“You have not removed her clothing,” Irene notes.
“The wounds are obvious. The torn throat, the slashed bosom.”
“We would like to be alone with her.”
His face curdles with puzzlement and distaste. What would women want with a dead woman?
“Prayers,” Irene explains, for a moment looking as modest and implacable as a nun.
It is enough.
He bows out of the shed, leaving us to the flickering torch and the features that flicker with deceptive life.
“I pray,” she says, looking at me, “we do not find what we expect.”
I can’t do it. I know what she wants to know. I am as eager as she to know it. But for the life of me I can’t do it: lift the dead creature’s oddly sentient skirt, look like any lewd man on her privates, violate her in death as well as in life.
Irene draws up the cloth like a curtain, her face stone.
It is only two superficial slashes, in an “X.” I turn away, cover my mouth, choke back my rising gorge. Is Sherlock Holmes pursuing such grisly examinations in London now? Or only cold, cerebral trails?
“Wolves,” Irene spits out. “Caves.”
“Is it the Ripper?”
“He has no time now. No…leisure. No time for pseudo-surgery. It is rip and tear and move on. Perhaps because we chase him.”
“Us? We’re responsible?”
“No.” She brushes her brow as if to remove cobwebs only she can see. “He would do what he does without us. To us, if he could. He does not discriminate. But somebody does.”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody wants us on this trail. On his trail.”
“To catch him?”
“Or for him to catch us.”
“Us? Me? They know about me?”
“You are the internationally famous Nellie Bly.”
“Not that international. Yet. Why don’t they want Sherlock Holmes?”
“I’m not saying they don’t, but Dr. John H. Watson is not missing, that I know of.”
“Who is Dr. John H. Watson?”
“Sherlock Holmes’s Nell.”
“He has a friend, that man?”
“You’re surprised?”
“He struck me as utterly self-sufficient, but…when he left our rooms, after—”
“After?”
“After he’d tried to convince you that you were up to facing Nell’s loss.”
“Did he try to do that?” Her tone was dreamy, distant.
“Try to convince you? Yes! You wouldn’t listen.”
“I couldn’t hear then, not even Sherlock Holmes. That was…clever of him. A pity I…missed it.”
“You missed much in those hours. You were as lost as Nell.”
She shook her head. Threw off that despairing self of hers, even the memory, as a snake would shuck a dead skin.
“We will all be lost if we do not track and stop this criminal. He is rushed now. He has become used to being ignored, forgotten, overlooked. No more. He kills like a wolf on the run…to where? To somewhere that he can revert to his usual practices.”
“You make it sound like a…an art form.”
“It is a form, I’m convinced of that. Not so mindless as it seems.”
“But it must be. No mind could conceive these attacks and remain sane.”
“Didn’t you absorb your Krafft-Ebing? These killers are perfectly sane until they kill. They are Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes. On one hand the rational, organizing mind. On the other, the rampaging, tearing emotions.”
She turned me to face the torchlight, to watch it flicker in her living features as it had danced on the face of the dead girl moments before.
“Don’t you see it? The great rationality of Sherlock Holmes, for instance? Don’t you sense the insanity that lingers beneath? The more that Reason rules, the more Insanity runs rampant beneath the surface. We are all like that. We are all just this far from being like that. Look at your rage toward your violent stepfather Jack Ford! You testified against him in a court of law as a child. Why do you subject yourself to madhouses and brothels except to expose other Jack Fords? Look at the rage of Jack Ford. You lived with a madman, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. You made Nellie Bly to hunt him down. You are with me now to find another incarnation of him. Don’t tell me I am an unnatural woman to protect mine, to fight the darkness that gouges at my kind. You are me, and I am you. And we both can become Jack Ford or Jack the Ripper if we let ourselves.”
“No. I will never admit that.”
“Then you will never catch Jack the Ripper, however many headlines you covet.”
“I am more than headlines!”
“Prove it. Come with me even though you believe the hunt pointless.”
“I…don’t.”
She looked at me. I did not look at her.
“Come with me,” she said as softly as a siren, mocking my reluctance and my hunger at the same time. For a moment, I wondered if this was how Jack the Ripper felt, reluctant and hungry. And why. “You will be sorry, but you will get Jack Ford at last.”
“He’s dead,” I said, meaning to object.
She only shook her head.
11.
Cold Comfort
He has always been of unstable mind and a person whom one would expect to become actively insane from a comparatively minor cause.
—DR. W. ORANGE, SUPERINTENDENT, THE BROADMOOR CRIMINAL LUNATIC ASYLUM, 1883
FROM A JOURNAL
At the train station, Irene consulted the schedules.
Or she appeared to.
She approached the ticketseller, a broad man of sixty with old-fashioned muttonchop whiskers as broad. Fortunately, he spoke some English, so I was able to follow the conversation, which quickly became one of Irene’s casual interrogations.
“We need tickets to Frankfurt,” she began, “but—”
He paused in shuffling through his papers.
“We were supposed to meet my brother here and travel on together. I wondered if he had bought a ticket yet. In the past day or two. He may have arrived here before me.”
