The Ripper's Shadow

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “They don’t sound like Mr. Lipsky, either,” Mick says. “Maybe that’s why the coppers are still looking for Jack the Ripper.”

  There’s a long queue outside the Whitechapel Casual Ward. Among the people in ragged clothes, carrying their worldly possessions in bundles, I recognize women who normally sleep in courtyards or alleys; fear of the Ripper has driven them to seek shelter. Some have children clinging to their skirts. Mick and I walk alongside the line, scrutinizing the men. We reach the entrance without finding John Kelly.

  “He must be inside already,” Mick says.

  Two guards stand at the double doors to the two-story brick building. They’re registering and searching the people they let in, inspecting baggage, writing names. They’re confiscating knives and liquor bottles.

  “If we go through the line, they’ll discover I’m a woman and send me to the women’s ward,” I say. “Even if you get into the men’s ward and find Kelly, he probably won’t talk to you because he doesn’t know you. And the doors will be locked soon. We won’t be able to leave until tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.” Mick leads me to the back of the building.

  A high brick wall encloses the grounds, but Mick easily scales it. Soon he’s inside, opening the gate. We run across a yard containing large stones that the men will break into smaller rocks for road construction. Mick tries the back door and lets us into the oakum-picking room, filled with mountains of old, frayed ropes. Tomorrow, the women will shred it into fibers for making new rope. I imagine my fingers sore from fibers burrowing under my skin.

  A life in the casual wards has never been far outside the realm of possibility for me.

  In a steamy kitchen, cooks pour watery stew made of onions, meat scraps, and potatoes into giant tureens. We hurry up the back stairs to the men’s ward. The long, unheated room, with windows too high to climb out of, is crowded with men dressed in identical wool nightshirts. The beds are narrow lengths of canvas stretched between pairs of rails along each side of the room; they are like hammocks pulled tight and flat and covered with thin blankets. The sour, fecal, sweaty stench turns my stomach. A preacher walks up and down the aisle, reading from the Bible. In the light from flaring gas jets on the walls, I see a glint of red hair. I point. We approach the big man who’s stowing his knapsack on a shelf above his bed.

  “Mr. Kelly!” I call.

  He turns. Coppery whiskers stubble his cheeks, dark circles underscore his puffy, sad eyes, and his thick shoulders sag. “Who’re you?” I tilt back my hat. His eyes pop as he recognizes me. “What the hell?”

  “I’m sorry about Kate,” I say.

  Kelly tightens his jaw. In the bed on the left of his sits a tramp who works a toothless mouth like a cow chewing cud. On the right, two hale young men who look like railway laborers play a game that involves exchanging obscene curses and hard punches.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say.

  “Sod off! You scared Kate out of her wits with your talk about the Ripper.”

  “I was just trying to warn her.”

  “So now the Ripper’s killed her. You were right. Did you come to rub it in?” Kelly abruptly sinks onto the bed. “I loved her, you know? She was a whore and a drunk, but I loved her, and now she’s dead.” He wipes his hand down his face. “The last time I saw her was that Saturday afternoon. We were broke. We pawned my boots.” His feet are wrapped in rags. “Then I went to look for work. Kate went to borrow money from her daughter. I remembered what you said about the Ripper, and I made her promise to meet me back at Cooney’s lodging house by four o’clock. Do you know what her last words to me were? ‘Don’t you fear for me—I’ll take care of myself, and I shan’t fall into his hands.’” Kelly shakes his head remorsefully. “I shouldn’t have let her go. If I hadn’t, she’d still be alive.”

  I don’t want him to feel responsible for a death he couldn’t prevent. “It’s not your fault.”

  “You mean if she’d listened to you and me, she would be alive. So it’s her own fault?” Kelly’s spark of anger is quickly extinguished by sad nostalgia. “Nobody could tell her what to do. She was independent. And clever.”

  I nod regretfully. If not for her idea of modeling for boudoir photographs, she wouldn’t have attracted the Ripper’s attention. But it was I who had taken the photographs.

