Whitechapel

by Sam Gafford

  I picked it up and looked at it. In itself, it was an innocuous little thing; nothing really to make it stand out at all. I would have thought that a prince would have chosen a more impressive book for his diary. Perhaps that was the whole point after all. No one would have suspected that this insignificant object carried the secrets and thoughts of a member of the royal family. It would have stood unrecognised on any bookshelf.

  The first few pages were fairly standard. There was the prince’s signature and a few notes as to his residence and a couple of other addresses, one of which I think was in Whitechapel, but I couldn’t be sure of it. The diary entries were a different matter.

  The first entry was dated three years ago. The handwriting, although rough, was sure and confident—that that was the real pity. The grammar and spelling were horrible, and there were frequent crossed-out words. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this to be the diary of a ten-year-old child.

  In the beginning, most of the entries were rather ordinary. Eddy was complaining a great deal about having to go and do things that he didn’t want to do. Public appearances bored him, and he seemed to have nothing but disdain for his subjects. All he ever wanted to do was go hunting, but he was forced to attend state functions, sit in meetings on subjects he had no understanding of, and pretend to be the hope of his country. Worse than anything else, Eddy had to act as if he didn’t hate his father.

  Bertie, the Prince of Wales and Eddy’s father, was considered by many to be a national disgrace. A known adulterer, Bertie was a man of dark excesses, and it was widely hoped that he would not live to become king. It was no surprise that Eddy hated his father. A great number of Englishmen also hated Bertie. Eddy’s hatred, however, was far greater and fiercer than anyone else’s. It leeched off of every page.

  For nearly a year, the entries continued on in this manner. Nothing much changed other than that various entries appeared about a friend named S. whom Eddy had apparently known while in school. His full name was never given, but the two boys apparently shared a close friendship of a somewhat questionable nature. In any case, other than his mother, S. was the only person about whom Eddy ever wrote in an affectionate way.

  Then things changed in the winter of 1886–87. S. suffered a nearly fatal injury. It apparently had to do with a horse-riding accident when S. received a very severe blow to the head. He spent most of the first half of 1887 recovering, and when he did so, S. had changed. Before he had merely had a dislike of women and considered them beneath his notice, but now he had developed a hatred that was truly maniacal. Perhaps he blamed a woman for his accident; there was no answer in the diary, only mentions about how S. would go on and on about the evil of women. Soon, however, his hatred shifted into fantasies of violence.

  What was concerning was the fact that Eddy was beginning to share S.’s views. His handwriting was starting to become wilder and less readable. There had been a young woman whom Eddy was actually fond of (I gathered she worked in a sweet shop), but about whom Eddy was now beginning to express the most vile thoughts imaginable. She had apparently committed some unforgivable mistake, but Eddy did not elaborate on it.

  It was becoming obvious that Eddy was very impressionable. If he spent too much time around a strong, forceful personality, he would begin to adopt that person’s beliefs and values. That was the worst thing he could do with S.

  The turning point came at the beginning of 1888. During an expedition to the East End, Eddy joined S. in nearly beating a prostitute to death. Eddy’s comments afterwards were filled with a mix of horror and excitement. He was at first repulsed and then exhilarated. It didn’t hurt that the woman was not only common but a prostitute as well. To Eddy, it was a simple step downward from thinking of her as a commoner to considering her something less than human.

  S. was thrilled and eager to do it again.

  If the diary was to be believed, they managed to do it at least three other times.

  Eddy’s handwriting was becoming more and more disjointed. It was mirroring, I was sure, the deterioration of his mind. Eddy had taken to ignoring his state schedule. Times when he was supposed to be at functions or on trips, he snuck away to be with S. He said that schedules and reports were doctored to make it appear that he was keeping to his duties. A mechanism of protection had already begun to encircle Eddy. There was no longer any mention of the sweet shop girl, and I hoped that she had not become another victim.

  The horror started with the entry of August 7th.

