Chapter 10
I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. had not the time to get ears for police. thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
Caroline awoke in a cold pool of morning light.
It took her a moment to orient herself, so deeply had she been sleeping.
At first, she thought herself back in Audley House, a sensation that had not swept her up in its warm, familiar arms since her first week in Whitechapel.
But with a jolt like a carriage wheel dropping into a pothole, it was gone.
She shoved the covers back and scrambled to her feet.
The strange, drunken party came back to Caroline in bursts as she dressed, clumsily tugging at the laces of the frock she’d worn last night.
Never had she been in her room this late in the morning; she was unfamiliar with the way the watery sunlight caught on the angled, whitewashed ceiling. It must be past seven.
She paused on the gable landing, ears pricked to the shut door with the silver handle. She had stumbled onto something when she surprised Rab in the kitchen, with his decanter of purple liquid.
She had only to keep up the charade long enough to find out the truth of this place.
She took the servants’ stairs two at a time, imagining Mrs. Easton’s puckered expression at her tardiness, and barreled into the kitchen, her hastily pinned hair falling free around her face.
“Good morning,” she gasped to the landlady, who was standing at the stove with her back to the door. “Is breakfast done? What can I do? I didn’t hear the clock, I slept in—”
But Caroline trailed off. The pot of water on the stove was not yet boiling; a bowl of eggs sat beside it, uncooked. The sink was full of dirty dishes.
Mrs. Easton rubbed a fist into a puffy eye. “The boarders passed a late night. None shall be up for a few hours yet, I expect. Sit down. Your franticness is giving me a headache.”
She poured them cups of tea and they sat in silence, sipping. The anxiety tried to bubble out of Caroline with a tapping fingernail or bouncing foot, but she forced her body to remain still. Mrs. Easton was clearly in no mood for jumpiness.
When their teacups were empty, the landlady sighed. “Come on, now. Those dishes won’t do themselves, no matter how many times I ask nicely.”
It took them an hour to wash and dry the supper and dessert plates. The Dutch clock tolled nine times, but the house remained quiet.
Mrs. Easton pulled breakfast trays from a cabinet and began placing boiled eggs in their china cups. “I’ll make them up,” she said. “You take them to the rooms. My knees aren’t friends with the stairs this morning.”
Up and down Caroline went until her knees, she thought, felt about the same as Mrs. Easton’s.
She started with the first floor, pulling the trays from the dumbwaiter and ferrying them to their doors.
She could only carry one tray at a time, and by her second trip, she was huffing and puffing with the effort.
After dropping Monsieur Rodart’s tray in front of room 104, Caroline stood listening for a moment, catching her breath.
The hallway was silent. No thud of boots on floorboards, no squealing bedsprings.
She walked to the scarred door of the east wing on the balls of her feet.
It stood silent and vaguely disapproving amid the foiled wallpaper and Ottoman rugs, no different than it had been on any other day.
Caroline raised a hand to the iron bar that belted its middle.
The metal was cool and black under her fingers.
She tugged, gently at first, with a furtive glance over her shoulder, then in earnest, leaning her weight against it, bracing her foot against the frame. But the iron padlock held firm.
—
Ten o’clock found Caroline back downstairs, sitting at the counter with a second cup of tea in her hands, curling her blistered toes back from the ends of her shoes.
Doors had begun to squeak open in the house overhead, footsteps a few pounds heavier with breakfast trays in hand.
Caroline had not yet spent an idle moment at the boardinghouse and found it unsettling.
There was too much to think of when one’s body wasn’t moving.
She stared down into the drowned tea leaves and wished she was at her desk with a pen in her hand.
Mrs. Easton got creakily to her feet and staggered to the pantry.
“I suppose we can start supper. Make a stock from the peelings and trimmings. We’re out of meat.
Out of flour. Out of butter, for God’s sake.
They’re a blight of locusts, the lot of them.
I should double my rates. Triple them.” She reemerged, looking murderous.
“There’s naught left to eat but porridge. ”
Caroline blinked. The larder had been full last night; every shelf stuffed with glistening hams and wax-wrapped cheeses.
“One of us must stay,” Mrs. Easton went on. “The boarders all know you, of course, but the other men…well. They’re bound to be crotchety this morning, and they don’t like change on a good day. So I shall remain here, in case any of them need something, and you, Miss Huxley, must do our shopping.”
