The Ripper's Shadow

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “Abraham did not come home last night.” Mrs. Lipsky asks, “Sarah, what is happening?”

  I dredge up the explanation from a mire of guilt. Mrs. Lipsky reacts with violent protests in English and Russian. I say, “I’m sorry,” and wait wretchedly until she subsides. “Why was he out on the streets last night?”

  “The fool!” Mrs. Lipsky seems as angry with her husband as worried about him. “I told him not to go, but he would not listen!”

  “Go where?”

  “To Stepney. He spies on Commissioner Warren’s house. Every night.”

  I am stunned, although it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Mr. Lipsky wasn’t any more willing to bow to the Mile End Vigilance Committee than to the Russian authorities during the pogroms. “He wanted to exonerate himself by proving that Warren is the Ripper. He decided to catch Warren in the act of murder.”

  “Yes!” Mrs. Lipsky groans in frustration.

  Last night, he must have followed Warren from the Stepney house to Whitechapel. When Warren stalked Kate to Mitre Square and killed her, Mr. Lipsky must have seen. I’m ashamed of thinking, even for a moment, that Mr. Lipsky was the killer.

  “Suppose he did catch Warren. What did he mean to do then?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he did, either.”

  The ability to think beyond the immediate next step hasn’t been a strong point of our group. We hardly believed our schemes would work, so why plan for their consequences? And now our plan to expose the Ripper, and save my models, has gone hellishly wrong.

  Mrs. Lipsky and I start cleaning up the mess because we don’t know what else to do. When we’re finished, Mrs. Lipsky makes tea in the dented urn. I find two intact cups. We sit in despair, drink, and listen to the cattle bellowing at the slaughterhouses while daylight turns the window from black to gray.

  Footsteps come pounding up the stairs. Catherine rushes breathlessly into the room. She’s wearing a fur stole over a pink tulle frock; her face is vivid with stage makeup. “Mrs. Lipsky! Sarah!” Mick follows close on her heels.

  I’m astonished to see them. “Mick, why aren’t you still in the hospital?” He’s dressed in whole, clean clothes that are too big for him, probably supplied by a charity. His hair is neatly trimmed under a new tweed cap, and his new shoes shine.

  “I heard Mr. Lipsky was arrested,” he says, gazing adoringly at Catherine.

  “So did I,” Catherine says.

  “I couldn’t just lie in bed. I’m fit as a fiddle, anyway.” Mick flexes his shoulder.

  Catherine hugs Mrs. Lipsky. “I’m so sorry.”

  Mrs. Lipsky smiles through tears. I feel like crying myself, so grateful am I for the solace of our young friends, so glad I haven’t lost them. “Catherine,” I say, “I’m sorry I lashed out at you. Will you please forgive me?”

  “Of course!” She hugs me. “You were right—I’ve been stupid and selfish. But I’ll try to be better from now on.”

  Her generous spirit brings my tears close to the surface. So does my new understanding that not all lost friendships are lost forever. The broken circle is coming together again.

  Mrs. Lipsky serves Mick and Catherine tea, and I tell them what happened.

  Something occurs to me that should have earlier. “The other Ripper isn’t the Duke of Exford. The man I saw with Liz was too small.”

  “It ain’t Mr. Lipsky, either,” Mick says. “We gotta get him out of the blockhouse.”

  Catherine nods in vigorous agreement. For once they’re united, by their loyalty to Mr. Lipsky. If it were just myself and Mary Jane Kelly in peril, I would forbid Mick and Catherine to pit themselves against Commissioner Warren, but because it’s Mr. Lipsky, I must accept whatever help they can give.

  After Mrs. Lipsky packs a basket of food for her husband, she, Catherine, Mick, and I walk to Whitechapel Road. Noisy crowds clog the approaches to Dutfield’s Yard and Mitre Square, which are cordoned off by police. Folks who’ve heard about the double murders are eager to view the scenes.

  “Jack the Ripper kills again, twice on the same night!” newsboys shout.

  So now the murderer, who is actually two people, has a nickname.

  Handbills lie scattered underfoot, and I pick one up. Catherine hails a cab. As we sit in it and the driver yells at the crowds blocking our way, I read the handbill aloud:

  Police Notice

  On the mornings of Friday, 31st August, Saturday 8th, and Sunday, 30th September 1888, women were murdered in or near Whitechapel. Should you know of any person to whom suspicion is attached, you are earnestly requested to communicate at once with the nearest Police Station.

