What Alice Knew

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  The space itself was exceptionally neat and well organized. There were separate areas where the frames were cut, carved, and painted, with the necessary tools placed carefully at each station. The frames were stacked in orderly rows, saws and files were kept together, and varnishes and paints were lined up neatly on the shelves.

  The three passed to the back of the room, and William tried the door. It was locked, and he nodded to Archie, who took out his piece of wire and again fiddled with the lock until it opened. They entered another room. Here there were no windows, so the area was dim. Henry gripped Archie’s hand, both because he genuinely had trouble seeing and because he feared they might find something from which he would need to shield the boy.

  Despite the dim light, the contrast to the front room was immediately apparent. The place was a jumble of disorder. Scores of canvases lay about in unruly heaps, making it difficult to pass. At first it seemed like these might be additional inventory that would eventually make their way to the outer room for framing, but as the brothers moved farther into the space, they could see that what lay there would never be framed. The pictures had been destroyed, cut to tatters, so that the linen hung in strips from the wooden stretchers. They had once been paintings of women. Here and there one could make out an arm, a breast, or a torso that had escaped the knife, although mostly one saw only flesh-toned strips hanging from the wooden supports like flayed skin.

  “My God!” said Henry with horror. To create under any circumstances was arduous—his worst moments as a writer came when he had to discard a work that refused to thrive. But to have one’s work fail again and again as it apparently had for Newsome—no wonder the man had gone mad. “It’s a graveyard,” he murmured.

  “Newsome and the girl must have left,” said William, looking around the appalling space with relief and leading them back to the main part of the shop. They were about to leave when Henry pointed out a low door behind the framing table that they had not seen when they came in.

  William walked over and turned the knob, which opened onto a steep flight of steps leading into a dark basement. A light from a lamp flickered below.

  “Someone’s down there,” said William, trying to fight back a sense of dread. “Stay here.” He took a file from the table—it would serve as well as anything for a weapon—and descended the stairs. It was eerily silent, though the light from the lamp continued to shine dimly from somewhere in the recesses below.

  At the bottom was a cavernous space dominated by a large wooden table. Rolls of cloth were arranged on shelves behind it, and piles of wood were bundled on the floor beneath. Hanging from hooks on the wall were knives of various sizes for cutting the cloth and wood for the creation of new canvases. If the space above were a graveyard, William thought, this was a birthing room. Each new canvas was like a life that had not yet been shaped by choice, a tabula rasa for the imprint of the imagination. Yet how fragile and short-lived was that innocent state. One touch of the brush and it was lost.

  The light from the lamp was coming from the far end of the space, and William crept quietly to what he soon saw was an alcove, hardly bigger than a closet, abutting the far end of the room. He took a breath and looked inside.

  The girl Sally was seated on a stool at the back of the alcove. She was undressed, not comfortable in being so, yet not ashamed either. She held herself with the sort of awkward pride that William recalled in the photograph of Polly Nichols. It was amazing how the idea of art aroused an instinctive reverence in people.

  Hunched at an easel in front of the girl stood a slight man in glasses. Although he was turned so that only part of his face was visible, William knew at once that he had seen the man before. He was the bespectacled youth who had conferred with Asher Abrams about framing during dinner. There was another piece to the puzzle, then. Newsome must have overheard his questions about the De Quincey volume and then attacked him in the park afterward. He had had the image of Sickert as the attacker in his head for so long that it took him a moment to adjust to this revised image. Indeed, for the space of a few seconds, he could not do it. He could not replace the one figure with the other in his mind’s eye.

  Newsome was painting in concentrated silence, yet even from the distance at which William was standing, he could see that the results were not promising. Newsome had drawn a preliminary sketch in keeping with Legros’s precepts, but the outline was shaky and uneven; it might have been the work of a child. And the brush, subject to regular bursts of movement, seemed beyond the control of the artist. William remembered having seen this sort of spasmodic activity in patients fixated on certain basic acts—washing their hands or buttoning their jacket—as if some outside force were compelling them to do these things against their will.

  Sally turned her head. Perhaps she had heard a creak in the floorboards or was tired of holding one position, but whatever it was, her gaze shifted so that William entered her line of vision. She gave a sharp cry of surprise, scrambled from the stool, and grabbed for her clothes.

  Newsome stopped his jabbing motion, his brush poised in midair. He seemed about to ask the girl what she was doing, and the look on his face seemed quizzical, until he suddenly registered the presence of an interloper. He turned sharply and faced William. “What are you doing here?” he demanded in a thin, reedy voice. It was a frightened whine, hardly the voice one would associate with a murderer. “Can’t a man paint a picture in peace?” His voice was pleading, and for a moment, William felt a great welling of sympathy for the slight figure before him and, with that sympathy, a fleeting doubt as to whether this poor soul could be guilty of such horrible crimes. There was hurt and fear in Newsome’s face, but not malevolence. Could the whole scene be an innocent one, a young man, sadly without talent, struggling valiantly to produce art?

  Sally had run from the alcove and across the larger room to where Henry and Archie stood at the top of the stairs. The boy threw his arms round her.

