The Ripper's Shadow

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “Allow me,” Hugh says. He’s white-faced and perspiring, and his shirt is red with blood.

  I gasp, wordlessly thankful he’s alive. He hits Dr. Poole on the head, but he’s so weak, his blow subdues Dr. Poole for only a moment. We take turns hitting Dr. Poole. He’s on top of Catherine. When it’s my turn, I’m not just hitting him, I’m hitting Commissioner Warren for attacking my friends, my mother for leaving me with doubts about my father. Each thud is an exuberant release that has little effect on Dr. Poole. Catherine claws his eyes. He hits her cheek with the knife handle. Catherine shrieks. Hugh takes the light stand from me, then collapses. I grab Dr. Poole’s coat and try to pull him off Catherine. He doesn’t budge.

  “Get out of the way, Miss Sarah!”

  Mick charges toward Dr. Poole, a broom handle held high in both hands. The anger that energized Hugh and me revived Mick, too. I fall away from Dr. Poole and land on my knees. Mick yells as he brings the broom handle down on Dr. Poole’s head.

  There’s a thudding, cracking sound. Dr. Poole jerks, then lies still. Catherine screams, writhing under him. Mick rolls Dr. Poole’s limp body off Catherine. Her legs thrash; she beats the air with her hands and sobs. Mick kneels beside her, seizes her wrists, and says, “Don’t cry, you’re safe now.”

  She blinks, sees him, and swallows a scream. He gently raises her to a sitting position.

  “Dr. Poole was following me down Aldgate High Street,” Catherine babbles. “I was almost here when I saw some men with lanterns and sticks coming.” The Mile End Vigilance Committee. “After they passed, I looked over my shoulder, and Dr. Poole wasn’t there. He must have gone to hide from them.” She spies me on the floor with Hugh. “I didn’t want to disappoint you, Sarah. I had to bring Dr. Poole here. So I went looking for him. When I found him, he started chasing me. I couldn’t get to Harrow Alley. I had to come the other way.”

  It wasn’t failure of wits that had almost cost Catherine her life, but loyalty.

  Mick helps her to her feet and says, “Dr. Poole can’t hurt you. I knocked him out.” He kicks Dr. Poole’s thigh. Dr. Poole doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make a sound. “See?”

  My anger dies down with a shuddering, sighing sensation, like a locomotive engine that’s run out of coal. Catherine stares at the inert Dr. Poole. She turns to Mick, and her dazed eyes fill with adoration. It’s an involuntary, bred-in-the-blood reaction of a woman to a man’s heroics. She presses her lips against Mick’s dirty cheek, then weeps violently against his shoulder. Mick doesn’t smile, but his chest swells; he looks ten feet tall. I glimpse the man he’ll become.

  “Oh, God.” Hugh’s voice echoes my horror at how badly we erred, our relief that everything turned out all right.

  We all look at one another, and a collective sob of joyful amazement issues from us.

  Leo rushes in with his men. Glad to see us alive and Dr. Poole laid flat, they do a double take and notice the cuts on Catherine’s hands, the bruises swelling on my face, and Hugh pressing a blood-drenched hand to his wounded arm.

  “Let me look at that,” Leo says to Hugh.

  Hugh strips off his coat and shirt. The wound is even worse than I thought—a deep, oozing gash on his left upper arm that continues down across his breast. Leo tears up his own shirt and fashions a tourniquet.

  PC Barrett groans and sits up. “What the hell is going on?”

  I’d forgotten about him. Barrett hauls himself to his feet and stands looking down at Dr. Poole. “Who’s this?” Everything has happened too fast for me to believe it, let alone comprehend the ramifications. I say, “It’s Dr. Henry Poole.”

  Barrett regards me with stunned recollection. He rubs the back of his head; it must ache from his fall. “The man you said is Jack the Ripper.”

  “What on earth brought you here?” Hugh asks.

  “I was walking around Whitechapel . . .” Barrett stops himself. I notice he’s wearing ordinary clothes, not his uniform; I remember that Inspector Reid fired him. He was watching for Commissioner Warren! My friends and I weren’t the only ones out to catch Jack the Ripper tonight. “I heard the girl’s screams.” He looks around the slaughterhouse, and comprehension dawns. “You set a trap for Dr. Poole. She—” he points at Catherine “—lured him here.”

