I must admit, with all that I have seen that is unpleasant, I felt a slight shiver as we approached that spare bed and the sparer figure that barely raised the profile of the sheets.
I tried to keep my eyes from her chest in the dim light but couldn’t. The flatness seemed symmetrical. It was only one breast taken. Wasn’t it? How would Irene’s “smattering” of Polish include as extraordinary a word as “breast,” that is not heard in public unless it belongs to a chicken or a duck, and even then is deemed crude by some?
Our guide left the light on a small bare table so it could cast our shadows large and distorted on the rough plain walls. Irene rustled straight to the bedside and took the woman’s limp hand between hers, as if to warm that chill flesh.
She began crooning some thick, Slavic syllables. I am not at all certain that they were Polish. They may have been a combination of Slavic words, or some lullaby that she had made up, but I had reckoned without her remarkable voice. The words she uttered were so melodic, so tremulous with sympathy and sorrow, that it would take a heart of stone to resist them.
The pale lashes that lay upon the woman’s bloodless cheeks like shadows lifted open. She was a study in ashen tones, this girl: her hair the color of blond lace, her skin a strange jaundiced match to her hair. She reminded me of a doll cut out of buff-colored paper: flat, monotone, almost lifeless.
Irene murmured more and stroked the hair at her temple. A faint flush of life-giving color appeared at her cheeks.
She muttered a word.
Irene leaned closer to hear it.
When the patient repeated it, I heard it. “Merci.”
The girl spoke some French!
Now Irene’s chatter mixed French with the Slavic sounds. She was casting a braided twine of language like a line into the sea, drawing the girl up from her lifeless state.
I begin to hope that we might indeed learn something here.
Irene leaned over the pathetic creature, whispering, weaving her multilingual spell into a singsong like poetry. I noticed that the gold locket she wore on a long chain swung out when she bent forward, that it swung back and forth like the weight on a clock pendulum, a small gold sun that shone like a glimpse of high summer in the dreary hospital ward.
Irene glanced at me. “A chair?”
I looked around the huge barren chamber, seeing but one item of that sort. A wooden chair by the door, meant for the attending nurse, no doubt, who was not in attendance. My note-taking fingers itched. I saw an article on the neglect in French hospitals, which mirrored the neglect in hospitals the world over….
“Hurry!” Irene’s whisper tossed the English word into her European stew like a raw onion into well-simmered bouillabaisse.
I rushed to the chair, lifted it though it was awfully heavy, and lugged it back to the bedside.
No ailing heads on miserably flat pillows stirred at my revolutionary act. The only sound was the drag of my shoes on stone. I set the chair by Irene, who sank onto it as if it were a cushioned divan.
Only one of her hands now held the woman’s in custody. The other had moved to the gold chain at her neck and was idly swinging the locket to and fro even as her voice had settled into a lulling singsong.
Now the poor girl’s face looked positively feverish, hot spots of cerise blooming on her thin cheeks, her eyes blue and very black in the center, as if the pupil had exploded like a blossom.
Irene began to speak, still using an up-and-down rhythm. The girl answered her in a blaze of unintelligible syllables.
Irene eyed me, not surprised when she saw that I had withdrawn the notebook and pencil from my skirt pocket.
“Her name is Leska. Her family are Moravian sheepherders.”
I made notes, amazed that Irene had delved as deep as family already.
“The Austrian grip upon their land drove them west,” Irene murmured to me after another interminable exchange. “West beyond Austria. Cities proved harsher than the land. The family lost each other. A brother in Fribourg, married. A father buried in Bregenz. A mother in Dijon. Alone, this one came finally to Paris. She worked as a laundress.”
These facts were spit out to me as whispered asides between long mutual exchanges in the hybrid language that Irene had drawn out of Leska. I noticed that she spoke slowly in answer to Irene, her gaze blank and directed to some spot beyond us both.
It was like an interview with the dead, or the near dead, and I had never seen the like of it. For a moment I didn’t know if I blessed or cursed Sherlock Holmes for so arrogantly insisting I remain tethered to Irene.
