Death at Whitechapel

by Robin Paige

  “From the Crown’s point of view, then,” Charles said, “it was a good thing that the Prince died when he did.” He paused. “Although I’ve heard...” He let his voice trail off.

  “Ah.” Sickert looked directly at him. “What have you heard?”

  “That he did not die in ‘92,” Charles said softly. “That he is, even now ... alive.”

  It was true. Eddy had become so increasingly irrational and was such an unsuitable heir apparent that news of his demise had clearly come as a relief to the government. In fact, some weeks before the death was announced, Charles had heard that there was a plan afoot to have the prince committed to an asylum, and that after he set a second fire at Sandringham, even his mother had agreed that he must be confined. His reported death and funeral put a stop to the rumors for a time, but soon they were circulating again, and Charles heard it said that Eddy was being held in Balmoral, the royal Scottish residence on the River Dee.

  “Even now alive,” Sickert repeated musingly. There was a silence, broken only by the rattle of wheels on the pavement below. “Well, then,” he said finally, “there it is.”

  “Yes,” Charles said, “but those are only rumors. I wonder whether you have any direct knowledge.”

  Another silence. “Abberline is a better source on that subject than I.” Sickert sounded irritated. “Why can’t you get it from him? I’ve given you everything else you wanted.”

  “Not quite,” Charles said. “‘The Ripper—you haven’t told me who he was.” He paused. “Who they were.”

  Sickert laughed dryly. “They’re dead, you know. The whole lot of them. All but the chap who drove the coach. That’s where the women were killed—except for Mary. They were lured into the coach with the promise of a fast piece of work at a good price.”

  This came as no surprise to Charles. It was common for customers to invite prostitutes into their carriages, to be let out some while later, some distance away. “The coachman’s name?”

  “Netley. John Netley. He used to drive Eddy to Cleveland Street when he came to visit Annie. Since he already knew the secret, he was recruited to take the Ripper—the rippers—into the East End.”

  “Is Netley still in London?”

  “He was five years ago, working as a coachman out of a depot at the Great Central Station, in Marylebone.” Sickert scowled. “He tried to run Alice down, you know. Twice. The first time when she was about four. Then again, just before her seventh birthday, in Trafalgar Square. She had to be taken to the hospital that time. He’s a bad character, that one. If he’s not dead already, I warrant he won’t last much longer.”

  Charles took a deep breath. “And Gull was the Ripper himself? You’re sure of that?”

  “Who else could have carved them up so exquisitely besides that old vivisectionist?” Sickert said, in a barbed voice. “But he didn’t work alone. And he wasn’t the mastermind. Gull had the stomach to be a butcher, but his mind was failing fast. He lacked the wit to think the whole thing through—except for the bloody rituals.” Sickert laughed sarcastically. “He could handle those, all right. Oh, yes, he could handle those.”

  “The rituals,” Charles said slowly. “You’re speaking about the mutilations, I take it.”

  He had studied the reports of the Coroner’s inquests and knew the basic details—and of course he had seen Mary Kelly’s body. As he recalled, each of the women (except for Elizabeth Stride, where the Ripper had evidently been interrupted) was mutilated in much the same way: their throats cut from left to right, their abdomens opened to the breastbone, their intestines removed and placed over the shoulder. In the last two killings, organs were missing: Catherine Eddowes’ kidney and uterus, Mary Kelly’s heart. In the latter killings, as well, rough triangles had been cut in the victims’ faces.

  “Yes,” Sickert said, “I’m speaking of the mutilations.” There was a pause, and when he spoke again, his voice held a note of half-veiled surprise. “When you see Abberline, give the fellow my thanks, will you? I must say, it’s a relief to talk about it, even ten years later. Get the whole thing off my chest, as it were.” He straightened and said in sudden realization, “By Jove, it is ten years, isn’t it? Ten years, almost exactly. Mary Kelly was murdered on the ninth of November.” He gave a harsh laugh. “HRH’s birthday. Quite a gift, that, from his fellow Freemasons.”

