All sisters write hidden scripts on each other’s hearts so. Don’t they? Even the sisters who rot long afore they’re in their graves?
On those friendlier days, in those times, I’d go with Julia Kelly—that’s my sister, a spitfire name, and me plain old Mary Jane—down from our crib in Hole in the Wall Street, nearabouts where Tad sweat himself nigh to death in the iron works six days a week, to the river. Well, it looked as if ’twere a river. It were Menai, the strait what separated us from Anglesey. I thought as a girl that crossing Menai meant escape, and imagining it always made my heart soar high as the gulls.
The word escape sent Julia’s heart skyward too, only I didn’t know it as yet.
As I said, we often went down to the banks to comb for the sort of flotsam children think enchanted. Shiny stones. Driftwood like sorcerers’ wands. Water weeds we insisted were mermaids’ hair. One day—it were autumn, I remember, because the sun were setting when I glanced up at the brute height of Caernarfon Castle, skies all battered and bloodied in reds and purples and it not yet chimed six unless I’d missed the bells.
There’s those as figure otherwise now, in light of violent circumstances, but I don’t miss much. Never did. I’ve ne’er been as clever as Julia, but I know how the world turns, that there’s forces that can’t be stopped, sure as the sun sets, and her always pulling and stamping to get her own way.
Anyhow, there was egrets about, scavenging as we were but never mussing a single snowy feather, and the bells not chimed yet, and Julia and I searching after some token to hide behind the loose brick by the water pump and keep for ourselves, when my sister froze as if Death had gripped her.
What she’d found wouldn’t seem like much to most, I’d wager. Not if they weren’t windblown Welsh lasses as often out of shoes as in them. It were half a dredge oyster. They’re generally ugly—outside chipped rock, inside a dull grey sheen—but that shell were like a sunrise. One surface smooth and chalky, t’other a sweet gleaming pink like a color we’d dreamt up, the sort you couldn’t properly believe unless it were right in front of your nose.
This one must be magic, my sister told me in Gaelic. We’ll hide it in the usual place. It’ll bring us both luck that way.
You found it, I protested. You can keep it for yourself if you like.
Talismans could turn their coats if claimed by the wrong party. That much I was sure about even then.
Doesn’t matter. If it’s yours too, I’ll be safe so long as I’m near. It’ll keep us together forever.
I still wonder whether she meant that as a blessing or a curse. Or if she suspected I schemed to flee Caernarfon as fast as ever I could. Even afore everything changed.
—
The day we found the shell were back when we had names, proper names, Mary Jane and Julia—but less than a year later our brothers started up calling us the Sparrow and the Lark, on account of Julia always warbled whenever a hat was like to drop. My sister sang without knowing it, sang constantly, and her voice were like a berry, bright and sweet at once, and no one in Wales can live with a talent and not attract notice. Our brothers were only rude and selfish over it—Give us a ditty afore supper, little Lark, or I’ll twist your braids clean off—that sort of rubbish. But brothers aren’t so different from the men as come later, are they? So I knew trouble already lurked in the mouse holes and cobblestone cracks, ready to seep out at any moment.
I were granted a voice like a horsehair brush, sounded as if I’d been smoking shag from the cradle, and that were what the boys had latched onto, was the contrast. The way her voice could move a stone to tears and mine scour a copper pot.
I hated Julia first for her voice. As she grew louder, every day I grew quieter, a rough breeze drowned by birdsong.
—
I pass my hands in their fingerless gloves over a guard rail without touching it, the stink of brine thick as stew in my nostrils. I’m not used to being on this side of the river. Came over early, all the cocks screaming, and since then I’ve done naught but wander. The Southwark docks are somber this time of year without the reds and yellows and greens peeking from the bushels of the apple vendors. Without the sun’s blessing and with the nip of snow in the air. A street seller of tools passes me in the gathering dark, clanking as he goes, hawking knives, cleavers, saws, steels, voice tiredly booming, “Best quality starting at tuppence a blade! First sharpening gratis, new an’ used, satisfaction guaranteed!”
