Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  I found him soaked and shivering near the statue of the Virgin.

  It was past the early services and before the next. No one was near. The great cathedral pillars soared around us like stalactites and stalagmites the ages had shaped into a vast cavern of frozen wax turned to stone by some poor excuse of a Midas.

  I had been nurtured in this world of incense and beeswax candles and sanctimony, but the savagery of the steppes and the sweeping riders of the East is in my veins and my holy water is now blood and not wine.

  “What is it?” I crooned, holding him as Mother Church does sinners.

  His teeth were chattering, his fabled strength a limp rag. So does the God of Christians magnify weakness.

  “I am crucified,” he whispered in the language that we share.

  It is hard to offer spiritual advice to a demon.

  “Tell me your trouble.” I care for no one. Well, one. But that is an aberration I will deal with later.

  “Tell me your trouble,” I crooned. He is a beast, after all, and responds to simple things. Simple sins. Simple falsities, simple lies.

  “I am torn! I am torn,” the tearer cries. Terror.

  “Hush. How?”

  “I flew with the hunter. Above the wooden rooftops, over the gilded dome of the church, over the marsh and the firs, the mountains and the spires, over the roof of the world. I see myself suspended over the dome of the Temple, tempted by the Devil to dash myself onto stones and sin. I see myself suspended over domes, great gilt domes in a great gilt city, on my own holy power, dashing the Devil onto stones and eternal fires. Will I be in Heaven, or in Hell? What is holy? What is power?”

  “Both. Power is holy. Holy is power.”

  “And sin?”

  “Sin is . . . salvation.”

  “Yes, yes! We sense that in my village. We must sin to be saved.”

  I couldn’t restrain a shrug. I only recognized the first part of that sentence, to which we all serve life terms. We must sin or be sinned against. The rest is delusion.

  He raked his hands—claws—into the tangled wet hair at his temples, his eyes as wild as a stallion’s.

  “I have come out of the wilderness, walking for months, to seek salvation. I have come to this stone city, and others like it, to find fellow sinners and fellow saints.

  “But their wines are weak and their stomachs as well. The horses are fettered and the women . . . the women refuse, or demand pay! It was not like that in my village,” he added drunkenly. “No one drank deeper, or rode faster or farther, or sang louder, or danced longer, or cursed harder, or loved more women, willing women, women who couldn’t resist. . . .”

  My glance lifted to the Virgin’s simpering face. She resisted him, too, but he didn’t see it.

  “This is a foreign city,” I consoled him. “You have come to learn about foreign cities, and what you may accomplish in them.”

  And so have I.

  “I will go to a finer foreign city than any. I will be a power higher than any ruler. I will bring myself up so high that I will bring them all down.”

  He let himself sprawl against the wall, took a long draught from the thick pottery bottle in his hand. He drank as if it were water, when I knew that the slightest swallow was scouring liquid fire.

  “I must go to the Gypsies,” he said, “and stroke their horses and hear their violins and have their women. My mind screams from the silence of these cities, of these stone blocks, houses of God, and houses of women.

  “I have sinned.” He buried his shaven boy’s face in his huge callused hands, in which he clutched a crude wooden cross. His anguish was genuine. It was most interesting.

  He is a very young man with the broad shoulders of a boar, of only medium height but with brute strength that multiplies when fueled by his erratic emotions, or the always reliable liquor. Even he does not know his own age. He thinks he is around twenty, give or take a few years.

  Peasants are so refreshing, unspoiled.

  32.

  Sherlock the Shredder

  A did not show the slightest trace of emotion, and gave no

  explanation of the motive or circumstances of his horrible deed.

  He was a psychopathic individual, and occasionally subject to

  fits of depression. . . .

  —RICHARD VON KRAFFT-EBING, PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS

  The light under my bedchamber door was the faintest sliver, but I was able to ascertain the time on my locket-watch by the mingled moonlight and gaslight sifting through in my window: 2:00 A.M.

  Though my heart was pounding, my mind told me that such a phenomenon must be investigated.

