Chapter 11
“And now,” said the reverend, “let us pray for those souls who most ungently departed this world. You know of whom I speak; I shan’t sully their memories with the details of their deaths.”
Caroline dutifully dropped her head, but she did not take her eyes from the sandy-haired man three pews back from the pulpit.
It had been a week since she’d read the newspaper in the street. A week since she’d learned that, on the night the Whitechapel murderer struck twice, London’s chief police commissioner had dined at the Full Moon. Slept at the Full Moon. She had poured his wine.
When she’d returned to the boardinghouse that morning, Caroline had obeyed all Mrs. Easton’s orders with jumpy efficiency, listening to the front door squeal open and closed a dozen times.
By noon, only the regulars remained, and most stayed in their rooms until twilight.
At supper, she watched them from the corners of her eyes but noticed no change in their behavior other than a languor that might be attributed to overindulgence.
Mr. Tythe did not raise his head from his folded arms, and not even Senhor Perreira called for a second glass of madeira.
But by the next morning, all seemed back to normal.
Not for Caroline, though.
The mistrust she’d felt that first night on the boardinghouse’s steps solidified, deepened, until it gnawed at her insides like an ulcer.
Something sinister was afoot in the Full Moon. Something related to her brother’s disappearance, and, perhaps, to these mysterious murders. But what?
She was no closer to answering that question than she’d been a week ago. Which was why she’d begged the morning off so she could go to Mass.
—
The service had just started when she slipped through St. Mary’s heavy chapel doors and took the first vacant seat she spotted.
Crammed between two matrons who smelled of cooking sherry and mothballs, respectively, Caroline folded her hands in her lap and scanned the packed pews for Sergeant Corbet.
She had located him quickly, seated beside a woman in a blue hat.
Its ostrich feather tickled his ear every time she nodded, which is how Caroline spotted him; the repetitive flash of his hand brushing the tendrils away drew her eye.
She had not been certain she would recognize him out of uniform, but the uprightness of his shoulders amid the sea of slumping spines left her in no doubt.
“I regret that I did not know these women,” continued the reverend now in his nasal, monotonous voice.
“But they were members of our community, and perhaps they were known to some of you. Let us remember that before they were victims, they were daughters and sisters; some of them were wives and mothers.”
Caroline stared at the whorls of close-cut hair on the policeman’s bent neck and tried not to fidget.
When the sermon was over, she would make her way to Sergeant Corbet and tell him she needed to speak with him.
Once they were alone together, she would tell him what she knew: that Sir Charles Warren, chief police commissioner, had been a guest at the Full Moon the night the Ripper had killed two women.
And that was as far as her plan extended.
Were you my sister, the policeman had said, when he left her a block from the boardinghouse after saving her in the alley, I would not allow you within shooting distance of the Full Moon.
What did he know, or guess at?
“May they rest in peace,” the reverend went on.
“And may their deaths inspire you to cling even more tightly to the word of Christ. In times of unrest and fear, it is hardest to hear the voice of God. Reach for the hands of your neighbors. As St. Paul said to the Corinthians: Aim for restoration. Comfort one another. Live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Amen.”
“Amen,” echoed Caroline, and leapt to her feet.
—
“It’s atrocious,” the woman in the ostrich hat was saying to Sergeant Corbet as Caroline stepped awkwardly behind him. “Absolutely atrocious.”
“I could not agree more, Mrs. Belford.” His tone was practiced, soothing. “I assure you, both the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police are on the case now. We will catch our man.”
“Young women torn up on the streets,” the matron went on, full cheeks trembling with the strength of the emotion.
“Even if they were…well. This is not the Whitechapel of my youth. No, no. If my parents—who were well-to-do silk spinners, mind you, with a storefront in the high street—if they could see the state of their neighborhood now, the streets full of drunks and Indians, they would roll in their graves—”
“Sergeant Corbet,” Caroline cut in, “forgive me for interrupting.”
The policeman turned. He was taller than she remembered, and clad today in a navy pinstripe suit. His eyes were the same bright blue threaded through with green, his mustache neatly trimmed.
“Miss…Foster, is it?” he asked after a moment.
In the way the soft line of his brows drew together, Sergeant Corbet saw what she had seen herself in the glass that morning: Her lips were pale, her eyes rimmed with red.
Since she had learned of the murders six days ago, sleep had evaded Caroline.
She meted out Dr. Hoffman’s pills, taking just one every other day. But she could not bring herself to open the brown bottle labeled Ner-Vigor Compound that Rab had deposited beside her closed door. Even if it promised rest, she was not ready to lose herself to a substance she did not know.
“Are you well?” the policeman asked.
“Quite well, thank you.” Caroline smiled weakly. “I’m so sorry to accost you like this, on a Sunday. But I hoped…perhaps we could speak?” She was aware of Mrs. Belford behind the policeman’s shoulder, listening to their conversation with naked interest. “Outside?”
Sergeant Corbet’s eyes scanned her face and read, as though stamped there, the whetted edge of her fear. But he said only, “Of course,” and with an apology to an open-mouthed Mrs. Belford, he ushered Caroline toward the church doors.
Outside, light filtered green-gray through the clouds and a sharp westerly wind dragged the last yellow leaves from the elms.
“Shall we walk?” Sergeant Corbet asked, offering her a crooked elbow. “It’s a bit brisk, I’m afraid. But the wind will keep eavesdroppers at bay.”
