Death at Whitechapel

by Robin Paige

  39

  The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife’s spirits.

  JOHN GAY

  The Beggar’s Opera,

  1728

  Sarah Pratt stood beside Mr. Hodge in the morning room, her hands clasped and her head bowed, as he began his recital to her ladyship. The tragic story seemed to go on endlessly, from Dick Pratt’s first astonishing appearance at the kitchen door, to his demands for food, drink, and clothing, and finally, to his sudden, shocking death.

  “He drowned?” Lady Charles asked, in a horrified tone.

  “He was attempting to cross the Stour by walking across the lock gates,” Mr. Hodge said with a disapproving frown. “It was a very foolish thing to do, for the man was so apparently inebriated that he could scarcely stand, much less balance himself. This is according to one of his drinking partners,” he added. “Once in the water, I fear he was doomed. He was encumbered by Lord Charles’s riding boots, which he obtained from this house by extortion.”

  Her ladyship shook her head. “What an irony,” she said sadly.

  Sarah Pratt was not sure what iron had to do with it since the boots were made of leather, but it did seem to her to be eminently just that Pratt’s greed for drink and fine boots should have sunk him. She had been enormously relieved when she discovered that Pratt had indeed died by drowning (rather than rat poison) and that the constable had come to escort her to the jail so that she could identify the mortal remains. Still, her relief had been colored by her consciousness of her own dreadful guilt, and she could not feel easy until she confessed her thefts to Mr. Hodge, who had been quite stern with her, as he should. And to her ladyship as well, with a true remorse for her theft.

  But Lady Charles, having now heard the entire story, was not stern. She turned to Sarah with a sympathetic look. “I am so sorry, Mrs. Pratt, that you have lost your husband.”

  “Oh, please don’t be sorry, your ladyship!” Sarah burst out. “‘Ee was a bad man an’ got wot ’ee deserved.” She could not say how glad she was to have been returned to the comfortable estate of widowhood, but she could say something else. She twisted her hands, her voice breaking. “I’m so dreadf‘lly sorry to’ve took wot didn’t b’long t’ me, on ’is account. It wuz wrong o’ me, very wrong!”

  “Yes, it was wrong, Mrs. Pratt,” Mr. Hodge said firmly. “And it was wrong to lie to your employer about your situation. I think, under the circumstances—”

  Sarah was never to know exactly what Mr. Hodge thought because Lady Charles interrupted him, in a gentler tone. “I think, under the circumstances, that Mrs. Pratt’s earlier marital condition should best be forgotten. And it is no great crime to give food and drink and clothing to the poor and needy—in fact, I recall the vicar exhorting us to exactly that endeavor not two Sundays ago.” She smiled. “But I do hope that in future, Mrs. Pratt, you will not hide your light under a bushel, as it were. When you offer gifts of food from our kitchen, please make Mr. Hodge aware of your good works.”

  “Oh, yer ladyship, yes, yer ladyship,” Sarah cried eagerly. “Oh, I will, yer ladyship, I—”

  “Thank you, Sarah,” Lady Charles said. She turned to Mr. Hodge. “With regard to our kitchen staff—”

  “I’m afraid I have bad news, m’lady,” Mr. Hodge said. He cleared his throat, not looking at Sarah. “Mary Plumm has given her notice. In fact, she has already left.”

  “My goodness,” Lady Charles said, with some surprise. “She didn’t last long.”

  “I think,” Mr. Hodge said carefully, “that on balance she was not an entirely suitable person for the position. She was—” He cleared his throat again. “I am sorry to say, m’lady, that she was quite impertinent to me, when I had occasion to remonstrate with her about walking out late last night with one of the stableboys. And while Mrs. Pratt herself showed great forbearance with the young person, I hardly think that she was a helpful addition to the kitchen staff.”

