Chapel Noir Read online

  When I look at him, I feel that I am on the fringe of some borderland inhabited by Huns and Vandals. Or Vikings. Those whose reputation for pillage and rapine still goes unsurpassed. I look into his simple, savagely compelling eyes and think of Nero the crucifier, Genghis Khan the conqueror, Vlad the Impaler, Torquemada the torturer, Ivan the Terrible.

  Oh, he is magnificent. There is nothing of which he is not capable, which means that he can be a great and powerful force in the world of tomorrow, if properly trained. If properly harnessed and disciplined.

  But he is like those fierce northern pack dogs with the pale blue eyes and the strength many times their size. He runs for himself and no one else. He runs for the fire of running, the fire of breathing the icy air, the raw alcohol fumes, for the lust of hunting and mounting and rending.

  And yet this magnificent animal nature is fettered. Is tied to hundreds of years of simpering self-doubt and guilt. Christianity and that broken god on the cross have much to answer for.

  The contradiction is tearing him apart, as it rends all who meet and have doings with him.

  I must be careful.

  I must go where he goes, see what he does.

  I must be very careful with my beast, my master, my beast.

  My cipher in light and dark, good and evil, life and death.

  My creature, my butcher boy.

  My key to the future of empire, and everything that goes with it.

  21.

  The Women of Whitechapel

  Every man is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

  —MARK TWAIN

  “The most puzzling aspect of these Parisian crimes,” Irene said the next morning as we studied my portraits of footprints, “is the great variance between the scenes of the crimes.”

  She glanced at me and Elizabeth.

  “You two have absorbed far more from the sensational press about these atrocities in London. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of, to ignore the entire sequence of events.”

  “I can do more than imagine, Irene; I can tell you. You were busy hobnobbing with that Bernhardt woman and driving out with Godfrey to visit Maison Worth in the rue de Rivoli.”

  What I intended to be a roll call of idleness Elizabeth took for a list of honor.

  “Bernhardt! Worth! Rue de Rivoli! You have seen Paris, Mrs. Norton! Oh, can we not go see these wonders?”

  “You are to call me Irene, remember, and we cannot go anywhere amusing until this matter of the transplanted Ripper is settled.”

  “Of course,” Elizabeth murmured contritely. “I forgot myself.”

  “You do not want to do that again,” Irene said sardonically. “There is so much of you to forget.”

  At that Elizabeth lived up to her nickname and blushed bright pink.

  “I do not have a sensational cast of mind,” Irene mused regretfully. “Perhaps I have absorbed my quota of sensationalism through the medium of opera plots. That really is a very good idea, you know.”

  “What!” I admit that I was a bit exasperated by now.

  “The creation of a cantata, or a closet opera, based on the lives and wives of Henry VIII, with me singing all the female roles. I would need a sophisticated composer, and a fine, fat basso for a partner.”

  “You would have to lose your head twice.”

  “Singing angelically, of course, to the bitter end, over and over. Perhaps it could be combined with the legend of Bluebeard,” she speculated, “for an additional French flavor.”

  In fact I was glad to hear her reconsidering a performing career. A compact “portmanteau” piece that could be performed anywhere with a minimum of cast, costume, and stage setting would be most convenient to her current life. That this fortuitous notion emanated from Sherlock Holmes was incidental, I told myself, though my teeth ground at the thought for some reason. Perhaps it was at finding myself thinking in a French expression: portmanteau.

  Was I possibly becoming . . . Continental?

  “I have some notes myself,” Elizabeth said, producing a blank-page book filled with a strange combination of handwriting and cryptic symbols.

  “It’s my own system, Miss Huxleigh,” she said as she noticed me noticing her script.

  This cryptic form of shorthand only confirmed my suspicion that Elizabeth was among us because she was a Pinkerton agent. Why did Irene not trust me with this intelligence? Of course, when it came to the London depredations of Jack the Ripper Irene was facing a condition she relished less than all others: ignorance.

  “You write shorthand?” I asked Elizabeth quite pointedly.

