‘All right. We’ll hold her,’ the sergeant said to the sailor. ‘And you sit down and wait your turn.’
The other woman said rather quickly, ‘Sergeant – I hope you’ll look out for my dog. He’s called Buffie. And here is my card.’ She went to the door looking neither right nor left. The girl was taken off crying and yelling denials, the sailor left the counter and sat down. The sergeant looked at me, and at the piece of paper.
‘There’s a record of a Marie Jeanette Kelly, fined twelve and sixpence by the magistrates on 22 August last Wednesday week for causing an affray with another woman outside the Ten Bells public house. She gave her address as Donaldson’s Buildings. That’s just off Middlesex Street. Does that help you, Mrs Frazer?’
‘It does. It does indeed,’ I said with enthusiasm. I was delighted. Mary Jane, following the old tradition of not giving her known name in court, had, I guessed, uninventively fallen back on her baptismal name. It seemed very likely she was the woman had up for fighting only nine days before. She must still be nearby.
The sergeant looked at me cautiously. ‘It’s not a nice neighbourhood, madam,’ he warned. ‘I would advise you not to go there unaccompanied. Perhaps a male friend or relative would go with you, or go himself and spare you the experience altogether.’ I knew Donaldson’s Buildings, though I didn’t say so.
‘I shall certainly do as you suggest,’ I told him. Not all Whitechapel coppers are ignorant bullies, though many are. They are licensed to be so. Their job is to keep the poor under control, as everybody knows. This sergeant though, was a conscientious man, with thoughtful eyes, which he turned on me.
‘Don’t get your hopes up too much,’ he advised kindly. ‘This may not after all be your sister and if she is not, the disappointment might be very distressing for you.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I wish you every luck, but,’ and I think this was the point he really wanted to make with me, ‘sometimes young women such as your sister seems to be do not always welcome rescue.’ He looked at me gravely. ‘Some of them will have none of it. That hectic life – I believe you have some inkling of what I mean – has a strong appeal, however undesirable it seems to most ordinary people. It can become habitual, as with alcohol or some strong drug, and it’s hard to step back from –‘
I shook my head. ‘I only hope that will not be the case with Mary Jane.’ Then I took my leave, walking across Whitechapel Road where a Salvation Army band was playing, to Middlesex Street, with Petticoat Lane Market in full swing, and all the Jews out, and so down a little, poor street, and through an alley to Donaldson’s Buildings. It was one of the worst of spots, a court surrounded by houses, not even very old, but sadly worn. There, at midday, men leaned against blackened walls cut by narrow doorways, smoking pipes in the sunshine. Women sat out of doors watching pale children, some shoeless. A thin girl in rags drew water from the pump at the end of the court, turned to carry her bucket home. The slabs with which the court was paved were littered, and they stank with years of dirty water and the contents of chamber pots being flung out of windows on them. This behaviour was not considered right, but people did it all the same. There were the usual couple of thin dogs turning over a pile of something in a corner by a wall. There was the usual sound of a baby crying its head off. A chicken squawked in a back yard, but otherwise, there was silence. It was the silence of real poverty, augmented by the silence of people, though no doubt perpetually at odds with each other, watching the approach of a stranger. For this would be a place where few stopped, not even the postman. In fact, none of the houses had a number, just a coloured rag trailing from a window, a symbol, circle or triangle, painted or scratched on the door.
There were gratings in the paving by the buildings. As I stepped beside them I looked down by chance and clearly saw, for the light was fairly strong, the attenuated figure of a woman covered with a blanket lying below in a heap of straw. Her face was white as snow. She looked near death. Worse, beside her, a small heap in the blanket moved a little, there was a small wailing noise. I felt chilled, shivered, moved on towards a woman sitting at the end of the court on a kitchen chair, rolling cigars on a board in her lap and placing them in rows in a wooden box. A girl of about six sat beside her on a scrap of mat, doing the same. Their fingers flew. Neither looked up as I drew nearer, although they must have known I was coming towards them. Aloft, I heard a window open, behind me, a door.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for my sister, Mary Jane Kelly. Can you help me?’
