Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  against the ruby of their voluptuous lips . . . something about

  them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same

  time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning

  desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. . . . Faugh!

  . . . They are devils, of the Pit!

  —BRAM STOKER, DRACULA

  These unsavory cooking odors, and others too unpleasant to spend time naming, crowded with us into the small passage, where we confronted the place’s guardian.

  The concierge was a sharp-faced woman with hair of the same lurid shade as in a poster for some Montmartre establishment of low repute. She ordinarily would not have let even President of the Republic Carnot go unchallenged, I am sure.

  Still, she was so taken aback by our cortege—stately priest, distraught lodger, and three painted women—that she let us proceed inside without a word. I heard a series of clicks after we passed. She was either fumbling for her rosary beads or her absinthe bottle. With the French both are props of the soul in times of uncertainty.

  We trudged up the dark, narrow stairs, single file, our prisoner first, then Father Holmes, then Irene, Elizabeth, and I.

  The hapless Kelly resided in a room on the first floor, just off the stairwell.

  Docile, though still apparently unnerved, he led the priest through a door that was still ajar. We followed until we were fully in a mean little room bare of any but the most necessary furnishings.

  While Sherlock Holmes sat Kelly down at an uneven-legged table matched with a pair of rickety stools, I surveyed the cot covered with soiled blankets, a visible night jar near it, and a chair missing its back struts in a corner. There was no fireplace, only the one door, the window over the street, and a smaller window high up on the sidewall.

  The upholsterer’s room sported not one piece of furniture that was covered with anything more than grime or dust.

  Without a word being said by anyone, Irene marched to the long window overlooking the street, whose frame held glass windows split into two in the style known as “French doors.”

  She swiftly drew the gaping side closed to match its sister, then jerked her head to summon Elizabeth, who sped to take a position before the secured windows.

  I was nearest the door. At Irene’s nod, I shut it and stationed myself there.

  Sherlock Holmes had ignored our movements, concentrating his attention on the prisoner as he pushed him onto one stool.

  Irene went to the chair in the corner, and sat.

  Kelly’s eyes followed our every move as if Mesmerized.

  I was not used to inspiring dread in anyone, and was amazed that I could do it only in so debased a guise, though I myself should have shrunk from us three in the streets, not knowing our true characters.

  Yet in this room, only one person was in his true character, and that was the suspect.

  “You will keep them away from me, Father?” he whined.

  How could we harm him, really? Especially if he was upright enough to resist the temptations posed by such women as we impersonated.

  But he kept twisting on his stool to assure himself that we remained at the fringes of the room. I sensed that he would rather perish than attempt to cross a threshold we guarded.

  “You are James Kelly, the East End upholsterer?” Mr. Holmes asked him, also speaking in English.

  Kelly blinked, his muddy hazel gaze sharpening for an instant. “Strange. I am hearing in tongues. That is such sweet heavenly music, a chorus speaking in dozens of tongues. Here there are two tongues anyway. Your holy presence keeps those demons at bay, Father, and I have been permitted to hear your French words in English. Do not leave me, I beg you! They will fly upon me like mad things and force me into lewd acts.”

  “Rest easy, my son. I can tell that you are not well.”

  “Not well! I have been tainted by these devilish women! A pox upon them who have given me a pox, innocent lad that I am. It is a foul conspiracy. Can you not make them vanish, Father?”

  “Alas”—Sherlock Holmes looked over his shoulder at Irene seated in the corner, glanced at Elizabeth and me standing guard at the window and door—“I have hoped for such deliverance before, but it has not yet been granted. Now.”

  He drew away, looked down on the man, and his voice assumed an authoritarian certainty. “You are an upholsterer by trade, and that is your most recent pursuit, but I see that you followed the sea for some time. You were born in Liverpool, have been briefly married but descended into drink and debauchery. I see the blood of a murder on your hands.”

  Irene and I had witnessed Sherlock Holmes’s skill at assessing people’s pasts from the present testimony of their speech eccentricities, their dress and demeanor, and the telltale marks of professions or pursuits upon their anatomy.

