For Valentine’s Day, a taste of Bad Love and its consequences. Not quite horror, and not quite whimsy, we offer you an original story – some period fiction concerning the Deptford Assassin, Mr Dry, from our Tales of the Last Edwardian series.

The Workman and His Hire

When the door-handle turned, she was ready enough. She had expected it to end this way, and had wondered many nights how it would come about. Some hackster from the streets, half-cut on Holland gin and staggering as he raised the knife…

The man who entered the squalid room was not from her imaginings. His brown patent boots caught her attention above all else. They were perfectly polished, something that you never saw in this part of Spitalfields. It was common enough on Dorset Street to see men with no boots at all. Leather for drink, when all else was gone.

Neither tall nor short, he had a rounded face and pale blue eyes which watered slightly. Under other circumstances, she would have thought him a lawyer’s or a chandler’s clerk – a quiet, respectable sort of man.

“You are Miss Clara Smith,” he said. A statement, delivered in a soft voice.

He took off his bowler hat, but there was no convenient stand for it. Bending, he placed the bowler on the floor by his side. After some apparent thought, he moved it half an inch to the right.

She lifted herself up on her elbows, but that brought a fit of coughing, and more blood.

“I am Clara Smith,” she managed to say after the fit had died down. “And you… you are come from Charles Kebworth.” She spat into a bloody piece of cloth. She had no weapon, and no strength to use one. No strength to cling to this life.

“Yes.” He closed the door at his back.

Ragged ghosts of wallpaper clung to the walls, the laths showing through the plaster in many places. An enamel wash-basin, a crooked wardrobe and the bed were the only furnishings. It was a room much like many in the tenement lodging houses hereabouts, if not better than some. An actual, solid bed, rather than heaped blankets or a stale mattress on the floor, was considered a prize in some parts.

He glanced at the orange-box by the bed, a box in which a tired green blanket seemed to rise and fall. The faintest sound of breathing stirred the thick air.

“That will be his, I assume?”

“The boy is almost ten months old. He is called–”

A dismissive wave of the hand. “I know who you are, which is the point.”

The room stank of urine, sweat and sickness. The smells which came in through the broken window were little better. The screaming of drunks and whores rose from the streets, along with the fish-wife battles and the cry of the cat’s meat man. She had stayed at White’s Row Chamber for a while, but the porter had taken exception to the child’s crying, and her funds had run too low. This place, this stinking place, would be her last lodging.

“You are here to murder me,” she said, and coughed again. “I thought his thugs would come soon. That last note… I should not have threatened him. I wasn’t thinking. As it happens, I fear you need only wait. Another few days…”

“Consumption.” He looked closer. “And the fever well set in, I think.”

“Yes.”

She was almost unable to ask the question that had haunted her for weeks.

“Will you kill my boy as well? I know that Kebworth cares nothing for the child.”

A look that might have been mild surprise crossed the man’s face. “My client gave no instructions as to children, pets or sundries.”

Clara Smith fell back onto one arm, her chest banded with pain. “He merely wishes me dead and forgotten. An end to my demands, to my entreaties. An end to any risk to his position.”

“That would seem to be the case.”

“Who are you?” she asked. “Am I to be murdered by an unnamed stranger?”

He moved the bowler hat with one polished boot, and frowned at it. “This floor is none too clean.” He looked up. “My name is Edwin Dry.”

A gasp; a long, choking cough which spattered the cloth once more. She recovered herself.

“The Deptford Assassin. Are you sunk so low then, Mr Dry, that you pursue dying women.”

He seemed unaffected by her barb. “Mr Kebworth was having trouble finding you through the usual routes. I am not ‘usual’. I know the smell of these streets – and how to find a single bird within a rookery.”

Her smile was bitter. “But do you know your employer? Do you know what he does, to men and to women?”

Mr Dry pursed his lips, the slightest gesture. He came nearer. “I have a commission, and a fee to collect. Other people’s lives, whether joyous or tragic, are hardly my concern.

“So you do not know.” She sighed. “I loved him, once, and thought that love returned…”

Outside a woman shrieked her price, and a man laughed. Clara Smith wrung the rag between her fingers; the child slept on.

“I’m not the first he’s ruined, you understand. I’ll tell you the truth of Charlie Kebworth, of how his wife dines on roasts whilst I have sold the last buttons on my blouse for stale bread. Of how I loved him, and how he used me–”

Her breath gave out, and she coughed again into the rag.

“I would rather you did not. Time presses.” He slipped a long, slender knife from under his plain brown jacket. “It will be quick, if that concerns you.”

“Please.” She wiped bloody spittle from the corner of her mouth. She had been an actress, once, and tried to draw on what remained of her craft, her beauty. “Please listen, before you… put an end to me.”

