The Whitechapel Girl Read online

  As they edged along into their seats, Celia put her finger to her lips indicating that Sophia should lower her voice.

  No sooner had they taken their places than everyone around them rose to their feet and began clapping enthusiastically.

  ‘What’s happening?’ murmured Celia, nervously avoiding the frantically pumping elbows of the man next to her.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ beamed Sophia, craning her neck to get a better view. ‘That creepy old man mounting the platform is the Reverend Roland Stedgely. The League’s star. A real fanatic.’ Remembering the inspiring words of the pamphlet he had written, Celia frowned at her friend’s mocking tone.

  Stedgely raised his bony hand and the applause gradually subsided. The audience took their seats and he began to speak.

  ‘We would have much to fear if the slum-dwellers of the East End were left to their unholy ways,’ he intoned in his booming Scottish base. ‘We who know better must lead them towards the path of righteousness. Innocent lambs they may not be, but we can change those who are young enough to have still pliable minds. For our work we need more funds, and more volunteers to dispense the farthing breakfasts that attract the urchins to our missions. I call upon those here to devote their time and money to the cause. And mark that I will accept no weakness. No males over the age of twelve years shall be admitted to the breakfasts.’

  He leant forward, clasping the lectern with his gnarled, mottled hands; his voice took on a shuddering, ominous rumble.

  ‘Even though they will try to slip in, but we must resist them. They are beyond redemption. Let them go to the Jew’s soup kitchen or the Popish mothers’ meetings for their crusts of bread. We have no use for them. It is the young girls that we must redeem, be they willing or not.’

  He quelled the rapturous response to his words with a finger jabbing heavenwards.

  ‘Do not think it will be easy. Our missionaries have been attacked in the streets by wild women with matted hair, their faces and hands ingrained with dirt, their breath stinking of the demon liquor, refusing to allow their daughters to listen to our Truth. But their wrath is a small price to pay for the souls of their young!’

  Celia joined in with the new burst of applause, but Sophia just rolled her eyes and looked languidly round the wildly cheering room.

  Stedgely, staring with his hooded eagle eyes around the packed room, nodded his acknowledgement of the energetic reception his words were receiving. Then he slammed his hand down hard on the lectern, making the dust fly up and dance in a gaslit halo around his grey head, and continued with his diatribe against the slum-dwellers of the East End.

  Apart from Sophia, the whole audience was enraptured by his preaching about hellfire and redemption, and after a half an hour of his ranting, she was far more interested in her friend’s hat.

  ‘Do tell me, Celia,’ she said, moodily swinging her legs, ‘where exactly did you buy your bonnet?’

  ‘Stop prattling on, for goodness’ sake, Sophia,’ snapped Celia. Then she gave out a little gasp of pleasure. She fussed with her ringlets and straightened her skirts. ‘Look. The reverend gentleman is coming over here. To us.’

  Ignoring the clamouring crowd that had gathered round him, Stedgely stopped in front of Celia. He looked steadily into her eyes, as though he could penetrate her very thoughts. ‘I trust that we shall be seeing you at future meetings, Miss… ?’

  ‘Taylor,’ said Celia impulsively.

  Sophia’s jaw dropped.

  ‘Miss Taylor,’ he repeated with a brief nod.

  ‘Goodnight, Reverend,’ said Celia, putting out her arm for the dumbfounded Sophia, and leading her friend out into the cool night air.

  ‘The evening is quite lovely,’ observed Celia. ‘Even though there is a nip in the air. How wonderful nature is.’

  ‘Celia! What’s happened to you? You lie about your name. You’ve gone all poetic. And your cheeks are positively glowing.’

  ‘I can’t think what you mean,’ answered Celia, as they made their way along the quiet residential streets.

  ‘Why did you tell him your name was Taylor?’ Sophia shook her head making her curls bounce around her pretty, wide-eyed face. ‘It makes you sound like a parlourmaid.’

  ‘I would rather my father didn’t know about this evening.’

  A look of understanding came over Sophia’s face; she was a well-practised deceiver of her own parents. ‘But the way you looked at old Stedgely,’ she said, ducking in front of Celia, making her come to halt. ‘I can’t imagine why you did that.’

