City of Darkness

by Kim Wright

  Leanna ducked her head a bit guiltily, knowing what Aunt Gerry said was true. In the two weeks since her arrival, Leanna had roamed the streets of London daily with Gerry’s maid Emma in tow. She had indulged herself in several gowns but the purple one, delivered just the evening before, was her favorite. It brought out the grey in her eyes and she had never worn a color quite so deep and striking. Gwynette had been more of the opinion that maiden girls should wear shades of pink, robin’s egg blue, and yellow – colors which suited neither Leanna’s temperament nor her coloring.

  Ever since Aunt Gerry had mentioned having a dinner in her honor, Leanna had been so carried away with excitement that she’d forgotten to be homesick. Had practically forgotten she was in mourning. But Gerry was right, her grandfather had never been one to stand on ceremony and if he were here he would most certainly tell her to wear what she pleased. Leanna resolutely broke off a bit of bread and smeared it with jam. She wouldn’t worry. This was a new life and the old rules did not apply.

  Emma entered the room with a fresh pot of tea and, after a rapid glance at the table to make sure all the serving dishes were full, sat down across from Gerry. At first Leanna had been stunned by the casual manner in which Gerry ran her household. She had never seen a home where servants dined within arm’s length of their employers and were in fact frequently sought for counsel or companionship.

  It was hard to peg Emma’s exact social position, but Leanna had to admit that, thanks largely to Emma, what the home lacked in formality it compensated for in efficiency. Emma ordered the food, managed Gerry’s daunting social calendar, and supervised the cleaning efforts of the pregnant girls who came in twice a week. Gerry was a patron of a home for unwed mothers and liked to offer these young women the chance to earn a pound or two. The first morning after her arrival, Leanna thought she had gone mad when she bounded down the staircase only to find four big-bellied, child-eyed girls on bended knee polishing the entry floor. Her shock had been magnified when a half-hour later Emma rang that breakfast was ready and they all trooped in to join them at the table, wolfing down massive portions of oatmeal and hot buns. It was all she could do to maintain her composure from cracking into a fit of giggles at the sight of seven women - four of them pregnant and one older woman wrapped from head to foot in an orange silk kimono- sitting in a circle waiting for their tea.

  It was at that moment the door to the kitchen opened and she had first spied Gage, the sole male member of Gerry’s household. Heaven knows from what charity Geraldine had acquired Gage, but he served as a combination cook and butler and was quite timid. Gerry had informed her on the first night of her visit that Gage had prepared a special welcoming supper but lacked the nerve to serve it to her himself. The ensuing meal had been delicious - a standing rib roast and a delicate apple tart for dessert - and Leanna had begged Gerry to have Gage come out and take his bows. But now that she was actually seeing him she nearly cried out with surprise. Gage had an enormous goiter which obscured the majority of his throat and gave him the appearance of a bullfrog. Other than the large pouch and his eerie silence, he was a model butler, attired in a white linen serving suit even at dawn, and a superlative cook. Leanna couldn’t blame the pregnant girls for stuffing extra almond buns into their pockets. If she’d had pockets, she’d have been tempted to steal a few herself.

  It was Emma who provided order amid all this chaos, who proved to be the still island around which the flotsam of Gerry’s wild life drifted. Leanna wondered why Tom had never mentioned the girl, for she was an enigma to Leanna. Emma could scarcely be any older than herself, yet she was so calm and assured, not only in the brownstone of Mayfair but also in the shops and streets of London. And she spoke in beautiful tones, saying words Leanna had never known a servant to use. She had the look of the Irish, with her gingery hair and milk-white skin, and Leanna was surprised Tom had not found her intriguing. But then he had never mentioned Gage either and Gage was certainly a fascinating specimen of humanity.

  “Oh heavens, darling, read this,” Aunt Gerry said, dragging Leanna’s thoughts back to the present. “Aloud, so Emma and Gage can hear.”

  Leanna swallowed, and reached for the front page of the Star. “Last night,” she read, “the following letter was delivered to the Central News Agency of Fleet Street.”

