Anyway, as she praised me for my looks, clothes and prosperity, she was still eyeing me speculatively. I told her my usual tale of widowhood and then got down to business. In a lower voice I said, ‘I’ve come looking for my sisters, Mary Claire and Mary Jane. I think you knew them both. I want to help them if I can find them. Can we go in the back for a private talk?’
She brightened. It was a common dream, the dream of the relative back from making a fortune in the colonies, ready to save the family from want.
She looked round at the customers and pulled another couple of pints for the men easing their tired bones at one of the tables in the middle. The woman was still slumped in her corner. Cora Mundy beckoned me through the door into her private room.
Inside, a door at the back gave on to a small dirty yard where the privy and the beer barrels shared most of the space, except for when Cora let the butcher next door store an overflow, when it was also full of carcasses or the waste meat.
The only time I’d been out there a cat had leapt off a pile of bones and offal with a rat in its mouth. Mercifully the view of all this was obscured because the small window beside the door was too dirty to see from. At the back of the room was a dresser where cracked cups and unmatched plates stood in disarray. In the middle was a table covered in newspaper on which stood a pewter tankard and a plate, which had no doubt had on it Harry Mundy’s supper. Harry himself was sitting in his torn armchair, from which the stuffing poked out in places. His feet, in slippers, were inside the fender of the fireless grate and he was reading King Solomon’s Mines. Beside him on the floor lay the Sporting Life.
‘I’d offer you a cup of tea, dear, but as you see the fire’s out,’ Cora said comfortably. ‘Take a seat at the table, do. More gin?’
I shook my head and sat down on the wooden chair at the end of the table.
‘Mary Anne Kelly, as ever was,’ observed Harry Mundy, putting down his book and picking up his paper. ‘Where’s you sprung from then?’ He looked me up and down. ‘City clothes and a country face,’ he observed. There was nothing wrong with Harry Mundy’s wits. I’ve known plenty with half Harry’s brains in a much more prosperous way of business. His weakness was idleness, not stupidity. And being born poor, of course.
‘Calgary,’ I said shortly. ‘I’m here looking for my sisters, Mary Claire and Mary Jane. Do you know where they are?’
‘Mary Claire went up to Liverpool with a sailor a long time ago – five, six years ago. What was his name now? Sugden, I think. Edward Sugden. Right, ma?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said.
‘Wilmot came by,’ he told her, ‘by the back way, while you were out front.’
‘You told him no, I hope.’
‘Didn’t I?’ he said with satisfaction, shaking his paper to get rid of a couple of flies. He took a short length of pencil from his waistcoat pocket and began to note something in the margin.
‘As to Mary Jane,’ Cora said, ‘she’s around and about.’
‘To and fro,’ added Harry, jotting down a calculation.
They were telling me Mary Jane, now twenty, was on the streets, getting her living from prostitution just as I had. I assumed Mary Claire was in the same game, if she’d gone off to Liverpool with a sailor. This news came as no surprise.
‘What’s a poor woman to do?’ Cora remarked.
‘Not marry a bishop, that’s for sure,’ I told her. ‘Do you know where I’ll find Mary Jane?’
‘She’s not been here for a bit. About a month,’ Cora said. ‘I’ll put the word about you’re looking for her. Am I to say she’ll hear something to her advantage?’ She looked greedy.
‘No fear,’ I said firmly. ‘I’d have the whole of Whitechapel round me like flies. My circumstances aren’t bad, but they’re only modest.’
‘Yes, my dear,’ nodded Cora. ‘Well, in your shoes, if I had anything, this place would be the last where I’d reveal my good fortune.’
‘Seen any Indians out there?’ asked Harry. ‘Any squaws? Cowboys? Totem poles? Any scalpings and all that?’ He must have been at Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. I never told him how Robert Ford, who had shot Jesse James, had been two days at Esmeralda’s.
‘Hundreds,’ I told him. ‘But it’ll have to wait. I’m pressed at the moment. And I’m eager to start finding Claire and Janie. For the rest,’ I added, giving the words some import, ‘keep mum. Not a dicky bird. I’m going incognito for my own purposes.’
Harry gave me an incredulous, sidelong look from his chair. Cora also nodded, ‘Please God you find them poor girls very soon,’ she said piously.