  “Not quite shorthand,” Elizabeth said, rushing on. “Anyway, there were suspects aplenty for the role of Jacky-boy, most of them low-class persons from the slums. From the start, though, there was some notion that the Ripper might be a step up in class from his victims. They all went meek as lambs to the slaughter, and sad as their lots were and drunk as most of them were, they were wise enough to know a rum dude from a legitimate client.”

  She stared for a moment at her own writings as if they were an alien transcript, then went on.

  “Mary Ann Nichols,” she said slowly, as if naming the dead repeated the crime in a way.

  “The first Whitechapel victim,” I prompted her, sometimes known as “Polly” Nichols. After all, I read the newspapers at the time as well.

  Elizabeth straightened and resumed her brisk report, eyes on her summary. She reminded me a bit of Sherlock Holmes at his most officious.

  “Her husband had an affair with the midwife who delivered their fifth child.”

  I couldn’t help gasping at the cruel betrayal.

  “He kept the children and paid her an allowance of five shillings a week until he learned she had become a prostitute. She liked to drink. Needed to, would better describe it. She was a small woman, just over five feet tall, of forty-three years.”

  Irene noted, “You are well informed.”

  I couldn’t tell if it was a straightforward comment, or a gibe. Did she know Elizabeth’s real role, or not? The uncertainty was maddening, yet I did not dare ask her on so little evidence. Nor did I wish to know that I was being kept ignorant with Irene’s complicity.

  “The London newspapers erupted with information about the Ripper’s victims,” Elizabeth said. “I have always thought that information was the answer to all life’s problems, but am no longer so sure. Anyway, on August 30 last, Mary Ann was drunk and hadn’t four pennies for a doss house, though she’d tried for a bed. She had high spirits, though, and a ‘jolly bonnet.’

  “At 2:30 A.M. she was even drunker and told a woman friend she’d be off the streets soon. Within an hour and forty minutes, a carman found her dead in Bucks Row. Her throat was cut, and her abdomen had been slashed until the intestines showed.

  “Dark Annie Chapman,” she went on in a monotone that sounded like a dirge, “was even smaller than Mary Ann—barely five feet—and older, forty-seven. She’d had three children: a daughter lost to meningitis at twelve, a son sent to a crippled children’s home, and another daughter sent to an institution in France.”

  I shook my head at these serial tragedies, but Irene stiffened at mention of France.

  “Her husband gave her a weekly allowance of ten shillings until he died in ‘86. Then she turned to drink and doss houses and the streets. She was seen alive, with a man, at 5:30 A.M. on September 8. At 5:45 her body was discovered by a carman living at 29 Hanbury Street, her throat cut and her skirt bunched above her knees. The intestines had been drawn from her slashed abdomen and placed over her right shoulder. Like . . . ribbons. Her stomach lay above her left shoulder, and her womb was completely missing.”

  “These were the first internal injuries,” Irene observed.

  I nodded.

  “Elizabeth”—our own Elizabeth faltered at the name—“Long Liz, she was called. Long Liz Stride, though she was only five-foot-two. She was Sweden-born, forty-four, and had married an Englishman named Strid
e, who died in ‘84, four years before her. She later claimed that her husband and children had died during the famous steamer collision of the Princess Alice with the Bywell Castle in the Thames, in which six hundred-some people lost their lives.”

  “A steamer collision,” Irene mused. “I suppose she sought sympathy.”

  “But she was not believed, and rightly so. She was seen many times on the night of September 29, often embracing a man variously described, but once he was said to be well dressed in a cutaway coat.”

  “A cutaway coat,” I pointed out, as few of the Ripper suspects were that well garbed.

  “Indeed. She was found at 1:00 A.M. on Berner Street, throat cut, but she wasn’t mutilated. Catharine Eddowes, who was found forty-five minutes later, was not so lucky. She was forty-six and just five feet tall. She was arrested for drunkenness the night of September 27, but let go at 1:00 A.M. the next morning. She gave the false name of Mary Ann Kelly to the jailer. He released her at the very moment that Elizabeth Stride’s body was being discovered. She was found forty-five minutes later, throat cut, skirt bunched at her waist, her bowels pouring from her body.”

