.

Boys are always throwing away that sort of thing.

His face beneath the blonde curls, which the mist confused, as if underwater, is ridiculously handsome, but he's too timid to take advantage of it. "Miss Forbes, I'm dreadfully sorry to bother you at such an hour," he says, squeezing the hat.

"It's ok; I'm awake at three every morning," she replies, and sits him in a chair, and then draws up her own across from him, with the gas light behind her, so the full spluttering cone of it is thrown on his face.

"My fiancée, you see, she's disappeared."

He takes out a letter from his coat, creased several times, and, trembling, unfolds it so he can hand it across to her.

There's something.

This little niggling thread which winds all the way down into the depths of her and which in following she keeps losing, and losing again, but it's still there, tickling, throwing up sparks somewhere, saying to her no, no, keep going, there's something here, in the nervous throat above his muffler and the twitchy hands and all this humble surface gloss-

She takes the letter.

"Something isn't right. Her parents aren't very…amiable to the match, but we'd decided to marry anyway, and now suddenly she's gone abroad. And this note, as well, from my mother, who's been so supportive of us, and now suddenly- she says women these days have no hearts, and they won't hesitate to break another's. And Jane's letter- there was no return address, no identifying information, only this little note, it's all I have, I don't even know where she's gone, but she promises herself to me, she says not to worry, she'll be back soon, and we'll be married at once. Miss Forbes, can you tell from where it's been sent? Is it possible my mother knows something?" He sits back in his chair, rubbing one of his hands anxiously.

She carries both of the letters over to her work table, and flattening them out under the gas lamp, takes out her magnifying glass, and meanwhile she turns over that niggling, trembling something in her mind, touches it from every angle as she lifts and turns the papers and runs the glass over them, going back over his whole quivering figure, first in the fog, and then in the room, where all the little details of him are counted off one after another, the muffler, the worn coat, the young and timid face, the long-fingered hands, ink-stained, and that hat, wrung between them-

She turns over the mother's letter.

So.

The hat.

She shuts her eyes for a moment.

Tock tock tock from the horses and that long and mournful calling, into the fog, into the Thames, across all the haunted corners of desolate Whitechapel.

"Both the letters are from your mother," she says without opening her eyes. "She hired an actress to play your fiancée and then abandon you so that you'd see the only woman who'd ever love you is your mother, who's sick, probably consumptive, but she's always been controlling, and she was never going to let you marry and leave her, consumption or no consumption. And you're not who you say you are."

She opens her eyes and turns around.

His face has undergone this whole transformation.

He's sitting with one leg crossed over the other with such easy confidence, and there's this coiling, an animal thing, you can feel it, not just in him but in yourself, walking its premonitory fingers down your spine.

They look at one another for a moment.

She thinks: here's where you slink a little, you walk like there's something nesting inside you, something frothing, something even his self-assurance can quail before. You tell them: not just a girl. You tell them: it's not a slur to wear petticoats and walk softly, with a big parasol.

"In my anxiety, I forgot to introduce myself properly, so in all fairness, I haven't technically misrepresented myself." Even his voice has changed, and he is 100% aware of his own attractiveness, and how the dimples in either cheek go straight to your head, just for a minute, just until you straighten your shoulders, and you clasp your hands behind your back, and you put all twenty four years of carefully honed logic between yourself and this man who tells all the little evolutionary twists of you that still know how to scent a predator, he's not a man, not quite.

"The letters aren't yours. Are they even real?"

"Oh, quite," he says, leaning forward and steepling his fingers beneath his chin. "They belonged to a friend of mine. Recently departed. Terrible tragedy."

"Your hat," she says, and snatches it out of his hands. "Good quality, but battered, bought in a premium shop three years ago, so you had money, but you don't anymore, because no one who buys a hat like this doesn't replace it once it's in this kind of shape. Unbrushed, faded in several spots, but you still care enough about appearances to smear it with some ink, so you care about not having money anymore, you're not a drunk, then, maybe a gambler, except- it's a forgery. A good one. This hat was actually bought…three days ago?" He nods slightly, still smiling. "And manually aged. So you're not poor, but you wanted me to think you are, which means everything else about your appearance is probably carefully cultivated to lead me astray. So you're not a clerk, you don't have an overbearing mother, although you're probably childless, because you're an ass, and I want to have more faith in female kind, that it'd say nope, no thanks to procreating with you. Shhhjt," she says when he opens his mouth to comment. "Don't interrupt me." She brings the hat to her nose. "You don't have any pomade in your hair."

"Astute observation."

"But someone with pomade in their hair recently wore this. And you can only buy this scent from one shop, a high-end one where it's specially mixed for one specific customer."

She tosses the hat back to him. "You're Kol's brother, aren't you?"

His dimples go even deeper; he doesn't seem perturbed at all. "You are quick, aren't you?"

"No, Scotland Yard puts aside its tiny, much-lamented penis and ridiculously fragile ego to call in me, a mere woman, because I'm an idiot."

That doesn't perturb him either. He leans forward a little, clasping his hands on top of the hat he's caught one-handed, so nonchalantly she is almost completely certain he practices it in front of his mirror. "I thought it might be time for us to meet at last. You have been poking at my organization for months now. Thought I'd suss out the competition, so to speak. It seems you might not disappoint me after all."

"I'm glad," she snaps. "Last night I couldn't sleep, wondering if I might meet your standards."

He licks his lips a little and leans forward even more, looking at her in a way so you can feel it in every inch between them, something penetrating, something that touches all the parts of you that ice over first, the spine, the suddenly nerveless hands, wooden on her skirts.

There's this whole other presence in the room, like something precedes him. It's in all the buried parts of you that still quiver after the gaslights have been put out, and in your warm abode you feel some cold portent of the world Outside.

She picks up the cane leaning against the wall beside the door and tries to hit him in the face.

He grabs her by the wrist.

There's this brief struggle: it's usually over this fast, but it doesn't end like this, with the cane sailing out of her hands, and her face pressed into the wall so she can feel some pain, just enough to remind her she's been bested, but he doesn't hurt her, not quite, he presses her into the wall and puts his lips right against her ear, but he doesn't hurt her: that would be too easy. "Ah, ah, sweetheart; let's not be like that, hmm?" He tsks; she can feel his breath on her cheek. He smells damp; he's still a little slick from his walk. There's a faint lingering odor of soot in his hair, and, underneath that, his soap.

She doesn't struggle; he'd like that. Men like this: they want to watch you fight till all the hope goes out of you.

"This is my polite warning to keep your little nose out of my affairs. Now, I only grant one warning, so use it wisely. I'd hate for you to end up in the Thames. All that decomposition would do just terrible things to your complexion." She can feel him smile against her.

She reaches her hand back and grabs him by the testicles.

The trick is to squeeze and turn; it's just like a doorknob, except with more vomiting and tears.

She kneels down with him as he sinks to the floor, still holding him, her skirts flaring our around her knees, like a lady. She hasn't even flashed an ankle. "Ok, so. Here's what I think of your warning." She boops him on the nose. "Now. I have a garden party at two this afternoon, so if I don't start last minute preparations now, somebody's not getting their hors d'oeuvres, and I don't have to tell you how even a triple poisoner is completely harmless next to a middle-aged parishioner who misses out on the snacks. Leave, and in a few months when I have enough evidence, I'll have you arrested. Right now, you are just wasting my time."

You can't turn your back on someone like this, so when she stands up, she grabs Kol's revolver off the mantle, groping around behind her for it, and turns it on him with her sternest Not Impressed face.

He knocks the gun out of her hand and throws her down into one of the armchairs.

He's completely incensed; he grabs her by the hair and bends her head back so he can loom over her all doom-like, still pinched around his lips, and with no color in his cheeks, but he's one toe out of the asylum if the whispers are correct, and she forgot to account for the effect of crazy on the human pain threshold.