As we walked back into the other room she took off her sacking apron, dropped it behind the bar and addressed three Russian sailors who had come pushing through the door, arms linked. ‘What’s it to be, gents? A nice glass of ale?’ To me she muttered, ‘Do you want news of Jim Bristow?’
‘Only if he fell under a brewer’s dray,’ I responded.
‘I’ve got to disappoint you, then,’ she said. She was pulling a pint as she spoke. She put it on the bar. ‘Here you are, Ivan,’ she said. ‘That’s tuppence. Two pence,’ she added, speaking loudly and clearly, holding up two fingers. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some coins. ‘What ship are you off?’ she enquired, quickly taking a shilling and a penny from his extended palm, putting the coins in the till and closing the drawer.
He searched for the words. ‘Murmansk. Eketerina, six days,’ he announced. ‘Pretty girls,’ he concluded, looking at me.
As she pulled the next two pints she muttered to me, ‘Ask in the corner if she has any news of Mary Jane. She’s an unfortunate by the name of Cath Eddowes, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Give her a shilling,’ she appealed. ‘She’s down on her luck.’
And she’ll spend the shilling here afterwards, thought I, so you’ll benefit; but I went over to the slumped figure leaning into the corner, motionless, barely detectable, for the fizzing gas mantle cast some light into the room, but not on to her.
I went up close and sat down on the bench beside her. I looked at her. She was quietly asleep, a woman of forty to forty-five with a big, tired hat with cherries on it askew on her dark hair, which had streaks of grey in it. She wore an old grey cotton frock, partly rucked up so you could see her legs were splayed, and a good length of leg, in wrinkled black stockings, from knee to ankle, ending in a shocking pair of black boots, the leather all wrinkled up, several buttons missing. Her mouth was open; she was breathing heavily, nearly a snore. In spite of all that, she wasn’t too bad considering everything; she had nice high cheekbones and a well-shaped mouth, and if her hair under the bonnet was falling down, it was abundant and curly, which counts for a lot in a woman.
I picked up the thick, work-worn hand from her lap and pressed a shilling into it, ‘Mrs Eddowes,’ I said in a loud voice, ‘can you help me? I’m looking for my sisters, Mary Claire and Mary Jane Kelly.’ Perhaps, I thought, Harry Mundy was right in saying that Mary Claire had gone to Liverpool. But perhaps she had not, and was still in Whitechapel. Or perhaps she had gone, then come back again.
Catherine Eddowes came round a bit when she felt me pushing the coin into her palm. Her fingers tightened over it, and she muttered, ‘Kelly – yes. That’s me.’
‘Mrs Eddowes,’ I said, ‘it’s my sisters who are called Kelly.’
She opened her eyes, large and dark, and answered, ‘Find your sisters for a shilling, is it? I’ve done worse, for less.’
I had no doubt of it. She mumbled on, ‘I’m Jane Kelly, sometimes. I’m married to John Kelly – sometimes.’
I hoped I wouldn’t have to hear one of those long, complicated Whitechapel sagas, full of husbands, children, beatings, landlords, accusations made and refuted, quarrels and the like. I hoped, but I knew I might have to listen. She hailed from elsewhere, this woman, Kelly or Eddowes, or whatever. She had a touch of the North in her voice. Half Whitechapel, at that time, came from somewhere else, as if they came in on the Thames ti
de, along with the household rubbish, broken casks, bits of woods, discarded paper. What was her story? A marriage failed, so out into the world alone to pick up with some other drinker and start a new little home, just the two of them, a bottle of gin between? Or a solid tart’s career starting as a pretty girl, worth half a guinea picking up clients on the promenade at the back of the music-hall, then, a few years later, down to five bob in the West End, and so down, faster and faster until it came to a fourpenny stand-up in an alley, enough for a bed in a row in a dosser, or a good, long drink (planning to use the money for the first, then being tempted and using it for the last). And then, she’d be lucky not to catch pneumonia on a cold wet night, get picked up and die in the hospital. It was to prevent all this I wanted to find Mary Claire and Mary Jane. That life was nothing. It meant grim city streets from which the only relief was drink – or the dream. This dream was of true love, of a rich kind protector, of being taken care of, but as the streets and the men wore you down and down it grew harder and harder to believe in, and, when it finally went, so did you.