  I couldn’t help wincing at Elizabeth’s cut-and-dried description, which read as if taken from a police report, void of the horrified expressions that found their way into the press accounts.

  “The Ripper was interrupted earlier,” Irene suggested, “but made up for it later with a vengeance.”

  “So the police concluded,” Elizabeth said. “This was the same night the anti-Semitic scrawl was found about 3:00 A.M. in Goulson Street. ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’ At least that is what the message was rumored to be. Sir Charles Warren ordered the graffiti removed within two and a half hours.”

  “He feared an uprising against the Jews?”

  “Perhaps. Jews was reportedly spelled ‘Juwes,’ which is an unlikely spelling, even by the ignorant. Those who hate people for their race generally learn to spell the hated syllables, if nothing else. Perhaps the message had nothing to do with Jewish matters.

  “He cut her face. Eddowes’s.” Elizabeth’s voice shook for the first time. “Catharine’s. He slit her eyelids and sliced off the tip of her nose. What was done elsewhere was not reported in the press, but I have heard that this was the most thorough mutilation yet.”

  “An odd sort of distinction,” Irene observed, “as if taking a body apart was an escalating achievement.”

  “The most thorough dissection until Mary Jane Kelly, that is,” I put in. “The real Mary Jane Kelly.”

  Irene immediately fastened on my distinction. “One almost identical first name and a single surname attached to two different women, both victims of the same killer. Merely coincidence?”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “The newspapers and the public throve on the details of the deaths. I found myself dwelling on the sad lives of these women rather than their brutal deaths.”

  “And the ‘real’ Mary Jane Kelly?”

  “Used the name of Marie Jeanette Kelly sometimes,” Elizabeth said. “She claimed a fine gentleman client had taken her to Paris last year.”

  Irene frowned at that. The word “Paris” in any Ripper context alarmed her like a siren in the street.

  “Her first husband died in an ironworks explosion,” Elizabeth went on. “The man she lived with in Whitechapel, Joseph Barnett, didn’t want her to be a prostitute, but they were thirty shillings behind on their rent of a few square feet in Miller’s Court, a one-room hovel, and he was out of work. What else was she to do?

  “Marie Jeanette, or Mary Jane, was fair, blond and blue-eyed, and only twenty-five years old.” Elizabeth’s voice trembled as if she saw this young woman in her mind’s eye, as if her youthfulness touched the American girl. “A lissome girl of five-foot-seven, she would have stood taller than most reported Ripper suspects, save for the one tallish man seen with Liz Stride.

  “Two people heard the cry of ‘Murder!’ from the area near her room about 4:00 A.M., but she was seen in the neighborhood by several witnesses between 8:00 and 10:00 A.M. The landlord’s agent, coming for the delinquent rent, peered through the room’s window at 10:45 A.M. and ran screaming from what he described as ‘more the work of a devil than of a man.’

  “Mary Jane Kelly had been flayed, mutilated, disemboweled, and dismembered.”

  We were all silent for some time, imagining that tiny room splashed with blood and guts.

  “They didn’t suffer,” Irene said at last. “There is that.”

  Elizabeth paled, then burst into impassioned speech. “How can anyone know what those women suffered, even before Jack the Ripper? Those poor creatures just needed a couple pence for a bed for the night. Cribs, they called them—miserable, filthy cots in a row at a doss house. They were mostly widows and wives who’d been turned out, or who’d left brutes of husbands. They didn’t deserve to draw Jack the Ripper for a final client and a final crib.”

  I was silent, remembering my few but desperate hours of homelessness after I’d been unfairly dismissed from my clerking position in London years before. If I had not met Irene . . . or if Irene had not seen my plight and chosen to rescue me. Yet the notion of these women selling themselves remained repugnant to me.

  “Client!” I repeated the word with disdain. “You make their downfalls sound like an accident in a respectable business.”