  Dear Boss:

  I keep on hearing that the police have caught me. But they won’t fix me yet…I am down on certain types of women and I won’t stop ripping them until I do get buckled.

  Grand job, that last one was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear from me, with my funny little game.

  I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle after my last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough, I hope. Ha, ha!

  Next time I shall clip the ears off and send them to the police just for jolly.

  Jack the Ripper

  “Hmmm…” Leanna finished, letting the paper drop, “It’s been a few days since they’ve reported on the killings. Jack the Ripper, he calls himself? It’s very fitting.”

  “It’s absolutely ghastly!” said Gerry, “and whatever does he mean ‘I’m down on certain kinds of women?’”

  “Prostitutes,” Emma said shortly. “He hates prostitutes.” Gage rose and silently left the table.

  “Well he has certainly given Scotland Yard fair warning that he plans to try again,” Leanna said. “It’s a schoolboy taunt, is it not? Like he’s rubbing their noses in the fact they haven’t been able to catch him. Oh, look, farther down, they quote one of the detectives. ‘Trevor Welles…’” she began.

  “Trevor Welles!” Emma and Gerry cried in unison.

  “He’s a dear friend of mine,” Gerry said, “and he’ll be your dinner partner on Sunday. Trevor being quoted, imagine that. I knew him when he was just a bobby.” Emma gave a little snicker. “Well go on, Leanna,” Gerry insisted, “What does he say?”

  “He says Scotland Yard has every intention of apprehending the Ripper,” Leanna said, dropping the paper again. “He’s certainly a talkative sort, isn’t he?”

  “Tell Leanna how you and Trevor met,” Emma said innocently.

  “He arrested me,” Gerry said.

  Leanna raised her eyebrows.

  “No, truly, some time back Tess and I and several of the other women in the suffragette movement were protesting the fact women weren’t allowed to row on the Thames -“

  “Row on the Thames?” Leanna asked skeptically.

  “Yes, can you believe it? Any fool or drunk of a man can take a pleasure craft into the water but no woman can steer a boat on the Thames. So we went to Hyde Park and we chained ourselves to trees and we said we would not leave until Parliament -“

  “Aunt Gerry,” said Leanna, half amused and half impressed. “You chained yourself to a tree outdoors in the elements without food or water or any…facilities? However did you manage?”

  “Oh I doubt we were there more than ten minutes,” Gerry went on, so absorbed in her story she was oblivious to Emma’s muffled giggles. “They sent out the bobbies and Trevor was the one who arrested me. Quite the gentleman he was, and as he was loading me into the wagon he said ‘Stick to your guns, ma’am,’ rather low under his breath. I’ll never forget that. He gave me a bit of courage just as I needed it.”

  “They seriously took you to the prison?”

  “To Newgate, worst in the city.”

  “Gage and I had to go down and post her bond,” Emma said dryly. “She wasn’t in a cell. Mr. Welles had taken her and the others into a private room and even fetched them a spot of refreshment.”

  “I was incarcerated, nonetheless,” Gerry said, pulling herself up with great dignity.

  “And now he’s a detective on the Ripper case,” Leanna mused. “This is going to be quite a party.”

  “Oh dear,” Gerry said, peering at her grandniece. “I have two young men coming, but it ha
s suddenly struck me that the others are my age or more. We’ll probably seem to be hopeless fuddie-duddies to a girl like you. I do hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  Leanna grinned. “I doubt very seriously I’ll consider your friends to be fuddie-duddies,” she said, “But are you certain about the purple dress? I wouldn’t want to make a false step…”

  Emma excused herself and left the table, several plates stacked deftly in the crook of one arm. Gage had cleaned the kitchen, leaving her only the last dishes to do and she lowered them into the warm water of the basin and began to swish them about slowly. The fact that the Ripper promised to kill more prostitutes plagued her mind, and the silly story of Gerry’s arrest had not distracted her as thoroughly as it usually did.

