by Robin Paige
In the meantime, she looked forward to a cup of hot tea, a hot scented bath to wash away the dirt of the East End, and a nap—although she knew that her sleep would be troubled by many things, among them the poignant memory of a pretty young girl with a bruised face and the glint of tears in her eyes.
It was nearly ten by the time Charles arrived, cold and wet indeed. At Richards’ direction, he went straight to the library, where he was greeted by a heartening domestic scene: a bright fire, a glass of fine, dry sherry, his slippers toasting on the fender, and the sight of his dear wife wearing his favorite blue dress, her face rosy in the firelight.
“Kate!” he exclaimed in surprise, bending to kiss her. “What the devil are you doing in London?” He turned, to see Jennie seated on the sofa. “Both of you! I thought—”
“You thought,” Kate said demurely, “that we would do as we were told and stay in the country, out of trouble.” She handed him a glass of sherry and poured one for herself. “Isn’t that right?”
“Well, something like that,” Charles admitted. He turned to see a table laid for three, with a white damask cloth, fresh flowers, and candles. “But I see you have come to town to keep me company at dinner.” How very sweet of Kate, not wanting to be parted from him for a single night.
“Something like that,” Jennie said. She sighed heavily, and Charles noticed how worn and sad she looked. “But there is a great deal more. I fear you shall be very angry when you hear what we have got up to, Charles.”
“No, he won’t,” Kate replied. “He shall be far too interested in what we have to tell him to be angry.” She smiled and put her hand through Charles’s arm. “But Cook has made your favorite partridge pie, my love, and nothing at all shall be said of the day’s doings until you have warmed yourself, finished your sherry and dinner has been eaten.”
An hour later, after they had progressed from their sherries through dinner and dessert to the port, they were once again seated in front of the fire, Charles and Kate on the sofa, Jennie in the chair opposite. Charles half turned so that he could see his wife’s face.
“Now, Kate,” he said fondly, lifting a lock of her russet hair, “let me. hear what you have done today. You have been shopping, I suppose?” He smiled at Jennie. “Is that why I should be angry with her, Jennie? Has she been spending a great deal of money?”
Kate pulled her hair out of his grasp. “You can stop being patronizing, Charles,” she said tartly. “It is not becoming to either of us.”
Charles frowned. He never meant to patronize Kate, but sometimes he didn’t entirely think through the implications of his words. “I’m sorry for offending, Kate,” he said, genuinely regretful. “You can spend whatever you like, of course.” He paused. Should he have said that, or was it patronizing, too?
Kate stirred impatiently but did not reply to his remark. Instead, she said, “Jennie and I should like to discuss what has been learned today. What discoveries have you made?”
“I don’t really think—” Charles began.
“Charles,” Kate remonstrated quietly.
Charles thought for a moment. Kate had certainly proved helpful on other occasions, when there were complex issues to be untangled and difficult relationships to be sorted out. Perhaps, since she was removed from this case and knew so little about its various dimensions, she could bring a fresh view to it. And certainly Jennie had a right to know what he had attempted to do on her behalf today.
“Of course, my dear,” he said, and began a recital of the discoveries of the day, however minor, in the order that they had occurred. He described the confectioner’s clerk’s denial that she had ever known Mary Kelly and reported the landlady’s assertion that Finch had not kept a darkroom at his lodgings. He recited the barber’s claim that the dead man was an expert photographer with a history of blackmail, going back to the notorious episode of the male brothel on Cleveland Street, and his recollection that Mary Kelly might have been a nursemaid. Then he recounted Abberline’s stunning statement that the Ripper case had been solved long ago, and the inspector’s refusal to be involved with the investigation except by-perhaps-confirming or denying what Charles might learn from other sources. He concluded with Abberline’s remark that the Ripper killings had been motivated by a secret marriage, and his intimation that there had been a cover-up, at senior police levels or even higher, in the Home Office.
“In the Home Office!” Jennie exclaimed, and Kate said, “Do you suppose the police knew, all along, who was responsible?”
“It’s possible,” Charles said, “which makes it very unlikely that anyone, at this late date, will get at the truth. There have been too many opportunities to destroy the evidence.” He sat back, feeling weary and defeated. Although he had managed to gather an impressive array of odd bits of information, he could not for the life of him put them together in any meaningful pattern.
And worse, he had kept two important things back, out of concern for Jennie’s feelings. First, he had not revealed that George Cornwallis-West had indeed been stationed where he could see Jennie go up and down the stairs to Finch’s lodgings, and second, that he was beginning to harbor the definite suspicion that George, in the heat of a jealous passion, might have stabbed Tom Finch to death.
24
He [Dr. William Gull] had been attending a poor patient with heart disease, and after his death was extremely anxious for a post-mortem examination. With great difficulty this was granted, but with the proviso that nothing was to he taken away, and the sister of the diseased patient, a strong-minded old maid, was present to watch proceedings. Gull saw that it was hopeless to conceal anything from her, or to persuade her to leave the room. He therefore deliberately took out the heart, put it in his pocket and looking steadily at her, said, “I trust to your honour not to betray me.” The heart is now in Guy’s museum.