Shivering, I settle further into my scarlet shawl, but no one pays me any heed and ne’er do I expect them to. The weary day laborers what search for odd boatyard jobs as my own dear Joe does when he’s short on chink glance warily at the knife hawker, scratch at their bristly jaws and head for their homes with tight lips, shuttered looks. The date is November 10th of 1888, and as bad a business as it was before, now nobody can look at a knife the same way any longer. Maybe never will again.
I know I won’t.
Crimson dusk is pooling at the sky’s edges, bleeding into the Thames, turning the hundreds of ships’ masts into stark black spears. The judies will be hurrying indoors soon, whether or not they’ve earned their billet, though all changed November 9th, and it don’t matter a whit anymore whether a girl is indoors or out. Roofs make no difference, nor walls, nor doors.
Nobody’s safe.
When I’ve haunted the riverbank long enough, aimless and cold, I fall into step with a paint-smeared trio of dollymops headed into a public house, trying to puzzle where I can stow soundlessly away, where best to travel, when and whether I should flee the city like a shadow chased by the dawn.
How will I quit London now I’ve died in it?
—
When I were eleven, an English lady called Fairbanks whose husband opened a fashionable hotel inside Town Walls grew bored with tea parties and started teaching school to the brightest of Caernarfon’s “beggarly” girl children. Julia and I both were accepted after being examined and took lessons with a dozen or so other lasses in Mrs. Fairbanks’s parlor, everyone desperate for the smooth pats of her china hands and the tea cakes she’d offer if we excelled. When I gave out in London as I were from well-to-do stock, it were only thanks to Mrs. Fairbanks I was believed, though I lost as many airs and graces later as I’d gained.
Easy earned, easy spent, they say.
My sister could always finish her sums and her catechizations easy as blinking, but I pored over mine, wasted tallow candles over them, and so when the hearth weren’t scrubbed or the rugs beaten, I were the one switched for it back at our crib.
I hated Julia second for her wits. She never lifted a finger to help me, though I was the eldest, only tossed her fair head with a false commiserating look, and I begun to see her for what she was. An empty thing, with a heart like a hole, and shovel as much admiration as you liked into the cavity, she’d fault you for shorting her. It’ll keep us together forever, she’d said that day at Menai about the shell. Then I’d thought she’d wanted a sister, a loyal and true one.
But that weren’t it at all.
—
The dollymops palaver amongst themselves over cups of max at a pub called The Rusted Anchor, swilling carefully as we’re wont to do with the first quaff of the night, savoring it, letting the gin coat the tongue. I should know. I perch by the smoking hearth, a shadow within the shadows, watching. Silent.
“They say as she were Jack’s particular mistress, and that’s why she were gutted so much worse than t’others, like, for he were jealous and it was a love quarrel,” the first gushes. She is comely still, dark-haired and rosy with friendly craters in her skin from a bout with the pox.
Not quite right, I think, smiling, though love did have something to do with it.
“Oh aye, ’twouldn’t do by half to gut an unsuspecting stranger so thorough, as any proper gent knows.” The second has a shrewish face, witty and knowing, and the trio laugh coarsely.
Truth be told, we all resorted to laughter after the second or third girl died—damned
if I can remember which. But what choice had we? I think, remembering. ’Twas either laugh or slit your own throat and save Jack the bother, plagued with unholy terror as most were.
Leaning closer, I listen.
The third, a thickset lass, takes a deep swallow of gin and shudders. “I don’t see how you can make fun so soon after. She weren’t even a cheap whore like us, but a proper ladybird what fell on hard times, so the papers say. And then to make such a bad end! She were once engaged to a baronet.”
It’s all I can do not to snort. I’d lit out for Southwark, across the river from my neighborhood, as fast as my wits and will could take me, and nary a soul knows me on this side of the water, so I’m not surprised the rumors here are shy of the mark. I’d not wanted to glimpse anyone I’d known before. And it’s true I were once a proper ladybird, decked in mauve silks and kept like a parrot in a pretty brass cage.
Engaged to a baronet, though? That’s a bit thick even for the gutter press.
