“So when I sail blithely from the City to Marylebone or cross over a river wide and deep enough to drown a battalion, you’re the lad who made it happen?”
“A tiny part of it’s my work, sir. It was good work. I raised three kiddies and now all are in trade or honest labor.”
“Well, by God, sir, you’ve provided civilization with a long ton and a half more than I have. Here, porter, the bottle. This man drinks to his fill on my tab!”
The bartender scurried over, made a bottle ready with ceremony, and Mr. Hoyt, for such was the name, and I had a merry time together. He was quite a decent man and laughed at my bad jokes and puns, never grew intemperate even though the company had jettisoned him at sixty-five without so much as a farthing or a fare-thee-well. We both wept a tear for his wife, and agreed that liquor eased the pain.
“And you, sir? If you do not wish to speak, I understand. But somehow the burden is less when you share it, even for a bit, even with a stranger.”
“There was a woman, I lost her. There was a friend, I lost him. I hate them for the pain they caused, I miss them for the love they provided. It’s a banal story. Commonplace, pitiful. I try not to get all weepy, because in other respects, I was so lucky.”
“But it’s love that’s most important, now, isn’t it. When all is said and done, love is what lasts, or the pain of it missing, that lasts as well.”
“It’s surely so,” I said, turning to more bubbly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Jeb’s Memoir
Suddenly, it was November 6, which was just in advance of the high-water mark of the quarter-moon and the run of days most likely for Jack to express himself once again. We had to make a choice on which man to follow if indeed he went one of those nights.
“Tell me,” Dare said, “which of our three boys we should pick for our game, given that either he’s cleverly disguised his intentions or none of the three has a thing to do with this.”
“I would say we could abandon Major MacNeese. With his job’s long hours, his children underfoot, his wife’s love and engagement, he’s the least likely candidate. Leaving out of it how his brain works, the chap is too busy for Jack’s kind of all-night action.”
“I had hoped you would reach that conclusion. So of the others, Major Pullham and the heroic Colonel Woodruff, VC, which do you prefer?”
“The case for Woodruff is strongest.” I said. “He is alone all nights or in an opium den. His life is Spartan, dedicated to a duty that, it seems to me, is of dubious usage to the world, and therefore has more discipline for controlling himself for as long as he can. He comes and goes and reports to nobody. He does not drink with friends or hang about with other old soldiers. It’s as if he’s in mourning. So he, of the three, has by far the most ample opportunity, and given his battle experience and his long service s/ID, the most exposure to the sort of violence and carnage of which Jack is so happily author. He would be by far the most auspicious choice.”
“I have reached the same conclusion,” he said.
“As for the adventurous rake Major Pullham, he is clearly a kind of sex maniac, but not our kind of sex maniac. He lives to have intercourse.”
“He does indeed.”
“So he engineers such a thing at each opportunity, plus keeping up a busy professional life and being a willing partner in Lady Meachum’s ambitious social plans, which means he must be all ritzied up for suppers, brunches, weekends in the country, even the odd ball or masquerade, as those of that class are so idiotically inclined to do. So the question must be asked: How would he have time? He’d have to plan like a genius, and though he’s clearly a gallant sport, there’s no indication he’s a genius.”
“It would not seem so.”
“However . . .” I said.
“Yes.”
“The rings. We are forgetting that Jack took Annie’s wedding rings.”
“Your point?”
“Rings are treasure. Goods. Material things. Clearly, Major Pullham needs to prosper. Though he is not primarily a thief, he could not help but snatch something there that he thought had value. For Woodruff, there seems to be little of the material world in his mind. He does not have, he does not acquire, he has no interest in things. They insult him. His acts are pure.”
Dare considered. “The point is well constructed. I would not have thought of it.”
“So. Does hunger for treasure trump abundance of opportunity?”
“A believer in capital—that is, treasure—would argue that it did.”
“It is indeed human motive, well verified in history, literature, myth, and folklore since ancient times.”
“I must say, I do agree.”
“We are in accord?”