He doesn't want to lose his composure; she can see him struggling with it. This was supposed to be his Moment, she was supposed to cower, kneel, etc. "Send my regards to my brother," he says, a little breathlessly, and for a moment she thinks, he's incandescent, you can see his rage from the street, through the fog, through the rain she can hear now against her window, but it's not just anger, it's a different kind of strain in his voice, he licks his lips, he looks down into her eyes, for a moment he just hovers there, half an inch away.

He pulls back with the gun in her hand, and cracks his neck, and now for a moment she realizes here it is, she's about to die, Kol will return to find her splattered across the wall and scattered all about her couch (he looks like a mutilator), but, no, he puts the gun in his jacket, and walks backward to her analysis table, smiling the way he did when she first turned back to him with the letters in her hand. "This looks important," he says, and picks up one of her beakers.

He drops it.

He swaps the labels on three of her beakers, breaks another, takes all of her pipettes.

The hat is retrieved from the floor, and with a flourish, he rolls it all the way up his arm to his head, where he settles it at an angle.

"Good day, Miss Forbes," he says in his Downtrodden Clerk voice, winking. "You may keep the letters. A little souvenir, if you will."

She chases him all the way out into the street, but he's vanished into the fog.

She throws open the door to her apartment just as Kol shoots one of the vases from her Aunt Vespa.

It explodes; for a moment she staggers back against the wall, her ears ringing. "What are you doing!" she yells. "How many times have I told you no shooting in the house?"

He spreads his arms, and then takes aim again. "Come on, darling; that vase was a travesty. I've done it and your decor a favor."

She wrenches the gun away from him before he can take another shot and, after struggling briefly with herself, to pistol whip or not to pistol whip, she puts it aside on the mantel where there is now an empty spot, courtesy of his brother. "I had a visitor this morning," she says as he throws himself down on her couch, where he's already discarded his wrinkled jacket.

"A gentlemen caller? If he was any good, send him my way after you're done with him. Maybe ding him up a bit emotionally first. They're more open to strange, morally repugnant things that way."

"It was your brother."

He sits up slowly on the couch, like he can't be lying down for this news. "Nik? Did he hurt you?"

"He broke and/or stole half of my analysis table!"

"So, only your ego's a bit roughed up then?" he asks, and now he swings himself off the couch and comes over to examine her, lightly touching her chin. "You could be a lot worse for the wear after an encounter with Nik."

"Did you get my note?" she demands, rounding on him as he makes his way back to the sofa, rolling up one of the sleeves that's sagged down his arm a little. He's been carousing in style somewhere; his hair is all roughed up, the jacket he's slung over the sofa with a new tear in its left arm and that pungent hanger-on opium that will take her days to air out of the apartment.

"Is that what was crinkling underneath me?" he asks, throwing himself down on top of it again, and flinging one arm up over his eyes. "Listen, darling, I'd love to read up on whatever sin I've committed this time, leaving fingerprints on the mantel, bumping the easy-chair and removing it one quarter of an inch from its proper place, etc., etc., but I'm fagged. It's been a long night. Lots of sex."

She rips the note out from underneath him and hurls it onto his face. "Put my bookcase back in order by the time I'm home, or else. The note explains it in exacting but succinct terms, which I'm sure you'll appreciate. You can read and still have time to clean up the muddy bootprints you left all over the rug."

"You're not angry at me, darling. Take it out on my brother. I can give you the names of several establishments where you just might so happen to bump into him."

"I'm angry at both of you. For all of his other glaring defects, he didn't track mud all over my apartment, or take my encyclopedia."

He opens his eyes and creases his face into something smirkily reminiscent of his brother. "You can have it back for the price of that woman's contact info, the one from the case with the snake?"

"No."

He sighs way too dramatically and works his shoulders back into the sofa, propping one of his boots on the armrest. "I can obtain it through less savoury means, but I'm a gentleman as you know, I thought I'd ask you first. And with a recommendation from her savior, it's less work for me."

"I'm not giving you as a 'recommendation' to anyone. I'm not evil. A little bit sharp sometimes, when people can't be bothered to do things the way I tell them to, but not evil."

"What time is your party?" he asks without opening his eyes. He's beating his boots to some invisible rhythm, showering little bits of mud and who knows what other street detritus onto the floor.

"Two. Precisely."

"Right. I'll see you then, darling."

"No, you won't. You're not invited."

"I invited myself. No party is complete without me."

"It's lawn croquet and cucumber sandwiches, not cocaine and group sex."

"Do you see why you need me?" he says, and deftly shifts his hip so the shoe she throws at him bounces instead off the sofa and falls with a thud to the floor.

Caroline is some days complaining about his brother; Nik tends to have that effect on women. You ought to meet their sister.

London is similarly tempestuous, and for an entire week pours down every cloud onto the miserable horses and the griping workers which through their bow-window pass in white fairy steams that insulate them from the watchers above.

Nik makes three attempts on her life; she's not very fussed about them. There's a dramatic moment when an aspiring assassin shoots at her from a hansom passing at full gallop, he thought that was going to be quite a show, but Caroline merely landed the ever-present cane smack into the wheel spokes, crashed the carriage, overtook the assassin, and in full view of Constable Something trussed him like a pig for easy transportation.

Anyway, he won't even mention the poisoned letter. Not Nik's finest. One rather wonders if he's even trying.

They're sitting before the fire warming their feet, his own in Caroline's lap, which he must share with a bundle of papers she's perusing, when downstairs someone rings the bell.

A constable is shown into the flat by Mrs. Hudson, an unfamiliar one, new by the looks of him, somewhat nervous in the presence of all those blonde curls and white skin, very virginal of you, darling, and taking off his hat in order to occupy them in some way, stammers out, "Constable Hopkins. Inspector Lestrade's sent me round to knock you up, miss. Ma'am." He clears his throat, and adopts a more manly mien. Excellent, darling. "Sorry to intrude upon you, but there's been a murder out at Woodman's Lee. Rather frightful one; Inspector Lestrade's on site at the moment, and says we must have your assistance."

Caroline sets aside her papers, but doesn't disturb his feet. "Give me a brief sketch of the events."

Constable Hopkins is somewhat taken aback. "Excuse me?"

"I'm not one of Lestrade's constables; I don't have to come running just because he's summoned me. So I want to know if the case is of any interest to me. Also, Lestrade's kind of a…"

"Prat?" he supplies.

"Yes. So it has to be something of significant intrigue to persuade me to actually work alongside him. You can speak in front of my colleague; he often accompanies me on cases," she says in response to the glance the constable throws at him from beneath his lashes, a sideways thing, very hurtful.

"A man's been spit clean through with one thrust of a spear; I don't know how any man could have done it, miss. Not with that sort of force."

"Oh," she says, and sits forward with her fingers beneath her bottom lip, and in so doing lending herself a resemblance to Nik that she'd hardly appreciate.

"Captain Peter Carey was found dead in his cabin this morning; the wife and daughter sent to the village for the police. And what we found- it's like a slaughterhouse, miss. Inspector Lestrade says he hasn't seen anything like it since that poor girl what was slashed at George Yard."

"Ok," she says, as if God proclaiming a judgement upon His subjects.

The following week is uncommonly busy; Caroline darts here and there to all the various districts unraveling some particularly knotty skein or another; the Irregulars peep in and out at steady intervals to leave their missives in the sitting room. He sees Enzo three times in as many days.

Having then to amuse himself, he engages in those revels which common decency has taught him must be abhorred and which on the contrary he finds quite natty, but even these pale eventually: one does tire of orgies and the various thorny intrigues which inevitably spring up between participants.

He didn't believe it either, darlings.

He does poke two of Whitechapel's more touchy gangs into open warfare, but that's hardly any challenge. On Tuesday he flagellates Countess Maria and her lover, on Wednesday cheats a prince out of half his inheritance, and on a drizzly Thursday, stands with his jacket turned up to those invasions of mist and smoke which, in trying to gain admittance to his back, curl innocently round his collar to test its wooly mettle.