  “She didn’t come back that night, but I figured she’d slept at her daughter’s. On Sunday morning, I heard the Ripper had killed two more women. I didn’t know one was Kate. I went to Mitre Square for a look, and I stood on the very spot where my poor old gal had been cut to pieces, and I didn’t know!” Kelly utters a broken laugh. “Then today I heard that the dead woman from Mitre Square had a pawn ticket in her pocket. It was for a pair of boots. So I went to the police station, and they took me to see the body. And there were initials tattooed on her arm—‘T. C.’” His eyes roll, and he rubs his mouth.

  He’s remembering Kate’s mutilated face, her nose cut off. I hate to bother him with questions, but all I can give him is a chance at vengeance for Kate. “I think she knew who the Ripper is. I think that’s what she didn’t want to tell me.”

  “Whatever she knew, she didn’t tell me, either,” Kelly says morosely.

  Mick and I exchange disappointed glances. I ask, “Had anything unusual happened recently?”

  Kelly shakes his head; then he freezes, startled by a sudden thought. “It wasn’t recent, but you could say it was unusual.”

  “Screw you, prick!” shouts one of the young men at Kelly’s right. He and his friend aren’t just playing now. They throw punches that sound like hammers striking meat.

  “We better go,” Mick says uneasily.

  I have the pulse-racing sensation that I’m about to hear something important. “Wait.”

  “It was April last year,” Kelly says. “Kate comes home one morning, says she’s got a new customer. She shows me two crowns he paid her. I said, ‘What’d you do to earn that?’ She smiles, cunning-like, and says, ‘Special things.’”

  That April, she’d sold our first boudoir photographs, but two crowns is far more than her share of the sale. The customer must have bought a set, found her, and engaged her services.

  “Ripper Number Two?” Mick whispers to me.

  “I asked what special things and who he was,” Kelly says, “but she said the deal was, she had to keep quiet. I let it go because the money was good. She would spend a night with him once a week or so. Then one morning, she comes home like this.” Kelly moans, shakes violently, and clutches his stomach. “She was as pale as a sheet. She took some pills she brought, then went to bed. I wanted to fetch a doctor, but she said no.” Kelly rubs his mouth, closes his eyes for a moment, and whispers, “Jesus.”

  Other men join in the fight, yelling, flailing, and hitting. Mick prompts, “What?”

  “When I gave her the chamber pot so she could piss, I seen a big cut.” Kelly’s finger traces a line below his waist. “It was stitched with thread. She said she’d been in a knife fight and gone to the infirmary and the surgeon sewed her up.”

  I remember Kate hugging herself when I questioned her. It wasn’t to hold in the information; she was remembering the pain. And the reason she was upset to hear that Polly Nichols had been cut open? So had she.

  “I asked her who cut her. She wouldn’t tell me.” Kelly says grimly, “I think it was that special customer.”

  Mick and I look at each other in surprise. If the customer was indeed one of the two Rippers, then how had Kate escaped?

  “Three weeks later, she was well enough to go back on the streets,” Kelly says, “but she was never the same. Her monthlies stopped. At first, we thought she was expecting, but no baby ever came. She complained about feeling hot, and she would cry or get mad for no reason.”

  As I puzzle over this, the riot spreads. The preacher flees, men curse and roar as they fight, and a window shatters, raining broken glass. Mick says, “Miss Sarah, we gotta go!”
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  “I wanted to know what really happened to Kate, so I went to the infirmary and asked the surgeon. But he said she wasn’t there that night.” Bitterness shows on Kelly’s face. “She lied.”

  Abiding by their deal, Kate had protected a killer. She’d stepped into his shadow and not told anyone what he’d done to her there.

  Guards rush into the room and assail the fighters. Mick and I push through the brawl, and as we run down the stairs, I hear the door of the ward slam shut. Safe in the street behind the building, we breathe foggy, smoky air that burns the ward’s stench out of our lungs.

  “Was it Ripper Number Two who cut Kate last year?” Mick asks.

  “I don’t think it was Commissioner Warren. I can’t imagine him sparing his victim, let alone taking the trouble to sew her up. Maybe it was Ripper Number Two.” They say I’m a doctor now ha ha. “Maybe he really is a doctor, and he stitched the cut.”