In any case, whatever Cath Eddowes’ life had been, it had come down to this, now – snoozing, half-drunk in Cora Mundy’s alehouse. The Russians were getting noisy, first shouting, then laughing, then bursting loudly but sadly into a melancholy song. The young one, seventeen or so, with red cheeks and a blond fringe, was crying, I think.
Cath Eddowes had gone into a daze, the fine black eyes were staring into space. I squeezed her hand firmly to bring her round. ‘Well, dear,’ I said, ‘can you help me?’
‘The police,’ she mumbled.
‘Do I look like a policeman, my dear? I’m just a woman such as yourself looking for the only relatives I have left in the world.’
She rallied a little. ‘I know. I know,’ she said. ‘I had a sister once, a pretty, kind girl. But she went wrong –’
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to keep my patience. ‘Not the only one, I dare say, the world being as it is and men what they are.’
‘And now she’s no more.’
‘Very sad.’
She spoke, as if in a trance, of the country, open fields and rivers, the maypole dance on May Day. ‘Then, ruin,’ she said. ‘Love, but it was not fated to last.’ Whores are sentimental, or else as hard and tough as railway ties. Thinking of this, and a shilling wasted, I was about to leave, when she said, ‘What are their names, your sisters?’
‘Both Mary Kelly,’ I told her, again. ‘Mary Claire and Mary Jane.’
‘There was a Mary Kelly had a room in a house where I lodged.’
‘What street? When?’ I urged. ‘I’d be most obliged if you could tell me.’
‘Mm,’ she said. Her eyes closed and she threw her head back, singing very loudly and in a nice contralto:
‘Father, dear father, come home with me now.
The clock on the steeple strikes one.
You promised, dear father, you would come home
As soon as your day’s work was done.
Our fire has gone out, our house is all dark,
And mother’s been watching since tea,
With poor brother Benny so sick in her arms.’
She concluded with some satisfaction:
‘And no one to help her but me.’
Her speech was clearer when she sang. I was desperate. She might have been mistaken about a Mary Kelly at her lodgings, or even if she was remembering accurately, the woman could have been another Mary Kelly – it’s a common enough name, God knows; apparently even Cath Eddowes herself claimed it from time to time. Yet I didn’t want to depart without finding out what, if anything, she knew.
I tried another shilling, pressed it into her palm again. The fingers closed, then opened. ‘No, no, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t need payment. This Kelly, a fair woman, quite young, was at Mr Murgatroyd’s, near Goulston Street, in a room, with a feller, I think. She left – well, before Christmas, I know.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Eddowes,’ I said, rising.
‘The landlord cut up rough. She did a moonlight flit, two months’ rent unpaid. You might ask how she got away with two months in the first place.’
‘You might,’ I replied. ‘Well, good luck to you, my dear.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she replied wearily, now looking me muzzily in the face for the first time since I’d approached her. Those tired eyes told me that very little hope of luck remained in her. There was just a spark, though. ‘I’m going down to Kent with my man, hopping.’
‘Nice to get into the country.’
‘Nice,’ she said. She started a song about a blackbird on a twig.
As I left, Cora Mundy called out, ‘Where shall I find you, if I get some news?’
‘I’ll let you know soon,’ I called back. I did not want to give her my address. I didn’t trust her not to send all and sundry to my lodgings to see what they could get.
I turned back to the woman as I went out, calling, ‘Good-night, Mrs Eddowes,’ but she did not respond.
And of course I never saw Catherine Eddowes again, for a month later she was murdered.
It was late now, too late to take dark streets to Goulston Street, walk up crumbling stairs, bang on doors in an unlit building, waking tired children and men who had to get up at four next morning. I had another reason for getting back to my lodgings in Fleet Street, too: upwards of £2000 in share certificates and notes, a bag of gold nuggets and some jewellery I’d brought across the ocean in a strongbox in one of my trunks. I planned to entrust all this to a London bank. The colonial banks had a habit of going bust or getting robbed, held up or absconded from by dishonest employees. There were solid Canadian banks, it had to be said, but I wanted my cash safe in good old England, and the sooner the better. It was my savings and hoardings, enough to buy me a big spread in Canada, a large house with a couple of acres here in England, to keep me in modest comfort, invested at 3 per cent.