  “Grate fun last nite. S and me went trolling agin but wit a change. We wus dressed in the uniforms of the Grenideer Guards. S thot it wud be a hoot! The skels were all about us. We found two near George Yard and split up.”

  It was no different from many other entries in the diary when the two men had used prostitutes. I steeled myself for another beating.

  “I finished wit my skel and tossed her some coins. She wus gud enuf. I wus waitin for S on the street when sum dumb P.C. asked whut I wus doin there. Told him I wus waitin’ fur a chum who’d gone wit a girl. He went away but S didn’t com back so I went and looked.”

  The handwriting got wilder here as if he could barely contain his excitement.

  “I found him bent over the skel. He was stabbin’ her and laughing. The knif was red wit blud. He saw me and called to me. ‘Try it,’ he says, ‘it’s fun!’ So I did and it wus! We tuk turns stabbin’ and cuttin’. I think we stabbed over 20 times in all. I used my own knif on her, not wantin’ to share S’s knif. I got her belly and chest, but S kept hittin’ her cunny. It was rite fun! Maybe next time, I’ll take sumthin out of her and bring it home.”

  I lay in my bed, prostrate with horror. Arthur was right that Eddy didn’t confess to killing Nichols, but he did help kill some other woman. Not only that, but he didn’t show the slightest remorse about it. I was disgusted. Never before had I been faced with such monstrous and violent disregard for human life. What made it worse was that it had been committed by a man who was supposed to represent the best of British society. No matter how bad Eddy’s father had been, Eddy was far, far worse.

  The entries ended soon after, but there were enough to make me very, very uneasy. Eddy was constantly talking about the murder. He reminisced about how it felt to plunge the knife into the woman’s flesh, how the blood spurted, and the squishing sound it made. I tried to tell myself that the woman was already dead by the time Eddy showed up, but it didn’t help much. No matter what his belief, he intended to kill that woman.

  With a sigh, I closed the diary. I was forced to agree with Arthur. Whatever else he might be, the Duke of Clarence, Prince Eddy, was a murderous, sadistic madman . . .

  And we would have to stop him no matter the cost.

  Chapter 28

  Would I were in an alehouse in London. I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety.

  —William Shakespeare

  September 7, 1888

  I fell asleep soon after finishing reading and awoke to two very different feelings. The first one had dogged my sleep, causing vague dreams of unease and killers wandering through the fog. The second was happiness at seeing dear Ann sitting at the end of my bed, watching me with such a look of tenderness that I would have braved a hundred blows to my head if that were the result.

  “Did I wake you?” she asked. She smiled, and I delighted in the smell and very sight of her.

  “I can think of no better way to be woken up. Are you all right?”

  She grinned. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” She reached forward and moved a stray piece of hair out of my eyes with her fingers. Her touch was gentle and electrifying.

  “I feel . . .” Sitting up, I was delighted to find that there was no sharp pain coming from my neck. “. . . much better, actually. I think I am nearly healed.”

  “Well, let’s have the doctor be the judge of that, shall we? Did you sleep well? It looked as if you were having very troublesome dreams.”

  I frowned slightly before I r
ealised what I was doing and put up a brave front. “Just some left-over images from my getting hit in the head. Nothing more, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, about that. You’ve been very naughty, you know. Leaving me alone after Arthur’s party and then running about with him on the shores of the Thames. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I thought I was keeping company with a quiet, studious book clerk and find myself saddled with a foolish adventurer!”

  I would have taken offence at her remarks if she hadn’t delivered them with such a smile. I chuckled.

  “Not through my choice,” I said. “I’d have much rather been down in my hole cataloguing books all this time.”

  “So what was all this about then? Arthur told me very little.”

  “Well, it’s a bit complicated.” I summarised some of the events that had brought me to my sad state. I only left out the part about what the book was, who had written it, and what Arthur and I had surmised about the writer. There were only suspicions at that point, and I didn’t want to worry her any more than I already had.

