God is asking more of us than that. We must hold firm in our resolve.”
I acquiesced, seeing no chance of prevailing against such unshakable certitude that God’s will was dictating our course of action.
Furthermore, Edward Wickham was my husband and I owed him obedience, even when my heart was troubled and filled with uncertainty. It was his decision to make, not mine.
“Do not expect me until tea time,” Edward said as he rose and went to fetch his greatcoat. “Mr. Lusk has asked me to attend a meeting of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and I then have my regular calls to make. Best you not go out today, my dear, at least until Inspector Abberline has these riots under control.” Edward’s duties were keeping him away from the vicarage more and more. He sometimes would return in the early hours of the morning, melancholy and exhausted from trying to help a man find night work or from locating shelter for a homeless widow and her children.
At times he seemed not to remember where he’d been; I was concerned for his health and his spirit.
The fog was beginning to lift by the time he departed, but I still could not see very far — except in my mind’s eye. If one were to proceed down Commercial Street and then follow Aldgate to Lead-enhall and Cornhill on to the point where six roads meet at a statue of the Duke of Wellington, one would find onself in front of the imposing Royal Exchange, its rich interior murals and Turkish floor paving a proper setting for the transactions undertaken there. Across Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, with its windowless lower stories, and the rocklike Stock Exchange both raise their impressive facades. Then one could turn to the opposite direction and behold several other banking establishments clustered around Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence. It still dumbfounds me to realize that the wealth of the nation is concentrated there, in so small an area…all within walking distance of the worst slums in the nation.
Do wealthy bankers ever spare a thought for the
The crumbling, hazardous buildings fronting the courts house complete families in each room, sometimes numbering as many as a dozen people; in such circumstances, incest is common…and, some say, inevitable. The buildings reek from the liquid sewage accumulated in the basements, while the courts themselves stink of garbage that attracts vermin, dogs, and other scavengers. Often one standing pipe in the courtyard serves as the sole source of water for all the inhabitants of three or four buildings, an outdoor pipe that freezes with unremitting regularity during the winter. Once Edward and I were called out in the middle of the night to succor a woman suffering from scarlet fever; we found her in a foul-smelling single room with three children and four pigs. Her husband, a cabman, had committed suicide the month before; and it wasn’t until we were leaving that we discovered one of the children had been lying there dead for thirteen days.
The common lodging houses are even worse — filthy and infested and reservoirs of disease. In such doss houses a bed can be rented for fourpence for the night, strangers often sharing a bed because neither has the full price alone. There is no such thing as privacy, since the beds are lined up in crowded rows in the manner of dormitories. Beds are rented indiscriminately to men and women alike; consequently many of the doss houses are in truth brothels, and even those that are not have no compunction about renting a bed to a prostitute when she brings a paying customer with her. Inspector Abberline once told us the police estimate there are twelve hundred prostitutes in Whitechapel alone, fertile hunting grounds for the man who pleasures himself with the butchering of ladies of the night.
Ever since the Ripper began stalking the East End, Edward has been campaigning for more police to patrol the back alleys and for better street lighting. The problem is that Whitechapel is so poor it cannot afford the rates to pay for these needed improvements. If there is to be help, it must come from outside. Therefore I have undertaken a campaign of my own. Every day I write to philanthropists, charitable establishments, government officials. I petition every personage of authority and good will with whose name I am con-versant, pleading the cause of the
Today I did something I have never done before: I wilfully disobeyed my husband. Edward had forbidden me to attend the inquest of Catherine Eddowes, saying I should not expose myself to such un-savory disclosures as were bound to be made. Also, he said it was unseemly for the vicar’s wife to venture abroad unaccompanied, a dictum that impresses me as more appropriately belonging to another time and place. I waited until Edward left the vicarage and then hurried on my way. My path took me past one of the larger slaughterhouses in the area; with my handkerchief covering my mouth and nose to keep out the stench, I had to cross the road to avoid the blood and urine flooding the pavement. Once I had left Whitechapel, however, the way was unencumbered.
Outside the Golden Lane Mortuary I was pleased to encounter Inspector Abberline; he was surprised to see me there and immediately offered himself as my protector. “Is the Reverend Mr. Wickham not with you?”
“He has business in Shoreditch,” I answered truthfully, not adding that Edward found inquests distasteful and would not have attended in any event.
“This crowd could turn ugly, Mrs. Wickham,” Inspector Abberline said. “Let me see if I can obtain us two chairs near the door.”
That he did, with the result that I had to stretch in a most unladylike manner to see over other people’s heads. “Inspector,” I said,
“have you learned the identity of the other woman who was killed the same night as Catherine Eddowes?”
“Yes, it was Elizabeth Stride — Long Liz, they called her. About forty-five years of age and homely as sin, if you’ll pardon my speaking ill of the dead. They were all unattractive, all the Ripper’s victims. One thing is certain, he didn’t choose them for their beauty.”
“Elizabeth Stride was a prostitute?”
“That she was, Mrs. Wickham, I’m sorry to say. She had nine children somewhere, and a husband, until he could tolerate her drunkenness no longer and turned her out. A woman with a nice big family like that and a husband who supported them — what reasons could she have had to turn to drink?”
I could think of nine or ten. “What about Catherine Eddowes?
Did she have children too?”
Inspector Abberline rubbed the side of his nose. “Well, she had a daughter, that much we know. We haven’t located her yet, though.”
The inquest was ready to begin. The small room was crowded, with observers standing along the walls and even outside in the passageway. The presiding coroner called the first witness, the police constable who found Catherine Eddowes’s body.
The remarkable point to emerge from the constable’s testimony was that his patrol took him through Mitre Square, where he’d found the body, every fourteen or fifteen minutes. The Ripper had only fifteen minutes to inflict so much damage? How swift he was, how sure of what he was doing!
It came out during the inquest that the Eddowes woman had been strangled before her killer had cut her throat, thus explaining why she had not cried out. In response to my whispered question, Inspector Abberline said yes, the other victims had also been strangled first.
When the physicians present at the postmortem testified, they were agreed that the killer had sound anatomical knowledge but they were not in accord as to the extent of his actual skill in removing the organs. Their reports of what had been done to the body were disturbing; I grew slightly faint during the description of how the flaps of the abdomen had been peeled back to expose the intestines.
Inspector Abberline’s sworn statement was succinct and free of speculation; he testified as to the course of action pursued by the police following the discovery of the body. There were other witnesses, people who had encountered Catherine Eddowes on the night she was killed. At one time she had been seen speaking to a middle- aged man wearing a black coat of good quality which was now slightly shabby; it was the same description that had emerged during the investigation of one of the Ripper’s earlier murders. But at the end of it all we were no nearer to knowing the Ripper’s identity than ever; the verdict was “Willful murder by some person unknown.”
I refused Inspector Abberline’s offer to have one of his assistants escort me home. “That makes six women
