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‘Having a good night, Marie?’
‘Can’t grumble, Mrs Ringer.’
Andrew was on the verge of blacking out. She was standing next to him! He could scarcely believe it, yet it was true. He had heard her voice. A tired, rather husky voice, but lovely in any case. And if he really tried, ignoring the stench of tobacco smoke and sausages, he could probably smell her, too. Smell Marie Kelly. Mesmerised, Andrew gazed at her, rediscovering in her every gesture what he already knew. In the same way that a shell holds the roar of the sea so this fragile body seemed to contain within it a force of nature.
When the landlady placed the beer on the counter, Andrew realised this was an opportunity he must not waste. He rummaged swiftly in his pockets and paid before she could. Allow me, miss.’
The gesture, as unexpected as it was chivalrous, earned him an openly approving look from Marie Kelly. He was paralysed. As the painting had already shown, the girl’s eyes were beautiful, yet they seemed buried beneath a layer of resentment. He could not help comparing her to a poppy field where someone had decided to dump refuse. And yet he was completely, hopelessly enthralled by her, and he tried to make the instant at which their eyes met as meaningful to her as it was to him, but – my apologies to any romantic souls reading these lines – some things cannot be expressed in a look.
How could Andrew make her share in the almost mystical feeling overwhelming him? How could he convey, with nothing more than his eyes, the sudden knowledge that he had been searching for her all his life without knowing it? If in addition we consider that Marie Kelly’s existence up to that point had done little to increase her understanding of life’s subtleties, it should come as no surprise that this initial attempt at spiritual communion (for want of a better way of putting it) was doomed to failure. Andrew did his best, obviously, but the girl understood his passionate gaze just as she interpreted that of the other men who accosted her every evening.
‘Thanks, mister,’ she replied, with a lewd smile, no doubt from force of habit.
Andrew nodded, dismissing the significance of a gesture he considered an all-important part of his strategy, then realised with horror that his careful plan had not taken into account how he was to strike up a conversation with the girl once he found her. What did he have to say to her? Or, more precisely, what did he have to say to a whore? A Whitechapel whore, at that. He had never bothered speaking much to the Chelsea prostitutes, only enough to discuss positions or the lighting in the room, and with the charming Keller sisters, or his other female acquaintances -young ladies whom it would not do to worry with talk of politics or Darwin’s theories – he only discussed trivia: Paris fashions, botany and, more recently, spiritualism, the latest craze. But none of these subjects seemed suitable to embark on with this woman, who was unlikely to want to summon some spirit to tell her which of her many suitors she would marry. So he simply stared at her, enraptured.
Luckily, Marie Kelly knew a better way of breaking the ice. ‘I know what you want, mister, although you’re too shy to ask,’ she said, her grin broadening as she gave his hand a fugitive caress. It brought him out in goose pimples. ‘Thruppence, and I can make your dreams come true. Tonight, at any rate.’
Andrew was shaken: she did not know how right she was. She had been his only dream the past few nights, his deepest longing, his most urgent desire, and now, although he was still scarcely able to believe it, he could have her. His whole body tingled with excitement at the mere thought of touching her, of caressing the slender body silhouetted beneath the shabby dress, of bringing forth moans from her lips as he was set alight by her eyes, those of a wild animal, a tormented, indomitable creature. That tremor of joy rapidly gave way to a profound sadness when he considered the unjust plight of the fallen angel, the ease with which any man could grope her, defile her in a filthy back alley, without anyone in the world uttering a cry of protest. Was that what such a unique creature had been created for?
He had no choice but to accept her invitation, a lump in his throat, distressed at being compelled to take her in the same way as her other clients, as if his intentions were no different from theirs.
Once he had accepted, Marie Kelly smiled with what looked to Andrew like forced enthusiasm, and tilted her head for them to leave the pub.
Andrew felt odd following the whore, walking behind her with bird-like steps as though Marie Kelly were leading him to the gallows instead of to plunge between her thighs. But could their meeting have been any different? From the moment he had come across his cousin’s painting he had been penetrating deeper into unknown territory, where he could not get his bearings because nothing around him was familiar. Everything was new and, to judge from the deserted streets they were going through, quite possibly dangerous. Was he blithely walking into a trap laid by the whore’s pimp? He wondered whether Harold would hear his shouts and, if so, if he would bother coming to his aid, or use the opportunity to avenge himself for the offhand treatment he had received from his master all these years.
