by James Reese
And so it is that Mr. Penfold, AKA Frank Townsend, AKA Francis Tumblety, sits at present in the Marlborough Street Police Court, charged with four counts of gross indecency, one per playmate.81 Misdemeanors, these; and so Abberline will have but one day in which to question T., whereupon he will either have to remand him into custody, charging him with concern and/or complicity in the Whitechapel murders, or grant him bail for seven days and try to better his case against him, whereupon…Well, we shall deal with that if & when it eventuates.
Meanwhile, here we sit nervously by in the Carfax suite, this business being rather too hot to conduct from home. Caine counts again and again his store of bailable cash. Speranza sits with her Aeschylus, satisfied at having secured from Constance the scenery prerequisite to our play’s final act. Thornley, for his part, has just confided to us his faith in Mr. Penfold, he on whom all our plans depend, he who does our bidding only because we have sprung him, as it were, from Stepney Latch. & now this just-delivered; Peck wires from Edinburgh that all sits in readiness.
Edinburgh! The hours betwixt here and there—between these Friday fears and our setting-out on Sunday—number 51 in sum. Pray may they pass as scripted!
BRAM STOKER’S JOURNAL
9 Nov. ’88.—Success! Thornley and Caine have just left the hotel and head toward Marlborough Street, bail in hand. This they will convey to two men whom they have yet to select—strangers; men unknown to Abberline—who will agree to post bail for profit of their own. Bail was set at £300. What can such a considerable sum mean? It can only mean Abberline would prefer to keep hold of T., of course; and this is good, as it further means he will continue to trail T. when the time comes, as he must.
Surely Tumblety knows what we have done, as news of his own capture appears in to-day’s papers and he has sworn to watch us from…well, I care not to think from where. From Hell, let it be! And for once, I fear, he shall not hearten to see his name in type. What will he do? Pray naught but pack his already-harvested hearts and follow us to Edinburgh, pray pray pray may he do nothing more.
Meanwhile, Mr. Penfold poses more questions than he provides answers, as he has had a rough two days returned to detention; but it seems he played his part well: He is remanded on bail for seven days’ time, in the course of which Abberline & his men will strive to arrive at charges they can cause to stick…. Seven days hence. What will our situation be seven long days hence?
BRAM STOKER’S JOURNAL82
Is our arrogance unbounded? Prior references to all this as a play now unsettle my stomach, and Mr. Penfold the would-be suicide must be the sanest of us all.
My knees all but buckled when I heard the cry of the newsboy on the street. In truth, I heard naught but Whitechapel…! and fell onto the first bench I found. As I was nearer the Lyceum than home, I continued to that place; but on the way I went into the post to wire Speranza at St. Leonard’s and the others at the Carfax Arms. At the Lyceum, I went wordlessly into the XO and sent a flyboy in search of Harker, whom I dispatched to Miller’s Court, directing him to get as near the scene as possible and report back to me w/ details, as details are yet scant in the newspapers. Then I locked the door and curled up on the couch, crying like a child till Harker re-came.
What news he brought, he could hardly impart. Instead here we two sat sharing a bottle of Henry’s best, Harker drinking away what he has lately seen, I drinking away what we have done. Or rather failed to do. Why? wondered Harker. Why had I sent him to that slaughterhouse? I would not have, had I known what a shambles Tumblety has made of Miller’s Court. I apologised; and I took Harker into my arms before taking him into my confidence. Rather, I took the man as far into my confidence as I could, viz., I forbore all talk of the super-natural and said it was a mere murderer we contended with. And though Speranza will chide me for converting this fifth Child of Light, we have now Harker’s co-operation, and this will stand us in good stead; for, hailing from there, the man knows Edinburgh well.
Details came from a calmed Harker in time. All Whitechapel is wild, says he.
Oh, would that we had let Penfold sit another day in prison! Then our false Tumblety would have been freed of all suspicion, and we’d have shaken Abberline once and for all; but no, the fiend would never have let that happen. And now Speranza speaks true. “We were as arrogant as he,” says she to me, confidentially, “but now all discourse, all dealings are done. The devil must die.”
