Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Where are we going?” I dared to ask when we were a distance from the hotel and I saw her raise a cane to hail a cab on the main boulevard.

  With her high top hat and muffling scarf, not to mention movements that were uncannily masculine, we had suddenly become a Parisian couple on the way home from the theater or opera or ballet.

  “Someplace your bloodthirsty American soul will treasure,” she answered gruffly, in a voice alarmingly male. “The Paris Morgue.”

  I allowed her to assist me into the hesitating hansom, my heart pounding like a debutante’s. The Paris Morgue. Was there ever such a thrilling destination for a not-so-innocent American abroad?

  My struggles to survive in America had taught me the pointless scrabble to earn a few dollars through hard labor. I used to call myself “little orphan girl,” even though my poor widowed mother was alive. In fact, I had supported her from a very young age. During my sojourn as a factory girl, I learned that the only light in such drudgery was the delusion of “catching a mash.” Many a working girl met a man on the streetcar and accompanied him to a bar, got drunk, and had a great “fall,” only to repeat the pointless recreational round the next weekend. Having no money left one at the mercy of others’ charity. I myself almost lost my tonsils for no reason in a hospital charity ward. I enjoyed more comfortable living conditions during a stay in the Magdalen Home for Unfortunate—fallen—Women, but no freedom. In the French maison, although some, including Miss Nell, may consider my role sordid, there was not only comfort, but pretty clothes and superb food on top of it. Now that I had been “reformed” by Irene, I slept in a first-class hotel and met famous men. I also was privileged to join the hunt for the kind of beast not merely content to buy women’s virtue, but compelled to brutalize their bodies for the mere sin of needing to survive as best their skills and society would let them. I took the atrocities of Jack the Ripper very personally indeed.

  Notre Dame was a mountainous silhouette against the electrically lit mists that wafted from the river Seine. Gas and electric lighting now mingled on the Paris streets as the newer form overtook the old. We were set down beside its stone bulk on Irene’s command, and walked to the Ile de la Cite’s end to enter the Paris Morgue by its rear, riverward door.

  My escort was as commanding as any man. Mention of an Inspector le Villard’s name spurred a bored but officious lemming of a guard to scurry off in search of an even more offensive bureaucrat.

  He came, a monocle in one eye, wearing a rusty black suit.

  “Madame Norton. They said your visit would be unconventional.”

  When Irene nodded, he eyed me.

  “My secretary, Miss Huxleigh,” she said.

  On cue, I dug into my skirt pocket to produce the notebook and pencil that are ever my companions, proud that my own natural impulses made me a perfect substitute for the absent Nell. The thought of that worthy but innocent woman’s name made me almost chuckle, save that a morgue is not a fit place for chuckles. Hysterical laughter, perhaps, but not chuckles.

  The official lifted the eyebrow that was not engaged in scowling to hold the monocle in place.

  “I cannot, unfortunately, show you the bodies of the two files de joie.”

  Files de joie. Girls of joy. For whom? Not for themselves, certainly.

  Irene’s expression was hardening into protest when the man spoke further.

  “The gendarmes and surgeons had finished their inspections, and we could not hold them from their families and a decent burial any longer. However, the woman from the Eiffel tower is unclaimed, and you may see her. The sight is gruesome,” he added, smiling like a sadistic stork.

  Irene nodded, looking resigned.

  He led us through a series of clammy rooms.

  “Electrically powered refrigeration,” Irene whispered in my ear, her words icy. Despite the artificial chill, Death’s foul breath tainted the air.

  Finally, we stopped outside an ajar door. Inside I saw a small bare chamber. Upon a stone slab lay a naked woman.

  I had expected to see death. To see naked death.

  I had not expected the vicious assault of those conditions on my senses.

  The river roared in my ears like an ocean. The floor heaved and swayed beneath my feet. Irene’s hand clawed into my forearm, whether to brace me or herself, I cannot say.

