Chapter 1 #3
“Thank you.” Caroline had no idea if this was a fair price. But it was one she could afford. She pointed at the stack of luggage beside the train. “That big steamer there is mine.”
As the man muscled her father’s trunk onto a dolly and rolled it toward the clanging elevators, Caroline forced her face into an expression of cool disinterest. She did not turn her head toward the scent of roasting nuts, or stare at the African who strode past in a top hat, swinging an ivory-tipped cane, nor try to read the headline of the paper that another newsboy thrust in her face.
“Coroner’s inquest on the body of Annie Chapman! Read every detail here!”
But waves of panic broke against the inside of her skull.
It had seemed so simple, seated in her favorite chair beside the window at Audley House, to find Charlie. The Midlands Railway from Birmingham to London, a cab to the East End. But now that she was here, her plan felt paper-thin. A leaf boat on the open sea.
Her fingers began to tremble.
Find Charlie, she told herself. Find Charlie.
He would be there. Carys said he’d only ever written from the address in Whitechapel. Caroline curled her fingernails against her palms, pressed until sharp pain cut through the thickening fog in her head. He would be there.
Upstairs, the cabbie shouldered his way through tall open doors and onto the pavement of the bustling high street. “Right this way, miss, follow me…”
Caroline stepped over the threshold, raised a hand against the low sun, and took her first glimpse of London.
The day was nearly spent, the late light jaundiced beneath a soot-smudged sky. It had rained earlier; black water lay in puddles between the cracked paving stones. On all sides, buildings stretched up like rotten teeth, their once-white facades covered, like everything, in a thick layer of grime.
The street before her was wide—at least twice the width of Stafford’s high street—and crawled with the activity of an anthill.
Carriages and buggies, omnibuses and carts, vied for space.
The road itself was dirt. No, Caroline realized with a flash of horror.
Not dirt, but manure, the droppings of thousands upon thousands of horses and mules packed into a thick layer that had turned to shin-high muck in the rain.
And the smell.
This is what five million people smelled like. Like sulfur and sewage and cooking fires, sweat and blood and the hot bodies of beasts. Beneath it all, above it all, lay the sick-sweet stink of decomposition.
“This way, miss,” said the man, steering her luggage toward a line of waiting black hansom cabs. “Best cab in the city, I told you. This way!”
And then she was hoisted unartfully into a musty little carriage with stuffing coming out of the upholstery and no glass between her and the back of the cabbie’s head.
Caroline had barely taken her seat before he shouted “Hup!” and the skinny nag broke into a reluctant trot.
She said a silent prayer for her steamer trunk, which he had secured slapdash to the luggage rack.
“You’ve come on a good day for it,” the cabbie said, turning his head to shout at Caroline as the horse slogged through the mire of the street. “No rain since this morning.”
Caroline could hear her own pulse in her ears, shallow and rapid. The foul odor seemed to concentrate itself in the close air of the carriage. She looked about for a sash to lower the window, but the glass was glued in place.
“Has…has a sewer line broken, perhaps?” Caroline asked. She tried breathing through her mouth, but the air felt thick and noxious against her tongue.
The cabbie laughed. “That’s just London, miss. You’ll get accustomed to it.”
The faintness was creeping up again, rising like water.
Caroline’s head felt too light, her hands in her lap queerly weightless.
She fought the sensation, pressed her toes into the cramped, pointed ends of her boots.
She focused on the greasy window, on her reflection staring back at her, face floating above the high neck of her black gown.
An English rose, her father had called her on the rare occasions she agreed to attend a country dance, when Carys had forced her waist into a corset and her coppery hair into curls. She had never been beautiful. But now she was a shadow of herself, thin and flickering.
More like an English ghost.
“Not from around here,” the cabbie said over his shoulder.
It was not a question. “I’ve picked up a few like you the past week.
One from Hampstead, the other from Oxford, if you can believe it.
An honest-to-God scholar. All come to see where the murders took place.
” He craned his head around, fixed Caroline with an unpleasant smile.
“But you’re the first lady. Which one do you want me to take you to first? ”
Caroline blinked. “Which one…”
“George Yard is nearest,” he said, turning back to the horse’s bony rump and raising his whip.
