“Jack is fine,” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking, Herman, what the devil are you doing in here?”
“I heard great things about the meat pie,” he said. “I thought I’d try for myself.”
“You’re being cagey.”
“So I am. I’m a guest, of course! One of your fellow club-men owed a large favor. As my entry for a few hours into this place eradicated his debt entirely, I expected greater things, I’ll be honest. This is quite sedate.”
“It’s a proper place,” I said. “I dined last evening with three members of the house of commons, and a crown prince.”
“Yes, that’s lovely. But I was anticipating something more debauched.”
“You’ll be needing a different sort of club for that.”
“I guess I will. Or, I can do as you, and risk my life and health in the rougher end of town.”
“Yes. Perhaps you should do that.”
We were interrupted by one of the house-men, with a refill for me and a drink for Herman. In the pub, we drank ale. Here, a decent bourbon or a gin and tonic. Brandy, if it was a holiday. London was largely without wine, which meant that was what I craved the most when I was there.
Herman asked the man for a cigar, and so we both had one of those as well, silent for a time as we drank and smoked.
“I have to say, I don’t think you’re glad to see me,” Herman said.
“It isn’t that,” I said, although he was correct. “It’s disconcerting. I know a great many people, from a number of avenues. Each occupy a narrow spot in my world. Seeing one of those people in a place where I should not expect to see them, I find arresting.”
He laughed, loudly enough to draw the temporary attention of some of the other men sharing the vast study. That kind of boisterousness was sufficient to get one shown the door.
“You did see me!” he said, slapping his knee. “I knew it!”
When I didn’t respond to this, he leaned forward into a whisper.
“In Whitechapel. Your hunting grounds. You saw me.”
“I did see you. And you me. I think we’ve established why my appearance on those streets is not unexpected. Why were you there? I’m sure an innocent explanation exists, but I admit I haven’t been able to settle on one on my own.”
“Innocent?” he laughed again. Quieter, this time, and with less evident mirth. “Benign, yes. I find things like innocence and guilt to be all but meaningless when self-reported. I will await your adjudication on the point to determine my degree of innocence.”
“All right, what is your benign explanation?”
“I was conducting an experiment.”
“Did it involve the man in the carriage?”
“It did.”
“I was under the impression a medical professional such as yourself only conducted experiments in the hospital. A ditch on the side of High Street past Midnight seem less than ideal conditions.”
“That depends on the experiment, Jack. Do you know what I do?”
“You’ve described yourself as a surgeon.”
“I am. And do you know what that means? It means I cut people up.”
On the whole, he was doing a terrible job of convincing me he wasn’t Jack the Ripper. I wondered if he was even trying. Granted, I hadn’t accused him of anything like that, but he must have known this was one of my concerns.
“You…”
“Professionally. I do it to figure out what’s wrong with them, and then I put them back together again, if I can. Sometimes, I remove something to see if that was the cause of their malady. Other times, it’s to see what happens once it’s removed. Is it essential? We know there are some things we simply can’t live without, of course. The heart, or the lungs, as examples. Do you know why I’m at St. Mary’s?”
“Because that’s where the sick people are?”
“That’s true, but not the sort of sick you may be thinking of. Here’s the dirty secret: a poor, institutionalized madman with no family, no prospect for release, no expectation for a future of any kind that exists outside the basement walls of Bedlam, is still a man. His mind may be malformed, but his body works like any other man’s body. Women likewise, of course. More commonly so, I’d add, for they suffer from hysteria at a much higher rate.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re telling me, Herman. Are you saying you perform surgeries on madmen, just to see what’s going to happen? How can they let you do that?”
He laughed.
“Oh, my friend, we all do that. Medical science can only learn so much from corpses.”
I think of this conversation whenever someone asks me to explain why I dislike doctors so much.
“So you were performing a surgery on this man in a coach on the side of the road.”
“No, no, don’t be absurd. Unlike my colleagues, I was trying to actually help him. You see, my companion that evening was a man who was locked away for being criminally insane. By all rights, he should be at Newgate waiting to hang for someone’s blood, only he was tossed into Bedlam before provided that opportunity. I don’t fully know the circumstances—a head injury is my wager—but something happened to him upon reaching adulthood which fully converted him into a murderer. But in theory alone; not in practice.
“His history makes him a valuable subject. Since he hasn’t killed anyone that we know of, and yet is so undeniably marked by Cain, it’s our hope—more so my fellow doctors than myself—that we might find wherever in the body this mark is located, so that we might eradicate it.”
“If I’m following,” I said, “you mean to cut off body parts until he doesn’t want to kill anyone anymore. Is that right?”
“You are always so quick to the point. Yes, that’s exactly right. Only that isn’t what I want to do. These efforts are all irreversible, you see. What’s removed can’t well be reattached. Yes, it’s of value to know what humors to drain to alleviate a man’s bloodlust, but whatever cures obtained would no doubt end up applied successfully to the next patient, not this one. I’m looking for a more compassionate alternative. I mean to cure what’s gone amiss in his head, not his gut.”
