“You’d best come inside. There’s a hare for supper, and nary a soul to share it with,” said I pointedly, for she had left out the part about condolences over John being blown to bits.
Of course I knew as she’d only meant to make a final break from Caernarfon, and I a ready excuse—a newly widowed sister taking up with an unmarried sibling, what could be more natural?—but I didn’t care one way or t’other what she was after. Within four days I’d done give her the slip and were in huge, hustling Cardiff, where poor dead John’s coal had been shipped away all over the globe, without a cent to my name after the train fare nor a soul in the world to claim me as theirs.
It was like going mad. It was like dying. It was like heaven.
When I spread my legs for the first game gent, following some husky words spoken and a fee decided back at his crib, I saw after he’d doffed his gloves that he’d ship’s clerk hands, pale and smooth as milk, and I laughed for the pure pleasure of the sight. I weren’t always well in Cardiff, caught spells of melancholy and the occasional rotten customer, but I’ll always remember how I carried myself like a queen, traded every cent I was worth just to waste the coin on more enjoyment.
I’d never had enjoyment afore, you understand, and found I liked it plenty.
They call it going bad, on account of you’re servicing blokes what don’t love you and ain’t about to marry you. But ’twas pretty bad with John Davies, though I was married to him, and all I got in trade for it were more work. When it comes to servicing, I’d fain barter for coin or champagne instead of more work any day, and there’s plentiful lasses on the streets who’d not argue with me. The ones who are yet alive to argue at all.
—
The dollymops are peckish, so they order two pigeon pies between the three of them, hovering over the scran like witches over a cauldron. Some soldiers on leave occupy a table nearby now, clapping one another on the back and hooting and even breaking into raucous song, and they irk me something fierce, as my fellow ladybirds are still discussing me and I’ve plenty more to learn and noplace better to go as yet. When I move a bit nearer along the narrow communal bench, I fear as they’ll spy me, but I might as well be a wisp of steam wafting up from the crusts they’re dividing onto tin plates.
“I heard Mary Kelly had a live-in cove called Joe Barnett, but he quit her on account o’ her drunkenness,” the pretty one says. “They was always moving from crib to crib, for no landlord would have ’em. She got ugly whenever in her cups, so I hear. So he threw her over.”
My teeth set. It ain’t news, I just don’t fancy hearing it said.
The sharp-faced one cackles, lifting her cup of max. “I’d prefer a strong drink to a live-in beau any day. What a milksop. I’ve this to say for Continental types, they don’t fault you for taking a drop too many when out carousing, while your stuffed-shirt English variety…” She shrugs, sipping.
“Best be wary o’ Continentals. Now they say it’s an Italian doing it, an opera singer what always played villains onstage and took to it something terrible and caught Cupid’s disease from one of us and went mad,” the thickset one says as she studies a morsel of what’s possibly pigeon.
Covering my mouth with my hand, I chuckle silently into my fraying glove.
You can be driven mad by music sure enough, that I’ll warrant you.
The shrewish one licks gravy from her lips. “Twirling his waxed moustaches, unsheathing a great whopping dagger, and laughing maniacally all the while. None of us would find that a bit suspicious. I swear to Christ, you are such a ninny. Even a bobby would notice a scoundrel o’ that caliber.”
“It’s all very well to stay away from Jews, and foreigners, and butchers, and suspicious characters, but supposing the killer is an Englishman?” the brunette laments. “Then how are we to avoid him?”
You won’t, I think, and not without certain satisfaction.
The Man with the Long Black Coat is a poised gent whose name I ne’er caught on the few occasions we spoke, but many’s the time I saw him about the ’Chapel, and he always made a tiny bow to me, like a shopkeeper or a butler would do, and it always made the laughter bubble up in my throat. He moves like the shadow of a man, your eyes touching him and then glancing off again. A silhouette what ain’t there at all. His coat is as deeply black, in fact, as his collar and cuffs are pure white, but he’s no aristocrat, only maybe a clerk, for his togs are completed with a quiet black tie, quiet black hat, and quiet black boots. I’ve nary heard his boots make a single sound, come to think of it.
