“They seem right enough,” said he. “Not seeing two where one should be? Or getting a blur anywhere, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Well and good.”
“May I read?”
“I see no reason why you should not, so long as you do not strain your eyes. Not by candlelight, I should say.”
“May I be up and about?”
“Not yet. A day or two more in bed should put you right, though.”
“What about food?” said I. “I’ve had only a bowl of broth this day.”
“You held it down? No nausea?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you may eat what the rest eat. Perhaps Annie could make up a tray for you so that you could eat here in bed. I’ll mention it to her.” Then he nodded, apparently satisfied. “You’ve come through it well, Jeremy.”
He began to pack up, rolling the soiled bandage and tucking away the gin bottle. As he did, I put a question to him.
“Mr. Donnelly,” said I, “you have good Latin, have you not?”
“I should think so,” said he. “Medical Latin, Church Latin, what have you. Why do you ask?”
“Sir John used a Latin phrase describing the capture of the Raker which quite baffled me. He said that he had been found ‘in flagrante delicto.’ What did he mean, sir?”
Mr. Donnelly, who usually seemed ready to smile or break into a laugh, looked at me quite soberly. “That would translate roughly as ‘caught in the act,’ ” he said.
“Caught in what act, sir?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, Jeremy, situated as you are here in Covent Garden, you must be aware of what is done between men and women, the commerce in prostitution and so on?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“Then I may tell you that that creature, the Raker, was caught in the act of sexual intercourse with the corpus of a woman.”
“A dead woman? Is that possible? Can it be done?”
“It can be, and it was. Even I, who have seen a good deal more than I would wish to tell, was quite shocked by what I saw there in that barn. You see, Jeremy, the sex function is very powerful in men, a very great force indeed, and if it be thwarted, madness of a sort can result in some. In the case of the Raker, because of his gruesome reputation and the tales told of him, not to mention his hideous appearance, even the prostitutes of the street rejected him. The method he chose to satisfy his lust is not so very strange, considering his familiarity with the dead; they were his subjects; he was their master. With that little stiletto of his, he could change those who had rejected him, or might reject him, into his compliant partners. Sir John blames himself for not realizing the Raker’s guilt earlier, since he was always about. I blame myself for not understanding the significance of the peculiar, virtually bloodless nature of the wounds he inflicted. For in death, his victims seemed always quite lifelike.”
I listened most solemnly to all that Mr. Donnelly had to say. Inwardly, I was quite agog, amazed at the twisted logic he suggested. Yet my response to all this was a rather weak one.
“I had no idea.”
“Nor, for that matter, did the rest of us,” he said.
I sat there in bed, considering all this for a long space of time. Then, thinking to put my attention to practical matters, I said: “So as I understand it, he had a new victim — a new … partner?”
“That is correct.”
“Would it be helpful for me to write out a new item for the Public Advertiser to call for those who knew her to come and give her proper name? I have little to fill my time here.”
“That should not be necessary, Jeremy. The Raker himself knew her after a fashion, for she had so vociferously rejected him that he learned what he could of her and vowed that one day he would have her in his own way. She was an Italian girl known as Mariah — or Maria, more likely. No one on the street seems to know her family name.”
Stunned, as I might have been from a great blow, I leaned back on the pillow with my eyes closed, striving to hold back the tears. Yet they came.
Mr. Donnelly grasped me by the shoulder. “Jeremy,” said he, “1 had no idea — Why, you must have known her.”
ELEVEN
Hosea Willis was brought before the Lord Chief Justice the next day at Old Bailey. The remarkable swiftness with which he went from capture to conviction came through the Earl of Mansfield’s desire to have done with the matter as quickly as possible. There was nothing could be said in his defense, and nothing was what he said. He simply plead guilty to the three homicides with which he was charged, and allowed that there had been four previous which had gone undetected. With that, the Lord Chief Justice asked him if he felt remorse. I was told that the Raker did no more than look at him blankly and rep)eat the word as a question — “Remorse?” — as if to say he had no understanding of it. Then was the sentence of death by hanging pronounced upon him and the gavel brought down, effectively ending the Raker’s life but for the formalities on Tyburn Hill.
With the Raker’s brief appearance in court and the judgment passed upon him, I became the beneficiary of ten guineas in reward for his capture. The sum was brought me by Sir John in a leather pouch quite like the one in which Poll Tarkin had kept her treasure. He offered it to me with a warm smile, saying he wished it were more.
“In truth,” said he, “I should have said twelve or thirteen guineas would have been a fairer division, but so it was decided.”
“I am most grateful, sir,” said I, weighing the bag in my hand.
“Do you wish to count them?”
“No, sir, I take the members of Parliament at their word.”
“Then perhaps I ought take it downstairs to Mr. Marsden for safekeeping in the strong box. It is not wise having a large amount lying about, as you yourself have cautioned me.”
“With your permission, I will keep it by me. I have need of it.”
“Oh? Already have it spent, do you?”
“In a manner of speaking, I do, yes, sir.”
“Hmmm.” He mused for a moment. “Nothing frivolous, I hope?”
“No, indeed not.”
“Well then, keep it, by all means.” He went to my door, then turned back to me. “May I ask on what you have set your mind? Perhaps it is something with which we should supply you. Clothes … books — whatever is in our means, we try to give.”
“I know that. Sir John, yet this is something quite apart. Trust me in this, please.”
“Of course,” said he, and with a firm nod he left me.
I sat in bed, a book and the bag of guineas before me. In fact I did open up the bag and look inside, though I did not count the coins. I closed it up and tossed it back on the bed, then did I pick up the book that lay open before me. It was a copy of Mr. Goldsmith’s gentle romance. The Vicar of Wakefield, brought me as a gift by Lady Fielding that very morning; she had suggested he might autograph it for me when next I saw him. I delved into it immediately and found myself quite captivated by Dr. Primrose and his brood. Yet now, with the reward in hand so much earlier than I had expected, I found I was unable to concentrate upon the pages of the book, so impatient was I for Mr. Donnelly’s arrival.
The day before, I had told him all of my relations with Mariah — from my first glimpse of her as an acrobat in Covent Garden to my last meeting when she laughed, seeing me in woman’s garb. I left out nothing, not even my foolish fantasies of escape to the American colonies. Mr. Donnelly did not laugh at me, neither did he sneer. He told me that, years before, when he was a lad of about my age in Dublin, he had formed just such a fascination for a girl of the streets; that he had gone so far as to steal money for her from his father’s shop in hopes of reforming her; that it had all ended badly when a shop assistant was blamed for the theft, and young Gabriel was forced to confess. His father, far from outraged, had taken him in hand and managed to convince him that the girl wanted only his money, for each time she asked for a sum, whatever the reason, it always was greater than the last.