Chapter 14
The People
London, United Kingdom
An American “Jack The Ripper”
The people of Birmingham, America, are all very much exercised over a series of mysterious murders which have taken place in that neighbourhood.
They are similar in character to the Whitechapel atrocities.
The victims selected are negroes. There have been four of these tragedies within the last three weeks.
No motive for the crimes is apparent, and in each case the body of the victim has been horribly mutilated.
Myrtle. Chapman. Myers. Wickham.
For the next week, names floated through Caroline’s head.
Manning. Graham. Warwick. Hastings.
The word she searched for hovered just below the surface of her consciousness, but whenever she tried to grasp it, it slipped away.
For she had heard, in the alleyway—it felt like a lifetime ago—the name of the street where Mary Jane lived. Rab had asked her, Are you still in the flat in…? It had been a common surname. Something unexceptional. Something forgettable.
The cache of books hidden in Charlie’s wardrobe had given her no answers, but they filled her with the exhilarating sensation that a net was beginning to close.
The pieces of the mystery circled one another in Caroline’s mind, their orbits growing tighter and tighter.
But she still did not see the connection between them.
And the only lead she could pursue was the prostitute who claimed to have loved her brother.
Charlie’s portraits of Mary Jane reminded Caroline of a doe stepping from the shadows, full of tenderness and uncertainty. Caroline was jealous of the obvious affection in them, the way Charlie captured the innocence in her eyes, the hope in her mouth.
Perhaps Mary Jane and Charlie had been lovers. Or perhaps his attention had been so gentle, so sympathetic, that the poor woman had mistaken it for love. But he wouldn’t have married her. Would he?
Martin. Lambert. Murphy. Sussex.
Caroline continued to volunteer for all Mrs. Easton’s tasks outside the Full Moon.
She dropped letters at the post office, lugged burlap bags of groceries from Covent Garden Market.
She did not dare peer through the windows of Rab’s chemistry again, but she always walked home down Brick Lane, her eyes peeled for a glint of uncovered gold hair.
She marked every street sign. But none of them rang through her head with the toll of recognition.
“You’re a bit jumpy,” Mrs. Easton said, when Caroline dropped a sack of barley on the kitchen flagstones for the second time. “Are you feeling all right, Miss Huxley?”
“I feel fine, thank you. Just a bit tired.” Caroline avoided the landlady’s eye as she bent to pick up the scattered grain. Each night she was thrust into the dream of the field of flowers, Charlie waiting at the edge of the forest, the beast behind her.
“Hm,” said Mrs. Easton, with her hands on her hips. “Well, I need you rested, please. Next supper is a week from today, and there’s enough work for ten of us, I’m afraid.”
Caroline’s heart sank. She had lost track of time, despite the moon out her window growing fatter each night, just six days from full.
She had hoped to speak to Mary Jane before the next party.
For, she felt certain, the morning after those men met, and ate and drank and made the walls tremble with their voices, another woman would be dead.
“We’re nearly out of flour,” the landlady said, surveying the larder shelves. “I’ll have to go to the miller today.”
Caroline froze. Miller. Miller’s Court. That was where Mary Jane lived. She nearly whooped for joy.
“I can go,” she said, trying to keep her voice casual.
Mrs. Easton nodded to the kitchen windows; the garden boxes were obscured behind a miserable gray drizzle. “Last thing I need is you laid up in bed with a head cold.”
Caroline mustered a smile she hoped was convincing. “I’ll wear a cloak and a scarf. A bit of fresh air will do me good.”
Mrs. Easton shrugged and turned her attention back to the larder. “Take my umbrella, please, and my wool hat. There’s money in the purse by the door.”
—
“Miller’s Court?” the pock-faced shopgirl repeated. “It’s in Spitalfields. Bit of a hoof from here, miss. And in the pissin’ rain.”
Caroline swallowed her impatience and hoisted the sack of freshly milled flour higher on her shoulder. Her back was beginning to ache, and her true errand had not yet begun.
“Where in Spitalfields, please? It’s important.”
She had stopped at this bakery in Chicksand Street specifically because she knew Mrs. Easton would never set foot inside it. The landlady had spoken disparagingly a time or two about the quality of the bread, the steep prices.
The shopgirl picked at her nails.
“I’ll have a bun,” Caroline said desperately. “But please, the directions. It’s important.”
The girl sighed and slid off her stool. “Which bun, then?”