  ‘It was you who kept asking me to go to a League meeting with you, Sophia.’

  ‘I wanted to have some fun,’ said Sophia impatiently, her voice rising to a squeak.

  Celia took Sophia’s arm in hers and hauled her along in the direction of Belgravia. ‘Stop raising your voice, Sophie, you’re making a spectacle of yourself.’

  ‘Me?’

  This time it was Celia who stopped, causing a couple out for an after-dinner stroll to have to step into the roadway in order to pass the two squabbling friends.

  ‘I was very moved by the meeting, Sophia. And I intend to go to another one.’

  ‘Celia!’ Sophia threw up her hands in despair. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘Don’t you care about the unfortunates who are living on the very doorsteps of our homes?’ Celia scolded her.

  ‘How could I help but be concerned?’ mocked Sophia. ‘Belgravia is simply bursting with the poor.’

  When Celia didn’t respond to her teasing with her usual giggles, Sophia gave up. ‘Oh, have it your own way, Celia,’ she snapped. ‘Go out and save the ridiculous girls from themselves. Go and get your throat cut down some dingy alleyway in Whitechapel, or wherever it is that Stedgely and his cronies hang around at night.’

  Slowly the smile returned to Sophia’s face. We could go to the East End now,’ she suggested. We could go to the music hall.’

  ‘No, Sophie, we couldn’t. We shouldn’t even be out.’

  ‘At least I came to the meeting with permission,’ scowled Sophia. ‘Mama thinks it’s good for me to take an interest in charitable matters.’

  * * *

  Celia walked confidently to the front of the hall and took a seat near the speakers’ platform.

  ‘Aren’t you the brave one?’ Sophia taunted, trailing after her. ‘Where’s the little mouse who used to hide at the back of the hall?’

  ‘I want to be able to hear properly, Sophia. That’s all,’ said Celia, tucking her skirts neatly around her.

  ‘You want to be closer to that raving evangelist, more like,’ giggled Sophia.

  ‘Sophia,’ Celia replied, her voice cool but her cheeks burning. ‘The Reverend Stedgely is a very good man.’

  ‘You’re so innocent, Celia.’ Sophia sounded bored. As far as she was concerned, this fourth visit to the League was definitely one too many. She looked vaguely round the room hoping, not very optimistically, for a diversion.

  Celia looked far more content as she settled herself in a demure, straight-backed pose and waited bright-eyed and eager for the meeting to begin.

  A whey-faced woman, dressed in the dullest of grey serge costumes, strode purposefully on to the stage, Bible in hand, and started off the proceedings.

  ‘It is but a few short years since the League began its crusade against the twin demons of drink and lust.’ She spoke in a chantlike dirge, waving her Bible for emphasis and throwing back her head so that her deep-set eyes rolled even more deeply back into their sockets. ‘But we have come far in our noble campaign to return decency and Christianity to our once great metropolis.’

  As the woman took a great wheezing intake of breath, ready to begin her next onslaught, Sophia almost burst from suppressing her giggles. There, round the woman’s nostrils, clear for all in the front rows to see, was the unmistakable crust of dried snot.

  Celia turned and glared at her companion.

  Oblivious to her inadequate nasal hygiene, the lady
in grey continued. ‘Now, without delay, I would like to introduce the man responsible for our success.’

  Thunderous clapping drowned anything further she might have said, but gave Sophia the chance to whisper to Celia. ‘I’m never sure why he’s a reverend, you know: no one ever mentions a parish or anything. Or even…’

  Celia’s look was enough to rebuke Sophia into silence.

  As Stedgely mounted the platform, he made his usual, seemingly self-deprecating gesture of raising one hand, indicating that he was unworthy of such an ovation. But, also as usual, this merely had the affect of whipping the audience into even more fervent applause and cheers of support for their leader. He was in every way, except in the matter of dress, just as much a star turn as anyone who trod the boards of the music hall.

  At the first utterance from his lips, the noisy acclaim immediately came to a halt.

  ‘In this, the beginning of our fourth year of missionary work,’ he began. ‘I want you all to renew your commitment to our task.’