When first I spoke with him, I were dead drunk in Raven Row, staggering home to Miller’s Court on the night after my sister reappeared, and he caught my elbow. He held it—held me—long enough for me to notice. Friendly, caring even. His eyes were colorless in the gloom. He said, “You must be more careful after dark, my dear young lady,” and I know how sweet and purring a demon can sound, for I grew up with one.
And the Man with the Long Black Coat is unquestionably an Englishman.
—
After Cardiff, there were London, and after that were Paris, and Paris is where I discovered champagne.
The dollymops were right: Mary Jane Kelly was a right lush. My neighbors were quoted in the papers, and my landlord, John McCarthy, and all t’other roaches what scuttle about the streets of Whitechapel.
Mary Jane was pretty and well-spoken, but when the drink got in her…
When in liquor she was very noisy; otherwise she was a very quiet woman…
You scarce saw a pleasanter girl than Mary Jane, save for when…
Well, I can explain all that.
After I’d kept enough Cardiff blokes warm to earn another train ticket and a pair of used but well-mended frocks, I went to London in 1884. A practiced hand I were by that time, and not just with my hand, and if I’d been a handsome lass before, by then I was a full-blown rose, and the lads took notice. I said Paris and I meant it. Gents carted me off for a fortnight or more to laze about and to eat feasts—fish so fresh they blinked at me, I’d swear it, duck smothered in oranges, bread you didn’t have to pick green spots off, and every bite tasted of butter.
And the men themselves! What monocles, what gaits, what togs they had. I’d a handful of regular blokes within a month, and naught would serve them but to buy me new fripperies, put me on a boat, and pretend as I were their wife when they’d business in France. The rings I wore might have been paste right enough, but the men was real as anything, leaving stray hairs and sandalwood cologne and damp patches on the bedsheets.
Chère Marie Jeanette, they would croon as they left me of a morning, you’ll rest peaceful and quiet today, won’t you? Promise me? and I’d sit before the open window with a cigarette and the dregs of the champagne bottle, thinking how like starlight it had tasted, cool and sparkling, as I watched the traffic wend from the lodging houses to the shops and gardens. My voice would feel scraped from use, and I’d mix honey in hot brandy, loll in the ruined linens until the boardinghouse rang the gong calling lodgers to a late breakfast of hot croissants and soft cheese.
Champagne, though…in Paris, everyone drank it. Tad and my brothers had ne’er shared their max with me, though Julia and I occasionally stole a taste in the dead of night when we was meant to be using the privy, and we nipped at Mam’s tonics something terrible. I loved gin from the first. I love it now, but I love champagne more than anything. Champagne is nuzzling against the wing of an angel. Gin ain’t the same, but I’d every right to chase after the glow that Paris would take on after a few glasses, and Whitechapel needs a sight more help to look romantic than Paris. You’re drunk whether you just swallowed liquid diamonds or pure pine bark, and Mary Jane Kelly, I read after dying, was one of the most decent and nice girls you could meet when sober.
I’d learnt better than to be sober by that time, thank Christ.
I took my chance in the instant when a bud unfurls, affrighted of my sister’s malice, and left Caernarfon a married woman. Cardiff welcome
d me as a friendly widow who wanted a shilling or two whenever her mending income ran dry. Then I went from London to Paris with men who thought I sounded like a draught of their favourite cigarette, and that felt like silk against my skin, like a caress, because they paid extra for it.
My voice.
They fair bled coin for my voice. They thought it beautiful.
There’s neither rhyme nor reason to what men find beautiful. Some want larks, and others sparrows. Some want to make a lass happy, smile when she smiles—and others, as my brothers hinted at so long ago, only care to watch her bleed.
Here is the truth about the Man with the Long Black Coat: if not for champagne, I’d ne’er have took up with him, for I did love Joe Barnett. Love for Joe Barnett felt like eating a great chop running with juices, the sort served alongside roast taters sweet as cream, and after a meal like that you feel heavy, though maybe as happy as heavy. Maybe heavier than happy sometimes.
