Chapter 3
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet.
I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track.
That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits.
I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.
Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal.
How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again.
You will soon hear of me with my funny little games.
I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it.
Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you.
Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight.
My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.
Good Luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Dont mind me giving the trade name. Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha
Despite the unfamiliar room, and the strange man across the landing, and the murderer wandering the streets, Caroline slept like the dead.
When she opened her eyes to Rab’s third rap, it took her a moment to remember where she was.
“Miss Huxley,” he called. “It’s nearly six.”
She looked around in bewilderment for Miss Huxley, a young woman she had known tangentially through Eloise, before remembering that she had commandeered the surname for herself.
“Thank you,” she called back, and waited until she heard his door close before throwing back the covers.
She got to her feet, stretched her arms overhead with a moan, and walked to the window.
Whitechapel sprawled beneath her.
She was high, three floors above ground level.
The buildings across from hers were two or three stories at most, mainly made of the ubiquitous soot-blackened brick she had seen all through the city yesterday.
She could see quite far, five or six streets, before an uneven line of buildings taller and wider than hers blocked the view.
They were huge, with rows of tiny windows and too-small chimneys, and the sight of them filled Caroline with a vague dread before she realized what they were.
Workhouses. Where Oliver Twist had begged for more and had been refused. Where London’s poorest worked like slaves in exchange for a bowl of watery porridge and a flea-ridden bed. Where she would likely end up, if she did not find her brother.
Not many people were out in the streets below, but a few black-hatted pedestrians walked the pavement, and a mule cart passed under her window.
In the smoke-blurred sky to her left a thin moon hung, slender as a nail paring.
She was facing south, toward the Thames, although the day was not clear and she could not see the silver gleam of the river.
Her room at Audley House had faced south, too, but the view from those windows had been of the rose garden, with its overgrown paths and moss-gilded statues. Beyond the line of hedges stood the forest, dark and ancient, like a wild army at the gates of her civilized world.
The thought jarred something loose in her memory.
It may be a bear to get to, Rab had said last night as he stood at the top of the stairs, but you can’t beat the view.
Her trunk sat beside the armoire, its brass clasps glinting dimly. She knelt before it and unsnapped the fastenings. As she threw it open, the smell of her old life floated up to her: the must of Audley House’s Tudor plaster, the rose oil she applied behind her ears.
She had packed the trunk, it felt, in another life, and when she pulled out a neatly folded stack of clothing, it took her a moment to recognize the lively patterned and pastel garments as her own.
They were pieces of frippery, with their fluttering lace and covered buttons, their tiered skirts and matching gloves.
She had given her most ravishing gowns to Eloise, but even these, her simpler day frocks, seemed ridiculous now.
She couldn’t imagine wearing any of them while scrubbing floors or changing bed linens.
She shoved the dresses aside. Beneath them the spines of books gazed up at her like old friends, their gold-leaf titles winking. She ran her fingers affectionately across them before tugging one free.
Tucked behind the front cover of Wuthering Heights, just as she’d left it, was the stack of Charlie’s letters. She flipped through them until she found the one she was looking for.
The letter itself contained nothing important, just Charlie’s response to an argument she’d had with Eloise.
But doodled into the corner, in indigo-blue ink, was a window.
A window that looked over a back garden.
She squinted her eyes at the slatted fence, the neat brick path and shingled toolshed, and smiled.
It was the same garden she had walked through last night.
The vantage point was lower than her own, and the room from which he had drawn this would be on the second floor, she guessed, looking north over the vegetable boxes to the back gate. And—it took a moment to orient herself—his view was over the west end of the garden, not the east.
You are never, under any circumstances, to enter the east wing of the second floor.
She had a plan, then. Find this room. Search for any signs of Charlie.
Feeling oddly fortified, Caroline slid the letters back into their hiding spot and replaced the book beside the others. “I’ll unpack you later,” she promised, then glanced forlornly at the crepe dress that hung on the back of the desk chair.
Despite its fine material, it was simple enough to pass for a day dress.
Custom dictated that she wear black for a year after her father’s death.
All her other gowns would draw too much attention, but still, she did not want to reach for it.
After all Lord Foster’s talk of the dangers of the world, all his strict rules that kept Caroline shut up like some caged, wild thing waiting for the stud horse or the slaughterhouse, he had failed to protect her. He had died and left her with nothing.
It was she who had paid for Lord Foster’s funeral with her mother’s emerald earrings, she who had chosen the simplest pine casket and cheapest lilies.
She who had sat in the front pew and stared at the whorls and knots in the wood all through Reverend Sanders’s sermon about legacy and glory, she who had thrown the first handful of dirt onto the unfinished wood and turned away with the hollow sound of it ringing in her ears.
In the silent weeks after her father’s death, she understood the depth of his disinterest in her.
Not in any of the letters in his desk, in the documents in his bank safe, was there a single mention of what should become of her.
There was nothing left to bequeath, and still, he had bequeathed her nothing.
So she did not allow herself to grieve. She turned her sorrow into anger and her anger into action, and instead of collapsing, as she might have done if she had found any evidence that her father had loved her, she dismantled her beloved home to save herself.
Charlie was not here. But she could find him. She had to.
After washing her face, cleaning her teeth, and relieving herself in the porcelain chamber pot, Caroline laced her own corset—not tightly; she could nearly hear Carys’s tut of disapproval at the way the fabric gaped at her waist—and pulled the black dress over her head.
It smelled of the train and sour sweat, and she remembered how Rab’s nostrils had flared when he first saw her.
Nothing to be done about that. She would smell like a kitchen maid soon enough.
—
There was a round looking glass on the wall beside the armoire. She observed her reflection as she pinned her hair into place.
Caroline knew, the way women know these things, having been born into competition with one another, that she was not lovely.
That adjective was reserved for the other young ladies who decorated the homes of Staffordshire’s lesser nobility, with their rosy cheeks and plump hands, their bright eyes and easy smiles.
Eloise was not lovely either; Lord Foster had once said she looked like a potato farmer’s daughter, with her square jaw and overlarge nose.
The two girls had laughed about their looks, hiding their hurt.
The old spinsters of Staffordshire, they had called themselves.
It will be us sitting at the edges of the dancing, with our canes and our cognac, criticizing the young ladies loud enough for them to hear!
Then Eloise had gone to London for the season and returned betrothed to a fat-fingered boy with four thousand pounds a year.
Once or twice, a young man at a dance had called Caroline striking.
But that was not the word, not exactly. Caroline’s blue eyes stared back at her from their rings of white lashes.
When had she become so thin? She was too pale, her chin too pointed, her lips too thin, her teeth too sharp.
An honest observer might have used the word unsettling.
A writer, a Thackeray or a Shelley, might have gone on to say her face was out of time, ill-suited for the nineteenth century that, above all, demanded that women be soft.
Hers was a face that belonged to pre-Roman Britain, with its solstice rites and mist-wreathed standing stones.
She looked like a strong breeze might blow her out of existence. A ghost from another time.