Death at Whitechapel

by Robin Paige

  Is that it? Kate wondered. Is Winston trying to get Jennie away from George? Does he fear that she will marry him and drag her sons into the social ruin that was sure to follow? Or is there something else behind Winston’s precipitous departure? Is he running from something? From someone?

  “You may go if you choose,” Jennie said stiffly, “but I cannot. There are things I must do here. For one, I can’t possibly leave Maggie in Manfred’s hands and go off on holiday to India. Capable as he is, he requires my direction.”

  At the mention of Manfred, Winston’s face flushed even redder and his nostrils flared. Kate, watching, remembered the animosity between them. Perhaps George wasn’t the only man of whom Winston was jealous.

  “I shan’t give up trying to persuade you, Mama,” he said, obviously attempting to steady himself. “After you have read the note and the clipping, I believe you will see the wisdom of my suggestion. Leaving England may be the only answer.” He bowed to Kate and Charles. “Good night.”

  When he had gone, Jennie shook her head. “What an exhausting boy he is,” she said tiredly, “and so ridiculously full of himself. India! After all I have done to help get his political career underway, I cannot believe that he is dashing off to play polo! It is utterly irresponsible of him to be swayed by such schoolboy distractions. What in the world will the Party think?”

  But Kate did not believe it was polo that drew Winston to India, so much as something else pushing him. Something has happened to frighten him, she thought. Was it the blackmail note, or what he had learned about his father’s situation, or something else? But there was no ready answer to the question, and she was too weary to puzzle long over it.

  “Richards says dinner is ready,” she said. “Perhaps we shall all feel better after we have eaten.”

  Their conversation during dinner was not sprightly, and Jennie, pleading a headache, retired almost immediately afterward to her room. Kate and Charles returned to the library, where Charles poured himself a whisky, sat down in his chair by the fire, and put his feet up.

  After a moment, Kate prompted, “The letter Winston brought—aren’t you going to read it, Charles?”

  Charles sighed. “Oh, I suppose,” he said testily. He took out the envelope, which Winston had already torn open, and pulled out a letter and a newspaper clipping. He read both in silence, then tossed them down on the table beside him.

  “After everything that happened today, I’m not in the mood for this kind of thing,” he said.

  “What does the blackmailer want? Money?”

  Charles closed his eyes. “Five hundred pounds,” he said wearily. “The love of money is the root of all evil. Read these, Kate, and see what you make of them.”

  The newspaper clipping, from an unidentified paper, was terse, to the point, and threatening. Kate was glad that Jennie had not wanted to read it.

  POLICE CONTINUE INVESTIGATION

  The Metropolitan Police are continuing their investigation into the murder of Thomas Finch, of Number Two Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia. A reliable anonymous informant has offered to aid them in identifying the chief suspect in the crime, a veiled lady seen leaving the murder scene. Further developments are expected shortly.

  The note that accompanied the clipping was typewritten, on a half-sheet of thin yellowish paper. “I will trade my silence for five hundred pounds,” it said. “Get the money and wait for my instructions.” There was no signature.

  Kate looked from the note to the clipping and back again, thinking that Jennie really should go to the police. The longer this went on, the more suspicious her visit to Finch’s lodgings appeared. On the other hand, if she went to the police, the resulting notoriety would disgrace not only herself but Winston. It was a hopeless dilemma.

  She frowned down at the note, thinking that something about it seemed to tug at her memory. The phrasing? She read it again, but nothing came to her. The paper? Perhaps, for it was of a familiar sort that could have been purchased at any stationery shop. The typing was ordinary, too—although from the way the letters were inked, slightly heavier at the bottom, she rather thought that the note had been typed on a down-strike machine. The British seemed to favor them, although she herself much preferred her own Remington up-strike machine, which had come from America.

  But still there was something. Her frown deepened. Holding the note, she crossed to the desk where Jennie had earlier left a pile of manuscripts and two notes. Jennie had asked her to read one of the notes, which contained a complimentary reference to a short story Beryl Bardwell had written for Maggie. Having smiled over it, she had bundled the other materials into a drawer, for the second note (which Jennie surely had not intended to leave in plain sight) was of an embarrassingly private nature and Kate had not wanted the servants to happen on it.

  She opened the drawer now, pulled out the papers, and began to leaf through them. When she found what she was looking for, she smoothed it flat and reached for the magnifying glass that was kept in the top drawer. She bent over and studied the note for a moment, then laid the blackmail note beside it and studied them both intently. After a moment, now completely sure of what she was seeing, she straightened.

  “Charles,” she said urgently, “come here, won’t you? I should like to show you something very interesting.”

  Her words were met with a soft snore. That great detective, Lord Charles Sheridan, was asleep by the fire.

  Kate went to him and shook him. “Charles,” she said, “come to the desk. There’s something you must see!”

  Grumbling sleepily, Charles got out of his chair and followed her. But a moment later, he was awake and alert. “By Jove, Kate, I think you’ve solved it! But why in the world—”

  The door opened and Richards said, with a sniff that disapproved of late-night comings and goings and especially of this brash young man, “Mr. Winston Churchill, my lord.”