  Monsieur Bureaucrat melted like paint in my vision and wavered like a raindrop on a pane of glass as he left us to our macabre mission.

  “You have influence with the Prefecture,” I said, concentrating on the minutiae so the grosser facts of our surroundings should not overwhelm me.

  “Not much,” she said tightly. Her eyes met mine. “You are a woman of the world.”

  “Miss Huxleigh, Nell, is rather more unworldly, I think.”

  “You are right. I cannot subject her to what we will see here. She has more strength than is apparent, but I am unwilling to disillusion her of certain civilities.”

  “She has an unsuspected taste for the Gothic, you know.”

  “I know.” Irene pushed aside her dark muffler and smiled. “But this is more than Gothic. It would make sense only to a worldly woman, and you are that, are you not?”

  “Of course,” I said. It was true. I had seen much that most women had never suspected. But I had also done less than one might imagine.

  Irene Adler Norton’s remarkable brown-gold eyes seemed to burn like the electric lamp outside the primitive chamber as they measured the truth and the misrepresentations that have always been twin aspects of my soul.

  “You may wish this revelation, Pink, but I am responsible for your presence. Can you withstand this?”

  “I don’t know. I can try.”

  “Honestly said.” She took a deep breath, one so deep that I thought it would never end. “The refrigeration process eliminates much that is unpleasant, and therefore real. We will not need Nell’s smelling salts here. Would that there were as useful a defense for the sense of sight.”

  She took my wrist again, gently. “You have some knowledge of Jack the Ripper. I have greater knowledge. I have riffled through an entire chapbook of Jack the Rippers, and anything we may imagine about him and his ghoulish pursuits and ghastly killings is insufficient. I believe the wounds upon these women are fouler than anything anyone might have imagined about Whitechapel, than anyone might suspect.

  “We have the privilege to see the truth, to face it, and to try to stop the evil that kills so vilely. I have decided that you can survive what would drive most women mad, and many men. Can you?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “The truth, Pink? At last?”

  “The truth at last.”

  I swallowed. I had vowed to see life in all its ugliness. I had given myself up to witness what most people hoped never to meet in even their nightmares. Irene Adler Norton was offering me a new variety of nightmare, and I realized that we both would never be the same if we met it face-to-face.

  But what is the use of living, if one cannot face death?

  I squared my shoulders, a fruitless gesture, and nodded to the chamber awaiting us. To the naked woman who would never feel the chill of the Paris Morgue’s marvelous refrigeration system.

  Would that I were not chilled to the bone and the soul myself.

  Irene turned to enter the room, and I followed.

  Just as I had when I discovered the bodies in the maison de rendezvous, I forced myself to study the larger surroundings before I let my eyes dwell on the object of our pity and horror.

  The smallness and meanness of the viewing chamber struck me first. An arched ceiling made it seem like a tunnel, or a crypt or a wine cellar, save that the walls and ceiling were whitewashed to a deathly pallor.

  The black bar of a wooden rail sat high on one wall, and from a series of iron hooks articles of the victim’s dress dangled like clothes on a macabre washline. High-button shoes as well as limp stockings, grimy bloomers, petticoat and apron, striped bodice and mended j
acket hung from the long line of hooks. To see one woman’s entire habiliment strung out like this was both chilling and pathetic. The mottled brown-red on the bloomers and corset cover looked at first glance like some overblown floral fabric until one realized that blood had been the dye.

  There was only the faintest putrid odor. I was glad no man was here to see me shiver from the cold, from the room’s centerpiece that finally became the only thing I had not studied.

  The body lay on a stone bier, a slab perhaps two feet high from the floor, on its back, a dingy linen cloth draped from shoulders to knees.

  Her face was pale, as I had expected. I had not expected it to look so ordinary, to seem so capable of animating in an instant, the eyes opening, the lips parting, vision and breath restored . . . stirring to acknowledge my presence.

  She was neither particularly pretty nor plain. Her face was framed by brown hair pulled back without the relief of softening curls.