After guiding him along Hanbury Street, a muddy alley dimly lit by a single oil-lamp sputtering on a corner, Marie Kelly beckoned him down a narrow passageway leading into pitch darkness. Andrew followed her, convinced he would meet his death, or at least be beaten to within an inch of his life by a couple of ruffians much bigger than him who, having stolen everything including his socks, would spit contemptuously on his bloody remains. That was how they did things here, and his idiotic adventure richly deserved such an ending. But before fear had time to take hold, they came out into a filthy, water-logged backyard where, to his surprise, no one was waiting for him.
Andrew glanced warily about him. Yes: strange as it might seem, they were alone in that evil-smelling place. The world they had left behind was reduced to a muffled rumble in which a distant church bell’s chimes rang out. At his feet the moon, reflected in a puddle, looked like a crumpled letter some unhappy lover had tossed on the ground.
‘We won’t be disturbed here, mister,’ Marie Kelly reassured him, leaning back against the wall and drawing him to her.
Before he knew it, she had unbuttoned his trousers and pulled out his manhood. She did so with startling ease, without any of the provocative foreplay to which the Chelsea prostitutes had accustomed him. The matter-of-fact way in which she manoeuvred his sex beneath her hiked-up skirts made it clear to Andrew that what to him was another magical moment was to her no more than routine.
‘It’s in,’ she assured him.
In? Andrew had enough experience to know the whore was lying. She was simply gripping him between her thighs. He assumed it was common practice among them, a trick to avoid penetration, which, if they were lucky and the client failed to notice or was too drunk, reduced the number of hasty intrusions they were forced to undergo each day, and with them the unwanted pregnancies that such might bring about. With this in mind, he began to thrust energetically, prepared to go along with the charade.
It was enough for him to rub himself against the silky skin of her inner thigh, to feel her body pressed against his for as long as the pretence lasted. What did it matter whether it was a sham if this phantom penetration allowed him to cross the boundary imposed by good manners and force his way into the intimacy that only lovers share? Feeling her hot breath in his ear, inhaling the delicate odour of her neck and clasping her to him until he felt the contours of her body merge with his was worth infinitely more than thruppence. And, as he soon discovered when he ejaculated into her petticoats, it had the same effect on him as other, greater, undertakings. Slightly ashamed at his lack of endurance, he finished emptying himself in quiet contemplation, still pressed against her.
Eventually he felt her stir impatiently. He stepped back, embarrassed. Oblivious to his unease, the whore straightened her skirts and thrust out a hand to be paid. Trying to regain his composure, Andrew hurriedly gave her the agreed sum. He had enough money left in his pockets to buy her for the whole night, but he preferred to savour what he had just experienced in the privacy of his own bed, and to persuade her to meet him the next night.
‘My name’s Andrew,’ he introduced himself, his voice high-pitched with emotion. She raised an eyebrow, amused. ‘And I’d like to see you again tomorrow.’
‘Certainly, mister. You know where to find me,’ the whore said, leading him back along the gloomy passageway she had brought him down.
As they made their way towards the main streets, Andrew was wondering whether ejaculating between her thighs entitled him to put his arm around her shoulders. He had decided it did, and was about to do precisely that, when they ran into another couple walking almost blindly towards them down the dim alley. Andrew mumbled an apology to the fellow he had bumped into, who, although scarcely more than a shadow in the darkness, seemed quite a burly sort. He was clinging to a whore, whom Marie Kelly greeted with a smile.
‘It’s all yours, Annie,’ she said, referring to the backyard she and Andrew had just left.
Annie thanked her with a raucous laugh and tugged her companion towards the passageway. Andrew watched them stagger into the blackness. Would that fellow be satisfied with having his member trapped between her thighs? he wondered. He had noticed how avidly the man clutched the whore to him.
‘Didn’t I tell you it was a quiet spot?’ Marie Kelly remarked, as they came out into Hanbury Street.
They said a laconic goodbye in front of the Britannia. Rather disheartened by the coldness she had shown after the act, Andrew tried to find his way back through the gloomy streets to his carriage. It was a good half-hour before he came upon it. He avoided Harold’s eyes as he climbed into the brougham.
‘Home, sir?’ Harold enquired sardonically.
The following night he arrived at the Britannia determined to behave like a self-assured man instead of the fumbling, timid dandy of his previous encounter. He had to overcome his nerves and prove he could adapt to his surroundings if he was to display his true charms to the girl, the repertoire of smiles and flattery with which he habitually captivated the ladies of his own class.
