A Kind of Madness
ANTHONY BOUCHER
The term “Renaissance man” has been overused through the years, but it is entirely reasonable to use that appellation for William Anthony Parker White (1911–1968), better known under the pseudonyms he used for his career as a writer of both mystery and science fiction, Anthony Boucher (rhymes with “voucher”) and H. H. Holmes. Under his real name, as well as under his pseudonyms, he established a reputation as a first-rate critic of opera and literature, including general fiction, mystery, and science fiction. He also was an accomplished editor, anthologist, playwright, and eminent translator of French, Spanish, and Portuguese, becoming the first to translate Jorge Luis Borges into English.
He wrote prolifically in the 1940s, producing at least three scripts a week for such popular radio programs as Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, and The Casebook of Gregory Hood. He also wrote numerous science fiction and fantasy stories, reviewed books in those genres as H. H. Holmes for the San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Sun-Times, and produced notable anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy, and mystery genres.
As Boucher, he served as the longtime mystery reviewer of The New York Times (1951–1968), with 852 columns to his credit, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (1957–1968). He was one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America in 1946. The annual World Mystery Convention is familiarly known as the Bouchercon in his honor, and the Anthony Awards are also named for him.
“A Kind of Madness” was originally published in the August 1972 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
A KIND OF MADNESS
Anthony Boucher
In 1888 London was terrified, as no city has been before or since, by Jack the Ripper, who from April through November killed and dissected at least seven prostitutes, without leaving a single clue to his identity.
The chain of murders snapped abruptly. After 1888 Jack never ripped again. Because on July 12, 1889…
—
He paused on the steps of University College, surrounded by young ladies prattling the questions that were supposed to prove they had paid careful attention to his lecture-demonstration.
The young ladies were, he knew as a biologist, human females; dissection would establish the fact beyond question. But for him womankind was divided into three classes: angels and devils and students. He had never quite forgiven the college for admitting women nine years ago. That these female creatures should irrelevantly possess the same terrible organs that were the arsenal of the devils, the same organs through which the devils could strike lethally at the angels, the very organs which he…
He answered the young ladies without hearing either their questions or his answers, detached himself from the bevy, and strolled toward the Euston Road.
For eight months now he had seen neither angel nor devil. The events of 1888 seemed infinitely remote, like a fever remembered after convalescence. It had indeed been a sort of fever of the brain, perhaps even—he smiled gently—a kind of madness. But after his own angel had died of that unspeakable infection which the devil had planted in him—which had affected him so lightly but had penetrated so fatally to those dread organs which render angels vulnerable to devils…
He observed, clinically, that he was breathing heavily and that his hand was groping in his pocket—a foolish gesture, since he had not carried the scalpel for eight months. Deliberately he slowed his pace and his breathing. The fever was spent—though surely no sane man could see anything but good in an effort to rid London of its devils.
“Pardon, m’sieur.”
The woman was young, no older than his students, but no one would mistake her for a female of University College. Even to his untutored eye her clothes spoke of elegance and chic and, in a word, Paris. Her delicate scent seemed no man-made otto* but pure essence de femme. Her golden hair framed a piquant face, the nose slightly tilted, the upper lip a trifle full—irregular but delightful.
“Ma’m’selle?” he replied, with courtesy and approbation.
“If m’sieur would be so kind as to help a stranger in your great city…I seek an establishment of baggages.”
He tried to suppress his smile, but she noticed it, and a response sparkled in her eyes. “Do I say something improper?” she asked almost hopefully.
“Oh, no. Your phrase is quite correct. Most Englishmen, however, would say ‘a luggage shop.’ ”
“Ah, c’est ça. ‘A luggage shop’—I shall remember me. I am on my first voyage to England, though I have known Englishmen at Paris. I feel like a small child in a world of adults who talk strangely. Though I know”—his gaze was resting on what the French politely call the throat—“I am not shaped like one.”
