Chapel Noir (19 page)

I shall never forget my reunion with Quentin Stanhope on the train from Prague to Paris, and how when I swooned at penetrating his disguise at last, he made short work of my confining corset strings in a manner I am still not fully sure of to this day, save that it was quite improper and strangely thrilling.

Indeed, all of the events that I became involved in through Irene and her sideline of private inquiry agent were usually quite improper and strangely thrilling.

I had never met such a pack of scoundrels and murderers and wicked women until after I was “rescued” from starving on the streets by Irene Adler! Now one of these fallen women was about to be imported into our very midst. This girl seemed fairly fresh and innocent, but I suppose that could be a pose. I cannot say I relished her close company, but could hardly object to a “rescue” attempt when I myself had benefited from one.

While Irene was gone I occupied myself with copying my sketches of the footprints in the carpet from the miniature chatelaine notebook onto pieces of the sketching paper I use to lay out designs for my needlework projects. I must admit I took an intense pleasure in translating my measurements into a life-size representation of the impressions. Imagine! I might be looking at the sole of Jack the Ripper!

In truth, I enjoyed my role as recording artist for Irene’s problems almost as much as I relish my role as diarist, though no one will ever read my homely narratives. I suppose there might be some interest in the more lurid aspects of our investigations, but I certainly would never countenance the publication of what is so private to me and of such little interest to the world in general.

I can only hope that John H. Watson, M.D., is similarly sensible and discreet.

The time fairly flew, and then Irene made her entrance in the open door of our apartments, the American girl beside her, along with a porter with yet more baggage. I was pleased to see, however, that Miss Pink traveled with only one trunk.

Miss Pink (I must remember to call her Elizabeth even in my thoughts) wasted no time on renewed acquaintance, but came rushing to the desk at which I worked.

“Well, here I am, persuaded by this silver-tongued diva to accept free room and board with no need of accepting other, more intimate offers, and given an opportunity to develop my skills for other marketplaces than
maisons de tolerance
. I see Miss Huxleigh has been as busy as a bookmaker! I am told that I am to apprentice you in the useful arts. What wonderful work! Imagine: those faint impressions we saw on the nap of a carpet are now laid out as clearly as a footstep in hot tar. You could do illustrations for the daily newspapers.”

“Oh, no. My poor drawings are for private viewing only. And what journal would care to print representations of something so ugly as boot prints?”

“Why, the
Police Gazette
,” said she, drawing up a chair and sitting down beside me without being invited, an American habit, I take it. “If only you and Missus Norton had been crawling around White-chapel, they would have paid you royally for all these footprints . . . this one looks like my best satin slipper with the Louis XIII heel.”

With that the girl ran to unbuckle and unlock her steamer trunk and began tossing out articles of clothing until she emerged triumphant, rather like Prince Charming, with a single slipper except that hers was fashioned of silk and not glass.

She galloped back to the desk and set the filthy sole down on my drawing. It fit the outline to a T-strap.

“Call me Cinderella!” she crowed (and indeed, her voice lilted into the raucous range of Casanova in full cry). “That is very good work, Miss Huxleigh! It shows that your other drawings are liable to be tiptop, too.”

“Tip-top?”

“Perfect. Splendid, as they say in Blighty. That was my last stop, you know, and I learned a thing or two about that nasty Ripper. I’m sure I can help you pursue the fiend now that he’s moved on to Paris.”

“My dear girl, we are here to help
you
.”

“Then we are all of one mind. We will work together. I hear that you have met with Sherlock Holmes. I would give anything to meet him. He is all the talk of New York. And I hear that you take notes. So do I!”

“Indeed. I rather thought your line of work was less . . . practical.”

“Oh, anything a girl may do to stay alive and independent is practical, Miss Huxleigh. I admit I don’t let much stop me. If I am overbearing, you must let me know.”

Where would I begin?

“Dinner,” Irene said from the door to her bedroom, “would be a good idea.” She had shed her coat and bonnet. “I think we three may patronize the hotel dining room without causing scandal. We can also be served in this chamber, but perhaps should celebrate our alliance with a public outing.”

Alliance? Is that how one would describe good works?

I was beginning to wish that we had got on better with Sherlock Holmes.

