Touchstone Season Two Box Set

by Andy Conway

  Notably, with the canonical five, I’ve included references to incidents witnessed around the murders:

  1) The two men Danny sees walking away from the body of Polly Nichols are Robert Paul and Charles Cross (aka Letchmere), who have already discovered her body and gone to find a policeman. But while they alert PC Jonas Mizen to the body, PC John Neil discovers the corpse. This is the policeman Danny sees approaching.

  2) At approximately the hour of Annie Chapman’s murder, in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, neighbour Albert Cadosch heard someone saying, ‘No!’ followed by something falling against the fence. I have ascribed both of these to Danny.

  3) Elizabeth Stride’s murder was thought to have been interrupted, hence the lack of mutilation and the subsequent murder of Catherine Eddowes the same night. I have given the interruption to Danny. But first he sees Israel Schwartz and another man, known as ‘Pipeman’, fleeing the scene, having witnessed the attack on Stride. Louis Diemschutz was the man driving his pony and cart into Dutfield’s Yard. He believed the Ripper was possibly still in the yard due to the behaviour of his pony, and that he slipped away while he went into the International Working Men’s Educational Club to get help. Again I have made this all about Danny.

  4) With the final canonical murder of Mary Anne Kelly in Miller’s Court, I have gone with Beadle’s preferred interpretation of Bury murdering her in the morning (see Beadle, 195-202), and making his escape just before the arrival of Thomas Bowyer at 10.45 a.m., who came to collect the overdue rent and was the first to discover the bloodbath.

  Dundee. Beadle makes a case for Bury fleeing London as his modus operandi came under scrutiny, just at the point he moved to Dundee. He also uses modern profiling methods to make a fairly convincing case against Bury, with a wealth of circumstantial evidence and conjecture. That aside, while William Bury never confessed to the Whitechapel murders, there are a few tantalising indications from his final days alone that he might have been Jack the Ripper:

  1) On two occasions when neighbours in Dundee expressed horror over the goings on in Whitechapel, Bury said nothing and his wife Ellen said ‘Jack the Ripper is quiet now/taking a rest’.

  2) The night before he gave himself in, Bury reacted with violent fear when a friend casually asked if there might be a Jack the Ripper story in his newspaper (his wife was already lying mutilated in a trunk at this point).

  3) When Bury handed himself in he said, quite nonsensically, he was afraid he might be arrested as Jack the Ripper (the logic was he’d found his wife hanged and then cut her up in a panic and this might somehow implicate him in the Whitechapel murders).

  4) Two chalk messages were found written on the walls of the Burys’ apartment: Jack Ripper is at the back of this door (on the back door) and Jack Ripper is in this sellar (on the stairwell). There has been much conjecture as to who wrote these graffiti, from local children, due to the childishness of the hand and the obvious spelling and grammatical errors; the semi-literate Ellen Bury, perhaps leading to the attack on her; and William Bury himself, as an admittedly unhinged warning to the local populace.

  5) The wounds to Ellen Bury bear several similarities to the wounds inflicted on canonical Ripper victims Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes and are painstakingly compared in Beadle’s book. As at least one poster at Ripper Casebook has pointed out, genital mutilation is very rare in serial killers, so what odds that two such murderers should practise it at roughly the same time, living in roughly the same area?

  6) When executioner James Berry arrived to perform his duties, Bury said, ‘I suppose you think you are clever to hang me? (emphasis on the final word) But because you are to hang me you are not to get anything out of me.’ Seeing as Bury had already confessed to the murder of his wife, what exactly did he mean by these two cryptic remarks? ‘He talked as if he thought himself to be one who stood head and shoulders above every other criminal who had passed through my hands,’ said James Berry. It does imply he thought himself a very special catch, and that he was punishing his executioner by refusing to divulge his real identity, which was obviously something much more than a man who’d killed his wife in Dundee.

  7) James Berry stated that two Scotland Yard detectives travelled incognito to Dundee to witness William Bury’s execution and listened in on the above exchange. They discussed it with him afterwards and all three firmly believed they had seen Jack the Ripper executed.

  8) Beadle writes that James Berry ‘was resolute to his dying day that he had hanged Jack the Ripper.’

  And finally, as an unsettling (for me) postscript to this story, James Berry resigned from his post as Britain’s public executioner in 1892, after an execution in Liverpool of a man named Conway.

  BRIGHT STAR FALLING

  Dedication

  To Liz

  tĥaŋkší who was lost

  Introductory note

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, but it contains many historical figures and I have tried to be as true to their history as possible.

  While riding my fictional wagon train through the history of the Lakota people, their struggle and their culture, I have tried to be respectful, and I hope this book is seen as, in the words of one advance reader, “a love letter to the Lakota’ and a celebration of their world.

  The Historical Notes at the rear of the book provide a glossary of all Lakota words and phrases I have used, as well as detailed referencing of the sources for most historical events. Historians still dispute many of these events, but I hope I have provided as accurate a version as I can, while bending it to the necessities of a fictional story.

  Bright star fallen

  LIGHTNING FLASHED, I flew through a blue void and fell to the plains by the Tongue River, in the land of Montana. The white men called it 1874. This is not a poem. Everything I say is said plain.

