Victor had seen a great many horrors in his life, but the conditions of those women would stay with him forever. Not that it would do him or them any good, he thought as he drank the last of his beer and signaled for another.
“Oi, wot ya got there, Collie?” Fanny, a local prostitute with a shrill voice called out to her friend who’d just come into the pub.
“You know I ‘ate that name. It’s Colleen,” the woman said, putting on airs as best she could.
She would have been able to pull it off if she’d many teeth left. In a sea of mousy brown and bleached blonde, she stood out with almost silver hair and pale, freckled skin.
“Oh, all hoity-toity today, ain’t we?” Fanny said, swishing her skirts about her legs.
Colleen lifted her nose in the air and sashayed over to the bar, winning a derisive laugh from Fanny.
“Look at her,” Fanny said and then gave an exaggerated imitation of Colleen and flounced her way to the bar as well.
A few onlookers gave hearty laughs, but Colleen was not amused. She said something to the barkeep that Victor couldn’t hear before turning to glare at Fanny.
The barmaid dropped off Victor’s beer and he took a long drink from it.
“You get somethin’ good this time?” Fanny said, leaning in to try to sneak a peek at the small bundle Colleen held close to her bosom.
“If I did, you ain’t seein’ none of it. I earned it.”
“On your back,” Fanny said, winning another laugh from the men at the tables nearby.
One of the men reached out and grabbed Colleen by the skirt and pulled her into his lap. “Why don’t you share it with me, Love?”
“Get off me,” Colleen said, struggling to get up.
Victor set his beer down, his teeth on edge. Things like this happened daily, hourly, in the Ten Bells, but Victor was spoiling for a fight tonight and if these idiots wanted to oblige…
“Don’t worry,” a voice said from nearby, Marie. “It is like this every time she comes in.”
Victor eased, but only slightly.
“All right, all right,” the barkeep said, coming around to the table. “Let ‘er go, Paulie. It’s hers. She’s got the right to keep it.”
Colleen wrenched herself away and hugged the small parcel even more protectively than before.
Marie sat down at Victor’s table.
“What’s in it?” Victor asked, curious in spite of himself.
Marie looked at the woman with sympathy. “She sleeps with the baker and he pays her in sweets. It’s probably a tart,” she added, turning back to Victor. “He thinks that’s funny.”
Victor clenched his jaw and nodded. Why not add insult to injury?
Marie smiled at him. “Don’t feel too bad for her. She does all right. Better than most.”
“And you?” he asked, not sure why he wanted to know.
She shrugged. “When I’ve got a man, I do all right.”
She watched Colleen leave the pub before leaning back in her chair and smiling sadly at Victor.
“But you never stay put, do you?” Marie added.
Victor knew she didn’t mean him in particular although it was true enough for him as well. All he could do was nod and take another drink of beer.
A small group of men led by George Lusk came into the pub then. Victor had been waiting for them. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee had finally been officially formed. They’d sent letters to the Powers That Be asking for more police, more attention and so far they’d gotten little in return. The only real change was that the marauding bands of vigilantes had turned into marauding bands of organized vigilantes.
While George Lusk was conservative and, from what Victor had heard and seen of him, a peaceful man, the men under him were not. They’d much rather hit first and not bother to ask questions later, as the lump on the back of his head proved. With Victor’s mood as dark as it was today, joining a group of thugs who were bound to find trouble whether it was real or not, sounded just right.
“You’ll excuse me,” Victor said as he stood and started toward Lusk.
He’d nearly gotten there when he felt someone tugging on his sleeve. He turned, expecting to see Marie, but instead found young Alfie, Freddie’s little brother, panting and holding out a note.
Victor frowned and read it quickly. His mood grew that much darker. Vale had contacted her younger self. That witch was still pulling the strings, even from her jail cell.
“No reply,” he muttered softly as he folded up the note and slipped it into his pocket.
The boy nodded and looked around the pub, his eyes unerringly finding a rather well-endowed woman.
“Ay,” Victor said, tugging on the boy’s shoulder to get his attention.
Alfie spun around, fear he’d done something wrong in his eyes.
Victor let out a sigh. “You’re doing a good job.”
The boy smiled proudly and puffed out his chest. “I know.”
Victor couldn’t help but smile. “Now, get out,” he said, spinning the boy around and giving him a nudge toward the door.
The boy fought his own smile and, with one last cheeky look at the woman’s bosom, slipped out the door.
Lusk banged his fist against the bar to get everyone’s attention. “I’m looking for men.”
“I know a few that swing that way down in Croydon,” Fanny said, earning a roaring laugh from the crowd.
Lusk let them have their laugh and then held up his hands. “All right, all right. We’re waiting to hear back from Inspector Aberline about adding men to the patrols in Whitechapel. But until we do, we’re going to do it ourselves.”
That won him a loud cheer and some vitriol aimed at the police.
He held up his hands for silence again. “If you’re able bodied—”
“Able to what?” Fanny said again, earning another laugh.
Lusk glared at her.
“All right. Just ‘avin’ a bit of fun.”
