by David Field
‘This is Spitalfields, young lady. Do you know what happens when a police officer enters an area like Dorset Street and starts asking questions?’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Well, let me tell you. It’s like sneezing into a box of chicken feathers. They scatter in all directions, give themselves false names, deny even their own grandmothers and run like Hell as soon as our backs are turned.’
‘So why do you need my assistance?’
‘I was very impressed with your performance that day in the pub, when we came across Pearly Poll. You know how to blend in with these people and ...’
‘Because I’m one of them myself?’ Esther interrupted him with a bitter grimace.
‘Do you want to hear what I’m proposing, or are you going to wallow in your own self-pity the whole day? If so, I’ll take my leave now.’
‘Sorry, carry on.’
‘As I was saying, no-one’s going to suspect an ordinary young lady like yourself — although, let me add that I think you’re far from ordinary — anyway, an ordinary young lady like yourself seeking out someone who knows someone else who can organise an abortion. If we can confirm that the person whose name Mary Kelly was given really was Pearly Poll, then we have lawful justification for kicking her door down.’
Esther slid into the spare chair and decided to come clean. ‘I’ve already got beyond that point on my own initiative. After you left me in the White Hart, I pretended to Pearly Poll that you were my fancy man, that you’d got me in the family way and that you were prepared to give me a tenner for an abortion. I was supposed to meet her back at the White Hart last night to take it to the next stage, but with everything that happened on Sunday I didn’t have the heart and quite frankly I couldn’t see the point any more.’
Percy’s eyes had opened wide at this revelation. ‘Have you any idea how much danger you were courting, confronting the woman like that? She may well be controlling our Ripper, who almost certainly killed your friend Martha and women like Poll can normally rustle up an army of thugs to silence anyone who gets in the way of their illegal activities.’
‘I don’t think she suspects me,’ Esther countered, ‘but even if she does, the fact that I’ve already got her to more or less admit that she does abortions means that you don’t need Mary Kelly any more, doesn’t it?’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Percy requested, ‘but it would only be your word against Poll’s. We need to find some women she’s already performed the service for and perhaps get confirmation that it was done in that room in George Yard Buildings and the key to getting all that may be Mary Kelly. That’s my hope anyway. What I need you to do is to find her for me.’
‘If I do, will you do something for me?’
‘That will obviously depend,’ he replied cautiously.
‘Nothing unlawful, although perhaps something beyond even your capabilities. I’ve written Jack a short note — could you see that he gets it?’
‘I could push it under his door, certainly. That’s as far as I’ve managed to get so far in my attempts to talk some sense into him.’
Esther ran quickly upstairs and grabbed the note she had written five times before being satisfied that she could not improve upon it in any way. A collection of pens, paper and ink were her one luxury in life and for once she was putting them to better use than the idle scribbling of poems that occasionally came into her head in quiet moments gazing down into a cats’ meat factory yard.
Two hours later Jack was intrigued to hear his uncle hammering yet again on his door, yelling, ‘If this doesn’t pull you to your senses, I’ll be down in the tea shop next to the bakery for the next half hour’, and watched a thin envelope sliding under his door. He noted the neat handwriting of his name on the envelope and the perfume in which it was doused brought back heavenly memories, so he tore it open.
The tears he was ashamed to shed began again as he read what Esther had written.
Dear Jack,
Please excuse this somewhat cowardly way of telling you what I was unable to do to your face. First be assured that I love you with all my heart and all my being. But I now realise, with deep sadness and longing, that we cannot have a future together.
We are simply from different worlds. Yours is a world of wealth and security, whereas I am penniless, existing from day to day in a rented room overlooking a miserable yard in a backstreet slum, scraping together a living from sewing other peoples’ clothes. If we were to remain together and perhaps even become husband and wife, how could you explain my background to your comfortably-off friends in the society to which you belong, but I do not?
I don’t like to think for one moment that you were only interested in me for my body or my looks and I will not insult you by suggesting that you were, but apart from those, what could I bring into a relationship and perhaps even a marriage? One day my looks will fade and what would be left? If love for you could be a suitable substitute, then I have that in such abundance that I have to keep stopping for the tears even while I’m writing this. But, simple seamstress that I am, even I know that in this harsh world that we both inhabit, my devotion to you could never make up for my lack of breeding.
Please accept my word that I never looked upon you as a step up in life, or an easy way out of the backstreets of Spitalfields. I could have lived as your wife in the meanest lodging house in East London and been the happiest woman in the world. But I cannot ask that of you and I could not spend the rest of my days wondering if you looked upon me simply as an adventuress who got lucky.
So goodbye, my darling Jack. Please give your mother my sincere apologies for my rudeness and know that I will always care for you.
Esther
While Jack was splashing tears all over her letter as he held it to his face and breathed in the lingering perfume, Esther was striding, head down, up Brick Lane, avoiding wagons and fellow pedestrians in her determination to reach the Rosen’s premises in Lamb Street with her latest completed commissions before the clouds that were still delivering drizzle with a depressing determination decided to hurl down something more substantial. She reached the building slightly out of breath and paused for a moment to slow the pace of her heartbeat. She looked up at the familiar three stories that had once been home and noted that Isaac and Ruth had finally got all the windows installed, although unless they spent a fortune on scrubbing, the stonework would forever retain the scorch marks from that dreadful night.
