City of Darkness

by Kim Wright

  “Not such a bad walk either, Miss. Lighted streets, enough people, a straight five minute path down to the docks. Isn’t that so, Lucy?”

  “A straight path,” Lucy parroted. She was obviously trained to agree with anything he said, and Cecil wondered if the bruises up and down the girl’s arms were put there courtesy of this well-dressed, soft-spoken man. In a room full of idiots, Cecil reflected, Lucy was queen. She had been sniveling that she was afraid of the Ripper all evening, with short pauses to agree to provide an alibi for every thug in Christendom, and it did not seem to have occurred to her there might be any contradiction in these two activities.

  But the man had been clever to draw Lucy into the conversation, because the corroboration of a woman seemed to sweep away whatever doubts Leanna may have had. She smiled again, turned and made her way back to table where Emma was weeping.

  “Smart to send to docks,” Micha said. Like Cecil, he had observed the exchange in a shrouded silence, but the minute Leanna moved out of earshot he had stood up. “Dead end, yes?”

  Quite right, Cecil thought. A dock is the ultimate dead end street. In the black-specked mirror behind the wall he could see Leanna pulling Emma to her feet and the two of them making their way out the door. The girls would not only be in the most dangerous part of town, but cornered. Micha laughed and pulled on his coat, pausing behind Cecil to make a single slashing motion with his hand, drawing his imaginary knife around Cecil’s throat in a gesture that eerily mimicked that morning when they had all been collected around the family breakfast table, reading their newspapers. Tom had made just such a motion on Leanna, slipping behind her, his arm around the waist, brandishing his finger as a weapon and they had all sat in the comfort of their sunny breakfast room and laughed. How long ago had that been? No more than a few weeks, but it seemed to Cecil as if these events had occurred in another lifetime. He gazed into the cracked mirror behind the bar and watched as Micha stepped into the streets and turned in the direction of the docks.

  7:48 PM

  Tom was not making good time on his wounded ankle and had nearly lost track of John twice. The figure of the man and the woman had faded almost to grayness within the fog and the two of them kept turning. This was the nature of the streets around the waterfront – they grew more winding, less linear or predictable and what seemed to be a busy thoroughfare sometimes trickled down to an alley. It seemed as if the entire neighborhood had been cruelly designed to deceive outsiders, as interwoven and illogical as a web.

  A woman brushed against him. Later he would realize it was an attempt to catch his attention, to draw him into an alley or a bed, to initiate a transaction that would end with his money in her pocket, his seed between her legs. But at the time, he instinctively stepped aside to allow her passage, murmuring an apology as if he had been the one who’d jostled her. It all took no more than a few seconds, but when Tom looked back up John was out of sight.

  7:48 PM

  The girl had been polite, as ladies always pretend to be, but something in her voice has brought it all back. The memory of his fall from grace, the beginning of the long slow descent of his life. She had asked for a cab. She had tossed her head. He could imagine her on that bright lawn, looking down at his hands, seeing the blood there and asking – in that cool, superior voice - “What have you done?”

  The ladies. How they lift you up and how they set you down.

  He shakes his head, tries to clear the jumble of memories, to concentrate. The whores, yes, of course the whores must be punished, but their crimes are miniscule compared to the ones who called themselves ladies, the ones who looked down their small white noses, the ones who could fully see you no matter how cleverly you hid, the ones who knew at a glance all the bad things you had done. Mary Kelly, walking with her books. Everyone said she was kind, all those fools sobbing over her at the pub, but once he had spoken to her in the street and she had literally drawn back from him, as if she too could see the blood on his sleeve. Like Katrina with her yapping dogs, like this girl who had stood at the bar of a broken down pub and calmly requested transport. They could see it, they could see him, every one. Whenever they came near he heard the old question. Whathaveyoudone,whathaveyoudone, whathaveyoudone.

