The Ripper's Shadow

by Laura Joh Rowland

  Catherine makes a visible effort at patience. “Sarah, you’ve done so much for me. I don’t want to hurt you. If you’re in love with Hugh, tell me, and I’ll keep my hands off him. Otherwise, don’t be a dog in a manger.”

  The doorbell jangles as Hugh, speak of the devil, sweeps into the studio. He wears a long black evening cape and top hat; he carries a valise. In high spirits, he doesn’t notice the embarrassment on Catherine’s face and mine.

  “Good news! We’re going to investigate Alfred Palmer, Duke of Exford.”

  “How?” I am startled because he seems to have gained access to the only suspect whose identity we’ve determined. “Where?”

  “Palmer’s hosting a ball tonight at his house in St. John’s Wood.”

  My immediate resistance to going isn’t due only to my fear of meeting this man who may be the Ripper. I have a deep dread of social events. The only ones I ever attended were at school, the fetes given by the wealthy patrons. I stood alone in a corner, mortified by shyness.

  “A ball! What fun!” Catherine jumps up and down like a child offered a treat. “Hugh, will we have time to dance together while we’re investigating?”

  “Uh.” It’s obvious that Hugh doesn’t want to be with Catherine in a situation tailored for romance. “I’d planned to take Sarah.”

  Catherine’s eyes widen as her gaze moves from Hugh to me, then narrow. “Why not me?” She’s surprised and hurt, suspicious that there really is something between us.

  I try to take the sting out of Hugh’s rejection. “Because it’s too dangerous.” How I wish I could send her instead of going myself! “If the duke sees you, he’ll recognize you from your photographs.”

  “If he’s the killer, you’ll be putting yourself right into his path,” Hugh adds.

  Catherine frowns because we’ve taken sides against her. I say to Hugh, “I thought you didn’t know the duke. How did you obtain an invitation?”

  “I didn’t, actually. I happened to learn of the ball when I was in town, making discreet inquiries about Palmer.”

  “You intend for us to crash the ball?” Although we may lose our chance at the duke, I seize on an excuse not to go. “We won’t be let in.”

  “Never fear.” Hugh opens his cape. He’s dressed like a medieval troubadour, in parti-colored tunic and hose. “It’s a costume ball.” He reaches into the valise, extracts two black velvet masks, holds one over his eyes, and grins. “No one will know we’re not on the guest list.”

  “But I haven’t a costume.”

  “I brought you one.” Hugh pulls from the valise a bundle of pale blue silk and white fur. “Pinched it from my sister.”

  Catherine brightens. “The duke won’t recognize me if I wear this.” She unfolds the costume—the gown of a French lady from the past century, matching slippers, a tall white wig, and a fur cape. “Oh, how beautiful!”

  “No,” Hugh and I say together.

  Tears glaze Catherine’s eyes. “Never mind, then.” She drops the costume. “I shan’t beg to go where I’m not wanted.” She flings an angry glance at Hugh and one filled with the pain of betrayal at me; then she runs out the door, calling, “I’ll find someone who does want me!”

  I’m afraid I’ve made her angry enough to spite me by roaming the town and putting herself in the Ripper’s sights.

  “This happens too often,” Hugh says sadly. “I flirt with women so that everybody will think I’m a normal, red-blooded Englishman. Sometimes they want more than I can give them. Lord, I hate hurting that sweet girl.” He adds darkly, “I’m bound to get my comeuppance someday.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I say, trying to absolve him the way he absolved me when I blamed myself for my father’s death. “Catherine will be all right.” But young hearts are tender, and she’ll have a harder time forgiving me—her trusted friend—than Hugh.

  “I hope so,” Hugh says. “In the meantime, you’d better dress. Our coach is waiting.”

  Upstairs, I reluctantly don the costume. The gown hangs loose on me, its neckline alarmingly low; my collarbone juts. I cover myself with the white fur cape. The elaborate white wig renders my complexion even paler than usual. I look like a courtesan wasting away in the Bastille. I imagine what PC Barrett would think if he could see me, and my eyes well as I powder the whisker burns around my mouth.