  I square my aching shoulders. “Yes. We set a trap. And we caught him.”

  My friends and I exchange triumphant, exulting glances. We’re not sorry for what we did, and we don’t care who else knows. We four, risking our lives in the shadows behind the scenes, have accomplished what the police could not. Mick isn’t the only one who seems taller. The ground beneath my feet looks farther down than usual, and I don’t think it’s just because of the blow to my head.

  Barrett stares at me and shakes his head; I’ve exceeded his estimation of my nerve or my underhandedness. “Holy hell . . .”

  “You oughta thank us. We caught Jack the Ripper for you,” Mick says with insolent pride. “You better take him to jail before he comes to.”

  Barrett crouches beside Dr. Poole, who lies face up, eyelids sagging. He feels Dr. Poole’s wrist, leans an ear to his chest, looks up, and says accusingly, “He’s dead.”

  Shocked, we stare at Dr. Poole, then at one another. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We talked over our scheme, anticipating how it might play out, but a scenario in which we killed Dr. Poole never occurred to us.

  The flush of victory fades from Mick’s face. “I didn’t hit him that hard.”

  “Nor did Sarah and I,” Hugh says.

  There’s fresh, profuse, wet blood on the floor around Dr. Poole. When Barrett rolls Dr. Poole onto his stomach, I see a big, awful cleft in the back of his head. The weapon I mistook for a broom handle when Mick swung it lies beside Dr. Poole. It’s an axe whose blade is gory with blood, hair, and bits of shattered skull and grayish brain tissue. I wonder if Mick knew it was an axe. Hugh gags. I experience a sick, foreboding sensation that’s worse than nausea.

  Catherine, leaning on Mick, says, “Serves him right.” Her smile at Mick is brilliant, admiring.

  “You and your friends are in serious trouble, Miss Bain,” Barrett says, regaining a semblance of his policeman’s authority. “This was murder.”

  There’s danger as well as strength in friendship. Alone, none of us were capable of killing; together we are. Our triumph shrivels into fright. We knew we could get in trouble, but the reality is more disastrous than we anticipated. “We were only defending Catherine,” I hurry to say. “You saw him attacking her. If we hadn’t stopped Dr. Poole, she would be dead.”

  Barrett glowers at us. “I think a lot of other things happened before I got here. Just how was this trap for Dr. Poole supposed to work?”

  I explain. The blow to my head and the distrust in Barrett’s eyes make me less than articulate.

  “Maybe you were never going to hand Dr. Poole over to the police alive,” Barrett says. “Maybe you meant to kill him.”

  “Why would we?” Mick asks, incredulous.

  “You’re wanted in connection with the Whitechapel murders. You could have set Dr. Poole up to get yourselves off the hook. Maybe he didn’t really attack the girl. Maybe the four of you attacked him, and he was defending himself.”

  “He did attack me!” Catherine says. “Sarah took a photograph.”

  “Just let me develop it, and you’ll see.” My shot of Dr. Poole is our perfect counter against Barrett’s accusations. I hurry to my camera.

  It’s lying on the floor. It must have been knocked over during our fight with Dr. Poole. Exclaiming in dismay, I tilt the camera upright on its stand. It looks intact, but I hear a tinkling sound. My hands tremble and my heart thuds as I remove the exposed negative in its cartridge. Glass—countless tiny shards—rattles.

  “The plate is broken.” I see my disbelief on Hugh’s, Mick’s, and Catherine’s faces.

  Through all our misadventures, photography is the one thing that always worked. It gave us the pictures of the people who bought
my boudoir pictures, of Annie Chapman at the morgue, and of Commissioner Warren’s African photograph. But now photography has failed us when it mattered the most.

  “So much for proof that Dr. Poole is the Ripper,” Barrett says, sounding vindicated yet disappointed.

  “But you believe he is!” I cry, threatened again by the prospect of my friends and I losing one another, our liberty, and our lives.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. Inspector Reid won’t believe it, and neither will the rest of the police force. When Reid finds out about this, he’ll string all of you up himself.”

  We thought the problem of Dr. Poole was solved, but now that he’s dead, it’s as if his hands are clamped around our ankles and he’s dragging us down to hell with him.

  “How’s Inspector Reid going to find out?” Mick asks.

