Chapter 8
The Times
London, United Kingdom
Sir—
Whitechapel horrors will not be in vain if “at last” the public conscience awakens to consider the life which these horrors reveal.
The murders were, it may almost be said, bound to come; generation could not follow generation in lawless intercourse, children could not be familiarized with scenes of degradation, community in crime could not be the bond of society and the end of all be peace.
Some of us who, during many years, have known the life of our neighbours do not think the murders to be the worst fact in our experience, and published evidence now gives material for forming a picture of daily or nightly life such as no one has imagined.
(Excerpt from Rev. Samuel A. Barnett’s letter to the editor of The Times.)
In the weeks between Charlie’s visits, other than the occasional afternoon spent sipping tea in Eloise’s drawing room, Caroline’s only friends had been those she met on the pages of books.
The obsession had been born of boredom. On one of her father’s long trips to the capital, she had let herself into his study and absentmindedly trailed her fingers along the spines on the bookshelves, until the gold waves embossed on a book as thick as her hand stopped her dead.
She tugged the tome free and stared down at the cover. Moby-Dick, it declared. Or, The Whale.
She had read—on the floor, with her back against the bookshelf—until the light through the window faded.
She had not noticed the numbness in her legs nor the ache in her spine until Carys, flustered and pale-lipped, found her and forced her to eat supper.
Caroline had reluctantly complied with the book open before her, the spoon forgotten halfway to her mouth.
And she had read on through the night, read until the sun gilded the trees and the house woke around her, read until she had consumed the final word and sat for a long time with the closed book pressed against her heart.
And so it had continued.
She read every novel in her father’s study, even slogged through a few philosophical texts. She had blushed at Voltaire’s Candide, clenched Dumas’s pages as though she were the one holding the rapier, and drunk up every sentence of A Tale of Two Cities.
Here, in black ink, she could live a thousand lives. She could travel the world, walk in the shoes of a prince or a pauper. She could sail the ocean, spend her childhood in an orphanage, fight a war, fall in love.
When Charlie next visited, he grinned as she recounted every plot point of Far from the Madding Crowd, and a week after he’d left, a package was delivered with her name on it.
It was trio of books. Pride and Prejudice. But what stopped Caroline’s heart in her chest was the name beneath the title.
A woman. A woman had written these novels.
Caroline read the trilogy in a single day, and although she rolled her eyes at the interminable dialogue and complete lack of swordplay, something kindled inside her.
This woman, this Jane Austen, had created something.
She had made up people with hopes and fears.
She had decorated rooms with drapes and paintings and pianofortes.
She had swirled her characters around one another, tangled them up together.
She had breathed life into a world of her own invention.
And that world, those people, now existed without her. Beyond her.
Other than through the deeds of one’s sons, it seemed the only way open for a woman to leave her mark on the world.
Caroline went into town the next day. The bookseller carried other novels of Austen’s—Emma and Sense and Sensibility—and Caroline purchased all of them, hoping (she would be disappointed) for more than conversations in drawing rooms. The bookseller had nodded approvingly at her stack.
“Very popular,” he’d said. “Very popular, miss, with the other ladies.”
Caroline had wrinkled her nose at that. “Do you have anything else?” she asked. “By a lady?”
The bookseller had sighed and pointed at a bottom shelf. “The Brontes,” he said, with a sniff of disapproval, “are ladies.”
And so Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights had come into Caroline’s life like long-lost friends. In those pages, she met the mirror to her own sorrow and hope. And she wondered—silently, self-consciously—if she might ever build a world of her own out of paper and ink.
She had tried. Lord knew how she’d tried, in the empty weeks between Charlie’s visits.
She had hurled herself at the diary he bought her like a dog against the bars of a cage.
But whatever strange soul inhabited the great works of fiction in her bookshelf—even, she admitted begrudgingly, Austen’s—she was never able to conjure it.
Until now. Now, in the dark hours of night, after the work of the boardinghouse was done and the bolt was drawn across her door, something beyond her moved her hand.
The words appeared in her mind as though dropped there, and she could not get them out quickly enough.
