‘You’ve put the past behind you?’ I said flatly.
‘I have. It scarcely exists for me any longer.’
‘No pity, no thanks for your mother, who tried to rear you?’
She looked at me, remembering, I have no doubt, that stumbling, defeated woman coming home with uncertain, tipsy steps to the room we all lived and slept in, recalling, perhaps, her unhappy, sodden muttering sleep, the grey-faced beginnings of another toilsome day, those helpless, anxious eyes which sometimes went over us, her daughters, as we went about our daily business, the excuses and tears to the landlord coming for the rent – our mother’s errors, her weakness, her loneliness, and struggle. She may even have remembered her love. But she could not afford those recollections and resented me for forcing them on her.
‘I have pity – yes,’ she responded.
‘A grain of pity, but, it seems, no more. Have you even that much for Mary Jane?’
Her face unstiffened for a moment. ‘What do you expect me to do?’ she burst out. ‘Take her in? I don’t want it and Mr Sugden wouldn’t stand for it. Why should he? Mary Jane’s life is her own. It has nothing to do with me.’
The room was warm, but it felt cold. My sister sat solidly in her unbecoming hat, worn like a crown, condemning me, her mother and sister for their lives. I could not blame her, but it was not what I expected when I had begun my voyage to find her. She had fallen silent as Dora came in, all eyes as usual, and set down the tray with a pot of tea and a mug of milk on it. Dora left. My sister had composed herself after her outburst. ‘Suppose you discover Mary Jane, what will you do?’ she asked me.
‘Take her back to Calgary, if she’ll come,’ I said.
‘To that …’ She could not bring herself to pronounce the word ‘brothel’. ‘To that place,’ she finally said.
‘It’s better than Whitechapel, Clara,’ I told her.
She flinched even at the mention of the name, then set down her cup resolutely and delivered a statement. ‘I’m very glad to have seen you again, Mary Anne, and to know you’re alive and well and prospering. But it was in my mind as I came from Liverpool last night that we came to the parting of the ways many years ago – your doing, not mine. And that it wasn’t likely we could mend matters. I want no part of that old life. I have a new one now. I have written out the address of a good woman nearby to me on this card and you may send letters to me there, only if essential.’ She took a card from her handbag and gave it to me. The address on it was in Fleetwood, some way from Liverpool.
‘So I’m not even to know where you live?’ I said, stung.
‘It’s better not,’ she replied firmly. ‘I must go now. It’s a long way back.’ And she set the child on his feet and led him from the room. She did not even turn in the doorway to wish me goodbye and good luck.
I sat on for a few minutes, quite stunned, then was on my feet in a rage, pacing the room, furious at, yet wounded by, this cold rejection. To be considered too wicked and corrupt for the rest of the world is one thing, to be treated like a leper by your own sister is another. Hadn’t I brushed her hair every night when she was young? Hadn’t I taken a comb and vinegar to it weekly against lice, given up my wages, whether of virtue as a milliner, or vice as a tart, to help put food in her mouth and boots on her feet? Hadn’t we gone out hand in hand on cold days when we were short of coal, to collect scraps of wood, chair legs, bits of rotten skirting board, for burning? Hadn’t I taken her to Robin Hood and his Merry Men at the Pavilion Theatre one Christmas when I was in funds, on a tram to Victoria Park to hear the band (though, come to think of it, Jim and I had run off somewhere and she’d had to find her own way back, with only sixpence in her pocket)? And now I was not even to be allowed to know where she lived, had to correspond with her through a stranger, and, she’d made it pretty clear, only in emergencies. I had become, it seemed, my sister’s guilty secret.
Spite and thoughts of revenge filled my head. When the day dawned that that eminent shipping clerk, Mr Sugden, lost his employment or fell under a Lime Street tram, I thought, and a letter arrived in Canada, via Mr Ratcliffe my lawyer, appealing for assistance, what rough answer wouldn’t I give? I knew what happened in such cases. Dolly Halloran had many a letter about the poor harvests and drowned pigs in Donegal from a family which would not speak her name, because of the disgrace she’d brought on them in earlier days. Many a now-prosperous rancher, shipped out as a failure, or to avoid scandal, had found himself the cornerstone of a family which had as good as disowned him in the old days. So, I thought, when the tale of outgrown shoes and day-old bread, or the funds suddenly needed for my brother-in-law to seize a business opportunity reached my ears in Canada, Clara need not expect a kind response from me.
