“Wha’ eve’ yer say, Miss.”
He ate everything in sight. But between mouthfuls of roast and potatoes, he told me a little about his background. He could have been one of Dickens’ characters in Oliver Twist. He and his friends had been leading a subhuman life in the darkest of London’s slums. He lived in an area of Whitechapel, the East End’s crime-infested hub. Years later, I would recall this conversation. I’d realize I knew someone who actually lived in Jack the Ripper’s hunting grounds.
“Your father is dead?”
“Naw,” he said. “Me fatha’s in Spitafields.”
Spitafields was one of London’s poorest areas with broken down houses, most rotting from attic to cellar. Uncle volunteered on occasion at Providence Row, where the Sisters of Mercy had created a night refuge for destitute women and children. He had described it and Brick Lane and the other streets in the area as a dark, uneasy place brimming with haggard, skinny women, and children with sunken eyes and pale faces and empty stares.
“So he’s alive, then. Your father.”
“’e is. But I wan’ nothin’ t’do with ’im. ’e spends mos’ of ’is time in molly ’ouses.”
“In what?”
“Chummin’ with ova men ’ho fancy ’im. ’e finks ’e’s th’ wrong sex.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. “Oh,” I repeated with a gasp.
He continued to munch on the last of the bread, and I finally asked about his mother.
“She’s a barmaid. Never meant to ’ave me. Billy t’either. But along we come.”
“Billy’s father?”
“Someone else. I come alon’ afore me dad figured ’e wanted t’ be a woman ’sted of a man. Don’ know ’ho Billy belongs t’. Mum used t’ be a laundress. Lived in a ’ouse in Thrawl Street and then with a bloke in George Street, but they gots kicked out for drinkin’. She moved down in Miller’s Court on the north side a’ Dorset Street, ya see. Finks Billy’s dad was th’ owner of a chandler shop on Dorset. Billy looks like him. Stout with blue eyes and pale. Looks a bi’ like the Chandler bloke. But maybe a guy ‘ho works at the gas works on Stepney. ‘e gives ‘er nice dresses. Like yours.”
I knew the area. A place where women paraded along Commercial between Flower and Dean and Aldgate or on Whitechapel Road, soliciting clients. I could not even begin to speculate what kind of life these children had.
“Your mother doesn’t take care of you or Billy?”
“She’s awright. She tends t’ Billy when she can.”
“And what about you? You have to take care of him a lot.”
“Aw, e’s no bova.” He shrugged and ripped off another chunk of bread.
He’s no bother? I thought. He is just a child himself. Aunt Susan had always wanted children and could never have any, and here was a woman who had produced two and cared little for either.
As if he had read my mind, Archibald said, “We does awright, Miss. We get fed and ‘ave a bed now and fen a’ the Union. Kin’t smoke fere. Bu’ i’s fem old ones I worries ’bou’.”
“The old ones? The elderly people, you mean.”
He nodded. “They kin’t ’ave even a cuppa fru th’ day. Only one in th’ mornin’ and one in th’ evenin’. At nigh’ fey ge’ a hunch a bread and a tad of bu-ah. Maybe a bi’-a-gruel and a dip in th’ copper now and fen.”
I couldn’t stand it. Poor people, hungry people, maimed or sickly, and all they received each day were two cups of tea, some oats boiled in milk or a slice of bread, and a cup of hot cocoa. These misfortunates had little choice... go to the Whitechapel Union or live on the streets, and likely to die too soon in one or the other.
Archibald dabbed the last of the bread in the skim of gravy from the beef roast. “Say, Miss, fem fings I saw in th’ lab. Fey was parts a people?”
“Yes, Archibald. Organs taken from bodies after death.”
He thought a moment. “Fey don’ ge’ fem from graves, does fey?”
I doubted that Archibald had ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, which had certainly popularized the image of the Resurrectionists, who were often eminent physicians who snatched bodies or employed grave robbers to supply them, so that they could study colours of death displayed in various stages of bacteria in corpses. Putrefaction was an important factor in the timeline of death... the subtle green that appeared twenty-four to forty-eight hours post-mortem; the feathery black along the vessels; and the black blotches that would smear the face and torso and limbs after four or five days. That was when the final never-to-be-forgotten stench of death permeated the air.
The poorly maintained city graveyards gave off their own peculiar smell as well. I shuddered, remembering the mortuaries near the dock after the Thames disaster. It was not inconceivable that Archibald knew grave robbers. Perhaps he had even been approached to participate in such activities himself. Hopefully not by Sherlock, though he’d mentioned back at Oxford that, for purposes of research, he had ‘come across’ severed heads and legs and arms, likely provided by those undesirables who made a living dismembering with crowbars, axes and saws.
“Why do you ask about such things, Archibald?”
“I ’ears fere’s good money in i’. I ’eared they does i’ ’andsome, they does. Nearer on four pounds, sometimes five. ’ave a mate ’ho give up crackin’ cribs fer it cos ’e says ’e ’ad a nice spree over it.”
“It is illegal, Archibald.”
He lowered his head. Then he said, “We best be goin’, Miss.”
“Yes, we should. Now, remember Sherlock’s instructions, won’t you? You won’t say much. I will tell them that you stutter a bit and that you are shy. And if you recognize the Asian man you saw