  “Go to Scotland Yard and tell them where you’ve been,” William called out loudly. “Wait for us there.” He had spoken with shrill authority, and he saw that his words had brought about a change in the visage of the figure before him. Newsome’s face, which had looked only sad and confused a moment earlier, contorted into an angry grimace.

  The children had clambered out of the shop, but Henry descended the stairs into the basement and was approaching the area where Newsome stood. What happened next was rapid and dreamlike. With a quick, surprisingly determined movement, Newsome darted from the alcove, took a knife from a hook on the wall, and grabbed Henry by the collar of his jacket, pressing the knife to his throat. William did not have a chance to raise the file he had been holding. He remained planted where he was, his face blank with shock.

  Henry too had no time to register what had happened, only to realize suddenly he had a knife at his throat. He could feel it there; indeed, it was so sharp that it had already made a shallow incision, and a trickle of blood had run onto his collar. Mrs. Smith would have a job with that, he couldn’t help thinking, even as he felt the sting of the cut and a sense of dread rise in him. Perspiration gathered on his forehead, and his body began to shake. He looked across at his brother. Countless times on the playground of their youth, William had come to his rescue, pushing the offender aside or saying something in his sharp boy’s voice that had the same effect. But what could William do for him now?

  Newsome pressed the knife harder against Henry’s throat, and there was another trickle of blood. How much of this could he take? Henry wondered desperately. Was the maniac going to hack him to death by degrees? He tried to remain still to avoid more pressure from the knife, though he was perspiring heavily and feared he would collapse, which might well cause the knife to slide down his throat, with God knew what result.

  William, who had remained frozen, staring at the scene before him, roused himself from his stupor and addressed Newsome. He tried to keep his voice calm and authoritative, though he could feel the effort as a physic
al strain on the muscles of his body. “What good would it do for you to hurt him?” he asked softly. “I’m the one you want. I’m the one investigating the case.”

  Henry murmured agreement. “Just tagging along,” he muttered faintly.

  Newsome did not appear to hear. He continued to grimace. Henry, fearing that the knife would slip, tried to hold his breath.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” William exhorted.

  The question seemed to agitate the attacker further, who, for the first time, raised his voice. “How do you know?” he cried. “Did they tell you? Did they advertise it?”

  William was confused. Hadn’t Newsome advertised his deeds himself with his letters to the newspapers and Scotland Yard? “You know that everyone knows what you did!” he exclaimed.

  Newsome seemed to grow wilder with this statement. His eyes darted about, and he pressed the knife closer. Henry’s teeth began to chatter.

  William recalled what had happened with Pizer during his visit to Broadmoor; he had somehow provoked the man to attack him. It was the same now, except it was not himself but his brother who was in danger. This fact made him feel sick with guilt and fear.

  “You need to go where you’ll be cared for,” he pleaded with Newsome. “You need to be helped.”

  “Helped?” The man’s voice had grown louder and more shrill. “Where they’ll know and stare? Like you and him and all the others!” He spit out the words wildly and pressed the knife with still more force against Henry’s throat. Henry’s eyes rolled up in his head.

  William paused. What he was doing wasn’t working. Indeed, it was making things worse. He must reevaluate, rethink the context in which he was responding. This was how he came up with original ideas: reseeing a situation from another angle, one that had been ignored because of convention or habit. Except it was one thing to resee in the pleasant confines of his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another to do so in a dark basement where a deranged killer had a knife at his brother’s throat. But this was precisely what he had to do. What use were his powers of thought if they could not be employed now, when Henry’s life was in danger?

  He willed himself to concentrate, to block out everything but the problem before him. What was inciting this man to such a frenzy? What was he afraid of? Suddenly he saw why Newsome was painting in a dimly lit basement alcove; why he painted with spasmodic, uncontrolled brushstrokes and responded with fear and then fury at being interrupted. He had not been following the pattern of the man’s increasingly enraged responses. Newsome’s mind was not on the women he had killed; they were only the by-products of the initial trauma of being discovered in the act of self-abuse.

  Brand a man a deviant, and you are likely to make him one. Newsome could not recover from what had happened to him that day at the Slade. He replayed that traumatic episode every time he tried to paint a picture, and it was the failure to paint that must have driven him to kill. The murders were repetitions too—furtive and performed with the repetitive stabbings that he had seen in the bodies of Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. They too were a reenactment of that original trauma. At the root of it all was shame. That had been the root of Pizer’s rage. The lesson was clear: deprive a man of his humanity, and be prepared for the consequences: a human being capable of God knows what.

  William addressed Newsome slowly and carefully, trying to incorporate his new understanding into his words. “I didn’t mean to disturb your privacy,” he said. “I was worried about Sally.”

  Newsome continued to press the knife to Henry’s throat, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.

  William continued. “We are all of us prone to do things that are…unseemly. What you did was unfortunate, but in no way deviant or unnatural. It was wrong to shame you.” He spoke gently, no longer as an investigator or even as a conventional scientist, but as a psychologist and a human being who could not only explain but soothe the turbulence of a disordered mind.