“Surgery on his head?”
“No, something much simpler. A wartime solution, if you will.”
“I’m not following.”
“How many of us come back from war with an abiding desire to kill more people?”
I could think of hundreds who did. Probably half of European history could be summed up by the maxim, give young men more people to kill, before they decide to kill us. That was almost the entire point of the Crusades.
I didn’t say that, because it wasn’t the direction he meant for me to go.
“You mean, war trains soldiers to develop an aversion to killing,” I said.
“Over time, the passion for it is worked through, and they can retire to civil, non-violent lives. Yes.”
Then I understood.
“No,” I said. “Tell me this isn’t what you’ve been doing.”
He put up his hand, as if to signal me to halt before charging.
“I’ve given you the wrong impression. I haven’t done anything. It was an idea.”
“You meant to bring him to Whitechapel to… to what? To work the murder from his system?”
“He’s an unrealized killer. I supposed that were I to give him an outlet for his unquenched need, it might cure him. That’s all.”
“That isn’t all. What about the life he takes?”
“Oh well… look at who we’re talking about. Beyond this Ripper…did you know someone is killing women and dropping their headless torsos in the Thames? Just the torsos, Jack. They’re all animals, and if it weren’t for the knack your namesake has for capturing the imagination of the dailies, nobody would care. It isn’t as though getting captured for the act was likely. The Yard would pin it on the Ripper, and they’re having no luck landing him as it is.”
I’m probably not the best person to go with in a debate on applied conditional
morality, because my record isn’t all that tremendous. Basically, I’ve done a bunch of things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but look pretty monstrous in retrospect. I know that about myself, and I’m mostly at peace about it. So, I don’t know what it means that I could see no angle of Herman’s “experiment” that was anything other than morally reprehensible.
“I appreciate how little you think of the people in the East End, Herman, but they’re still people, as you have yourself pointed out. They live and breathe and feel pain and have aspirations and souls. Encouraging a man to butcher one of them just to see what happens is without justification, regardless of what you learn from it. You must see that.”
“Hardly any encouragement is necessary.”
“You understand my point.”
“Yes, of course. But I’m disappointed I can’t make you see this from my perspective. I imagined us more alike than that. I didn’t proceed, though, if you must know. Once I recognized you, and you me, I corralled my patient and returned him to his cell. No harm done.”
“It was my arrival that stopped you? Why was that?”
“I knew you’d step in. Most men—most gentlemen—would frankly walk past. Do you think Lord Pish-Tosh-Farthing over there would step in to save the life of a whore? But you would. It’s both your most fascinating and confounding quality.”
“Kudos, I suppose, for knowing me as well as you appear to.”
“Yes. Well. Sleep easily with the knowledge that you have, in fact, stopped me. If I can’t convince you of the value of this work, I can scarcely proceed.”
He put his empty glass down on the table and got to his feet. I think I was probably supposed to urge him to stay or something, but I couldn’t wait for him to leave.
“Besides,” he said, “were I to continue, I suspect you’re also the sort of man who would alert the necessary authorities, irrespective of our friendship. Would you agree?”
“I would, yes.”
“As I thought. It was a great pleasure running into you here, Jack. Pity membership is so challenging, I think I’d really like to come back sometime.”
He clapped his hand on my shoulder and stepped around the chair.
“One thing,” I said, “before you go.”
“What’s that?”
“The girl recognized you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The reason I was in a position to see you that night was that the girl recognized you, from another occasion in which you visited Whitechapel. But you’ve told me it was your first effort, and I thwarted it.”
He smiled, but at the same time didn’t smile at all.
“How interesting! Well that’s remarkable. That a case of mistaken identity would nonetheless put you in exactly the position to witness my departure. I of course spotted you before you reached High Street. You must have worked that out already. Otherwise, why would I have been in the midst of leaving?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Of course. But, I promise, it was my first time. You know, that’s the interesting thing about being dressed properly in a place like that: to an extent, we all look alike to them, don’t we? Good day, Jack.”
“Good day, Herman. Be good.”
He smiled, and walked off.
I was in Whitechapel on the night of the final murder.
It happened about ten days after that last encounter with Herman, which was nearly long enough to have put it behind me and forgotten about it. I was certainly no longer including him on the list of my close associates—I didn’t anticipate enjoying long conversations with him over a pint in the future, which is really the extent of my measure of friendship for most—but that was about all. What I mean is that I didn’t in any way anticipate how things would end up playing out.
The last victim was Mary Jane Kelly, but I knew her as Marie Jeannette, because she liked to pretend she was Parisian. Nobody believed her, and in fact one of the accoutrements she used to cement this assertion was a silk scarf that was just an old discard scrap I’d given her. Still, I called her Marie, because she wanted to be called that, and I am not one to ignore one’s chosen name, given how often I changed my own.