  Hugh stands beside Mick and Catherine. “He doesn’t have to.”

  I move close to my friends. “Unless you tell him.”

  Confusion on Barrett’s face turns to dismay as he realizes he’s outnumbered by four people who’ve just colluded in a man’s death. I feel an exhilarating sense of power, and there’s a new fierceness in Hugh’s and Mick’s eyes. To kill a fellow human is to cross a line, and crossing that line has changed us. Having learned that we’re capable of killing, the compunction against it seems less insurmountable than before.

  We killed Dr. Poole to protect one of us.

  We could kill again to protect all of us.

  The impulse comes upon us with a heat like fire. In this moment, I realize that at some point I fell in love with Barrett, but I feel nary a hint of chagrin, because I’m not in love with him now. He’s the enemy. Hugh and I glance at the light stand, Mick at the axe beside Dr. Poole. As Barrett reaches for his nightstick, then remembers he’s not in uniform, panic glints in his eyes. Leo and the slaughterers move to block the exits, for if Barrett reports us, he’ll also report them. Catherine looks around for a weapon, ready to help Hugh, Mick, and me do what’s necessary.

  Then the impulse fades. The fire in us isn’t hot enough. Killing once in the fever of a reckless moment isn’t the same as killing in cold blood. Breath seeps from us; our muscles relax. The turbulence in the atmosphere settles. Leo and his men shrug and move away from the doors. Astonished disbelief is written all over Barrett; he’s wondering if what he thinks just happened really happened.

  “Our fate is in your hands,” Hugh says solemnly.

  Our fate has been in Barrett’s hands since the day that he first came to my studio. I just didn’t know it until now. Every subsequent time that he came back and then left, I was relieved because danger had temporarily passed yet saddened by unfulfilled need and impatient to feel the danger and excitement—to feel fully alive—again. Now, as I wait for Barrett to leave this time, I feel only dread; he has the power to destroy us, and we’re not ruthless enough to destroy him first.

  Silent and looking numb, Barrett moves toward the door. This is the last time I’ll see him until my murder trial, when he testifies against me. He stops to gaze at Dr. Poole’s corpse, as if weighing the value of justice for Jack the Ripper against the value of the lives of the people who would be punished for his murder. The meat-and-iron smell of Dr. Poole’s blood thickens the air. I put my arm around Mick. Catherine’s hand grips mine. Hugh stands with the three of us.

  Barrett looks up. The numbness, confusion, and astonishment are gone from his manner; his eyes are clear and alert. “There’s so much blood on this floor, nobody’ll notice that some’s human. We just need to get rid of the body.”

  We.

  In this moment, Barrett becomes one of our circle. My heart soars. It’s partly because he’s not going to report us, partly because my falling in love with him wasn’t a case of poor judgment. Despite all that Barrett has done to hurt me, he’s taken my side when it mattered most, and he’s revealed his worth as a man. He’s given me, and my friends, our lives. We’re too stunned to thank him for forsaking the law he swore to serve.

  “I own a rendering factory,” Leo says.

  Hugh finds his voice. “I’ll never complain about the smell from those places again.”

  Leo brings the wagon full of animal debris. Two of his men heave Dr. Poole’s body into the wagon, cover it with bones, gristle, and hooves, and drive it away into the fog. Barrett mops blood into the drain while Leo sluices the floor with buckets of water.

  My heart begins another descent. All the mopping in the world won’t erase what we’ve done. Even if we’re not punished for it, we’ll have to reckon with it eventually. And Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror isn’t over. We’ve hauled our net of fish up from the water, only to discover that there was a big hole in the net and the shark in the bottom has swum out.

  “You and your friends should go,” Barrett says to me. “Where can I find you?”

  That I can trust him now, and will see him again, is meager comfort. “The Jews Temporary Shelter in Spitalfields.”

  Dr. Poole will never kill again, but Commissioner Warren is yet at liberty, and Mr. Lipsky is yet to be exonerated.

  42

  In the dining room at the Jews Temporary Shelter, Mick, Hugh, Catherine, and I breakfast on smoked herring, braided egg bread, buckwheat porridge, and tea. It’s Tuesday morning; we’ve been here for the two nights since we dispatched Dr. Poole. We wear plain dark clothes provided by a local charity. My head and Catherine’s are covered with shawls, like the Jewish women’s. We could pass for immigrants, but we take precautions—keeping to ourselves, eating our meals after the other residents have finished. Between meals, we hide upstairs.