An angel, he was thinking. Beyond doubt an angel, and a delectable one. And this innocently provocative way of speaking made her seem only the more angelic.
He took from her gloved fingers the slip of paper on which was written the address of the “establishment of baggages.”
“You are at the wrong end of the Euston Road,” he explained. “Permit me to hail a cab for you; it is too far to walk on such a hot day.”
“Ah, yes, this is a July of Julys, is it not? One has told me that in England it is never hot, but behold I sweat!”
He frowned.
“Oh, do I again say something beastly? But it is true: I do sweat.” Tiny moist beads outlined her all but invisible blonde mustache.
He relaxed. “As a professor of biology I should be willing to acknowledge the fact that the human female is equipped with sweat glands, even though proper English usage would have it otherwise. Forgive me, my dear child, for frowning at your innocent impropriety.”
She hesitated, imitating his frown. Then she looked up, laughed softly, and put her small plump hand on his arm. “As a token of forgiveness, m’sieur, you may buy me an ice before hailing my cab. My name,” she added, “is Gaby.”
—
He felt infinitely refreshed. He had been wrong, he saw it now, to abstain so completely from the company of women once his fever had run its course. There was a delight, a solace, in the presence of a woman. Not a student, or a devil, but the true woman: an angel.
Gaby daintily dabbed ice and sweat from her full upper lip and rose from the table. “M’sieur has been most courteous to the stranger within his gates. And now I must seek my luggage shop.”
“Mademoiselle Gaby—”
“Hein? Speak up, m’sieur le professeur. Is it that you wish to ask if we shall find each other again?”
“I should indeed be honoured if while you are in London—”
“Merde alors!” She winked at him, and he hoped that he had misunderstood her French. “Do we need such fine phrases? I think we understand ourselves, no? There is a small bistro—a pub, you call it?—near my lodgings. If you wish to meet me there tomorrow evening…” She gave him instructions. Speechless, he noted them down.
“You will not be sorry, m’sieur. I think well you will enjoy your little tour of France after your dull English diet.”
She held his arm while he hailed a cab. He did not speak except to the cabman. She extended her ungloved hand and he automatically took it. Her fingers dabbled deftly in his palm while her pink tongue peered out for a moment between her lips. Then she was gone.
“And I thought her an angel,” he groaned.
His hand fumbled again in his empty pocket.
—
The shiny new extra-large trunk dominated the bedroom.
Gabrielle Bompard stripped to the skin as soon as the porter had left (more pleased with her wink than with her tip) and perched on the trunk. The metal trim felt refreshingly cold against her flesh.
Michel Eyraud looked up lazily from the bed where he was sprawled. “I never get tired of looking at you, Gaby.”
“When you are content just to look,” Gaby grinned, “I cut your throat.”
“It’s hot,” said Eyraud.
“I know, and you ar
e an old man. You are old enough to be my father. You are a very wicked lecherous old man, but for old men it is often hot.”
Eyraud sprang off the bed, strode over to the trunk, and seized her by her naked shoulders. She laughed in his face. “I was teasing you. It is too hot. Even for me. Go lie down and tell me about your day. You got everything?”
Eyraud waved an indolent hand at the table. A coil of rope, a block and tackle, screws, screwdriver…
Gaby smiled approvingly. “And I have the trunk, such a nice big one, and this.” She reached for her handbag, drew out a red-and-white girdle. “It goes well with my dressing gown. And it is strong.” She stretched it and tugged at it, grunting enthusiastically.
Eyraud looked from the girdle to the rope to the pulley to the top of the door leading to the sitting room, then back to the trunk. He nodded.
Gaby stood by the full-length mirror contemplating herself. “That silly bailiff, that Gouffé. Why does he dare to think that Gaby should be interested in him? This Gaby, such as you behold her…” She smiled at the mirror and nodded approval.