  “I’m afraid your mother has gone to bed, Winston,” Kate said. “She was very tired.”

  “It’s not my mother I’ve come to see,” Winston replied. “I’ve come because—” He shifted from one foot to the other, awkwardly. “That is, I’ve come to tell you—I mean—”

  “For God’s sake, Winston,” Charles said impatiently. “Spit it out, will you? We don’t have all night.”

  Winston bowed his head. “I’ve come because I know the identity of the extortionist,” he said in a tone that sounded almost humble, “and his motive. I was hoping to keep the thing from Mother by getting her away, but I see now how foolish that was, and how... well, cowardly of me. I have behaved in a self-centered and entirely dishonorable way, and I confess to being utterly ashamed of myself. I am the guilty party, you see. The culpability lies with me.” He brought his heels together, lifted his chin, and squared his shoulders as if he were facing a firing squad. “It’s time the ugly truth was brought out into the open—and the sad business brought to a close.”

  36

  When one is in love one begins by deceiving one’s self, And one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

  OSCAR WILDE

  A Woman of No Importance, 1893

  Handed the envelope by a messenger as he came off the cricket-field behind the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, Lieutenant Cornwallis-West wiped his face with a towel and went to sit down on a wooden bench. He was still breathing hard from the exertion, but as he held Jennie’s lavender-scented note in his hand, he breathed harder, and his heart began to pound at a fearsome rate. It could only be a reply to his plea for forgiveness, and he turned it over in his fingers with a deep trepidation.

  What would she say? If she rejected him, he really did not know what he would do. Could there be some other man? Yes, most likely. And probably Winston was urging her to turn him away. Winston certainly didn’t like him, nor did Jack, and both of them would give anything if Jennie would abandon her interest in him. Or was she so frightfully confounded by this other business—this gruesome Finch affair—that she could
not think which way to go? He already deeply regretted having meddled in the matter, fearing that his efforts had done his cause more harm than good. But couldn’t she see that he was the only person on earth who could save her from the mire of that dreadful Cleveland Street affair?

  Well, there was nothing to do but read what she had to say. He ripped open the envelope, pulled out the note, and read it swiftly, his heart leaping with a lover’s joy as he began to take it all in. Yes, he was forgiven! Yes, she loved him! Yes, a future lay before them, bright with the promise of true love! Now the way lay clear to his proposal, and perhaps in a few months, Lady Randolph would call herself Mrs. George Cornwallis-West, and he would be the husband of the most beautiful woman in the land.

  George closed his eyes and held the note against the sweaty front of his cricket shirt, imagining the ecstacy of being married to Jennie. But it was only a moment before the romantic dream of the future began to give way to the practical realities of the present. If Jennie truly intended to lay open the way to a marriage proposal, he would have to speak to his father and mother immediately.

  And that prospect was enough to bring him down to earth with a thump, for he could easily imagine what his father and mother were going to say to the idea of his marrying Lady Randolph. They had already made their views on the subject quite plain, especially with regard to his obligation to marry for money. No matter how he protested, they were absolutely set on his getting his hands on Mary Golet’s fortune in order to ease the family’s debts and mortgages. It wasn’t enough that they had married his older sister to the Prince of Pless’s fortunes and had their eye on the Duke of Westminster for the younger. Now they wanted him to marry money and use it to redeem the dreadful situation they were in.

  But he did not intend to marry for money, and they should have to be disabused of that thought and be reconciled to Jennie. And when Ruthin Castle and the Denbighshire holdings came to him, he meant to sell, family sentiment or no. The estate was heavily encumbered, but it should fetch enough—a hundred thousand pounds, perhaps—to take care of him and Jennie. In the meantime, he should have to leave the Guards, for while he loved the freedom and excitement of a Guardsman’s life, he could never support a wife, especially such a wife as Jennie, on a Guardsman’s pay. Winston had put it to him bluntly, only a few days before: “Love starves on an empty stomach.” George could only agree, of course, and if his family would not help to support him and Jennie, he would go to his Bond Street friends and see if they could not point the way toward a few firms that might pay him well for the use of his name on their directors’ roster. And he could probably think of something else in the way of business, although he certainly did not have much head for it.

  At the thought of Winston, George frowned darkly. He was confident that he could bring his father and even his mother around eventually, but Winston—that peremptory, impertinent, and pugnacious boy—was quite another matter. Jennie’s son had taken an aggressive dislike to him and seized every possible opportunity to come between him and his mother. In fact, George suspected him of whispering malicious lies to Jennie about his innocent friendships with other women, in a brazen effort to drive them apart. And Jenny, for all her lovely virtues, had one dreadful flaw: she could not say no to her son. Whatever Winston wanted, his mother moved heaven and earth to get for him.

  George sat quite still, chewing on the ends of his handsome gold mustache. Yes, it was entirely possible that Winston, with his diabolical scheming and intrigue, would yet step in and snatch his dream away.