Still, I was too busy noting down any tidbits Irene threw my way to give in to girlish shudders.
Irene was nodding as the young woman droned on. Her head moved up and down like a puppet’s, but the gold locket below her throat still swung from side to side. I found the motion oddly soothing and had to blink myself alert to catch and record the rare English phrases Irene tossed over her shoulder to me from time to time. The girl seemed not to notice these abrupt asides.
“The next step,” Irene hissed at me. “She became a fille isolée. She plied the streets alone, at her own risk.”
The girl’s hand withdrew from Irene’s and folded as for prayer, some childish gesture she remembered in her distress. Her monotone grew higher-pitched, the singsong even more pronounced. She called for someone named Maria, perhaps her dead mother.
From what I had seen of the unfortunates forced to solicit on the streets themselves, no mother would wish to know of such a fate for her daughter. It was the lot of the women of Whitechapel; still mired in it a number of them had gone down to their gruesome deaths.
“A savior,” Irene told me. “A holy man who speaks in tongues. Sin can be salvation.”
I noted that all down, for it was coming fast now, Irene speaking half to me and half to the girl. Sin can be salvation? I suppose it could be regarded as the last straw before seeing the light.
“Ah! The act…the holy coupling…is salvation.”
My pencil paused. This was a tenet of no religion I had ever heard of. They were all very sure about unmarried copulation being one of the quickest and surest highways to Hell.
“And then,” Irene said, “the…end…the climax of coupling is salvation, says the Master.”
I wrote it all down, though I had never heard such gibberish.
“God is…love.” Irene leaned near and began to ask questions, as if to pin down the exact meaning of each word in their confusing dialogue. To me: “Lust. Remember Krafft-Ebing, Pink. Lust-murders.” She leaned so close she seemed about to snatch the syllables from the poor girl’s lips as she uttered them. “Ah, bawdiness…no, lechery.”
God is love. Lust? Lechery? Those last words I could not write down, though I have never been very religious.
This unfortunate must have been drugged with laudanum or some such. I was transcribing the ravings of a drug fiend and Irene was passing them on to me as if they were gold ore. I wondered which of the two was the more insane.
Irene put one hand to her forehead, as if it too could not contain such opposing concepts. “There must be…reparation.” She nodded, then looked at me, pointing a finger so I should write. “Pain. Denial.”
The girl droned on, and suddenly Irene went silent. She slumped in the chair, exhausted.
Leska lay on the ashen linens, her eyes feverishly bright, her lips moving but no sound coming out, as if she were reciting the Catholic rosary. Her voice faded and she seemed to sleep, though her eyes remained eerily open.
Irene stirred, straightened. Looked at me one last time. “Sacrifice,” she intoned.
She shook herself, then leaned over the barely conscious girl. Her voice sunk low again. Foreign words flowed like undiscovered rivers in forgotten lands. Again the lullaby, again a soft and soothing refrain. At the end she whispered one word over and over and finally it evolved into English: “Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.”
I felt in need of that restorative myself, for my fi
ngers were stiff with cold and my mind numb with something other than that, some spiritual chill perhaps, at all I had heard, though I am not religious, or even superstitious, as I will tell anyone.
“Sleep,” Irene repeated with a sigh, leaning her head on her hand.
I saw that her eyes were dark wells of sadness, that she instructed herself as well as the injured woman, as if she doubted that her wish or command to sleep would do any good for either of them.
6.
Ripper Redux
In the East End we are used to shocking sights, but the sight I saw made the blood in my veins turn to ice…huddled against the wall, there was the body of a woman and a pool of blood was streaming along the qutter from her body…I remembered the man I had seen, and I started after him as fast as I could run, but he was lost to sight in the dark labyrinth of the East End mean streets.
—SGT. STEPHEN WHITE OF THE METROPOLITAN POLICE, 1888
FROM THE NOTES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M. D.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, Holmes.” I was in fact very much afraid that I did, but dare not admit it either to him or myself.
“You mean that you were lurking in the dark yard beside the lifeless body of Elizabeth Stride when Louis Diemschutz found her? Good God, why?”
He stared across the street toward the gate of the very yard in question.