  He waited for the unrestrained shouts of willing agreement to cease. ‘It is in the knowledge that we have right on our side that we must keep entering those streets of shame. We must not be weak, nor flinch in horror from what we see there: the depravity that begins at such an early stage in those young girls’ lives.’

  ‘Praise be!’ came the cry from several members of his enraptured audience.

  He brought his bony fist down hard on the lectern, thumping it with surprising force for such a long, gangling man. His strange, undefinably coloured eyes held the gaze of everyone – Sophia included, despite her earlier cynical comments – as he stared about him. His stringy hair and gaunt, graveyard features seemed unimportant to those who felt themselves in the presence of an other-worldly power.

  ‘And now,’ he boomed, ‘a new madness has entered the streets of this city. Women, carrying the disease which has been sent to them as a warning from God Himself, are still carrying on their filthy trade.’ He challenged a blushing woman sitting near Celia with an unblinking stare. ‘We cannot close our minds to the existence of such things. We need to know our enemy.’

  The woman swallowed hard and tried to regain her composure.

  ‘The festering dung held tight in the cauldron of the slums beneath the lid of secrecy would shock you far more than my words telling of that dread disease. In this once fine city of ours,’ he continued, pointing at the now totally discomforted woman, ‘young women, barely more than children themselves, become mothers and then kill their own offspring.’ He nodded his head at the disbelieving woman. ‘I have proof. Oh yes!’

  The gasps of horror from around the packed hall were confronted by a question shouted in a bold cockney voice from near the back. ‘Proof of what?’ asked the not-quite-adult voice.

  Angry murmurs came from all round the room.

  ‘Sit down!’ someone shouted.

  ‘No, throw her out,’ yelled another.

  ‘You get yer hands off,’ she demanded, pulling herself free and shaking her fist at Stedgely. ‘You listen to someone else for a change. What mother would kill her own baby if she could provide for it, eh? You tell me that.’

  The young woman was shoved down roughly into a chair by two men dressed in black imitation of Stedgely, who was now speaking loudly over her complaints.

  ‘We will rid the streets of vice by saving them while they are girls. Even if it is too late for the likes of her, we will carry on!’ he roared, pointing towards the pitiful young woman who was now surrounded by accusing faces. ‘We will force out the corruption and make this city safe once more for decent people.’

  The girl tussled with the two men and struggled to her feet. ‘I said get yer hands off me. And I won’t be shut up again. I come here to tell you lot what’s what, and that’s what I mean to do.’

  ‘Disgraceful!’ tutted a middle-aged woman from the audience.

  ‘And you,’ the girl shrieked, jerking her head towards Stedgely. ‘Yer no different from yer mate Charrington. Yer might not come in and close down the case-houses like he does, but yer still poking yer noses in where yer not wanted. And yer driving the customers away and us girls out on to the streets, just the same as him. That’s what yer doing.’ She shouted louder, raising her voice over the growing protest. ‘Instead of them coming to us, we have to go out and look for geezers now, out into the streets and alleys. Yer’ve made us fair game for any bloke what wants to hurt us or rob us. Do us in, if he feels like it. Who’s gonna look out for us on the streets eh, you tell me that?’

  The objectors’ voices rose in waves of fury.

  ‘Sit down!’

  ‘Throw her out!’

  ‘Stop her filthy tongue!’

  ‘Don’t let her blame you, Mr Stedgely. She doesn’t have to walk the streets.’

  Stedgely never replied, he just watched, observing impassively, as the room exploded in self-righteous surges of indignation.

  ‘Shut up, all of yer,’ the young woman yelled with a force which surprised them. ‘Yer reckon I don’t have to walk the streets, do yer? Well, how d’yer suggest us brides makes our living, then? Cleaning big houses for the likes of you, so’s yer old man can get us in the family way, and not even have to pay for the privilege of giving us one?’ She poked the chest of the astonished woman who was cringing in the chair next to her.

  ‘There are places you can go for help,’ the woman remonstrated weakly with the filthy-looking girl.

  ‘And where’s that then?’ demanded the now enraged cockney.