20.
Wild Oats

Some would see only the surface: an ungoverned, filthy boy,
sexually crude and personally licentious, precocious only in
sinning, sneering, and thumbing his “snot-nose” at a wiser
world
.
—
NOTE TO MYSELF

FROM A YELLOW BOOK

He is resisting my efforts to accompany him on his nightly outings.

I have given him his lead for long enough, first in London, now here. It is time that I am initiated into his secret ways.

I was forced to point out that he depends upon me for everything: food, drink, clothes. Especially drink.

His capacity is the stuff of legend. I must remind myself that he is still so young, though his rough features and unkempt hair, his amazing lust for everything sensual—and “sensual” is too elegant a word, perhaps “the sensational” is better—his every instinct is the opposite of culture, of civilization.

When I look at him, I feel that I am on the fringe of some borderland inhabited by Huns and Vandals. Or Vikings. Those whose reputation for pillage and rapine still goes unsurpassed. I look into his simple, savagely compelling eyes and think of Nero the crucifier, Genghis Khan the conqueror, Vlad the Impaler, Torquemada the torturer, Ivan the Terrible.

Oh, he is magnificent. There is nothing of which he is not capable, which means that he can be a great and powerful force in the world of tomorrow, if properly trained. If properly harnessed and disciplined.

But he is like those fierce northern pack dogs with the pale blue eyes and the strength many times their size. He runs for himself and no one else. He runs for the fire of running, the fire of breathing the icy air, the raw alcohol fumes, for the lust of hunting and mounting and rending.

And yet this magnificent animal nature is fettered. Is tied to hundreds of years of simpering self-doubt and guilt. Christianity and that broken god on the cross have much to answer for.

The contradiction is tearing him apart, as it rends all who meet and have doings with him.

I must be careful.

I must go where he goes, see what he does.

I must be very careful with my beast, my master, my beast.

My cipher in light and dark, good and evil, life and death.

My creature, my butcher boy.

My key to the future of empire, and everything that goes with it.

21.
The Women of Whitechapel

Every man is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
—
MARK TWAIN

“The most puzzling aspect of these Parisian crimes,” Irene said the next morning as we studied my portraits of footprints, “is the great variance between the scenes of the crimes.”

She glanced at me and Elizabeth.

“You two have absorbed far more from the sensational press about these atrocities in London. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of, to ignore the entire sequence of events.”

“I can do more than imagine, Irene; I can tell you. You were busy hobnobbing with that Bernhardt woman and driving out with Godfrey to visit Maison Worth in the rue de Rivoli.”

What I intended to be a roll call of idleness Elizabeth took for a list of honor.

“Bernhardt! Worth! Rue de Rivoli! You have seen Paris, Mrs. Norton! Oh, can we not go see these wonders?”

“You are to call me Irene, remember, and we cannot go anywhere amusing until this matter of the transplanted Ripper is settled.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth murmured contritely. “I forgot myself.”

“You do not want to do that again,” Irene said sardonically. “There is so much of you to forget.”

At that Elizabeth lived up to her nickname and blushed bright pink.

“I do not have a sensational cast of mind,” Irene mused regretfully. “Perhaps I have absorbed my quota of sensationalism through the medium of opera plots. That really is a very good idea, you know.”

“What!” I admit that I was a bit exasperated by now.

“The creation of a cantata, or a closet opera, based on the lives and wives of Henry VIII, with me singing all the female roles. I would need a sophisticated composer, and a fine, fat basso for a partner.”

“You would have to lose your head twice.”

“Singing angelically, of course, to the bitter end, over and over. Perhaps it could be combined with the legend of Bluebeard,” she speculated, “for an additional French flavor.”

In fact I was glad to hear her reconsidering a performing career. A compact “portmanteau” piece that could be performed anywhere with a minimum of cast, costume, and stage setting would be most convenient to her current life. That this fortuitous notion emanated from Sherlock Holmes was incidental, I told myself, though my teeth ground at the thought for some reason. Perhaps it was at finding myself thinking in a French expression:
portmanteau
.

Was I possibly becoming . . . Continental?

“I have some notes myself,” Elizabeth said, producing a blank-page book filled with a strange combination of handwriting and cryptic symbols.