  Sarah could not have said how grateful she was to Mr. Hodge for keeping to himself the whole circumstance of Mary Plumm’s explosive departure. She did not want her ladyship to know that she had allowed herself to be manipulated by a mere kitchen maid, and that she had given in to the girl’s blackmail. With a warm look at Mr. Hodge, she said, “It don’t matter if it takes a week or two t’ find another maid. I kin do th’ work by myself.” The fact was that she had been doing it herself for the past week, with a heavy dose of Mary Plumm’s insolence to boot.

  “Your cooperation is commendable, Mrs. Pratt,” Lady Charles said, “but I should like to offer an alternative. I have just received a post from a young lady I met in London. Her name is Ellie. To be quite honest, she has ambitions for the stage and might not be with us long, but she strikes me as a willing worker. And if she has another trade besides acting, she might find life a bit easier. Will you give her a chance?”

  On an earlier day, Sarah Pratt might have expressed her dismay at being asked to teach an aspiring actress how to make potato crulles and strain the soup. But today she was so full of gratitude toward her employer and Mr. Hodge that she bobbed her head and exclaimed, “O’ course, yer ladyship! A chance she shall have! I’ll do my best t’ see that she learns an’ does a good job an’—”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Pratt,” Lady Charles said, smiling. “And thank you, as well, for the loan of your clothing. It was very kind of you to allow Lady Randolph and me to make off with your best hat, in the rain. It served us well. By way of thanks, Lady Randolph has sent you this, from her very own wardrobe.” And with that, her ladyship produced a fancy cardboard hatbox, with the words “Paquin’s Distinctive Parisian Millinery.”

  Distinctive Parisian millinery! Sarah could scarcely draw her breath. She took the box with trepidation, lifted the lid, and peeked at the marvel of pink tulle and silk roses inside. “Oh, yer ladyship,” she breathed, “it’s beautiful! I’ll wear it t’ chapel on Sunday, I will.” Then she felt a surge of disappointment, remembering Dick Pratt, scarcely cold in his grave. “Oh, but I can’t. It’s too gay fer a widow.”

  The corners of Lady Charles’s mouth quirked. “Put it away for a time, then. Since your husband was absent for a very long while, I don’t think you should be expected to observe an extended period of mourning.”

  One more peek, and Sarah closed the lid. “Yes, yer ladyship,” she said somberly, but inside, her heart was singing.

  “Very well, Mrs. Pratt,” Lady Charles said. “You may go, and I shall send Ellie to you directly.”

  Still whispering her thanks, Sarah took her box and departed.

  Authors’ Notes

  In endeavouring to sift a mystery like this, one cannot afford to throw aside any theory, however extravagant, without careful examination, because the truth might, after all, lie in the most unlikely one.

  Pall Mall Gazette

  December 1888

  Bill Albert writes about the Whitechapel murders:

  Writing an historical mystery is not the easiest task in the world. Writing a mystery that contains an unsolved historic mystery is even more difficult, especially if the writers intend to explore a possible solution. And when that historic mystery is the infamous serial murders of Jack the Ripper—about which dozens of books and many hundreds of articles have been written—that difficulty is further compounded.

  Susan and I have not attempted to “prove” a particular theory of the Whitechapel murders of 1888. However, Ripperologists (as students of the Ripper killings playfully style themselves) will immediately recognize that our approach to the solution of these murders is not original with us. It is based on a group of related theories advanced over the last twenty-five years by five British writers:

  Paul Bonner, Elwyn Jones, and John Lloyd of the BBC, in their research for the 1973 television docudrama, Jack the Ripper, uncovered the existence of Joseph Sickert, the son of Walter Sickert, who repeated the stories about the killings that he said his father had told him. The BBC research is documented in
the book, The Ripper File, published in 1973.