  He checks his pocket watch. He has told the beast to meet him at half past eight, and he wishes to arrive first. To have the chance to prepare himself, to prepare the space.

  He slips off his barstool, heads towards the door. He has not bothered to pay for his beer. But then again, he never does.

  7:50 PM

  No more than a minute later, Trevor Welles was entering the Pony Pub and approaching the barmaid. He knew this place and he even knew this girl. He had spoken with her several times since the night of the double murders, eventually revealing himself as a detective. She seemed to remember, for she greeted him with enthusiasm. Some people liked to be interviewed by the authorities, Trevor had noticed. It was a strange thing, for having the police come to your door in most neighborhoods was social disaster. But in the East End, it seemed to give one a certain status among her peers.

  He described Emma and Leanna to the girl and she said, yes, they’d been there. No more than minutes before. She glanced around for confirmation, but all the men who had been seated nearby seemed to have scattered too.

  Trevor felt like pounding the bar in frustration. The girl said they had entered with a man called Georgy but had left alone. She was sure of this. She nodded emphatically as she spoke.

  Trevor could only hope the fact they’d left alone meant the funds had exchanged hands and this Georgy was done with his game. Most of the bobbies were congregated along Merchant Street, so if the women were seeking transport, as they almost certainly were, someone would undoubtedly intercept them.

  Trevor turned to go. He was almost to the door when the girl called after him.

  “Oh, Sir, one other thing. They’re headed to the waterfront.”

  7:59 PM

  Leanna had long since given up on consoling Emma. Instead she linked arms with the girl, concentrating on keeping her upright and mobile, and trying to take note of the sign posts they passed. She didn’t know what the man at the bar considered a five-minute walk but they had been on the streets for nearly twenty, with no waterfront in sight. This was a disaster. No one could blame Emma, who had been in a stupor for days. It was Leanna who should have seen the truth. That the man at the bar had been a bad man too, possibly in consort with Georgy, equally intent on misleading them. Leanna shuddered at the sight of the mean houses with rags stuffed in the shattered windowpanes, at the pinched, yellow look the women all wore beneath their garish makeup, at the mingled smell of sweat, urine, and wet wool which seemed to steam from everyone they passed, choking her and occasionally making bile rise up in her throat.

  Yet Mary Kelly had lived in these streets and John and Trevor walked them every day. Even Aunt Gerry, and those society matrons Leanna sometimes dismissed as foolish, came to Whitechapel regularly to dispense food and clothing. Why was she the only one too cowardly to look into the face of need, the one who was made literally sick by the stink of poverty?

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” she said, tugging at Emma, who had paused on a corner. The street lamps were a comfort as they passed below them at certain intervals on each block, not only because they allowed her to read the signposts, but also the faces of the people. It was like walking between waves of darkness and light. As the girls would leave the glow of one lamp, Emma seemed to strain forward to the next, but Leanna was in the pattern of looking back at the light behind them as a way of marking time and distance.

  When they came to the darkest part of the seventh block, she glanced behind her and saw a faint shadow moving under the street light they had just passed. Leanna continued to look back, but did not tell Emma. There had been men pressed all around them earlier, too many to note, but now the crowd had thinned out and each figure took on a different sort of significance.

  “Emma,
I’m not sure we’re going the right direction. We’ve been walking for nearly twenty minutes, so if the man in the bar was right, we should have been at the dock a long time ago. I think we’ve gotten ourselves turned. We should ask someone.”

  “No,” Emma said. “Not anyone here. They know who we are.”

  Leanna looked over her shoulder. The shadowy figure was still there… but then again, there was a shadowy figure coming towards her from the other direction as well, and two more passing on the opposite side of the street. The fog reduced everyone to the same amorphous grey shape, she thought, trying to push her panic down. Perhaps the fact that the mist seemed to be getting thicker did indeed mean they were close to the water. Besides, the Ripper had taken his victims to dark alleys and rooms with doors that locked. He had never attacked a woman early in the evening on a major street, no matter how badly lit it might be, and while she and Emma might be lost and vulnerable, at least there were two of them. “What do you mean they know who we are? Georgy knew your name but he –“

  Emma shook her head. “The costumes aren’t working,” she said. “The people in the bar knew we were rich, at least that you were, and if we speak to anyone, even to ask directions, our voices will just confirm what our clothes suggest. We don’t belong here.”