  My name is Bright Star Falling and this is my story. This is the name the Lakota gave to me, but I know that in my former life, my white name was Katherine Bright. How I can know that and not know who I was is something the spirits have not yet revealed to me, but it is what it was.

  When I say I fell to the plains, it was Little Star who found me lying in the tall grass a hundred yards downriver of the Lakota camp. And it was Little Star who said the night before, he had seen a star fall from the sky. Little Star named me Bright Star Falling. It was a great honour to be named by a winkte, though I didn’t know it then.

  I remember the cold. I remember the pain. I remember my eyes opening to the light. I was lying but couldn’t move. My whole body so heavy. My first thought was that I had been hit by a train.

  So I must have known what a train was. Even though it felt like a distant memory, or a dream that had already slipped away, scared by the morning light. It hurt like all hell.

  I remember thinking that night had turned to day.

  The flash of light.

  The blue void.

  And I was flying, falling, careering, lost in light.

  Gone.

  It was my fingers that moved first, as if something was pricking them. I gripped straw. Something wet and sharp. It was the dew on the grass.

  I tried to groan but gagged on broken glass in my throat. Ta-te, the wind spirit whistled in my ear, although I did not know his name then. It was the Lakota that told me who the Wind God was — and yet I felt like I had known him as a close friend before I fell like a star.

  Perhaps it was Tate who made me fall.

  I gazed on grey sky, trying to move, the blood circulating, my limbs twitching, awakening.

  Footsteps came scrunching through tall grass, heading towards me, and I raised my head, heaved myself up, dizzy, pain shooting through me, blinking and trying to see.

  A blurred girl standing before me oozed into focus and it looked like the smudge of a mountain range behind her. I saw that the girl had brown skin, large white eyes, her black hair in braids. She was wearing a nightdress of linen woven in coloured stripes and a breastplate made of beads.<
br />
  “Where is this?” I said.

  I tried to push myself up. The girl stepped back, her moccasins scrunching the sodden grass.

  “When is this?” I said. An odd question.

  I sat up, steadying myself till the land stopped spinning, breathing the sweet air.

  Behind the girl, the shape on the horizon lurched into view and I saw that it was not a mountain range but a cluster of tipis.

  The ground vibrated as if the Wakinyan — the Thunder Beings — were charging for me, their hooves drumming the ground, coming close and closer, and as I twisted and pushed myself up to my knees, the pain arrived. I howled.

  Standing unsteadily, arms out to balance myself, I stared in horror at the figure approaching.

  It was not a Wakinyan, just a man on a sorrel horse, though the sight of him that morning was as terrifying as if he had been a Wakinyan. His horse’s flanks painted red and white, his headdress of angry feathers, and the white stripe across his face.

  He screamed out as he galloped for me, teeth flashing white, and I felt myself fainting, sinking, falling and the last thing I saw was the tomahawk spinning.

  We are all related

  TONGUE RIVER. 1874. I awoke to find myself not scalped, but in the arms of what I thought was an Indian brave, leaning against him, his hands gripping the reins either side of me.

  I laugh now to call him a brave. I laugh as he laughed when I called him that. And yet he was the bravest man I ever met.

  He saw me wake, smiled and said something encouraging that I didn’t understand. It took many moons to learn Lakotan, even though I always had a sense of what was said, despite not knowing the words.

  I was too weak to fight, too tired to flee, dizzy and shaking and as parched as I was. So I let him take me into the village of tipis.

  The little girl who was the first I’d seen, was running alongside us, calling out to the village and I could hear the gathering commotion before I saw it.

  It wasn’t until Little Star rode into the centre of the village that I saw the Hunkpapa gathering round. They stared and gaped at me. Some grabbed at me, but Little Star whipped them away and barked that I was his and he had found me and I was touched by magic also.

  He pulled his horse up, let me down to the ground, and chattered instructions, which was to tell some winyanpi that I needed help, because they came running with water and blankets, and soon I was wrapped up warm and being fed sweet water from a gourd bottle and later pumpkin soup.

  Everyone in that great encampment came to peer into my soul, and Little Star made speech after speech about how I was the bright star that had fallen that night. There was fear in their faces. Fear and wonder. And that fear of me never quite left the eyes of the Lakota. I guess I was always something to be scared of.

  They tended to my cuts. I don’t know what happened to me before I fell, but if I wasn’t hit by a train, I must have been mauled by a bear, because Little Star said I was covered in scratches and bruises and my face burned so much he almost didn’t recognise me as a white woman.

  But he always laughed and said he’d known right away, as burned as my skin was, because of my red hair. No Indian woman had that colour hair. As red as a sunset or a campfire.

  So I was a great wonder. Something to be seen. A white woman fallen from the sky.

  They argued over me, as I lay there, and though I couldn’t follow every word of it, I knew that some of the women wanted to send me out to the wild to be eaten by wolves or the vultures — whichever got me first— because I was sica.

  Shee-cha, they said. Shee-cha.

  I heard that word a lot in my first few hours in the camp. You might say it was the first Lakota word I learned.