He found Marie Kelly sitting at a corner table, brooding over a pint of beer. Her demeanour unnerved him, but as he was not the sort to think up a new strategy as he went along, he decided to stick with his original plan. He ordered a beer at the bar, sat down at the girl’s table, as naturally as he could, and told her he knew of a guaranteed way to wipe the worry from her face. Marie Kelly shot him a black look, confirming what he feared: he had made a tactless blunder. Andrew thought she was going to tell him to clear off with a simple wave of her hand, as if he were an irritating fly, but she restrained herself and gazed at him quizzically for a few seconds.
She must have decided he was as good a person as any to unburden herself to because she took a swig from her tankard, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and told him that her friend Annie, the woman they had bumped into in Hanbury Street the night before, had been found that morning, murdered, in the same yard they had been in. The poor woman had been partially decapitated, sliced open, her intestines pulled out and her womb removed.
Andrew stammered that he was sorry, as shocked by the killer’s attention to detail as he was to have collided with him moments before the crime. Evidently that particular client had not been satisfied with the usual service. But Marie Kelly had other concerns. According to her, Annie was the third prostitute in less than a month to be murdered in Whitechapel. Polly Nichols had been found dead with her throat slit in Bucks Road, opposite Essex Pier, on 31 August, and on the seventh of that month, Martha Tabram had been found brutally stabbed with a penknife on the stairs of a rooming house. Marie Kelly laid the blame on the gang from Old Nichol Street, blackmailers who demanded a share of the whores’ earnings.
‘Those bastards will stop at nothing to get us working for them,’ she said, between gritted teeth.
This state of affairs disturbed Andrew, but it should have come as no surprise: after all, they were in Whitechapel – the putrid dung-heap upon which London had turned its back, home to more than a thousand prostitutes living alongside German, Jewish and French immigrants. Stabbings were a daily occurrence. Wiping away the tears that had finally flowed from her eyes, Marie Kelly sat, head bowed, as though in prayer, until, to Andrew’s surprise, she roused herself from her stupor, grasped his hand and smiled lustfully at him. Whatever else happened, life went on. Was that what she had meant by her gesture? After all, she, Marie Kelly, had not been murdered. She had to go on living, dragging her skirts through those foul-smelling streets in search of money to pay for a bed.
Andrew gazed with pity at her hand lying in his, the dirty nails poking through the frayed mitten. He, too, felt the need to concentrate for a moment in order to change masks, like an actor who needs time in his dressing room to concentrate on becoming a different character. After all, life went on for him, too. Time did not stop because a whore had been murdered. He stroked her hand tenderly, ready to resume his plan. As though wiping condensation from a window pane, he freed his young lover’s smile from its veil of sadness and, looking her in the eye for the first time, said: ‘I have enough money to buy you for the whole night, but I don’t want any fakery in a cold backyard.’
This startled Marie Kelly, and she tensed, but Andrew’s smile soon put her at ease. ‘I rent a room at Miller’s Court, but I don’t know as it’ll be good enough for the likes of you,’ she remarked flirtatiously.
‘I’m sure you’ll make me like it,’ Andrew ventured, delighted at the bantering tone their conversation had taken – this was a register at which he excelled.
‘But first I’ll have to turn out my good-for-nothing husband,’ she replied. ‘He doesn’t like me bringing work home.’
This remark came as yet another shock to Andrew on an extraordinary night over which he clearly had no control. He tried not to let his disappointment show.
‘Still, I’m sure your money will make up his mind for him,’ Marie concluded.
***
So it was that Andrew found paradise in the dismal little room where he was now sitting. That night, everything had changed between them. When at last she lay naked, Andrew made love to her so respectfully, caressing her with such tenderness, that Marie Kelly could feel the hard shell she had carefully built around her begin to crack. To her surprise, Andrew’s kisses, marking her body like a pleasurable itch, made her own caresses less mechanical, and she quickly discovered she was no longer a whore lying on the bed, but the woman crying out for affection that she had always been. Andrew also sensed his love-making was freeing the real Marie Kelly, as though he were rescuing her from one of the water tanks in which stage magicians immersed their beautiful assistants, bound hand and foot, or as though his sense of direction had saved him from getting lost in the maze, like her other lovers, allowing him to reach a secret corner where the girl’s true nature survived intact.
They burned with a single flame, and when it waned, and Marie Kelly began to talk about springtime in Paris, where she had worked as an artist’s model, and about her childhood in Wales and on Ratcliffe Highway in London, Andrew understood that the strange sensation in his chest must be the pangs of love: he was experiencing all the emotions of which the poets spoke.