“Indeed. To Major Pullham, then, boulevardier, dasher, swordsman, cavalryman, ace salesman of horsey gimcracks and gewgaws, and Jack the Ripper,” said the professor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Diary
November 6, 1888
* * *
It is almost over. I have but once more piece of butcher’s theater to provide the horrified, titillated busybodies of London. And the great city demands that it be a corker. I have to surpass all previous efforts and stamp my legend on the face of the town as permanently as Big Ben or St. Paul’s Cathedral or the stone intricacy fronting the Houses of Parliament. Those three plus Jack: London, linked in memory forever.
What does one need for a masterpiece? Clearly, I needed time and space and privacy. The street had done well in the early going, if somewhat insecure. Moving to sealed-off squares and yards was an improvement. But none had light, room, and security, and I’d had too many by-the-whiskers escapes with blue bottles just missing me or me just missing them, with cart drivers and night watchmen and all the riffraff that coagulates in the rotting East End good nights and bad, fair and foul, morning, noon, or night.
Thus I took my most monstrous risk today. I tried to make it as safe as possible, minimize the play of fate, discipline myself severely for the part I need play, not give in to temptation to show off my wit or learning or eloquence, but keep hard and steady on course, wheel locked or tied in.
I chose my wardrobe with some patience, acquiring a dingy, stained frock and a bowler that looked as if it had been dragged behind the omnibus, escaping none of the shit the team of beasts normally left on our city streets. White shirt, though tending toward gray, frayed at the collar; black four-in-hand, utterly unremarkable; my dingiest boots, no spats, no knife hidden away in belt beneath frock.
Garbed several levels below my station, I got to the Ten Bells at the busy hour of eleven P.M. It’s not a big place, with the bar in a square island at the center eating up more floor space, so it was crowded, smoke hung in the air, gambling games were in full drama, yells and shouts and curses filled the air, most of the inhabitants being men either preparing for a night’s friction in the alleyways all ’round or recovering from same, and so it was a diverse group united only by sex impulse: bankers, stock traders, beer wagon teamsters, sailors, soldiers perhaps, hod carriers, maybe a construction laborer or two. Many looked like something out of Mr. Dickens’s sugar-glazed ingot of Christmas treacle, perhaps the low clerk Bob Cratchit, drinking to oblivion after whoring away the money that should have been saved against Tiny Tim’s operation, ha ha.
Exactly as I desired. I sat at the bar, sipping stout, enjoying it, I smoked a cigar, I laughed and seemed as animated as any of them, and after I felt comfortable and had assured myself that none of Abberline’s plainclothesmen lurked about, I enjoyed the rhapsody of Jack. You heard it everywhere.
“Think he’s gone? Been a bit.”
“Not Jack. That boy’ll ride his horse hard to the end.”
“Sooner or later, he’ll jigsaw a dolly and a copper will round the corner. Copper goes to whistle, gives chase, and soon enough the revolver squad arrives. One shot, and that’s the end of Jack.”
“One shot? More like fifty, and they’ll knock off a parson, t
wo choir members, and a wee lassie in the volley!”
In time, I entered a conversation with one of the barmen, a burly chap with reddish muttonchops and hands and forearms that you might find on a dock worker. Tattoos, too, signifying naval or army service or to the East for John Company. He had the beady eyes of a man who noticed.
As for entrée into a conversational encounter, the universal welcome mat to chat was conjecture about Jack, every man’s obsession.
“I say, friend, I heard a rumor they got Jack already.”
“No such bloomin’ luck,” he said. “My wife’s brother’s a copper for Warren, and he’s telling us the boys in blue don’t have nothing, not a clue, not a direction, not even a scrap of evidence. Most of the witnesses is liars, and Jack’s by far a cleverer boy than anybody knows. It ain’t luck getting him by, it’s brains, it is.”
“I agree,” I said. “From what I hear, he’s been a hair away from apprehension four or five times, and the coppers just missed it together.”
“He’s clever and he’s got guts,” the barman said. “Bloke is mad as a hatter, but you’ve got to admire the cheek on the bugger.”
We lapsed into silence, he drifted off to fill glasses with gin or stout or beer, exchange cheer, josh a gal or two, and eventually return to my area for a lounge. But I knew the man, like all the men, wanted to talk Jack. I waited for him to think of something to say, and finally he did.