“Many men who could be your brother or another’s have bought tickets in the past two days, men enough to be brother to half the Prussian army.”
Irene smiled apologetically, with a helpless tilt of her head.
“My brother is rather headstrong. He may have grown annoyed because I am a trifle late. He is a man of middling height, dark-haired…but, Hortense!” She turned to me. “You have the portrait of Henry, don’t you?”
At this cue I drew a cabinet photograph from my capacious handbag. When the small book opened, one side of the glass showed a photograph of Irene, the other a pastel portrait of a man.
“Henry.” Irene beamed proudly.
“This is not a photograph.” The ticketmaster leaned through his archway to squint at the likeness.
“Henry is afraid of cameras. So silly, but true. He could be persuaded to sit for a sketch, however.”
I had to swallow a grin. Irene’s first act on recovering her wits after Nell’s abduction had been to drag me to a café in Montmartre, where a rather seedy artist nursing absinthe had listened to our long, joint, and sometimes conflicting descriptions of James Kelly, also known as Jack the Ripper to the Paris police, and had finally drawn this likeness to our mutual satisfaction.
Despite the portrait being handdrawn, the eyes had the wide, staring look found in some photographs. Otherwise, that was the only sign that the subject was quite mad.
The ticketmaster’s callused finger poked at the celluloid protecting Kelly’s face. “I saw a fellow like that. Your brother, you say? He had no money for a ticket, but insisted he must reach Frankfurt as soon as possible.”
“Oh, Hortense!” Irene sighed heavily. “Henry has been gambling again! And after he promised our mother…. Sir, I apologize for my brother’s behavior. If you can guess where he might have gone, we will find him and pay his way.”
“Gone?” He
regarded us as if we were the mad killers. “He’s gone all right. To Frankfurt. Yesterday evening. He may have won the price of a ticket gambling, for he paid the entire fare with a fistful of coppers.”
Irene nodded slowly while I shut the cabinet on James Kelly’s loathsome face, but only temporarily.
No doubt that was what had become of the dead flower girl’s hard-earned coppers: a ticket for James Kelly to another city he could terrorize.
While I reflected bitterly on this fact, Irene purchased two tickets for Frankfurt leaving within the half hour.
“Looks like that brother of yours keeps one step ahead of you,” the ticketmaster noted, “and of his promises to his mother, too.”
We stepped away from the window to one of the hard wooden benches strung along the platform, and sat.
The wind was chill. I heard a faint cry of “Flowers” on it. The smell of spiced nuts trailed from the chestnut vendor’s stand some fifty feet away.
“Do you need a comfort station before we continue?” Irene asked. For a former prima donna she was unusually practical at times.
I sat beside her. “There is no comfort station on this journey.”
She did not argue.
12.
Cork and Candle
Halifax is built of stone,
Heptonstall o’ stone,
I’ Halifax ther’s bonny lassis,
I’ Heptonstall ther’s none.
—OLD CHILDREN’S RHYME
FROM THE NOTES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M. D.
A veteran of foreign wars like myself should not have been rattled by the swift arrival of the police and the even swifter removal of the pitiful yet breathing body under my care into the custody of the ambulance men.
Yet I was shocked beyond anything the chaos of combat had ever accomplished. Certainly I was loath to give up my patient, but the authorities were as rough with me as with any of the gawkers who soon gathered to murmur and bruit about the name of Jack the Ripper.
It was even more shocking when a pair of bobbies said I had to wait for the inspector and made clear that my medical title was only a liability at this time on this scene.
I couldn’t even resort to the sometimes magical name of Sherlock Holmes, although with the police it was less of an “open sesame” than with other authorities in London. These were not even the London police, for Whitechapel had its own (and I might add, remarkably thickheaded) force.
So I fretted in that dark yard now lit by a constellation of lanterns, watching the cobblestones suffer under the boots of enough policemen to have Holmes crying to heaven at the stupidity of it all.
Holmes. Where was he? The police had come, presumably because he had found and warned a bobby on patrol. I had heard their shrill whistles calling to each other like hysterical birds, but nothing more of Holmes.
“And you say your name is Dr. Watson, sir?”
“I don’t say it. That is my name. Dr. Watson of Paddington.”
“A long way from Paddington, sir, at such a late hour. Does your wife know you’re about?”
“Of course she does! A doctor is often called out at night on cases.”
“Convenient, ’tisn’t it, sir? What case brought you out tonight, all the way to Whitechapel?”
“Not a case of mine, exactly.”
“No?”
“A case of a friend of mine’s.”
“Who is?”
“Not here at the moment.”
“But he was here before?”
“Yes, of course. We found the poor woman together.”
“Did you now? And where is he, did you say?”
“I didn’t say. I sent him to alert you lot, while I attended to the…patient.”
“But you said it was his case.”
“Yes, well…but he isn’t a doctor.”
“Then how can he have ‘cases’?”
“Ah, really, you are wasting your time, and these men are completely trampling the ground, destroying any evidence that might remain!”
At that moment I heard the report of a pistol in the distance.