Champagne feels light as a feather, and so did the Man with the Long Black Coat.
—
“What clues have the police so far?” asks the stout dollymop, pressing her fork into the last crumbs of crust.
“Will you listen to Sherlock Holmes ’ere,” the rat-faced one snorts, and we all grin at that, though I again stifle my laughter.
“Clues?” the comely one demands in disbelief just as a serving boy catches her eye. “Oi, there—another round, that’s a good lad! Clues, you say? How can a nightmare have clues? This one’s not just ripped, she’s ripped t’ shreds, and in her own digs. What are they meant to do, by Jesus? Divine the sick brute’s moniker by reading patterns in the blood?”
“There’s two things I found out this morning, as might make a difference.” The snide one sounds grave for the first time.
“Truly?”
“Truly. Ye’ll have heard about the stolen heart, then?”
The others’ faces sour with revulsion—even I, who brought the heart’s theft about in the first place, feel my belly lurch in protest.
“Aye, though I wish to Christ I’d not. What else?”
“There’s a charm or something o’ the kind she always wore, ’bout her neck, I heard tell from my cousin what visits the same grocer across the river.” She takes a long pull of her pipe. “Fond as anything of the trinket, a seashell I think ’twas.”
“And so?”
“And so it’s missing too.”
At their words, I cannot help but reach up and touch the oyster, feel its smoothness beneath my thumb as I so often have before.
—
“Give us a hand with this, love, and dry yer eyes. If they’ll not miss us like honest good neighbors, they can go straight to hell, says I,” Joe announced with strained good cheer.
We stood in a thin rain like workhouse gruel in Brick Lane in March of 1888. None of the judies had yet been gutted, and I’d been with Joe for nearly a year. I shifted my feet, angry at the squish of the puddle into my patched boots, angry that both stockings were already sopping. Piled about us were a trunk, a carpetbag, two little wooden crates, and the burlap sack holding the contents of the larder what Joe were thrusting towards me. Taking it, I slipped it over my back and took a pull of max from my flask.
“That’s what got us chucked out in the first place, so yer doing us no favors pickling yer guts at six in the morning,” Joe said.
He sounded gentle, or maybe just hoarse, because we’d shouted ourselves sick again last night and been sent packing from Brick Lane to sleep rough or find new digs, not so much as a day’s notice, and our rent paid through the end of the week and all. I’d have demanded the balance, but a window were broken, how I couldn’t recall, though my arm had a rag wrapped about it shielding a cut, and the lemon-sucking landlady told me she’d keep my chink to cover the damages or else whistle for a crusher.
“Don’t take on so, Mary,” Joe begged again in his Irish lilt, passing me his kerchief.
“I’m not blubbing, I’m bloody wet,” I sniffed.
I sounded like a stick scraping along a wall, partly thanks to the drink and the shouting, but some of the soreness must have been due to the actual words I’d yelled, I reasoned, because you can’t drag every foul name you can recall from your gullet and not bruise it some. Not when the names were lobbed at a steady cove like Joe.
Peering at Joe through the murky rain, I tried to make out what had enraged me the night before. But I ne’er knew what any of my swains had done to set me off come the dawn. Not unless I found marks and knew I’d scratched and yowled just as any cat will when cornered. But Joe wouldn’t hit me, not for a king’s ransom, so I knew it a useless exercise, like struggling over the harder maths Julia could finish in a quarter of an hour. Sometimes in Paris I’d screamed because they liked it, wanted a touch of spice, and sometimes I’d scream because the bottles were dry or the restaurant closed or the bloke wanted to tie me down.
More often I’d shout to hear myself after being so long a sparrow, I figure now, though it’s all very hard to recollect.
That day in 1888 I were twenty-five years old, same age as when I died. By then the better London brothels with the polished windowpanes and pretty door knockers wouldn’t have me any longer, on account of I were steady and amiable until I’d took a drop too many. Fair and full-figured as I was, no one took me to Paris any longer, either.