“I met a man,” she said. “An Englishman. Oh, so very stiff and proper. He looks like Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Le Tour du Monde. He wants me.”
“Fogg had money,” said Eyraud. “Lots of it.”
“So does my professor…Michi?”
“Yes?”
Gabrielle pirouetted before the mirror. “Am I an actress?”
“All women are actresses.”
“Michi, do not try to be clever. It is not becoming to you. Am I an actress?”
Eyraud lit a French cigarette and tossed the blue pack to Gaby. “You’re a performer, an entertainer. You have better legs than any actress in Paris. And if you made old Gouffé think you love him for his fat self…Yes, I guess you’re an actress.”
“Then I know what I want.” Gaby’s eyelids were half closed. “Michi, I want a rehearsal.”
Eyraud looked at the trunk and the block and tackle and the red-and-white girdle. He laughed, heartily and happily.
—
He found her waiting for him in the pub. The blonde hair picked up the light and gave it back, to form a mocking halo around the pert devil’s face.
His fingers reassured him that the scalpel was back where it belonged. He had been so foolish to call “a fever” what was simply his natural rightful temperature. It was his mission in life to rid the world of devils. That was the simple truth. And not all devils had cockney accents and lived in Whitechapel.
“Be welcome, m’sieur le professeur.” She curtseyed with impish grace. “You have thirst?”
“No,” he grunted.
“Ah, you mean you do not have thirst in the throat. It lies lower, hein?” She giggled, and he wondered how long she had been waiting in the pub. She laid her hand on his arm. The animal heat seared through his sleeve. “I go upstairs. You understand, it is more chic when you do not see me make myself ready. You ascend in a dozen of minutes. It is on the first floor, at the left to the rear.”
He left the pub and waited on the street. The night was cool and the fog was beginning to settle down. On just such a night in last August…What was her name? He had read it later in The Times. Martha Tabor? Tabby? Tabbypussy-devil?
He had nicked his finger on the scalpel. As he sucked the blood he heard a clock strike. He had been waiting almost a half hour; where had the time gone? The devil would be impatient.
The sitting room was dark, but subdued lamplight gleamed from the bedroom. The bed was turned down. Beside it stood a huge trunk.
The devil was wearing a white dressing gown and a red-and-white girdle that emphasized its improbably slender waist. It came toward him and stroked his face with hot fingers and touched its tongue like a branding iron to his chin and ears and at last his lips. His hands closed around its waist.
“Ouf!” gasped the devil. “You may crush me, I assure you, m’sieur. I love that. But please to spare my pretty new girdle. Perhaps if I debarrass myself of it…” It unclasped the girdle and the dressing gown fell open.
His hand took a firm grip on the scalpel.
The devil moved him toward the door between the two rooms. It festooned the girdle around his neck. “Like that,” it said gleefully. “There—doesn’t that make you a pretty red-and-white cravat?”
Hand and scalpel came out of his pocket.
And Michel Eyraud, standing in the dark sitting room, fastened the ends of the girdle to the rope running through the block and tackle and gave a powerful jerk.
The rope sprang to the ceiling, the girdle followed it, and the professor’s thin neck snapped. The scalpel fell from his dead hand.
The rehearsal had been a complete success.
Just as they planned to do with the bailiff Gouffé, they stripped the body and plundered the wallet. “Not bad,” said Eyraud. “Do actresses get paid for rehearsing?”
“This one does,” said Gaby. And they dumped the body in the trunk.
Later the clothes would be disposed of in dustbins, the body carried by trunk to some quiet countryside where it might decompose in naked namelessness.
Gaby swore when she stepped on the scalpel. “What the hell is this?” She picked it up. “It’s sharp. Do you suppose he was one of those types who like a little blood to heighten their pleasures? I’ve heard of them but never met one.”
Gaby stood pondering, her dressing gown open…
—
The first night, to the misfortune of the bailiff Gouffé, went off as smoothly as the rehearsal. But the performers reckoned without the patience and determination and génie policier of Marie-François Goron, Chief of the Paris Sûreté.