From the pub across the street there is raised a cry of "Thief", hardly worth even turning round for, and so he continues hovering with the handsomest angle of his face turned toward the passing cabs and dogcarts, lingering with just enough casualness that he may say it's only that accident of fate which has happened to deposit him here, adjacent to her flat, nothing would be so absurd as to suggest he's waiting as an abandoned dog pines after its master, and has tired of lying round the flat, and come here, where he will spot her first.

August has nearly finished and autumn come firmly into the full flower of its assurance that its reign will be a prolonged one and the horses, sensing this before any of their bundled masters, droop their heads with the burden of this presentiment, kicking at the mud. Watch the beasts, whose barometers are always tuned to that special frequency which man will never sense till its blundered into his courtyard, and found all the chinks in his windows.

He blows into his hands.

He's just decided to nip into the pub when he spots a man coming along the pavement opposite him, in just his shirtsleeves, and under a Donegal hat that's capitulated somewhat pathetically to the downpour, and sags forward over his eyes. He's at least a head taller than most of those passersby who jostle him in their own preoccupied rush toward those goals at which all passersby are always straining, and stops before the flat, where he rings the bell and waits politely for a response, though he's soaked.

The page Billy admits him, and within a minute he's come back out into the rain with his hands in his pockets, so he's either a disappointed client or one of those Baker Street Irregulars to which Caroline is always adding.

He looks straight ahead for just a moment, across the street to a spot where their eyes may meet halfway, and hold for merely a second in that incidental collaboration of strangers who are occasionally thrown from their own sphere into another's.

The man only looks at him for a moment, and then strolls on away down the pavement.

He sees that he's got very blue eyes.

When Caroline is chewing over something, when her mind must worry at it for some time, she reorganizes her newspaper editions till she has got at the soul of it.

There is absolute silence at these moments.

The moon laps at the bow-window, solitary in its reign; the street lamps have been put out.

He flips the cylinder of his revolver in and out, having recently oiled it so that the movement will not bring Caroline's Wrath onto his head; if you think his brother, who has ended an entire bloodline and buried not less than two of his sister's husbands, is fodder for your tales, fabled bogeyman of those closet recesses which whisper down their superstitions with their mothballs, you ought to disturb Caroline in the midst of her tidying.

As with most of his stories, this begins: once upon a time when he was drunk. And there he'll stop. The details are too horrific; there is a triple murderer incarcerated at Newgate, a strangler, very mad, who cried upon the retelling of them.

When she's come round to the sofa where she'll put her feet in his lap and her head back against the rest he may breathe again. She sighs and thrusts her hands into her hair; the newsprint has left a smudge on her cheek. "What is it this time? The orange pips?" he asks her, tweaking the toes in his lap.

"No, I solved that one yesterday. It's your brother."

"Has he tried to kill you again? I can break one of his kneecaps with a bat, but I can't guarantee I can get to the other before he shoots me. Still, I'm willing to try."

"He hasn't bothered me in days."

"And that disappoints you?"

"It concerns me. It means he's…lurking somewhere."

"That is one of Nik's favourite means of transportation."

She's got that look on her face again: when something has perplexed her beyond the usual twists of a Tuesday letter bombing, she takes her bottom lip between her teeth and forms her hands into a little prayer knot beneath her chin. His brother has stumped her. His brother does that to most people. You could have slept beside him in his mother's belly, and still not fathom all the human drivings which must be at work somewhere, somewhere.

The wind begins tapping at the window, and raising in the chimney a keening between life and death: a howl which is at once one and the other, and in a breath sounds the clans' knells, and in the next cries after its youth. Only winter can with one bay fetch spring in green reminisce to the consumptive's lonely breast and in distant graveyards lower its frozen dead. And here it's only 26 August.

Caroline taps her feet in his lap, and he says at last, resting one hand on her ankle, "You can't beat Nik, Caroline. He destroys everything. Always. It's what he does."

But you cannot present her with an impossibility. A mind that large knows there are infinities beyond the brain's paltry reach: there is a resolution to every puzzle. Because one discovers or does not discover it does not preclude its existence.

"We'll see," she says, and smiles, poking him cheekily in the chin with her toe.

He licks it.

"Gross!"

"I've licked far worse things, darling."

Two days later, she marches into the room while he's at table, drooping over his breakfast, and lays a paper down flat on the empty plate beside him. "Do you know anything about this?"

It's a clean white sheet, very plain, and folded twice horizontally:

534 C2 13 127 36 31 4 17 21 41

Douglas 109 293 5 37 Birlstone

26 Birlstone 9 47 171

He spares one eye for it, and then returns to feeding his rather voracious hangover some toast. "It's a piece of paper with some gibberish on it."

"It's a cipher message."

"Do you have the cipher?"

"No."

"Then it's gibberish." The toast opens negotiations with his stomach: to the better man goeth victory, etc. Ten shillings on the toast.

"Your brother sent it to me two days ago. It's obviously a reference to a book, more precisely, specific words on a specific page. And two days later I still have neither the book nor the teensiest, tiniest hint as to which book I need to look at." She flaps the paper at him. "And you know nothing about this?"

"I haven't seen Nik in a week. And anyway, darling, do you really think he'd give me the very key to whatever Nefarious Scheme he's trying to draw you into? If he hasn't given you the name of the book, it's because he wants you to sort it out on your own."

She sighs, looks tormented for a moment, Why Me I'm Pretty, God isn't supposed to punish these sorts of specimens; if you've paid any attention whatsoever to humanity's oeuvre, you'll see the victor is always the maiden, and never the wolf.

"Ok. Ok." She brings her hands together underneath her chin and begins to pace. "He cannot expect me to freaking…pluck one book at random from the last thousand years of literature or turn every library upside down attempting to find it. So. So." She turns back and forth along the table, her skirts swishing after her. "It's something common. It's something…most people would have. Something you could easily get ahold of. Not the Bible, because, obviously. The cipher starts with '534', probably a page number, so a large book; that narrows it down a little. C2...C2." She turns round and begins her next row, clapping the tips of her fingers a little beneath her nose. "Not chapter; if we're beginning on page 534, we'd be way past the second chapter."

"You haven't read any of Nik's books, darling, have you? You ought to; they're good for a laugh. He takes copies of them round to all the booksellers and replaces whatever's in the window with his own. He fancies himself a much better poet than he is."

She tilts her heads, and removes her fingers from beneath her nose. "He wouldn't-"

"Force you to read one of his books by means of a cryptic message which would seem to carry some dire warning/prophecy you need to solve before it's too late and all of London is doomed? He absolutely would. But I don't imagine that's what he's getting at."

"C2, then. Column. Column two- yes; that makes much more sense. So, a large book, printed in columns- long ones, since one of the words is listed as the 293rd. A book that has to be common, or else how could he expect me to solve it? And that's what he wants me to do, isn't it; he wants me to play this freaking game. So, double columns, more than 534 pages, and common. And it has to be some kind of standardized text- page 534 in his book is exactly the same as page 534 in mine."

He sits back in his chair; his stomach has triumphed, for the moment. He watches her pace back and forth, back and forth, trailing all her suppositions after her, in a sort of under the breath babbling which suddenly ceases for the moment before the revelation, when she has to freeze for just a moment to let it seep into all the corners of her, and overturn every other observation which plays always at the perimeter of her mind, the ray of sunlight on the table and the fleck of dried blood on his left thumb, the vague lives of the city beyond their window which in making their usual rustlings of existence illuminate for her some unknown extrapolations that lie for him in a sullen murk.

"Not the dictionary- too random, too curt. You'd have trouble sending a message with that."

And then she turns, and she screams, "Almanac!" at him and pops the hands out to either side. "Whitaker's Almanac!"