  Stephen Knight, writing in 1976, presents a compelling case against a group of Masonic murderers, including Sir William Gull, who acted on behalf of the Crown to conceal Prince Eddy’s marriage to a Roman Catholic commoner. This is the story, essentially, that Walter Sickert tells Charles in Chapter Thirty-Two. Knight also argues for a massive cover-up at the highest levels of the police and the government, and includes information about the clairvoyant Robert Lees, whom Kate and Jennie meet in Chapter Twenty.

  Melvyn Fairclough, author of The Ripper and the Royals, proposes that the leader of the Ripper gang of Freemasons was Lord Randolph Churchill. The most persuasive evidence he offers for this accusation is a letter from Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline to G.J. Goschen, Chancellor of the Exchequer, naming Churchill and Gull as co-conspirators. Like Knight and the BBC researchers, Fairclough also relies on the recollections of Joseph Sickert.

  We have treated these true-crime works as historical references and have endeavored to make our fiction consistent with the facts the authors compile and present.

  Having said that we do not offer an original solution, however, I also have to say that as theories go, the Masonic conspiracy theory seems to us highly plausible, especially given the symbolic nature of the mutilations, which is itself powerful evidence for Masonic involvement. The chief argument against the theory—that a gang of “gentlemen Jacks” could not have successfully pulled off the crimes under the noses of the police—is countered by evidence that Chief Commissioner Warren and Assistant Commissioner Anderson (both advanced Freemasons) were involved in a cover-up that began and ended in the Cabinet. Other arguments (that Gull was incapacitated at the time by a stroke and that Walter Sickert and J.K. Stephen were themselves members of the Ripper gang) can either be rebutted or do not substantially contradict the basic theory. What is more, no one has ever satisfactorily explained how a single lunatic Jack could possess (all at once) the motivation to commit the killings, the skill and medical knowledge needed to perform what amounted to surgical operations under primitive field conditions, the foresight to organize the murders, and the physical strength to transport four corpses from unidentified murder sites to the places where they were discovered. The question of why the killings stopped so abruptly after the murder of Mary Kelly is also troubling, if one is arguing for a serial killer without a rational motive. Altogether, it seems to us that the Masonic conspiracy theory has a great deal going for it.

  But we are novelists, not detectives or true crime writers. Among the dozens of possible approaches to the solution of the Ripper crime, we adopted the one that fitted most neatly into our main story line. For us, the primary attraction of the Masonic conspiracy theory—especially as it is presented by Melvyn Fairclough—was that it proposed Randolph Churchill as one of the Rippers. It provided a stage upon which we could confront our characters—Jennie and Winston Churchill—with a frightening threat to the Churchill family reputation, and see how they might act to protect themselves and each other.

  Susan Albert writes about Jennie and Winston Churchill:

  Jennie Churchill is one of the most interesting women of her time. She was the daughter of an American stock speculator, the wife of a renegade aristocrat, and the mother (and chief cheerleader) of one of Britain’s most remarkable and controversial political figures. She was probably the lover of the Prince of Wales, certainly the long-time lover of a handsome Hungarian count (Count Charles Kinsky), and the beloved of too many men to count.

  Apart from these relationships, however, Jennie defined herself by doing, after the age of forty-five, things that other women did not do at all. She started a literary magazine (1898); obtained, funded, and outfitted an internationally sponsored hospital ship to serve men wounded in the Boer War (the Maine, 1899); wrote a memoir and several plays (1907-1910); and developed an Elizabethan theme park in the middle of London (1911), complete with a jousting tourney and full-size replica of one of Drake’s famous galleons. Yes, she did indeed marry young George (1900), but the romantic marriage could not survive her fiscal extravagances and her husband’s emotional extravaganzas.

  In his memoir, George wrote that he “found it a bit thick” to have to pay for a barouche that Randolph Churchill had purchased nearly twenty years before, while Jennie confided sadly to her sister that she hated having to endure George’s passionate affairs with actresses. They divorced in 1913, and George immediately married his current actress. In 1918, Jennie was married again, to Montague Porch, who was even younger than George. In 1921, she forgot Robert Lees’s caution about watching her step, put on a pair of new Italian shoes, and fell down a stair, breaking her left leg. Gangrene set in, and the doctor amputated the leg above the knee. Two weeks later, on June 29, 1921, her femoral artery ruptured and Jennie Jerome Churchill died. To Lord Crewe, Winston wrote: “The England in which you met her is a long way off now, & we do not see its like today. I feel a very great sense of deprivation.”

