Dust and Shadow

by Lyndsay Faye

  “As far as I can make out by memory,” said he, “the path I followed after leaving you at Berner Street took me north via Greenfield Street, Fieldgate Street, then Great Garden Street and thus to the small maze surrounding Chicksand Street, which is where I encountered our quarry. I then made my way back to Berner Street, whilst he, inexplicably, proceeded here to a largely emptied commercial district. I imagine he traveled down Old Montague Street, which becomes Wentworth Street, then narrows again into Stoney Lane, which finally led him straight to where we stand. Then, and here we are blessed, for the extraordinary is always of use to the investigator, he did something positively absurd. He killed a woman, then disemboweled her in an open square with three separate entrances and any number of guards within—but we have visitors, Watson. It was only a matter of time. Let me do the talking, if you don’t mind.”

  A middle-aged man with greying muttonchop whiskers, a shabby bowler hat, and the physique of a dray horse approached us, a tentative smile fighting for supremacy with his suspicious and hooded eyes.

  “Excuse me, sirs, but I can’t help but notice that you’ve been in this square and out again more times than is natural. I wonder if you might be good enough to say what your business is here.”

  “Tell me who’s asking,” my friend replied with a surly glare and, I noted with amusement, a perceptibly Welsh turn of phrase.

  The man crossed his powerful arms expectantly. “That’s no more than your right, I suppose, though I’m under no obligation to tell you with the Ripper still at large. My name is Samuel Levison, and I’m part of a group organized to keep the peace in these parts. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee we go by, and if you’re reasonable, you’ll tell me your business before I call a policeman to do my work for me.”

  Holmes’s eyes lit up eagerly. “I’ve heard of your men,” he cried, “and you’re just the help I’ve been wanting. Yesterday, it was—I’d been to a few more pubs than I should, I don’t mind telling you, and close toward morning someone told me I was but a quarter mile from the spot where another poor creature was killed. Sounds absurd in the light of day, but I’d a terrible urge to see the place. I’d hardly entered the square when I heard someone behind me. A rogue and a rascal if I ever saw one, and he flashed a blade, saying he’d have my money or my blood. Well, I’ve never been one to back down from a fight, so I pulled out my knife, but drink had the better of me and the bloody scoundrel cut me straightaway—here, in the shoulder. By the time I’d dragged myself home, I never realized I’d dropped my pipe in the scuffle. It’s been with me for many a voyage, and I wasn’t easy in my mind until I’d had a look round. Stem was burnished wood, with designs I’d carved—birds and such.”

  “Lads?” Mr. Levison called to his companions. “Seen anything on the ground that might belong to this fellow? I am sorry, sir, but like as not someone’s pawned it by now.”

  “Ah, more’s the pity. I’d little enough hope as it was.” Holmes squinted at the murder site. “You’ve more important things on your minds than my pipe. The body was in front of those houses?”

  “Yes, opposite Church Passage.”

  “And what did the neighbours hear?”

  “Unfortunately, the buildings are unoccupied.”

  “Ah, that’s a shame, it is. Seems an empty enough place, to be sure.”

  “Kearly and Tonge’s Warehouse yonder is guarded by night, and a police constable lives just there, but no one heard a thing.”

  “Police just on the other side of the square?” Holmes whistled softly. “I might never ha’ lost my pipe if I’d known that.”

  “Don’t see how you could have known—not unless you were Sherlock Holmes, that balmy cove.”

  The men laughed heartily at this incomprehensible jest, and Holmes flashed a ready smile in return. “What, that unofficial ’tec? Don’t tell me you know him.”

  His question provoked another bout of merriment. “Know him!” chuckled Mr. Levison. “That’s rich. I think Lusk, our president, knows him, but if he’s a careful man, he’ll steer clear of Sherlock Holmes. I know I would, if I were him.”

  Torn between burning curiosity and the sight of a colourless Holmes leaning ever more urgently upon his stick, I ventured, “Hadn’t we best return home?”