“Quarter-moon’s coming up. He’ll do it again, you watch. He’s got a thirst now, bad, likes the blood, but most of all likes the way the town is all rattled. Him, one lad, bringing five million people to a dead halt. Must be a feeling.”
“I’ll never know,” I said. “I’m too busy adding sums by gaslight to squash a fly.”
“That’s me, too, brother, slinging suds twelve long hours a day,” he said.
“Let me ask you something.”
At this point, another round of professional activity ensued as he tended to his customers, a rowdy lot, and when I caught an eye, I pointed to my empty glass, and he nodded and brought me another, almost black it was, with a cusp of foam like frosting on a Christmas cake. I took a mellow gulp, enjoyed, and then leaned a little closer. “I’m betting a feller like you, works in here, knows a thing or two. Pays attention-like. Hears a lot, forgets nothing.”
“Perhaps it’s so.”
“Yes, well, here’s the point. I’m a married man, see, but I likes the pleasure when it’s safe. I come down here once every two or three months off money I’ve cribbed up the wife don’t see. It don’t harm no one, is how I see it.”
“It sure don’t,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said. “Now, here’s my little issue. I can’t help think of what happens if I’m with Judy in the alley, all steamed up, boiler set to pop, and Jack comes along and decides to do two tonight instead of one.”
He laughed. That is, larfed. “Old son, Jack’s down on birds. He ain’t picking out men yet, is he now?”
“He ain’t till he is. I’d hate to be first. You don’t stand much chance against a fellow so right with a knife.”
“Not without the Royal Artillery, you don’t.”
“So here’s my play, friend. Worth a shilling. Would you know of a gal who’s got a room? You could visit her there, be all safe and tidy and away from Jack’s ways with the blade. I’d pay the tariff, knowing it’s more than the thruppence standard. The safety would be worth it.”
“Hmm,” he said, scrunching up an eye.
Then business called, and he tended some others, paused for a time to josh two men who looked like barristers slumming, poured three gins for a gal in the trade who wound her way back to a table where she sat with two friends, lit a fellow’s cheroot, then drifted back. The shilling was on the bar, under my hand.
He came close, I released, he snatched and pocketed. “All right, chum, you didn’t hear this from Brian Murphy, now.”
“Got it.”
“Fellow named Joe Barnett, lives with a gal off and on. Now I hear it’s off. She lets her friends double up when it’s cold out and they can’t make doss. He don’t like that, as the room is small. So off he goes, all the girls is talking about the poor thing. She’s a pretty thing, too, though somewhat gone to flab. Says she worked in a high-class house once. She ain’t in here now, but she’s on the streets most nights; believe me, she ain’t at choir practice.”
I laughed.
“Little heavyset, blond, though, like an angel you’d see in some old painting. Rosy-cheeked, bosom all aquiver, you’d enjoy a romp with her. Name’s Mary Jane Kelly, any of the girls knows Mary Jane, they does, and she lives just down the avenue in McCarthy’s Rents.”
“McCarthy’s Rents?”
“Fellow named McCarthy owns it. It’s really called Miller’s Court. Rank little place, one of them hole-in-the-walls, you go in a passageway, it’s all little rooms back there. She’s in thirteen, if I recall.”
“Mary Jane Kelly.”
“She was in earlier tonight. She’s in a lot. Or at the Britannia, drinking it up as fast as she earns it. Got the gin bug bad, poor thing, and when she’s all hooched up, she likes to sing. I cuts her a break now and then, slipping her a free one. But she’d be the one for you, friend.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jeb’s Memoir
Major Pullham lived in a smart house on Hoxton Square in Hackney, perhaps a mile and a half north of Whitechapel. It was all gentry, the best sort of tidy, prosperous, upper-bourgeois London, the ideal toward which all Englishmen were instructed to strive. His—actually, Lady Meachum’s—house stood on a street of grace in a state of grace, happily a peer of its cohort, stately, refined, well kept, an ample recompense for a dashing cavalryman shot at ten thousand times in his career for the crown. Too bad he wasn’t satisfied with it alone, but then that’s the nature of the beast.