  I pushed my feet into my icy slippers and donned my dimity dressing gown, then slowly opened my door.

  The heavy hinges did not squeak. I had long moments to examine the scene: Irene, hair down, poring over the Ripper papers and my notes by the light of an oil lamp.

  I shuffled into the outer room, and she looked up, her finger already at her lips to demand silence.

  The pleasure that filled me was immense. This was something she did not wish Elizabeth to know. Our old equilibrium seemed fully established again as I slipped into the empty chair at her side and raised my eyebrows.

  Not only my painstaking list of the Ripper suspects and their specifics lay scattered over the table’s surface. So did new pages filled with Irene’s large, looping penmanship.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  She whispered back. “Trying to determine which suspect was Sherlock Holmes.”

  My toes curled in my slippers. Not only was Irene confiding in me and not that upstart Elizabeth Pink, but she was attempting to implicate Sherlock Holmes in the Whitechapel horrors!

  I really could not imagine a more blissful moment, except that Quentin Stanhope would walk through the passage door and join us.

  “Height is the key,” Irene said. “Except for the last victim, who was attacked in her bed apparently, all of the victims were of short stature. You see what that means?”

  “Ah, they were easier to attack.”

  “On the streets. And,” she added to herself, “in the act.”

  The Act. I was informed enough to know that this was not a portion of a stage play. More than that I did not wish to know, but perhaps it was necessary that I know some small bit more.

  “I do not understand, Irene.”

  “You understand my . . . implications about the bizarre piece of furniture in the maison de rendezvous.”

  I nodded like a student spouting back algebraic formulas. “It was a kind of bed, designed for immoral purposes, so that the . . . gentleman (here I thought of the rotund Bertie and nearly gagged) need not recline. Or could recline on a surface even with the floor, so he should not exert himself. Unduly. For whatever reason.”

  “Excellent! You have the gist of it anyway. But in Whitechapel, where the likes of the Prince of Wales would not usually set boot toe, the women there most often did not recline. Do you understand what I mean?” She eyed me with some concern.

  “Oh! Like sheep, you mean. In Shropshire. Why did you not say so plainly? They always . . . stood up.”

  “I would not know, but apparently you do. Sheep. Yes. But in Whitechapel the Ripper who went to the slaughter laid them down as he cut their throats. They were dead by the time they touched ground, and felt nothing, thank God, when he went to his real work.”

  “The mutilations.”

  She nodded.

  “We had people in the country, men, I suppose, who mutilated animals on occasion. The poor beasts would be found in the fields, made evil work of. Were they attacked by these same sort of men who kill women?”

  “I don’t know, Nell. Krafft-Ebing notes that young boys who torture and kill animals often advance to higher forms of life to destroy.”

  “I am glad that I do not read German,” I said with a shudder.

  “But you have lived in Shropshire, and that was apparently enough to glimpse the work of som
e Jack the Ripper or another.”

  “True. All things come to Shropshire. So what is your point, Irene, about Sherlock Holmes in Whitechapel?”

  “Only that he was at a distinct disadvantage. Like Godfrey, he is a man well above average height.”

  “As is Quentin,” I said complacently.

  “But Quentin was not in Whitechapel. Nor Godfrey. We know that Sherlock Holmes was, because he told us so. Why did he do that, do you think?”

  “He wished to confound me?”

  “He wished to confound me also, and to warn us that he has been active in this case since the beginning. And to tell us that the suspects for the role of Ripper are wider and broader, and taller, than we may think.”

  “So—?”

  “So. I am looking for Sherlock Holmes in Whitechapel. I am sure he went there in disguise. Perhaps several. I suspect it is true that, in disguise, he was identified as a suspect. I ‘suspect’ that this amused him mightily. I also suspect that if we determine where and when he was identified, however erroneously, we shall know a great deal more about the more likely suspects for the crimes.”

  “What of the mad upholsterer who fled to France?”

  “We should definitely pursue him, but in what way I am not sure.”

  “So you don’t think that Sherlock Holmes really did it?” I had not intended to sound so disappointed, but I could not prevent it.