  When I totter downstairs in the blue silk slippers, Hugh makes a valiant attempt to pretend nothing is wrong with my appearance. We decide not to take my miniature camera—neither of our costumes offers a good hiding place for it. As we climb into the carriage, I’m thankful for the fog; my neighbors won’t see us and gossip about me. We ride north through Regent’s Park. The farther we go, the deeper I lapse into misery.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Hugh says. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I can’t tell him about PC Barrett.

  Hugh waits a moment, then says, “All right.”

  Now there’s a coolness between us; I’ve hurt his feelings as well as Catherine’s. We ride in silence to St. John’s Wood. The wide streets are overhung with trees whose lush foliage obscures gardens and villas. The quiet is unsettling. We turn down a narrower lane and arrive at a brightly lit, Italian-style mansion with white stucco walls. Hugh sheds his cape, tells the driver to wait by the other carriages parked on the road, and helps me from the carriage.

  We don our masks. Walking up the stairs to the mansion, I stumble, unaccustomed to high heels. Hugh catches me and draws my arm through his. I hear voices, laughter, strange music, and a deep, rhythmic pulse. When Hugh opens the door, the noise blares out at us from a grand foyer. Through an arched doorway, I see a huge ballroom dimly lit by a gas chandelier. A crowd dances to a frenetic dirge played by an orchestra of black men dressed in formal evening clothes, blowing horns, sawing fiddles, and pounding drums. Guests are disguised as Chinese mandarins, Roman gladiators, ballerinas, knights, Greek gods and goddesses. They gyrate singly or in pairs. Many costumes are even less modest than mine. Bare flesh gleams. Masked faces leer. Painted mouths laugh, gulp wine, and kiss.

  This is the dark side of high society. Unnerved, I shrink backward, but Hugh pulls me into the ballroom, and we’re enveloped by the hot, raucous crowd. “Let’s dance.”

  He clasps my waist. I place one hand in his, the other on his shoulder. The floor is so packed, it doesn’t matter that I don’t know how to dance. Troubadour and French courtesan, we can only sway in place while jostled by other revelers.

  “I see why Palmer has this remote hideaway,” Hugh shouts in my ear. “He can’t do this at the ducal manor. Ah—there he is. The pirate.”

  I see, across the room, a tall man wearing a tricorn hat with a yellow feather. A black patch covers his left eye. His face is red and fleshy. He guffaws at someone’s joke, then turns and moves away from us.

  “Come on.” Hugh pulls me toward the duke.

  As we squeeze past other dancers, a knight cuts in on us. He yanks me close to his tin-armored chest. “Let go of me!” I struggle while he leads me in a waltz that plows a swath through the crowd. “Hugh! Help!”

  Far away, Hugh’s masked face bobs among others as he fights to reach me. I wrench myself from the knight’s chain-mailed embrace and fall. Prancing feet trample my gown, knock my wig askew. A boot steps on my wrist. I scream in pain.

  “Sarah!” Hugh is pulling me to my feet.

  “Get me out of here!”

  He drags me, shouting, “Pardon us,” to the people he elbows. I’ve lost my slippers, like Cinderella. Someone stomps on my toes. Leaving the ballroom, we enter a dim corridor. There, couples kiss and fondle. I cringe from them as we pass, ashamed of myself for behaving in the same fashion with PC Barrett. Hugh pushes open a door. We find ourselves in a cold, silent cavern that smells of turpentine and linseed oil. A silvery glow pours from a skylight; the fog is clearing around a lopsided moon visible through the glass.

  “Are you all right?” Hugh asks.

  My heart is
still hammering; my wrist and toes hurt. “I think so.” I straighten my wig.

  “What have we here?” Hugh says, looking around.

  I survey easels, plaster torsos, a table strewn with jars, brushes, and paint tubes. “An artist’s studio.”

  Hugh flings back cloths from easels. The canvases show poorly done portraits of Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes posing in my studio. “Did you paint these, Palmer?” he asks the absent duke. “You could use some anatomy lessons.”

  “He’s copied my boudoir photographs,” I say.

  “Maybe that’s all he wanted them for.” Hugh’s voice echoes my disappointment.

  “Maybe he didn’t kill the women.” I fear we’ve come here to learn nothing except that the duke indulges in lascivious parties and bad amateur art.

  “He could still be our man. Let’s have a look at the rest of the house.”