He frowned, but turned back to the crowd. “If you’re able bodied and want to join up, come see Frank here.”
Victor joined the men who moved over to the bar.
The little man who’d been one of his captors earlier frowned at him.
Victor smiled back.
~~~
“The bettermost dolls’ eyes, they’re the natural ones. Made in a superior way, you understand?”
Victor did not reply. He did not need to. The man needed no audience, no reaction; he supplied them all himself.
“Lovely. Fourpence a pair, they are, but no one wants them anymore. They all want common eyes.”
Victor sighed and he and his companion continued down the street on a tour as endless as the man’s conversation. The men of the Vigilance Committee were sent out in pairs to patrol. Victor was sure it was some sort of punishment that Frank had put him with Old Tuck. The man simply never stopped talking.
“The missus and I, we also make human eyes. I’ve got two cases; in the one I have black and hazel, and in the other blue and grey. And for the ladies’ eyes we put a little more sparkle in ‘em, just to make ‘em shine a bit more than the gents’.”
Victor tried to ignore the endless prattle, but it was like a bee buzzing in his ear.
“The French makes eyes as well,” Tuck said, snatching a sideways glance at Victor. “But, if ya don’t mind my sayin’ so, they’re low quality. Don’t move right. Just sort of sit there, starin’ at ya.”
He held up his hands in front if his face like a mesmerist and wiggled his fingers before letting his hands fall to his sides again. “Quite unnervin’.”
There was a blessed pause after that and they walked a few steps in silence. Victor relished the quiet, but it was short-lived.
“I had a lady customer once,” Tuck said, launching himself yet again. “Husband didn’t even know. That’s how fine that eye was. I thought—”
“How about a drink?” Victor said quickly.
He’d noticed Tuck’s eyes had lingered on
every pub door they’d passed.
“You must be thirsty,” he added. After your ceaseless talking.
The man swallowed and licked his lips before pursing them in thought. “A pint would go down easy.”
One good thing, perhaps the only good thing, one could say about Whitechapel was there that there was always a pub close by, and Victor nodded toward one just up the street.
Tuck rubbed his hands together and grinned. “Just one. Just to quench the old thirst.”
As Victor had suspected, one quickly led to two, and Old Tuck was just as happy to stay put in the pub for just a bit longer, “to rest my poor old weary bones.”
Victor left him there and set out on his own. The streets were busy; they almost always were. This part of the city was so overcrowded that the people seeped out of buildings and onto the streets like water through cracks in a bursting dam.
His rounds took him up Wilkes and back around the Black Eagle Brewery. As he turned East, the train and Shoreditch Station to his left, he noticed a cab. A rather nice cab. A rather familiar cab.
He crossed the street and found the cabbie taking off a feedbag from his horse. It was the same man he’d seen outside of the hospital the day Elizabeth Stride had paid Dr. Blackwood a visit. The same man he’d seen drive past Annie Chapman’s boarding house the night she was murdered.
“Have a light?” he asked, pulling out his pipe and holding it up.
The man nodded and put away his feedbag. He dug into his pocket, pulled out a pipe of his own and a match. He lit it and held it for Victor to get his pipe going and then did the same for his own.
“It’s a nice carriage,” Victor said. “You own it?”
The man pushed his shoulders back. “I do.”
“Think I saw it the other night.”
“I get around,” he said, with a shrug.
“The night of the murder.”
The man’s jaw set.
“Not far from it,” Victor added with a thoughtful puff from his pipe.
The driver narrowed his eyes and cocked his head to the side. “Look, I ain’t got nothin’ to do with any of that.”
Victor eyed the small man. “You drove a doctor into Whitechapel that night,” he said, hoping he was right.
The driver’s face went a bit pale. “How’d you know that?”
“That coroner said that the murderer might be a doctor,” Victor said.
The man’s eyes went wide with fear and he chewed at the inside of his mouth.
“I’m with the Committee,” Victor said, standing a little closer to the smaller man. “If you know something, you should tell me.”
The man’s eyes fluttered nervously. “I took the doc ‘round to Pelham near Hobson. Said he was helpin’ a babe be born. Nothin’ to do with that other business.”
“Dr. Blackwood?”
The man paled visibly. “I didn’t say that.”
Victor smiled slightly. “Of course not.”
So Blackwood was in Whitechapel the night of the second murder, and possibly the first.
“Look, I can’t afford to lose that job. I just got it last week.”
“I’m sure it is nothing,” Victor said, and the man relaxed.
Victor nodded genially and then clapped his hand down heavily on the man’s shoulder, feeling the cabbie’s legs give just a little beneath him. “But if it is not…”
“I just drive. I don’t know what he does. He gets out and likes to walk. I don’t even know where he goes really.”
Victor’s gaze did not flinch.
The man swallowed nervously and shook his head. “He just walks.”
“Did you drive him here on the morning of the first?”
“The first?”
Victor leaned in. “The first of the month.”
“I told ya. I just got the job a week ago.”
“Is he here tonight?”
He shook his head. “I ain’t seen him in two days.”