  Winston Churchill is often seen through the heroic lens of his actions during the Second World War, and people of our generation feel a particular affection for his courageous leadership in the face of the German threat. In this book, however, we were interested in an earlier Winston: the arrogant, ambitious, and opportunistic young man who had far more enemies than friends and whose impatience to get ahead created one furor after another. As an officer in training at Aldershot, Winston had a disgraceful record of pranksterism, race-fixing, and hazing. (Our fictional story about the bullying of Arthur and Manfred Raeburn is modeled on a similar incident that took place in 1896. The Bruce-Pryce affair ended in a lawsuit, rather than a suicide, however.) In India and Egypt, Winston made enemies by criticizing the military judgments of his senior officers in his newspaper dispatches and in The Malakand Field Force and The River War. (Winston took Charles’s advice and changed the title.) In South Africa, during an escape from a Boer War prison camp, he used his brother prisoners shamefully. Through all his early years as a soldier, he was accused of being a medal hunter and a “glory hound” and of exploiting his Army experiences to launch and finance a political career.

  Churchill was elected to Parliament as a Conservative, but that alliance didn’t last long. In 1904, amid a great hoopla and hubbub, he crossed the floor to join the Liberals, and when they came into power a short time later, he was invited to join the Colonial Office. At the time, he was writing a biography of his adored father, Randolph, which Winston’s own biographer calls “one of the most systematic whitewashings that any biographer ever attempted.” In 1910, he was named Home Secretary, a Cabinet position that gave him access to the police files on the Ripper and would have allowed him to remove any evidence that incriminated his father in the Whitechapel murders. Through the late 1920s and 1930s, Winston and his wife Clementine were often visited at the family home of Chartwell by a famous British Impressionist who taught Winston to paint.

  The artist’s name was Walter Sickert.

  References

  Here are a few books that we found helpful in creating Death at Whitechapel. Other background works may be found in the references to earlier books in this series. If you have comments or questions, you may write to Bill and Susan Albert, PO Drawer M, Bertram TX 78605, or E-mail us at china@tstar.net. You might also wish to visit our web site, http://www.mysterypartners.com.

  The British Journal Photographic Almanac & Photographer’s Daily Companion. London: Henry Greenwood, 1896 & 1897.

  Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990

  Churchill, Peregrine and Julian Mitchell. Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill. A Portrait with Letters. Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co., 1974.

  Churchill, Winston S. Frontiers and Wars (The Malakand Field Force, The River War, London to Ladysmith, Ian Hamilton’s March). New York: Konecky and Konecky, 1962.

  Churchill, Randolph S. Winston S. Churchill Volume I Companion Part 1 (187
4-1896) and 2 (1896-1900). London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1967.

  Fairclough, Melvyn. The Ripper and the Royals. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1991.

  Jones, Edgar. The Penguin Guide to the Railways of Britain. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books Ltd.,1981.

  Jones, Elwyn and John Lloyd. The Ripper File. London: Futura Publications Ltd., 1975.

  Knight, Stephen. Jack the Ripper—the Final Solution. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1976.

  Manchester, William. Winston Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion. New York: Dell Publishing Group, 1989.

  Martin, Ralph G. Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972.

  Morgan, Ted. Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry 1874- 1915. New York: Simon & Shuster, Inc., 1982.

  Sutton, Denys. Walter Sickert: A Biography. London: Michael Joseph, 1976.

  Wilson, Colin & Robin Odell. Jack the Ripper: Summing up and Verdict. London: Corgi Books, 1988.

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