  She tilted her head to consider the idea with as much dispassion as Sherlock Holmes himself considered the impression of a footprint.

  “It is not impossible. Mr. Holmes shows the same unusual lack of emotion that is required to commit such vile acts. He is a man driven by enthusiasm, who may descend into great depths of melancholia. In many ways he is a typical actor, like Henry Irving. Poor Bram! Devoted to that monster of self-pride, brilliant but brutal to all around him. Only Ellen Terry could survive Irving’s monstrous self-indulgence, and she does, with grace.”

  “I do not think that these other theatrical people are involved, although it would cheer me up considerably to implicate Sarah Bernhardt.”

  Irene laughed, though she choked the sound behind the offices of her palm. “Sarah on the prowl in Whitechapel. Quite the comedy.”

  “She dresses in male garb, as do you.”

  “Ah.” Irene eyed me again. “A woman dressed as a man could have committed the crimes. And the height would be no problem in that case! Thank goodness that Sarah and I have our whereabouts strictly accounted for during the Autumn of Terror. Did you not see us both then? You are our alibi.”

  “Hmmph,” I said, which I always did when I had nothing more substantial to contribute.

  Irene moved her papers around like parts of a puzzle. “No, Nell. However fascinating it is to speculate, I keep coming back to the mathematical facts. And they are very clear. There is only one suspect who could possibly be Sherlock Holmes, and that is in the case of the third victim, Elizabeth Stride.”

  “She is the one who was only killed.”

  “Yes, if you can call having your throat slashed being ‘only killed.’ “ Irene shot me a quick, forgiving smile. “In the cases of the Whitechapel Ripper, that was indeed a boon.” She searched through the papers until she found and laid two atop each other.

  “If you remember, Nell, Liz Stride was the most widely seen victim the night of her death.”

  “Busy about her disgusting business, you mean.”

  “Now, Nell. These women had lives aside from the way they earned their pence. In fact, Liz had earned sixpence that day for cleaning some rooms at Flower and Dean Street. The woman who oversaw the lodging house she had cleaned paid her as they shared a drink at the Queen’s Head public house.”

  “Earn an honest sixpence, and she spends it on drink the moment after.”

  “It was a friendly round with the woman who employed her. Men celebrate such transactions every day in the same way, and are thought no less for it.”

  “By me they are.”

  Irene sighed. I was interrupting her declamation. “Anyway, Liz Stride was at the Queen’s Head at 6:00 P.M.”

  “Which queen was that? The head’s, I mean? One of Henry VIII’s, whom you intend to impersonate?”

  “I don’t know which beheaded queen the pub is named after! That is not pertinent. What is pertinent is that Liz Stride was next seen by a barber and charwoman of her acquaintance at her common-lodging house on Flower and Dean Street at 7:00 or 8:00 P.M. She borrowed a clothes brush, as she intended to go out, and left a piece of velvet with the charwoman to look after.”

  “Velvet?”

  “Velvet. Mary Ann Nichols had a ‘jolly bonnet.’ Annie Chapman had two combs, a piece of rough muslin, and a bit of envelope containing two pills in her pocket, which the Ripper slashed open as he did her body. Missing were two or three brass rings she wore on her fingers. They couldn’t have been taken for reasons of robbery, having no value. This killer invaded every odd corner of their lives. These women had so very little, but what they had, they treasured. Including life, I would think.”

  I could say nothing to that. I rustled among the papers, then glanced to the drawn curtains to Elizabeth’s sleeping alcove.

  “She sleeps like the dead,” Irene noted in a spectral whisper. “She suffers from that brittle energy of the young, which collapses upon itself if called upon to do too much.”

  I nodded. We were not quite so young, so it was we two again on the case, as it had been in London and, I hope, ever shall be.

  “Look,” I said, resuming my role of sister sleuth. “This journal says that Liz Stride was seen at 11:00 P.M. by two laborers outside the Bricklayer’s Arms. She was with a man dressed in a black morning coat with a billycock hat and a thick black mustache. Oh dear. They were hugging and kissing in the rain. Most inappropriate.”