And so he shall: I will see to it, even if I die in the doing.
FROM THE METROPOLITAN POLICE FILES83
the draught report of Dr. Bond
Result of Post Mortem examination of body of woman found murdered & mutilated in Dorset St., Miller’s Court, to-day 10.11.88; thus:
Position of the body when found:
Deceased was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The lt arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a rt angle & lying across the abdomen. The rt arm was slightly abducted from the body & rested on the mattress, the elbow bent & the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the lt thigh at rt angles to the trunk & the rt forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.
The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off. The arms were mutilated w/ several jagged wounds. The face was hacked beyond recognition of its features. Tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.
The viscera were found in various parts viz; the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the rt foot, the liver btw the feet, the intestines by the rt side & the spleen by the lt side of the body.
The flaps cut from the abdomen & thighs were on a nearby table.
The bed clothing at the rt corner was saturated with blood, & on the floor beneath was a pool of blood covering about 2 ft sq. The wall by the rt side of the bed & in a line with the neck was marked by blood which had struck it in a number of separate splashes.
Postmortem Examination:
The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows & ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched & cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. Numerous other cuts extending across all the features.
The neck was cut through the skin & other tissue right down to the vertebrae the 5th & 6th being deeply notched. The skin cuts in the front of the neck showed distinct ecchymosis.84
The air passage was cut through at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid artery.
Both breasts were removed by more or less circular incisions, the muscles down to the ribs being attached at the breasts. The intercostals btw the 4th 5th & 6th ribs were cut through & the contents of the thorax visible through the openings.
The skin & tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps. The rt thigh was denuded in front to the bone, the flap of skin, including the external organs of generation & part of the rt buttock. The lt thigh was stripped of skin, fascia & muscles as far as the knee.
The lt calf showed a long gash through skin & tissues to the deep muscles & reaching past the knee to 5 ins. above the ankle.
Both arms & forearms had extensive & jagged wounds.
On opening the thorax it was found that the rt lung was minimally adherent by old firm adhesions. The lower part of the lung was broken & torn away.
The left lung was intact. It was adherent at the apex & there were a few adhesions over the side. In the substances of the lung were several nodules of consolidation.
In the abdominal cavity was some partly digested food of fish & potatoes & similar food was found in the remains of the stomach attached to the intestines.
The Pericardium was open below & the Heart absent.85
MEMORANDUM TO THE DOSSIER86
The 13th day of December, 1888.
It has been more than a mo
nth since I last took up this Record. I return to it now to tell of all, all that passed in the interim.
The day after the discovery of murdered, mutilated Mary Kelly, the Home Office offered full pardon to anyone “other than the murderer,” and our poor Caine had to be restrained, restrained and later sedated, so determined was he to go to Abberline with all & everything. Now it seemed that it was Caine, not I, who had eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.87 Indeed, such was Caine’s state that we feared he would not be able to accompany us to Edinburgh the next day, Sunday, 11 November, as planned. Thornley advised against it, in fact; but two factors conspired to overturn my brother’s professional opinion: the first was Caine’s utter refusal to stay behind in London, and the second was the lack of a warder to watch over him if we insisted he do so, viz., someone to keep him from confessing. So it was that in the end Hall Caine accompanied us from the Carfax Arms to King’s Cross, where our party boarded a train due to steam northwards towards the Scottish capital.