She's very cute when she deduces.

He's taken up in spite of himself; she just sweeps you along so that the rebelling stomach is forgotten, and the headache resigned to understudy.

She snatches the required book off her shelf and brings it over to the table; he comes out of his chair to bend over the pages as she rifles through to '534', where both of them tap their fingers along the columns, counting off words till number thirteen is reached. 'There," she calls out.

"Is," he replies.

And then 'danger' 'may' 'come 'soon'; he catches up the letter she left on the empty plate beside his half-finished breakfast, and scratches down each word as she calls them out.

"There is danger may come very soon one Douglas rich country now at Birlstone House Birlstone confidence is pressing."

Caroline stands for a moment looking over the sheet of paper, the open almanac forgotten in front of her.

And then: "Get your coat," she snaps, running for her own room. "Now."

The reader will forgive if I here pause and scribble down a bit of scenery.

Birlstone squats on the northern border of Sussex, where it has lived for centuries. Its humble cottages have for some time sweated against the approach of that abominable weed which society calls the wealthy, who, having been charmed by its woods and chalk downs, now encroach on the harrows and mushrooms.

The star around which these lesser beings revolve, trifling crumbs of elegance which have broken with the main nucleus and suffer now at its gilded hem, is the Manor House of Birlstone. It is to this august building our narrative has now turned. In the days of Hugo de Capus the soldiers of the first crusade leant their heads here and dreamt of infidels; in the 16th century God thumbed his nose at this bit of history and sent his fires to obliterate it.

But man and his structures are never so quickly defeated; the Jacobeans raised a country house on the very spot, taking some of the charred corner stones for themselves and so incorporating their ancestors into the very foundation of what you can now see for yourself on a ramble through the countryside, very much as it looked in the 17th century, the outer moat having dried out but the inner still guarding for nigh forty feet the original gables and windows.

But it's not for this house you have come.

We turn our eye, then, to the dogcart rattling at top speed along through the mud toward this house, much to the regret of its sweating bearer. In it are two figures, quite snugly tucked against one another. Dusk is just falling. In the country, dusk is no mere vanishing from grey to black; here every shade of red and no poet's pen to transcribe them. The man is broad-shouldered, handsome, but half-dressed, for a gentlemen, in dapper trousers but with no jacket, and his sleeves turned back to his elbows.

She is particularly stunning on this day. There is some shade of gold which might depict for the reader some 1/10th of the impression which her curls must have made on a curious wanderer walking the road at that precipitous hour, but language has not yet invented it. She wears trousers and a man's jacket, tailored to her own slight form, but the hair bounces about her shoulders, hindered by neither pins nor hat.

Here the dogcart stops before the manor and then is handily turned round, its charges having alighted. What precisely happens in the house is of no consequence: it is enough to know the man wades up to his thighs in the moat and boosts the woman over the windowsill of a small room to the right of the drawbridge, and afterward pulls himself.

There is no shot.

Birlstone drowsily watches the sun steal away into its woods, and farther still beyond them.

It is here, having prevented His skillful ministrations to Fate, she becomes the woman.

When she walks into the apartment shaking September 1st from her bonnet, Kol picks up the Eastern Morning News edition lying at his elbow on the breakfast table, and with a snap unfurls it.

He clears his throat.

"Another Whitechapel tragedy. Brutal murder of a woman. The Central News says: 'Following close upon the recent ghastly tragedy in Whitechapel, Londoners were yesterday horrified to hear of a similar outrage perpetrated in a manner which has seldom been equaled for brutality. At a very early hour in the morning a constable on beat duty found lying in Bucks-row, a narrow thoroughfare abutting on Thomas-street, Whitechapel, the dead body of a woman about 40 years of age. The throat was gashed with two cuts, penetrating from the front of the neck to the vertebrae. The body was at once taken to the Whitechapel mortuary, where it was found that the unfortunate victim's abdomen had been ripped up from thighs to breast in a most revolting manner, the intestines protruding from three deep gashes. The clothes were cut and torn in several places, and the face was bruised and much discoloured. The woman's dress seems to show that she was in poor circumstances and marks upon some of the undergarments indicate that she has been an inmate of the Lambeth Workhouse. This summarises the facts of the case. All besides, is in profound mystery. And so forth and so on, we humbly submit our outrage for this woman we from our moral pinnacles spit at, unless she's on fire, etc. etc. Sound like your department, darling?"

But whether it is or is not her department lies unuttered on her lips because at the door there is a sudden thrumming, tentative and rapped out at the height of her chest: the page Billy, then.

She opens the door.

"Telegram for you, ma'am," he says, handing it over. "And there's a hansom downstairs. Says he's to take you to Scotland Yard."

She exchanges a look with Kol. "I didn't call a cab."

"I can dismiss him, if you like?" Billy ventures.

But she holds up one hand and she opens the telegram and here the mystery unravels in Lestrade's blocky printing which urges her at once to drop all momentary concerns and hurry to the station on a matter of 'no small importance'.

"Tell the driver I'll be down in a moment," she says, and sees him out the door.

"The Scotland Yard dress?" Kol asks, already standing. He throws back the remainder of his coffee.

"The Scotland Yard dress," she confirms.

You have to remember, all these eyes, all these men, and stroll in like before you lies only one long hall, and at its end your throne.

She takes one deep breath.

She lets Kol open the door for her, and then she sweeps inside this storm of typewriters which raise in each corner a flurry of grapeshot, and from down the corridor to the left there drifts the cries of the suspects who moan from their 9th circle all the protestations which only a guilty man can submit, there was never a purer babe to walk the earth, and through these maelstroms of man and machine the looks fished up from every nook and cranny, so that you must greet them chin up, chest out, and spin the lacy parasol you can't put down, you will not let them make you some honorary man, an otherly creature, neither girl nor boy, an in-between, they will know every flirty twist of your wrist, and the swish of each silken layer.

"Hello, darling," Kol says, and pinches the butt of one particularly bitch-eyed constable who tries to glare her back into her tea room.

And then they turn the corner, past the evidence room, beyond the mortuary, to the left of the hall where Inspector Lestrade keeps his tidy little office.

The door is open.

"Let me see your best 'I can see all the way through to your tiny cock' smile," Kol tells her.

She obliges.

"Excellent, darling."

He walks through first, and just for a moment eclipses her view.

And then she clears the doorway and she sees a man seated in front of Lestrade, his back to the door, but she knows this head, she knows the curls, unkempt, Kol usually slicks back his own hair but this man- this man wants you to see he has had no hand in his attractiveness, God just sort of swept in and said, 'and so he was perfect' and rolled him from bed to frock coat with the hair disheveled, not so you'd mistake him for any shamble-footed vagabond, plying the tender hearts of silk-hatted ladies, but with just that touch of casualness, so you know: oh, this old thing? It just came that way.

"You," she snaps.

Lestrade looks up from Kol's hand, which he has gripped a little too hard: you always have to prove your manliness around one of those sodomites, after all. "Ah, Miss Forbes. I'm pleased you could make it so quickly." He isn't. He's smiling through his teeth.

But Klaus stands and turns to her with an entirely genuine smile, his most cherubic dimples in both cheeks. "Miss Forbes; so pleased to see you." He holds out one hand as if to take hers, coming around his chair with his hat in the other.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she demands.

Lestrade sits back in his chair, looking amused. "Ah, yes, Mr. Mikaelson; Miss Forbes' theories about you are a bit of an inside joke here at Scotland Yard. It's possible you've heard you are apparently the most dangerous and well-connected criminal in all of London?"

Klaus smiles ruefully. "I hear rather the entirety of England. Perhaps even the world. But that's all right. Whatever she thinks of me, I humbly submit to her judgements." He bows a little. "It's quite all right, inspector. We've had a bit of a misunderstanding between the two of us in the past, but there's no one else I'd rather you consult on this gruesome business."