After half an hour of raging, a kind of pity for her came over me. She had lost her mother and her oldest sister, who should have taken care of her – small wonder she’d become bitter. Now she had obliterated her family and her past, no doubt had a false tale she told her neighbours, kept a silence even with her husband about where he’d found her, and what her circumstances had been. The truth was between her and God, now, and, as we know, He is often lied to, puts up no arguments and never tells. What sort of a life had she, hating her own past life, forced to lie, clinging righteously to her dreary familiar things, a small cold house, an ugly chapel at the end of the street, embracing, sober-faced and sadly clothed, the dull routine of Sunday psalm-singing and Monday washday, through to the Saturday whitening of the front step, the scrubbing, polishing, cooking, shopping, ironing, black-leading and holystoning?
As I stood, thinking all this by the fireplace, in came Dora to collect the tray, but goggle-eyed.
‘Mrs Frazer,’ she told me, ‘the baker came with such a horrible tale – a woman foully murdered by some stables right off Whitechapel Road, just opposite the hospital.’
All my blood seemed to drain away. I stood frozen, one hand on the mantelpiece, just strong enough to stand, but not speak or move. She went on, relishing the tale, and its effect on me, ‘They found her early this morning, two men going off to work in the market, thought at first she’d been ravaged, then her throat cut. But when they come to undress her in the mortuary, oh dear, oh my, didn’t they find she’d been horribly mutilated, ripped right open like a pig, with big slashes down her belly, torn up you know where. Ain’t it horrible?’ Her big blue eyes were wide and frightened, yet she enjoyed the fear. ‘There’s a monster at large,’ she concluded.
My first thought had been for Mary Jane and Rosie. ‘What was she called?’ I managed to bring out.
‘They don’t know, says the breadman. It sounded like some poor old tart, from what they’re saying in the neighbourhood – begging your pardon, mum, a poor unfortunate, I should have said. Well, that’s the most likely, ain’t it, unless he knew her, the murderer, I mean. Perhaps it’s his wife, though. Wicked villain. He must have been covered in blood, after hacking her about like that. It made me come over quite faint when I heard.’
As she spoke I had turned and gone into my bedroom, begun to splash my face with water, brush out my hair. I got out of my wrap and nightdress and put on my chemise. ‘Help me,’ I called. ‘I have to go out. I’m in a hurry.’ Her face full of curiosity, she tied the string of my petticoats, buttoned my boots as I did up my hair. While at work with the buttonhook on the floor she said, ‘Mind you, there was another woman killed round there only a fortnight ago, stabbed over a hundred times, they said.’ She looked up at me. ‘Do you think it could be the same man?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, feigning indifference, but I had already thought of Rosie’s story about the woman who had been killed three weeks earlier, and the fear she’d said she had begun to feel. ‘It’s as if the whole neighbourhood was rotting like a piece of meat,’ she’d said; and then she’d gone off, drunk, alone, singing. Dora handed me my hatpins as I put on a bonnet and so, uncorseted, breakfastless and poorly washed, I rushed into the street, found an empty cab and went
to Mrs Mundy’s.
I banged violently on her door to make her open up. It was just after nine o’clock. A man with a handcart stopped to watch me beating on the door. A woman came out on the pavement and said, ‘She’s up. I’ve heard her moving about.’
Finally, Cora opened the door in a huge unclean nightdress, like a tent, and a shawl over her shoulders. Seeing me, she tried to shut the door again. I’d have none of it, and stuck my boot in the crack. A couple of women with baskets joined the man with the handcart and the woman who lived next door to watch. ‘Let me in, Cora, it’s not what you think,’ I said loudly. She was forced to open the door.
‘For God’s sake,’ she protested, ‘what is all this?’
In the bar, which smelt of last night’s beer and tobacco, I asked her urgently, ‘The woman who was murdered – who was she?’