He was touched by the tone her voice took on when she described the Parisian squares with their riot of gladioli and petunias, and how on her return to London she had insisted everybody say her name in French, the only way she had found of preserving intact the distant fragrance that softened life’s sharp edges. He was equally moved by the hint of sadness in her voice as she described how they had hanged pirates from the Ratcliffe Highway Bridge until they drowned in the rising waters of the Thames. This was the real Marie Kelly, this bitter-sweet fruit, nature’s flawed perfection, one of God’s contradictions.
When she asked what work he did that could apparently allow him to buy her for the rest of his life, he decided to risk telling her the truth. If their love were to exist it must be nurtured in truth or not at all, and the truth (of how her portrait had sent him on his foolish quest to find her in a neighbourhood so different from his own) seemed as beautiful and miraculous to him as those stories about impossible love you read of in books. When their bodies came together again, he realised that, far from being an act of madness, falling in love with her was possibly the most reasonable thing he had ever done. And when he left the room, with the memory of her skin on his lips, he tried not to look at her husband, Joe, who was leaning against the wall, shivering with cold.
It was nearly daylight when Harold delivered him home. Too excited to go to bed, if only to relish the moments he had spent with Marie Kelly, Andrew went to the stables and saddled a horse. It was a long time since he had woken at dawn to go riding in Hyde Park. This was his favourite time of day, when the grass was still dewy and everything appeared untouched. How could he waste such an opportunity? Within minutes, he was galloping through the trees opposite the Harrington mansion, laughing to himself and occasionally letting out a cry of joy, like a soldier celebrating victory, because that was how he felt, remembering the loving look she had given him before they had said goodbye until the following night. It was as though she could see in his eyes that, unwittingly, he had been searching for her for years and perhaps I should take this opportunity to apologise for my earlier scepticism and confess that there is nothing that cannot be expressed in a look. A look, it seems, is a bottomless well of possibilities.
And so Andrew rode on, seized by a wild impulse, overwhelmed by a burning, pulsating sensation that might reasonably be described as happiness. Prey to the effects of such a violent infatuation, everything he rode past appeared to sparkle, as though each of its elements the paths strewn with dead leaves, the rocks, the trees, even the squirrels leaping from branch to branch – were lit by an inner glow.
But, have no fear, I shall not become bogged down in lengthy descriptions of practically luminous parkland, because not only do I have no taste for it but it would be untrue. Despite Andrew’s altered vision, the landscape clearly did not undergo any transformation, not even the squirrels, which are well known as creatures that pursue their own interests.
After more than an hour of strenuous, exhilarating riding, Andrew remembered he had a whole day to get through before he could return to Marie Kelly’s humble bed, and must find some way of distracting himself from the dreadful feeling that would assail him when he realised that the hands of the clock were not turning at their usual speed but were actually slowing down on purpose. He decided to drop in on his cousin Charles, which he usually did when he wanted him to share in his joy, even though this time he had no intention of telling him anything. Perhaps he was simply curious to see what Charles would look like to his feverish gaze, which had the power to enhance everything. Would he glow, like the squirrels in the park?
Chapter IV
Breakfast had been laid out in the Winslow dining room for young Charles, who was doubtless still lazing in bed. On a table next to the French windows, the servants had set out a dozen covered platters, bread rolls, jams and marmalades, and several jugs brimming with grapefruit juice and milk. Most of it would be thrown away because, contrary to appearance, they were not expecting a regiment, only Andrew, who, given his famous lack of appetite in the mornings, would almost certainly be content to nibble at a roll, ignoring the extravagant spread displayed in his honour.
Andrew was surprised by the sudden concern he felt at such waste. He had spent years contemplating tables like this, creaking under the weight of food no one would eat. This curious response was the first of many that would result from his forays into Whitechapel, inhabited by people capable of killing one another for a half-eaten roll. Would his experiences there stir his conscience as they had his emotions? He was the type of person whose cultivation of his inner life left little time for worrying about the outside world of the street. He was above all devoted to resolving the mystery that was himself, to studying his feelings and responses: all his time was taken up in attempting to fine-tune the instrument that was his spirit until he felt satisfied with the sound it produced.