  Charles looked up. It was true, then. His suspicions were correct.

  “You don’t look surprised,” Sickert said. “I suppose it had already occurred to you, then.”

  “Just now, actually,” Charles said. Although now that he thought of it, he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t come to him before.

  “I suppose,” Sickert said, “I had better explain that angle, although I should have thought Abberline would have done so, since he was the one who found it out and told it to me.” He gave Charles a slantwise look. “You are a Freemason?”

  “I was once,” Charles said, “when I was in the Army. I’m afraid I did not take it very seriously, or rise through the degrees, or pay much attention to the rituals.”

  “Well, then.” Sickert sipped his tea, then put down the cup. “Do you remember hearing anything about a message chalked on a passageway wall at the scene of Catherine Eddowes’ murder?”

  “Indeed, I witnessed it myself,” Charles said. “I was called to photograph the scene, but it was very early in the morning and there was not yet enough light. What I saw was written in a strong, well-shaped hand, and the words were quite clear.”

  “But you didn’t photograph it?”

  “Commissioner Warren came, just at sunrise. He sponged the wall himself, fearing that the message might incite a riot. There wasn’t an opportunity to photograph it, unfortunately.”

  “And do you remember what it said?”

  “It was so enigmatically worded that I have never forgotten it,” Charles said. He quoted: “‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’”

  “And I suppose you took the word Juwes to be a misspelling for the word Jews, and were not surprised by the commissioner’s action.”

  “Oh, I was surprised,” Charles said, “as was everyone there. Several of the detectives, particularly those of the City Police, were nearly livid. The message was the first real clue, the only clue ever left by the Ripper. It could have been photographed, then covered with a blanket and the passageway guarded so that it was not seen by the public. No one present could understand why the commissioner did such a thing. It seemed totally incompetent.”

  “An incompetent policeman, a competent Freemason,” Sickert said dryly.

  “A Freemason?” Charles asked in surprise, then checked himself. Of course, Warren was a Freemason. Most of the men in positions of authority were Freemasons. In fact, that’s how some of them got those positions.

  Sickert ticked off Warren’s titles. “A District Grand Master, a Past Grand Sojourner of the Supreme Grand Chapter, and member of the Royal Alpha Lodge, of which Eddy himself was the Right Worshipful Master. It was Commissioner Warren’s sacred obligation to scrub off that declaration, in order to protect the men who wrote it. They were also Freemasons.”

  Charles stared at him, the whole thing beginning to make a gruesome sense. So the word “Juwes” didn’t refer to Jews, but to Jubel, Jubelo, and Jubelum, the three apprentice Masons who, according to tradition, treacherously murdered their Grand Master and were ritually executed for the crime. Freemasons referred to them collectively as the Jues—a deliberate allusion to the Jews who crucified Jesus Christ. And the Ripper’s mutilation, the removal of the women’s intestines mirrored the way the three Jues were punished for their betrayal, their vitals taken out and thrown over the left shoulder. It had become the symbolic penalty for revealing the secrets of Freemasonry.

  “So the mutilation,” Charles murmured, “was in effect a secret code, making clear to the initiated who was responsible for the killings.”

  “Exactly,” Sickert said. “And remember that the
victim was found in Mitre Square, and that a piece of her apron was cut off and placed directly under the message.”

  The mitre and the square, Charles thought—the Masons’ tools. Mitre Square itself had been named for the Mitre Tavern, where Freemasons had met for two centuries. And the apron—of course! He himself had taken a photograph of Prince Eddy and the Prince of Wales wearing their Masonic regalia: ceremonial aprons made of white lambskin and lined with white silk, meant to symbolize the aprons worn by stonemasons. The clues were so clear, so unmistakably clear, as long as one understood the arcane lore of Freemasonry.

  Watching Charles’s face, Sickert smiled. “I see that you’re getting the picture.”

  “I am,” Charles said. “The women were killed to keep them silent, and mutilated as a—a what? A Masonic joke? A warning?”