"A misunderstanding?" she nearly shrieks, and in the corner where he's taken over a chair for himself, and sits slouched and twirling one of his cuff links between his knuckles (he can never keep them on), Kol puts his hand to his nose and then drops it beneath his chin.

She takes another breath.

He has already gotten so completely too much satisfaction from her, so she steels her shoulders, she sets her parasol in the corner, she sits down in the chair next to him and folds her hands primly in her lap, and not for one single second does she look at him as he seats himself once more, his knee touching hers.

She does keep an eye out for any opportunity to stomp his foot beneath the jagged little heel of her boot.

With ears alone she takes in Lestrade's monologue as he begins to expound on the murder Kol rattled off to her from the Eastern Morning News. Mary Ann Nichols, also called 'Polly', inmate of Lambeth Workhouse for seven years, killed elsewhere and later deposited where her discoverers found her, in the opinion of the doctor who examined her on-site.

She shuts out the squeaking of Kol's chair as he swings it back and forth, pushing off the wall with his feet, and the quiet susurration of distant reports, all these niggling commotions that intrude on every mind and, elbows out, jostle for their spot in the queue, these she takes and she sweeps aside, narrowing in on him.

It's almost the Downtrodden Clerk mask he wore to her apartment; but there are shades of distinction between them. There he was left-handed, here, he leads with his right when he gestures; it was the right he offered to her in greeting. There is a note of earnestness in his voice: Daddy's little liberal benefactor, patron of the poor, throwing his pounds at the slums as if in snowing them down beneath the weight of all these donations, he can lift them somehow above their silt.

He lets some of his charm through into his voice; this he subtracted from the Downtrodden Clerk, this he adds in now, not so you can feel there is a subterranean sort of menace behind it, lurking in those depths of mankind where slink all the subcutaneous whispers of vice, a young charm, a charm with roses in its cheeks, vaguely aware of its own attractions, having not yet harnessed them, but taking advantage naturally. He means every word he says; he leans forward, into the table, into that zone where you are taken from participant to intimate; there's no artifice; Lestrade, who has seen it in all its many and varied shades, and cuffed it all the same, suns himself in its glow.

He has a smudge of charcoal on his right thumb.

She looks at this from the corner of her eye as Lestrade continues on and on and Kol thumps his chair back against the wall and from the street there is a hansom driver's enraged cry, and these she takes, and she tucks them away, she runs over the angle of the smudge, the age of it, how its worked its way into his cuticle and finely dusted the nail and the faint impression of the same mark on his right pointer finger.

She thinks: something real.

She thinks: something he wanted her to see. Something he wanted her to watch lift its head from underneath Mr. Mikaelson: Social Reformer and with one saucy blink draw her on.

So.

Fine.

She leans forward, onto the desk, mirroring his pose, resting her fingers beneath his chin.

"It was Mr. Mikaelson insisted we call you in, Miss Forbes. There's hardly any need for your presence at the moment, it's most likely one of the High Rip gangs, of course, and it won't be long before one of them informs. But, of course, Mr. Mikaelson, Scotland Yard well understands your concerns and is happy to help alleviate them," Lestrade informs her.

Klaus puts a fist to his mouth for a moment, clearly overcome. "I'm sorry, Inspector. I knew this woman from my visits to the workhouse where she lived, and it's absolutely horrendous. Those poor women, out on those bloody streets, with no other choice, and to come- to come to that sort of end." He shakes his head."

"A friend of yours?" she asks crisply.

"Well, I'd hardly call her that, Miss Forbes, we met once or twice, but, as you may know, I've done some work in such quarters. I'm building another workhouse, one with which we aim to improve upon the old model, a place where cheap lodgings can be had without the squalor, without those terrible exploitations of their brethren. If these women could afford to lay their head under a roof, they wouldn't be out on the streets exposing themselves to such vile dangers."

"You are certainly a contribution to humanity. It's England's fortune you were born here."

He pretends to completely miss her sarcasm. "Thank you," he says, and slides this bashful little smile across the desk to Lestrade. "Seems we might bury the hatchet after all, hmm?"

For just a moment, she cannot handle her inability to strangle him in front of God and half the Metropolitan force, and turns to scrunch her nose at Kol, who, bored the second Lestrade opened his mouth, is now intent on the ripostes between her and his brother.

He lifts his eyebrows.

There is a piece of hair, at the nape of Klaus' neck. One stiff clock spring of blonde he touches sometimes: Social Reformer Klaus is a bit fidgety, he doesn't have that stillness of the man from her apartment, he doesn't have that otherworldly silence, an inhuman thing, a thing you find in houses gone unloved for years. You think, looking at him, he could sit for five mercurial centuries, letting the ivy grow over him while history shifts and shifts again and whole cities die and in a decade spring from new and better fingers.

She can find a thread of it, in this Klaus. In some imperceptible movement of his elbow, you see the shade of past gestures, and then it's gone.

She sees the charcoal smudge on his thumb: she sees that, and nothing else.

His clothes have only the itinerant spices of autumnal London, soot, dirt, the smells which have risen up from the Thames and whispered in slow driftings over its people. The hems of his trousers are splashed with that distinct clay of Clay Hill, but it's a false lead: the splatter of it is just slightly off, not thrown up by passing hooves or his own shoes, but smeared on by hand, so that even his pants take her off somewhere to wander in confused ravings.

She rises gracefully from her chair. "Do you have the woman's belongings here?"

"Hmm?" Lestrade asks, looking up from his conversation with Klaus, which has progressed on without her, as most conversations between men do.

"Mary Ann Nichols? Do you have her belongings here? Her clothes, anything she had on her when she died?"

"Oh; yes, of course. But that won't do you much good, Miss Forbes; of course we've already identified her, and she wasn't carrying much. Certainly nothing of significance."

Klaus has sat back in his chair, and folded his hands beneath his chin. For just an instant, you see him flicker to the surface: he looks at her rather than Lestrade when he speaks, and she feels this thing.

She doesn't want to say a shiver.

"Let her be the judge of that."

He stands in the doorway of the evidence room watching her.

She turns over a white handkerchief in her hands, reading in it what men cannot parse.

About her feet splash the yards of blue satin, foaming round the delicate toes which flirt from beneath it; she has done up her hair as for a ball. The gloved hands turn the deceased's articles over and over; the magnifying glass trawls each corner and seam for its hidden cache, panning at streambeds where the mere mortal has long since cast off his hope with his sieve.

He clasps his hands behind his back.

He wets his lips.

He steps forward with a smile.

He leans in so close he can smell the rosewater on her neck, and drops his voice so no straining ear may hear what is only for her, there is only the two of them, he wants her to understand, yes, yes, somewhere a world of sweating humanity toiling away at its survival, but when he enters a room, love, what you may sense with your peripheral vision and hear faintly belling in your ears is but cake frippery.

She does not tense when his nose grazes her neck. The handkerchief is set aside in favor of a comb, and this too is thrust beneath the glass, where its tines loom fantastically.

"I hear you received my message? It would seem poor Birlstone lives to see another day."

"How are your testicles?" she asks with an edge in her voice, turning over the comb.

He smiles. "Fully recovered, if you're inquiring for reasons of personal interest."

She does not engage with that; pity.

He pulls back now, keeping his hands clasped, and pacing in ever narrowing loops as a predator might run down its prey, so that she must filter out the clicking of his heels on the floor, and shuck off that instinctive rime which frosts the boldest of hearts in his presence, cringing, as they ought, before those communal nightmares of all humans, which see in him the faceless terrors of those woodland loams to whom midnight applies its most threatening violets.

"It's not a gang," he says, staying always just out of her peripheral vision, so she must feel rather than see him. "I would know. I own most of them."

"Is it you?" she asks sweetly, still not bothering to turn her head, and now retrieving the scrap of looking glass from the box where the last human bits of Mary Ann Nichols have been stowed.