THOMAS ACLAND,
son-in-law of Sir William Gull
In Memoriam: Sir William Gull
Kate and Jennie had sat quietly through Charles’s recital, alternatively glancing from him to each other and to the fire. When he came at last to the end, they sat for some moments, not speaking. Finally, Kate broke the silence.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose we had better tell you about our day.”
Charles got up to pour himself a second glass of port and to put another log on the fire. “Tell away, dear,” he said. “I promise to be amused.” He sat down, put his feet on the ottoman, and prepared himself for the gay account of the hours that his wife and her friend had spent flitting frivolously in and out of the Regent Street shops and the difficulties they had experienced in finding exactly the right hat or shoes or ribbon.
But instead, Charles found himself listening in shocked amazement and growing incredulity as Kate narrated the journey she and Jennie had made in their disguises as Mary Kelly’s Irish kinswomen, first to a clairvoyant in Bloomsbury who had told them that Dr. William Gull was the man who had carried out the Ripper’s butchery—and then, even more unbelievably, to Duval Street, in the most dangerous depths of the East End, where they had somehow managed to locate Mary Kelly’s former landlady and hear her astonishing claim that Kelly and her three friends, attempting blackmail, had been murdered to ensure their silence, while Catherine Eddowes had been killed in error.
“So Jack the Ripper was no lunatic,” Kate said, concluding. “And if Mrs. McCarthy is telling the truth, Dr. Gull—if indeed he was the one who dissected the women—did not act alone. He was only one member of a group of men who singled out these women because they had information that jeopardized the well-being of a certain highly placed individual or family. It was more expedient and more effective to murder them than to buy their silence. Besides, no matter how much the women were paid, they couldn’t be trusted to hold their tongues. Sooner or later, word about the secret marriage and the baby would get out.”
All through Kate’s recital, Jennie had sat silent and stricken, her face quite pale, her fingers tightly laced
together in her lap. It was clear to Charles that the idea of Sir William Gull’s involvement distressed her deeply—and with good cause. Throughout the late eighties, Sir William and Randolph Churchill were known to have been the best of friends. If Gull had taken part in the Ripper murders, might not Randolph have done so, as well?
Charles let out his breath. “Unbelievable,” he muttered. “Absolutely incredible.”
“It’s all true, Charles,” Kate protested. “I’ve accurately reported every word we heard!” She appealed to Jennie. “Isn’t that so, Jennie?”
“I wish I could say otherwise, but I cannot,” Jennie said with a long sigh.
“I am not at all questioning your veracity,” Charles said hastily. What Kate said tallied with Abberline’s reluctant assertion that the Ripper killings took place because some highly placed authority found it necessary to cover up the traces of a secret marriage. He gave her a wry grin. “I suppose it’s your good fortune I’m questioning—that the two of you could manage to locate and question not one but two people out of the whole of London who have important facts about these murders.”
“I grant you that we were fortunate, Charles. However, people who know of this are not as uncommon as one might expect.” Kate replied. “According to Mrs. McCarthy, the real reason for the murders is well-known throughout the East End, where there’s a great deal of bitterness toward the police for pretending that the women were killed because they were prostitutes, or that they were the random victims of a lunatic. Their tongues are held in check only by fear. And Mr. Lees made it very clear that Scotland Yard believed that Sir William Gull was involved with the murders, and that it was known that he did not act alone. He also said that at least one policeman—perhaps your Inspector Abberline—could identify the other members of the group.”
Charles could not dispute her words. What she and Jennie had learned was corroborated by what Abberline had been willing to tell him, and all of it pointed in the direction of a massive official concealment of the truth, as high as the Home Office, perhaps even the entire Cabinet. And who was the highly placed person whose son’s secret marriage and child so threatened—
“I’m afraid there’s more, Charles,” Kate said quietly. She rose and went to the desk, where she took out an envelope. She opened it carefully, took out a sheet of cheap white paper, and handed it to him. Charles squinted at the penciled script:
November 11, 1898
Dear Lady Randolph,
This is the last correspondence you shall receive from me, for I am quitting the country. If you go to my studio at Number 24 Cleveland Street, third floor, at ten tomorrow morning, you shall be able to retrieve the negative of the photograph I sent you earlier. I regret any distress you have suffered regarding our communications over the last year.
Yrs respectfully,
A. Byrd
Charles had to suppress a small smile. Whatever his other faults and failings, Tom Finch had had a sense of humor, at least when it came to choosing a pseudonym. But there was more than that to cheer him, for it looked very much as if he now had a lead on the whereabouts of the negative. First thing tomorrow, he would visit Number 24 and see what could be learned.
“The letter was dated and posted on the day Mr. Finch was murdered,” Jennie said in a low voice, “but somehow delayed in the post. I found it with the rest of my letters, which Winston sent over at my request earlier this eveni ng.” to
“Jennie and I talked about it while we were waiting for you,” Kate said, “and this is what we have concluded. For whatever reason, Mr. Finch decided that it was time to end the extortion. So he wrote and posted the note to Jennie, giving her directions to the place where he kept the negative—perhaps a rented or borrowed studio. Immediately thereafter, someone else discovered what Finch planned to do and killed him—without learning that he had written this letter. Then that man telephoned Jennie and summoned her to the scene of the murder, hoping, perhaps, that she might be seen and implicated. If we can find that man, we shall have found Finch’s killer and the man who wrote the typed blackmail note. And if we can locate the negative at this address”—she pointed to the letter—“there will be no more blackmail!”
