~~~
The money allowed her to stay in a common lodging for a few days and buy food and drink. While there, Katie met a man named Jon Kelly. He was a sometime market porter and full time drunkard in need of a partner. And she was desperate. Katie knew she would never have tender feelings for him, but he was a decent sort and would provide her with some protection. She would need it if she was going to drink.
Chapter 23: Two Small, Blue Bed Ticking Bags
In April of 1888, Katie was 46 years old. She had been with Jon Kelly six years. They lived together in common lodgings in London’s East End when they could afford it, in the casual wards when times were tough. Because Katie had to keep everything she owned on her person while she slept to protect it, she sewed two bed ticking bags to add to all the pockets she wore under her skirts.
Her health suffered, but she sought no remedies. Katie had lost most of her back teeth and had to be careful what she ate. She had increasing occurrence of severe back pain in the area of her kidneys and had endured the excruciating pain of passing multiple stones with her urine. The condition of being unable to catch her breath came more frequently, but was at its worse on the numerous occasions when her tissues held onto fluid, making her whole body feel bloated and tight.
Katie earned money in a variety of ways, such as running errands or scouring for a shopkeeper, but these jobs could be found only when she was washed and carrying herself well, a set of conditions becoming increasingly rare. As a beggar, she sang on the streets, when her cough allowed, with a ticket telling a sad tale pinned to her breast and an imploring look on her face. When all else failed, she took to prostitution.
Since the autumn of 1887 several single women, about Katie’s age, had been stabbed to death and left on the streets in the East End. No doubt they were victims of the High Rip gangs that took protection money from prostitutes. Mr. Kelly’s presence in Katie’s life had protected her from them so far. He wasn’t good for much, but he had a way with a knife.
Katie frequently spent what little she earned on drink instead of food. She had been in the habit of selfishly consuming her food and drink before reuniting in the evenings with Mr. Kelly, but since the recent spate of murders, she shared everything she could with him. More than ever, Katie was afraid of being on her own, and did her best to keep Mr. Kelly’s interest.
Chapter 24:A piece of Blue and White Shirting, Three-Cornered
In early September, 1888, with a terrible ache in her head and cramps in her belly that could only be soothed by more drink, Katie stalked her daughter in Holborn, looking for an opportunity to ask for money. The pursuit had become a habit, something she did every month or two. Each time, Annie showed a little more disgust and contempt. When Annie was younger, Katie was delighted by the idea that she knew her daughter’s mind, shared her thoughts and experienced her emotional states. Now she tried to deny what she knew full well; Annie’s thoughts and feelings were plain to see on her face. Katie was compelled to endure the shame of it out of hunger and thirst.
Lingering within sight of the front door to Annie’s house, she peeked around the corner from the nearest street crossing two houses away. She endured cold looks from those of the neighborhood who passed by on the street. What they saw in her was unmistakably clear in their mute expressions; with her many layers of clothing, unkempt appearance and the odor of her unwashed body and clothing, she was the embodiment of weakness and failure, of arrogant and insufferable shame.
With more drink in her belly, she would not care what they thought. Although it didn’t work as well as it once had, alcohol could be depended on as a buffer against all her woes, her aches and pains, her fear of each day and the coming night, her dread of the future and her progressive infirmity.
When deep in her cups, she could be who she wanted to be, for it set her imagination free. She became a person who stayed with Jon Kelly because he was aging and a drunkard who needed help getting along in the world. She ate little and had no real home because she was past the time in life when the consistency of such things was necessary for raising a family. If she fell asleep in an alley between crates, it was because it was comfortable enough and the weather had permitted it, and had nothing to do with the fact that she had passed out while playing Grandmother’s Trunk with the ghost of her dead mother.
Her imagination had worked over her past as well. One day, she decided she’d indeed touched Catherine through the silver inside her thimble that last night at The Black Anchor. Once that was the truth, it was an easy matter to blame her mother for thwarting her efforts to work for Frank Carver. Catherine had taken over her voice and facial features to express defiance.