"It's a bit sloppy, don't you think, sweetheart? I'm certain you think better of me than that. The police do not find my corpses. Unless I deem their discovery useful." He stops just behind her, leaning in once more. "Murder of this sort is very messy. I don't recommend taking a stab at it."

He waits for her laughter.

Instead, she turns round and pins on him such a look as would shrink a lesser man. "Really? Really?"

He likes how her indignation puffs her up; very fetching. He has somewhere in his palette a recreation of her cheek, but merely a pallid copy, and no hand, even his own, which can coax it to truer similitude.

"Your deductions, Miss Forbes?"

"None of your business. What is your interest in this anyway? We both know you can drop the fawn-eyed crap about your workhouse charity. Did she work for you?"

"I'm not a pimp; men of my abilities do not descend to such base crassness. But it does occasionally happen that these women, eager for an extra shilling or three, may be persuaded to yield up all the various sweet nothings which less cautious men let slip. And all men are less cautious in the throes of passion, with a whore for a bedfellow. Where, after all, has this fallen woman to turn? Surely not to anyone of significance. Who hears her secrets? The walls of her abode, sole ear to her drunken ramblings?"

"So you use them as spies. Blackmail? Charming."

He dimples. "I'm pleased you think so."

"You really need to stop pretending that I'm complimenting you."

He has stepped in close enough that she must either shrink back against the table or, in standing her ground, press herself indecently to his chest; she does not yield, as he predicted, and stands nose to nose with him, coldly, both arms crossed over her breast, and the magnifying glass tapping impatiently against her elbow. "I trust you're properly intrigued?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

"I would rather be this man's next victim than work for you."

Ah, but you see she's captivated; minds such as this do not merely skim the surfaces of such conundrums, leave a bit of foam in their wake, ascend once more to sturdier shores. Already she turns it about in her mind, ascertaining from whence trickles all its tells: perhaps the realm of spirits roams in free anonymity, but man leaves his prints in the dust, no matter how scanty his heel.

She steps back so that she may circle him now, tapping the magnifying glass, looking at him from beneath her long lashes; he turns in sync with her to mirror her steps, hands still behind his back, the smile growing on his face as she cocks her head and, having failed to glean from the press of his trousers and the buttons on his vest anything which he does not want her to foretell, asks instead, "Do you think they're being targeted precisely because they're your employees, or simply because they're prostitutes, any old lunatic who can keep it together for three seconds can lure them off into a dark alley?"

"Either way, my employees are dying by a hand not my own."

She rolls her eyes.

"You know," she says, and resumes her pacing. "It might be easier for me to tackle this case if somebody hadn't destroyed my analysis table. Also? Your brother broke my microscope while he was playing with it."

"Yes, Kol can be somewhat trying. You should never let him touch anything." He stops.

And this too she mirrors, turning so they are once more face to face, all the color in her cheeks now, and in her eyes the spark of something which he may be so bold as to call a beginning.

When she returns home from the mortuary, her chemicals have all been replaced; there's an entire bundle of pipettes on the work table.

And beside this: a brand new Powell & Lealand with a bow around it.

Next morning, Caroline wakes him by tearing the blanket off him. "Up, up, up, up, up!" she calls, now wrenching open the curtains. London, having recklessly allied itself with her, stabs him in the eye with a ray of sunlight.

In the sitting room, a mug of tea and a piece of toast are each thrust into his hand, the shirt he has haphazardly buttoned set to rights, a tie thrown and rapidly knotted round his neck.

"It's eight o'clock in the morning," he tells her, blinking.

"I know; I let you sleep in. And as a thank you, you're going to go through all of these," she says, and onto the breakfast table she deposits a stack of newspapers which shudders the entire structure; the floor lists as in a storm. "That's Enzo and Tim," she calls out half a second before the bell sounds downstairs.

"Who's Tim?" he asks.

Tim, it happens, is the man he saw some days ago, in his shirtsleeves and Donegal, one of Caroline's many unofficial agents which she has trained and ranged about the streets of London so it may not so much as breathe without lifting her bright and nosy head towards its stirrings.

He's a good half a foot taller than Enzo, and hangs back while customary greetings commence between Caroline and her favourite Irregular; brown-haired, a sandy sort of hue, from what he can make out beneath the hat, and with the end of it curling at the nape of his neck, an untamable piece at which its owner scratches in agitation.

The blue eyes are framed with lashes Bekah would envy, and the shaved cheeks smooth as a child's; a boyish twenty-four, he wagers.

His profile is stunning.

"Kol Mikaelson," he says, coming forward with his hand out to get a look at the entire thing.

"Tim O'Sullivan," Caroline replies for him, grabbing both their hands as they move to shake the other and flinging them back toward their respective owners. "Now. Boys. Murderers don't just spring out of the ether fully formed. So. This man must have some sort of rehearsal, maybe an earlier murder, maybe some assaults- we're looking for anything with any sort of passing resemblance to the recent mutilations in Whitechapel. He spent some time refining this. Set aside anything involving stabbings with no apparent motive, any violent attacks against prostitutes, all of it, I want it here." She slaps the table with her hand. "We'll go back to the beginning of this year, and then farther back, if necessary. Enzo." She heaves another stack onto the table.

Tim appears slightly overwhelmed; it's a good look for him, very crinkly about the eyes.

"Kol." She taps the one with which she opened his morning, and beside it adds a third, pointing at Tim; he jumps a bit. "I want your findings alphabetized, and in chronological order. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Enzo drawls, but facetiously; Tim is not so jaunty about his answer, and mutely nods.

"I don't see a fourth stack, darling. Are you merely cracking the whip today?"

"Nope; I have errands to take care of. Be back in an hour, and you can all present me with your findings then."

There are two incidences which Caroline deems noteworthy.

The first is from the 25th of February, which saw 38-year-old widow Annie Millwood admitted to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary for stab wounds to the legs and lower part of her abdomen, inflicted (in her own somewhat tipsy words) by a strange man who took out a clasp knife and stabbed her.

On March 28th, 39-year-old 'dressmaker' Ada Wilson opened her door to a man about 30, around 5' 6", fair moustache and sunburnt face who threatened to kill her if she didn't give him money, and, when refused, stabbed her twice in the throat. Ada's neighbors, being somewhat skeptical of the legitimacy of any dressmaker who caters to an all-male clientele in those blistery morning hours of butchers and candlestick makers (ought he to have resisted that?), have added to the reports their own interpretations of the victim's career.

Caroline paces in front of the table, tapping her chin. "Ok. She's our most likely connection, then, but I'll send someone around to ask at the Infirmary about Millwood too. She's dead now, but there must be a record somewhere of the attack, and maybe someone still on staff who personally treated her." She spins round toward Tim, and says, quite abruptly, "Take off your clothes."

"What? Me clothes?" Tim freezes over the stack he's still sifting through. He's a nice soft accent, touch of Dublin in it, and in its foundations something farther south that he can't place.

"You too, Enzo," she adds, and Enzo, ever obedient, only shrugs and begins to divest himself of his trousers. He's lamentably free of sodomistic urges, but a perfect eye full, which he leans back to enjoy, putting up his feet on the heap of papers he's given up halfway through, and which Tim has undertaken to finish.

Tim looks at him.

"You heard what she said, darling." He settles in to watch; Tim has a set of shoulders on him which he is quite sure will prove a perfectly commendable leg rest once naked.

Caroline has dashed off to her room and returned with a police uniform thrown over either arm; the left she hands to Enzo, and the right to Tim, who remains defiantly clothed. Absolute rubbish, if you ask him.

"Enzo, you're off to the infirmary at the workhouse. You will ask these questions." She thrusts a notebook at him. "Tim, you're going to interrogate Ada Wilson and any chatty neighbors." She pushes another notebook into his dumb hands, which have only just accepted the uniform and hang now woodenly uncertain of their mechanical duties. "Oh, wait! Sorry; I forgot you're actually a nice man with a sense of modesty. I'm used to Kol."