She pushed open the front door and walked in, calling out as she did so, ‘Shalom, Isaac, it’s only me — Esther.’
Isaac or Ruth would normally come through from the back into the large ground-floor room that had once housed half a dozen sewing machines, each with a seamstress working away busily at the treadles. Today the room was empty as usual, but from behind the curtains that now divided the original room could be heard muttered Yiddish curses in a man’s voice.
She shouted even louder and Isaac’s head appeared between the gap, complete with his customary kippah.
‘Good day, tochter. And how does this day find you? Your face it is sad, yet you smile. Why is this?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Here’s my latest completed work — do you have more for me?’
‘Who can tell, in that patschkerai of paper that is behind the curtain? Oy vey, if God had intended me to be a keeper of books, he would not have given me the fingers of a tailor.’
‘Doesn’t Ruth still do your paperwork?’
‘In good times she does. But today, as for the past week or so, Ruth she is, how should I say, not so good that she can rise from her bed. Will you go up and visit her? You were always like a real tochter to the both of us, since God did not choose to bless us with any of our own.’
‘Of course I will, Isaac. Then I’ll help you with that paperwork.’
She climbed the narrow stairway to the bedroom on the first floor that had always belonged to Isaac and Ruth and had been one of the few rooms to survive serious damage in
the fire. Ruth lay half sleeping, half whimpering, in her bed, but seemed to stop when she heard the footfall on the wooden boards in the doorway. She turned her head and seemed relieved to discover that it was only Esther as she held out a bony hand covered in age spots.
‘Ah, bubbeleh, so good you should come and see me.’
‘Are you in pain?’ Esther asked with concern. ‘As I came up the stairs, I heard you crying out.’
‘Thank the good Lord it was not Isaac. He must not know, since he is such a good man and he tries so hard for my happiness.’
‘Mustn’t know what, Aunt Ruth?’
‘I am dying, child. I need no doctor to tell me that soon I will be no more. Then what will Isaac do?’
‘I’ll look after him, mume, I promise you.’
‘Such a good child. You will not tell him about the pain?’
‘Of course not, but surely ... ’
‘He has many worries already, but he is a good man.’
‘He seems to be having trouble with the accounts down there.’
Ruth chuckled, then screwed her face with the pain of shaking her sparse bony frame. ‘Isaac was never the one for the figures — except mine, when I was his kale. I thought he would give me many kinder, but it was not to be. Then you came into our lives and you must help him, since he is your foter now.’
‘I promise I will,’ Esther assured her, ‘and now is there something I can get for you?’
‘A glass of water, perhaps. And peace of mind for Isaac.’
Back downstairs, hoping not to inadvertently disclose just how sick Ruth was and how permanent the arrangement was likely to become, Esther offered to come up to the business every day and look after the books until Ruth was well again. The old man was almost in tears as he took her two hands in his and kissed them.
‘Such a mentsh, always. Can you start today?’
‘Once I’ve run one more errand, foter Isaac. I’ll be back within the hour, I promise.’
Her mind reeling with the implications of what she had just learned about Ruth and the responsibility she had taken on, but glad that she had plenty to take her mind off Jack, Esther walked a little further along Lamb Street, then made the left turn down Crispin Street until the entrance to Dorset Street came into view. Taking a deep breath, she walked up to two teenage girls who were doing a fair impression of holding up the wall at an entrance into a courtyard while exchanging a pipe whose contents they were taking it in turns to inhale. They eyed her with dumb curiosity as she walked up to them with the best cheery smile she could manage and enquired after Mary Kelly.
‘She normally only does men,’ the one with very few remaining teeth replied with a knowing smirk.
‘I’m not seeking a hairdresser,’ Esther replied starchily. ‘I need to ask her something important.’
‘What’s it worth?’ the other girl demanded.
‘Forget it,’ Esther replied as she turned and walked smartly away. She had only gone a few yards when one of them shouted after her departing back.
‘If yer means the fat whore, try Miller’s Court.’
Miller’s Court came into view towards the centre of the street and it appeared to be somewhat above the normal run of lodging houses, in the sense that the downstairs rooms were marginally more spacious and had windows that opened. Through one of them could be heard the tuneless attempts of some woman or other to render some sort of folk song that sounded vaguely obscene, so far as Esther could deduce from the slurred words. She walked into the passageway that led to the rooms and just as her eyes were focussing in the gloom she narrowly avoided tripping over a youth propped up against the wall, cutting a length of leather into a sole for his boot, employing a sharp knife. Esther looked at the blade and shuddered as she recalled what had happened to Martha and the other women in recent months; then she realised that the youth was staring in fascination at her bosom and took advantage of having his full attention.
‘I’m looking for Mary Kelly.’
‘Mary the Irish whore?’ the youth enquired.