She was protecting me from a terrible temptation.
During their occasional visits, Katie never brought it up with her mother because she didn’t want to spoil their time together. Her mother disapproved of the life Katie led, but out of love, held her tongue. Several times lately, Catherine had cradled Katie’s face in her hands and said, “Your suffering will be over soon.” She was afraid to ask her mother what she meant.
When Katie was not drunk, she didn’t believe such fantasies were real. Catherine was dead and gone, her thimble was merely a thimble. Her life was a deep and overflowing cesspit that could never be cleaned. With no hope, no love, Katie’s only refuge was drink, and she would always return to it as quickly as she could.
Annie emerged from her house and walked east along the street toward Katie. When she was close Katie stepped up to the corner and smiled for her. Annie stopped and clearly struggled to smile. “Mum, I cannot help you this time.”
At least she didn’t tell me again how bad I look.
“But you always have a little something for me.”
“I do, and then I suffer for it when Mr. Phillips finds out. I can’t pretend it’s good to see you.”
How can she stand so close, in her clean blue and white cotton skirt and warm shawl, and deny my need?
“I am your mother,” Katie said miserably.
Outrage hardened Annie’s features. “Oh...but what you’ve done to my mother!” she said, tears in her eyes. “You’ve shattered my memories of the mother who loved and cared for me, who sacrificed to protect me. Every month you come to give me a glimpse of hatred, madness and death.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “You come to me from the bowels of the city,” Annie cried, “smeared with filth…reeking of disease...to ask for money.”
Katie could only stare in horror, knowing exactly how Annie saw her, for a mirror had shown the same only recently. The memory was vague because she had been deep in her cups. Perhaps it had been a late afternoon—she couldn’t quite recall—when her reflection appeared in a shard of a broken mirror propped up in an abandoned shop window as she passed by on the street. She stared at her image, unbelieving. Who was the impostor wearing the aspect of filth and madness her sisters had worn like a costume when they lived in the workhouse? She knew it was her own image, but it was not the way she saw herself. She shook her arms, expecting the costume to fall away in tatters. When it did not, she panicked and flailed her arms and legs. She screamed and turned away from the mirror and fled.
Yes, there is a madness about me. I’m not just wearing it. I’m not playing a role. I am a filthy, drunken, muck-snipe whore.
Annie had fixed her gaze on the pavement at her feet. “You frighten me,” she said, quietly, pitifully. “What vermin do you bring to my doorstep? What illness might you leave with me?”
Katie touched the piece of blue and white shirting on her head. She’d picked it up at the common lodging that morning to bind up her hair because she had lice again and didn’t want to give them to Annie.
“I would never intentionally harm you,” Katie said. How good it would be to become angry, but there was nothing but a sense of helplessness. She was a sneaking, bloodsucking spider slowly crushed beneath her sweet daughter’s heel.
And rightly so, for I have harmed her. I am a miserable burden for Annie
to bear. How embarrassed she must be.
Katie wept into her ragged sleeve.
“Take this and go.” Annie held out a double florin.
Katie gazed at her daughter for a time, but the young woman would not look at her. “I’m sorry,” Katie said as she took the coin and turned to walked away.
“So am I,” Annie said.
Sobbing, Katie kept walking. She has the life I wanted to her to have, and such as I am, I can’t be a part of it.
Chapter 25:A Single Red Mitten and Twelve Pieces of White Rag
Katie and Mr. Kelly were living at Cooney’s common lodging, sharing a third floor room with twenty other individuals distributed among four beds. Assuming the role of husband and wife, they were signed in under the names Mary Ann Kelly and Jon Kelly. Katie had used the alias, Mary Ann, for the last two years, ever since causing a fire while drunk at Palmar’s common lodging one mile to the East.