There were times, owing to the constantly changing and rather unpredictable nature of his thought patterns, when this task appeared as impossible to him as lining up the goldfish in their bowl, but until he succeeded he sensed he would be unable to worry about what went on in the world, which for him started where his own pleasant, carefully scrutinised private concerns ended. In any case, he thought, it would be interesting to observe in himself how hitherto unknown preoccupations emerged through simple exposure. Who could tell? Perhaps his response to these new worries might hold the key to the mystery of who the real Andrew Harrington was.
He took an apple from the fruit bowl and settled into an armchair to wait yet again for his cousin to return to the land of the living. He had rested his muddy boots on a footstool and was smiling as he remembered Marie Kelly’s kisses and how they had both, gently but completely, made up for all the years they had been starved of affection, when his eye alighted on the newspaper lying on the table. It was the morning edition of the Star, announcing in bold print the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute called Anne Chapman. It gave details of the horrific mutilation she had suffered: besides her uterus, which he had already learned about from Marie Kelly, her bladder and womb had also been removed. Among other things, the newspaper also mentioned a couple of cheap rings missing from one of her fingers. It appeared the police had no clues as to the murderer’s identity although, after questioning other East End whores, the name of a possible suspect had emerged: a Jewish cobbler nicknamed Leather Apron, who was in the habit of robbing prostitutes at knife point. The article came with a macabre illustration of a policeman dangling a lamp over the bloody corpse of a woman sprawled on the pavement.
Andrew shook his head. He had forgotten that his paradise was surrounded by hell itself, and that the woman he loved was an angel trapped in a world full of demons.
He closely read the three-page report on the Whitechapel crimes committed to date, feeling worlds away from it all in this luxurious dining room, where man’s capacity for baseness and aberration was kept at bay as surely as the dust tirelessly polished away by servants. He had thought of giving Marie Kelly the money to pay off the gang of blackmailers she thought were responsible for the crimes, but the report did not seem to be pointing in that direction. The precise incisions on the bodies suggested that the killer had surgical knowledge, which implicated the entire medical profession, although the police had not ruled out furriers, cooks and barbers – anyone, in short, whose job brought them into contact with knives.
Queen Victoria’s medium was reported to have seen the killer’s face in a dream. Andrew sighed. The medium knew more about the killer than he, even though he had bumped into the fellow moments before he had committed the crime.
‘Since when did you develop an interest in the affairs of empire, cousin?’ asked Charles’s voice from behind him. ‘Ah, no – I see you are reading the crime pages.’
‘Good morning, Charles,’ said Andrew, tossing the paper on to the table as though he had been idly leafing through it.
‘The coverage given to the murders of those wretched tarts is incredible,’ his cousin remarked, plucking a cluster of shiny grapes from the fruit bowl and sitting in the armchair opposite. ‘Although I confess to being intrigued by the importance they’re attaching to this sordid affair: they’ve put Scotland Yard’s finest detective, Fred Abberline, in charge of the investigation. Clearly the Metropolitan Police are out of their depth in a case like this.’
Andrew pretended to agree, nodding abstractedly as he gazed out of the window, watching the wind scatter an air-balloon-shaped cloud. He did not want to arouse his cousin’s attention by showing too much interest in the affair, but the truth was he longed to know every detail of the crimes, apparently confined to the area where his beloved lived. How would his cousin react if he told him he had bumped into that brutal murderer in a murky Whitechapel alleyway? The sad fact was that, even so, he was unable to describe the fellow except to say he was enormous and evil-smelling.
‘In any case, regardless of Scotland Yard’s involvement, all they have are suspicions, some of them quite preposterous,’ his cousin went on, plucking a grape from the bunch and rolling it between his fingers. ‘Did you know they suspect one of the Red Indians from that Buffalo Bill show we saw last week, and even the actor Richard Mansfield, who is playing in Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde at the Lyceum? I recommend it, by the way: Mansfield’s transformation on stage is truly chilling.’
Andrew promised he would go, tossing the remains of his apple on to the table.
‘Anyway’ Charles concluded rather wearily, ‘the poor wretches in Whitechapel have formed vigilante groups and are patrolling the streets. It seems London’s population is growing so fast the police force can no longer cope. Everybody wants to live in this accursed city. People come here from all over the country in search of a better life, only to end up being exploited in factories, contracting typhus fever or turning to crime in order to pay an inflated rent for a cellar or some other airless hole. Actually, I’m amazed there aren’t more murders and robberies, considering how many go unpunished. Mark my words, Andrew, if the criminals became organised, London would be theirs. It’s hardly surprising Queen Victoria fears a popular uprising – a revolution like the one our French neighbours endured, which would end with her and her family’s heads on the block. Her empire is a hollow façade that needs progressively shoring up to stop it collapsing. Our cows and sheep graze on Argentinian pastures, our tea is grown in China and India, our gold comes from South Africa and Australia, and the wine we drink from France and Spain. Tell me, cousin, what, apart from crime, do we produce ourselves? If the criminal elements planned a proper rebellion they could take over the country. Fortunately, evil and common sense rarely go hand in hand.’