  Metropolitan Police Office

  “Why’re they askin’ for information when they’ve got Mr. Lipsky?” Mick asks.

  “It does seem strange.” But the news is a partial silver lining in a very dark cloud. “At least we still have a chance to save Mr. Lipsky.”

  We disembark outside Newgate Prison. The sight of the vast, gloomy dungeon brings back memories of Commissioner Warren grilling me. The guards inform us that “the Ripper” isn’t allowed any visitors. They won’t let Mrs. Lipsky leave the food for her husband. As we walk away, Catherine says, “We need Hugh.”

  “Yeah!” Mick brightens, and Mrs. Lipsky looks hopeful.

  I know what they’re thinking: Hugh was a mainstay of our circle, and he’s a wealthy nobleman with influence. But I say, “We can’t expect Hugh to help. Not after what happened to him.”

  Catherine looks grieved by the memory. Mick says, “What happened?” I didn’t want to upset Mick with the news when he was in the hospital, and I was afraid of what Mrs. Lipsky would think of Hugh, but now his secret is public knowledge.

  After I explain, Mrs. Lipsky murmurs, “Poor Hugh.”

  Mick says, “We can’t let Warren get away with this! Hugh ought to be glad to pay him back!” After everything they’ve been through together, his attitude toward Hugh has completely reversed, and Hugh is his comrade in arms.

  “Maybe Hugh is well enough now,” Catherine says. “Let’s go see.”

  #

  We travel to Argyle Square via the underground railway, in a crowded, noisy train filled with smoke and steam. We emerge at St. Pancras Station and blink in the morning light. Everything here seems normal, untouched by last night’s events. At Hugh’s house, I ring the doorbell, and when Fitzmorris lets us into the vestibule, I introduce my friends. He’s clearly surprised to see us—and me in male costume. His face is haggard with distress. When I ask what’s wrong, he says, “Lord Hugh tried to take his own life.”

  We’re speechless with shock. Mick looks confused, frightened, a child faced with the incomprehensible. Mrs. Lipsky puts her arm around him. Catherine and I blurt, “How—?” “When—?”

  “On Friday. He didn’t want me to tell anyone.”

  Attempting suicide is a sin that would add to his disgrace and enflame the scandal if it were made public.

  “He slit his wrists in the bathtub.” Tears well in Fitzmorris’s eyes. “It’s fortunate that I found him before he lost too much blood. The doctor was able to save him.”

  The image of Hugh lying unconscious in a tub while his blood colors the water red is horrific. I knew he was upset, but I never imagined he’d try to kill himself. Beautiful, clever, affectionate, blithe-spirited Hugh! How could we bear the loss of him?

  “We should go upstairs,” Fitzmorris says. “I don’t like to leave him alone.”

  He’s afraid Hugh might try again to commit suicide. I thought I was protecting him by staying away from him, but I should have been here to stop him. As we climb the stairs, my guilt multiplies. I shouldn’t have let him undertake the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

  In the bedroom, Hugh lies with his eyes closed, under a quilt. His face is alarmingly white except where the bruises have faded to pale blue; his matted blond hair seems drained of color; he looks like a marble effigy on a tomb. His arms lie atop the quilt, and his wrists are bandaged. T
he room is thick with the chemical smell of chlorodyne and a sweet alcoholic taint of laudanum. Fitzmorris arranges chairs around the bed. We sit; he quietly withdraws. I hold Hugh’s right hand, Catherine the left. She and I and Mrs. Lipsky blink back tears. Hugh’s fingers are limp in mine, cold even though the room is hot from the fire in the hearth. He slowly opens his sunken eyes, roused to reluctant consciousness. His pupils are dilated huge and black from the opium in the drugs.

  “Well. This is a surprise.” But Hugh’s voice is hollow, as if he’s incapable of any emotion except despair. An untouched breakfast tray sits amid the medicine bottles on the bedside table. The fire hisses and crackles in the ensuing silence.

  Catherine speaks up. “Why did you—?” Her voice trembles.

  “It seemed better than going on.”

  I should have realized that losing his family and social position was too much to bear. I feel so sorry for him. He must have brightened the lives of so many people besides me, and yet he thinks his life isn’t worth living.