She occasionally helped in the kitchen at Cooney’s, earning a little extra food for her efforts. Hung over and barely holding her own, she was washing dishes when the deputy of the common lodging, Mr. Wilkinson, passed through carrying a sack of something to the pantry. “Good morning, Mary Jane,” he said, and then he was gone.
His wife, Carole, beside Katie, pulled bread from the oven. “He never knows the proper name of any woman.” She set the pans on a rack to cool, then straightened and turned to Katie. “He doesn’t really see us. Something wrong inside.” She tapped her head. “Caught a splinter when he served in the navy. He’s mistaken me for any number of women he’s known, and there are times I have to convince him who I am. He squints hard at me, then something happens inside and there I am—he knows me again.”
Katie wasn’t interested in pleasant conversation and remained silent. Her mouth, dry and filled with a sour, rotten taste, didn’t feel as if it could form words. Wet to the elbows in greasy dishwater, she continued to scour pans with a filthy, blackened scrub brush. Her head ached with a pounding pain that accompanied each pulse of blood through the vessels in her neck.
It wants to get out. Katie looked at a knife among the items still to be washed. I could use that to let the blood out and end the pain. She picked up the blade and ran a finger along its edge. The knife was dangerously sharp, but the metal felt as if it had been sharpened with a file, nicks and burs all along its length. Scabs of flesh were stuck on it from the last joint it carved.
No, that would hurt. I’ll just finish up, get some food in my belly, then go find a drink before Mr. Kelly finds me. He’d planned for them to leave London for migrant work in Kent.
“You come in at different times from Mr. Kelly,” Carole said. “Aren’t you afraid of the Whitechapel Murderer?”
“No,” Katie said, surprised that it was the truth. Almost a week ago she’d read in the London Times about the victims and speculations about the killer. After what she had been through with her daughter yesterday, there hadn’t been room in her head for thoughts of murders. However, as she stumbled along the street last night, hurrying to get back to the common lodging before they locked the doors, Catherine, walking beside her, suggested she should find the Whitechapel Murderer.
What a strange thing for her to say. She didn’t say whether she wanted me to turn him in for the reward or make friends with him. Surely she doesn’t want me to become his next victim.
There is so much excitement over those wretched, hapless women in the newspapers. I am like them; just one of so many poor, castoff women.
But nothing like that ever happens to me. No one is ever excited about me.
“Are you all right, Mary?” Carole asked.
Katie didn’t respond. Finished with the dishes, she left the wash tub and sat at the table, her pounding head hung low.
Carole cut the crust off the end of one of the fresh bread loaves and gave it to her. “You don’t have much to say this morning,” she said.
John Kelly entered the kitchen, saving Katie from having to answer.
“Come, woman,” he said. “We’re off to Kent to go hopping. Our train leaves this afternoon. We must earn our keep. If we’re going to drink more than our share, the least we can do is help pick some of the stuff.”
Katie shook her head slowly, but he reached for her left arm and helped her to stand.
“It’ll be like a holiday. We’ll get out of London, breathe the fresh country air. It’s just what you need to rid yourself of the doldrums.”
One place is as good as another. She picked up her crust and allowed herself to be led.
~~~
And one task was as good as another. Katie picked hops for a week. Every time her basket was full, she dumped it into the big burlap sacks held in wooden frameworks set at intervals along the rows of hops vines. Under different circumstances, it would have been pleasant. The long rows of posts and wires supporting the climbing plants created lovely green corridors in which to work. The sun felt good on her face and when she became too hot, plenty of shade provided relief. Occasionally a laborer on stilts passed along a corridor to pick the hop cones too high for those on the ground to reach or to repair the wire and string supports.
