“Angelic? Are you joking?”
The sketch artist picked up a pencil in his blunt fingers and walked to another easel. In seconds, a face was alive, its features and some hints of character distinguished by a few swift lines.
“A boy?”
“Handsome, isn’t he?”
Bell shook his head in disbelief. “A choirboy.”
“As I said, angelic.”
Bell stared, shaking his head. “Do you think he really did look like this?”
“Had the young woman ever made the acquaintance of a Bible, she’d have sworn on a stack of them. She truly believed he looked like this, even though he scared the daylights out of her.”
“How did he frighten her if he looked so innocent?”
“He cornered her in Hanbury Street.”
“That’s where he killed Annie Chapman,” said Bell.
“Same exact place. Number 29 Hanbury Street. An alley leads into a backyard. Chapman was next. First time he tried it was this girl. Grabbed her throat in both his hands.”
“How did she get loose?”
“I don’t know if you have any conception of the life these women live. It’s no better now than back then. You can see it in any slum street that hasn’t been cleared. And many that have . . . The girl had wandered all night in the rain, seeking clients to raise the price of a bed to sleep in but spending it on drink instead. Out in the rain to earn the money again. By the time the Ripper cornered her, she was soaked to the skin. Dripping wet, head to toe. His hands slipped. She ran.”
Barlowe tossed his pencil on the easel tray and stalked back to his whale.
Set in the back of the house away from street noise, the atelier grew quiet but for the occasional, distant huff of locomotives crossing the Battersea Railway Bridge and the scratching of Barlowe’s steel pen.
“What was her name?” Bell asked.
“Emily.”
Bell pondered what he had heard. “I think I understand why you never drew his face.”
“And why is that, Mr. Bell? I would like to know. Because I have asked myself a thousand times, could I have stopped the Ripper from killing God knows how many more girls if I had?”
“No one would believe that this handsome boy would hurt anyone. In fact, they would even find it impossible to believe he would patronize a prostitute.”
“Not when he could have any girl in London with his smile. My editors would have laughed me out of their office.”
Bell saw that Barlowe was deeply distressed and thought he knew why. The tall detective moved closer and arrowed the full force of his probing gaze into the artist’s eyes. “Or, were you afraid you might finger the wrong man?”
Barlowe stared, silent for a full minute, before he whispered, “What if . . .” He paused to compose himself. “What if in her terror and panic, she imagined another face? A different face. A boy she might have admired from a distance? Or a handsome young gentleman—it seems a gentleman’s face, wouldn’t you agree?—a youth in clean clothes and utterly unattainable? Couldn’t even the poorest creature experience a romantic crush? . . . But . . . What if he were recognized—this innocent, whose face I sketched for the newspapers and posters? If the mob didn’t kick him to death, they would hang him from a lamppost.”
“Didn’t you think to ask her again later, after she calmed down?”
“Of course! I waited a week. I went to her regular spots. Couldn’t find her. Spoke with a woman who had known her. She told me that Emily was afraid the Ripper would come back for her. She was so frightened that she kept running. She left Whitechapel. Left London—half mad with fear, she must have been. I was told later that the poor thing ran all the way to Angel Meadow.”
“Where is that?”
“Manchester. And if you think Whitechapel is rotten, you should see Angel Meadow. Thousands of workers’ tenements built on top of a paupers’ graveyard. Twenty-five years back, it was even worse. Engels, who you may recall wrote the Communist Manifesto, and had seen a thing or two, called it Hell on Earth.”
“Were you there for the newspapers?” Bell asked.
“I wrangled a commission. But I went looking for Emily.”
“Did you find her?”
“Easily. She was famous, having come from exotic London. Slum dwellers’ lives were so tightly circumscribed in those days. The Manchester folk called her London Emily.”
“Did you ask her?”
“She saw me coming and she let out a shriek and ran for her life.”
“I need something to take to Manchester,” said Isaac Bell.
Joel Wallace unlocked the two-inch oak door to the closet that housed the field office arsenal.
“What part of Manchester?”
“Angel Meadow.”
“The poor folk are too beaten down to trouble you much. But for the gangs—they call them scuttlers—I recommend a U.S. Marines’ landing party.”
“I was thinking more in terms of an alley gun.” Bell was opting for close-quarters stopping power that wouldn’t mow down innocents.
“Number 4 lead bird shot,” said Wallace, “will change minds up to five yards.” He handed Bell a double-barreled derringer. Bell practiced loading the two-inch .410 cartridges into the stubby pistol until he could reload without taking his eyes off his target.
Bell settled his hotel bill with the Savoy’s cashier and exchanged pound notes for a sack of shiny half-crown coins. In an old-clothes shop at St. Katharine Docks, he bought a sailcloth seabag, a pair of rugged trousers, a rough wool undershirt, a frayed jacket bursting at the elbows, a pair of heavy boots that the shopkeeper said came from a steamship stoker’s widow, a length of rope for a belt, and a sweat-stained stoker’s cap that he inspected closely for lice.