Andrew liked listening to Charles ramble in this relaxed way, pretending not to take himself seriously. He admired his cousin’s contradictory spirit, which reminded him of a house divided into endless chambers all separate from one another, so that what went on in one had no repercussions in the others. This explained why his cousin was able to glimpse, amid his luxurious surroundings, the most suppurating wounds and forget them a moment later, while he found it impossible to copulate successfully after a visit to a slaughterhouse or a hospital for the severely injured. It was as if Andrew had been designed like a seashell: everything disappeared and resonated inside him. That was the basic difference between them: Charles reasoned and he felt.
‘The truth is, these sordid crimes are turning Whitechapel into a place where you wouldn’t want to spend the night,’ Charles declared sententiously, abandoning his nonchalance to lean across the table and stare meaningfully at his cousin. ‘Especially with a tart’
Andrew gaped at him. ‘You know about it?’
His cousin smiled. ‘Servants talk, Andrew. You ought to know by now our most intimate secrets circulate like underground streams beneath the luxurious ground we walk on,’ he said, stamping his feet symbolically on the carpet.
Andrew sighed. His cousin had not left the newspaper there by accident. In fact, he had probably not even been asleep. Charles enjoyed this kind of game. It was easy to imagine him hiding behind one of the many screens that partitioned the vast dining room, waiting patiently for his stunned cousin to fall into the trap he had laid.
‘I don’t want my father to find out, Charles,’ begged Andrew.
‘Don’t worry, cousin. I’m aware of the scandal it would cause in the family. But tell me, are you in love with the girl or is this just a passing fancy?’
Andrew remained silent. What could he say?
You needn’t reply’ his cousin said, in a resigned voice. ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand either way. I only hope you know what you’re doing.’
Andrew, of course, did not know what he was doing, but could not stop doing it. Each night, like a moth drawn to the flame, he returned to the miserable room in Miller’s Court, hurling himself into the relentless blaze of Marie Kelly’s passion. They made love all night, driven by frantic desire, as though they had been poisoned during dinner and did not know how long they had left to live, or as though the world around them were being decimated by the plague. Soon Andrew understood that if he left enough coins on her bedside table, their passion could continue gently smouldering beyond the dawn. His money preserved their fantasy, and even banished Joe, Marie Kelly’s husband, whom Andrew tried not to think of when, disguised in his modest clothes, he strolled with her through the maze of muddy streets.
Those were peaceful, pleasant walks, full of encounters with the girl’s friends and acquaintances, the long-suffering foot-soldiers of a war without trenches; a bunch of poor souls who rose from their beds each morning to face a hostile world, driven on by the sheer animal instinct for survival. Fascinated, Andrew found himself admiring them, as he would a species of exotic flower alien to his world. He became convinced that life in Whitechapel was more real, simpler, easier to understand than it was in the luxuriously carpeted mansions where he spent his days.
Occasionally, he had to pull his cap down over his eyes in order not to be recognised by the bands of wealthy young men who laid siege to the neighbourhood some nights. They arrived in luxurious carriages and mobbed the streets, like rude, arrogant conquistadors, in search of some miserable brothel where they could satisfy their basest instincts for, according to a rumour Andrew had frequently heard in West End smoking clubs, the only limits on what could be done with the wretched Whitechapel tarts were money and imagination. Watching these boisterous incursions, Andrew was assailed by a sudden protective instinct, which could only mean he had unconsciously begun to see Whitechapel as a place he should perhaps watch over. However, there was little he could do, confronted with those barbarous invasions, besides feeling sad and helpless, and trying to forget about them in the arms of his beloved. She appeared more beautiful to him by the day, as though beneath his caresses she had recovered the innate sparkle of which life had robbed her.
But, as everyone knows, no paradise is complete without a serpent, and the sweeter the moments spent with his beloved, the more bitter the taste in Andrew’s mouth when he recalled that what he had of Marie Kelly was all he could ever have. Because, although it was never enough and each day he yearned for more, the love that could not exist outside Whitechapel, for all its undeniable intensity, remained arbitrary and illusory. And while outside a crazed mob tried to lynch the Jewish cobbler nicknamed Leather Apron, Andrew quenched his anger and fear in Marie Kelly’s body.