  “I hear,” I said, “that you have been diligently standing vigil by my bedside?”

  “Of course, I nearly died of fright myself when you collapsed on my doorstep. The doctor had to give me something to calm me down when we couldn’t wake you up. I thought . . .” She bent her head and I could see tears starting to run down her cheeks. “. . . I feared I had lost you, Albert. I couldn’t endure that thought. I would have laid down and died with you if you hadn’t come back to us.”

  I was stunned. Here I thought that this woman to whom I had already pledged my heart had thrown me aside like yesterday’s newspaper. Sitting up, I pulled her to me and held her as she cried.

  “There, there,” I said, “it’s all right. I’m fine now. Everything’s fine.”

  She pulled away suddenly and angrily slapped me on the chest. Her voice was terse but playful.

  “Don’t you dare!” she said. “Don’t you dare make light of this, Albert Besame! I’ve been so angry with you.”

  I laughed. “So I gathered. You seemed especially angry at me after Arthur’s party.”

  Composing herself, she replied, “Well, yes, I suppose I was. You were a bit of a bother at the party, you know. Kissing Mary and making that scene with Richard. You made me quite angry and I had a right to be! But Mrs. Hutchins says that you’ll be fine with the proper amount of training.”

  “Oh?” I said. “And what kind of training might that be?”

  “Why, husband training, of course! Mrs. Hutchins said it took her several years to train her husband correctly, but I expect you to be a much faster study.”

  We laughed. “I shall endeavour to master my studies quickly.”

  “You had better!”

  Perhaps my training was more needed than I thought, for I stupidly asked the wrong question almost immediately.

  “Ann, why weren’t you here when I woke up last night?”

  She took her eyes away from mine.

  “The day after the party, while you were rushing around the sewers of London (figuratively and literally), Richard came calling and invited me out to see the theatre with him. He gave me two tickets for last night’s performance of his play, and I had planned to ask you to accompany me. Then you collapsed on me before I could say a word about it. I wasn’t going to go. I didn’t like leaving you here. Call it ‘woman’s intuition’ if you will, but I had a feeling that, no matter how long I sat by your side, you would wake up the first minute I wasn’t here.”

  “So you left in order that I’d wake up?” I said, half-jokingly.

  She laughed lightly. “No! But I had sent the tickets back to Richard with a note saying that I could not attend, and he sent a message imploring me to come. I was torn, but I so wanted to see the play. Mrs. Hutchins told me I should get out of the house, but I think she was just tired of my being in her way. When Arthur said he would sit with you, I decided to go after all, but I came back the absolute minute I could get away!”

  “And how was the play?” I was trying to be magnanimous, but it wasn’t easy.

  Ann’s face lit up like the sun. “Oh, Albert! It was wonderful! I can’t tell you how amazing it was. You know the story, yes?” I nodded. “Well, Richard plays both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s a scene, about two-thirds of the way through, when Jekyll is confronted in his lab by the inspector. The man doubts Jekyll’s claims, so Jekyll drinks his potion right in front of him, and he changes to Hyde right there on the stage!”

  “Before the entire audience?”

  “Yes! Richard told me that he uses no makeup at all in the change; he does it all by contorting his body and face.”

  I found this all very hard to believe. “And it’s effective? It doesn’t look false?”

  “No, not at all. It’s amazing what he can do. Our tickets were for the front row, so I would have seen if he was using any tricks. The only thing I noticed was that the lighting changed a bit when he did it, but that was all. Several of the women near me fainted.”

  “It sounds as if I need to see this play for myself. Would you be averse to seeing it again?”

  Ann’s eyes brightened at the thought. “Not at all! I’d love to see it again. I’m sure there’s something I missed. But I have to be going out for a while now, so I want you to rest some more.”

  “Going? Where are you going?”

  She smiled and patted my chest affectionately. “I need to get back to the church. The reverend’s been asking for me and I’ve put them off long enough as it is. There’s still work to be done down there.”