  We climb a narrow staircase. With dark-red wallpaper that gleams in the light from brass sconces, it resembles a giant throat. We reach the second-story landing. Sudden screams emanate from a doorway that leads to another staircase.

  My blood chills.

  We halt abruptly, exchanging wide-eyed glances.

  “I’ll go first.” Hugh starts up the stairs.

  As I follow, the screams grow louder; they resonate with terror. At the top is an attic. A bed stands in dim light cast by lamps on side tables. On the bed lies a naked, full-breasted woman, her arms and legs spread wide, her wrists and ankles bound to the bedposts. Her slender body is slick with sweat, her long auburn hair tangled, her pubis shaved. Her eyes are crazed like a trapped animal’s as she strains at her bonds and screams.

  Shock slams my heart.

  Out of the shadows to the woman’s left steps a tall, muscular man, naked except for a white shirt with billowing sleeves. He’s not wearing the pirate hat, but I see the black patch over his eye. It’s the duke. He holds a long, thin object in his right hand. The woman gasps. The duke lashes at her with the object—a black leather whip. It cracks against her thighs. I scream the instant before she does.

  The duke whirls toward us. His red face is engorged with violent lust. The woman shouts words I can’t discern because now Hugh and I are racing down the stairs.

  “It’s him! He’s the Ripper!” I cry as we speed through the dark studio.

  “I’m afraid not,” Hugh says.

  We run along the passage where the couples embrace, into the crowd and wild music in the ballroom. I insist, “He killed Martha, Polly, and Annie! We must fetch the police!”

  “Shut up, Sarah, for God’s sake!” Hugh drags me out of the house. The air is fresh but icy, I’ve lost my fur, and my bare feet tread on rough ground. Hugh bundles me into our carriage.

  As we ride toward London, I grab Hugh’s arm and shake him. “We have to go back! The duke is going to kill that woman!”

  He clasps my hands and says, “Sarah, it’s not what you think. That woman suffers his abuse willingly. She enjoys it as much as he does.”

  Incredulous, I stare.

  “Some people are like that,” Hugh says, embarrassed at having to explain to me. “Didn’t you hear what she shouted as we were leaving?”

  I shake my head.

  “She said, ‘Hit me harder! Please!’” Hugh clarifies, “The duke isn’t going to kill her. It’s just a game. Not a very nice one, to be sure, but not a crime. And not evidence that the police will accept as proof that he’s the Ripper.”

  17

  “Even if the duke’s not the Ripper, there’s still the other chap I tailed from the bookshop,” Mick says, wolfing down bread and bacon.

  The day after the ball, my wrist is sore where it was trampled; the lurid sights I saw are etched in my brain. Hugh hasn’t come over, and neither has Catherine, who must still be angry. Only Mick arrived, in time for lunch. Mud cakes his shoes, his knickers are wet up to his thighs, and he smells like a sewer, but his fresh, youthful face revives my spirits. After I gave him an abridged version of what happened last night, he assured me that not all is hopeless.

  “How ’bout I show you the other chap’s crib?”

  “All right.” I’m curious, and if the dreaded summons from the police comes, I will be safely absent.

  Carrying my miniature camera in my satchel, I walk with Mick along Cable Street into Stepney, which is near the London Docks. At the storefronts, Indian merchants sell strange fruits and vegetables to women in saris. It’s as if we’ve traversed a hemisphere instead of the few blocks from Whitechapel. The foreign tongues have a different flavor, and so does the cold, gray air. The sweet smell from the sugar refineries is pleasant at first but soon overpowering.

  I take the chance to say, “I want to apologize for Catherine. She’s selfish and mean.”

  “No! She’s not! She’s the most perfect girl I ever saw!” Embarrassed because he’s pinned his heart on his sleeve, Mick looks down at his dirty shoes and mumbles, “’Course she doesn’t want nothin’ to do with me.”

  “She should at least appreciate your trying to find out who the Ripper is.”

  “It’s not just for her I’m doing it.” Mick blushes because we both know it mostly is. He ends the conversation by saying, “We gotta turn here.”

  He leads me down an alley lined with tenements. Chinamen, their hair in long pigtails, recline in opium dens, smoking pipes amid pungent smoke. We enter a square bordered by terraces of old brick-and-stone houses, once elegant, now dilapidated. In the green, dark-skinned children play amid trees and weeds that have grown up among the ruins of a demolished church.

