If there were dreams or nightmares, I have no memory of them. Instead, it seemed that not ten seconds later, Mother was shaking me hard, pulling me from sleep. I uttered unintelligible sounds as I emerged from unconsciousness and found her over me, the usual look of contempt and dismissal on her severe and formerly beautiful face.
“Get up, get up,” she said. “There’s a cabman here. Dress and be gone. I cannot have strange cabmen standing around in my foyer.”
It took a few seconds as cobwebs full of butterfly wings, fly legs, dustballs, and the odd dead leprechaun cleared themselves from my mind. Finally I achieved a version of clarity. “What’s he want?” I said.
“He says he’s from O’Connor, and he’s here to take you somewhere you’re needed. I must say, this whole newspaper business you’ve got yourself in is very annoying to me. Now I find you have a Goliathan pistol over there, capable of blowing down a wall.”
“I’d be happy to loan it to dear sister Lucy, Mother. Perhaps she can play with it in the garden. Do tell her to look down the barrels and pull the triggers to see if it’s loaded.”
“You are too loathsome for words,” she said. “Now hurry. I am giving the cabman your tea this morning because he is working and you are lazing about like a dog. Hurry, hurry.”
She left in high snoot, as if that were different from any other form of being for her, and I pulled on my clothes, locked the Howdah in the desk drawer on the general principle that anything so dangerous should be locked away, and headed downstairs.
“Now, then, what’s all this about?” I demanded of the cabman.
“Sir,” he said, “Mr. O’Connor has requested that you be conveyed swift as possible to 13 Miller Court, Whitechapel.”
“God in heaven, man, why?”
“Sir, there’s been another one, that’s what Mr. O’Connor told me to tell you. This one beyond imagination, so the early reports suggest. You’re to get to it and get details fast for the next edition.”
November 8, 1888
Dear Mum,
I ain’t sent you the other letters but now my plan is to wrap them up with this one and send ’em all along, so you and Da can have a good laugh.
It’s a happy time down here. It’s been such a while since Jack has been about, we girls are sure he’s gone. They say he favors a quarter-moon, coming or going, but he’s missed a couple now.
Maybe he’s gone to try his luck in America! Maybe Sir Charles’s Peelers have done scared him off, as they’re everywhere these days. Maybe he fell in a hole and got eaten by rats, the cheesy bugger.
Joe says we are quit of him, and that he’s a lucky lad, because if Joe had gotten ahold of him, he’d of hammered and chopped him so bad, wouldn’t be enough to put on sale at the fish market.
Anyhow, thought you’d want to know.
I did get a little rowdy tonight after my gins, but didn’t have no customers, as it’s raining. I sang too loud and Liz upstairs pounded on the floor to get me quiet. Sorry, Liz! Hope I didn’t wake Diddles the cat! Sorry, Diddles!
Anyhow, I’m feeling right safe and good now. It’s pouring out and not even the Ripper would go out in that cold soaking. I’m locked in my little room, I’ve had my gin, the fire’s burned low and tomorrow’s a new day and I am full of hope.
Best and love, Mum.
Your loving daughter,
Mairsian
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Diary
November 9, 1888
I got there around five A.M. If the world was expecting dawn, that was not yet evident. A gloom had clapped itself across the city and scored the night with bitter rain. A wind blew nails through the air, to chill the skin and the soul. The streets, even in the hustle-bustle of Whitechapel, where the ever rotating wheel of sex walk dominated, were quiet. Only now and then could a pedestrian be sighted in the shrouded element; all the Bobbies had retreated to warmer climes. Only a madman would be walking about with impunity.
Equally, Miller’s Court, a city in its own way, was empty of humanity. All the bad little girls, their thighs smeared with goo, their mouths slack and distended by cocks, were abed for a little peace and dreams of prosperity. Working families, of whom there were a few so unfortunate as to share whoretown with the Judys, had yet to arise for their twelve to sixteen hours of routine exploitation in whatever form of hired slavery it was their fate to endure. I went swiftly to the window of No. 13, reached in, feeling as my fingers found the lock button. I pulled it and heard the click that indicated the spring had sprung.
That easily I was in. Her little cave was dark, though embers glowed in the fireplace. It was no more than twelve by twelve, and whoever would consign a human being to so small a space was himself criminal, though since it was Mary Jane’s own fondness for the laudanum of gin that brought her there, it was she herself who was largely guilty of the crime against Mary Jane. Character, as much as system, was in play in this case. I was soon to add my meager share of woe upon the lady, but it was she herself and the society in which she existed that had engineered such colossal cruelty. I was merely the last in a long line of criminals who feasted on their victim’s weakness.
I slid off my overcoat as I stood there, then slid off my frock coat. I rolled up my sleeves, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. In time, they accommodated and I saw her, her flesh translucent and delicious as she lay in slumber, breathing gently in the wan light, slightly tilted to her left, pinning that arm beneath her, her nubbin nose and pouty fount of lip oriented likewise to left. She was, however brief it would last, a picture of beauty. I could see her clothes neatly folded on the table next to her bed, along with a few folded pieces of paper, letters, evidently. She had been reading them prior to slumber.
She was not naked. She guarded her sweets against the curiosity of strangers with a flimsy chemise that fell in soft, tantalizing disarray to reveal as much of Mary as any would need to want to see more of her. I could identify the hollow of her throat, the smoothness of her shoulders, the alabaster glow of her skin, the mild flattening effect that gravity had on her two voluptuous, ripened breasts, which lay toward me, constructions so gelid of flesh and so perfect in distribution that it was all one could do not to approach and demand suckle, anything that would draw a lad close to those eternal udders and their awesome whisper of the bounty and pleasure of life.
I pulled on my gloves and snapped them tight so that the leather glowed. They had been through much, and I had one more ordeal for them to protect me from. I reached back and slipped the butcher from the belt that had secured it against the flat of my back, under my jackets. I stood there for who knew how long, lost in computation. Which angle, which hand, a cut or a stab, a hand to mouth, or would the first wound be powerful enough to buy silence through the few seconds of the dying? Would she thrash, kick, buck, twist? She looked so formidable that I doubted she’d take her passage easily.
Decisions made, I stepped to the side of the bed.