We were ten. We Children of Light were of course myself, Hall Caine, Lady Wilde, Thornley, Joseph Harker, and Mr. Penfold; who, along with his three pseudonyms of Godalming, Tumblety, and Townsend, had traveled to Edinburgh the night prior with Thornley, and circuitously, too, lest any men of the Yard be trailing them. The rest of our party was comprised of Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and two ancillaries, viz. actors, recruited to read the parts of Banquo and Macduff, with all lesser parts to be accorded us amateurs. It was, after all, research and ambience Henry was after, not acting excellence; not yet. As those actors factor not at all in what follows, I shan’t here commit their names to this summarising Record. Nor am I at liberty to say who else it was had travelled ahead of us—at Speranza’s urging, nay insistence—to meet up with Mr. Peck and see to arrangements re: the castle, the creation of a Temple, & the pseudo-rites we would later read and by which the bloody business would be done.88
Ironic indeed that we the Children were the truer actors whilst keeping the company of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry; but we dissembled well, taking our cue from the Bard:…to beguile the time, look like the time.89 So it was we partook of chatter upon the train, &c. Caine, of course, was yet somewhat sedated, and upon our arrival would have retired to the hotel as unwell had we let him; but we did not: He needed watching. For her part, Speranza was never so demure. She did not even contend for the floor at luncheon, but freely ceded it to Henry, who toasted us with Macbeth’s “to the general joy o’ th’ whole table,” before proceeding to hold forth re: the staging of Banquo’s ghost and other such business. Thornley and Godalming alone had reason for their reticence at luncheon, they both being in beyond their ken—mere “aficionados,” as Henry had it. I? I busied myself as always I do, seeing to the details of both our read-through & research as well as those pertaining to our truer purpose, slipping away from the table once, twice, to hear privately from Mr. Peck that everything sat in readiness in our chosen corner of the castle.
As Henry had insisted all our Edinburgh business be done in a day, we proceeded from luncheon to a short conference with the Edinburgh press. This I’d arranged to please Henry, yes, but also as an alibi: newspapers would report that we were all out of London and therefore heedless of whatever the bailed—and of course absented, searched-for—false Tumblety was up to. Finally, we repaired to our hotel for naps and what-not, in the quiet course of which we Children, sans Harker, convened in Caine’s room to see to the last details. It was late afternoon before I introduced Mr. Peck to our party, whereupon he led the slow way up, up, up the sloping Royal Mile toward Edinburgh Castle.
There we took our tour, a still-blanched Harker stopping to sketch this or that at Henry’s direction; for, as ever, it was the Guv’nor’s goal to carry the castle’s effect onto the Lyceum stage, to impress it upon his public when finally Macb. opens some weeks hence, at year’s end.90 And whilst Henry pointed out to Harker the battlements, the stones’ various shades of beige, &c., so, too, did he drop crumb-like comments for me to record—…Macbeth ought to see Birnham Wood moving through crenellations identical to these;…let us be sure the limelight doesn’t reflect off Ellen’s beetle-wing dress so as to render her silver daggers bronze;…more vermilion than blue in the dying light, &c.—and this I did, listening all the while for the call; and when finally it came, Sto-ker, Sto-ker, my sudden inhalation caused Henry to turn and ask if I were well. I was not. Tumblety had come. Tumblety was in the castle. Doubtless, too, he had with him the heart of Miss Mary Kelly.
“Yes, yes, Henry,” said I, “I am well. Rather close in here, though, don’t you find?” But then I turned my complaint to compliment so as to assuage Henry and stop his questions from coming. “Don’t you feel it, Henry?…The air here seems the very breath of the Bard! Would that we could bottle it and bring it back to the theatre…. Oh, right you were, Henry, in having us all come; right you were indeed.” Whereupon he smiled and was smugly silent some while, some blessed while, whilst I listened for it again:
Sto-ker, Sto-ker.
By torchlight, Peck led us to the room he had arranged. One of the rooms, rather. And there, amidst the spirits of untold Scotsmen, we circled ourselves and read through the tale of the usurping, mad-becoming king and queen; but, as neither Henry nor Ellen deigned to play their parts at present, leastways not to the full, our focus fell upon the group scenes, and in the course of these, Mr. Penfold acquitted himself surprisingly well. So, too, did it amuse to hear Thornley read the role of Lennox. My amusement was short-lived, however. Throughout our reading there came the call Sto-ker, Sto-ker, and at times scent verged on sight, sight touch, touch taste, &c., such that I knew he was near and nearing still.
