“Easy, there,” he said. “We got no quarrel with you.”
“Then what’re you doing on my doorstep asking about Annie?”
“We just want to talk,” Charles said.
I held out the bottle of gin. “For your trouble,” I said, and then Charles lifted the bag of winkles.
The Pensioner eyed the bottle longer than he did the sea snails, and after a moment he turned back inside. “Come on, then.”
Charles looked at me and his eyebrows gave a quick little hop, to which I nodded, and so we followed the Pensioner through the door, though if I had been alone I never would have done so. We came into a single cramped room, with a little kitchen off to one side from which a rancid smell emanated, and a staircase that was more of a ladder climbing up a bare wall in the far corner. A table stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by a chair and a couple of stools. The Pensioner motioned for us to sit and shuffled off into the kitchen, then returned a moment later with two mismatched tin mugs. He extended his hand toward me and snapped his fingers impatiently, so I gave him the gin bottle, which he opened.
“Thanks for talking with us,” Charles said.
The Pensioner splashed some gin into the two cups, pushed one to Charles and the other to me, and then took a drink for himself right from the bottle. “Who said I was talking?”
Charles tossed the bag of winkles onto the table, and they landed with a rattle of their shells. “People been harassing you?” he asked.
The Pensioner plucked a pin from the bag and scooped a handful of the little snails out onto the table. “More than that. I lost my job.”
“How?” I asked.
“They called me to testify at the inquest.” He stuck the pin into the opening of the winkle’s shell and dug out the curling little bit of meat. “Had to take the whole day for it, and my employer gave me the sack.”
“What do you do?” Charles asked.
“I was a bricklayer,” he said, and took another swig from the gin bottle.
Charles went for a pin and winkle, and I decided to as well. Though dead and cooked, the little snail seemed reluctant to give up its armor, but once I’d tugged it free I relished the briny, chewy morsel, and flicked the empty shell onto the table.
“You knew Annie Chapman,” I said. “That’s why you spoke at the inquest.”
“I know lots of women,” he said.
“What can you tell us about her?” Charles asked.
The Pensioner picked another few winkles. “She were a good woman. Good teeth. Strong legs. Drank too much at times.” He took another swig.
“What else?” I asked.
“Tell me what you want to know,” he said, sounding irritated.
The problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to know. We’d come to the part of the plan for which I hadn’t prepared, having hoped the necessary action would present itself. But sitting there in that hovel, looking into the eyes of a man I wouldn’t have trusted with a casual greeting on the street, I was at a loss. “Can … can you tell me about Johnny?” I asked.
“Don’t know much about him. She never talked about him unless she were near shipwrecked with drink.”
“She took his death hard, then?” I said.
“Johnny ain’t dead,” he said. “Far as I know.”
“I thought he died on Christmas Day,” Charles said.
“Ah, you be thinking of John, her husband. No, Johnny’s her son, John Alfred.”
“Her son?” I said, and the sound of her spirit’s screaming echoed in my mind from an entirely different, motherly direction. “Where is he?”
“Saint Vincent’s School in Dartford,” the Pensioner said. “He’s a cripple, see? She had to leave him there.”
“When?” I asked.
“Don’t know. I told you, she never talked about him. But I think it were about the same time her daughter died.”
“She lost a daughter?” Charles asked.
The Pensioner shrugged. “Infection or some other.”
I sat back in my chair with the overwhelming sensation that Annie Chapman’s deepest wound had right then been laid bare before me. It didn’t surprise me that she’d turned to drink to extinguish her pain, in the same way my father had, and I knew the dissolution to which that path led. Unlike my father, her self-destruction had been slow, and Leather Apron was not the author of it, but merely its finisher, and I now knew I had to seek out Johnny in Dartford.
“Thank you for your time,” I said.
The Pensioner took another gulp of gin and picked a winkle. “Time’s all I got,” he said, and didn’t even rise for us as we went to the door, and bade no farewell as we stepped through it.