Caroline took his arm and allowed him to lead her down the stairs and onto the path that encircled the church. Between the bent trunks of yews, gravestones leaned against one another, their inscriptions scrubbed clean by rain and time, looking ready, themselves, for burial.
Although Sergeant Corbet worked to disguise his limp, Caroline adjusted her steps to match his, and they fell into silence as the voices at the main entrance faded behind them. He had positioned himself between her body and the wind, and his arm against hers was solid and warm.
“Now,” said Sergeant Corbet, when they were halfway down the length of the church, “What is it that you wanted to discuss with me, Miss Foster?”
Here, with tree branches crosshatching the sky and gravel crunching beneath her boots, Caroline’s theory felt paper-thin.
“Is it concerning your brother?” Sergeant Corbet pressed gently. “As promised, after we met, I made inquiries. But I found nothing in our records for a Mr. Charles Wallace Foster. I would have come to you if I had.”
“It’s not about Charlie,” she said. “At least, not directly.”
Out with it, she commanded herself. Out with it. He might laugh. He might dismiss you. But you must tell him.
“How well do you know the police commissioner?”
“Sir Warren?” Sergeant Corbet asked, surprised. “Not well. He doesn’t associate much with patrol officers. He’s given a few impassioned speeches to the rank and file about catching our man, but that’s all. Why do you ask?”
“He was at the Full Moon. As a guest. The night those two women were murdered.”
She caught the hitch in the policeman’s step, the half-second pause that was not due to his limp.
“Are you certain, Miss Foster?”
Caroline nodded. She watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple lifting and lowering beneath the collar of his coat.
“His is not an uncommon face,” Sergeant Corbet said gently. “There are many men who resemble him—”
“It was him.”
He had not laughed at her; not yet. But beneath the mustache, his full lips pressed together. “Why would the police commissioner,” he said after a moment, “who, I might remind you, is a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, pass the night in a Whitechapel boardinghouse?”
“I don’t know. But it was him, Sergeant.
And there’s something…something wrong with the place.
With the other guests. Something to do with the murders, I think.
And with my brother’s disappearance.” She shook her head, exasperated by her own inarticulation.
“I know it sounds mad. But I can feel it.”
He considered her for a long moment, his blue-green eyes deep as pools.
“Then you must tell me,” he said levelly, “everything you know.”
It was the only chance she had, the only lead.
She trusted Sergeant Corbet, not only because he’d saved her life, but because of the way he watched her while she spoke, the way he nodded slowly, considered his words before he said them.
Charlie would have liked him, she thought. Would have thought him a good man.
So Caroline told him everything she knew.
She told him of the night of the full moon, of the strange assortment of men gathered around the boardinghouse supper table, their drunken voices rattling the windows.
She told him the promise she had made to Mrs. Easton, to leave the dishes in the sink and lock her door.
How, while she had slept, two more women had been murdered.
How the following morning she had returned from her errands with the damning newspaper illustration of the commissioner, whose wine she had poured, whose supper she had served, to find the house all but empty, the newcomers fled, their crumpled sheets reeking of sweat and wine.
—
When it was over, they walked twenty paces in silence. The path before them was empty save for some ravens scratching in the dirt; the rose windows of the apse peered down at them like red eyes in a sickly face.
“It’s an open secret,” said Sergeant Corbet, in a voice so soft that Caroline turned her face to his.
He was closer than she’d realized, his cheeks pink from the bite of the wind.
“Something illegal goes on in that boardinghouse. There are a handful of businesses in the East End that are off-limits to the police; 212 Old Montague is one of them. I have long guessed it was like the others: a brothel or opium den masquerading as a doss house, with someone powerful on the take. But to claim that one of the guests is responsible for these terrible murders, to claim Commissioner Warren himself is involved…” He trailed off, shook his head.
“That would cost me my livelihood and my reputation. I do not discredit your theory, Miss Foster. But I can do nothing, nothing at all, without a preponderance of proof.”
“I will find it,” Caroline heard herself say. And she would. For Charlie, she would. What other option did she have?
“Do not put yourself at unnecessary risk.” He moved his body imperceptibly closer to hers, so their shoulders brushed.
She wished to lean against him, feel the solid warmth of another human being.
“And start carrying a weapon—a small knife will do, something easy to hide. I realize the danger you will be in, Miss Foster. I wish I could search the house myself.”
The front path of the church was visible now, stretching to the high iron gates.
The air was cold and sharp, and though it was nearly noon, the day was dark as twilight.
But she was here to witness it, to smell the sweetness of rotting leaves and black dirt.
Unlike the women she had read about, who had been left on the street to die like dogs, with their insides spilling out.
“Why does he do it?” The words were out before she’d thought them. “Tear them apart, I mean. Is it not enough to take their lives?”
The policeman raised his gaze from the footpath. “It’s not just their lives he’s taking. He removed something from the last body, Miss Foster. The woman’s kidney.”
Caroline’s hand flew to her mouth.
“He sent half of it to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, along with a note signed in the woman’s blood. He’s calling himself Jack the Ripper. It will be in the newspapers tomorrow, I expect. Warren begged them to wait until he has someone in custody, but they won’t hold the story any longer.”
“What kind of monster—” Caroline began.
“You’re right,” Sergeant Corbet interrupted. The pleasant planes of his face had hardened. “Whoever he is, he is a monster.”