“It’s my own system, Miss Huxleigh,” she said as she noticed me noticing her script.

This cryptic form of shorthand only confirmed my suspicion that Elizabeth was among us because she was a Pinkerton agent. Why did Irene not trust me with this intelligence? Of course, when it came to the London depredations of Jack the Ripper Irene was facing a condition she relished less than all others: ignorance.

“You write shorthand?” I asked Elizabeth quite pointedly.

“Not quite shorthand,” Elizabeth said, rushing on. “Anyway, there were suspects aplenty for the role of Jacky-boy, most of them low-class persons from the slums. From the start, though, there was some notion that the Ripper might be a step up in class from his victims. They all went meek as lambs to the slaughter, and sad as their lots were and drunk as most of them were, they were wise enough to know a rum dude from a legitimate client.”

She stared for a moment at her own writings as if they were an alien transcript, then went on.

“Mary Ann Nichols,” she said slowly, as if naming the dead repeated the crime in a way.

“The first Whitechapel victim,” I prompted her, sometimes known as “Polly” Nichols. After all, I read the newspapers at the time as well.

Elizabeth straightened and resumed her brisk report, eyes on her summary. She reminded me a bit of Sherlock Holmes at his most officious.

“Her husband had an affair with the midwife who delivered their fifth child.”

I couldn’t help gasping at the cruel betrayal.

“He kept the children and paid her an allowance of five shillings a week until he learned she had become a prostitute. She liked to drink. Needed to, would better describe it. She was a small woman, just over five feet tall, of forty-three years.”

Irene noted, “You are well informed.”

I couldn’t tell if it was a straightforward comment, or a gibe. Did she know Elizabeth’s real role, or not? The uncertainty was maddening, yet I did not dare ask her on so little evidence. Nor did I wish to know that I was being kept ignorant with Irene’s complicity.

“The London newspapers erupted with information about the Ripper’s victims,” Elizabeth said. “I have always thought that information was the answer to all life’s problems, but am no longer so sure. Anyway, on August 30 last, Mary Ann was drunk and hadn’t four pennies for a doss house, though she’d tried for a bed. She had high spirits, though, and a ‘jolly bonnet.’

“At 2:30
A.M
. she was even drunker and told a woman friend she’d be off the streets soon. Within an hour and forty minutes, a carman found her dead in Bucks Row. Her throat was cut, and her abdomen had been slashed until the intestines showed.

“Dark Annie Chapman,” she went on in a monotone that sounded like a dirge, “was even smaller than Mary Ann—barely five feet—and older, forty-seven. She’d had three children: a daughter lost to meningitis at twelve, a son sent to a crippled children’s home, and another daughter sent to an institution in France.”

I shook my head at these serial tragedies, but Irene stiffened at mention of France.

“Her husband gave her a weekly allowance of ten shillings until he died in ‘86. Then she turned to drink and doss houses and the streets. She was seen alive, with a man, at 5:30
A.M
. on September 8. At 5:45 her body was discovered by a carman living at 29 Hanbury Street, her throat cut and her skirt bunched above her knees. The intestines had been drawn from her slashed abdomen and placed over her right shoulder. Like . . . ribbons. Her stomach lay above her left shoulder, and her womb was completely missing.”

“These were the first internal injuries,” Irene observed.

I nodded.

“Elizabeth”—our own Elizabeth faltered at the name—“Long Liz, she was called. Long Liz Stride, though she was only five-foot-two. She was Sweden-born, forty-four, and had married an Englishman named Stride, who died in ‘84, four years before her. She later claimed that her husband and children had died during the famous steamer collision of the
Princess Alice
with the
Bywell Castle
in the Thames, in which six hundred-some people lost their lives.”

“A steamer collision,” Irene mused. “I suppose she sought sympathy.”

“But she was not believed, and rightly so. She was seen many times on the night of September 29, often embracing a man variously described, but once he was said to be well dressed in a cutaway coat.”

“A cutaway coat,” I pointed out, as few of the Ripper suspects were that well garbed.