This time the sigh came from the man. He lifted his half-hunter on its chain.

“Five minutes, then. No more.”

Clearing her lungs as best she could, Clara Smith began the last story she would tell.

Charles Kebworth shuffled the folders on his grand, expensive desk, seeing opportunity in each and every one. Plans for another factory, a scheme of transport, even an arch perhaps – the Kebworth Arch. There would be tenements to tear down, and monies to a certain Member of Parliament. Perhaps two Members, if he wished to expand down to the river itself. It could be done, it could be done…

This was to be his year. He must be clear-headed. The coffee by his left hand was cold, and he reached behind him to ring for a fresh pot. His fingers encountered soft cloth. He drew his hand away sharply, turning in the chair.

“What the…”

“I am here for my remuneration,” said Mr Dry.

Beyond him the heavy main door, which had been open a moment ago, was closed. Kebworth had no idea how the killer had passed his manservant or the clerk in the outer office. He chose to cover shock with bluster.

“You have no right coming in here unbidden – and unannounced. I demand –”

“She is dead. My remuneration, as agreed?”

The businessman stared as a small revolver slid into Mr Dry’s hand, seemingly from nowhere.

“Yes, yes.” Kebworth unlocked the top drawer of his desk, and brought out a plain white envelope, unsealed. Enough could be seen of its contents to suggest a considerable number of bank notes lay within.

He passed it to the other man. “You didn’t need to bring a gun to ensure payment, you know.”

Mr Dry glanced down at the weapon, and blinked. “That? I have that with me for a later commission.”

Kebworth breathed out noisily. “I see. What misbegotten soul is next?” He forced a smile. “No, I’m sure you won’t tell me. You are, I suppose, a businessman in your own right. We are not so very different.”

There was no smile from Mr Dry.

“A line I have heard many times,” he said. “But it will not wash, dear me, no. It will not wash.” He looked around the well-appointed office, noting the crystal tantalus filled with whisky, the leather-bound books, hardly opened, which lined the walls. “I merely kill people.”

“You profit from your love of murder.”

Mr Dry’s pale eyes seemed cold, distant. “Love? And twice I hear that word in one day. I am indifferent to it, myself.” He placed the envelope into an inner pocket. “But you, Mr Kebworth, have had opportunities to know love and embrace it. You received, but did not give fair measure back. I deem that poor business practice indeed.”

Kebworth cried out as Mr Dry’s boot slammed into the oak-fronted drawer, trapping the seated man’s fingers.

Mr Dry tutted. “You were reaching for your own revolver, perhaps? The one you keep under the papers in that drawer?”

“Damn you, I paid up, didn’t I? Why are you still here?”

Mr Dry reached into his jacket with his free hand. Between thumb and forefinger he held a small silver coin.

Kebworth eased his fingers free, flexing them in pain. “What’s that for, then? I hardly need loose change in my line of —”

The single shot came before Kebworth could move from his chair. He might have felt the impact in the very centre of his forehead, but it was doubtful.

“I am modern in my outlook,” murmured the Deptford Assassin. “A woman’s money is as good as any man’s.”

The grand businessman was no longer listening. The Kebworth Arch, shattered by a few grains of lead, would never rise over Spitalfields. Mr Dry considered the corpse for a moment, then slipped the threepenny bit into his pocket.

That had been all she had left in the world, that and the boy.

“I give you this,” she said as he raised the knife to her neck. She pressed the coin into his hand. “You must know why, having heard me out, and you must know how it shall be earned.”

In the circumstances, he considered it adequate. He liked to think that his rates were nothing if not flexible.

“It was most extraordinary,” said the Superintendent of the Christ Church Orphanage. “Never seen the man before, yet he walked in bold as day, into this very office.”

The clerk smiled at the turn of phrase, being fond of Wordsworth himself. “As bold as day, eh? Not another Sir Hubert, I hope. And he brought this child?”

The two men stared at the bundle on the Superintendent’s desk. One small hand was visible, clutching at the worn green blanket.

“Indeed. He passed this to me, with the boy.”

He held up a tarnished silver threepenny bit.

“ ‘The price of a life’, he said, ‘I shall know if you do not take good care’. And then he was gone, more swiftly than I would have thought a man could move.”

“Most extraordinary, as you say, sir.” The clerk reached for his pen. “I shall enter the babe as… Smith. A name that can serve for boatman or baron. Shall I give him a first name, for the books?”

The Superintendent tapped his lower lip.

“Hmm. We are up to the letter E, are we not? Edward? Edgar? No… I have a notion that I heard a name recently.”

He moved the blanket aside, and gazed into the infant’s almost colourless eyes.

“Write him in as… Edwin.”