  Sickert shrugged. “Who knows? The Freemasons are fond of symbolic acts, so it might have been a gesture of tribute to the Master of their lodge. Or perhaps they thought it would silence other persons who might have some scandalous information they thought to turn into ready money. Or perhaps the mastermind behind the crimes was simply engaging in a cruel joke. The man was certainly capable of it. He was mad, you know.”

  “Who?” Charles demanded. “Who?”

  “Why, don’t you know?” Sickert said. His face was twisted. He laughed unpleasantly. “It was Lord Randy, of course.”

  “Randolph?” Charles whispered, feeling suddenly sick.

  “Mad as a hatter,” Sickert said. “Mad as the great Gull. The newspapers got that right, at least. It was the work of a warped mind.”

  For a long moment, Charles could not speak. At last, he said, “Is there any proof?”

  “I doubt it. Or if there is, you’ll never see it, nor will anyone else. It is buried deep in the bowels of Whitehall. I learned what I know from Eddy’s tutor, James Stephen. He was a brilliant man—called to the bar, kept chambers, wrote poetry. He had been treated by the grand and glorious Gull for a head injury, and the two knew one another well. He told me and Abberline, together, what he knew, and then he died.” He added, with heavy irony, “It is said that he starved himself to death.”

  “Starved—” Charles could go no further.

  “That’s the official report,” Sickert said. “It’s all a very bad business and best forgotten. There have been times when I’ve feared for my own life. But Alexandra likes me, because of my affection for Eddy. That’s what’s kept me alive, I think.” He cocked his head, listening. “Someone’s coming up the stairs. Perhaps I should have told you about—”

  The door opened, and a young girl of twelve or thirteen burst in, carrying a bunch of violets. She was a pretty thing in a white shirtwaist, blue skirt, and white stockings, with long, dark hair and delicate features in a heart-shaped face.

  “Hello, Walter,” she said. She spoke loudly, and with an odd rhythm. “I’m not intruding, am I? Should I go away again?”

  “No, don’t go, Alice,” Walter said, also loudly. He motioned to her to come and stand beside him and slipped his arm around her waist. “Lord Charles, I should like you to meet Miss Alice Crook.”

  Charles stood and took the girl’s hand. “Miss Crook,” he said gravely. “I am very pleased to meet you.”

  “You’ll have to speak up,” Walter said. “She’s deaf, you know.” He smiled slightly. “Like her father.”

  33

  “The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether.”

  “Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault, said my friend.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  The Purloined Letter

  Charles caught a cab at the corner of Hampstead Road and Euston. He directed the driver to Paddington Station, where he went into the telegraphic office and spent some time carefully composing a telegram to Frederick Abberline, in Bournemouth. That done, he turned up his collar and trudged down Baker Street in the direction of Mayfair and Sibley House. It was late afternoon now, well past teatime, and the day had turned cold. There was a bite in the damp gray air, the presage of winter weather, and the mist blowing up from the river was like needles against his face. He might have caught another cab and saved himself a chill, but he wanted to clear his mind before he arrived at Sibley House and it was time to relate Walter Sickert’s incredible story to Kate—and to Jennie.

  It had been a strange and eventful day, a day that had dispelled, at least in Charles’s mind, much of the mystery that surrounded the most atrocious crimes London had ever known. There were still a great many details he did not know now and perhaps would never know, but the basic outlines seemed clear, even simple. If all that he and Kate had learned were true, the Ripper killings were the result of a unfortunate marriage obliterated by the royal family and a blackmail attempt by a one-time nursemaid and her friends, whose murders had been clothed in a mad Masonic ritual.