My interrogation paused as every helmet in the vicinity lifted to gauge the distance and the caliber of the shot.
I desperately feared it was my old Army Adams, a sturdy, accurate and noisy firearm.
“Holmes!” I burst out, fearing for his life.
“Holmes? That is the name of your accomplice?”
“Blast it, man! Of course not. I am speaking of no accomplice, but of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective. Surely you have heard of him.”
“Can’t say that I have,” rejoined the stolid, cockney voice of PC Whoever.
I groaned. “I must speak with Inspector Lestrade.”
“Is this someone else you expect us to know?”
“Of Scotland Yard,” I finished with the ringing conviction of a desperate man.
“Lestrade is coming,” a familiar yet authoritatively strident voice announced. “And so is this sorry fellow I trapped six streets over in a yard as dark and hidden as this one.”
Holmes, his face smudged with grime and the occasional darkening bruise, hauled a scowling, blinking, cringing figure into the lantern light.
I had never been so glad of seeing such a likely looking villain in my life. I meant the man in Holmes’s custody, of course.
Our return to Baker Street was, thankfully, in such a wee hour that it was not observed by Mrs. Hudson. I shudder to think what that worthy Scots lady would think of Holmes’s profligate ways with the condition of his clothing.
My vigil by the wounded young woman while waiting for the police and ambulance to come and take her away and Holmes’s pursuit of his quarry had done nothing for either of our appearances.
Holmes insisted that Inspector Lestrade, who had finally arrived on the scene and grandly dismissed us as both suspects and witnesses, would send for us when the poor girl was able to speak and would interview us then. Until that time, we could only find our weary way home. I stopped to wire Mary not to worry, for I could see no sense in making for Paddington when I’d so soon be needed in town again.
I must say that we both trudged up the stairs to 221B silent and solemn.
Holmes left me in the parlor setting out the foreign forms of the shot glasses on his chemistry table while he retired to his bedchamber to remove the blighted articles. To me these glassy artifacts seemed like remnants of another time now that a woman and her assailant had been found, but not to my ever-curious friend Sherlock Holmes.
In moments Holmes returned in his favorite mouse-colored dressing gown, humming happily off-key while putting his pipe-smoking kit together beside the Persian slipper on the mantel.
“It appears that I will have that most rare opportunity granted to few mortals, Watson,” he noted.
“What is that, Holmes?”
“A chance to interview a victim of the Ripper…or a purported victim of some lust-murderer, at least. Not to mention a suspect for the Ripper himself. I am glad you were along last night, old fellow, not the least for your medical skills. This time I have a witness to my innocent appearance on the scene! What did you think of Whitechapel?”
“A hole, a filthy hole. I knew as much, but to see it in person reminds me of the Black Hole of Calcutta of legendary repute.”
“Unfortunately all of Whitechapel could answer to that epithet, Watson. As long as civilized nations allow such sinkholes of poverty, despair, and neglect to exist, crime will have a field day. Crime, not mere puzzles, Watson, not the intricate interplay of greed and vengeance and jealousy that have brought me some of my most perplexing cases, but crude, raw, brutal crime. Murder most inexplicable and savage.”
“Yet you seem to think that these case studies of Krafft-Ebing shed some light on such senseless murders as Jack the Ripper’s.”
My comment plunged my friend into one of his gloomy reveries.
His thin cheeks bellowed in and out as he inhaled on the black briarwood pipe until the tobacco
truly took, and the pipe began to exhale smoke like a fire-breathing dragon.
“‘Case studies,’” he quoted back at me finally. “A doctor’s expression, and quite rightly so, yet such an appalling admission. It turns Jack the Ripper—and James Kelly and Sweeney Todd and Bluebeard, if you will—from a singular demon into a simple if noxious mania common to more than one man. Does one really fancy one solves anything by seeing Rippers produced in endless links like strings of sausage?”
“I know about the legends of Bluebeard and Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, but who is James Kelly? You promised earlier to tell me his story.”
Holmes cast himself into the velvet-lined chair as if craving its cradling softness. His eyes lit up with the joy of contemplating an enigma.
“A demon upholsterer, if you will, Watson. A miserable man from the miserable manufacturing and port city of Liverpool. A bastard, quite literally. Yet a happy boy bound to the upholstery trade with no greater ambitions than that.
“Then one day he discovers he has great expectations. It seems his father is not dead but a successful merchant who has left young James a tidy sum in his will. Of course, that only makes him a well-provided-for bastard. His lifelong love for his mother turns to hate. Then he is severed from his beloved trade and given the golden opportunity of being sent to school, for him a prison not a boon. One revelation, and not only his entire life changes but also his feeling toward his fellow man…and woman, especially, as a certain person of my acquaintance would remind me rather sharply, were she here.”
“Are you referring rather coyly to my wife, Mary, Holmes?”
Holmes must have inhaled rather too deeply of his pipe; he coughed violently for at least a minute. I was forced to rush to him and apply a few sharp slaps to the back before he recovered.
“You do see what I mean, Watson? That Krafft-Ebing and his book make mice of monsters?”
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