  “Something’s happened,” Mick says. I can tell he’s aware that now is the wrong time to spring the news on Hugh, yet he’s eager to believe that if he can interest Hugh in our common concerns, everything will be normal again. He tells Hugh about the two murders and Mr. Lipsky’s arrest.

  Hugh listens without response.

  “We thought you might be able to help us save Mr. Lipsky.” Mick sounds disappointed but not willing to give up on Hugh.

  Hugh sighs. “Sorry, but I’m not much use right now.”

  “Don’t you know some important people?” Catherine asks. “Can’t you tell them Mr. Lipsky is innocent and ask them to get him out of jail?”

  “They don’t know me anymore. I’m a leper. They won’t do anything I ask.”

  Mick’s and Catherine’s faces fall. Mrs. Lipsky murmurs, “He needs to rest.” She, who needs help the most, doesn’t want him bothered while so ill. “We should go.”

  Catherine, Mick, and I don’t move. Hugh’s lethargy is contagious, and there’s a comfort in being together even now, as if we’re still more than a sum of our parts. Although I’m at wit’s end, I feel obligated to raise morale as Hugh once did, to fill his role as instigator.

  “There must be something we can do to save Mr. Lipsky,” I say.

  “Like what? Break him out of jail?” Mick utters a woeful laugh.

  Hugh closes his eyes. I can’t tell whether he’s listening or dozing.

  “Maybe you can ask PC Barrett to help,” Catherine suggests.

  Barrett, who left me on my own at the murder scene. “He won’t go against Commissioner Warren,” I say bitterly. The thought of Barrett and Warren brings on a resurgence of anger, the hot, molten steel inside me that straightens my sagging posture.

  “We can’t give up and let that rotter Warren win.” Mick’s face is flushed; he’s caught fire from my anger, and a desire for revenge has rallied his spirits as well as mine. “We have to prove Mr. Lipsky is innocent.”

  Catherine rubs her eyes; her lashes are clotted with black makeup. In her pink dress and fur stole, she looks like a child playing dress-up and weary of it. “Yes, we have to.” But when she lowers her hands, her gaze gleams as if with reflected flames. “How?”

  I know what she’s thinking: we’ve always relied on Hugh for initiative as well as morale. But my anger stimulates thought, inspiration, and grandiosity. “We find out who the other Ripper is.”

  “What good will that do? The other Ripper killed Liz. Mr. Lipsky was arrested for killing Kate. Even if we can find out who the other Ripper is, it won’t get him out of jail.”

  Once again, she’s voiced an unpalatable fact. But I see the situation with the clarity that extreme fatigue sometimes confers, when the usual inhibitions that limit the scope of our thoughts are dulled. My mind opens like the aperture of a camera, letting the light enter.

  “The police don’t know there are two Rippers.” They’re still looking at the picture with half of it cropped out. “We’ll discover who the other is, and we’ll find evidence that he killed not only Liz, but Martha or Polly.” There won’t be evidence that he killed Annie or Kate; Commissioner Warren was responsible for those murders. “We’ll give his name and the evidence to the police.” Unable to picture what evidence or how we would approach the police, I skip over those blank spaces in my plan. “They’ll realize Mr. Lipsky isn’t the Ripper and let him go.”

  “Yeah!” Mick says. Catherine and Mrs. Lipsky brighten. Hugh lies immobile in a drugged stupor.

  “Are we supposed to forget about Commissioner Warren?” Mick asks.

  I will never forget him. Someday, somehow, I will make him pay for everything he’s done. “First things first. We save Mr. Lipsky, then we tackle Commissioner Warren.”

  “All right. So how do we go about catchin’ Ripper Number Two?”

  Our new quarry now has a nickname. My instincts zero in on the most seemingly direct path to him. “We start again at the beginning.”

  27

  Overnight, the temperature plunged. Winter is coming on although it’s only the first of October. An icy wind blows away the vapor from our breath as Mick and I walk up Dorset Street at nine o’clock this Monday morning.

  “It’s good to be back in the game,” Mick says. “I just wish Hugh was with us.”

  I nod sadly. “Maybe Catherine will cheer him up.”