Caroline balked.
She had not been outside the Full Moon since the day when she had followed Rab and Mary Jane, had nearly been raped. Her heart beat unpleasantly hard as she searched for an excuse.
“Get potatoes and carrots at the greengrocer,” Mrs. Easton was saying, ticking off the items on her fingers.
“There’re onions and cabbages aplenty in the garden yet.
And a cut of meat at the butcher. A chuck or a round, whatever looks best. I’ll take the bus to Covent Garden tomorrow to get the rest of it, but that’ll tide us over. ”
There was nothing for it. No reason to decline and stay here, in the relative safety of the boardinghouse. Unless she revealed what had happened in the alley the day she followed Rab and Mary Jane.
Caroline accepted a handful of coins from Mrs. Easton’s purse, tied her bonnet strings under her chin, and took the burlap bags from their hooks by the garden stairs.
As she opened the cellar doors and stepped into the bracing wind, dread sank through her.
She would keep to the main street, she promised herself.
She would do her business, return straight back to the boardinghouse, and not dawdle.
The last strains of summer had faded; the morning was bright and sharp.
Garden mud sucked at her boots. Caroline unlatched the gate and walked swiftly down the alley, glancing over her shoulder every few steps.
But she was alone, and when she emerged onto Davenant Street, she blew out the breath she had been holding.
The street was busier than she had imagined it would be at this hour.
Caroline’s shoulders relaxed as she joined the throng.
But by the time she turned from Davenant Street into Whitechapel High Street, she knew something was wrong.
The pavement was crushed with people. They shoved and shouted and paid no heed to Caroline, threading her way through the crowd to see what the matter was. The air was stiff with anxious energy.
“Two more women murdered in the night!” shouted a red-cheeked newsboy from his precarious perch on a water pump. “Read all about it! Two more unfortunates butchered by the Ripper!”
Caroline’s stomach dove.
“Whitechapel murderer still at large!” shrieked a second newsboy on the opposite corner. “Killer claims two more souls! Police force disgraced!”
Caroline fumbled in her pocket for one of Mrs. Easton’s pennies and fought her way to the front of the crowd.
“Throats slashed!” shouted the newsboy as he took her coin and handed her a paper. “Bodies mutilated! Whitechapel killer strikes again!”
Caroline folded the newspaper beneath her arm, put her head down, and shouldered her way west.
Only when she had left the claustrophobic press of people far behind did she stop. She leaned against the shuttered window of a dress shop and began to read.
St. James Gazette
London, United Kingdom
Sunday, September 30, 1888
The Murders In Aldgate And Whitechapel
Mutilation Of One Of The Bodies
The East End of London is again much excited by the discovery of two more revolting murders.
About one o’clock in the morning, the body of a woman, with her throat cut, was found in a yard belonging to a workmen’s club, in Berner Street, and an hour later another woman was found murdered in the corner of Mitre Square, Aldgate.
In the latter case the body was also mutilated, and as this was not the case with the woman found in Berner Street, it is supposed that the murderer was disturbed before completing his dreadful work, and then he proceeded toward the City and committed the second crime.
As regards the line of conduct to be followed by the public, there ought to be no panic.
There is no occasion for one. These outrages are confined to one district and to one class of women, the most difficult to control or protect of all the community.
It is very natural that Whitechapel should be terrified; but even in Whitechapel people who work all day and go to their beds at night are in no greater danger than they would be elsewhere.
The victims are the miserable creatures who must needs prowl about the streets in the dark.
The criminal must have a hiding place in Whitechapel. He can hardly be the casual resident of a lodging house. He can be no ordinary tramp. In so limited a field, and with a definite class to pick from, the police ought not to have any insuperable difficulty in running down their man.
Two more women. Two more, brutally murdered, while Caroline slept a dreamless sleep.
But it was not the account of the brutal murders that made Caroline’s heart stumble out of rhythm.
At the bottom of the page was an illustration. An illustration of a man with a thick, luxurious mustache. Caroline blinked. It was the man who had been sitting beside Rab at the supper table last night, who had asked about Charlie. And beneath the illustration, a name.
Chief Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren.