by F. G. Cottam
It’s the low places he frequents. I reckon he takes his entertainment puerile and cruel. Flea circuses and bear-baiting are the style of the man. He’s like a little boy with a stick poking curious at an ailing creature. That’s my intuition. He’s a man-child who takes an infant delight in inflicting pain. He’d rather a performance of Punch and Judy than a play by Oscar Wilde.
But he’s physically strong. I do well to remember that. And if his mind is immature, his body is young and vigorous. A man comfortable in the villainous dens and hide-outs of this great ill-lit city is either a complete fool or a man confident he can handle himself and whatever human obstacles come his way. He’ll be handy, will Edmund Caul. I’m not a betting man myself, but I’d bet on that.
I’ve a hunch he was at the fight I fought against the Boilerhouse in Whitechapel last month. It was the sort of event would attract him. His might have been among the faces, scarlet with heat under their hats behind the smoke of their cigars in the crowd. He might even have risen to his feet applauding cued by that cute drivel about me being the Irish champion fresh off a Dublin boat.
If he was there, he’d know what I’m capable of. But I’ve become quite certain in my mind that the knowing and seeing wouldn’t for a moment put him off. It would have the opposite effect entirely. His vanity would compel him to take the challenge. He’d look forward with relish to doing me a painful mischief between the ropes.
That could of course be me deluding myself. There’s a lot of wishful thinking encouraged by the prospect of earning 20,000 pounds just by cuffing a novice fighter around the ring. But if Caul is the fellow I think he is he never backs off or forgives a slight and would never in all eternity learn the Christian lesson of turning the other cheek.
I’m anticipating someone proud and spiteful who takes things personally. I’d be disappointed now if he was any other way. The severity of the beating I plan to give him might otherwise play afterwards on my conscience.
October 22nd 1888
I was on the point of finding him when he found me. He was there at Bethnal Green. The dog fights are staged deep underground in the basement of a derelict brickworks there. It’s a vast subterranean room supported by iron pillars placed every few feet, the floor cobbled, the light sparingly supplied by candle tallow and the odd strung oil lamp.
The howl of the bull terriers and mastiffs awaiting their moment in their cages is chorused by the howls of men drunk on savagery and money staked and liquor sold there from a tapped barrel and served in cups of waxed paper fashioned to hold only a single fortifying shot.
The dogs go at it literally in a pit. It’s circular and about eight feet deep and the same in diameter and I think is a filled-in well. Water encourages cholera and if you don’t want it around you’re wisest dispensing with it altogether. That’s what they must have done when bricks were still shaped and fired there. They filled their poisonous well. Now the East End has found a practical use for it as it does for most things.
There was straw to soak up the blood on the floor of the pit but not so much of it that the beasts couldn’t find with their paws the purchase to rip and tear at one another. The smell of canine piss soured air thick with the smoke of cheroots and clay pipes. Greenish stains clung to the cobbles where chewing tobacco had been spat. The crowd pressing around the action was an insalubrious rabble: patched, frayed, holed, loud and dirty. Closer to the press and the smell of unwashed bodies clung, sweetish and corrupt.
I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned and it was him. He wore a bowler at a rakish tip and his white teeth shaped a grin under a trimmed moustache. He was my height and every inch of him warily alert under his coat and brocade waistcoat. You know some men are agile and fast. It was in the posture of him and the easy way he held his Malacca cane. The amusement around his mouth failed to soften eyes that looked black in the feeble light.
He said, ‘Ain’t you the pugilist feller from over the water?’
‘I’m not the Irish champion. That was a lie.’
‘The noble art,’ he said. ‘The noble artiste.’
‘You were there?’
‘I won thirty guineas that evening. The odds on you were long. Too long, I thought, when I saw you test the tension of the ropes before you changed. That’s when I placed my bet.’
‘D’you box yourself, Sir?’
He grinned again. ‘I’ve natural advantages in a fight. I was born quick and strong. Sweat and effort ain’t my style, Irishman.’
‘Easily said.’