  James Kelly had not. His eyes protruded like a puppet’s. For a moment he forgot the demonic presence of three fallen women, two of whom were innocent of all wrongdoing.

  “Y-you know? But I have seen Him already. The Master came and gathered the flock until the Holy Spirit descended in tongues of flame everywhere, and all we disciples prayed in tongues and drank the blood of Our Lord. Our Lord was a carpenter and I am a mere upholsterer, but still I pounded the bloody nails and must atone, must atone. I have seen the Master and you are not He. How can you be He who will save me?”

  A distinctly uncomfortable expression passed over Sherlock Holmes’s disguised features. Although his detective work might have “saved” innumerable clients from disgrace and even death, I suspect that he found the notion of spiritual salvation a repugnant one, at least in relation to himself as either the object or bestower of it.

  As Irene had often told me, he relied on evidence and logic and science. Anything other than that earned his disdain, including the finer feelings, I think. In his own way, he was as intent as the cowering man on the stool in keeping us wicked women at a distance.

  In my case, I took it as a compliment.

  Kelly spread his hands, as if looking for Sherlock Holmes’s dramatic blood evidence. “They were to hang me,” he said, “but I knew God would not permit it. He had a better plan for me. A mission.”

  “And why should you be so chosen of God?” Sherlock Holmes demanded.

  “I was raised in a religious home, Father, good Catholics all, and was apprenticed by age fifteen to the upholsterer’s trade, happy in all things, until I learned one day of my so-called good fortune. I’d inherited a substantial sum, held in trust for me for ten years, but mine through one John Allen, a master mariner and no relation.”

  “God’s fortune did indeed shine upon you, my son.”

  “No! It was the Devil’s own bargain. I was Satan’s bastard, born out of wedlock and left for my whoring mother’s mother to rear while off my bedamned dam went and later wed this mariner. I was, for my own ‘advantage,’ taken from my trade and packed off to business school and then to work in a pawnbroker’s shop, which is only one step up from the practice of usury, in my opinion. Only four years later did my misery persuade those who held the purse strings on my tainted inheritance to give me the money to resume the upholsterer’s trade. I went to London.”

  “Yes, yes.” Mr. Holmes seemed about to say something, then clasped his hands behind his back and strode to and fro in the manner of an agitated cleric. “It is best to confess quickly, in one long rush. Tell me what you did in London.”

  “Upholstery jobs, Father. It were good work. I liked it. Always did. Pounding the little nail heads nice and neat along the trim. I was a ‘finisher.’ They don’t let just no one be a finisher.” He frowned, glanced at the door, the window, at us three silent witnesses.

  “I got to having a pint or two after work. Everybody did.” His expression darkened. “Then they came around. Them painted demons from Hell! What’s a young lad to do? I didn’t know. The drink fuddled me! I was a good boy ‘til then. Then they made me bad. I tried to resist but they were always there, always
comin’ ‘round, teasing, wanting money.”

  His head jerked around to view each of us, then he clamped his hands to his face so he couldn’t see us. “I did the best thing. Took off. Took to sea on a man-o’-war, where they don’t have those demon women.”

  “A man of war? How would you be taken on such a ship?”

  He shrugged. “It was American. But I had to come back. ‘Twasn’t home. Home was . . . Curtain Road.”

  “Curtain Road?”

  “In the East End. Did upholstery work there, then got some casual work around the docks, shipping back and forth from the Continent. I was a seaman now, too. But the pints and the whores was still there, and the Devil had drunk down my spirit, and I couldn’t resist. So I thought, like the Book says, ’tis better to marry than to burn. I found Sarah and we started walking out. Nothing nasty now! Nothing your lot do.” He glared at us again, then clapped his hands to his ears.