‘Murdered?’ she exclaimed in confusion. ‘What murder?’ She must have guessed Jim had been to see me (or knew he had) and thought I’d come to row with her.
‘A woman was killed last night,’ I said. ‘She was cut up and mutilated near Whitechapel Road, opposite the hospital.’
Cora stared at me. I even had a moment of doubt. Perhaps it was just a silly rumour; Cora usually knew everything which happened within a mile of her alehouse, almost before it happened. She seemed to pluck information from the air, like catching flies.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Harry opened the door at the back on cue, an enamel mug of tea in his hand. He was unshaven, wearing shirt and trousers, and slippers on his feet. He filled the doorway.
‘That’s right, ma. I had it from her next door.’ He nodded in the direction he meant. ‘She put her head over the fence while I was in the yard. They found a dead woman up against a stable doorway in Bucks Row, round Durward Street, all cut up. Ask me, I’d say it was the same bloke who killed that tart, Martha somebody.’
‘What was her name?’ I cried.
‘They don’t know her name or who she was. Why come here? Oh …’ he said, understanding. ‘You think it might be Mary Jane. Well, I don’t suppose so. If you’re going to go running through the streets with your hair hanging down every time somebody cuts up a tart you’ll soon be skin and bone. Still, it’s not nice, I’ll give you that, especially if one man done both crimes. But they’ve probably got him by now anyway. You’d better go to the police station.’
What he said steadied me. At least Harry was always sensible. Even so, as I turned to go I felt dizzy. Cora spotted it.
‘Oh, sit down, Mary. You look all over the place,’ Cora said impatiently. ‘I’ll get you a little drop of gin to steady your nerves. How can it be Mary Jane – she’s not reduced to going down the back of the coalyard in Bucks Row with men she doesn’t know, is she? That’s for the lowest of the low. She’ll turn up,’ she assured me. ‘If she’s still here she’ll soon get to hear you’re asking for her. You’d do better to go out shopping, go to a play, enjoy yourself a bit.’ She shook her head compassionately. ‘Your nerves’ll go completely at this rate. You’ll get ill, that’s a fact. Find yourself a sweetheart and go down to Brighton, get some sea air. You used to be giddy enough. You never stopped laughing and kicking up your heels. Now look at you –‘
‘I suppose you’ve got Jim Bristow in mind to restore my lost gaiety,’ I interruped. ‘Well, I don’t want him and you had no right to point him in my direction.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she said angrily, feeling in the wrong, prepared for a quarrel. ‘He’s a lively sort.’
‘Lively?’ I said. ‘He turned up last night looking like a three-day-old corpse. Where’s his hair? It hasn’t been long since he got out of prison, that’s my guess.’
She didn’t answer. ‘You’ve got very fussy since you left,’ she began.
‘Hah!’ I told her. Harry Mundy was laughing. ‘Listen, Cora,’ I said, ‘I’m here for a purpose, and that’s all. I don’t require a pimp or a sweetheart, and if I wanted one, or both, Jim would be the last man on earth I’d pick –’
‘You’re a silly old cow,’ Harry Mundy told his mother unsympathetically. To me, he said, ‘Anyone can see you’re well above all that and as for Jim, she may love him, but I don’t. He’s a fool, and if he don’t end up on the gallows it won’t be for want of trying, and as for gaol, well, you’re right there, six months for being caught breaking into a pawnbrokers.’ He paused. ‘Only thing is, he may know where your sister is.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Just a notion I have,’ he responded. ‘Excuse me – I’ve business to do.’ And he’d dived back into his kitchen before I could stop him.
A bedraggled woman came in, hair poking out from under her bonnet and a general air of beginning the morning before last night was properly over. Cora was annoyed. She would not have opened up so soon if I’d not come round.
‘Give me a pint, my dear,’ gasped the woman. ‘I’ve had a shock. Someone told me about a poor bitch cut up in Whitechapel Road –’
‘Goodbye, Cora,’ I called out, and legged it down Commercial Street to Whitechapel police station, which I entered with a trepidation caused by past experiences I’d had there.
