October 24, 1888
Dear Mum,
Well, I know you heard the news. He done two up, one real bad. They even have a name for him these days, the newspapers do, they call him “Jack the Ripper” on account of some letter he’s said to have written, although if you ask me, it’s all a bunch of horseradish, as a fellow who could do what he done to the last one wouldn’t make no sense when it comes to writing letters on account of his being all crazy and everything. He’s like an orang or something, in human form, some kind of crazy ape with a knife, maybe a Russky or a Pole or a Chinaman, but no Englishman, that I’ll tell you.
That’s what us girls think. No Englishman could do such horrors and so we still feel safe with our own kind, which seems to be how we’re doing things these days.
And we are not alone. You’d think the city might sit back and enjoy this foul brute chopping on unfortunates but it’s like everybody is behind us! It’s something! Why, just a few weeks back, before the double event, two constables spotted a local hooligan and gave chase to him. People thought it was Jack himself, and they got in on the game, and soon a mob was on this chap’s tail, they right near strung him up. Well, he weren’t no angel, but he weren’t Jack, either. It was a fellow called Squibby, a low common bully. The coppers got there in time to save him a jig under the gallows tree. They even went to the police station and tried to get him for the rope, sure it was Jack, but the coppers held firm.
I know all this scares you and Da, Mum. But don’t let it. See, I’m not like those other girls. They all works the street and their jobs take them into alleys. All Jack done, he done in alleys and squares or other dark nooks. Myself, it’s all different for me. I’m safe and snug as a bug in a rug in my own little room. My fellow and I are sort of on the outs now, but I see him every day and I know he’ll be back soon. Having Joe around is one thing, as he won’t let nobody hurt me. Oh, and on top of that, there’s a watch dog. Well ha ha ha, there I go again, making jokes. It’s not a dog, it’s a cat. The lady upstairs, Elizabeth, she keeps a kitten she calls Diddles, but Diddles ain’t no ordinary cat. Diddles knows when somebody’s about who shouldn’t be, and you can be sure Diddles will let out a racket if anyone shows up here who don’t belong.
So I know I’m safe. I’ve got my room, locked hard by automatic spring mechanical system, so even if I ain’t paying mind because of my thirst, it’s solid shut behind me, and then upstairs there’s Diddles, and he’s paying attention if anyone comes poking around, and then there’s my fellow Joe who wants me out of my business and comes by every day to talk about it, and believe me, if anyone tries a thing when Joe’s here, Joe’s going to leave him in the worst shape he’s ever been in. Then there’s Constable Johnny Upright and there’s Constable Walter Dew, who chased after and arrested Squibby, and above ’em all is Detective Abberline, the smartest fellow there ever was, and then there’s the big boss himself, Sir Charles, a war hero, so I’ve got all these important and powerful men to save me from Jack the Ripper.
So Mum, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll lose my thirst, maybe I’ll marry Joe, maybe we’ll leave London if Joe finds work someplace clean, away from all this trash here, and maybe we’ll even take Diddles the cat along with us.
Oh Mum, miss you so, wish it had worked out different, but I know it’ll be okay. I have nothing but hopes for a bright future and happiness for all.
Your loving girl,
Mairsian
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jeb’s Memoir
Since the aftermath of the famous “double event” is so well known, it hardly needs dramatization; summary will suffice. As it turned out, the murder of the two shocked not merely London and the empire that sustained it but the entire world. At the precise point in the hysteria, the name Jack the Ripper arrived out of nowhere (that is, if my fevered imagination can be considered nowhere) and, taken with the coincidence of the chopped ear and the brilliance of the contrivance (ahem!), became instantly accepted by that same world, a globe terrified with Jack and yet desperate for information about him. By midweek the enigma of “Juwes” had emerged, lodged as it was in an opaque sentence, to further excite comment, fear, hysteria, and all sorts of bad behavior. Various suspects were named, their curricula vitae examined, and ultimately, when their regrettable innocence was proved, they were left to fade back into nothingness. We did our best to keep the hubbub hubbing along nicely, as O’Connor insisted on running a letter, a postcard actually, that he knew to be fraudulent, simply because it rehammered the Jack idea and contained the felicitous self-identifier—clearly inspired by my insouciant tone—“Saucy Jacky.”
Jack became a virtual industry, as all papers went all Jack, all editions. Replate, replate! (I still hadn’t figured out what that meant.) I’m not sure if fear was driving the frenzy or something a little bit more dubious, being some kind of secret, sick fascination with the hideous tragedy of others. As long as Jack limited his slaughter frenzy to whores, he’d have hundreds of thousands of fans among the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, safely fenced from his hunter’s dementia as they were. Let him knock off one of those poofs, however, and he’d be less titillating and by far a more palpable threat.
In all this, I was kept incredibly busy. On Sunday the first, Harry Dam and I worked through the night with Henry Bright, who united our two stories into a single seamless piece of reportage that I thought, having read what the Times and the Evening Mail and the Gazette offered, was quite the best. Henry was a talented journalist and an ethical one, and he knitted the stories into a calm tapestry of murder, mystery, mayhem, and official police ineptitude. It can be read today with profit, I say with some pride. It was my best journalism.
I will merely allude to subsequent developments of the next week or so, among them the upping of various rewards, the holding of inquests, funerals, the staging of a bloodhound test at Regent’s Park that produced yet more humiliation for Warren (his prize beasts, Barnaby and Burgho, managed to find only a couple copulating in the trees!), who was rapidly becoming the laughingstock of Western civilization. The victims of the double event were quickly identified, and their names became as well known as any West End ingenue’s. Poor Elizabeth Stride, who is always short-shrifted, as her murder is so much less interesting, was the lady who met her end at Dutfield’s Yard, being a Swedish immigrant, who, despite her nickname Long Liz, was another dumpling, she having just returned from the country where she and her paramour had been hop picking, though without much success. The second was Catherine Eddowes, in Mitre’s, where Jack had taken his time to do right by her and left some kind of hideous exhibition on the theme of “her guts for garters” for all to see.
When everything had been reported, we in the journalism business, knowing a good thing, rereported it with embellishments, theories, illustrations, and so forth and so on. Issues emerged: How had Jack miraculously escaped from Dutfield’s Yard when the pony wagon clearly trapped him in it? How had he then gotten cross town, near a mile by the shortest street route (shorter by crow, but as far as was known, he was not a crow) to butcher Mrs. Eddowes within forty-five minutes under the very noses of two separate City constables, without a noise being sounded, and then, still more intriguing, how had he escaped from that locked box, surrounded as it was by patrolling coppers, to arrive at Goulston Street and the Wentworth tenements to deposit his obvious clue and leave his opaque, tantalizing inscription? And what could those words mean? What was the secret of “Juwes”? Was it a code, was it a foreign word, was it a willed misspelling, was it a Masonic symbol, was it a tsarist ploy, was it an obscure cockneyism? Many a tea and crumpet were downed over consideration of the Juwe jigsaw.