That Marie happened to be the last victim is something I blame myself personally for, because I remain almost positive she was targeted based on my associations with her. Aside from having been out with me the night I’d spotted Herman on High Street, on the night of her death I’d been seen speaking to her by at least half a dozen people at the Ten Bells.
We’d made plans to connect with one another later. Those plans weren’t met because she failed to show, but I had no witnesses to her not showing, and plenty to the promise of a later engagement.
In other words, a whole bunch of people could list me as one of the last people to see her alive.
As it happens, I was also one of the first people to know she was dead. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My final conversation with Marie took place fairly early in the evening, at Ten Bells. She was still moderately sober at the time, so there was every reason to think that after she’d had more she would either forget about our plans or sleep through them on accident. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The plans were to meet at the corner of a specific street at or around the midnight tolling, and to go from there to the room she said she had. I didn’t know where this room was; she’d mentioned it on several occasions, but I’d never been.
When she didn’t show, I sounded no kind of alarm, because again, this was how things went with her sometimes. Instead, I went to another pub—I forget which—and continued to drink.
I could have kept with that all night, and on a number of occasions, I did. But I had a standing arrangement with a coachman associated with the club, which was for him to appear on nights such as this at a certain corner of High Street at or around three in the morning, and to wait there for a half an hour. He was to leave after that, whether or not I turned up for a ride. I paid him in either case.
It meant that right around two in the morning I had to decide what I was in the mood for: a continuation of whatever carousing I happened to be enjoying, or a quiet ride to a private bed.
I’d like to say I decided on the latter most times, but it’s more accurate to say I probably should have every time, but did not. I am a poor judge of my own mood when I’ve had a decent amount of drink, and I appreciate any situation in which the people with whom I’m drinking can keep up. This used to happen all the time, and hardly ever does now.
On this night, I decided to call it an evening, left the pub, and made an earnest effort to orient myself toward High Street. It was a large road, as I’ve said, and since it cut right through the middle of the borough, it wasn’t that hard to find, provided one began walking in the correct direction initially.
This was harder than it sounds, and why I gave myself a full hour; many an early morning was spent wandering in the fog, looking for a singular wide road.
I found my way pretty easily that night, though, arriving at the wrong end of the road, but with plenty of time to walk down it and meet up with the coach before he departed. What I came across instead was another coach, and Herman standing next to its wheel.
My first instinct was to run away, right then. I could already foresee a future in which I never crossed paths with him again, and I was really happy with that future.
But then he made it clear that he’d seen me, and I had to stay at least long enough to find out what was going on.
“There you are,” he said. “I thought you’d never leave that horrid little rat-trap.”
The cabin door was closed, and his driver was absent. We were either alone, or whoever was with him was in the carriage.
“What are you doing here, Herman?”
“Waiting for you, Jackie.” He noted my review of his coach. “The driver’s off having a piss somewhere. It’s just us.”
“Who’s inside?”
“And him. We’ll talk
about him soon. He’s not up for company just now.”
“All right. Why were you waiting for me?”
The hairs on the back of my neck were standing at attention, which tended to be a good indication that I was in some immediate danger. I couldn’t see a way in which Herman represented an actual physical threat to my person—he wasn’t a man of slight build, but I am a very good fighter—but there were other ways to define danger.
“I was dissatisfied with our last conversation,” he said.
“Were you. And this seemed the best time to pick it back up? Come by the club tomorrow, I’ll invite you in and we can work through whatever you’d like.”
“I’m afraid we’re facing some urgency, Jack. You see, it came to me that you might get it in your head to relate portions of our chat to a local constabulary, and I couldn’t have that.”
“Well, you didn’t do anything, Herman. You told me so yourself, and I believe you. Why would I tell anyone anything?”
He laughed.
“Oh, come on. Another week, maybe two, and you’d be talking to someone about it, whether you planned to or not. Get a little drink in you, and who knows what will come out. Especially if another body is dropped. Let’s be adults.”
He was right; I hadn’t believed him at all. At the same time, I was having difficulty coming to grips with the notion that my erstwhile friend was actively ferrying around a lunatic and setting him loose on local prostitutes, just to see if it would make him less of a lunatic. Even if I decided it was definitely true that he was doing this, I could think of a dozen different ways my bringing it to the attention of the police would backfire on me personally, with one of those ways being that they would then know I exist.
Despite all of that, another week before I started talking sounded pretty accurate.
“Are you saying it was you?” I asked. “All this time?”
“Not me personally, Jack.”
“Right. Who’s in the carriage, Herman?”
He ignored the question.
“Here’s what I will allow. Without confessing to any prior abetting of sins, I’ll have you know that I didn’t appreciate the notion that you had the power to do me harm. And so, I took the necessary steps to wrest that power from you.”
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