  Hugh has the private sickroom. A Jewish doctor stitched his wounds and gave him medicine, but he became feverish and delirious. Mick sat vigil by him the whole time. This morning, Hugh felt well enough to get up. Now Mrs. Lipsky brings the newspapers, and he thanks her with a smile.

  Catherine and I have separate quarters, too. The cuts on Catherine’s hands and legs are healing, and she eats with a good appetite, but at night she wakes screaming from nightmares. The bruises on my face are purple, my headache, dizziness, and nausea have abated, and the cut on my back is only skin deep, but at night I lie awake, reliving the events in the slaughterhouse, pondering what we might have done differently, as if I’m rubbing them into my mind with sandpaper. We accomplished Hugh’s “one splendid thing,” but no matter that we put Dr. Poole to rights, Martha, Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, and Mary Jane are still dead, and we killed a man.

  The reckoning has begun. The consequences of our actions haven’t. We’re suspended in a state of waiting. Leo disposed of Dr. Poole’s remains, but we haven’t had word from Barrett, and because we’re still fugitives, we rely on the newspapers to tell us what’s going on in the world.

  “The inquest for Mary Jane Kelly’s murder was held yesterday,” Hugh says, reading while he eats. “The verdict was willful murder against some person or persons unknown.”

  We don’t know whether it was Dr. Poole or Commissioner Warren who killed her. We probably never will.

  I skim the newspaper. “There’s no mention of Dr. Poole. If anyone’s reported him missing, it didn’t make the papers.”

  Hugh sits up straight. “Hell’s bells! Look at this!” He holds up the front page. The headline announces, “Sir Charles Warren Resigns.” He reads the story aloud.

  “‘On Monday evening, the Home Secretary announced that Sir Charles Warren, the chief commissioner of police, has tendered his resignation. In a brief interview, Sir Charles declined to offer a full explanation as to the reason for his resignation, but he did state that the Home Office’s interference in the Police Department has been a great grievance to him. He also stated that he did not resign on account of the Whitechapel murders or the police force’s failure to catch the perpetrator.’”

  After we exclaim with shock, I say, “There must be more to the story.”

  Carriage wheels rattling outside precede the sound of the door opening
and footsteps in the hall. More immigrants must be arriving. Before we can hide, a man staggers into the room, a Jew with a long, straggly beard and mustache, dressed in black clothes too large for him. Mrs. Lipsky claps her hands over her mouth, sobs, runs to the man, and throws her arms around him. It’s Mr. Lipsky!

  He holds his wife and kisses her forehead while she weeps. His hollow eyes well with tears. They murmur endearments to each other in Russian. Catherine and I are crying, too, for their joy and our own. Mr. Lipsky has lost much weight, and his skin has a gray pallor, but he smiles at Hugh, Mick, Catherine, and me.

  “Knock me over with another feather,” Hugh says, wiping his eyes.

  He shakes Mr. Lipsky’s hand and slaps his back. Catherine, Mick, and I hug him. “How’d you get out of jail?” Mick asks.

  Into the room walks Barrett in police uniform. A sly smile plays across his face. “The charges against Mr. Lipsky have been dropped.”

  We clamor with bewildered excitement. “But why—? How—?”

  “Abraham, you’re so thin! I must feed you.” Mrs. Lipsky turns to Barrett and says with heartfelt sincerity, “Thank you for bringing my husband back. Have you eaten?”

  “I could use a cup of tea,” Barrett says.

  He drinks it at the table with Catherine, Hugh, Mick, and me. The Lipskys sit at another table by themselves. Mrs. Lipsky plies her husband with food, and he eats hungrily while he tells her in Russian the story that Barrett tells us.

  “Yesterday, some police officers searched a house in Stepney,” Barrett says. “They found a photograph of Commissioner Warren with a pile of dead African women. There were also three brass rings that were identified as belonging to Annie Chapman.”

  I never expected those items to come to light. “How did they know to search the house?”

  “They received an anonymous tip. It said Jack the Ripper lives there.”

  I realize what must have happened. “Anonymous?”

  Barrett looks over his shoulder, pretending to think that my pointed gaze is aimed at someone else.