  “All right,” Leanna said hollowly. “Keep your hood pulled tight. Perhaps our safety depends on our ability to blend in.”

  8:08 PM

  Tom attempted to run the next few blocks, paused to read a street sign and realized, to his utter frustration, that he had traveled in a circle. John and the woman must have taken a side street. He turned back, retracing his steps. Up to Hadley, back to Toddle, and then, without warning, Tom heard a sound. It was muffled and hard to pinpoint in location, but the nature of sound was irrefutable. A woman was screaming.

  His breath was coming in ragged gasps and Tom was forced to stop for a minute, to lean against a wall. There. The sound again. Muffled but persistent. A long low wail and Tom went in search of the source, praying that whoever was making it had the courage and the faith to keep calling.

  8:12 PM

  Alcohol made the world very clear.

  Cecil knew that not everyone would agree with this theory. Conventional wisdom, of course, would have declared that the seven beers he had gulped out of nerves at the Pony Pub might have impaired his ability to judge what was going on around him. But Cecil knew better. From the first time he had partaken – breaking into his father’s liquor cabinet at the age of twelve – Cecil had understood that alcohol was a type of religion, capable of guiding a man to insights he would never obtain with his workaday mind. There are levels of reality, he’d thought, as he’d heard his sister sign her death warrant with a well-spoken phrase, as he felt the butcher Micha drag a calloused finger across his neck in a mimic of the Ripper’s blade. As he watched that smug, barrel-chested detective lean over the bar and ask Lucy if she’d seen the girls from Mayfair.

  There are levels of reality, beginning with the simple shiny world of sensation where people like Georgy and Lucy and Micha dwelt, where coins might strike the palm or they might not, where there was sometimes the solace of food or sex or a warm place to sleep, but more likely hunger, loneliness, and chill. The pains and pleasures of animals – hardly enough to engage a man like himself. And then there is the level of thought, wherein lay the good detective and Cecil’s worthy siblings and the people who waltzed and plotted at the Wentworth balls. The people who live within this strata believe it to be the highest.

  Only a select few have experienced the next realm, that abstract band of infinite possibility that hums above the surface of everyday life. Cecil knew he needed alcohol to take him there, just as priests require Jesus to take them to God, and there is no shame in such dependence on an intermediary. He sat at the bar with his empty mugs spread out around him, watching colors grow brighter and edges grow sharper, and after the detective left the Pony Pub, Cecil had risen shakily to his feet. His sister had been sent to the water. The brute Micha had been sent after her and the detective after him and somewhere in this grand parade was the man whose soft voice had sent Leanna to the waterfront, a man Cecil understood to be a fellow acolyte, a student of the fringes. He had left the pub too, sometime after Micha and before the detective, but Cecil was not sure why.

  He threw money on the bar. He did not count the amount. Money always became inconsequential when he was in this particular state of grace. Counting money was nothing more than an attempt to measure the immeasurable. The coins he tossed were meant to pay for him and Georgy and Micha and anyone else within earshot of the tinkling sound, because Cecil would be a rich man by sunrise, surely so. He could not say why he felt this sudden urge to enter the streets. Leanna was doomed whether he stayed or whether he left, but Cecil felt compelled to follow her, propelled perhaps by the alcohol or perhaps by adrenaline, the last chemical throb of his fear.