  Newsome blinked again and then spoke in a wavering voice. “I didn’t mean to do it. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known anyone was there. I thought they’d all left.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “They called me an animal.”

  “We are all animals. But like us all, you are a human being as well. What you did then was hardly the worst thing a man can do.” He did not say that Newsome had gone on to do the worst.

  Newsome gestured desperately toward the alcove, and his voice became a pitiful groan. “I can’t paint!”

  William considered this; then he walked slowly to the easel and turned the painting over. “There,” he said. “Now no one can see.”

  Newsome’s face relaxed.

  “Please take the knife from my brother’s throat. I know you don’t want to harm him.”

  Newsome loosened his grip, and Henry staggered over to William’s side. Released from the pressure of the knife, he felt a surge of well-being. There was something to be said for having your life threatened; you appreciated being alive afterward—if you got away.

  The atmosphere in the room had become almost serene. The man’s spiritual being had been awakened, William thought. He had been deprived of his humanity, which had destroyed his vocation, an irrevocable loss, deeply connected to who he was. William could understand this. He had suffered his own crisis of vocation, and it had almost cost him his sanity. For Newsome, it had, and worse—it had driven him to kill.

  William looked at the man before him again. How could this quivering mass of fear and insecurity have brutally killed those women? He felt again a momentary doubt. It was ridiculous to doubt, when Newsome had just threatened to kill Henry. He had seen the man’s capacity for violence with his own eyes. Besides, Newsome had a motive, a psychological profile that explained the Whitechapel murders with an admirable completeness. And still, the shifting tendency of his own mind, his incapacity to arrive definitely at any solid conclusion frustrated and unnerved him. Couldn’t he ever be sure? How was it that others seemed to settle on things and be done? Of course Newsome was Jack the Ripper. Everything pointed to it.

  “What should I do?” Newsome asked simply. He still held the knife, but he seemed more like a child than a threatening killer.

  William would have liked to tell him to pray—a minister would tell him that—but he was not a minister. He said nothing. He only stared at the man before him, not knowing what to do or what to expect.

  It was Henry who knew. As a novelist, he trafficked in endings, and he had found that life and art were not so very different in that respect. Besides, he had heard the sound of shouts outside the shop and could see that Newsome had heard them too. Abberline had found them; he would be inside in a moment, but it would be too late.

  Henry averted his eyes, but William, who did not realize what would happen, saw it, in what seemed slow motion: the glint of steel against the pale throat, the slash, first only a sweep of the hand, then a red line, then a gush of vermilion.

  By the time Abberline and his men clambered down the stairs, Peter Newsome’s body, his hand still clutching the knife, lay slumped on the floor beside a pile of newly stretched canvases.

  Jack the Ripper was dead.

  Epilogue

  London. 1911.

  Henry gazed around the gallery, looking for people he knew. Some seemed familiar. Perhaps he had met them at dinner parties or seen their pictures in magazines, but they were so young; really, too young for him to know. Beside him stood Sargent, his tall frame more hunched than usual. It was clear that John would have preferred not to be there at all.

  “You know I don’t like to go out,” he had told Henry when the invitation had come. He had grown reclusive since the death of his mother and sister, content only during his sojourns to America, when he was painting the ceiling of the Boston Public Library. It was as though all the portraits he had painted had soured him on people’s faces.

  Henry, by contrast, craved society even more now than he had in his youth. He had purch
ased a home in Sussex, where he lived most of the year, but he looked forward to his visits to London. The social chitchat was a relief from the locutions of his writing, which had grown more complex as he grew older. The weight of his verbiage was like his physical weight. It too grew greater every year, as Alice would have noted with disapproval. There was the weight of loneliness as well. Life in the country exacerbated it. When he wasn’t working, he had a tendency to brood, to recall a past that he could not change, that unlike his writing, he could not qualify or amplify with words.

  The invitation to this event had been particularly welcome. It had brought to mind the great adventure of twenty-three years earlier. Henry touched his throat retrospectively, recalling the madman’s knife. How dreadful it had been, but how wonderful, a sublime interlude of family solidarity, a return of sorts to a childhood idyll.

  They were both gone now, his brother and sister. Alice had been first; she had succumbed to a cancerous lesion on the breast, a paradoxical ailment, given the gruesome memento she had received from that notorious killer. But when the diagnosis had come, she had seemed almost pleased. She said she welcomed an illness that had the good taste to be real and malignant. “All those years in bed with nothing wrong with me. It’s a relief to finally suffer in a way that people can understand.”

  In the time that remained, she had rarely spoken of the Ripper investigation. When reference was made to the case, she changed the subject or announced she had a headache. And though Sargent would occasionally bring over his paintings for her to look at, she lost her interest in the fine arts. She ceased to follow the gallery shows and exhibitions or ask for the art-world gossip as she used to.

  One incident during this period stood out for Henry. It had occurred one afternoon toward the beginning of her illness. She already understood the gravity of her condition, but the pain had not yet become debilitating, and the sickness seemed to make her, if possible, more alert than ever. They would spend some of their pleasantest moments together during this time, whiling away the hours, as she macabrely put it, awaiting the Angel of Death.