“Indeed. She was found at 1:00
A.M
. on Berner Street, throat cut, but she wasn’t mutilated. Catharine Eddowes, who was found forty-five minutes later, was not so lucky. She was forty-six and just five feet tall. She was arrested for drunkenness the night of September 27, but let go at 1:00
A.M
. the next morning. She gave the false name of Mary
Ann
Kelly to the jailer. He released her
at the very moment
that Elizabeth Stride’s body was being discovered. She was found forty-five minutes later, throat cut, skirt bunched at her waist, her bowels pouring from her body.”

I couldn’t help wincing at Elizabeth’s cut-and-dried description, which read as if taken from a police report, void of the horrified expressions that found their way into the press accounts.

“The Ripper was interrupted earlier,” Irene suggested, “but made up for it later with a vengeance.”

“So the police concluded,” Elizabeth said. “This was the same night the anti-Semitic scrawl was found about 3:00
A.M
. in Goulson Street. ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’ At least that is what the message was rumored to be. Sir Charles Warren ordered the graffiti removed within two and a half hours.”

“He feared an uprising against the Jews?”

“Perhaps. Jews was reportedly spelled ‘Juwes,’ which is an unlikely spelling, even by the ignorant. Those who hate people for their race generally learn to spell the hated syllables, if nothing else. Perhaps the message had nothing to do with Jewish matters.

“He cut her face. Eddowes’s.” Elizabeth’s voice shook for the first time. “Catharine’s. He slit her eyelids and sliced off the tip of her nose. What was done elsewhere was not reported in the press, but I have heard that this was the most thorough mutilation yet.”

“An odd sort of distinction,” Irene observed, “as if taking a body apart was an escalating achievement.”

“The most thorough dissection until Mary Jane Kelly, that is,” I put in. “The real Mary Jane Kelly.”

Irene immediately fastened on my distinction. “One almost identical first name and a single surname attached to two different women, both victims of the same killer. Merely coincidence?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “The newspapers and the public throve on the details of the deaths. I found myself dwelling on the sad lives of these women rather than their brutal deaths.”

“And the ‘real’ Mary Jane Kelly?”

“Used the name of Marie Jeanette Kelly sometimes,” Elizabeth said. “She claimed a fine gentleman client had taken her to Paris last year.”

Irene frowned at that. The word “Paris” in any Ripper context alarmed her like a siren in the street.

“Her first husband died in an ironworks explosion,” Elizabeth went on. “The man she lived with in Whitechapel, Joseph Barnett, didn’t want her to be a prostitute, but they were thirty shillings behind on their rent of a few square feet in Miller’s Court, a one-room hovel, and he was out of work. What else was she to do?

“Marie Jeanette, or Mary Jane, was fair, blond and blue-eyed, and only twenty-five years old.” Elizabeth’s voice trembled as if she saw this young woman in her mind’s eye, as if her youthfulness touched the American girl. “A lissome girl of five-foot-seven, she would have stood taller than most reported Ripper suspects, save for the one tallish man seen with Liz Stride.

“Two people heard the cry of ‘Murder!’ from the area near her room about 4:00
A.M
., but she was seen in the neighborhood by several witnesses between 8:00 and 10:00
A.M
. The landlord’s agent, coming for the delinquent rent, peered through the room’s window at 10:45
A.M
. and ran screaming from what he described as ‘more the work of a devil than of a man.’

“Mary Jane Kelly had been flayed, mutilated, disemboweled, and dismembered.”

We were all silent for some time, imagining that tiny room splashed with blood and guts.

“They didn’t suffer,” Irene said at last. “There is that.”

Elizabeth paled, then burst into impassioned speech. “How can anyone know what those women suffered, even before Jack the Ripper? Those poor creatures just needed a couple pence for a bed for the night. Cribs, they called them—miserable, filthy cots in a row at a doss house. They were mostly widows and wives who’d been turned out, or who’d left brutes of husbands. They didn’t deserve to draw Jack the Ripper for a final client and a final crib.”

I was silent, remembering my few but desperate hours of homelessness after I’d been unfairly dismissed from my clerking position in London years before. If I had not met Irene . . . or if Irene had not seen my plight and chosen to rescue me. Yet the notion of these women selling themselves remained repugnant to me.

“Client!” I repeated the word with disdain. “You make their downfalls sound like an accident in a respectable business.”