"I resent that," he says.

"You're complimented by that. Anyway," she continues, turning to Tim, and shooing him along with clucking tongue and little flaps of her hands, "you can change in my room, on the right. Don't use Kol's; he'll 'just so happen' to remember he needs something in there and walk in on you."

"This is a terrible assassination of my character," he assures Tim.

"Move!" Caroline demands, clapping her hands sharply, and skittering Tim on ahead of her as if fleeing a hunter, or perhaps a plague. "Enzo, sit in that chair; it's time for your makeup."

She sends Enzo and Tim off to their respective tasks, moustached, balding, Tim badly pox-scarred on his left cheek, Enzo with a mole on his right.

She walks George Yard in a jacket and trousers with Kol and his three pistols (sometimes you just need options, darling, he told her while secreting them all over). Lestrade and his men will have trampled everything, of course, and the thousands of shambling lives afterward which leave all their existence in their wake.

But there's always something to be learned. You can press your ear to the ground and listen to all ten thousand revelations shiver up from its soil, if you're willing, if you say to the voice which points out all the tread and re-tread trails that merge, mingle, shoot off in random directions, shh, shh, listen.

She lies down where the woman died.

Imagine: there is this fathomless dark, somewhere in some other world there is this rumored 'sun', and the hills put up their heads to touch it. But here you just pass from dark darker darkest and back again and if in daylight you're followed by all those normal hauntings of full noon you never even notice, the dress swishing round your heels and the cabs bellowing past, every ill-fated child with their hands hopefully in your pockets, here every myth stirs, shakes off its dust, roars from every niche and alley to turn against you your own beating heart.

She shuts her eyes.

Kol has kneeled beside her, but she doesn't notice that, she registers the warmth near her right side, she hears him push both of his hands into his pockets, she forgets all that.

So you pass through all these layers of dark dark darkest, each boom of your heart leaping you from one to the next, and that ever-present threat of your own footsteps, turning you around and around again, but ahead: this spit of land after a fatal sea.

You reach the George Yard Buildings and maybe you lean your hands on your knees; you take a deep breath.

She opens her eyes.

"There wasn't a struggle," she says aloud. "Nobody heard anything. She got here safely. She didn't live here, but she wasn't being pursued." She leaps to her feet. Kol watches her from where he's kneeling, hands still in his pockets. "She had a drinking problem, so. She's squandered the last of her earnings on alcohol." She turns toward the front of the tenement, puts out her hand to touch it. "She stops for a moment to lean on the building. And in the interim, she's strangled, and stabbed thirty nine times. Why would you stab someone thirty nine times?"

"Because I'm very angry with them," Kol replies.

"Exactly. But if this same man murdered Mary Ann Nichols, it wasn't Martha Tabram he was angry with."

She whisks out her magnifying glass and kneels next to Kol, going over each inch of the steps and all the surrounding area one painful centimeter at a time, crawling along through the soot and the horse manure and at intervals stopping to lay nearly flat, with her nose half an inch from the street.

It isn't until nearly twilight that they reach Buck's Row; Kol unbuttons his jacket and displays one of his pistols openly.

She repeats her whole meticulous process while the sun retires and the lamps are lit and there begins to slither from the alleyways and side streets the worst of the surrounding districts.

She paces around the spot where Mary Ann Nichols was left, measuring and examining and from every corner of the stable yard and the narrow street leading to it running the glass, touching the cobblestones with her fingers, remarking every stray fleck and smear.

Kol stands somewhere behind her back the entire time, watching the passersby, and whipping out his murder credentials every time someone lingers suspiciously: "My brother is Satan, At Your Service Mikaelson" he probably says, and escorts them on their way.

But once he threw a client out their window for calling her an 'impudent slut' and of the guy who tried to revenge himself by bombing her hansom at Scotland Yard after the arrest of one of his associates, there remains no precise trail of his last moments; pieces of him are still washing up on the Thames. So maybe he says simply, "Hello, darling; Kol Miakelson," and they run for their lives.

He likes it when they run for their lives.

He must get it from his brother.

"So?" Kol asks her in the hansom on their way home.

"I'm thinking," she says, and settles back into the cushions.

Enzo and Tim have brought back nothing the newspapers have not already sensationalized, but there is a telegram waiting for her from He Whom She Refuses To Name.

It's full of little dancing men, articulated stick figures posed in a variety of ways, and at the bottom, his ridiculous flourish of a signature, just 'Klaus', because of course a second name is for the poor and law-abiding.

"Can your brother write a normal message?!" she snaps, and sits down to decipher it.

The Ten Bells pub is located at the corner of Commercial and Church Streets and in our contemporary times now enjoys some small measure of fame in connection with the case I here recount. However, in this autumn of 1888, it was merely another Whitechapel fixture, unremarkable peddler of rum, issuing from its windows the raucous laughter and copious lighting of any thriving business. To the description 'clean' we must add 'suitably enough' and content ourselves with this grim yardstick of relativity.

It stands in the company of several other such establishments, and marks a standard point on the journey of any street woman plying her trade, tavern pavements being a commendable wellspring for those drunk and pliable clients by which a lady makes her living. To reach the door, you must circumvent several of them. Such revelations will further serve our narrative in future pages, but for now it is merely a notable fact with which I dress my stage.

In the far corner, in the very back of the pub, behind a table of seamen, there is a man; you know him well. At this stage in our tale you will have been granted merely a tantalising glimpse, but of course you have read of his past exploits, for who of any small literary ability will not have found himself drawn to this remarkable Mars?

It is here, however, you may feel your first flicker of pity in place of reverence. I have never known him to speak of love; too long was there a stone in place of a heart, a foundation of machinations where another man might have sewn tenderness, and walked softly in its path. Love art for men; to call Him such is to pluck the wings from Chronos.

But he had…something for this woman. A seed, once planted, if forgotten, left unwatered, will nevertheless put down roots, and with every cunning endeavour to lift its first tender shoot in quest of life, and so too did something in him lean towards her now, seeking perhaps warmth, friendship, a duality which in her he sensed, or, perhaps, wished to sense.

Truth be told, he was lonely.

Let us not humanise him. Does the devil not have his rainy afternoons, does he not gaze upon the latest soul put to his rack and feel in himself neither pleasure, neither pain, does he not feel where his sensations ought to lie and find in their place a sort of frost- neither frost, but something colder still, which stuns from him every fleeting joy?

But he checked his pocket watch ten times in as many minutes and for twice that length of time wrestled the folds of his jacket, and nervously adjusted his tie.

To be a customer at the moment of her entrance.

To see the door open on what must be merely another labourer and instead the shining hair, the blue eyes, the lips, the face which shares none of its qualities with the common detective, jaded to his lot, who views with foggy disinterest the sobbing beggar and his dishevelled mother. In her there is a softness, a supreme sympathy; in her there is a heart of which he might have conceived in his long distant childhood, when he dreamt into his mother that tenderness which to children and their fancies is for some time a worthy replacement.

He stands involuntarily.

For him the seamen and the whores have ceased to exist. Their laughter has vanished, the barman after it, into this maw go the gaslights, the hansoms, the pervasive stink of soot and sweat.

Perhaps it is then he ought to have known, but never are we competent diagnosers of our own frailties.

"Caroline," he says, and pulls out a chair for her.

She does not take it. She snaps, "Could you maybe send me a normal telegram like a human instead of acting like the very freaking embodiment of a moustache-twirling sensation literature villain?"

He takes his own chair and sits with his elbows upon the table, resting his fingers under his chin. "Would you care to know why you're here, love?"

"Don't call me that."

There is a certain angle at which she tilts her head to emphasize her irritation; it's quite captivating.