I got through the crowd and to the desk. I asked the sergeant, a tall stringy fellow with a black moustache, ‘That woman killed, what was her name? My sister’s missing.’
He shook his head. ‘At a time like this, everybody’s sister is missing, or their mother or their daughter. We haven’t yet identified the woman.’
‘Her age, then?’
Deducing that my sister was probably in her twenties, he kindly said, ‘Thirty-five or forty, no younger.’
The dead woman couldn’t be Mary, I thought, or Rosie Levi for that matter.
‘I don’t think it’s her,’ I said. ‘But as I’m here, will you help me?’ And I launched into my usual tale of widowhood and Scotland and my hunt for Mary Jane, asking if he could get the records examined for any clue as to her whereabouts. I think he was attracted to me in spite of my untidy appearance, for he willingly went off to organize a search, then returned, and asked me to wait. I found a seat opposite the desk and assumed a composure I did not feel, for the place made me uneasy.
I waited while the station’s clients came in and out – a captured pickpocket and the woman who had laid hold of him, two drunken sailors arrested for fighting, a woman with a baby in her shawl, crying out to the police to find a lost child – a whole parade of the accused, the accusers, policemen. A respectable-looking woman in a blouse with a diamond brooch at her throat came in, paused, shocked no doubt by the smell and the noise, then rushed to the desk, pushing aside a group consisting of policemen, a thieving apprentice who had taken a brass ingot from his master’s workshop, and the indignant owner. The lady began, insensately, to ask about a spaniel she’d lost the day before in Hyde Park. She’d been to nine police stations, already, she said. The policeman, the apprentice and the robbed master yielded to her. The apprentice spoke on and on to his employer in a mumble – this would break his mother’s heart, his sister was ill, he was sorry, he would never do such a thing again. Meanwhile the sergeant said to the lady, ‘Well, madam, I expect the police are doing all they can, but you’ll have been told of the traffic in stolen pets.’
‘That’s exactly why I’m here,’ she exclaimed. ‘An officer told me a Chinaman might have eaten him.’
‘I wouldn’t think so myself, really, madam,’ the policeman said.
‘Can you investigate? It’s a most terrible thought. My husband and I are most distressed.’
‘Indeed you must be,’ he said. Meanwhile the thieving apprentice was talking his master round. The delay, as the sergeant dealt patiently with a member of the respectable classes, had proved useful to the boy.
‘I do understand your distress, madam,’ said the policeman. ‘I should be upset myself if I thought anything like that had happened to my own pet animal. But we’ve never had any reports here of a Chinese
eating a dog. They’re most respectable and hardworking people on the whole, so I think you can rest easy on that score. Though if we did,’ he added, ‘I wouldn’t be hopeful of laying hands on the villain; for there are thousands of Chinamen in the East End, you know, and they all look pretty much the same.’
There was a stir as a sailor dragged through the doors with a girl in a petticoat and shawl, her boots unlaced. He hauled her right up to the counter, exclaiming, ‘Rifling my pocket, the bitch.’ The policeman holding the apprentice let go of him and went to intervene. He got him by the shoulder. The sergeant behind the desk reproved, ‘Wait your turn and watch your language with ladies present.’
‘Lady! She’s no lady! She’s a common thieving whore,’ cried the sailor. ‘Lay hold on her, not me.’
As this went on the apprentice and his master, after a quick whispered conversation, evaporated from the police station.
‘That’s not the lady I was referring to,’ said the sergeant with a glance at the woman who had lost her spaniel.
Another policeman came in with a piece of paper in his hand and gave it to the sergeant. He glanced at it and seemed to sigh. My eyes fixed on it. I could just read a name, Marie Jeanette Kelly. The sergeant put the piece of paper on the desk. The sailor was still clutching the girl, who was crying out, ‘I never done nothing, I swear it. He wouldn’t pay me, that’s all. He’s the robber. It’s him – he’s the thief.’ The lady with the lost dog had flinched back and was grasping at her blouse near the throat with a long, well-tended hand. She glanced in alarm round the room at the waiting men and women while the shouting girl, still with last night’s rouge and powder blotching her nose and cheeks, kept on struggling and protesting.
The Cry from Street to Street Page 11