He hailed a hansom to Euston, and changed clothes in the station lavatory. His disguise passed early tests with flying colors. The train ticket clerk assumed without asking that he was traveling third class, and a porter who bumped into him barked, “Make a lane, mate,” instead of, “Beg your pardon, governor.”
Drawn by the new Prince of Wales class 4-8-0 locomotive, the Manchester Limited glided from the station. Bell’s train, a local destined to make many stops, chugged after it, accelerated in fits and starts between dark, seemingly endless walls of slab-sided brick factories, and lumbered suddenly into open fields that seemed impossibly green in contrast to the city. The fields were speckled with snowy sheep and, as the train continued north, were laced by narrow canals.
In four and a half hours, the train passed through factory towns on the outskirts and arrived in Manchester, an industrial city of immense modern cotton mills and a thousand tall chimneys. The opulent railroad station, banks, stock exchange, and sumptuous hotels and palaces, were monuments to the yearly weaving of eight billion yards of cheap checked gingham cloth that made “Cottonopolis” so wealthy that the only city richer in the world was London.
Isaac Bell walked to the slums. It was raining hard. The last time he had seen smoke so thick was Pittsburgh’s infamous oily “black fog” that hurt to breathe.
Twelve pence made an English shilling, twenty shillings a pound. For fifteen pounds, grandees like the Earl of Milton and Lord Strone could charter a private train. Or a village could pay a schoolteacher’s salary for a year. The prostitutes Jack the Ripper murdered had been hoping to earn four pence to sleep indoors.
Isaac Bell’s half crowns—two and a half shillings—equaled thirty pence, and word raced like fire through the narrow lanes and fetid alleys that ringed the thundering mills. A tall sailor with yellow hair was handing out “two-and-six” to anyone who could tell him anything about an old woman known as London Emily.
Astonishment on the slum dwellers’ faces told Bell that a single shilling would have done the job. Work in the mills was sporadic, depending on the markets, and low-paying. There were li
nes outside the workhouses that traded a night out of the rain for a day of work, breaking rocks or picking oakum out of old hemp rope. The Salvation Army soup kitchens were crowded.
He described London Emily as short and thin, with gray or white hair. Even if she had been only sixteen when Jack the Ripper attacked her, from what he saw of Angel Meadow, twenty-three years in the slum would have long since turned her into an old woman.
A pale creature dressed in a ragged shawl tugged his sleeve. “I’m her. I’m London Emily.”
19
Isaac Bell shook his head. “I’m sorry, but you’re half a foot taller than she was on her best day.”
Against his better judgment, Bell gave her a half crown. It was a mistake that he would not make a second time. Flocks of old women descended from every point of the compass. Fights broke out as they struggled to get near him.
Bell took off at a long-legged run down lanes and through alleys until he lost them. But soon another flock gathered.
He was thinking he had to come back another day in a different guise when he heard a frightened cry. “Scuttlers.”
The women scattered.
The street gangs had come hunting for the sailor with half crowns.
Bell had not seen a bobby since he entered the slum and did not expect to meet one now. They came at him from two directions. It took a moment to realize they were separate groups who had spotted him simultaneously and would fight for the right to attack him. Swinging spiked pickax handles, short, thin, scarred, and tattooed men and boys exploded into bloody battle. The winners dispersed the losers with a bombardment of dead dogs and rats, stomped the fallen with nail-studded clogs, and charged Isaac Bell.
Bell had already fished the derringer out of his seabag. Waiting for the leaders to close within fifteen feet, he braced against the recoil and fired one barrel. The hail of lead pellets knocked the legs out from under four men leading the charge. The remainder gazed into the as-yet-unfired second barrel and cocked their skinny arms to throw their clubs.
Bell fired his second barrel and ducked the only club they managed to launch. His hands flew. He broke the gun open, pulled the spent shells, loaded in fresh ones, flicked it shut, and took deliberate aim.
A flicker of motion in the corner of his eye made him jump back and protect his head as the body of another dead animal plummeted down from a rooftop. The scuttlers charged. Bell fired, backed into a wall, and fired again. In New York, he would expect Number 4 lead shot at point-blank range to send the toughest Gophers fleeing—the same for a mob of strikebreakers in Colorado. The scuttlers were more hopeless, more accustomed to pain, or more anesthetized by booze, and when the bird shot only penetrated a half inch into their flesh, they charged again, bloody and limping.
Bell tried to reload. The lead scuttler swung a spiked club.
Hands busy on the gun, eyes on the threat, Bell stepped into the charge, kicked hard, snapped the barrels shut, fired twice, and reloaded. The man he kicked was writhing at his feet. Two more were down on the greasy cobblestones, pawing at their legs and trying to stand. Bell took aim and walked toward the rest.
There was ice in his eyes, and even the bravest broke and ran.
Bell vaulted a wooden fence. He had seconds before they regrouped.
He tore through twisted rows of reeking backyards, vaulted another fence, sidestepped an open sewer, and emerged in a section of the dense slum where no one had heard the gunfire. Or maybe they had, for the lane he found himself in was empty of people, and the silence was so deep that he could hear the hollow roar of gingham looms shaking wooden floors behind the high stone walls that guarded the mills.