  “I can’t stand the sight of ‘em! But I got to hold my hands to my ears ‘stead of my eyes. They hurt so, the pain between them, and sometimes my brain is rotting-like, and the bad smell and pus comes oozing out my ears.” He shut his eyes, keening and rocking with apparent pain, or the remembered agony. “Some mates said I’d caught a, a . . . disease from the filthy whores, God damn ’em all for making me go wi“em!” He looked up, dull-eyed. “A year later we wed. Sarah an’ me.”

  “When was that?”

  “When?”

  “What year, man?”

  “Ah . . . eighty-three. I think. A bad year.”

  “You told Sarah nothing about your condition before you wed?”

  His head shook. “The moment we became man and wife, I saw she was just another dirty whore. A harlot who’d lured me into sin. All she wanted was my money, like the rest of ‘em, only she was smart enough to marry me to get it. She probly’d given me the oozing pox, I told her. And the pain in my head, my ears . . . I took my penknife one day and . . . and I was going to dig out the filth in her ears that she got into my ears. I stuck the blade in under her ear and dug and dug. Her mother went screeching into the street, but the whores wouldn’t help her. The copper pulled me off Sarah, but I’d lanced the evil and it ate her up and she died a day or two later. So I was up in the dock for murder, when anyone would know I was the wronged party. Even the jury recommended mercy, but the judge sentenced me to hang, though I told ’em God had forgiven me and had a mission for me.”

  “You didn’t hang,” Mr. Holmes noted, with a touch of distaste.

  “No, and I won’t, for who would blame me for killing whores?”

  A mad scrabbling along the wooden floor confused me. Kelly had lurched off the stool and, still crouched like an animal, ran around Mr. Holmes for the door.

  I stood before it.

  He was there so swiftly, seizing my arm and spinning me around and away from the door. But he didn’t release me and flee. Instead, he caught me close and pressed something hard and cold and sharp against my throat.

  I could smell his fear through the medium of days-old clothing and nearly gagged.

  Had I been wearing proper street clothes, my high collar would have protected my neck, but my slatternly costume afforded no such protection.

  “There,” he said, breath and spittle spraying my ear. “The world won’t miss one more whore, and I shall be gone about my Master’s business in one more moment.”

  Everyone else in the room had leaped forward at his charge and then frozen in place, in horror.

  He had been quick and sure.

  I now stood in the same position the victims of Jack the Ripper had faced in Whitechapel instants before their throats shed lifeblood onto the chill cobblestones.

  A dagger of fear pierced my heart, but I could not move nor speak. I was as paralyzed as my would-be defenders all too, too far away.

  Nothing could beat the swift stroke of a master upholsterer. I found it odd that the hand that had ornamented the Prince of Wales’s siège clamour should shortly send me to my Maker.

  “You do not want to slay before the eyes of one of God’s servants,” Mr. Holmes said.

  A silence. “God’s servants, if they be true, are all down on whores.”

  We four remained silent, the expression “down on whores” from the supposed Jack the Ripper letters echoing in our pounding ears.

  I could hear my blood pulsing, as if eager to escape my skin under the quick glide of the upholsterer’s knife.

  I put a hand to my left ear to try to shut out that incessant thunder in my veins.

  The edge of steel at my throat, thin as a violin string, pressed harder.

  Sherlock Holmes was only three steps away. Irene five. Elizabeth ten. They might as well have all been in Afghanistan.

  And then I realized that I must be my own salvation.

  “All greedy, lying whores must die,” the madman Kelly was intoning in my right ear.

  I moved the fingers clapping the left side of my head delicately, as if penetrating a sewing basket filled with naked pins and needles.

  Practicing the domestic arts develops a fine touch. Blindly, I withdrew the jet head of a hatpin and struck the long steel tine at the rough hand resting where my neck joined my shoulder.

  Kelly yowled as three forms converged on us like leaping hounds, and I let myself slide to the floor.

  I was not too proud to scrabble away from the fray on hands on knees, despite the filthy condition of the floor.