  “Yes indeed, see your friend home, my good man,” agreed Mr. Levison genially. “I’m right sorry about your pipe, sir, but you’re a good deal too peaked to be out of doors.”

  “There’s days I’ve felt better, and that’s certain,” Holmes replied. “My thanks for your help, such as it was.”

  We slowly, for my friend grew steadily more faint, passed back through the narrowest of the entrances. Holmes made no protestation when I took him firmly by the arm.

  “What in the world could that fellow have meant?”

  My companion shook his head. “I haven’t the first idea,” he answered, “but I fear that we shall soon enough find out.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE Dark Writings

  By the time I got Holmes up the stairs, he was so drained of all energy that I lost no time in administering a fresh injection of morphine before consigning him to his bed. Afterward I felt compelled to clear my thoughts and, with no immediate object in mind, ambled toward Regent’s Park where a hailstorm of brown leaves lay strewn over the spacious grounds.

  Our visit to Mitre Square appeared only to have raised still more mystifying obstacles. Why should our quarry have killed again when he knew the alarm had been raised? Why should he have done so where at any moment he may have been interrupted from one of three directions? Above all, I dwelt upon the bizarre remarks the committee man had made about my friend. For all the Yard’s reticence to consult a self-labeled amateur, there was scarcely a more respected figure in the layman’s eye, and with each successive case Sherlock Holmes solved—in the rare instances he received full credit—he was compelled by his natural Bohemian reticence to turn down countless congratulatory invitations proffered by rich and poor alike. What extraordinary rumour could possibly have run him afoul of public opinion?

  I must have wandered for an hour, lost in pointless speculation. I had just turned the corner, my steps leading back down Baker Street, when I observed from half a block’s distance an angry altercation taking place upon our doorstep.

  “It is undoubtedly a sad circumstance which brings harm to the faultless health of the great Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” growled Mr. Rowland K. Vandervent, “but I will be damned, my good lady—and I use the word damned only in the presence of those it will affect—I will be damned if his condition prevents me from saving his character!”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Vandervent,” I said sternly. “I should like to have a word with you in private. Your gross disregard for both courtesy and Holmes’s frail state of health has been well noted, I warn you. Mrs. Hudson, I will deal with this person.”

  Thanked with surreptitious glances of gratitude from both parties (neither of whom, providentially, observed the other), I proceeded with Mr. Vandervent up the stairs. I roused the coals into a blaze as he finished the few laboured steps required to propel him into our sitting room.

  “I say, she isn’t a distant extraction of any of the Borgias, is she? I’ve never had such adjectives trowled in heaping mounds upon my person. What I mean to say is, Doctor,” continued Vandervent, suddenly lowering his raspy voice and glancing toward Holmes’s door, “the gawky fellow isn’t about to die on us, is he?”

  “By no means!” called the detective’s piercing tenor from his bedroom.

  “It is common enough knowledge,” declared Holmes when we had entered the room and Mr. Vandervent had cast himself into the armchair, “that spoken low tones, provided that the s consonant is disguised, are far more easily masked than a whisper.”

  “So it’s true, then?” returned Vandervent, running his hand through his frenzied hair. “You were knocked about by Jack the Ripper?”

  “I am at death’s door,” my friend replied acidly. “Therefore, I beg of you to co
me to the point.”

  “I only mean to tell you that I am sorry about the late edition of the London Chronicle. I had nothing whatever to say about it.”

  “How fascinating. I have barely finished the early morning editions. Look it up, would you, Watson?”

