Capeworld Comics

1872, Early August

 

One day, while walking Chopin Street, Cora saw the man.

But this time, the man was not a manifestation of her reputation. Her reputational manifestation was, as always these days, a weak little troll crouched in her shadow. She knew with one look that before her was the true ghost of the Werewolf of Blackwall–because he looked nothing like her manifestation, or the crazy-eyed madman that adorned the covers of so many issues of Illustrated Police News, or the superhuman menace printed on reformist pamphlets.

 

He looked just like a man in a coat.

 

Cora smirked.

 

One cover of Illustrated Police News came to her mind. It depicted the Werewolf as a beast-man with a mouth full of fangs. The cover asked WHO IS THE WEREWOLF? Inside the issue, several answers were offered–the insane son of a prominent family kept locked away in their ancestral home until one stormy night he escaped, the ghost of Bluebeard, Springheel Jack, or maybe even an actual werewolf.

 

None of the options were a little man with a crooked nose and bad teeth.

 

He was so different from her manifestation. The way she remembered him, with the darkness and the violence, garbed him in a terror that was not his own. But now that there were no shadows to hide his face, she could see that he was always just a man, just a sad man with a disgusting compulsion.

 

How could she not pity him?

 

The Werewolf’s blade and arm went through her like one breeze parting another.

 

Cora laughed, and her laugh was louder than any made by Agnes Little.

 

“Your father was a right bastard.” she whispered to the man. “But you don’t have to follow him, see? You’re his ghost. You aren’t him.”

 

The man continued to stab her, desperate to see a flash of blood and frustrated to find his blade clean.

 

“Oh, don’t you get it?” Cora sighed. “I suppose you don’t. I stopped being a victim, but you continued to be a killer.”

The man fell to his knees and looked at his hands.

 

He could do nothing to her, and thus he was nothing.

 

He wept as if he was a child who had been beaten.

 

“No blood for you. But that’s a good thing, if only you realized it. It keeps your hands clean.”

Cora helped the man off the ground, took him by his shoulders, and led him through the street. “Come on, little creature, let’s find you some help.”

 

By 1882, the certification of prostitution was repealed, ending the surgical rape that was legal under the Contagious Diseases Act and several reforms were passed within the Criminal Law Amendment Act which impaired the brothel trade including the raising of the age of consent from 12 to 16 and the criminalization of procuring prostitutes through intimidation or fraud. The swift passage of these reforms is historically credited to reformers such as Josephine Butler, the International Abolitionist Federation, and a ghost best known under the name Cora.