‘That’s the one,’ Esther replied, since the description sounded appropriate.
‘That’s ’er singin’ in there,’ the youth responded with a nod towards a ground floor rear room that bore the number 13. ‘She earns more openin’ ’er legs than she ever will openin’ ’er fuckin’ mouth,’ he added by way of musical critique.
‘I paid a penny for that lump of horsemeat in a crust, so eat the bloody thing,’ Percy instructed Jack. ‘And that’s an order from a superior officer.’
‘I’m not in the mood for eating a pie,’ Jack complained, ‘or anything else, for that matter.’
‘You’re as bad as that young lady of yours,’ Percy grumbled. ‘I feel like putting the two of you next to each other and banging your heads together.’
‘It would be worth it, just to be standing next to her again,’ Jack replied, his eyes fixed on the passing traffic as they sat in the tea shop at the corner of Mansell Street and Aldgate.
‘She seemed pretty devastated herself,’ Percy observed. ‘I’m sure it wouldn’t take much more than a smart rap on the noggin to bring her round. It’s as if somebody put poison in her head and it’ll take a while to work its way out.’
‘I gather you’ve seen her recently,’ Jack replied morosely, ‘which is more than I have.’
‘Of course I have,’ Percy confirmed. ‘How do you think you came to get that letter? What did she have to say, if I might enquire?’
‘Only that we’re finished,’ Jack mumbled into the remains of his tea.
‘Did she say why, exactly?’
‘Only some rubbish about not being good enough for me and that I might not be looking beyond her beauty at the real person underneath.’
‘And are you?’
‘Of course I am,’ Jack assured him. ‘I could have had lots of girls in the past, but none of them ever appealed to me. There’s something about Esther that holds you captive and won’t let you go. Not just her obvious beauty — something from deep inside, like she was made specially by God, just for me.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Percy advised him with a smile. ‘Believe it or not, your Aunt Beattie was once such a girl. The minute I laid eyes on her I was hooked and when she first began talking to me, I was hauled in and landed. She and Esther have the same charm that’s fatal to any man with half a brain.’
‘What would you call it, uncle?’
‘Lively intelligence, that’s what.’
‘Yeah, that sort of says it exactly,’ Jack agreed. ‘But how can I get her to realise that I love her, not just her looks?’
‘You could start by taking an interest in the latest job she’s doing for us.’
Jack’s jaw dropped. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s agreed to find Mary Kelly for me, then we might get enough evidence to put the buckles on Pearly Poll.’
‘Did you allocate any men to trail her and make sure she doesn’t come to any harm?’
‘No — why should I?’
‘Because I love her, that’s why — and you could have just put her in grave danger.’
Chapter Nineteen
Esther made the brisk journey to and from the Rosens’ premises many times in the days that followed. The accounts were no great challenge to her, particularly since a significant proportion of the mending work that constituted the bulk of the business was destined for her anyway, while Isaac sat at one of the surviving sewing machines making suits to order and humming folk tunes from his youth as he worked away, blissfully unaware that his life partner was fading away one floor above him.
Esther made sure to visit Aunt Ruth at least twice a day, to bring her comfort and to attempt to get her to eat. Some days she was successful, but most days not and she eventually managed to persuade a reluctant Isaac that perhaps a physician should be called in. On his first visit, after a whispered plea from Ruth, he ordered Isaac from the sick room while he made his examination, then advised Esther, who
had been allowed to remain, that she would need to purchase morphia pills from the local pharmacy, along with substantial quantities of laudanum for the times between the four-hourly swallowing of pills when the pain got too bad. He also took Esther to one side and advised her that the old lady had only a few weeks left.
Although her mind was kept fully occupied during the working day, keeping Isaac’s books of accounts, making discreet trips to the local pharmacy and handling any clothing alterations and repairs that came their way while Isaac continued his tailoring, Esther tried unsuccessfully to convince herself that her mind was playing tricks on her as she walked for twenty minutes or so each day between her work and her lodgings, as she had the uncanny feeling that someone was following her. Her vital importance to the kindly old couple who were effectively her adoptive parents was such that she could not for one moment contemplate not making the trip every working day and it was of limited consolation that Isaac insisted on paying her a weekly wage four times what she had been earning as a casual out-worker. But she dreaded the trips there and back and more than once considered asking whether she could move into her old room on the second floor, which had never been renovated. It had taken much of the ferocity of the fire some eighteen months previously and would take a great deal of work and expense to make liveable again.
It had begun with a woman who had clearly been following her on the day when she’d located Mary Kelly and then lost no time in passing on the address by means of a note left for Percy Enright at Leman Street police station. Apart from the courage she was required to summon up in order to re-enter the place that contained lingering memories of happier days, she was fearful that she might accidentally encounter Jack and was unsure how her heart and mouth would behave if she came face to face with him again.
Then on the way back up Commercial Street she became aware of a rough-looking labourer who darted into the nearest alleyway every time she stopped and looked behind her — a man who still seemed to be following her intently as she turned into George Street and all but ran for the safety of the common entrance to number 19.