An old woman poked her head from a window with no glass.
Staring at Bell, she disappeared, then reappeared in an alley. She edged closer, stepped into the lane, then edged back, restless as a cat. She was tiny, her wrinkled skin pale, her hair white. Bell stepped toward her. She glanced about fearfully but stood her ground. When she opened her mouth to speak, he saw she had no teeth. That lack could be what slurred her tongue so badly that he could barely hear her. Addiction to laudanum—a tincture of opium suspended in alcohol—was the likelier cause, and laudanum would also explain her restlessness.
“What did you say?”
“London Emily. I hear you’re giving two-and-six fer London Emily.”
“So did everybody in Angel Meadow.”
“I’m London Emily.”
“A dozen ladies told me the same. How can I believe you?”
“’Cuz I know what they don’t.”
“What’s that?”
“I know what yer gonna ask me.”
Intrigued, though not yet hopeful, Bell said, “Go on. What do you think I want to ask you?”
“Jack the Ripper.”
Bell shook his head. “Everyone knows that London Emily ran from the Ripper.”
The old woman stepped closer to Bell and spoke in a stronger voice. “Not in Manchester.”
“What do you mean?”
“I never told a soul. He’d-a found out.”
Isaac Bell moved subtly to corner the old woman. Would she scream when he showed her Barlowe’s sketch of a face that had been emblazoned in her memory before the Ripper attacked and long after the night of mind-rending terror? Would she run at the sight of the man who nearly killed her?
He pulled the stiff protective envelope from his seabag and carefully slid the sketch from it. London Emily fixed her eyes on it. She stiffened under her shapeless shawl. She stared. She broke into a toothless smile.
“Do you recognize him, Emily?”
She whispered.
Bell asked, “What did you say?”
“So handsome.”
“Do you remember?” Bell asked gently. “Where did you see him?”
“Hanbury Street.”
“Do you remember what number?” He was making a conscious effort now to quiet his excitement.
Emily nodded vigorously. “Number 29.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He asked me, ‘What’s your name?’”
Bell waited. She said nothing more. He asked, “What did you tell him?”
She stared at the sketch with a half smile.
“What did you tell him when he asked your name?”
“I told him, ‘Emily.’”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘What a lovely name.’ He said it suited me.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Thank you, sir.’”
“What next?”
“We went in the backyard and he grabbed me by the neck.”
She was getting agitated again, and Bell tried to ease her mind. “Was he really this handsome?”
“Oh, aye. Even more.”
“Emily,” Bell asked gently. “Could you have confused him with a memory of a different man? Some man you had known before? Or seen on the street?”
“Who could forget such a beautiful face?”
“Was he really this young?”
She shrugged. “I was young.”
“Are you absolutely sure he was the Ripper? Not someone else? Not a different handsome man?”
“Not someone else.”
“Even though you had only seen him once.”
“Not once! Not once! What do you mean?” she asked indignantly.
Bell felt the ground reel under his boots. He himself had speculated. Had the Ripper known his first victim? Obviously, Emily was not the woman buried under Scotland Yard. But was she someone else he had known, too?
“You saw him before you saw him in Hanbury Street?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember where you saw him?”
“Oh, aye.”
“Where?”
??
?Wilton’s.”
“Wilton’s? What is Wilton’s?”
“Wilton’s Music Hall. In Wellclose Square. I went if I could find a penny or a man to pay my way.”
Isaac Bell felt as if the black sky had fallen on his head.
A young girl’s crush, just as Wayne Barlowe had guessed. If not the angelic gentleman the illustrator had proposed, could a handsome actor have caught her eye? All the more dazzling in limelight and theater makeup?
“He was an actor?”
“No.”
“No?” Bell’s hopes soared as quickly as they had fallen.
“They never let him act—except once he carried a spear.”
“Then what did he do at Wilton’s?”
“Everything. He wore a sandwich board to tout the show. He ran for beer. One day, I watched him paint the scenery in the backyard. He sold sweets and passed out programs. Sometimes, he was a callboy, knocking on dressing room doors. And he stood right at the elbow of the prompter himself.”
An all-rounder, thought Bell. A boy-of-all-work assigned every job that needed doing in the theater. But how deep was their connection?
“Did he hand you a program?”
“I couldn’t get in that night. I had no money. By the time I earned it, he was gone.”
“Did you help him paint scenery in the yard?”
Emily’s face fell. “He chased me off.” She grew restless, her hands fluttering.
Bell asked, “How often did you see him on the stage with a spear?”
“Once.”
“Only once?” How did one sighting on the stage stick him so deep in her memory?
“And once when he carried a lantern.”
“So only twice?”
“Twice.”
“But you said you went often.”
“He wasn’t always there.”
Bell was aware that laudanum addicts were prey to hallucinations. As hallucinations went, her handsome callboy was a doozy.
“Emily, would you like to keep his picture?”