  When I looked up, Sherlock Holmes had wrestled Kelly into firm custody. For a gaunt man he seemed to possess incredible strength. But more than Mr. Holmes was responsible for Kelly’s sudden absence of struggle. Irene stood beside him, her pistol barrel pressed against his temple. Even a madmen recognized the futility of arguing with that.

  Mr. Holmes slung him back to the stool like a bag of coal.

  “Now, my son,” he said sternly, “you will answer my questions with no further outbursts, and ignore these women. Do you not recall that in the er, Good Book, sometimes, ah, angels appear in unlikely forms.”

  I could tell that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was only familiar with the Bible and the usages of the Christian religion in the vaguest of terms.

  Kelly’s eyes narrowed in calculation. “I see. This is a test. I am to prove myself fit to follow in the Master’s footsteps by heeding his priest, no matter what temptations surround me.”

  He folded his arms and straightened his shoulders. “Yes. I will prove my ability to resist these devils, which you say are angels in disguise.”

  “Excellent.” Mr. Holmes again paused. “You have worked on an elaborate article of furniture for Durand Frères?”

  Kelly squirmed on his stool. “A piece of angel’s work for the acts of the devil, but I did not know its purpose until I accompanied it to the house of sin and shame.”

  “Of course you did not,” Mr. Holmes soothed the fellow, as if he were indeed a clergyman. “You were the innocent tool. But once there, and once you had realized—”

  “I left, Father. As soon as I could.”

  “You did not dally on the premises?”

  “Dally? Who’d want the likes of me at such a place?”

  “You did not visit the house’s wine cellar?”

  Kelly’s expression hardened, either with distaste or the effort of appearing not to lie. “Wine? I like my pints too well, I admit, but wine is for the Master and the Mass, not the sort of doings that go on in a place like that. Not for the likes of me.”

  “So you claim that you left the house as soon as the . . . lounge was delivered?”

  “I am a workman, Father. I do the job and then go.”

  It was not lost upon me that Kelly might consider the elimination of fallen women an occupation or even a calling.

  “Hmmm,” said Mr. Holmes, with as much skepticism as I felt. “Now you must tell me what your mission from God is, and how you have gone about it.”

  Had we not been three, with a celebrated detective between us and him, I am s
ure none of us would have remained in the chamber with him for the next outpouring. Well, I wouldn’t have at any rate, not after endless moments in his homicidal embrace. To judge by the fascinated expressions on Irene’s and Elizabeth’s faces, fear was the least emotion they were feeling, though my skin crawled as if the man’s vitriolic hatred were poisonous spittle that was sprinkling my physical person as well as my senses.

  His theme was simple. Women were conniving, vicious, diseased beings who wanted his money and forced him into unwanted relations. God had given him a mission to stop them for the sake of good men everywhere, and when he found an opportunity, he did. He related a horrific number of attacks, but his accounts were so disjointed and confused that it would take hours and hours of questioning to sort out what was true and what a jumble, and he really admitted nothing when it came to the London horrors, although he seemed very familiar with them. But then, what Whitechapel resident would not be?

  During this inconclusive recital, I began to see why the London press had assumed the Ripper would soon be dead or confined to an insane asylum.

  Obviously a formal and longer interrogation was needed. We remained in Kelly’s miserable room while Sherlock Holmes delivered the resident to Inspector le Villard and two gendarmes in the street below.

  No curtains concealed the window, but Irene flattened herself against the adjacent wall, dingy as it was, and peered down into the street.

  “Is that it?” Elizabeth asked breathlessly of no one in particular. “We have witnessed the capture of Jack the Ripper?”

  “It would seem so,” Irene said. She glanced pointedly at Elizabeth. “But it would be premature to make any announcements to the public.”

  “And that is . . . was Sherlock Holmes himself?”

  “Not quite himself.”

  “I should like to meet him.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when the narrow door to the chamber creaked open to reveal the tall form of the French priest.

  We all turned, then converged on him. Perhaps he had absorbed some of Kelly’s mania, for he seemed taken aback, and drew away.