  Or maybe it was just by a betting man’s desire to see the game played out. Neddy used to laugh at him about it. They would go to the tracks and lay their bets and even if Cecil had a willing girl on one arm and a bottle of champagne in the other, he still could not resist rising whenever he heard the sound of a starting trumpet. Neddy couldn’t understand why Cecil stood at the railing. He always said that the horses would either run or they would not. The winners were determined by the gods, Neddy would call after him, they were chosen long before a lad like you was even born. Cecil knew Neddy was right, but he had stood watching every race he’d ever bet on, and now, as the clock of a faraway church struck the quarter-hour, he cast coins across a counter and turned toward the street.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  8:12 PM

  She has come early to the alley. She turns toward him slowly, and he thinks, somewhat irrelevantly, that her bulk actually gives her a sort of strange elegance, since it makes it impossible for her to do anything quickly. Her face registers surprise that he is alone and then anger, most probably at an anger at herself for ever believing that he was bringing her a client, ever thinking he would wish to erase his debt with the promise of fresh business.

  This is what happens when you strike a bargain with the man who calls himself Jack the Ripper. He stands before you in a dark alley with a gun. A cheap gun, purchased just this morning from an ironmonger, clumsy and unsteady in his hand.

  But at this range, it will do.

  8:12 PM

  The woman’s voice had come from a room in the back of a boarding house. Tom looked both directions, hoping against hope to see one of the bobbies Trevor had promised would be patrolling the area, but once again there was no one in sight, nor were there lights in any of the other windows of the house. Tom stood in the alleyway and debated what to do next. Stillness had settled, making him wonder if his nerves were getting the better of him and he’d imagined the whole thing. Then a fresh scream pierced the silence and, without thought, Tom was back in motion, ducking around the corner of the house and straining on tiptoe to see inside.

  One look was enough to tell the story. John’s back was to Tom, but it was unmistakably him, bending over a woman, wrenching apart her bare legs while she struggled and screamed. Tom flung himself against the wooden door of the hovel, and fairly bounced off, landing back in the yard with a thud and a scream of his own. He rolled over in the grass, bent double in pain and frustration and then the door jerked open, revealing the tall angry form of John Harrowman, shouting “What the hell is going on here?”

  It occurred to Tom that he should have done a better job of thinking things out. John was upright and armed, he was flat and defenseless. He made a sound which was intended as a roar of outrage but came out more like the beginning of a sob.

  John peered into the dark yard and frowned. “Is it Tom Bainbridge? Why on earth are you here?” He didn’t sound like a maniac, merely confused, and then the woman Tom had seen him with earlier appeared at the door, fully dressed and apparently fine except for the worry that creased her
brow.

  “Doctor?” she said. “I think she’s fainted.”

  “Probably for the best,” John said, turning back into the room. He shot one final glance at Tom. “You say you want to be a doctor, do you? Very well, I could use a hand. Have you ever seen a breech birth?”

  8:16 PM

  As they got nearer the lights of the waterfront, Leanna’s spirits lifted a bit. Emma had slowed to the point where she was virtually dragging her, but at least they appeared to have lost the figure in the lamplight. “We have to keep moving, Emma,” she said. “We can rest when we get home to Mayfair. And let’s cross to the others side of the street for a while.”

  “I’m exhausted. I need to stop and get something to eat.”

  “Something to eat? Are you mad? We aren’t returning from the theatre with Trevor. Come on, see the lights? We have to be close to the waterfront and we’ll find a cab there.”

  “We passed a pub just back,” Emma said. “I must rest, just for a moment.”

  “We can’t,” Leanna said, turning back to give the girl a tug. It was at that moment that she saw the man.

  The man or was it simply a man? Was it the same one who had followed them earlier? This one seemed taller, thinner than the first, with a long-loped gait. No, not the same man. The first one had been heavier and he had stayed on the opposite side of the street, but this man was right behind them, and growing closer with each step.

  “Emma,” Leanna said, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. “I think we’re being followed.”

  “Followed? What?” Emma stopped in her tracks and turned around. “I see no one.”