Victor stared into the man’s eyes. He saw fear there, but no deception.
He released his grip and patted the man’s shoulder. “I’m sure it is just as you say.”
The driver took a nervous step back and massaged his shoulder. If Victor found out he was lying, that he had a part in what was done here, he would need more than a massage to ease his pain.
“What’s your name?”
“Netley. John Netley.”
Victor regarded him for a moment. “Have a good evening, Mr. Netley.”
Victor started down the street and said over his shoulder, “and thanks for the light.”
It did not take Victor long to find the house the doctor had visited the night of Chapman’s murder. There was no baby born there that night though, although not for lack of trying.
The whorehouse had six girls working and one room that could be rented by the half hour. It seemed the doctor was a frequent visitor there until he’d been asked not to return. Apparently, he tended to take things a little too far. His last time with Lizzy Stride had been one too many times. He’d “damaged the merchandise.”
The doctor had come back that night and been turned away. Where he went after that, no one knew.
Finally, the pieces were beginning to fit together, Victor thought. And the picture they made was not very pretty.
Chapter Twenty-Two
IT WAS A PUNCH and Judy show. These so-called sitters were no more than Blavatsky’s puppets and they danced when she told them to.
Simon hated events like this. Lies and deception, preying on people’s fears. The “séance” took place in Blavatsky’s home in St. John’s Wood which doubled as headquarters for the Theosophy Society. The main parlor had been prepared with a table and chairs for the “sitters”, the people who would channel the spirits, and several rows for the paying spectators.
Of course, having the performance in a place she could rig with any number of tricks was wise, and every one of her stunts played well to the audience—except for Elizabeth, who seemed transfixed by the taxidermy baboon Blavatsky called Mr. Fiske. It stood in the corner of the room ironically holding a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. Apparently, Blavatsky was not a fan of science.
Simon shifted impatiently in his seat. As if having to listen to a mad woman conjure spirits weren’t enough, he was forced to sit next to Katherine Vale for the duration of it.
After he’d seen the photograph Elizabeth had salvaged from the fire, the cold fist that had held his heart since they’d come here tightened its grip. They’d half expected Vale to cancel the invitation, but she hadn’t. In fact, other than being a little more nervous than usual, she hadn’t behaved differently toward them at all. Simon had anticipated some change. It was almost worse that there wasn’t one, or at least not one they could observe. As Elizabeth had said, “Secret crazy is the scariest kind.”
Simon definitely agreed. It was possible Vale’s letter hadn’t done whatever she’d intended it to do, that their very presence had changed things and Vale’s plan was already thwarted just by them being there.
Was he so far gone that wishful thinking was now a viable option? Simon snorted softly at his own folly. The small noise he’d made earned him a reproachful glance from Elizabeth. He arched his eyebrows in an insincere apology and they turned back to the show.
“The room is too cold,” Blavatsky kept saying. “The spirits are shy.”
Simon bit his tongue to keep from shouting out, “Then just turn up the damned heat.”
Not that it would have done any good. He would have been escorted out and Blavatsky, clever woman that she was, would turn it to her advantage. People like her always found the angle.
Tonight, she found it for the princely sum of £2 per person. With roughly thirty people in the audience, it wasn’t bad for a night’s work.
In spite of the “challenging” conditions, Blavatsky pressed on, trying to summon the spirits of Annie Chapman and Polly Nichols. The sitters channeled all manner of dead persons fr
om a poor Cockney boy to Fredrick Chopin, but the victims were too traumatized to communicate. Unsurprisingly, neither Chopin nor the boy knew who Jack the Ripper was.
Despite the evening being a complete farce and generating not a shred of evidence toward the crimes, it was deemed a huge success by all in attendance, Vale included.
As the séance ended, she turned to Simon, a strange look in her eye. Gone was the guileless young woman they’d known here, and in her place was something else.
It was the look of someone who knew something he didn’t, of someone who had the advantage and took pleasure in that. It was an expression he’d seen in her before. In the other, older Katherine Vale. Suddenly, the room did feel cold.
He held her gaze, keeping himself as steady and unaffected as he could, and like a spark that was snuffed out, whatever had been in her eyes vanished.
She smiled, excited, seemingly unaware of the moment that had just preceded. “Wasn’t that fascinating?”
Simon nodded. Perhaps Elizabeth was right and bits of crazy were breaking off. The duality she presented was not a good sign.
“Rubbish,” Graham said.
He’d not bothered to hide his feelings about Blavatsky before the performance and clearly wasn’t going to sugar coat them now. Simon could see that the jibe struck Vale, but she shrugged it off and turned back to Simon and Elizabeth.
“I could introduce you, if you’d like,” Vale offered. “She’s very busy, but she’s taken a bit of a shine to me.”
“I’ll wait out front,” Graham said, giving Simon a look that said and if you were smart, you’d follow my lead. Simon was tempted to follow, but before he could, Elizabeth accepted her offer.
Madame Blavatsky sat in a large reading chair and looked very much the queen holding court as people came to pay their compliments for the evening.
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