Chapter 19
The Times
London, United Kingdom
Another Whitechapel Murder
Mary Jane was dead.
No matter how often Caroline repeated the words to herself—as she lugged chamber pots down the stairs, as she cleaned the scrubbing sand from under her fingernails, as she lay awake at night, watching the waning moonlight drift across the ceiling—they still did not seem true.
For how could a woman who had burned so brightly, who had inspired Charlie’s vivid drawings, be gone? When Caroline shut her eyes, she could see the flick of Mary Jane’s fingers, the hair-fine lines around her mouth.
But there was no doubt. The newspapers printed unflattering sketches of her, with a bulbous nose and beady eyes, but even in their crudeness Caroline recognized the woman her brother had loved.
Gone, gone, gone. Her life snuffed only feet away from where Caroline had sat a week ago, sipping her bitter tea.
She did not want to read the stories, the postmortem report.
She wanted to curl up in bed with the covers pulled over her head and not come out unless Charlie arrived on the boardinghouse’s doorstep to collect her.
But she forced her eyes across the words, forced herself to comprehend the atrocity that had befallen Mary Jane while she, Caroline, had been asleep in the servants’ staircase.
Her thighs skinned, her breasts sawn off. Her abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera.
It was the most violent of the Ripper’s murders. The most personal. As though the other women had been practice for this most grisly act.
—
On the nineteenth of November—the day Mary Jane’s mutilated body would be laid to rest in the Catholic cemetery in Leytonstone—Caroline awoke with a nausea that did not leave her as the day stretched on, wet and windy.
“What is it?” Mrs. Easton asked as they sat over their lunch. “You’ve barely touched your soup.”
Caroline dutifully dipped her spoon, lifted a chunk of beef. The flesh was pink and marbled. She dropped the spoon back into the broth and swallowed the saliva welling up under her tongue.
“I don’t feel well,” said Caroline honestly.
“I can see that.” Mrs. Easton placed the back of her hand against Caroline’s forehead. It was an act so natural, and yet so tender, that Caroline’s breath caught. Carys had checked for a fever like that a handful of times, when Caroline was very ill. It must be something mothers did.
“You’re not hot,” said Mrs. Easton, lowering her hand. “You’re pale, though. Have you been taking the tonic Mr. Ripley brought you?”
Caroline had avoided Rab since the last full moon.
When she was forced to acknowledge him—at the supper table, or when they passed in the hallway—she smiled politely but did not meet his eyes.
And when he knocked on her door each morning, she waited until his footsteps had faded down the main banister before unlocking her own door.
“Yes,” Caroline lied. “I take it every night.”
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Easton. “Well. We can roll out the pasties tomorrow, I suppose. The dough will keep. Go on. Go rest.”
Rest. The word was so simple. But the harder Caroline grasped at sleep, the farther away it slipped.
She had run her tongue around the corners of the medicine tin for every last mote of Dr. Hoffman’s pills.
But now the tin was empty and the blood in her veins felt like a swarm of bees.
She spent the hours between ten and six lying in bed, imagining the bloody mess that had been Mary Jane.
She managed a weak smile. “Thank you, Mrs. Easton. I shall.”
—
Rab was out; he had left after his usual bolted breakfast, and Caroline had heard the front door open and shut.
But upstairs on the garret landing, she rested her ear to his door for a long moment.
No sound. No movement. She tried the handle.
She knew it would be locked, but still, something inside her deflated when the metal workings did not turn beneath the pressure of her hand.
Seated at her desk, Caroline drew Charlie’s things from their hiding place and considered each in turn.
The sketch pads she set to the side.
She had examined each drawing a hundred times, run her fingers over each mark her brother’s hand had made.
But she could not bear to look at Mary Jane’s face, not on the day when her ruined body was being locked in the cold, damp earth.
Not when it was likely that this very book of sketches, left open that day on Caroline’s desk, might have inspired Rab to kill her.
No. No, it would do no good to think of that.
Caroline reached for the Blevins family Bible.
She had avoided it since she had first discovered the cache in the bottom of Charlie’s armoire.
The curls of hair made her think of her dead siblings, alone and cold in the Stafford churchyard.
And of Mary Jane and Charlie’s lost child.
But it was the only thing of her brother’s that she had not yet examined.
She set it on the desk before her now, ran her fingers over the embossed crest, and opened the cover.