Her eyes were red-rimmed. She looked up at me, face closed. ‘I don’t know anything about her,’ she said. From the corner of my eye I saw a couple of men coming closer to listen. I turned to them, saying roughly, ‘See here – I’m the sister of Mary Jane Kelly. I only want to find her. Can anyone tell me where she is? Or fetch her to me? I don’t care which.’ They gazed at me stonily. I held on tighter to my handbag and looked them straight in the eye, feigning meekness and candour. ‘I’m back from Canada,’ I explained. ‘I haven’t seen her for eight years.’ I was hoping no others were coming up behind me. The eyes of one shifted, I turned slightly to follow his gaze. There were indeed three men behind me, closing in, but, to my amazement, half-way across the court and coming towards me with his usual cocky gait, chin slightly up, was Jim Bristow.
‘Well, Mary my love, my dear,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here in these degraded haunts of the poor? Aren’t you shocked? Aren’t you scared of these regions of vice and crime, where the word “home” is only a hollow mockery and the voice of religion never heard?’
‘A policeman told me Mary Jane was hauled up for fighting ten days ago and gave this place as her address,’ I burst out. I’d been careless, over-confiding, I realized, as the woman rolling the cigars raised her eyes briefly at the mention of the police, then fell to working faster, while the two men near me stiffened, moved just half a pace closer.
Jim, however, seemed quite calm. That is to say, he played the part of a man who is quite calm. ‘There was no call to go to the police, Mary, not when I’d told you I’d help you. Ten o’clock, Ten Bells, didn’t I tell you? And after all the trouble I went to, climbing through your bedroom window – didn’t you like it? You seemed to, my dear – and now you go running to the peelers without a word to me. You’ve upset me now. Silly girl.’
My back was still turned to the court, as I wondered how many people, gathered by small signals, were accumulating behind me. Here was Jim mocking me, suggesting by his stance and all he said that he was my man, but that I’d been disobedient and displeased him, so now he might not defend me. He’d quarrelled with me for going to the police, and although by no means everyone in that court would be a criminal, no one would dare stand up for anyone who attracted official attention to Donaldson’s Buildings or its occupants. That is what is known in the East End as not minding your own business and there are punishments for it. Now I had to be obliging to Jim, who had helped to get me into this trouble. There was no point in enquiring further for Mary Jane.
‘Well, Jim,’ I said apologetically, courting his favour, ‘I’m sorry, I really am. Truth to tell, I got so impatient to find my Mary Jane, I just did what first came into my head. Can’t we go to Mrs Mundy’s alehouse now, and you’ll tell me where she might be?’
‘All right, dearie,’ he said, linking his hand swiftly under my arm. ‘I’ll forgive you this one time. So let’s off for a drink and chat.’ And he nodded to the men who had come up to me, we turned, and walked through the people, a big woman with a couple of hulking sons on either side, a ferret-faced little man, hardly more than four feet high, leaning against a wall with his hands in his pockets, watching, a crew of tattered, out-of-work fellows, a couple of saucy girls with big combs in their hair, a group of pinch-faced lads of nine or ten, already brutal, for innocence is a condition which does not last long in places like these. Jim glanced at several as he led me out of the court, me
trailing, he strutting in the accepted manner.
Back in the populated streets I shook off his arm, saying querulously, ‘I might have found out something there if you’d not come along.’
‘You might have been pushed out roughly under a bail of cabbage stalks and peelings, or worse,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t think you’d still be holding that heavy handbag you’re carrying, either.’
There might have been some truth in this. I had to admit I’d taken a risk, though I still thought I might have got away with it without him. Still, to mollify him I told him, ‘You’re looking smart today.’ It was true. He wore fresh trousers, light brown in colour, a clean shirt, bright blue waistcoat and a linen jacket, freshly ironed.
‘A bit of luck,’ he said. ‘A man feels better for a fresh set of clothes and a few sovs to jingle in his pockets.’ And as if to prove this, he jingled the money in his trouser pockets and laughed. ‘You were pretty glad to get out of Donaldson’s Buildings, eh Mary? You must be thinking you ain’t got no place round here no more. Am I right?’