“Because I was the one who really found the body, Watson. I returned here from my fruitless chase of Israel Schwartz to discover the street deserted. After all the activity I had witnessed here in the past half an hour that was decidedly odd.
“Immediately I was struck by the tragic misdirection of my actions. The woman who was the object of all the night’s attention was gone. Vanished. Of course I went first to the gate where I had last seen her and one of her many…swains.”
“As I recall, Elizabeth Stride was the third victim attributed to Jack the Ripper, and had escaped the rather more thorough later mutilations.”
Holmes did not answer me directly, resuming his narrative instead.
“I had little light and not much longer to examine her. She lay on her side, her legs drawn up and her right arm passed over her body as if she were sleeping. Her clothes were not disarranged, but the hands and wrists were sopping with blood and her throat was cut. Her left hand clutched a packet of cachous, the pills smokers use to freshen their breaths. The red flower pinned to her jacket looked like a stray gobbet of gore, but other than the slashed throat she had not been injured.”
“So you had time to assess the condition?”
“Barely. The body was warm and the blood still flowing when I heard the gate opening and withdrew into a dark niche near a rear door. All was as Diemschutz reported to the police later, save that I too left as soon as he fled. I regained the still-empty street and was away before he brought others to the site and they cried bloody murder.”
“I must say, Holmes, I am shocked and angry. I understand your need for secrecy about who commissioned your services in the Ripper case, and I would have respected that, of course. There is no reason, however, not to allow me to accompany you, as I have on so many other dangerous missions. Had I been present I could have examined the body from the viewpoint of a physician, and of a physician who has learned your methods of precise examination. I might have been of help!”
“You could not have saved her, Watson.”
“I might have stayed as you pursued Schwartz, seen something, prevented the brute from acting this time.”
“Ah, Watson, I can tell you from experience that imagining what one might have done is just that, an exercise in fancy and the very opposite to the stern logic I live by. And the reason for your absence that night was also just that: you are a doctor.”
“But,” I began, recognizing I was in danger of resorting to an indignant sputter, always a disastrous position in a debate.
I then grew silent as the true import of his words weighed on me like stones. I was a doctor. Jack the Ripper’s dissections had been accorded almost medical skills. Any doctor loitering in Whitechapel that terrible autumn stood in danger of being accused of the Ripper’s crimes.
My friend Sherlock Holmes sought to shield me even as he walked the streets with Jack the Ripper and his victims.
“I would have come anyway, Holmes,” I muttered testily to hide my confusion.
“I know you would have, Watson, but the woman was beyond any human help.”
Now I gazed in my own turn at the closed gate, picturing a woman’s life blood coagulating on the pavement as she lay dying alone.
“She would not have felt much after the throat slash,” I observed, more to comfort myself than to contribute to the knowledge of the death. As one trained to ease and save life, it opens abysses of speculation to contemplate the mind that can end life with one or two savage saws across the throat. It is not easy to accomplish with one clean cut, as I recalled had been the case with Elizabeth Stride, but great rage would do it. Or great skill.
“You wish to enter that building, don’t you, Holmes?” I said, returning to the present and our reason for being here on this street, at last, together, pursuing a belated investigation.
“No, Watson, I wish to enter that building’s cellar. Unless you care to dig, I suggest that the direct approach will be more convenient.”
The building in question did not need a sign to announce its purpose as the International Working Men’s Educational Club. Even as we had kept watch I had observed individuals of a working-class and Jewish appearance disappearing into its unimpressive portals.
Although I have traveled the globe far too widely to hold a man’s race or religion against him, I feared that the opposite might be true. The Jews of Whitechapel were often made scapegoats for gentile debaucheries in the poorer quarter. We might not be welcome.
“We wear no suitable disguise,” I pointed out.
“I hold the passkey of the rabbi’s name. Besides, I could enter here at any time in appropriate guise. I wish you also to observe the place and its denizens.”
So we climbed the few steps to the ground floor of that sectarian club. As I suspected of a working man’s association, the men within were earnest if not highly educated.