He wondered whether his beloved’s fervour sprang from her own realisation that they had embarked upon a reckless love affair, and that all they could do was greedily clasp the unexpected rose of happiness as they tried to ignore the painful thorns. Or was it her way of telling him she was prepared to rescue their apparently doomed love even if it meant altering the very course of the universe? And if that was the case, did he possess the same strength? Did he have the necessary conviction to embark upon what he already considered a lost battle?
However hard he tried, Andrew could not imagine Marie Kelly moving in his world of refined young ladies, whose sole purpose in life was to display their fecundity by filling their houses with children, and to entertain their spouses’ friends with their pianistic accomplishment. Would Marie Kelly succeed in fulfilling this role while trying to stay afloat amid the waves of social rejection that would doubtless seek to drown her, or would she perish like an exotic bloom removed from its hothouse?
The newspapers’ continued coverage of the whores’ murders scarcely managed to distract Andrew from the torment of his secret fears. One morning, while breakfasting, he came across a reproduction of a letter the murderer had audaciously sent to the Central News Agency, assuring the police they would not catch him easily and promising he would carry on killing, testing his fine blade on the Whitechapel tarts. Appropriately enough, the letter was written in red ink and signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, a name that, however you looked at it, Andrew thought, was far more disturbing and imaginative than the rather dull ‘Whitechapel Murderer’ by which he had been known until then.
The new name was taken up by all the newspapers, and inevitably conjured up the villain of the penny dreadfuls, Jack Lightfoot, and his treatment of women. It was rapidly adopted by everyone, as Andrew soon discovered from hearing it uttered everywhere he went. The words were always spoken with sinister excitement, as though for the sad souls of Whitechapel there was something thrilling and even fashionable about a ruthless murderer stalking the neighbourhood with a razor-sharp knife. Furthermore, as a result of this disturbing missive, Scotland Yard was deluged with similar correspondence (in which the alleged killer mocked the police, boasted childishly about his crimes and promised more murders). Andrew had the impression that England was teeming with people desperate to bring excitement into their lives by pretending they were murderers, normal men whose souls were sullied by sadistic impulses and unhealthy desires that fortunately they would never act upon.
Besides hampering the police investigation, the letters also transformed the vulgar individual he had bumped into in Hanbury Street into a monstrous creature apparently destined to personify man’s most primitive fears. Perhaps this uncontrolled proliferation of would-be perpetrators of his macabre crimes prompted the real killer to surpass himself. On the night of 30 September, at the timber merchants’ in Dutfield Yard, he murdered Elizabeth Stride – the whore who had originally put Andrew on Marie’s trail – and a few hours later, in Mtre Square, Catherine Eddowes, whom he had time to rip open from pubis to sternum, remove her left kidney and even cut off her nose.
Thus began the cold month of October, in which a veil of gloomy resignation descended upon the inhabitants of Whitechapel who, despite Scotland Yard’s efforts, felt more than ever abandoned to their fate. There was a look of helplessness in the whores’ eyes, but also a strange acceptance of their dreadful lot. Life became a long and anxious wait, during which Andrew held Marie Kelly’s trembling body tightly in his arms and whispered to her that she need not worry, provided she stayed away from the Ripper’s hunting ground, the area of backyards and deserted alleyways where he roamed with his thirsty blade, until the police managed to catch him.
But his words did nothing to calm a shaken Marie, who had even begun sheltering other whores in her tiny room at Miller’s Court to keep them off the unsafe streets. It resulted in her having a fight with her husband, Joe, during which he broke a window. The following night, Andrew gave her the money to fix the glass and keep out the piercing cold. However, she simply placed it on her bedside table and lay back dutifully on the bed so that he could take her. Now though all she offered him was a body, a dying flame, and the grief-stricken despair she had been unable to keep from her eyes in recent days, a look in which he thought he glimpsed a desperate cry for help, a silent appeal to him to take her away before it was too late.
Andrew made the mistake of pretending not to notice her distress, as though he had forgotten that everything could be expressed in a look. He felt incapable of altering the very course of the universe, which for him translated into the even more momentous feat of confronting his father. Perhaps that was why, as a silent rebuke for his cowardice, she began to go out looking for clients and spending the nights getting drunk with her fellow whores in the Britannia. There they cursed the uselessness of the police and the power of the monster from hell who continued to mock them, most recently by sending George Lusk, socialist firebrand and self-proclaimed president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a cardboard box containing a human kidney.