  “The rain? Or the hugging and kissing?”

  “Both.” I did not want to appear prejudiced against one over the other.

  Irene gave me her most ironic look. “And then there was the fruit seller with the appropriate name of Packer. He sold some of his wares to a woman who looked like Liz Stride and a man of medium height with a dark complexion within the next hour.”

  “Oh!” I said, having read ahead. “That’s right. Liz Stride was the one the man made the odd remark to.”

  “As overheard by another laborer on Berner Street just before midnight.” Irene’s forefinger touched the quote as she declaimed in a husky voice eerily masculine. “The couple kissed,’ ” she read, “and then he said, ‘You would say anything but your prayers.’ ” Such an odd remark, almost threatening. Very theatrical really.”

  “The man who spoke,” I reminded her, “was about five-foot-six, middle-aged and stout and clean-shaven! I say this was another couple. The man seemed familiar with her, although all these men seemed overfamiliar with all these women . . . I mean, in a personal way.”

  “But what are we to make of his clerklike attire: small black cutaway coat, dark trousers, and a round cap with a peak?”

  “Oh, I don’t know! These men who are reported with the soonto-be-dead women all dress in the oddest fashion, half-gentlemanly and half like a rough worker.”

  “Within forty-five minutes, a police constable saw a man and woman in Berner Street, opposite the side where the body was later found. This man was five-foot-seven, under thirty, with a dark complexion and small black mustache. He wore a black diagonal cutaway coat, a white collar and tie, and carried a sinister parcel just the right size for a savage assortment of knives. The woman wore a red flower pinned to her jacket.”

  I put my hands to my head. “It’s simple. The Ripper traveled with a medieval torture rack and simply stretched himself taller on every sighting.”

  Irene smiled. “There was Morris Eagle, who was attending a Jewish man’s socialist club on Berner Street at 12:30 A.M. He saw nothing, one of the few witnesses who blessedly had no confusing sightings to report.

  “But then came Israel Schwartz.
You can see why Baron Rothschild is concerned. The Jewish population of Whitechapel thronged around the scenes of the crime. Now I would love to have Mr. Israel Schwartz sitting at this table with us, for his was the most interesting sighting of all.”

  I glanced askance at the empty third chair around our table. I did not care to have any odd Whitechapel witnesses in our presence, innocent though they might be of any wrongdoing.

  “He saw the woman with the flower with a man five-foot-five, around thirty, dark hair, small mustache, fair complexion, wearing a dark jacket and trousers with a black peaked cap. This is the man who tried to throw her down, and succeeded. She screamed,” Irene noted.

  “I believe that she was the only Ripper victim to scream.”

  “I believe that you’re right. But here is where it gets astounding. Mr. Schwartz also saw a man across the street watching this scene. He was five feet eleven inches tall and around thirty-five years old, smoking a clay pipe. Fresh complexion, light brown hair and mustache. Dark overcoat and an old black hard felt hat with a wide brim.”

  “He is the tallest man in the case.”

  “Indeed. The man who was accosting Liz Stride called out ‘Lipski’ at him.”

  “Then he knew him,” I concluded.

  “That’s what Israel Schwartz thought. He took them for accomplices at robbery and ran away, fearing they wanted no witnesses and that the first man had warned his partner ‘Lipski’ to take care of Schwartz.

  “But no one followed the fleeing laborer, who fled to a nearby railway arch.”

  “Here it is! Look, Irene!” I cried. “The incident is in the Police Gazette for October 19, 1888. But the only description given is of the man who was assaulting Liz Stride. There is no mention of this man across the way he called Lipski. Do you think the papers were suppressing any Jewish connection because they feared attacks on the community?”

  “Possibly.” Irene’s lips pursed. “It’s true that within hours Sir Charles Warren would order erased the fascinating assertion that ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing,’ which was found near the body of the evening’s second victim, Catharine Eddowes. She, by the way, lived with a porter named John Kelly at Flower and Dean Street.