“You can’t read the papers, you daft sot, so you’re only gossip-mongering, which is shocking wickedness, and you should be ashamed.” The shrew-faced one winks drolly as the plump one pouts. “For my money, Mary Jane Kelly weren’t any more special than the rest of us. Only more dead, or anyways dead in more pieces.”
The others howl at this joke, and even I am forced to smile.
I was special though, I think when the mirth passes, my fingers clenching. I made myself special in spite of Julia, in spite of everything.
And the Man in the Long Black Coat knew it the moment he spied me.
—
When I were sixteen, I married a collier by the name of John Davies, the only reason he chose me being that Julia at thirteen weren’t fully a woman yet. By then she could sing like an angel and talk like a lady for all that there were holes in her skirts—I knew as well as anyone that it were only time on my side and nothing more. Commonest ally known to womankind, time. Time brings better weather. Turns squalling infants to sturdy helpers or else eliminates them altogether. Kills husbands. Time grants wishes if you’re brave enough to snatch at them, when you can see opportunity dangling like a rope down the slick edge of your well.
So I made my move, and John Davies was mine for the taking.
The men simply didn’t care which girl was which, I figure. Tad would have been equally chuffed to misplace either daughter since there was eight Kellys to keep in small beer and turnips. John just wanted a warm space to slot himself into of a night. And Julia, every inch of her rosebud breasts and farm boy’s hips, sure enough loathed me for getting out first, that endless blue gaze burning as John hugged my shoulders in his bear’s grip, promising Tad grandchildren as tall and strong as I’d grown and Tad grunting whilst he poured them another two cups of spruce-scented max.
I hated Julia third for her weakness. She wanted to keep me there all to herself, keep me poor and precocious as she was, nothing but a croaking shadow.
You can’t desert me this way, Julia hissed when the men fell to gin and talk of arranging a modest trunk for me to travel away with. It’s not sisterly, Mary Jane. And after me loving John so.
John had sniffed after her right enough, despite her youth, on account of hearing her trilling in the marketplace one Saturday. But that were simply the way of the world now I were marriageable and her only near to it. I couldn’t afford to wait.
Every tick-tock clacked at me to make-haste, make-haste, make-haste. The sister who’d once wanted to share a shell to keep us both from harm combed her flaxen tresses with a hundred strokes every night, stole precious oats from the larder and scrubbed her face with them, slapped me in a fury when I came home after stepping out with a neighborhood boy if he’d ever so much as cast an eye her way. Our six brothers would quake with laughter and applaud her spirit, Mam shake her head and tell me, It serves you right for filling out so sudden-like, Mary Jane, golden-haired and ripe as a fallen plum, though I’d not fallen just yet.
—
“I heard tell as she was fair as a princess. Everyone is saying so. She were beautiful before…before he got to her,” the stout dollymop muses.
None of them want to say left her corpse in tatters all over the room, and I don’t blame them.
“Beautiful, my foot. You’re so credible,” the snide one scoffs.
“None of us are beautiful anymore, or we’d live better,” the raven-haired one agrees, though she’s the best of a rather sorry lot.
True enough, I think, recalling the taste of French champagne with the same giddy bliss as I always do. Champagne is dipping your toes in a bath of pure gold. It’s pale, pale as hoarfrost, and tingles against the lips just so when the glass is iced. Champagne is the only thing on earth more thrilling than the Man with the Long Black Coat, and I’d not drunk champagne for a long, lonesome time.
“And anyhow,” the pockmarked judy continues, “that’s only the locals making up fairy tales and the newspapers and the peelers gobbling ’em down like gospel. It’s a better story, ain’t it? That’s our job these days, in these parts, other than getting ourselves ripped—spinning a good yarn. It tickles their fancies better if Mary Kelly’s a princess what was killed by a monster, you savvy, and not just a common trull cut up like a dead sow.”
“Christ yes,” the hatchet-faced girl chuckles, lighting a pipe and crossing her ankles. “Did y’see the way the papers drew Annie Chapman? If I were a dragon, I’d ha’ spit her straight out again.”
My eyes fall shut.
She’s right—it is a better story, I think. A beautiful girl who grew up in the shadow of Caernarfon Castle met with a monster.