Outside, we returned to Brick Lane and turned south, passing Thrawl Street, with the Frying Pan pub on the corner, then Old Montague Street, and from there wended down to Whitechapel. It was now just after two in the afternoon, which meant I had time enough to take the train to Dartford. I turned to my right to head for the Aldgate Station of the underground railway.
“Hold on, where you going?” Charles asked. “Hospital’s the other way.”
“I’m going to Dartford.”
“Dartford?” Charles shook his head. “You’re not bricky, you’re mad.”
“Why?”
“You’re going all the way to Dartford chasing a wild goose.”
“I know it’s what I need to do,” I said, and felt it surely. “It’s but, what, fifteen miles away?”
“Even so,” he said. “I have to play this evening.”
Even though I feared the loss of him at my side, I’d gained just enough confidence to proceed alone. “You don’t have to come with me, Charles. Keep your concert.”
“It isn’t that …” He held his hands up in the manner of surrender. “Just wait until tomorrow. I can go with you tomorrow.”
Confidence or not, I was frightened enough of the streets and Leather Apron that I considered his suggestion for a moment, but then dismissed it.
“Mr. Merrick doesn’t have any time to waste. I’m grateful for all your help, truly, but I must do this. If Johnny is there, I need to speak with him.” At that point, I turned and walked away, leaving Charles standing on the sidewalk. I wondered if he would follow after me, but he didn’t, which, I was surprised to acknowledge, disappointed me.
I checked my shawl and made my way down several blocks to the end of the tramway, where Whitechapel Street became Aldgate High Street, and there I passed under a broken section of the ancient stone wall that once surrounded the City of London. Halfway down the next block, I arrived at the Aldgate Station, where a length of the underground railway lay exposed below and perpendicular to the street before vanishing back into its subterranean lair.
I entered the station and purchased a ticket to Cannon Street. I knew from there I could board the aboveground railway to the London Bridge Station and the North Kent Line, which would take me out to Dartford. Beyond the ticket booth, I descended the staircase to the train platform in the cavern below. Having never ridden the underground before, I found the scene before me a phantasmagoria. Gaslight and some sunlight filtered through air, suffused with dust and smoke, not fully illuminating the vaulted space, while shadowy travelers flitted into view and out, and the steam engines huffed and growled along their tracks with glowing eyes like fabled dragons of old.
A conductor directed me toward my line, and after a wait of but ten minutes or so, my train arrived out of the mist and darkness. I’d purchased a third-class ticket, and I boarded a wooden car at the rear, which was open to the smoke and soot. Wealthier travelers boarded bright, contained cars with velvet seats, lit within by gas lamps. I found most of my fellow passengers were men, but there were a few women. I claimed a bench and tried to calm an unease that I realized had been growing in me since I’d entered that subterranean realm.
The train moved down the track with a curious undulation, gently up and down, with almost no side to side swaying. The roar of the engine fi
lled the tunnel completely with endless echoes, and the gaslight in the cars ahead glowed around us, turning the train into an island of light moving through a black void. The smoke at times seared my eyes and nose, and all of us in the third class coughed and covered our mouths.
It felt unnatural to be belowground, away from the sun, rooting about beneath the city streets. Those tunnels did not seem to welcome woman, man, or child, and as my disquiet went deeper, I wished for the train to hurry along so that I might be out of them.
We stopped at several stations along the way but still reached Cannon Street within twenty minutes, a trip that would have taken much longer aboveground. Despite the convenience, I nevertheless hurried from the car and rushed across the platform, then up the staircase to the surface, where I gratefully found the sun waiting outside and brushed the ashes from my dress.
The proper, aboveground railway station waited for me not far from the Metropolitan Underground. I went inside the main entry and purchased a round-trip ticket to Dartford. The next train didn’t leave for some fifteen minutes, so I bought myself a meat pie from a vendor and ate it while I waited under the arching glass ceiling. As the time for departure neared, the crowd around me on the platform thickened, and I checked my shawl in the jostle, imagining what it must have been like for Mr. Merrick to be besieged in a much bigger station like Liverpool.