  The dark line at the base of her neck resembled a fine cord from which perhaps some trinket had hung. It took an act of will to see it for the thin chasm between life and death drawn by a fine steel blade.

  “Throat cut, as with the Ripper,” Irene said.

  I realized that she had been studying me as I observed the room and its occupant.

  “It looks so . . . clean,” I said.

  “They have washed away the blood for photographs, no doubt. I wonder how much they washed the face.”

  “Why?”

  “She does not look like a woman of the streets, but rather a laundress or some other toiler. A prostitute would have used cheap paints, and I’d think the morgue authorities would leave them in place if they wished her to be identified.”

  “You are saying they don’t wish her to be identified?”

  “I am saying I would like to know if her face was ever painted or not. And men are so strange about such matters. They might have cleaned her face in an attempt to give her the dignity owed the dead, never realizing they were washing away the chief means of recognizing her. If she was a prostitute and if she wore paint.”

  “What of the . . . wounds.”

  She nodded at the linen that seemed to dissect the body into a magician’s illusion of a sawed-in-half lady: the dead white feet and lower limbs, the bare shoulders, neck, and head.

  Who had sawed her unseen in half, and how?

  Irene bent over to lift up the top of the linen covering.

  I curled my gloved fingers into my palms until I felt a dull fire like invisible reins being wrenched from my grasp.

  I heard a strangled moan. Mine. This woman had no breasts, merely gaping holes where slick underlying tissue showed through.

  I imagined the medical men and police investigators who had seen these mutilations wincing at the sheer savagery of the wounds, despite their endless exposure to the worst that may be done to the human body.

  Still, only a woman could feel such personal devastation at seeing a portion so unique to her sex hacked away.

  For some reason my mind went to the corset with its trailing gray laces hung above her head, to the roses of blood blooming along its upper edge, smearing the limp corset cover.

  Had she survived these injuries, these items would be an empty mockery of her woman’s dress.

  Irene’s face was frozen into an expression of utter self-control. She glanced at me as if judging my own command of myself, then let the linen down so gently it settled back on the abused body like the mistiest veiling.

  Her hand moved to the bottom edge, then her eyes consulted me. Last, she consulted me vocally.

  “Are you able to continue?”

  “No such choice was given her. Yes.”

  Her glance was already on the linen she lifted.

  This violation of privacy was really too much to bear. I reminded myself that doctors had stood here in this morgue building and done as much, and more. That male attendants had. That we were women and looking on one of our own, for the purpose of preserving others of our own.

  Still . . . the linen lifted up, and I moved beside Irene so I saw what she saw.

  She captured a deep breath and held it. Held it so long that I wondered if she would ever exhale again. I certainly had seemed to stop breathing altogether. My head grew . . . giddy. The clothing rack was pushing nearer and retreating like a weapon, its few empty hooks seeming to strike at my eyes. Strike my eyes blind from what they had seen . . .

  “The injuries appear to be external,” Irene said at last, having drawn on her indrawn breath to speak.

  I felt my eyelids flutter and dug my gloved fingernails deeper into the flesh of my palms.

  “This is very strange, Nell,” she went on, her voice sounding hollow in my ears, and then fading.

  I was unable to react, not even to her calling me by the wrong name.

  Her sudden grasp dug into my elbow. “Don’t swoon; there is no place to sit down here, except the slab, no place to lie down, except the floor.”

  I lowered and shook my head, waved the buzzing phalanx of flies from my ears, grasped hard on to Irene’s wrist with one hand.

  “Think of the larger picture,” she urged me. “What this means. This woman’s private parts have been . . . not surgically removed, but hacked off. The rest of the body is untouched, except for some bruising. There are no entrails, no slashing of the eyes. Why has the Ripper changed? The London victims were cut internally. I suspect if we get honest answers about the women on the rue des Moulins, they were treated similarly.”