‘I can’t go about as I used to, that’s true,’ I had to admit. ‘Here! This isn’t the way to Cora Mundy’s.’
For without my knowing it, he had led me back to Aldgate, instead of in the other direction. He stopped outside the underground station. ‘I told you I’d see you tonight,’ he said, ‘so tonight it is.’
‘What about Mary Jane?’
‘Mary Jane, Mary Jane, that’s all I hear from you. How about your Jim? Think for a minute about him, who’s always loved you.’ He stared me in the eye. ‘See you tonight,’ he said, and kissed me, then disappeared into the station. He turned and called, ‘Come in a hansom. They still haven’t laid hands on the bloke what murdered that woman last night.’ Then he left, always being the one to leave, never to be left, that was always how he got his advantage. But he had to seize a little more. From the stairs going down he called, ‘That’s why you need me to protect you.’
Meanwhile, a girl selling straggly Michaelmas daisies from a tray strung round her neck heard his words to me. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘you take care, love. I tell you, I won’t rest till they’ve caught him.’
They did not catch the murderer or murderers, or even discover the identity of the dead woman, Mary or Polly Nichols, until the following day, through, it was said, two flannel petticoats she was wearing stamped ‘Lambeth Workhouse’, from which apparently she had absconded some months earlier wearing the clothing they had provided. They then found her estranged husband, a printer, who identified her. It seems she had been married to him at twelve years old and borne five children, all living. The couple had lived together for over twenty years until, seven years before, he had pushed her out of the house for drinking, as, subsequently, had her father, a Camber-well blacksmith, for the same reason. Thus she’d fetched up in the workhouse, then run away, got a job as a maid and stolen from the family, to get money for drink, I suppose, and, only months before she died, ended up on the streets in Whitechapel, dossing in a lodging house in Thrawl Street. In spite of the life she’d led it appears she was a pretty woman, dark, with nice grey eyes. Though she was forty years old, everyone who saw the body put her at ten years younger.
A man named Charles Cross found her dead at about three in the morning as he was going off to work. He was walking down by the coalyard fence in Bucks Row when on the opposite side he saw the body lying in the road by the gates of the stables.
She was still warm when found, so she’d not been dead for long. When they took her to the mortuary she had on an overcoat, a brown wool frock, black stockings, the two workhouse petticoats and brown corsets. All she had in her pockets was a comb and a bit of mirror and a handkerchief. She was wearing or carrying all she had in the world, I suppose. Seemingly, she’d been seen up and down Whitechapel High Street all that night and into the next morning, going hither and yon drinking. She’d told a friend at half-past two in the morning, ‘I’ve had my lodging money three times today and I’ve spent it. It won’t be long before I’m back.’ Then, of course, she’d reeled off to find another client to give her the money for lodgings. She’d found him all right, but an hour later, or less, he’d killed her, horribly. Her throat was cut from ear to ear, twice, right through to her neckbone. Her trunk had been slashed down and across several times, so the intestines were poking through and small stab wounds had been delivered to her private parts. It was said a smallish knife, no longer than eight inches, had been used.
It was said that the murderer would have been covered in blood, but I thought he need not have been. If his victim had stood up against a wall or fence, facing forward so that he could take her from behind, he could have cut her throat then. The blood would have gushed forward. When she was dead, he could have set about his ghastly evisceration, getting very little blood on him, except for his hands. Anyway, I hoped he’d cut her throat before proceeding with the rest of his business, for then at least the poor bitch wouldn’t have known everything else he was doing to her.
However, when Jim left me at the underground station, I knew none of this, only that a woman too old to be my sister, or Rosie, had been killed and cut up. And at that time, of course, folk still thought the murderer had been someone she knew, or else a gang from the Old Nicholl after the few coppers she’d earned against the stable gates. Indeed, as I stood there, my mind, I don’t know why, was running not on the murdered woman but on that woman dying on dirty straw with her baby in a cellar in Donaldson’s Buildings.