  ‘There are, I don’t know, provisions.’ The elegantly dressed woman was close to tears, her chest hurt, and she was humiliated. The thought spun around in her mind: did this person actually know about her husband and their recently dismissed parlourmaid, or was it just an unfortunately accurate generalisation?

  ‘Well, the bastard Relieving Officer won’t help yer. Yer can take me word for that. I know. Yer don’t get nothing till yer prove yer’ve sold everything you own. Till you ain’t even got a pot left to piss in. And then yer have to sell the only thing what’s left. And that’s just what I’m doing, ain’t I? Selling meself. The last thing I’ve got.’

  Sophia burst into a fit of nervous giggles.

  The girl rounded on her. ‘And you can shut up, yer silly tart.’

  A man sitting near Sophia, who had been admiring her all through the meeting, saw his opportunity to impress her. He stood up and strode resolutely towards the object of the room’s contempt. Seeing his determination, the appalled yet exhilarated crowd made room for him to pass. On reaching the young woman, he seized her brutally by the arm and dragged her screaming and kicking through the big double doors which opened on to the street.

  He reappeared without her and slid the bolts firmly behind him. The cheers and hurrahs drowned her bashing at the wooden doors.

  ‘The sinner is thrown out,’ he said simply, and returned to a seat much closer to Sophia’s than before.

  Celia didn’t notice the new seating arrangements: all she was aware of was Stedgely speaking again, and the feeling that his eyes were burning into her, as though he were addressing her alone of all the people present. He spoke with a fervour which filled her with a determination to do whatever he wanted. She would join his crusade. She would make sure that no other young girl need ever again fall from grace. She would join in the campaign to make the streets a better place for womankind. She would be his disciple.

  ‘Women such as that whore,’ he roared, ‘will never labour honestly when money is to be had so easily from their corruption of hapless young men.’

  ‘Can’t those “hapless young men” control themselves?’ an elderly lady demanded indignantly.

  ‘Once a young man has been tempted by whores–’ Stedgely replied – ‘and from Adam onwards, the Bible tells us it is his nature to be so – then the viper of lust is in him. Only if he is fortunate enough to contract a Christian marriage might he be released from the poison which would otherwise su
ck away his very flesh.’

  ‘And what makes these “whores” different from any other woman here?’ the elderly woman continued.

  ‘Virtue has no meaning for them. They, in their ignorance, choose to indulge their desire for drink, fanciful dress, and the Hell of unbridled sexual passion. They do not even experience the misery of their fall, as any decent woman would. They exult in vice and corruption.’

  ‘And men cannot resist them?’ The woman’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘It is not the fault of decent men when the lower orders are given attractive physical form with which to tempt them. It is merely another test in the travails of life, to which some poor souls succumb.’ He drew himself up to his full, gangling height and looked down his long thin nose at her. ‘It is only by the intervention of the League that the young girls of the slums can learn to reject the life their mothers would force them into.’

  The elderly woman rose unsteadily to her feet with the aid of her stick. ‘So not only do you condemn the public women, sir, but you actually blame them when they are blessed with God’s gift of beauty.’ She gave a snort of derision. ‘Surely even one as slow-witted as you cannot believe that they have taken to the work they do…’

  ‘Work?’ He said the word incredulously, looking to the audience for support.

  ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘Work.’ With considerable effort the woman looked about her. ‘What sort of charlatans are you? You profess charity, yet actually you are thrilled by the horrors you claim you wish to heal.’ She would not be silenced by the audience’s angry denials. ‘I know your type,’ she sneered. ‘I have witnessed the so-called charitable ladies when a slum is not so terrible as they had hoped. “Can you show us nothing worse?” they beg, disappointed that they have seen nothing bad enough to make them of interest at their next soiree.’

  ‘Wait! I know her.’ A stout, ruddy-faced man stood up and pointed an accusing finger at the elderly woman. ‘I’ve seen her. Handing out leaflets claiming that the whores are poor, misunderstood maidens, sacrificed by wicked men.’ He pushed his way along the row till he was standing in front of her. ‘I’d know this creature anywhere.’ He turned to Stedgely. ‘She smokes cigarettes and wants the vote!’