  Later, Little Star taught me that sica meant ‘bad’ in English. But I’d known it all along.

  Shee-cha.

  “She is bad,” they said.

  But Little Star defended me. He waved his arms around and made a great deal of speechifying, and I could see, even through the pain, that the braves had a respect for him that wasn’t borne of fear.

  What I did not know then was that Little Star had used one simple word to describe me that had astonished everyone and made them shrink back from the thought of casting me out in the wild for the wolves to eat.

  He said I had wakan. Magic.

  Maybe it was that one word that saved me. It seemed to work, because those that had called me sica scowled and backed down.

  But later, while I was being patched up and fed, the crowd around me parted and an old man walked through whom I thought was their chief — though I learned later that the word ‘chief’ is not a word the Lakota use in the way we whites use it. But he was certainly respected and, I found later, a venerated medicine man.

  He gazed into my eyes and I recognized that stare from those wrinkled eyes of his. I had seen it many times before, even though I couldn’t remember when or where.

  The quarrel raged all over again around me, various braves protesting, and Little Star defending me. And all the time this medicine man gazed into my soul.

  In the end, he nodded and stroked my brow, as if to bless me, and said, “Mitakuye oyasin,” and turned and walked away.

  This ended the argument, because their chief had said something the Hunkpapa were fond of saying:

  We are all related.

  From that moment, I was one with the tribe. I gazed at the medicine man walking away across the camp and wondered how I knew his face and his name.

  However I knew it, I had been welcomed into the Hunkpapa by Sitting Bull.

  Tiyáta

  TONGUE RIVER. 1874. Little Star took me into his tipi and I lived with him, though we were never man and wife. The first thing he did was take out a beautiful elk hide dress and show me the intricate beadwork, cooing over its beauty. It took me some time to realize he had made it himself: a two-hide dress with a yoke of beautiful beadwork, every single one sewn on by himself. I could see he was so proud of it that I was surprised when he gave it to me and insisted I wear it.

  From that moment, I never put on my white woman’s clothes again and forgot I ever had them. Sometimes I would see bits of them being worn by a woman here, or a brave there, and every time I saw a rag of my past, I wondered who I had been, in that blank white void that was my memory of life before the Hunkpapa.

  Little Star put on another of his dresses in those first few days with me and braided my hair and fussed over me like a sister. I wondered if it was some native tradition for a man to do this when a woman was his guest, but I came to learn that he was a winkte and that he would dress as a man or a woman as the mood took him and that only a few in the tribe found this strange.

  It seemed he was respected. Not as much as a medicine man or warrior, but as someone touched by the spirits. Those the spirits had touched were held with awe, but also suspicion.

  Sometimes a brave would come to him when he needed sacred power for battle. Sometimes a winyan and her husband would come with their new child and ask him to give it a second, secret name. He always gave it a rude name, but they would take it with gratitude, because a name given by a winkte had magic and would protect the child. Even though he gave the child a rude name, they would give him a horse for his trouble.

  Some of them saw me as a winkte also, because I was a wasichu woman with red hair who had fallen from the sky.

  Little Star told me all about the Lakota, their customs and their life. How it was proper that Lakota women, the winyanpi, sit on one thigh with their legs and feet tucked to the side. How those with braids hanging over their breast were signifying that they were married. And that to look directly at a man, or any stranger, was unseemly.

  The men laughed as Little Star explained to me in Lakotan and bits of broken English, that a woman could marry any man she chose by inviting him into her lodge. They could live together and be married. And when she kicked him out, they were no longer married. They laughed because I shared a lodge with Little Star, who dressed l
ike a woman.

  They laughed that we were married.

  Another time, he drew circles in the dirt with a stick. Seven circles in all, and named them.

  Hunkpapa. Oglala. Miniconjou. Sans Arcs. Two Kettles. Blackfeet. Brule.

  Seven bands, he called them.

  And around those seven circles he drew another great line, encircling them all.

  Lakota.

  I was part of the Hunkpapa now, which was part of the Lakota people. Every year in the summer the seven bands would meet. There would be a sacred council of seven fires. Even Lakota from those offshoots who had decided to live on the white man’s reservations would come and camp with us and enjoy the last days of living free on the plains.

  Slowly, I was becoming Lakota.

  But I sensed that, though Sitting Bull had called me a relation, their mistrust of me never vanished. My position among the Lakota was always precarious.

  No one kept me in chains. I was free to leave, but I chose to stay.

  I learned their ways, and their words. Their spirits became mine. And, drop by drop, their blood became my own.

  Soon I was Bright Star Falling, and forgot all about Katherine, the woman I used to be.

  But every morning I woke fighting, as if my dreams were full of mysterious adversaries. English words haunted my mind.

  Touchstone. Birmingham. Danny. Hudson. Mitch.

  I didn’t know their meaning, but chanted them to myself, hoping they might somehow reveal this Katherine – this woman I used to be.

  Wówaši

  BLACK HILLS, MONTANA. 1874. It was late that summer when I first saw the Black Hills. I was still learning how to speak their language and how to sign it, but Little Star knew some English, so we taught each other.