There were the macabre remembrances stitched to the parchment, their color and luster long since faded. So many of them; dozens of lost children. Caroline’s throat tightened, and she forced her eyes to focus instead on the family tree on the opposite page.
It was an in-depth genealogy that, based on the cramped, tiny numbers beneath the first two names, dated all the way back to the fourteenth century. She found her mother’s name at the very bottom, tucked into the corner.
Mary Anne Parsons—m—Henry Thomas Blevins
Rose Silvia Blevins—b 1837
Helen Anne Blevins—b 1839 d 1870
Caroline inhaled. Her mother had a sister? No, it must be a mistake; someone had forgotten to mark the poor creature’s death date. Caroline had frequently pestered Carys for details of her mother’s family, but Carys had told her with no uncertainty that Helen Blevins had been the last of her kin.
Rattled, Caroline read on.
Helen Anne Blevins—m—Charles Wallace Foster III
Mary—b 1855 d 1870
Anne—b 1856 d 1871
Charles Wallace Foster IV—b 1859
Caroline Elizabeth Foster—b 1870
Caroline squinted at her own name. There was a tiny symbol beside it, like a capital A with a circle beneath its peak. Charlie had one, too, as did their mother. She traced her finger up the tree. The symbol seemed randomly distributed across the generations. But Caroline quickly noticed a pattern.
She and her mother were the only women with the symbol.
She double-checked, triple-checked. Yes, that was right. The symbol, except in the case of Caroline and her mother, was found only after men’s names.
Her pulse began skipping unpleasantly. There was something to this, she was certain of it. Something important, something dreadfully important…
And then it clicked. One moment Caroline had no idea what the symbol meant, and the next, she was certain.
She reached for the book of fairy tales so quickly that she knocked the stack of sketch pads onto the floor. She stared at the story of Saint Ciwa, at the border of purple flowers. She unclasped the gold chain from her neck, set her mother’s ring on the page, and pulled the Bible closer.
It was the flower. It was the same flower she’d seen in the garden. Here it was rendered in gold, a drop of blood hanging from each bloom. Here it was in purple ink. Here it was in simple lines: the rounded peak of the hood, the little circle representing its pistil.
Caroline hid the books away, fastened the chain around her neck once more, and made her way silently to the second floor.
—
Mr. Tythe, of the diminutive stature and overlarge spectacles, spent his days either seated in the armchair closest to the fire with a book as large as he was open in his lap, or out of the boardinghouse, attending lectures or ogling specimens at the South Kensington Museum.
Caroline knocked at the door of room 201 with an excuse ready on her tongue in case the naturalist had chosen today, of all days, to stay in his room. But when no answer came from her second knock, she turned the handle and entered.
Suspended creatures stared at her from their watery graves. Padded boards leaned against the walls, stuck with beetles and butterflies as bright and numerous as buttons. It smelled musty, of old feathers and ether, and Caroline breathed through her mouth as she crept to the desk.
Books were stacked in every corner, on the bed and the desk and the top of the armoire. Her eyes moved swiftly down the spines.
Animal Traits and Characteristics
Common Objects of the Sea Shore
A History of the Birds of Europe
Third from the bottom in the stack by the bedside, Caroline found what she was searching for.
Culpeper’s Complete Herbal
She sat on the floor, drew the book from its companions, and began flipping through the hand-colored illustrations. Wormwood and laurel, teasel and coltsfoot and burdock. Yellows and pinks and whites and greens, greens, greens.
Then, on a bottom right corner, she found it. The purple flower from the garden, from her mother’s ring, from the story of Saint Ciwa.
Caroline read the description with her heart in her mouth.
Aconitum variegatum. Also known as aconite, monkshood, wolfsbane. Belonging to the family Ranunculaceae. Endemic to the mountain meadows of the Northern Hemisphere.
Aconitum from the Greek akon (dart, javelin), the tips of which were poisoned with a paste of the plant. Highly toxic. In mild cases, ingestion causes dizziness, headaches, and confusion. In serious cases, paralysis, convulsions, and death by asphyxiation.
Caroline sat in stunned silence.
Death by asphyxiation.
Were not all the Ripper’s victims thought to have been strangled? What if they had died not with hands around their necks but with this poison in their blood?
Dizziness, headaches, and confusion. The exact symptoms that she and Mary Jane had both experienced after drinking Rab’s liquor.