Frustrated by his lack of courage, Andrew watched her return drunk each night to the little room. Then, before she could collapse on the floor or curl up like a dog beside the warm hearth, he would take her in his arms and put her to bed, grateful that no knife had stopped her in her tracks. But he knew she could not keep exposing herself to danger in this way, even if the murderer had not struck for several weeks and more than eighty policemen were patrolling the neighbourhood. He also knew he was the only one able to stop her. For that reason, sitting in the gloom while his beloved spun her drunken nightmares of corpses with their guts ripped out, Andrew would resolve to confront his father the very next day. But when the next day came all he could do was prowl around his father’s study, not daring to go in. And when it grew dark, his head bowed in shame, occasionally clutching a bottle, he returned to Marie Kelly’s little room, where she received him with her eyes’ silent reproach.
Then Andrew remembered all the things he had said to her, the impassioned declarations he had hoped would seal their union. How he had been trying to find her for he did not know how long -eighteen, a hundred, five hundred years – how he knew that if he had undergone reincarnations he had looked for her in every one, because they were twin spirits destined to meet each other in the labyrinth of time, and other such pronouncements. Now he was sure Marie Kelly could only see his avowals as a pathetic attempt to cloak his animal urges in romanticism or, worse, to conceal the thrill he derived from those voyeuristic forays into the wretched side of existence. ‘Where is your love now, Andrew?’ her eyes seemed to ask, before she trudged off to the Britannia, only to return a few hours later rolling drunk.
Until, on that cold night of 7 November, Andrew watched her leave again for the tavern, and something inside him shifted. Whether it was the alcohol, which, consumed in the right quantity, can clear some people’s heads, or simply that enough time had passed for this clarity to occur naturally, it finally dawned on him that without Marie Kelly his life would no longer have any meaning so he had nothing to lose by fighting for a future with her. Filled with resolve, suddenly able to breathe freely once more, he left the room, slamming the door resolutely, and strode off towards the place where Harold Barker waited while his master took his pleasure. The coachman was huddled like an owl on the seat, warming himself with a bottle of brandy.
That night his father was to discover his youngest son was in love with a whore.
Chapter V
Yes, I know that when I began this tale I promised there would be a fabulous time machine, and there will be. There will even be intrepid explorers and fierce native tribes – a must in any adventure story. But all in good time. Isn’t it necessary at the start of any game to place all the pieces on their respective squares? Of course it is – so let me continue to set up the board, slowly but surely, by returning to young Andrew, who might have taken the opportunity of the long journey back to the Harrington mansion to sober up, but who chose instead to cloud his thoughts further by finishing the bottle he had in his pocket.
Ultimately, there was no point in confronting his father with a sound argument and reasoned thinking: he was sure that any civilised discussion of the matter would be impossible. He needed to dull his senses as much as he could, staying just sober enough not to be completely tongue-tied. There was no point in slipping back into the elegant clothes he always left judiciously in a bundle on the carriage seat.
That night there was no longer any need for secrecy. When they arrived at the mansion, Andrew stepped out of the carriage, asked Harold to stay where he was, and hurried into the house. The coachman watched in dismay as he ran up the steps in his rags, and wondered if he would hear Mr Harrington’s shouts from where he sat.
Andrew had forgotten his father had a meeting with businessmen that night until he staggered into the library. A dozen men stood gaping at him in astonishment. This was not the situation he had anticipated, but he had too much alcohol in his blood to be put off. He searched for his father amid the array of dinner jackets, and finally found him by the fireplace, next to his brother Anthony. Glass in one hand, cigar in the other, both men looked him up and down. But his clothing was the least of it, as they would soon discover, thought Andrew, who in the end felt pleased to have an audience. Since he was about to stick his head in the noose, it was better to do so in front of witnesses than alone with his father in his study.
He cleared his throat loudly under the fixed gaze of the gathering, and said: ‘Father, I’ve come here to tell you I’m in love.’
His words were followed by a heavy silence, broken only by an embarrassed cough here and there.
‘Andrew, this is hardly a suitable moment to—‘ his father began, visibly irritated, before Andrew silenced him with a sudden gesture of his hand.
‘I assure you, Father, this is as unsuitable a moment as any other,’ he said, trying to keep his balance so he would not have to finish his bravura performance flat on his face.
His father bridled, but remained silent.