“I can take you to Buck’s Row, too, but it’s clear past Baker’s Row, so it’ll cost you another threepence.
Worth it, though, if you ask me. You can still see the blood on the pavement where he gutted her. Even after all the rain.”
Something cold and slick flipped over in Caroline’s belly.
The murders. This man was talking about the murdered women.
“You’re mistaken, sir,” she said, clenching her hands to keep them from shaking. “I’m going to see my brother. At 212 Old Montague Street. He’s expecting me.”
When the driver next spoke, it was with a voice she had not yet heard. “Sure, missy,” he said. The tone was mocking. Jeering. “I know that house.”
The cab rattled on in silence.
Caroline’s cheeks burned.
The man thought her a whore, that much was clear from the contempt in his voice.
Let him! What should she care? She would pay him his money and never see him again.
By this time tomorrow the whole dreadful day would seem like a bad dream.
She would write about it, commit it to the pages of one of the notebooks in the valise on the bench beside her, turn every rotten detail into words.
Caroline turned her face to the window and focused on breathing the fetid air. But soon she had forgotten both the smell and the conversation.
Block after block, the city passed. Caroline had read so many books about London, Eliot and Hardy and Dickens, but none had prepared her for the scale of it.
It was so big. So impossibly big. So many houses stacked together, windows looking into other windows, the gardens, when there were gardens, only large enough to hold a bed of vegetables.
And everywhere, people.
Caroline examined each passing countenance intently, but she saw no difference between these features and those of the inhabitants of Stafford, except, she thought, a tension in their expression, a hardness around the mouth.
—
It was nearly dark when they crossed Leman Street.
Caroline had seen many of London’s faces that day—the neo-Gothic spires of St. Pancras, Camden’s neat Georgian row houses, medieval churches with blackened facades.
She had passed cramped apartment buildings and bustling market corners, shoeshine boys smeared with polish and lines of laundry hanging obscenely between windows.
For over an hour, she had breathed London’s smell.
But nothing had prepared her for Whitechapel.
The fog hung low, thickened with coal smoke, and coated the carriage windows in a tarry mist. The streetlamps emitted a diseased glow that reminded Caroline of the marshlights from Carys’s bedtime stories, the fairy lanterns that lured lost travelers to their deaths.
The scenes they illuminated brought up fear like bile, rising through her throat and pressing against her teeth.
On the pavement before a dimly lit pub, a circle of men cheered as two others fought, already too drunk, at this early hour, to land their punches.
Figures leaned against shadowed walls, hats pulled low, faces obscured.
Dogs lurked down twisting alleys, and in the dark quiet under the graveyard trees, Caroline counted one, two, three women with sunken mouths who watched her passing carriage with something like hunger in their eyes.
What hell is this? Where have you been living, Charlie?
As the streets passed, panic set in. Her hands, clasped in her lap, trembled.
She ordered herself to breathe, but the stinking air was thick as soup.
The faintness was coming on, tugging her into unconsciousness, and she was just about to slide under when the horse pulled up fast and jolted her back into her body.
The cab had stopped.
Caroline forced herself to her feet as the cabbie opened the carriage door. She handed down her valise, took his proffered hand, and stepped into the close, damp night.
She was here. As the man left her on the pavement to unload her trunk, Caroline looked up at her brother’s home for the first time.
The walls of 212 Old Montague Street were built of the same stained brick as the rest of London and rose four stories into the starless sky.
Lights shone in the top gable room and through closed curtains on the ground and second floors, but the first floor was completely dark.
A few steps led from the street to the front door, and from the awning, a sign swung.
Boardinghouse
No Vacancy
And in the window leaned a hand-lettered sign, barely legible in the gloom.
Help Wanted: Maid of All Work
A boardinghouse. Charlie lived in a boardinghouse. The faintness dragged at her, blurring the edges of the building.
“That’ll be three shillings,” the driver said, lowering her steamer trunk to the paving stones with a grunt.
“But you said—”
“That was before I knew what kind of business you were in.”
Caroline glanced up and down the empty street. The threat in his voice was plain. She pulled the silver coins from her purse and deposited them into his waiting palm.
“Pleasure doing business,” he said, touching his hat in mock deference.