I walked wearily back to Fleet Street, satisfied that after only a few hours of investigation in Cora Mundy’s alehouse the word was out that I was looking for my sisters and I had even had rumours of them – of Mary Claire in Liverpool, Mary Jane in the very locality where I was searching.
It was, indeed, very strange, letting myself in through the side door of the tobacconist’s, walking upstairs and, alone, entering my apartment. Carriages came past in the street below. People went by talking from time to time. Nevertheless, it was a far cry from the singing, the noise in the bar, the piano, the men’s feet up and down the wooden stairs of Esmeralda’s, the laughing, shouts, noise all night till dawn and beyond it.
Tiredly, I took off my bonnet, flung it on a chair in my sitting-room. I let down my hair, took off my clothes and boots, washed in the basin of unfamiliar-smelling water, put on my nightdress and sank into bed. Sleep overcame me as soon as my head was on the pillow.
Dreadful nightmares ensued. Only an hour or so later, as the clock of the church nearby struck one, I was awake in the dark, wild-eyed and sweating. I’d found myself in a court, big dark buildings all round like black walls, running towards one of the alleys. At the bottom of the alley lay a road – I could see the street lamp at the end. I was being pursued. If I could get to the road where there were lights and people I might be safe, but my feet were sliding on the slick of filth lying on the stones of the court and he, my pursuer, was gaining on me. He caught me, cornered me against one of the black walls – that was when I woke, terrified, sat bolt upright as you do when afraid of a dream.
At first I did not know where I was. The curtains were drawn, the streets outside dark and silent. A carriage with jingling harness went past. Then I remembered where I was, back in London, far from my house in Canada near the river, with the forest rising in the distance. I breathed deeply, became calmer, and told myself the strangeness of everything had disturbed my nerves. I went back to sleep. And yet, again came dreadful dreams of being pursued through narrow, empty streets. Broken gutterings dripped on my head and I knew the drips were blood
. In a panic, still with the monster behind me, I reached the waterfront, where dark ships lay at anchor. A huge sky of scudding clouds moved overhead. And on the deck of one of the ill-defined craft were two girls in short dresses, hand in hand. In my dream I thought they could save me, or I them, I was not sure which, if only I could cross the water to the ship. Scanning the edge of the dock in terror, I could see no companionway to the boat, only a gap too big to jump, with murky water swirling below. I knew behind me my attacker, with what I saw as a wharfman’s hook in his hand, was coming up to me. And I knew suddenly, when he had killed me, he would get on to the ship somehow and kill Mary Claire and Mary Jane.
After that, tired as I was, I dared not go to sleep again. I lit the gas and sat reading a novel by Emile Zola about a whore, Nana, whom he calls the Gilded Fly (how such as us do fascinate the men); dawn came and the street below began to start up for the day with the sound of horses’ hooves, wagon wheels creaking, footsteps and voices.
At six I went down in my wrapper to the kitchen, intending to make myself some tea. There I found the girl servant, Dora, in her nightdress, letting out of the back door a young ruffian with a head of blond curls and his shoes under his arm. Saying nothing, I filled the kettle and put it on the kitchen range. She hastily rebolted the back door and set to riddling out the range and opening up the draught so the fire would come up. I leaned against the sink, waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘I’ll say nothing about this for the present,’ I told her, ‘but don’t let me catch you at these tricks again.’
She stood up and faced me, looking sullen and washed out, but I knew I had her where I wanted her. ‘Go upstairs and tidy yourself,’ I commanded. ‘I’ll make my own tea. I’ll need my bath at eight, plenty of hot water, and breakfast after that.’
She slipped off. If I had secrets to keep, or needed any errands run, I could be sure of her co-operation. One word from me to her mistress about her carryings-on and she’d be turned out without a reference, and what would she do then? In fact, I thought, I might as well offer her the chance of coming back to Canada and working at Esmeralda’s. She was well on that path already, the chit, at less than sixteen years old, so she might as well try it in a place where a whore can find more opportunity. There’s a woman famine out in those frontier-lands and many a whore has married an up-and-coming man and eventually found herself wife to a rich rancher, or a man in government, and nothing said, even if it’s known, about how her career began.
The Cry from Street to Street Page 5