  It had been four years since Emma had seen her older sister Mary, but she thought of her daily and all the publicity about this madman, this Ripper, was turning her concern into an obsession. Mary - pretty, saucy, and outgoing as she was - had been the idol of her shy, bookish younger sister. Their childhood in Dorchester with their brother Adam, their gentle mother and their schoolmaster father had been idyllic, or at least, Emma thought grimly to herself as she pushed her hair back with one damp palm, it seemed that way in retrospect. Their father had earned a respectable-enough living. Their mother was the angel of the county, so compassionate and skilled a nurse that people called her in to deliver their babies and comfort their dying.

  Then came the tuberculosis epidemic seven years ago, which closed the school for three whole terms, leaving her father without the only kind of trade he knew, and which ended with bodies piled high in the local cemetery and few men strong enough to bury them. Emma still dreamed sometimes of the piles of shrouded corpses, stacked as neatly as firewood. Her mother, worn down from incessant nursing, was the first to join them. Her father died four months later, leaving behind three children ranging in age from twelve to nineteen, a heavily-mortgaged home, and boxes crammed full of books.

  But if the schoolmaster and his wife had not managed to live to the age of forty, their children shared a strong instinct to survive and a ruthless lack of sentimentality. Within weeks Mary and Adam had stripped the house of every saleable item, divided the paltry lot, and begun to make plans to cope with an uncertain future. Adam had a chance to go the States - a former schoolmate had settled in Seattle and written that there was opportunity for a lad who was young and strong and fearless. It would take everything he had to get there, but he lit out nonetheless, promising to write and send money when he’d made his fortune.

  Mary had an idea she could become a governess, so she packed up Emma and the two headed for London. If nothing else, their father had left them a level of education rare in girls, and Mary quickly found work in the home of a prosperous tailor. Grudgingly, he and his wife agreed Emma could stay on too and the girls shared cramped space in the attic, with Emma running errands and doing chores for the humorless housekeeper while Mary drilled Latin into the unwilling heads of the tailor’s three sons.

  She hated her life. Emma knew it, could sense it, felt the desperation behind Mary’s quick smile. Many women on their own with a younger sister to support had done far worse, but she was nineteen years old and the days droned on like the beat of a metronome with no prospects of becoming richer, or fuller, or leading her out of the attic. Emma was powerless to help her sister and now, looking back, Emma could only marvel that Mary had been able to stick it out for two years, so ill-suited was she for the position of governess. One day, shortly after Emma had turned fifteen, Mary had simply disappeared, leaving a note and every pound she had managed to save tied in a scarf on the flat little cot. Emma leafed through the money, unable to blame her sister and too frightened to be angry at this latest desertion.

  The note had suggested Emma could stay on as the household governess - a final effort, Emma supposed, for Mary to assuage her conscience. The thought was not altogether ridiculous, for Emma was in fact a better student than Mary had ever been and had continued her studies, in secret, in the evenings. But she was only a year older than the tailor’s eldest son and slight for her age. The tailor had roared in fury and deposited her posthaste in the hands of his local sexton with instructions to escort her to the nearest workhouse. Emma sat quietly, politely, as the two discussed her fate. No matter where the sexton took her she had already determined that she would not stay. She had a good mind and thirty pounds tied in a scarf; surely London held something better than a workhouse for her.

  It was then that, after years of lucklessness, Emma’s life suddenly took a turn for the better. The sexton was a friend of Geraldine Bainbridge, and he mentioned Emma’s plight to her. Within hours Emma was delivered not to the squalor of the Knights Home for Indigent Youth, but to an elegant house in Mayfair, where it was at times her job to cook and clean but generally just her job to be sane. To impose discipline and order on an undisciplined and disorderedly household. It was a task for which she was uniquely well-equipped.