  “That’s where I followed him to.” Mick points at a narrow house, its doorway framed by stone pillars and a broken pediment. Its brick walls are studded with small, irregularly shaped stones. The windows are curtained.

  “Is he foreign?” I whisper, although my brief glimpse of him said not.

  “He’s as English as you or me. And he’s a gentleman, I could tell.”

  I conjecture why an English gentleman would live here. “If he’s the murderer, he needs a place near Whitechapel where he can quickly go to ground after he kills.”

  Seeing no sign of life inside the house, I ask, “What now?”

  “We wait over here.” Mick leads me to the opposite side of the square. Loitering behind a tree, we have a good view of the house. “If he comes, you take his picture. Then we sit tight until he leaves, and then we follow him and see what he does.”

  Church bells ring three o’clock. An hour elapses while we wait. The house remains still and quiet. Passersby look at us curiously.

  “Try to act inconspicuous,” Mick whispers.

  A gray mist rolls in over the rooftops. It feels as if the river is crawling ashore. The stench of the Thames marries the sickly sweet exudation from the sugar refineries. Soon we won’t be able to see across the square.

  “Halloo!” calls a voice.

  Mick and I look up at a man leaning out the attic window of the nearest house. He’s sallow-skinned, wearing a turban. “Why are you spying on the man who lives yonder?” His English is accented but precise.

  “So much for actin’ inconspicuous,” Mick says, chagrined.

  “Do you know if he’s home?” I ask.

  “He is not,” the Indian says.

  “What time does he usually return?”

  “Oh, no usual time. He keeps odd hours. Sometimes he is absent for days on end.”

  “What is the gentleman’s name?” I ask.

  “Mr. Smith, according to the landlord.”

  “Who else lives there?”

  “He lives alone.”

  I thank the Indian and hurry Mick away before we can attract more attention. Fog shrouds the square. When we near the house, Mick runs to the door and knocks.

  “Mick! What are you doing?”

  Nobody answers his knock. “Just makin’ sure he’s really not home.” Scampering around the block, he calls, “Come on!”

  At the back of the house, a cobbled al
ley lined with dustbins separates the buildings on the square from those on the street behind them. The fog glows yellow from lights in windows. Foreign chatter echoes. Our quarry’s house is the only one dark and silent. Mick tests the back door. It’s locked. He peers at its second-story windows, barely visible in the gloom, then begins to climb the wall, using the stones that stud its surface. My heart gives a mighty thump of alarm.

  “Mick!” I say in a loud, frantic whisper. “Come down!”

  He pulls himself onto a window ledge, crouches there, and tugs at the window, which slides up with a scraping noise. “Hah!”

  “You can’t go in there! It’s against the law.”

  “Be back in a jiff.” Mick scoots through the window.

  I pace and clutch my satchel, hoping the man doesn’t come home or the police stroll by. I’m responsible for Mick’s safety even though breaking into the house was his decision.

  The back door creaks open. I choke on a scream.

  “It’s only me.” Mick stands in the doorway, holding a lit lamp. His face somber above the flame, he beckons. “I’ve found something.”

  I want to leave before it’s too late, but Eve could not have felt more tempted by the apple. Fearful yet avid to see what Mick found, I step through the door.

  Mick closes it behind us. “Don’t worry. The house’s empty. I checked.”

  I follow him through a dingy kitchen that smells faintly of meals cooked long ago. The only sign of recent use is a teacup by the kettle on the stove. The parlor on the first floor is unfurnished, the scratched wooden floors bare, the fireplace swept clean. The air is colder and damper than outside, and peculiarly still.

  “Upstairs,” Mick says.

  The stairwell seems darker than the lack of artificial lighting can account for. The darkness shrinks the lamp’s flame, and I have the strange feeling that we’re going down underground instead of up. In the second-story passage, we enter a room. A sofa covered with a blanket stands under the curtained window that overlooks the square. An open armoire contains clothes that exude a faint, masculine odor. Everything looks ordinary, but my skin prickles at the sense of something not normal. The darkness is a palpable presence like the velvety black mold that grows in cellars. I can almost feel its fibers take root in my lungs with every breath.