He had half turned away from me, dismissive, bored already. He turned back and smiled the least pleasant smile I have ever seen in my life. He said. ‘You wouldn’t care to put me to the test.’
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I’d be more than happy to teach you a lesson in humility, Sir.’
He tilted his head. I couldn’t read what he was thinking at all. There was life in those black eyes but a curious blankness too. He said, ‘A hundred guineas you won’t last three rounds with me.’
‘I don’t have a hundred guineas.’
‘I’ll take collateral.’
‘I have no property or means.’
‘Your immortal soul will suffice, Mr. Barry,’ he said, in a way that sounded like he was not jesting darkly but entirely serious.
‘I’m not interested in your money, Sir.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Should I best you, you’ll grant me a request?’
‘You don’t look a prosperous man. You should fight for the prize. But it’s an academic choice.’
‘Meaning I haven’t a hope in hell?’
He grinned at that, properly amused. ‘You beat me,’ he said, ‘I’ll grant you your request. You have my word on it.’
Chapter Eleven
October 31st 1888
I was summoned by messenger to a meeting at Whitehall. The walk from the Devil’s Acre was a short one in distance but in character was swapping wretched drabness for austere grandeur. The transformation was accomplished in a few streets. I went from windowless hovels and the wretched poor to pillared porticos flanked by guardsmen in gleaming uniform. It is an aspect of London I think will continue to surprise me as long as I reside here.
I was passed in Parliament Square by a column of mounted militia with their sabres drawn and shouldered, reining their mounts one-handed, the sword blades wickedly curved and sharp in the pewter light of an autumn morning and the steady clop of a hundred horses ominous, like rumbling thunder.
Anderson was there. So too was Father Jeffries and a man to whom I wasn’t introduced I took from livery and manner to be a senior civil servant. This business is more and more curious. The building we were in suggested a conspiracy with which Lord Salisbury’s government is complicit. It also suggested confidentiality.
‘The match is made,’ I told them. ‘I posited the wager as you gentlemen requested.’
Jeffries said, ‘When does it take place?’
‘Since the venue was of my choosing, he was insistent on the date and time. We contest the bout at 9 o’clock at night on the 9th of November.’
Jeffries and Anderson exchanged a glance. The former said, ‘The ninth is not ideal.’
‘Worried you can’t make it, Father? You’re not coming. No one is. This is entirely a private affair.’
Anderson said, ‘Do you need anything, training expenses, funds for blood or iron tonics or special foods?’
I was able to train without charge at a gymnasium in Leadenhall in exchange for giving the city gents among its clientele one or two professional pointers. I said, ‘A few shillings wouldn’t go begging, Sir.’
‘I’ll see to it the funds are drawn.’
I smiled at Anderson and then at Jeffries, wondering who he really was. There were clergymen in London diocese with that surname. There were four of them but none of them was him. I’d done a bit of investigating. He was a man of the cloth. He had the piety and that hope for a divine conclusion to mortal life that p
uts a light in their eyes. But he wasn’t who he was claiming to be.
He cleared his throat. Again, he said, ‘The ninth isn’t ideal.’
I remembered his remark then about my being the seventh son of a seventh son. It seemed strange for a priest to be a believer in numerology, but everything about this business was strange. I said, ‘The odds will favour me on the night, gentlemen. I’ll do all I can to see to it that they do. I’m not an amateur at this enterprise. I go into the game fully prepared.’
‘Just so,’ Anderson said, taking a cigar from a leather case and rolling it between his fingers. The papers use a file photograph of him when they quote him on the Whitechapel killer. It is recent I think, but this Ripper business has aged him since he sat for it.
Lord Salisbury’s man had said not a word since we sat down in the leather chairs of that opulent room. He had confined himself to writing notes in a ledger.
Anderson lit his cigar with a strike of a Lucifer on the sandpaper strip of its box. He puffed and exhaled and through a wreath of smoke said, ‘Have you made a will, Mr. Barry?’
I laughed. I said, ‘It won’t come to that.’
There was a silence. I spoke into it. I said, ‘How’s Inspector Aberline doing on the ground with his Whitechapel investigation?’