  She had not minded taking care of Gerry, Emma reflected, as she gave the last plate a cursory flick with a towel, nor had she balked at the string of misfits and ne’er-do-wells Geraldine routinely took into her home. Emma was acutely conscious in every pale face that there, but for the grace of God, went she, and she ladled out soup and sympathy with a sure hand. But this girl, this Leanna, was a different matter. She had talked quite freely with Geraldine about the money she’d inherited and her family’s reaction and Emma had for the first time felt the sickening thud of jealousy. Not even the fact that she realized Leanna had been raised in a venomous household instead of the happy normalcy she’d known for twelve years, could abate Emma’s envy. Dear thoughtless Gerry had prattled on about the many pleasures London afforded an heiress until Emma could stand to listen no longer and had excused herself.

  Leanna, to her credit, at least had enough conscience to seem uncomfortable about the magnitude of her wealth. She had pleaded with Gerry not to introduce her as an heiress, but simply as her grandniece, as her ward, and Gerry had reluctantly agreed.

  “It’s too new to me,” Leanna had said. “I can’t get used to the money or the power it represents and I’m afraid people will look at me strangely because of it.”

  “I inherited money and people don’t look at me strangely,” Gerry had protested.

  Leanna had burst into giggles. “Oh but Aunt Gerry, they do.”

  Then Geraldine had laughed herself. “You’re right, darling, but they don’t look at me strangely because of the money. Quite the opposite. A little wealth gives you the right to be as queer as you wish yet remain socially acceptable.”

  “Well, at least don’t mention it around any young men,” Leanna had said firmly. “If I should attract suitors I don’t want to worry about if they’re only interested in my estate. Oh, Aunt Gerry, have I told you? I met the most attractive man on the train. He thought I was destitute and he paid my fare…”

  And so she had launched into the same story she had told a half-dozen times since her arrival and Emma finally escaped into the kitchen. If she should attract any suitors? The girl was mad. With her beauty and breeding she would attract suitors immediately, and Emma had never so acutely felt what Mary must have endured in that attic years ago. She was now the same age Mary had been – almost twenty - and she could feel her youth and womanhood as if they were a palpable ache in her chest. Gerry had offered her a home and a purpose and, like Mary before her, she had kept her mind on her work for a full five years. But she was young, and while she did not have Leanna’s long-limbed grace, Emma knew she was pretty. Men looked at her on the streets when she passed. But however was she going to meet any of them? The only man she saw on a regular basis was Gage.

  Geraldine had mentioned soup for lunch, but they were out of carrots. Emma reached for her cloak so that she might dash out to the greengrocer. She was glad for the excuse to take a brisk walk. The day was clear with a bite of autumn in the air and the morning fog had burned off to reve
al a crystal blue sky. Emma automatically strode the familiar route to the corner grocery, barely noticing what she passed, for her mind had drifted again to her sister. With all the news of the Ripper it was impossible not to think of Mary, for Emma was not being entirely truthful when she told herself that she had not seen her for five years. One winter day, the past December, she had gone with Gerry to deliver toys to an orphanage, ironically one attached to the very same workhouse she had herself so barely avoided. In the dark, dank evening, as they made their trips to and from the carriage with loaded arms, Emma had become aware that someone was watching her. She’d turned to see a solitary figure standing on the sidewalk across the street and although the woman was draped in a lacy red shawl from her nose to her waist, there was something familiar in her stance. Emma stood stock still, unable to look away from the form of her sister, and finally the figure raised one hand, in a kind of greeting, then turned away and disappeared.

  She had been quiet for the rest of the evening, unable to enjoy the squeals of the children as they tore into their gaily wrapped gifts, scarcely able to make polite conversation with the nuns who ran the orphanage. When Gerry had inquired why she was so silent, Emma had muttered something about taking a chill. But a mystery of sorts had been solved. Adam had never written the promised letters from Seattle. For all she knew, he had sailed off the edge of the map as the navigators in the old days had threatened, and for years she had thought Mary must have fallen off the earth somehow as well. But now she knew. There was only one reason a woman alone would walk the streets of the East End in a red shawl, and the Ripper had stated to the world that he didn’t like that kind of woman. Emma handed the grocer her shopping list with an automatic smile, which stayed plastered on her face as the elderly man flirted and teased her, just as he always did. But her mind was in Whitechapel, which may as well have been a thousand miles away.