The upshot was, as all aficionados of true crime know, that Eyraud was guillotined, nineteen months after the rehearsal, and Gaby, who kept grinning at the jury, was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour.
When Goron was in London before the trial, he paid his usual courtesy call at Scotland Yard and chatted at length with Inspector Frederick G. Abberline.
“Had one rather like yours recently ourselves,” said Abberline. “Naked man, broken neck, left to rot in the countryside. Haven’t succeeded in identifying him yet. You were luckier there.”
“It is notorious,” Goron observed, “that the laboratories of the French police are the best in the world.”
“We do very well, thank you,” said Abberline distantly.
“Of course.” The French visitor was all politeness. “As you did last year in that series of Whitechapel murders.”
“I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic, Mr. Goron, but no police force in the world could have done more than we did in the Ripper case. It was a nightmare with no possible resolution. And unless he strikes again, it’s going to go down as one of the greatest unsolved cases in history. Jack the Ripper will never hang.”
“Not,” said M. Goron, “so long as he confines his attention to the women of London.” He hurried to catch the boat train, thinking of Gabrielle Bompard and feeling a certain regret that such a woman was also such a devil.
* * *
* A word only Anthony Boucher would use. Originally he wrote “attar”; but he crossed that out and substituted “otto.”
The Sparrow and the Lark
LYNDSAY FAYE
It is evident that Lyndsay Faye (1980– ) has an affection for research, as all her novels have been set in the nineteenth century and praised for their authenticity.
Faye’s trilogy featuring Timothy Wilde, a bartender who became a policeman at the time that New York was creating its police department in 1846—coincidentally the year of the great Irish potato famine—began with The Gods of Gotham (2012); it was nominated for an Edgar Award. The second Wilde novel, Seven for a Secret (2013), deals with “blackbirders,” underworld thugs who kidnap northern Negroes and sell them into slavery in the South. The third, The Fatal Flame (2015), puts Wilde on the trail of an arsonist whose secrets might be uncovered by the cryptic murmurings of a starv
ing orphan with a tenuous hold on reality who has been brought to his door by Mercy Underhill, the love of his life.
A lifelong aficionado of Sherlock Holmes, Faye’s first book, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson (2009), received praise from many sources, including Caleb Carr, who wrote his own pastiche, The Italian Secretary, in 2005. Given blessings by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate, it pits Holmes against Jack the Ripper.
One of the stories that will be included in The Whole Art of Detection, a collection of her Holmes stories, “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness” was selected for the prestigious The Best American Mystery Stories 2010.
“The Sparrow and the Lark” was written especially for this collection and has never been previously published.
THE SPARROW AND THE LARK
Lyndsay Faye
I shudder yet when I think of her eyes. Midsummer blue like mine, bright and kindly for most folk, the ones she wanted to pet or admire her. But when she looked my way?
Cold and shallow as winter graves.
It weren’t always so betwixt us, this throbbing hate like a poisoned pulse. We was tender for half-moments, specks of time when she was six or so and I around nine, afore the boys arrived to plague us. Afore we begun plaguing each other over them, as girls are wont.
Now I’m dead, there’s naught to be done to bridge the rift.
—
I think back to Caernarfon in Carnarvonshire where we’d kip together on a barley-stuffed pallet in our parents’ room, instead of packed like tinned mackerel in t’other bedchamber with our six brothers. All on account we were girls. We slept too close to Tad and Mam to whisper without a harsh growl or a knock on the pate, for Tad (we always called our father by the Welsh word) were stern with us over the precious few hours of sleep he stole. But we tapped codes into sisterly skin, Did you eat enough? and Search the riverbanks together tomorrow? and felt as if we shared something sugary and forbidden, secrets that heated the belly like a stolen quaff of Mam’s tonic.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 36