  37

  The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  “Fate”

  The office of The Anglo-Saxon Review was on the fourth floor of a four-story building, and Manfred Raeburn, a pigeon-fancier from his youth, was in the habit of raising the window sash to the top and spreading a handful of grain on the sill for the birds. They, in turn, had learned to expect this generous offering, and came by the dozens to accept it, filling the morning air with the eager whirr of their wings. This morning, Manfred was captured by a particularly handsome gray-green bird with a green bill, pink feet, and a distinctive pattern of iridescent purple on its flight feathers. It reminded him of the pigeons that he and his brother Arthur had raised in the loft they had built behind the barn in Shropshire so long ago, and its soft cooing brought back a surge of memories. Arthur at eight, laughing with delight, his favorite pigeon perched on his hand. Arthur at fourteen, hanging a newly won blue ribbon around the neck of one of his birds. Arthur at nineteen, triumphantly hanging his Hussars sword at his hip. Arthur at twenty, hanging—

  Manfred shut his eyes. This was not the way to begin the morning, especially when he had several important things to do. Or perhaps it was, for it was the memory of Arthur, hanging limp from the rafter of the barn, that drove him to do what he had done, what he was doing now. He turned from the window, took off his tweed coat and draped it on the coat rack to the right of the door. Then he poured himself another cup of tea from the pot he had brewed earlier and sat down at his desk, where he took a Turkish cigarette from the leather holder his sister had given him, lit it, and leaned back.

  He sat thus for a few moments, smoking and thinking, mentally scanning his scheme for its flaws. Then, finding none—or at least none so substantial that they might scuttle the mission, he reached for a piece of flimsy and turned to insert it into the typewriter that sat at his elbow. Without hesitation, he pushed up his cuffs and set to work with the practiced skill of a journalist who spends a fair portion of his day at the keyboard.

  Hunched over the typewriter in his shirtsleeves, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, his forehead puckered in a frown of concentration, Manfred Raeburn should have seemed to any who entered the office the very picture of a young literary man driven by the dream of making a name for himself: hard-working, diligent, ambitious. In fact, the casual observer, glancing from the gold desk plaque engraved with the words “Managing Editor” to the impressive stack of letters from such writers as Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Henry James, might justifiably conclude that this very young man had already achieved something of success and importance on the London literary scene, and predict that with the help of Lady Randolph Churchill, he should surely achieve more. Manfred Raeburn, such an observer might remark, should call himself a fortunate young man. A happy and secure young man. A young man who had already climbed halfway up the ladder of success.

  But the one person on this earth who knew Manfred Raeburn intimately—his sister Maude—would see in his posture and in his face something else, something that would deeply worry her. In the furrow between his eyes, in the constant nervous chewing of his lower lip, in his close-bitten nails, she might read his desperation, his mounting anger. And knowing all too well what unhappy ghosts haunted his past, she might worry about her brother’s present intensity of expression, the tension between his shoulders, the fierceness with which he attacked the typewriter. Apprehensive for his health, she might have tried to lure him away from the office, might have pleaded with him to come to Shropshire for the weekend, might even have attempted to get him to accompany her on a trip to Egypt or America.

  But Maude, the only person on earth who knew and loved Manfred, was not here. There were only the cooing pigeons on the sill of the open window, only the shouts and the clatter of vehicles rising up from the street four floors below, only the footstep on the landing and the creak of the door opening—

  Manfred looked up from his work, squinting through the cigarette smoke that wreathed around his head. The gentleman standing on the other side of the desk wore a neatly trimmed brown beard, a brown tweed lounge coat, and brown wool waistcoat and exquisitely tailored trousers. His bowler hat was under his arm and he carried a walking stick.

  “Good morning, Raeburn,” he said.

  Startled, Manfred recognized Lord Charles Sheridan. What the devil was he doing here? Some silly er
rand for Lady Randolph, no doubt. Damned impolite of him to have barged in without even the courtesy of a knock. But Manfred had learned not to reveal his true feelings in such situations. He snatched the cigarette out of his mouth, stood, and said in a deferential tone, “Good morning, m’lord. I’m afraid you’ve caught me with my nose to the grindstone.” He paused. “Is there something I may get for you? There’s tea, if you like.”

  “Thank you, no.” Lord Sheridan took the leather chair opposite, crossed one leg over the other, and balanced his bowler on one knee. “Just give me a moment, if you will.” He took out his pipe and tobacco and set to work in a leisurely manner, filling his pipe.

  Still standing, Manfred watched him, increasingly unsure of himself. What did Sheridan want? Why had he come? He could feel the hostility rising within him and the despair that always came with it when he was in the presence of gentlemen like Lord Sheridan, the painful understanding that he was the wrong sort and that no matter how hard he tried, he could never belong. It had been the same way in the regiment, when he and Arthur had passed all the military tests with flying colors, met or surpassed every requirement, only to fail before the highest hurdle of all, the hurdle of social status. That was why Arthur—

  Manfred tightened his jaw. No, none of that now. What did this man want?

  When Sheridan had finished tamping the tobacco, he lit it and then glanced up, as if suddenly remembering Manfred’s presence.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Do sit down, Raeburn. I want to ask you a few questions.”

  Manfred resisted the urge to thumb his nose at this manifestation of arrogance and impoliteness. Still standing, he said, in a markedly cooler tone, “Questions? About what?”