  “What if he is?” Mick sounds discouraged. “John Kelly didn’t get us any closer to him.”

  “We need to find Ida Millbanks. She’s our last chance.”

  30

  The next morning, I decide to visit Hugh and ask if he’s made any progress investigating Ida Millbanks. But as soon as I step outside my door, I see a squadron of mounted police officers riding up the street. Commissioner Warren is in the lead. His eyes under his bushy brows squint as if in bright African sunlight; he turns his head from side to side as if hunting for black women to torture.

  He’s after me. There’s no other possible explanation for his presence.

  My shock is so breathtaking, so paralyzing, that I can’t will myself to run before he spots me. I had thought that he thought he’d done enough damage by hurting Mick and Hugh and instigating Mr. Lipsky’s arrest. But he must feel he hasn’t yet won the game he’s playing. What a fool I was to think that eleven days without another attack from him meant he’d decided to leave us alone! Despite my terror, I feel something like relief, for if my friends had to suffer at his hands, then so should I.

  As he rides nearer, our gazes meet. His nostrils flare as if he scents blood, and a malevolent twinkle ignites in his eyes. Following his mounted squadron are police constables on foot and a pack of reporters. I glimpse Barrett among the constables. He spies me and frowns. Alarm sucks in my breath. He must have told Warren about my pictures of the African photograph and Annie’s rings after all. That must be why Warren came. Fighting the impulse to hide, I muster the shaky bravado of a hunter facing down a charging beast that’s a hundred times his size and strength. Warren has the power to destroy me, but I shan’t run like a coward. I’ve gone far beyond the point of poking the wolf. I’m going to stand my ground, like the hunter dropping to his knee and holding his spear upright, ready to impale the beast when it pounces.

  The reporters assail Warren with questions. “Sir Charles, what brings you to Whitechapel?”

  They can’t see what he is. They’re blinded by his respectable public persona. As he and his squadron stop near my studio, neighbors come outdoors to listen. Warren says, “There’s been a new development in the Ripper case.” He ignores me, but his voice seems deliberately pitched for me to hear.

  I glance at Barrett. Since he kept silent while Mr. Lipsky was arrested, I’m angrier at him than ever. He sees me and shakes his head. A breath of relief mixed with disappointment gushes from me. He didn’t tell. Warren isn’t here because of the photographs. But I wish Barrett had done something instead of nothing.

  “We’ve identified a person who may have a connection to the case.” Warren looks straight at me; the twinkle in his eyes brightens, and his mustache moves as he smiles. “His name is Benjamin Bain.”

  I’ve dodged one blow only to be slammed by another. Hearing Warren speak my father’s name is like a punch to my stomach; I’m speechless with shock that it should crop up in this unexpected context. The fragile rampart of my bravado crumbles.

  A reporter asks, “Who is Benjamin Bain?”

  “He’s a criminal with a police record that dates back more than twenty years,” Warren says.

  I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Of course my father must have had a record because of his rabble-rousing. But surely it contains no evidence to implicate him in the Ripper murders.

  “What’s his connection to the Ripper case?” the reporter asks.

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge that information,” Warren says.

  “Has Benjamin Bain any connection to Bain and Sons Photography?” another reporter asks, pointing at my studio.

  “Yes. Sarah Bain, the proprietress, is his daughter.” As the reporters scribble, Warren says, “She may be in contact with him. We’re here to look for witnesses who’ve seen him.” He addresses the spectators. “I ask for your cooperation. Finding Benjamin Bain is crucial to closing the case, obtaining a conviction, and removing the Ripper from your midst once and for all.”

  The constables fan out along the street and begin questioning my neighbors. Barrett starts toward me, but Commissioner Warren reaches me first, peering down at me from his high seat in his horse’s saddle. “Do you have anything to say, Miss Bain?”

  This is another attack aimed at me, and with unerring instinct, he’s hit upon a powerful weapon to use—my father. Indignant as well as horrified, I stammer, “My father has nothing to do with the Ripper case!” Warren made that up for my benefit. “He was killed in a riot in 1866.”