It was past dinner-time, but I felt I’d had a whole day’s worth of woe and trouble already, with Mary Claire cutting me off like that, and my panicky rush to see if my sister had been murdered and the tricky visit to Donaldson’s Buildings. Of course, I’d had my gun on me in my big bag as always, and I suppose at a pinch I could have pulled it out and threatened the men who’d surrounded me. Even so, it had been a bad encounter.
Mary was, or had been recently, in the East End. What should I do next? I felt I needed to get away for a bit, in order to think, so took a cab back to Fleet Street, changed into my good rust-coloured silk dress, and a pretty yellow hat, and went to St James’s Park, less than a mile off, to see if the band was playing. Perhaps I’d even visit the theatre later before plunging back into the morass of the East End to meet Jim at the Ten Bells at ten that evening, as he’d insisted.
As I walked through Trafalgar Square I remembered sleeping there among the destitute there the night before I left for America. They would attempt to clear it on some nights now, I’d heard, but the poor and weary kept returning to sleep there, guarded by Nelson and his lions.
This question, Jack Armitage had told me, for he was a thoughtful man who read his paper every day, had become more crucial to those who mattered since a few years back a big march of unemployed men had got out of hand after a rally and broken into shops, and so forth, doing thousands of pounds’ worth of damage. Worse still, only the year before another big march in support of the Fenians had been broken up by the police, with much violence, even before they got to the Square to rally and demonstrate. Days later, 120,000 of them marched right through the centre of town to Bow, to bury a man killed on the public demonstration. The East End turned out to cry and lament, as it always will. It was a scandal supporters of the Fenians should be allowed to march about in open support of them, said Jack. Ever since I’d left, he told me, they’d been setting bombs all over London and killing people. They spoke of recruiting more police, Jack also said, but in his opinion if this public disorder continued, not to mention the bombing, the Home Secretary should call out the army to restore order.
As I stood among the pigeons, all seemed quiet. Still, it was inevitable that London, the heart of the country and the Empire, would be the focus for troubles and discontents of every kind, whether the culprits were anarchists, Fenians or just the poor. Worse, in that city, the province of the wealthy is encircled by the neighbourhoods of those in greatest want. Rich and poor live cheek
by jowl, they can’t be prevented from spilling over each other’s borders. From the East End to the parks, squares and prosperous streets come beggars, robbers and the destitute, while into the slums come a strange mingling of prosperous men – those hunting whores, landlords and their agents seeking rent and social reformers, all taking the diseases of the poor back home to distribute among the rich. A recipe for disaster.
As if to confirm some of these notions I, recently returned from the slums of the East End, was suddenly, to my utter astonishment, accosted by a tall gentleman who raised his silk hat to me and said, ‘Mrs Frazer. What a pleasant coincidence. You won’t believe that only a moment ago I was thinking of our voyage together.’
Preoccupied as I was, I had difficulty in arranging my expression suitably, for this gentleman was lifting his hat to me on the very spot which had once been my old beat. Almost automatically I put on a compliant whore’s smile, as if about to say to him, ‘Hullo, my dear, are you all alone? Would you like some company?’ – or to smile, of course, if he said it to me first. In those days, whoever spoke first, the outcome would be the same, a linking of arms and off to a dirty house off the Strand I knew, a dirty bed and money on the mantelpiece when the business was done.
He looked a little startled at my first expression, blank, brazen and shrewd all at one time as I suppose it was, by no means the face of Mrs Mary Frazer, respectable young widow of an engineer. However, I managed to recover myself quickly enough, I hope, remembering who he was and who I was supposed to be. So I greeted him politely in the character of Mrs Frazer, and with a genuine surprise similar to his own. It was Marcus Brown, my fellow passenger from the ship, but a somewhat different Brown, now out of his travelling costume. He seemed taller, richer and more important, although younger, in his black frock coat and tall hat. He wore black gloves and a black cravat. He was in mourning. What kind of man was he? I asked myself, realizing that in order to deflect his attentions aboard ship I’d been careful to ask him no questions about himself.
The Cry from Street to Street Page 12