  The thought that such terrible mutilations lurked under that bloody froth of lace and silk on the Prince of Wales’s siège d’amour was almost enough to tip me over into the swoon of the century.

  But then I reflected that I was privileged--yes, privileged—to know and confront such things so that perhaps other women in this city would not have to do so. And I took a deep breath, surprised that the thick metallic reek of blood did not dominate the air, that although I felt hideously hot, as if incarcerated in the lowest circle of hell, the room was actually chilly. That the flies had buzzed away, that I still stood upright, and that the linen was falling like a curtain to obscure the dreadful wound.

  “Did you expect this?” I asked Irene.

  “I expected carnage. Not this. We have been indeed drawn into something unique in the history of inhumanity.”

  “She was killed first, as the Ripper’s victims, and carved up later?”

  “I am not sure.” Irene sounded as troubled as I had ever heard her. “I am not sure of that at all.”

  If I had been disposed to faint, then is when I would have had full title to the state. But it was too late; I had drawn again upon my eternal resolve that nothing in life, or death, should abash me. I would be permitted no merciful moments of forgetfulness tonight, or ever after.

  This is the terrible drawback of wishing to be a woman of the world.

  27.

  The Skull Beneath the Skin

  The horrid fascination which the morgue has for the female

  mind, both foreign and native, is one of those phenomena

  which observers note in going through life, but cannot

  understand.

  —THE LONDON MORNING ADVERTISER

  FROM A JOURNAL

  Side by side, we leaned against the wall outside the chamber many minutes later, its cold leaching the warmth from our bodies, unable to move except in our minds.

  “So nothing in the London crimes was as horrific as what was done to that woman in there?” Irene asked.

  I stirred against the wall, which was as cold and hard as a stone slab. I felt emptied, emotionless, like a vertical corpse, as I considered the hard facts of so many deaths in a not-so-long-ago London.

  “There, I did not see for myself. But from what I have heard, the acts were more in the nature of sheer butchery, like some autopsy gone terribly wrong or performed by an ape. This is pure, premeditated defacement and mutilation, and to me even more horrific.”


  “I was right to spare Nell this, then. Was I right to think that you could better face it?”

  “It is not the sheer gore, Irene, but the nature of these attacks. They have become more—”

  “More difficult for women to face. Yet the throat is cut in every case.

  “In London, at least, it was a mercy cutting. All the butchery took place afterward.”

  Irene nodded. “Jack the Ripper was a monster, but he performed his most monstrous acts on dead women. Believe it or not, this is not unheard of. If he has truly relocated to Paris, he has grown crueler. I am not a surgeon, but the mutilations performed on this woman, and perhaps the other two, would seem to have been made prior to, or simultaneous with, death.”

  I bit my lip and took a breath as deep as those Irene had practiced this night to calm her emotions. “While the London Ripper attacked the internal organs, the Paris Ripper has become more superficial. The breasts hacked off, and what was done between their legs . .

  Irene nodded, as if to stop my description. “The areas violated are so specifically female, sites of both pleasure and pain in a woman, a mother.”

  “That is it! He attacks the maternal apparatus.”

  “Or what is most female in a woman, before she becomes a mother, and after. Many of the Whitechapel victims were mothers, but not Mary Jane Kelly?”

  “No. You’re right.”

  “She was the youngest, and most attractive??”

  “Lordy, yes.” My voice broke despite my best efforts. She had been only twenty-five, my own exact age. I gritted my teeth and stuck to what had always saved me from the warm, oozing trap of sentimentality: the cold facts. “The others were missing teeth and showed twenty more years’ wear and tear, but still one of them could take pleasure in ‘a jolly bonnet,’ for all the threadbare desperation of her life. Except for Catharine Eddowes. She sounded almost pretty, with her auburn hair and hazel eyes. She even dressed with style, a black jacket with false fur at collar and cuffs, and a bonnet trimmed with green-and-black velvet and black beads. It sounded much ‘jollier’ than Mary Ann Nichol’s bonnet.”