When the train arrived, I boarded and found a seat in the third-class car, blessedly contained this time, and before long we pulled out of the station and lumbered on our way. This train seemed much older than the underground, its upholstery worn to a polish, its wood and brass dented and gouged. I counted the five granite arches of the London Bridge to our left as we crossed the wide Thames, and then we stopped at the London Bridge Station for more passengers. That was my first time across the river in my life, and indeed my first time beyond the borders of the East End since I’d been a child, and I felt a child’s rush of giddiness as the countryside soon whipped past me at the speed of a greyhound.
The railway followed roughly the course of the river eastward into Kent, first through Greenwich, after which passing the vistas of farm, hamlet, and smoke-belching factory that alternated in my window like a zoetrope. That fleeting show and the motion of the railway car lulled me into a stupor, and the time barreled as quickly for me as the distance beneath the iron wheels of the train, such that I was surprised when the conductor made his walk through the cars shouting Dartford as the next stop.
I rose from my seat and made my way to the door, disembarking as the train came to a squealing, lurching stop. I asked an attendant at the ticket counter if he knew where in Dartford I might find St. Vincent’s.
“The Catholic Industrial School, you mean?” the man asked, looking over the top rim of his spectacles. “It’s on Temple Hill. That way.”
I thanked him and out in front of the station hired one of the waiting hansom cabs to take me there, another luxury I had not afforded for myself nor enjoyed since my girlhood. Though I found my saved wages rapidly diminishing, it would all be worth it if my efforts somehow ceased the haunting and restored Mr. Merrick’s health.
The hansom cab smelled of the cigar smoked by its previous passenger, but I ignored the odor and paid mind to the road ahead as we bounced and drove through the city, which was a great deal smaller and greener a metropolis than London. Tall trees grew everywhere, and I realized how much I’d missed them in the city, and in my pastoral reverie neglected to plan what I might say upon my arrival at St. Vincent’s until we were already there.
I climbed out of the cab, then paid my driver and sent him on his way back down the hill, while I surveyed not only the school but also the view of the surrounding countryside, including a vast heath to the southwest. The school appeared quite new, both long and spacious, built of brown brick that rose two stories to a roof lined with multiple peaks. Hedges and shrubs surrounded it, and ivy had already begun its slow and persistent conquest of the walls. I didn’t know who I might meet inside, nor how I would explain to them my presence here, for I thought it best to leave out any mention of ghosts. The only armature I carried with me was the name of a crippled boy housed somewhere within.
John Alfred Chapman.
I repeated that name to myself as I approached the door, ready to go inside and find him.
The door to the school lay open, and I walked into a barren lobby not nearly so well appointed as the London Hospital, with nary a side table, vase, or plant in sight. A great carved wooden crucifix, quite old by all appearance, adorned one wall, flanked by icons of Catholic saints gilded with gold leaf. Behind a long desk opposite the cross sat an attendant in a high-necked white blouse with a cameo at her throat, her graying hair pulled up loosely, and behind her stood a bank of file cabinets and drawers. Upon my entrance, she looked up at me and smiled. “Can I help you?” she asked.
I stepped toward her. “I’m here to inquire after one of the boys in your care.”
“Are you a relative?”
I considered lying, but thought against it. “I’m not. But I’m concerned for him.”
“I see,” she said. “And what is the boy’s name?”
“John Alfred Chapman.”
She repeated the name to herself as she spun around on her swivel chair to the file cabinet behind her, and after flipping through several inches of papers she said, “Here we are,” and withdrew one. Her expression as she scanned it quickly fell, though, from her brow to her frown. “Would you wait here a moment?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said.