Caroline gestured vaguely. The girl handed her something dense as a brick and spotted with black raisins.
“That’ll be tuppence.”
Caroline balked. “Tuppence! But I could eat a whole meal for that!”
The girl shrugged, held out her hand. “One penny for the bun, one for the directions.”
Caroline sighed and fished the copper coins from her purse. She had brought all her earnings with her, just in case. It had seemed a good idea within the well-lit walls of the Full Moon, but now the full purse felt like an anchor on her belt.
“Cross Commercial,” said the shopgirl, putting one penny in the till and the other in her pocket. “Left on White’s Row. Miller’s Court is just off Dorset.”
Caroline thanked her with chilly politeness and reemerged into the pouring rain.
—
Commercial Street was a few blocks east, a wide north-south corridor that ran from Shoreditch to the docks. Caroline paused beneath the bakery awning to adjust the sack of flour and open Mrs. Easton’s umbrella. Then she pointed her feet east.
She crossed Brick Lane, just a block down from where she first glimpsed Mary Jane.
Caroline peered through the rain in both directions.
It would be just her luck to arrive in Miller’s Court only to have passed the woman, unbeknownst, in the street.
But the pavement was empty save for a few brave pedestrians, dodging from one overhang to another with jackets or newspapers held over their heads.
The route brought her within spitting distance of St. Mary’s, and Caroline threw a wistful glance at the church walls as she passed.
The chapel would be warm and dry and, in this weather, crammed with the most unfortunate souls in the borough.
She wondered if Sergeant Corbet was on patrol, walking the sodden streets in his uniform.
Her body warmed as she walked. Caroline silently thanked the six weeks she had spent cooking and cleaning beside Mrs. Easton.
A month ago, she could not have carried a thirty-pound sack of flour for a mile.
But now her lungs, trained with ascending and descending the stairs countless times each day, did not burn, even as her legs ate up the distance between Brick Lane and Dorset Street.
—
Spitalfields, she was horrified to learn, was even poorer than Whitechapel.
The streets were littered with garbage, the road a sludge of horse manure, bits of rags, and vegetable peelings.
Every covered doorway was crowded with people; here a woman with a baby tucked under a tattered cloak, here a man with legs ending at the knee, here a pack of mud-streaked children, pressed together against the wall.
Caroline marched doggedly on. Up Dorset Street, past dozens of hungry eyes. The warmth that had spread into her arms and legs with the brisk walk dissipated; the sweat along her spine and under her breasts chilled.
This was a mistake. She had a target on her back, in her simple but expensive clothing. The sack of food on her shoulder, the purse jingling on her belt with each step. The blood pulsed hard against the skin of her wrists, her throat.
She kept her eyes on the pavement. Up she marched, up Dorset Street, with her shoulders bunched and her ears pricked, the little knife pressing against her belly like another corset stay.
She thought of the men in the alley, their grimy hands on her ribs, on her neck.
But none of the miserable creatures huddled out of the rain called to her or made any motion to follow.
She forced herself instead to think of the portraits in Charlie’s notebooks.
Of Mary Jane, gazing up from the page with such gentleness in her eyes that Caroline felt she knew her.
If there was any piece of information to be gained from this, any hint to where Charlie had gone, or the mystery at the heart of the Full Moon Society, she must pursue it.
She pulled on the version of herself that her brother had seen. Fearless, wild. Fierce as the dawn.
She reached Miller’s Court.
It was a dismal little square. Soot-stained buildings gazed down from all sides with eyes of smoky glass, and in the hooded door of the nearest flat, a group of women huddled together.
They reminded Caroline of a flock of pigeons, so indistinguishable was the first from the next. Their features were blurred with drink and hard living, their clothing a mass of browns and grays. But none wore a hat, nor a cloak.
“Excuse me,” Caroline said, approaching cautiously, as one might a spooked horse, “I’m looking for Mary Jane?”
Three pairs of eyes narrowed on her. She felt them appraise the black wool of her coat, the silk roses on her bonnet. Weeks of hard labor had frayed her cuffs and left grease stains on her bodice, but she knew what they saw, what they heard in her accent. She was not one of them.
The centermost figure, a crooked-nosed woman of indeterminate age, spoke first. “Who’s asking?”
“Caroline Huxley. An old friend.” Caroline adjusted the sack of flour, holding it like a sleeping child. “Brought her something.”