  But as he trudged along through the gathering twilight, Charles felt no triumph over the secrets that he and Kate had uncovered in the basements and lofts of Cleveland Street or the dirty alleys of the East End. What was to be gained from any of this knowledge? Eddy was either dead or permanently out of reach—and certainly out of the succession, his misdeeds having condemned him to a life of exile and imprisonment. Annie was disabled, her mind destroyed, a wanderer among the outcasts of the City. The men who had done the killing, Sir William Gull and Lord Randolph Churchill, were both dead—Gull (if Lees’ story was accurate) having died in a lunatic asylum, Churchill of syphilis, also a maniac, at the end. Only the coachman survived, apparently: questioned, he might be able to fill in some of the missing details, but what of that? Alice’s birth record could be found, Lees’ story could be checked, the Masonic affiliations could be confirmed—but to what end? There was nothing left to know about the Ripper killings that mattered to anyone, anywhere, except as a matter of forensic curiosity, or to serve some abstract ideal of justice.

  Justice! The thought of it set his teeth on edge. There had been no justice anywhere in the whole of this foul business, only fear, and exploitation, and high-level corruption. How high did it reach? To the Prime Minister, certainly, and the Prince. To the Queen? Very likely—the old lady was notorious for her demands to be told each minute detail of government, and neither her son nor the Prime Minister would have dared to keep Eddy’s marriage and Mary Kelly’s blackmail letter from her. And Sickert was only speculating when he said that the Royals had not sanctioned murder. Charles knew from personal experience how the Prince’s instructions were given, with a wink and a nod. And even if the directive had not come from HRH or Salisbury, they could not have escaped the knowledge of the women’s deaths. The papers had shrieked the gruesome news—the police reports, the inquest reports, the interrogation of suspects—from the end of August to early November. The Royals might have called off their dogs at any time after the first murder, and they didn’t.

  Oblivious to the traffic, Charles crossed Oxford Street, splashed to the thigh with gutter filth by a passing brewer’s wagon and nearly run down by a motor lorry, whose driver flung curses at him like stones. The fog wrapped around him like a cold, wet shroud, and in spite of the hurrying crowds that brushed past, he felt desperately alone. Yes, he had found it all out, but to what purpose? The knowledge could serve no one, bind no wounds, heal no broken hearts. No justice was possible, no public resolution, no restitution.

  But with this thought came another. What about the children? There was Alice, the Little Princess—except that she wasn’t a princess, for her mother was a Catholic commoner and her father no longer a prince. She was only a pretty child with a delicate face and something of her grandmother’s look, saved from the gutter by the generosity of her father’s friend, not very stable himself, who had taken the responsibility for seeing that she had some sort of decent life. No revelation of her parentage, of her connection to the Ripper killings, could ever change her circumstances or bring a
nything but unhappiness to her.

  And there was Winston. It had been his mother’s desperate efforts to silence Finch that had opened up this whole affair. If any word of Randolph’s involvement in the heinous murders were to reach the public in her son’s lifetime, Winston’s political ambitions should be ruined, his life wrecked. As far as Winston—and his brother Jack, too—were concerned, the sooner the Ripper was forgotten, the deeper the secret was buried, the safer their futures. They had nothing to do with the sins of their father. Justice could only destroy them, as surely as it would destroy Alice.

  Charles thrust his hands deeper in his pockets and ducked his head into the wind, the air flowing like cold water inside his collar and down his back, the clopping carriages and darting hansoms moving past in the deepening twilight, the gas streetlights, newly lit, emerging like haloed beacons in the gloom. Five minutes later, he had reached Sibley House, and Richards was opening the door and clucking over the wetness of his coat and shoes, and Kate was standing at the library door, her russet hair shining in the light, her hand held out in loving welcome.

  “You’re wet and cold,” she said. “Come in by the fire, my dear.”

  He did not answer. Instead, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, then folded her into his arms, warming himself in her warmth, cleansing himself in her fresh, clean scent. It would not be easy to relate to Lady Randolph Churchill the horrors he had heard today, but Kate would be there, and by her very presence would help him to say what needed to be said, only that much and no more. He touched her forehead with his lips, tenderly, thankfully. Kate would always be there, and for that, he was unutterably grateful.

  34

  PLEASE CONFIRM JACK RC AND WG STOP CAN YOU SHED LIGHT ON PRESENT WHEREABOUTS OF PAV STOP WALTER SENDS REGARDS STOP SIGNED SHERIDAN