Katie and Mr. Kelly took their turn making their meals in the communal kitchen and waited in line to use the outdoor toilet facilities. With Katie’s urinary troubles, waiting for the toilet, and then being hurried while taking her turn by those waiting in line after her, was a dreadful purgatory. She and Mr. Kelly sat around the big outdoor fire pit in the evening with the other laborers. Although there was plenty to drink, Katie did not become drunk. She maintained herself with doses of beer that did not leave her incapacitated while working, but were sufficient to keep her numb to most of her feelings. At night she and Mr. Kelly stayed in a hut with no furniture. They made a straw bed on the dirt floor and cuddled up close to keep warm in the night beneath blankets they had brought with them.
As the week progressed, her back began to ache and she experienced abdominal cramping. Her period, which had become inconsistent in recent years, chose that most inconvenient time to return. The cramps became unbearable and the discharge voluminous, a grim, dark red. She had no hope of finding silver in it.
Her mother, like so many, called it the blessing. But it mocked Katie. Why should she still be fertile? She thought wistfully of her children, her early life, her mother. She wondered if she would ever see Thomas again. She thought of the spot of blood on her mother’s handkerchief the day she stole her thimble.
So much time had passed since her last period, she’d disposed of her menstruation needs. She asked the matron in charge of the communal kitchen if there was anything about that she could use to stanch the flow, and was directed to a hut with a bin full of white, wool rags.
The night before they were to return to London, Katie was unable to sleep because of her cramps. Mr. Kelly, having collected their earnings from the management and grumbling about having been cheated, had gone to bed early with a bottle. Katie stayed up late by the fire pit drinking wine long past the time when everyone else turned in for the night. She would have a smoke, but her coughing fits had been bad for the last few days and her throat was sore.
No longer tended, the fire died down, the half-burnt logs settling with graceful, rising sparks and embers breaking into jumbles of orange shapes. The warmth had been stored in the stones around the pit and continued to push back the chilly night air and provide soothing heat to Katie’s aching abdomen.
She found a single mitten lying in the dirt and put it on, and slipped her other hand into the pocket that held her thimble.
Catherine sat down next to her and stirred the hot coals with a stick. “The blessing reminds you that you have children,” she said. “They love you.”
“I don’t even know Thomas, but I know Annie,” Katie said. “She does not love me.”
“When you go to ask her for money, she doesn’t see her mother. She sees what you’ve become. She sees what has taken her mother away from her. But her love for
you endures.”
Katie wouldn’t argue with her mother, but didn’t share her sentiment.
“Do you see them in the embers?” Catherine said pointing. Beyond the tip of the burning stick, there was an orange view of Thomas consoling Annie as she wept. Thomas had grown to a man with broad shoulders and a handsome face. They stood graveside. A coffin, Katie somehow knew was her own, was lowered into a churchyard cemetery. She was being buried in hallowed ground.
“She’s heartbroken over the loss of her mother,” Catherine said. “Once you’re gone, she sees you again, she remembers the mother who loved her and filled her with fond memories, warmth, goodness.”
She thinks I’m better off dead! Katie turned to throw harsh words at her mother, but found she was alone. Breath came in short gasps. What does she know about it? Why should I listen to her? I have lived longer and am now her senior. I’ll show her she’s wrong.
Taking slower, deeper breaths restored calm. Katie returned to the hut where Mr. Kelly slept, and lay awake beside him for some time, making decisions. She would become sober and go to Annie once again. She would promise to give up drinking and find proper work. She would ask Annie to open her heart and give her another chance to prove herself worthy of love.
Tomorrow would be a new start.
Chapter 26:Two Pawn Tickets
On September 27, Katie awoke smiling, despite a hangover and another throbbing pain in her head. A drink would help it go away, but instead she would live with it. The cramps had diminished in intensity.
With a renewed sense of purpose, she tried not to think too much about the future as she stepped forward into it.
As Katie and Mr. Kelly left the hops garden and entered the road that would take them to the train station, they fell in with another couple walking in the same direction. The female was about Katie’s age, tall, with thin pale blonde hair and a wide, smiling face. The man was also tall, rail-thin, somewhat stooped and reserved.
Jack the Ripper Victims Series: The Double Event Page 30