All three of them went pale. Salisbury’s man paused with his pen poised over his notes, freshly dipped ink about to drop from its nib and spoil the page. He leant forward to prevent the spill and as he did so a letter protruded from his coat pocket. Embossed in red wax on the flap I glimpsed the crossed keys and tiara of the Vatican seal. Then he sat back and the missive was obscured from view again.
‘Aberline’s an honest man out of his depth,’ Anderson said eventually.
We all are, I was tempted to say. Instead I kept my counsel.
Anderson cleared his throat with a cough and examined the tip of his smoke. The tobacco wasn’t the cheap stuff. It was rich and heady and rolled I assumed in Havana. He said, ‘Before you leave, will you take coffee with us, Mr. Barry?’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘I haven’t yet breakfasted, gentlemen. I’ve probably room for a biscuit on the side.’
It was almost eleven in the morning when I left them. Whitehall by then was its usual trundling procession of carts and wagons and Hansoms and omnibuses. It was raining steadily and gloomy enough for the drivers of some of the passenger vehicles to have lit their lamps. The painted hoardings on their flanks made pallid claims for Wills Cigarettes and Beecham’s Pills and various brands of waterproof. London’s weather had proven to me that no fabric yet invented is truly waterproof. I walked wary of splashes from cart wheels as rain and horseshit mashed by wheel rims brought brownish puddles welling to the gutters.
Every police officer in the City of Westminster seemed to be on duty, their expressions stern and vigilant behind their mutton chop whiskers and moustaches. There were armed soldiers acting as impromptu sentries outside several government offices.
There were bullets in the breeches of their guns. A ceremonial rifle has an altogether different look from one loaded and ready to fire. Perhaps there has been intelligence about an anarchist or Fenian bomb plot. I think though all this is just a consequence of troublesome times.
I was on my way to the gymnasium by now at Leadenhall. I had packed my kit bag in preparation as soon as the Whitehall summons had come. In my pocket was twenty pounds drawn for training expenses while we drank the excellent brew of coffee Anderson had offered and ate the slices of buttery shortbread served on the side.
My belly felt warm and full and I had already determined how I would spend at least some of the extravagant sum they had given me. They’d been lavish I suspected in the hope I could somehow purchase fortitude.
November 8th 1888
I am at once better and worse prepared for this challenge than I have been for any I have confronted in my life. My conditioning was good when I took on the Boilerhouse what seems a lifetime ago at the beginning of October. It’s improved since then through hard training and wholesome eating to the point where I feel stronger and fitter than I ever have. I’m sharp, my stamina is good and most of the old speed has returned to my reflexes.
Yet I cannot shake the trepidation. I’d go further and say it’s grown in me by the day since the match was made in that gloomy cellar where dogs maul and die for money to the east. It’s a feeling close to dread I’ve endured these last few days and I’m not a man familiar with the sensations of fear or even very much of pessimism.
Partially it is the feeling of being manipulated by forces I know little about. There’s government involvement in this scheme and I cannot work out why. The machinery of the state is at work in something most serious-minded people would dismiss as mere sport. There’s no contradiction in being pampered and exploited if you know the reason for your use. Otherwise it’s an uneasy mix to live with.
There was that letter with its Vatican seal of which I caught but a glimpse. England is a fiercely Protestant country. Jeffries is as authentic a man of the cloth as any that’s ever been ordained, that’s my conviction. But he isn’t who he claims. And the British Government and the Church of Rome are not natural allies.
Sometimes I speculate that Caul will stand me up. I’ll be stood in the ring raised under that railway arch in Hercules Road with the clock rudely timing rounds we’ll never fight as he revels elsewhere oblivious in the pleasures of some squalid place of entertainment. Perhaps he’ll be viewing the bearded lady or a tattooed pigmy in a tent at the fair on Wandsworth Common. Maybe he’ll be taking his pleasures among the ladies in the velvet plush of a Chelsea bordello.