It was well nigh midnight before our circle broke, but by the application of the names Irving, Terry, and Caine, I had earlier convinced a restaurateur to remain open into the small hours; and it was there, in the shadow of the castle, that we all supped.
His call came now with insistence, such that I hurried the supper as best I could, though now, with some ale in him, Henry thought it time to soliloquise. But eventually we all repaired to our hotel midway down the Mile, bade one another good night, and betook ourselves to bed; or such was the ruse. A half-hour on, we Children convened again in Caine’s room, whence we slipped out into the Edinburgh night and made our way back to the castle behind Peck, naught but moonlight brightening the stones of the street. Come like shadows, so depart!91 Such was our plan. Such was our hope.
Sto-ker, Sto-ker. It seemed he might slip out from every wynd, from every close we passed on our ascent. Or was it the disquieted dead I sensed? For Edinburgh is a sepulchral city; and if once its tenements rose fourteen stories high—so they did in medieval times, such that none living at street-level knew the light—in the centuries since, those same tenements have sunken somehow, nay the streets have been raised up to render the tenements’ lower stories tomb-like. Sepulchral indeed; for down there lay the bones of the plaguey dead: Once—when word of a plague was but a whisper—the city fathers decreed the effectual death of all those resident in Mary King’s Close, and in the night all means of egress from that place were stoppered, were forever sealed. Elsewhere, earlier in this very century, the body-snatchers Burke & Hare plied their trade in the subterranean city as well, and in its abandoned vaults did their brisk business in bodies, murdering for the monies the Medical College paid per corpse. Oh, indeed, best to tread lightly the streets of Edinburgh lest one wake its dead.
Nor does the city bear the name Auld Reekie for naught. It is redolent of many things, not all of them pleasant; but it was the sea’s salt and sulphur, blowing in from the Firth of Forth, that were prominent upon the air the night of our shadowed ascent. I was relieved to smell these scents, simply smell them: better by far that my senses not be disordered on this of all nights.
We climbed and we climbed and we climbed towards the castle, sitting there high upon its rock these thousand-odd years. Our destination: its dungeons; namely,
those rooms far beneath the Half Moon Battery, built upon the remains of what was once a ten-story keep called David’s Tower, battered down in the sixteenth century when Kirkcaldy of Grange failed to defend it on behalf of Queen Mary, who’d borne behind its walls the future James VI of Scotland—our James I, of course—successor to Elizabeth. Secret rooms were later carved from the ruins, rooms into which the King could escape if ever the castle came under siege again. The floor before his door was built to be false: by the removal of rods laid under it, it would collapse beneath the weight of any enemies daring to descend in search of the King. Said enemies would then find themselves fallen into the den of a ravenous lion. Rather a short stay would ensue, I suppose. But true, all this, according to Peck. And it was into that erstwhile lion’s den that we descended by ladder.
Sto-ker, Sto-ker. He had followed. He would soon show. With a nod, I told the others so, and said aloud that we had better hurry.
Peck and a blessedly unquestioning Harker had done their parts indeed: the rounded walls of the den were adorned with the repaired canvases secured by Constance, the same I’d last seen in the Isis-Urania Temple; and a dais featuring three places of prominence had been set before a table-cum-altar atop which sundry tools of ritual & rite had been laid, chief amongst these a golden scales, each of its trays bearing the shape of two cupped hands—the same that have been seen by so many upon the Lyceum stage when Shylock insists on having his pound of flesh cut from near the heart of the hated Antonio.
Soon all was in array. We had only to don our robes and hoods and assume our assigned roles.
Recent events had tired Lady Wilde terribly, and the ladder down into the den had nearly undone her; so it was that she was accorded the dress of the Imperatrix and let to sit center-all at the dais. At her left sat Caine as Cancellarius, whilst to her right was Thornley, progressing in the day’s play from Lennox to the Praemonstratur. That left but Peck, Penfold, Harker, X, Y, and myself to fill out the Order. We fell, then, one short of the Order’s full complement; but it was doubted that Tumblety or his demon would count.