Charles frowned. Kate’s postulate of a second blackmailer sounded plausible enough, and he possessed no facts with which to contradict it. But George Cornwallis-West was also a suspect. He had a powerful motive—he was passionately jealous of Jennie and would do anything to keep her to himself—and he had been at the scene of the crime. What’s more, the typed note that had accompanied the clipping might not have been a blackmail note after all. “You are not yet free” might simply be George’s way of binding Jennie more closely to him. It might all seem a bit irrational, but what lover—especially a young and passionate lover—behaved rationally?
And then, as though the thought had summoned the devil, the library door flew open and George himself burst in, with Winston at his heels, ineffectually remonstrating, and Richards following after, wringing his hands in dismay at such an ill-mannered display.
“Jennie!” George cried ardently. “Jennie, my dearest, my only love, at last I have found you!”
Jennie straightened her shoulders and gathered a dark dignity. “Winston,” she said with a frown, turning on her son, “what is the meaning of this?”
“I’m dreadfully sorry, Mama,” Winston said. “I tried to stop him, but once your footman let it slip that you were here, he absolutely would not listen to reason.” He cast a disgusted look at George. “I thought it best to come with him, for I feared he might create a scene.”
“A scene!” George was irate. “Well, I certainly hope so! A scene is exactly what I mean to create.” Half-recollecting himself, he bowed in Kate’s direction. “Do please forgive my impetuosity, Lady Charles. I realize that I am behaving boorishly. But I must beg a word with Lady Randolph alone. She and I have a great deal to—”
Winston put both hands on George’s arm. “George, Mama does not want to see you. You must come away with me, now!”
George shrugged off Winston’s hands. “I have nothing to say to you, Winston. I intend to talk to your mother, and I will not go away until—”
“I am utterly ashamed of you, George.” Jennie had risen and fixed a haughty eye upon her lover. “What can you be thinking of—intruding on the Sheridans in this unconscionable way!”
“Jennie!” George all but wailed her name. “We must speak! I can save you! I can tell the police—”
Now it was Charles’s turn to grasp George’s arm, with far greater authority than had Winston. “Whatever you have to tell the police must needs be said to me first, George.”
“And to me,” Winston said determinedly.
Charles shook his head. “Not now, Winston.” He pulled at George’s arm. “Come along to the billiards room, where we can have privacy.”
“Jennie!” George’s cry was anguished. “Jennie, please!” But Jennie had turned her back on him, and George was left to choose between following Charles of his own volition, or being dragged.
25
When murderers shut deeds close, this curse does seal them: If none disclose them, they themselves reveal them!
CYRIL TOURNEUR
The Revenger’s Tragedy
1607
It was dreadfully late, gone half-past eleven, but Sarah Pratt was not yet in bed. Still fully dressed, she sat half-dozing in front of the kitchen fire, her feet on the fender and the calico cat on her lap. Sarah had not yet gone to bed because Mary Plumm had not yet returned from walking out with the stableboy, and because she worried that Dick Pratt might come drunk from the pub and bang on the kitchen door and rouse the household—and because she feared that if she went to bed, she should dream that horrible dream again, the dream where she put rat poison in Pratt’s roast chicken.
Except that willy-nilly, she had fallen asleep, there in the chair, and dreamed it again, real as life itself. Only this time, the poison was not in the roast chicken. It wa
s in the cup of fresh horseradish sauce she’d made to go with the slices of cold joint that had gone into the basket Pratt picked up late that afternoon, when he came for the boots.
The boots. At the thought of the boots, Sarah’s eyes popped open and the sleepiness fled from her brain, to be replaced by a bone-chilling fear. And this time, her fear was not just for herself, but for her niece Amelia Quibbley, who worked as housekeeper and her ladyship’s maid. Frantic with the impossibility of meeting Pratt’s demand for boots and unable to think of anywhere else to turn, Sarah had gone to the housekeeper’s closet, where Amelia was counting the linen sheets, and tearfully told her the whole story. About Pratt’s release from prison and his sudden appearance, his ominous threats and demands, which every day grew more oppressive. About the food and the wine and the trousers. About the boots.
“Boots!” Amelia had exclaimed. Her mouth was a round, horrified O. “Yer sayin’ as how ye want me t’ steal a pair o’ the master’s boots?”
“Well, not steal, ’xactly,” Sarah said, in a small voice.
Amelia put her hands on her hips—rounder and softer hips, now that her baby had been born. “If it’s not stealin‘, I don’t know wot it is,” she said indignantly. “Ye sart’nly don’t mean t’ put the boots back after Pratt’s done wi’ ‘em, d’ye?”
Faced with this question, Sarah could only shake her head numbly. “F‘rgit wot I asked,” she said. “ ’Tis not fair fer me t’ drag ye into this mess. I’ll think o’ some other way.”