Except that he won’t. He’ll be as good as his word because though he is underhand and capricious and I suspect a prodigious teller of lies, his word is never lightly given. He will turn up confident of winning his wager, accepting the forfeit and swaggering off in possession of his prize. I sense anyway he’s seen sights far more grotesque than the bearded lady. And I suspect his interest in women doesn’t extend to pleasuring them.
The man who taught me this trade was Blackrock born and did become the Irish champion. He told me the most important lesson was nothing to do with the feint or the jab or where you place your feet to deliver a telling blow. He said the most crucial detail of all was to know your opponent.
That didn’t matter with a crude banger like the Boilerhouse. He was only ever going to do one thing and was only ever capable of doing it one way. Edmund Caul is a far more complex and dangerous proposition, my intuition tells me. Yet I know nothing about the fellow at all really that would help me in this confrontation. There are moments when the prospect makes me feel as vulnerable and helpless as an abandoned child.
This morning I had cause in my preparations to venture to Wapping. No one ever really sleeps at the place that was my destination so I set out early. There were uncommonly few people about even for the hour and those I saw had a tense and furtive look about them.
A girl slopped milk from one of the two pails she carried in her hurry to get where she was going. A coal merchant cursed the nag tethered to his wagon as he loaded the heavy hessian sacks. A policeman put me in the spotlight of his torch and affected a look of shrewd appraisal before passing on and consigning me back to the gloom.
Wapping smelled of tar and hemp rope and in drifts from the great wharves and warehouses of exotic cargoes brought aboard ships from every corner of the globe. After doing my business there I joined the leather-footed trudge of men walking towards a day’s labour unloading on the quays.
Eventually, between buildings, the river itself opened up to me, the sunrise an umber smudge behind the masts and rigging of the great flotilla of merchant ships creaking at anchor on the tide. Their lines and shrouds formed an intricate pattern of impossible complexity and reflected the confusion in my mind about tomorrow night’s business. Try as I might, I can make no mortal sense of it.
I bought a cup of coffee and a pastry for a ha’penny from
a quayside stall. The pastry tasted not of butter, like a Whitehall biscuit, but slightly of fish oil. It was fresh and sweet though and an antidote to the bitter drink I sipped.
I looked down at the lapping water and breathed in its familiar stink convinced of only one certainty, and it was this: in slightly more than 36 hours my fate would change in some fundamental way forever. Win or lose, I would emerge from my confrontation with Edmund Caul a different man from the one I had so far been in my eventful life. The manner and nature of the change were not apparent to me. The future was obscure, like a route to a destination masked by a concealing fog. But after the following night, I was convinced nothing would ever be the same for me again.
November 10th 1888
He arrived on time, bright and exuberant, whistling some ditty voguish this year among the singers in the music halls. He was wearing an ulster and his spats were flecked with some recent stain I supposed from the detritus in the street. It looked to the casual eye like smears of rust.
Not that my eye was casual, but that’s the way I tried to keep my demeanor. It was instantly unsettling to occupy a confined space with him. There was some restless, feral quality that made it so. I would compare it to standing close to the lion or tiger enclosure at the zoo. But it was worse than that, because, in a sense, we shared the same cage. There wasn’t the reassurance of steel bars separating me from the threat he exuded.
He seemed bigger than he had in the dog pit basement in Bethnal Green. His shoulders looked broader and more powerful and I was more aware of the span of him, the rangy reach of his arms. There were hectic patches of crimson on his sallow face I thought put there by the prospect of violence or the excitement of the wager. There was a hard glitter in his eyes when he smirked at me. His appetite was un-sated. He hungered visibly for the fray. And he had a preening confidence the sick presentiment in the pit of my stomach told me was entirely justified.
Stripped down he was as perfect a physical specimen as a statue of an athlete from antiquity carved from marble or fashioned from alabaster. The muscles were cleanly formed and perfectly symmetrical under his skin. The effect was spoiled by the odd reddish colouring of his flesh generally. And coarse hair bristled on his broad back and shoulder-blades in unsightly clumps. He grinned like a man with a fever before the bell sounded and we closed and when he raised his hands to clench them into fists I saw there was blood blackened and congealed under his fingernails.