  I had actually forgotten about Reverend Barnett and Ann’s work with the East End poor. It made me happy to hear that Ann had not.

  “Will you be home in time for supper?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I should think so.” She got up from the bed and walked to the door. “The question is if you will be!”

  I laughed. “I promise not to leave this house. Oh, Ann!”

  She stopped halfway out of the door. “Yes?”

  “Did you find someone to go to the theatre with? Seems a shame to waste a front row ticket.”

  “Yes, I did, actually. She was the one who brought back the message from Richard, asking me not to miss the performance.”

  “She?”

  “Yes, you know, your friend, Mary Kelly.”

  My heart fell into my stomach as she went bounding down the stairs.

  *

  I had just finished the breakfast that Mrs. Hutchins had brought me when Arthur exploded into the room.

  “Well?” he said anxiously. “Did you read it?”

  I picked up the diary and tossed it to him.

  “Yes, I did,” I replied, “but I wish I hadn’t. It gave me restless dreams last night.”

  “I can understand that,” he said. “I’ve had them as well.”

  “It’s a horrible thing. I still can’t believe what I read. Do you think it was real? You don’t suppose he made the whole thing up, do you? Or imagined it?”

  “I wish that were so,” Arthur replied, “but there are too many details that can’t be ignored. Fortunately, I have a bad habit of keeping a lot of old newspapers around. I went looking through them and this is what I found.”

  He tossed a folded paper onto my lap and helped himself to a fresh cup from the pot of coffee that Mrs. Hutchins had brought me. I unfolded the paper and looked at the page that Arthur had kept on the top. It hadn’t been a front page or even a very big headline, but Arthur had circled it and I felt my breath catch in my throat at the sight of it.

  It was the Times for August 10, 1888. There was a modest article under the headline, “The Murder in Whitechapel.” It detailed how a woman had been found murdered with more than thirty stab wounds. It sounded identical to the murder that Prince Eddy had described in his diary.

  I put down the paper. “It really happened,” I said.

  Arthur took a drink of his coffee. “Yes,” he said gravely, �
�it did.”

  He sat down in the easy chair and produced a small notebook.

  “It was later found that her name had been Martha Tabram. Her body was found on August seventh, a month ago today. If you remember when we spoke to those women in the pub, I believe it was this murder that had shocked them so. Tabram had been in the company with another ‘fallen’ woman, one Mary Connolly, also known as ‘Pearly Poll.’ That night, they had met two men. Poll went off with one, while Martha went with the other into George Yard. Here’s the kicker, Albert: the men they met were wearing the uniform of the Grenadier Guards.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing.

  “Could it be a coincidence? Maybe it really was a Guardsman who killed her.”

  Arthur leaned forward in his chair.

  “Except for this one fact: Poll could not identify the man she was with, let alone the one Martha went into George Yard with. Inspector Reid was the one who found Poll at first. Not trusting the police, she went and stayed with family until she was found again and brought to face a lineup. Every Grenadier Guard was present at the lineup, and yet she could not find either of the men from that night. Even ones who had been on leave or absent from the barracks during that time were brought forward. It did no good.”

  “Deserters perhaps? I’d certainly desert if I’d butchered a woman the night before.”

  “None. The men could not be identified because the men were not there. Prince Eddy and S were not in that lineup because they are not Grenadier Guards.”

  I felt myself grasping at straws.

  “Maybe . . . maybe S just told Eddy this story and Eddy made up the rest.”

  Arthur grinned. “Made up a story to put into a diary that, theoretically, no one but himself was ever to read? Why would he do that?”

  I confessed that I had no clue. “Perhaps he heard the story and imagined he was part of it?”

  “Not likely, but I’ll postpone judgment on that for now. I know what you’re trying to do, Albert. You’re looking for any possible reason for the prince not to be involved. I’m afraid the facts won’t let you.”