She rose and retreated through a door behind her desk, taking the sheet of paper with her, and was gone for quite some time. I waited on a bench beneath the heavy presence of the cross, my hands in my lap. When the woman returned, she brought with her a white-haired priest in his long black robes. He carried with him a small wooden box, and came around the desk to sit beside me on the bench, placing the box next to him.
“Good afternoon,” he said, his accent Irish. “I am Father Cogan. You’re here about John Alfred Chapman?”
“I am,” I said.
“But I’m told you’re no relation to him.”
“I know—” I started, but corrected myself. “I knew his mother, who died recently.”
“Died, you say?”
“Murdered. Have you by chance heard about the recent evil in the East End?”
“I have, indeed,” he said. “A great evil.”
“The boy’s mother, Annie Chapman, was one of the victims.”
Father Cogan crossed himself. “Oh, sweet mercy. What a dreadful, dreadful end!”
I nodded. “Would it be possible to speak to John Alfred?”
“Oh, my dear child, I’m afraid that’s not possible. John Alfred is dead, you see.”
My initial confusion at what he’d just said turned quickly to harrowing disappointment. If the boy was dead, then how was I to end the haunting? Charles had been right, and I’d wasted the trip out there chasing a wild goose and was no closer to helping Mr. Merrick than I had been that morning. I felt my frame buckling under the strain of my failure.
“We’ve had no word from the lad’s mother in some years,” Father Cogan said. “We sent letters but never heard back. But she’s dead you say? You’re sure of it?”
I stared hard at the stone floor, having gone a bit numb in my extremities. “Quite sure,” I said.
“Poor woman.” Father Cogan shook his head. “After she left him here, I heard she wandered out on the heath for two days, refusing to leave. As lost a soul as ever there was.”
“You speak the truth, Father,” I said, imagining her billowing cape, though he could not have known just how lost was her windswept spirit. “Why did she bring him here?”
“He was a cripple. His affliction was beyond her ability to care for.”
“I see. And when did the boy die?”
“Oh, it’s been nearly a year now. The lad would have been eight years old in November.”
“How did he die?”
“His defect kept him frail. A fever took him in the end, and by God’s will.”
“I see. Thank you, Father.” I nodded deeply and marshaled myself to rise from the bench and make the return journey to the hospital, but the priest held out his aged hand.
“Wait a moment,” he said, and brought the box onto his lap. “The boy is buried down in the churchyard, paid for by the school. But we kept this out of the coffin, thinking his mother might want something to remember him by, should she ever return.” He lifted the lid of the box away and pulled out a red crocheted scarf. “It’s fine work.”
“It is.” I remembered the bartender at the Ten Bells had mentioned that Annie crocheted.
“I wonder if you’d like to have it?” the priest said.
I faltered in my reply. “M-me?”
“You are the only person who’s ever come asking after him. His father’s gone, and now his mother, God rest their souls, the two of them. I don’t know what else to do with it.”
I accepted the scarf from him and found it very fine indeed, for it seemed there was a love I could touch in its weave. “I … yes, Father. I’ll accept it. If you’re sure.”
“I want it in the hands of someone with love for the boy.”
“But I never knew him.”
“And yet you’re here. That is enough for me.”
I nodded again, this time in gratitude. “Very well, Father, I accept it.”
“Thank you.” He slapped his knees. “Will you be heading back into London today?”
“Yes.”
“You best hurry on, then, if you’re to catch the last train.”
I thanked him and departed from the school, returning the way I’d come, back down the hill by foot. In a particularly quiet and empty lane, I took off my shawl and replaced it with the red scarf, which did not quite hide my face as well, but felt as soft as snow against my skin. I reached the train station just as the bell tolled the locomotive’s imminent departure, and I scrambled aboard almost in the same instant the wheels jolted forward. The ten miles to London passed quickly, but it was nevertheless approaching evening when we pulled into Cannon Street Station. I was not eager to once again descend beneath the streets to the Metropolitan Underground, but did so, and once more found myself traversing that unreal realm that was the surface’s forsaken twin.
A Taste for Monsters Page 15