She stayed up past midnight, the only interruptions the regular tolling of the Dutch clock in the parlor and the small, surreptitious sounds from Rab’s room across the landing.
She recorded her days in minute detail. The curl of steam against the cellar windows, the ache in her back after scrubbing the floors, the taste of Mrs. Easton’s scones, salty and buttery and crumbly, the way a sandcastle might taste in some fairy kingdom where the world was made of sweets.
Mostly, though, she wrote about the attack in the alley.
The memory did not leave Caroline in the days and weeks that followed.
It waited for her behind doors and in cupboards like some terrible boggart, but the monster was her own body and her own mind.
It regurgitated sensations and details without warning: the black half-moons of grime beneath the tall man’s fingernails.
The boyish gap between his front teeth. His hands on her ribs. His fingers around her throat.
She combed through each moment, each strangled breath.
She cataloged the men’s clothing, their sour scents, the expressions that flitted over their faces: delight and menace and rage and delight.
If she could re-create the scene truthfully, heartbeat by heartbeat, perhaps it would cease to belong to them, and belong, instead, to her.
But as September dropped its golden leaves and autumn’s gray skies blew in, Caroline’s daily tasks nearly doubled, and she found herself collapsing into bed with only a forlorn glance at her waiting desk. From dawn to long after the supper dishes were dried, she and Mrs. Easton worked.
“Every room will be occupied, come Saturday,” the landlady told her one Monday. “And we shan’t do more than keep our heads above water with the cooking and tidying. Everything we can do ahead, we must do now.”
They baked and iced enough tea cakes for the Royal Navy.
They teetered on stacked stools to dust the dining room’s crystal chandelier.
They stirred sheets with lye in great copper vats like East End witches.
They kneaded dough, roasted meat, boiled potatoes.
Caroline polished the silver until her reflection blinked back from every teaspoon and marveled at the new quickness of her fingers.
“It’ll rain tomorrow,” Mrs. Easton said on Tuesday, with an expert glance through the kitchen windows. “Better do all we can of our outdoor tasks today.”
Together they carried the boardinghouse’s rugs to the back garden and hit them with a broom handle until they had exhaled all their dust.
“I like to imagine our dear lord mayor,” Mrs. Easton said, thwacking the carpet. “Take that, you great Belgian git.”
Caroline imagined the faces of the two men from the alley.
The thought had occurred to her, briefly, that they might be responsible for the borough’s murders; that, working in tandem, they might be the Whitechapel killer.
But she soon dismissed it. The policeman—Sergeant Corbet, he’d called himself—had recognized the men, promised to pursue them.
From what she had heard secondhand at the Full Moon’s dining table, the Metropolitan Police were chasing their tails to find the killer.
Certainly they would have exhausted any easy leads.
Now, Caroline superimposed her attackers’ countenances onto the tufted wool, imagined their noses caving in, their eyeballs splitting and running like soft-boiled eggs.
But by the time she and Mrs. Easton had finished the seven-stone oriental from the parlor, she could think of nothing but her burning shoulder muscles.
“Put it down for just a moment,” Mrs. Easton panted as they carried the rolled rug back toward the cellar steps. “I need…just a moment.”
Caroline gladly set her end on the pebbled path of the garden. The landlady put her hands on her hips and arched her back.
“Mrs. Easton,” Caroline said tentatively, “I can handle lunch, if you need a lie-down—”
“I’m fine. Just a bit achy, is all.” She nodded at the rug. “Shall we?”
But Caroline’s gaze had landed on the box of purple flowers behind the older woman’s shoulder. Their velvety hoods bowed and nodded in the breeze, and the last of summer’s honeybees buzzed at their pistils. She had not found a time yet to ask.
“What kind of flowers are those?”
The landlady followed Caroline’s gaze. “Those? Those are hollyhocks, dear.”
“We had hollyhocks at Aud—in Birmingham. But none that color. Nor that shape.”
Mrs. Easton shrugged but did not meet Caroline’s eyes. “Perhaps they grow differently down here in the south. Are you ready? Only one more rug to go after this…”
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