  I cast about the chaotic room for some moments in search of the periodical in question, finally extracting it from the vortex of newsprint. The article was titled, in the usual gaudy capitals, “A MURDEROUS STRUGGLE,” and read as follows:

  It has been brought to the attention of this publication that further circumstances pertaining to the infamous double event, which may enhance our knowledge of the killer whose savage acts have brought terror to our streets, have recently come to light. It was not well known before today that Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the eccentric and reclusive consulting detective, was in the area upon the night of the double murder. We have learned that his time was spent in dalliance with a number of ladies of questionable vocation, consorting in the dens of vice so prevalent in those dark streets. It is also evident that it was Mr. Holmes who “discovered” the murder in Dutfield’s Yard during its very execution, and that in pursuit of an unknown suspect, he then disappeared during the time the second victim met her own hideous demise. Whether those lost minutes point the finger of suspicion at one of London’s most cloistered characters remains to be seen, but it is an established fact that Mr. Holmes returned to the site of the first murder in a state of bloody disarray. In addition, Mr. Holmes arrived without prior summons by the police at the scene of Annie Chapman’s brutal slaying three weeks ago, and the peculiar gentleman offered no satisfactory explanation of his being there. To suggest that Mr. Holmes’s self-imposed mandate to combat crime in all its forms has taken a turn against the destitute would be the lowest form of conjecture; however, we can state with greater positivity that the unconventional vigilante must be questioned to the closest degree regarding his activities and his strange foreknowledge upon the nights in question.

  To my immense surprise, at the conclusion of this trash, Sherlock Holmes threw his head back and laughed heartily in his inner, noiseless fashion until he had entirely exhausted himself.

  “I fail to see the humour you have, in your greater wisdom perhaps, detected,” remarked Mr. Vandervent.

  “As do I, Holmes.”

  “Oh, come, Watson! Really! It is quite too preposterous.”

  “It is libelous!”

  “It is superb. It clears up a small mystery, for this piece was written by the enigmatic Leslie Tavistock. However, it presents a fresh one, for the article is factually irreproachable. Where could Tavistock have obtained these particulars? Before the press even learned of the first murder, I had been carted off like a sack of oranges and you had left the scene. Do you imagine Miss Monk was interviewed about the events of the evening?”

  “It seems very unlikely.”

  “Or perhaps the regular Yarders spread the word that their peculiar amateur reinforcements frequent pubs of ill repute?”

  “Even less probable.”

  “I don’t imagine you’ve forgone your usual custom of appallingly florid biography and gone straight to the gutter press?”

  “You may put the thought from your mind.”

  “There is something about this article I do not understand,” Holmes confessed. “It is peculiarly malignant.”

  “I don’t see anything so peculiar about that. Journalists rarely worry about malignancy,” Mr. Vandervent corrected him. “They are far too concerned with selling papers, you see.”

  “I cannot help but think that the business of journalists is to report the news, and not to sell newspapers,” Holmes returned dourly. “Be that as it may, I cannot imagine any newsman would take it upon himself to write such rubbish without cause.”

  “You have more faith in my industry than do I, perhaps because you have suffered from less prolonged exposure. Nevertheless, you are right in thinking he has a clever source. Apart from your friends and the Yard, who are diligently shutting as many open mouths as they can, it is difficult to know who could have dogged your movements that night. Speaking of your allies, I don’t suppose any of them are false?”

  “I don’t suppose they are,” my friend stated flatly.

  “Quite right. In that case, I believe we have exhausted the subject of your delightfully rendered portrait in the local press. Consider, then, a postcard we received the morning after. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but I am clearly no judge as to what will amuse you.”

  Holmes’s face changed swiftly when he viewed the card, betraying his eager interest. After scrutinizing it, front and back, he tossed it to me.

  I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, youll hear about saucy Jacky s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

  Jack the Ripper

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” mused Holmes. “The hand at first appears to differ, but on closer examination, it is merely very hastily and agitatedly written. What do you intend to do with this beauty?”

  “The papers will be falling over each other to publish it. That previous letter has already been printed in facsimile by the Daily News. Every man, woman, and child is referring to the mad devil as Jack the Ripper.”

  “So I observed. What do you hope to accomplish?”

  “We shall sell newspapers, no doubt. In addition, I have not despaired that the handwriting may be recognized.”