Joe frowned at me, brown whiskers twitching and dripping with moisture. I’d first met Joe Barnett in a pub in Commercial Street, bellowing out a drinking song with his mates what are licensed as porters down Billingsgate Fish Market way. I was low enough to be walking the ’Chapel for custom already, lower than I’d been since Caernarfon, and there Joe stood, broad-chested and still smelling of the sardines he’d delivered, singing in a fine baritone, and he bought six pints that night for The prettiest girl I’ve e’er spied in all the East End, and wi’ the sweetest smile. His voice were so tender, and his jokes so bawdy, and he’d good employment, and didn’t care I were a dollymop years in the making.
He said as I’d seen life, that times had been hard, and I’d come out the winner yet.
I took digs with him the second time we met for a drink, and Joe said as he’d ne’er felt so lucky. As he spoke those words, in his warmly rumbling way, I touched the pierced shell hanging under my chemise and nigh blinded him with my grin.
When I could manage to stick to beer, I did. When I didn’t, I woke up feeling like I’d swallowed a hot poker, and we changed lodgings. George Street, Little Paternoster Street, and now Brick Lane. I’d ne’er thought even I could get myself kicked to the curb of Brick Lane, for Christ’s sake. ’Tis wretched cotton flock bedding all lumped into rough canvas, twelve and fifteen to a chamber sometimes, all Irish like Joe, with blushing cheeks and brash jawlines. We’d our own room, complete with rug and basin, but that was over now and to celebrate I took another sip of max.
“Easy, love.” Joe sighed, shouldering the pair of crates with the trunk hoisted in his other hand. I took up the carpetbag, balancing its weight with the sack over my shoulder. “Ye’ll float away and how will I find ye?”
He weren’t wrong—by then I was floating, just a little, and there were tears in my eyes now when before there had been only rain.
“I’m sorry for the things I said,” I whispered.
“The gin said them. The gin is a sure enough liar, don’t y’know.”
“Then I’m sorry the gin is such a harpy. I don’t want you to think ill of me.”
“I never do, fer I know at heart yer the kindest lass as ever breathed. Just sometimes ye think ill yerself o’ perfectly decent folk, afore they’ve done aught to offend ye, jump to the wrong conclusion without their having meant ye any harm, and that always breaks my heart a little.”
Joe shook his head and kissed the top of mine where I stood in the drizzle with neither a hat nor umbrella. He struck off to find us a new crib and I trudged after, watching the sturdy weight of the man beneath his load, placid and dependable as a
n ox. I wondered whether it were better for us that I didn’t savvy what things I was apologizing for, only knew sure as Testament that I’d said them. Supposing I forgot, I couldn’t look at Joe’s cheap shirt with his back muscles straining and think the bitter words that only meant he wasn’t Paris, and wasn’t champagne, and not that I didn’t love him.
That day, we pawned some handkerchiefs and a few spoons and took a room at number 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel, by which I might as well say we crawled into a rats’ nest. And that afternoon, drowning my sorrows at the Ten Bells Pub, my sister found me for the final time.
Completely by accident, damn London for its small cruelties and damn Julia to hellfire for her sins.
—
“Maybe the shell necklace were from Kelly’s beau, the one as threw her over, and she couldn’t bear to look at it anymore and pawned it at the nearest jerryshop,” the plump dollymop reflects. When she shakes her head, the firelight catches her across the bridge of her nose and I see she owns kindly hazel eyes. “Dunno why I imagined something like that, it’s ever so sad.”
“Never in all my days have I seen such a one for nursery stories as you,” the cunning one sniffs, pushing her plate away. “Fat lot o’ good a bauble like that would do Kelly now, or a beau for that matter. What she wants is a box and a shovel.”
“I’d almost think you were glad of another murder if that weren’t the awfulest thing I could imagine.” I hear tears beginning to form, her throat starting to swell.
“ ’Ere now,” the dark-haired judy interjects, stricken, “no one’s glad of anything of the sort! We’re sisters, we ladybirds, in name and in deed, and though they may call our kind frail sisters, we’re as game as any man jack on these streets, aren’t we, and we look out for our own. She meant no harm, only a dark sort o’ funning—didn’t you?”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 38