No well-read Englishman could be unaware of the social unrest among the less-prosperous classes. None could argue that the crowded and corrupt conditions found in Whitechapel were not only intolerable but had made Jack the Ripper’s attacks impossible to stop.
Whitechapel had become a cesspool, the stopped drain into which poured the dregs of the British Isles and Eastern Europe. The times had created a vast, shiftless population of former peasants clogging the great cities, flowing inward in a never-ending stream. The pogroms in Russia forced the Jews to choose death or flight. The Poles fled a variation brought by the same Eastern invaders who had bedeviled their land for centuries, along with many from many lands to the east. Ironically, these refugees came to the East End of London. Such people were poor, seldom spoke English, had few skills to sell.
All sank like stones into the lowest sections of our great city to mingle uneasily with our own unfortunates. These last were the legions of displaced farm workers forced from the wholesome country into the city-bred flotsam of humanity that had always blighted Mother London, including the homeless women who had no trade to ply but themselves.
“Why, Holmes,” I had jibed him as we began our proposed jaunt across the street, “I knew you were a Bohemian, but I did not know you are a socialist.”
“I am no ‘ist’ nor ‘ian,’ Watson. Merely an observer by inclination and trade. I take no political position except to note how these upheavals in nations may effect the commission of crime.”
“Many believe a foreigner is Jack the Ripper, that no Englishman would slaughter women so fiendishly.”
“And so they believed of Frenchmen in Paris,” he murmured.
“Paris? Is that where you were? You say that they suspect the Ripper of having relocated to Paris?”
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“Series of brutal murders occur everywhere, Watson. They are seldom recorded in sufficient detail and tallied in any sensible way that shows whether one man or a dozen may have done the deeds. It is always assumed that the lunatic’s violence is so severe and mystifying that the deed stands alone…until the next lunatic attack occurs. There is never an attempt to follow or show a pattern.”
“And did the Ripper show a pattern in Paris?”
“Several,” Holmes said tightly.
Using the rabbi’s name after knocking on the door, Holmes was shortly able to persuade a rather surly bearded fellow to speak to us, although we were obviously not ‘working men’ of any stripe.
“I’m searching for a man,” Holmes began.
“We are all men here,” was the short answer, accented but understandable.
“This man would have been a visitor, like ourselves.”
“Then he would be an exception.”
“That is what I hope,” Holmes went on. “I hope he was exceptional enough for you to remember him. You come from the Ukraine, I perceive. I see the journey has cost a great deal, including the loss of your sister, no, brother, pardon me. No doubt it has been hard to obtain work as an ostler in a city in which so many Irish are naturally suited for the job and also as hungry for work. 1 cannot blame you for seeking betterment through uniting with other men in your situation. Certainly the English lessons you study here are a great help, for your mastery of such a difficult language is commendable, and at least your mother will soon arrive.”
“What are you? Some Gypsy fortune-teller?”
“Alas, no. I could certainly use prescience in my profession but must rely on evidence instead. I am a consulting detective.”
The man’s shrewd eyes darkened with speculation. “And how did you discover about me?”
Holmes smiled slightly at the awkward construction that betrayed the fellow’s serviceable yet imperfect command of English. “I am a student like yourself, only I deconstruct the articles of appearance instead of those of sentences. An instant’s glance allowed me to notice the resemblance between your face and that of the tiny photographic likeness you wear on your watch fob. The fob was swinging during that instant or I would have never done your brother the disservice of taking him for your sister, however briefly. As for your origin, I am also a student of accented English. By the secure lodging of your tongue in your lower jaw, yours certainly springs from east of the Volga. Beyond that is the handkerchief that peeks out of your left inner breast pocket. The embroidery is of Russian style. I admit I hesitated for a moment there. Such handiwork is usually done by young women preparing for hope chests, or quite old women occupying time as best they may. However, your watch fob already paid tribute to your late brother and the handkerchief lay near your heart. I detected a mother, one whose arrival you expect soon in view of the loss of your brother. As for your history in working with horses, such men acquire calluses on certain areas of their fingers—on the second joints between the first and second fingers, for instance—that betray the constant rub of the reins through their hands.”
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