  “Respectable, no,” Elizabeth said, “but unavoidable, given their circumstances. Saucy Jack had no right to be ‘down on whores,’ if it was indeed the killer who penned those notes to the newspapers. Why or how was he any better?”

  “Why do you think,” put in Irene, “that the Ripper didn’t write to the newspapers?”

  “It stands to reason,” Pink said firmly. “Cranks are always writing newspapers claiming this and that. In the States, anyway.” She blinked rapidly and looked down at her notes.

  “That is an interesting point,” Irene continued, “because if the lack’ letters are false, then most assumptions about the Ripper may be false as well.” She sat back and eyed us both as if we were students and she the governess. “So. Summarize all that you have read of the Ripper.”

  We both spoke at once, hesitated, glanced at each other, and spoke in tandem again.

  At last order prevailed, and I started a fresh list of our joint conclusions.

  A little before noon, a knock sounded on our door.

  I started as if with guilt, for who would know how to find us at our new lodgings? Unless that Baker Street man . . .

  While I imagined the worst, Irene rose to answer the door.

  A snub-nosed boy in short jacket and beret stood there, in grinning possession of a note.

  “He will come at once,” he caroled in French so simple even I could understand it.

  Irene drew a coin purse from her skirt pocket, from which she plucked a gleaming coin for the lad’s open but dingy palm. “Well done; swiftly, too,” she told him before bidding him adieu and shutting the door. At least he was too short to be Sherlock Holmes in disguise.

  “Who is coming at once?” I asked as she glanced at the note’s contents and nodded in satisfaction.

  “Bram Stoker.”

  I sat silent. Once that name and that personage had stood for all that was stable and admirable in the flighty circle of actors, artists, and writers Irene had moved among during her early days in London before her operatic performing career took wing. Now I regarded it with shock and a certain bitterness.

  She had immediately perceived my reaction and argued against it.

  “Who better would I consult on the Wives of Henry VIII project than the consummate manager of Henry Irving, who is the consummate English actor of the age? We are fortunate to have made his acquaintance so long ago, Nell.”

  I said nothing.

  She glanced at Elizabeth. “Between Nell’s issues of last autumn’s London newspapers, which she had the foresight to tuck among the trunks of clothes I removed fr
om Neuilly to this hotel yesterday, and your memory and notes, I think you have sufficient material to take to my room for study. You may remain to meet Mr. Stoker, but I have theatrical business to discuss with him, so it is best that we confer privately.”

  “That’s all right,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t mind being left out. Mr. Stoker is a frequent visitor to America when Mr. Irving is on tour, and I had lots of opportunity to read of him there. Besides, I do so enjoy rummaging through these illustrated crime gazettes. They are such shockers, and so shockingly inaccurate. It’s like reading a dime novel.”

  She promptly began removing our piles of Ripper documentation to Irene’s bedchamber.

  “Irene,” I said when Elizabeth was safely absent, “I really do not wish to meet Mr. Stoker again. As you may imagine, our encounter at the maison de rendezvous was exceedingly embarrassing to us both.”

  “That is why another meeting would be so instructive, Nell. You can’t think that I only wish to consult him about a vocal presentation, although he is an ideal expert? I wish to know the why and wherefore of his presence at the murder scene.”

  “I do not! He has a young wife, one of the three most beautiful women in London, according to that Punch cartoonist, George du Maurier, and a sweet young son of only seven or eight. I cannot imagine what such a man, with such a fine reputation and family, would be doing in that kind of establishment.”

  “Oh, you can imagine only too well, which is why you were upset. Yet we were there for innocent reasons. Perhaps Bram was, too.”

  “I do hope so, but I fear not.”

  Irene nodded, approvingly. “You begin to suspect the ways of the world. They are often disappointing.”

  “This has been a most disappointing sequence of events. I am told that all the people I have met are habitually immoral, and that even my closest friend has found it more expedient to pretend to be! So that everyone who is not bad in a wicked world must feign to be so to preserve what goodness is left! It is insanity!”