  “You have been of immense help.”

  “Well, it was my duty to warn you and warn you I did. I was also determined to absolve myself of blame, and I congratulate myself on both counts. I shall see myself out, thank you. It would be a waste of ten minutes to accompany me, Dr. Watson. Good day to you both.”

  Holmes lit a cigarette at the candle by his bedside. He then glanced at me with a shrewd smile. “You see the significance of these taunting missives?”

  “Do they furnish any tangible clue?”

  “No, but they indicate a trend. In the first case, they are localized; both are postmarked from the East-end, which is further confirmation that our man knows Whitechapel intimately, perhaps lives there. But more interestingly, these letters will accomplish a very specific purpose upon their publication.”

  “What purpose, Holmes?”

  “Terror, my dear fellow. Abject terror. I will be very much mistaken if the colour of this investigation, black as it was before, will not have darkened by this evening.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Miss Monk Investigates

  I knew better than to think Holmes had been exaggerating for the purpose of effect, and soon word arrived from George Lusk that riots had flamed up in various East-end neighbourhoods, none of them fatal yet each an outpouring of impotent rage. A creeping fear now gripped half of London, and geographically speaking, the hysteria was spreading. Proposed solutions flooded into the Yard from all quarters and included, as I recall, dressing up male constables as female unfortunates, and spreading alarm wires throughout Whitechapel to serve as electric warning buttons.

  On the following morning, at Holmes’s request, I set out for the East-end to retrieve Miss Monk, whose presence was required in order to lay out our plans. What these plans included the detective omitted to tell me, but I was easier in my mind merely knowing such existed.

  When I knocked at the ground-floor room Miss Monk had taken for herself upon her improvement in fortunes, I half expected to find her still the victim of a morose nervous reaction. Instead, when the door opened, I discovered her neatly dressed, with a pot of tea on the stove and the gleam of fresh intelligence in her green eyes. She bid me sit with her usual blend of imitative elegance and habitual coquetry, then threw herself into the other of the two chairs flanking her roughly sanded table.

  “And wouldn’t you love to hazard at what I’ve been about.” She grinned, pouring me a cup of tea. I ass
ented with an encouraging smile.

  “I’ve been out on the town with the likes of Stephen Dunlevy, that’s what.”

  I started forward in some disquiet. “Miss Monk, surely you know how dangerous his company may be. We were in pursuit of Mr. Dunlevy when last we encountered…”

  “Jack the Ripper?”

  “Indeed, for want of a better name. Miss Monk, I don’t like to think what could happen.”

  “Aye, I know,” she assented gravely. “It’s a funny thing, Doctor—I thought I’d be too terrified to set foot out of doors again. Spent half of Sunday starting at every creak and whisper. But now even when I am frightened, the devilish thing is that I’m too angry to notice.”

  She looked me square in the face, and in that moment, Miss Monk and I understood each other. I had traveled through lands that she had never dreamed of in her most elaborate imaginings; she had lived a life whose sufferings I could not begin to guess at. Still, we understood each other, and I knew that whatever was asked of her in our increasingly desperate venture, she would perform to her utmost ability.

  “Very well. You saw Stephen Dunlevy. You are far too pleased for the errand to have been fruitless.”

  “You recall how his landlady let on he goes out more than he should, but never with any woman in mind?”

  “Yes, she reassured you of his total devotion.”

  Miss Monk laughed. “He don’t care ha’penny for me, Dr. Watson. But this tale he has, about his mate Johnny Blackstone killing that girl while he stood by—it’s true as gospel so far as I can tell, for after we’d had an afternoon pint yesterday, I doubles back and follows him again, and he walks straight over to—”

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Monk, but how did you come to meet with him in the first place?”

  “We’d arranged it when I left him to find you and Mr. Holmes. How is Mr. Holmes, then, Doctor?” she added apprehensively. I assured her that he would soon mend and requested she go on with her story.