I arrived at eleven P.M. Indeed, the quarter-moon now and then shone through the rushing clouds and a brisk wind sent the branches of the abundant trees clackity-clacking. It was really late autumn, and they had changed color and wore scarlet and russet threaded through their crowns, and the leaves, upon achieving the perfection of dry death, fell in swirls to earth and clotted gutters and lawns. The suggestion of rain was heavy in the air, and I felt it would fall before dawn. I had accordingly worn an ancient, used-to-be-father’s mackintosh over my brown suit, and a plaid scarf around my neck and my crumpled felt hat, pulled low over my ears. I wasn’t going to let rain stand between myself and Jack.
I found Professor Dare exactly where we’d planned, at a bench in Hoxton Square a good hundred meters from the major’s dwelling, but with a plain view of it. The major could not leave without our knowledge, as the back-of-yards formed a nice parkground but held no exit, being buttressed on all sides by houses such as his.
“Is he there?” I asked.
“Indeed. He and Lady Meachum returned at ten from some sort of social gathering. They were all topped up in silks and diamonds, so perhaps it involved the Mayfair set or some other golden collection. The hansom dropped them off, they let the last servant return to quarter, and now they are in the bedroom. Perhaps he’s atop her now, shouting ‘Onward, old girl, let me into the breech!’ and that’s that for the evening.”
“I believe we’d hear her scream in bliss,” I said. “It would overcome even the rush of the wind.”
We both laughed. Over our adventure, an enjoyable comradery had sprung up, which was perhaps why I reacted so angrily to Harry Dam’s calumny. Dare was every bit as ironical as I, every bit as radical, every bit as aware of the pomp and circumstance of empire and the core of rot it concealed, but a little bit more cold-blooded. He never grew angry at the ugliness of what hid in plain sight before much of London’s sleepy eyes; he only enjoyed a dark chuckle now and then. He was truly the Holmesian ideal.
“Here,” he said, “you may as well take this now. It’s quite cumbersome.”
With that, he opened his cape, did some dip
ping and unbuckling, and passed something over to me. It was quite heavy, an object in a leather pouch, the leather pouch in a nest of strapping. I felt it deposited on my lap and was astounded that its weight appeared far more than its size indicated. I bent, peeled through the leather strapping, got to the object concealed in the pouch, and while at first it made no sense to me in the low light of a far-off gas lamp, it gradually resolved itself into more or less known forms.
“Good heavens,” I said, genuinely shocked, “a gun.”
“Yes, it is. Damned big one, too, I’m told.”
I saw that it had a kind of curved wooden hand grip, and by that, I pulled it partly out of its sheathing and realized it had double hammers over double barrels. It was only a foot long or so, and thus its messages were contradictory. The part I’d pulled had a rifle quality, or perhaps shotgun, as there was a hinge and latch by means of which one could break it and insert shells; but there was no stock, only the thick, curled wooden grip. It had no barrel length, either, which disqualified it further from the rifle or shotgun category.
“Howdah . . . you do?” the professor said merrily.
“Er, I don’t—”
“It’s called a Howdah pistol,” he said. “Evidently I had an uncle who spent his life and fortune accumulating heads to hang in a hall in his home. Pointless, if you ask me, unless the heads were human, but alas, none was. He died, perhaps under wildebeest hooves, and it came to my father, and when he died, it came to me along with other knickknacks of dubious usefulness. I’ve had it in an upstairs room for years.”
“Is it a hunting gun?”
“After a fashion. It’s not for when you are hunting them, however, but when they are hunting you.”
I said nothing, not following.
“In India, they hunt tiger from little compartments cinched about an elephant’s back. Sahib need not walk in brushy, punishing jungle as he draws near his quarry. He rides in comfort, as befits the raj. But the tiger is smart. Sometimes he climbs a tree and, knowing he’s hunted, will wait concealed in the branches until the elephant passes by. He’s not stupid. He knows he has no quarrel with the elephant. He knows who his enemy is, so he leaps into the compartment up top and readies for lunch. In those closed circumstances, the rifle is too clumsy to maneuver. Sahib pulls his Howdah pistol from its scabbard, cocks both hammers, and, as the tiger lunges, fires two immense bullets down its throat. Sahib and Memsahib live to eat mango chutney another night and have many tales to tell.”