  Catherine is to spend the day with Hugh and the evening at the theater, which she’ll be escorted to and from by one of Mrs. Lipsky’s male Jewish neighbors. That leaves Mick and me to carry out our new plans. Mick’s company buoys me up. So does taking action on a new day, and a new chance to right wrongs. The anger is like a stove keeping me warm, cooking away fatigue, fear, and hopelessness. And I’m in my element—poking the wolf, courting danger.

  A crowd gathers around a street musician who plays an accordion and sings,

  “Has anyone seen Jack, can you tell us where he is,

  If you meet him you must take away his knife,

  Then give him to the women, they’ll spoil his pretty fiz,

  And I wouldn’t give him twopence for his life.”

  Jack the Ripper is now the subject of popular song.

  Mick and I enter Miller’s Court. The old tenements—built around a paved yard with a privy, a gas lamp, and a water pump, inhabited mostly by prostitutes—are quiet; the women who pay sixpence a night for a bed are asleep. I knock on the door of a room on the ground floor of house number thirteen. The window is broken.

  Mary Jane Kelly’s groggy voice calls, “Who’s there?”

  “Sarah Bain.”

  She mutters, shuffles, and opens the door. She wears a thin white nightdress under which her large breasts hang, their dark nipples visible. Her long hair is disheveled, her face puffy, and her sleep-crusted eyes glare at me.

  “So you were right. First Martha and Polly, then Annie, and now Liz and Kate. I ’spose you came to say, ‘I told you so.’”

  “No. Something more important. May we come in?”

  She glances indifferently at Mick, shrugs, and stands aside. The room contains an old wooden bed; her few belongings litter a table and washstand. Above the fireplace hangs a cheap print of “The Fisherman’s Widow”—a painting of a weeping young woman whose husband has drowned at sea. A coat hung over the window acts as a curtain and blocks the draft from the broken pane.

  Mary Jane’s belligerence subsides. “Thank ye for bein’ concerned about me, but it’s no use telling me to stay indoors at night. I would if I could, believe me. But unless I work, I can’t afford my lodgings.”

  “That’s about to change.” I reach into my satchel, take out a small purse containing the money that Mick stole from Commissioner Warren’s house, and hand it to her.

  Mary Jane opens it and exclaims, “Mother of God! Where’d you get this?”

  “You don’t need to know.” I think it’s ironic that Commissioner Warren’s money should be spent on keeping him a
nd his prey apart. Mick looks sorry to see the money go, but we agreed that this is the best use of his stolen goods.

  “You’re giving it to me?” Mary Jane’s blue eyes shine with tears. “Nobody’s ever done such a nice thing for me. Thank ye, Miss Bain! Now I’ll be safe!”

  #

  The sun plays hide-and-seek behind clouds and drifting smoke. The bookstores on Holywell Street look bright and colorful one moment, gray and dispirited the next. We stop at Russell’s Fine Books and peek inside. Mr. Russell, seated in his wheelchair, dusts bookshelves with a long-handled feather duster. Mick and I raise our eyebrows at each other, take a deep breath, and push through the door.

  Mr. Russell’s eyes bulge behind their spectacles. “You again!” He drops the feather duster and grips the wheels of his chair. “I shall call the police!”

  “Not so fast, old man.” Mick grabs the handles on the back of the wheelchair.

  Mr. Russell screams. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t like scaring a cripple, but Mr. Lipsky is suffering in jail, and necessity is the mother of ruthlessness.

  “Shut up,” Mick says, “or I’ll belt you.”

  “What do you want?” Mr. Russell cries.

  “The names and addresses of the customers who bought the photograph albums you showed us,” I say.

  “I already told you, they’re confidential!”

  “Get the ledger,” Mick says to me.

  I look around the bookshop, but I don’t see it.

  “It’s locked in the safe,” Mr. Russell says, frightened yet smug.

  “Give us the combination,” Mick orders.

  “I won’t!”

  “We’ll make a deal, Mr. Russell. You give us the names and addresses, and I’ll give you something I think you’ll like.” I open my satchel and remove an enlarged photograph, which I drop on the plaid blanket that covers his lap.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s Annie Chapman. She was murdered by the Ripper. It was taken at the morgue.”

  Mr. Russell traces Annie’s waxen face, cut throat, and gaping, empty stomach cavity with his soft fingertip. His round baby face flushes pinker, and a deep breath inflates his concave chest. He recognizes that the picture is a valuable moneymaking commodity. “How did you get it?” His voice is hushed with awe.