It’s even true, as far as it goes.
—
You can’t marry, Julia growled the day I became engaged to John, bruising my wrist with her little claw. I won’t let you.
We stood out in the rear yard, the last and sweetest of the sun’s rays blocked, as ever, by a feudal relic. The hate rose in me then something fierce, the same hate I always felt when told I’d never make it away from Caernarfon, would always live in the black gloom of that great hideous castle like a giant’s prison, in a tiny house on Hole in the Wall Street where our brothers pinched us purple and the leeks we could afford were always wilted and Julia and I would stuff cotton in our ears when Tad shoved Mam’s nightdress up and rooted like a great boar in their bed.
The hate I felt whenever I was called sullen and couldn’t answer, That’s not true, I’m just a sparrow, and silent when there’s a lark nearby to measure me against. That’s not the same thing at all.
’Tis settled, I told her. In a week’s time, I’ll be free of this sty.
It’s wickedness and you know it, said Julia, her eyes filling. Fast, shameful wickedness. I’ve a trull for a sister, and what am I to do without her?
Go to the devil, I suggested, and see if he’ll take you for a bride. You’d not refuse, I’d wager.
Julia turned pale as the pungent froth at low tide. But she didn’t care I were marrying—she cared I were marrying first, because without shadows to bully, a lamp don’t look like much, do it now?
I ne’er looked back after wedding John Davies, nor returned to Caernarfon. But I did raid the secret hiding place behind the brick and keep the shell, that innocent scooped shape, pearl-like and mysterious, and had a hole drilled in it, and carried it about my own neck to keep me safe and remind myself whenever the hate wound round my heart like prickling brambles that I’d won. I got out. I was Mary Jane again and she Julia left behind under the crushing shadow of that terrible heap of rocks, not the Sparrow and the Lark any longer.
Only two things matter in this life: who you are and where. The question is, can you truly change either one? Peel off one skin, don another, and walk away?
—
It were only two years later when I learnt Julia was right, and her sister Mary Jane was a trull true enough. As common a trull as thighs ever itched when kept too long together.
A fine trick of prophesy, I thou
ght that! Though I’d little enough choice over it. John being blasted to pieces in an explosion at the coal mine and all, them hitting a pocket of poison gas, and me suddenly with no husband, and nothing even left of him to bury, only a few shillings from the overseer and the head of my husband’s pickaxe to my name.
What in bloody hell did I want with half a pickaxe?
That were the first time as Julia found me.
I’d sent one letter home, only to say we was situated in South Wales and I’d not time to write nor chink for postage, leaving out the fact I’d discovered that colliers were about as hard worked as African slaves and being Mrs. Davies weren’t much other than living in a draughty cottage with a roof of thatched heather which sprouted mould along the eaves. John’s hands were gentle enough, but soot-dark no matter how much lye I mixed in the soap. After he’d roll off of me, I’d lie there still tingling, unsatisfied and downright confused over the sensation, exhausted half from drudgery and half tedium. Living an endless loop of toil like a waking sleep. My lot weren’t victorious enough to be fit for much correspondence, but I’d given too much away with just the single sheet of foolscap, it seemed, for Julia read of the mining casualties in the paper three years later and turned up alone with a carpetbag.
I were plenty vexed, but not shocked—she were the only Kelly in the house as could read, after all.
“I’m here to help you,” she announced in English, smiling. “You needn’t worry.”
“Aren’t you long wed by now?” I replied.
She shook her head, telling the tale, and in every word, I could smell the bitterness on her breath. “Mam fell sick. She needed me. There was twice as much work after you left. And you know what they thought of me back in Caernarfon. And I was that melancholy—oh, Mary Jane, I couldn’t breathe for missing you.”
Very likely, I thought, but was not flattered.
She reported that two of our brothers had married and thus Mam would now have enough people to do for her. Julia at sixteen was curved and charming, same as I was at three years her senior, only my sister had a voice like a bell with a curse in it. The false smile stayed fixed as she measured what I’d do. But all her neat white teeth were thorns to me, and her eyes pools to drown in.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 37