  “That’s interesting,” Warren says. “When you were first brought to my attention, I checked into your background, and that’s when your father’s name came up. But here’s the funny thing.” Joviality crinkles his eyes. “I checked the city death archives, and there’s no record of a Benjamin Bain dying in a riot in 1866 or any other year since.”

  A dizzy, battering sensation—as if I’ve been caught in a wheel of a cart and rolled head over heels along cobblestones—washes over me. Warren must be lying. And yet . . . His words drill deep into my core, from which I’ve never quite expunged my wishful, childish notion that my father isn’t really dead.

  Commissioner Warren smiles, as if he can read my thoughts on my face. “The police file only says Benjamin Bain disappeared in 1866.”

  His disappearance is the one thing I am sure of, but I’ve never quite lost my doubt about whether my mother’s explanation for it was true.

  “He’s been a fugitive from the law ever since,” Warren says. “The order for his arrest is still in effect. We had a tip that said he’s resurfaced in Whitechapel.”

  Here is another explanation: my father didn’t die; he ran away because the law was after him. It’s too much to absorb, too far beyond belief. My mouth is open, gasping. “What tip? Arrest—for what?”

  “That’s neither here nor there.” Warren waves my questions aside. I want to think that he doesn’t have the answers because he fabricated the whole story. But maybe the story is true and he’s withholding the information to torment me. “What’s important is that I warned you to forget about the Whitechapel murders and mind your own business.”

  I’m still reeling from shock, my wits almost lost. “But I have!”

  “Come now, Miss Bain.” Anger hardens his smile. “We both know better.”

  Exactly what does he know? That my friends and I are now looking for Ripper Number Two but haven’t given up on delivering Warren to justice? My thoughts scatter among memories of my second trip to Russell’s Fine Books with Mick and our visit to the casual ward. Has Warren been tracking my movements? Have his officers been secretly watching me the whole time? The silence between us hums with unspoken questions on both sides. Warren’s expression is inscrutable, but I think he’s wondering how much I know. Blindsided by his story about my father, I feel as if I’m playing cards with a lion who will devour me rather than tip his hand.

  Barrett hovers within earshot. He looks uncertain, distraught. I sense that he’s considering telling Warren about my photographs; he’s torn between duty and fear of the consequences. If
he does tell, Warren won’t like that he initially withheld the information, and he may be fired. It would serve him right, but my own consequences will be even worse if Barrett tells: Warren will arrest me for slandering him, tear apart my studio, and destroy my prints and negatives of the boudoir pictures, African photograph, and Annie’s rings. And then he’ll kill me and my friends.

  Barrett draws a breath, opens his mouth. My heart pounds with dread. Then he clamps his lips together, vexed by his own failure of nerve.

  My insides go limp with relief, but this constant cycle of terror, relief, and terror is running my own nerves ragged. I feel like a hot-air balloon that is repeatedly inflated with blasts from its burner, deflated as it cools, and inflated again, its thin fabric weakening under the pressure. The anger takes command, and it goads me to a new, reckless impulse. Why not take the offensive rather than cringe like a ninny? Knowledge confers power, and the advantage isn’t entirely Warren’s. I think of the hunter kneeling with his spear upright.

  “With all due respect, Commissioner Warren—you think you know everything about me, but you should think again.” As I stare at Warren, his image shimmers, as if in heat waves radiating from the pavement in summer.

  Warren remains impassive, but his horse skitters; the animal senses he’s disconcerted. He tightens his hold on the reins. His smile lacks humor. “If you think you can hide anything from me, then you should think again.”

  “You may know who some of my friends are. Mick O’Reilly. Lord Hugh Staunton.” Courage seeps into me, reinforcing the anger, as if saying their names invokes a magic spell.

  Caution hoods the unnatural brightness of his eyes as he tries to deduce what I’m aiming at. I get a glimpse into his life of hunting and butchering women by night, pretending to be a virtuous upholder of the law by day. I know what a strain it is to harbor secrets; there are many more people watching him than me, and he has further to fall.