He smiles, looking up at her from beneath his brows.

It takes some time; in Caroline Forbes there is an unflensed core of steel which neither time nor chauvinism have whittled, and with great reluctance bends; for nearly an entire minute they look at one another, she tapping her fingers against the arms she has crossed over her breast, he patiently waiting with his pointer fingers beneath his bottom lip.

At last she takes the chair.

"A woman called Mary Ann Connelly, street alias 'Pearly Poll', claimed to have been in the presence of Martha Tabram, whom she knew as 'Emma', on the Bank Holiday night which saw her demise."

"I'm aware."

"They were in the company of two soldiers, guardsmen, a corporal and a private; the private and Tabram advanced to George Yard when the foursome split up round 11.45. Poll, either through artifice or that muzzy veil of drunkenness under which she no doubt conducted her business, failed to identify either her own client or that of Tabram. However." He leans back in his chair with some satisfaction, smiling at her. "You may have remarked I have some avenues of inquiry open to me which our dear Inspector Lestrade has neither the wherewithal nor the stomach to exploit."

She folds her hands on the table; he can see at war within her that professional curiosity and the natural derision which she heaps upon the head of talents such as his. "You found them?"

"I have it on good authority the private has recently been discharged from military duty and counts this pub among his favourite watering holes."

"I don't think you have anything on 'good' authority. Is he here now?"

"Not yet." He leans forward once more. "But that's to our fortune. Had a sniff round Buck's Row and the George Yard Buildings today, hmm?"

"Kol told you."

"Kol tells me nothing I do not already know. Let's have a crack at your own methods, shall we?" He steeples his fingers again. "These are clearly your 'deducting' clothes. You've not bothered to change, which means you've come nearly straight from an investigation and in all eagerness, if I may flatter myself, to see me."

"You may not."

He ignores that. "You're therefore on the scent of something. Perhaps only a theory, but you're turning over some possibility or another. You won't have drawn any conclusions without acquainting yourself with the facts of the case. Martha Tabram was killed nearly a month ago; any traces of the killer will have long vanished, but not for you. Nichols is fresh; you'll have been in even more eagerness to examine the site of her murder. My telegram said only 'The Tens Bells 10 o'clock'. You turned straight round and came here after decoding it on nothing stronger than the name of a pub and an appointed time, which means you anticipated something more than just the pleasure of my company. You want to know what information I have, whether it supports or obliterates your own theories, which you have not spun sitting in your armchair at 221B as you've solved so many a seemingly hopeless knot, or else you wouldn't be here. No." He licks his bottom lip and lowers his voice to that intimate level of the confidante. "This is something new, even for you, isn't it, Miss Forbes?"

She sits in absolute silence for a moment.

"Nothing is new in the annals of crime. Not even you. The evil London overlord has already been done. Jonathon Wild, Adam Worth?"

"Mere prototypes." He waves his hand. "I'm something else altogether."

She bites her bottom lip in contemplation of this, without wavering for a second in her scrutiny of him. "You might be. But Jonathon Wild and Adam Worth never had a Caroline Forbes."

"No," he says softly. "I suppose they hadn't."

He just snaps his fingers suddenly, and two men materialize out of the crowd to snatch a man just coming through the door.

They're sparring when the man enters the pub; he's trying to trip her on his dimples, and she is giving him all her very best Not Here For It. He looks at her like…she doesn't want to say. Not like an opponent. You almost see something human in him; there's this surfacing in his eyes. If Matt had looked at her like that she'd have slept away her best years in America, with his children in her arms, and she thinks careful, careful: tiptoe so, so gingerly through this.

And yet still he sees the man.

He doesn't even take his eyes off her face; he sits back in his chair. He snaps his fingers, and the barman looks up, the sailors in front of them briefly turn around, for a moment even the smoke pauses, and hangs in wary indecision near the ceiling.

The man is dragged kicking and yelling to their table and everyone looks from Klaus to elsewhere.

"What the bloody fuck?" he demands.

"You're in the presence of a lady, mate, let's watch our tongue, shall we?" Klaus says mildly enough, and then he leans in, he lowers his voice, he hovers his lips half an inch from the man's ear, he gives him such a caressing look. He says, "It wouldn't be the first I've cut out for impertinence."

There is no disbelieving him.

The man goes still.

"Caroline," Klaus says, without pulling back from the man, close enough to kiss him, close enough that the man must feel the breath on his neck, must feel in his chest, in his throat, this natural little quailing. "May I present to you Private John Sholto?"

"How do you know who I am? I don't know you; I've never seen you in my life!"

"That's hardly important, John. May I call you that?" he asks, clasping the man intimately round the neck, and giving him a smile that's most definitely felled a woman or two in its day. "Listen very carefully, John. You're going to answer any questions this ravishing young woman puts to you, without hesitation, without any attempt at deceit." He shakes the man a little. "Hmm? I don't see any reason you can't walk out of here with all your limbs intact, do you? Your brother's stupidity isn't genetic, so let's conduct ourselves with a bit more sense. I'm having a very nice evening." He looks pointedly at her, turning the dimples now from John and back again. "I'd hate to sully it with something so crass as splenetic fluid. You just can't get that out of your shirt. Trust me, mate, I've tried."

Private John Sholto has gone very stiff; she can see his heart beating in his throat, how his sweat rises to his brow, his upper lip, all the little nooks and crannies that first reveal their fear, and with a slow tightening of his hands around the edge of the table he croaks out, "Jimmy…Jimmy's…that was you?"

"What did you do to his brother?" she demands.

Klaus makes this faux regretful face. "Isn't there any mystery in romance anymore, love?"

"This isn't a romance? Do you think you're freaking courting me?"

He doesn't answer; he just smiles and he lets loose of the poor guy's neck and once more he leans back in his chair and puts together his fingers, raising both his eyebrows at her.

"Let me see your hands," she says at last, and John thrusts them obediently out, glancing nervously to Klaus.

She examines the nails, turns his hands over for a moment, asks him, "Are you wearing the same boots you had on when you met with Martha Tabram?", and when he answers positively, she says, "May I see them?"

She goes over the boots with first her eyes and then the glass, touches a nick on the heel, and, handing them back, says to Klaus, "He had nothing to do with it." She turns to the man. "You can go. He won't hurt you."

Private John Sholto scurries away.

"Interesting," Klaus says without unsteepling his fingers. "It's been nearly a month since Martha Tabram died. Have his hands and boots really so well preserved the traces of that night?"

"It's not what he did then; it's what he's done in the meantime," she replies without bothering to elaborate, and stands. "We're done. Don't have a good night."

"I trust my brother is lurking somewhere nearby to see you safely home?" he asks as she turns around, and she allows herself this one tiny smile, which she turns back to let him see in its full and perky smugness. "He's been here the whole time," she says, and for this tiny, tiny moment, she gets to bask in the divine glow of his flabbergasted face.

It clears her skin.

A middle-aged sailor slips away from the bar and limps up to them, favoring his right leg.

"That's a nice touch," she says.

"Thank you," Kol replies in his own voice. "Hello, Nik," he says, and leans over the table to tweak his brother's nose.

"Well," she chirps, taking the arm Kol holds out to her, "I guess we know who's better at disguises, don't we?"

And then she turns, and she flounces out of the bar.

A/N: Coming soon: Prostitute Enzo, Klaus tries to date Caroline by kidnapping a child, Kol being Kol, and, oh yeah, more mutilated corpses. We'll see Elijah and Rebekah at some point, too.

The intention is to dip into the middle of the canon, after the Sherlock/Watson dynamic has already been long established, but I will later touch somewhat on how Caroline's sidekick came to be the younger brother of her archnemesis. (Spoiler alert: because it makes Klaus' eye twitch a little.)

Also, can anyone venture a guess as to the identity of Klaus' fawning, overdramatic 'biographer'? lmao