I, Ripper

I nipped into it, and first thing, I pulled the damned lump of apron from my pocket and dumped it. It did not fall right – I wanted the blood to show conspicuously so not even the thickest of the thick could miss its implications. Some fluffing was required to achieve the proper show.

That done, I fetched a piece of chalk from my trousers, where it had been secured for just this purpose. I had thought carefully about the message for almost a month, parsed it as lovingly as any poet does his poem, for it had to carry certain messages and certain implications but nothing more. I found a suitable emptiness of wall and began to inscribe my message, large enough to be seen as language, not scrawl, taking my time. I had thought it out as a visual expression, lines perfectly symmetrical, a quatrain of long, short, long, short, a few brisk syllables, perfectly clear as to meaning and intent and—

Good Christ!

I nearly leaped out of my boots.

As I labored in intense concentration and was nearly through the third line, something – someone – had poked me in the small of the back.

I turned, aghast, my heart hammering like a steam engine gone berserk and near exploding, reached back for the Sheffield, and turned to confront the enemy I must slay.

It was a child.

She was about six, frail and pale with a raw burlap makeshift sack on, her grubby feet bare, her hair blond and stringy, flowing down her face over huge and radiant eyes, skin like pearl yet here and there smeared with dirt.

“Would the gentleman care to buy a flower?” she said. She held out a single wilted rose.

Was this a scene from Old Man Dickens? Perhaps Mrs. Ward, who produced her share of the lachrymose treacle for genteel, tea-sucking lady readers, or even the humorless Hardy? They’d both killed off lads and lasses every fifty pages or so to make a dime or so off their penny dreadfuls. But this was not literature, it was real, this thin-shouldered beauty standing for all the dispossessed, the impoverished, and the slowly starving, cowering under their bridges and by the railway tracks in the cruel London night, aware that even crueller temperatures lay a month anon.

“What on earth are you doing out by yourself, child?” I said.

“Wasn’t no room in the doss ternight, so me mum took me under the bridge. I think she’s dead, though. She’s been coughing up blood awful bad. I could not wake her. I been walking an hour. Found a rose, thought I might sell it to a gentleman. Please, sir. It would mean so much.”

“You cannot be out here alone. It’s a dangerous time and place. Have you no people but your poor mother?”

“No, sir. We moved in from the country some months ago, for work, but Dad could find none. He went away some time ago, don’t know where to. Been alone with Mum ever since.”

“All right,” I said, “I shall find you a place to be.”

“Sir, just a penny for the rose is all I needs.”

“No, no, that will not do. The rose is worthless, you are without price. You come with me now, child.”

And so, the message unfinished and forgotten, I wrapped the child in my coat and lofted her to my torso, where she soon fell asleep across my shoulder. I headed up Goulston. At a certain point I looked back at what I had abandoned, wondered if I could get back to finish once I had attended to the girl, but instead saw, a block behind and approaching the nook where I’d paused for labor, the bull’s-eye lantern of a copper, swinging to and fro, at the end of the fellow’s long blue arm as he bumbled along, searching for rapers, robbers, bunco artists, pickpockets, and even the odd whore murderer such as myself.

Good Lord, I thought. Had this small girl not interrupted me, I’d be there still, finishing up my task. But no, she came along, I forgot that which had brought me there, and I abandoned my post. So once again my escape was too narrow to calculate, my luck too vast to appreciate. The whole episode seemed divinely plotted, though there was no room for divinity in my thoughts.

I carried the broken, tiny thing with me for several more blocks, past dark and sealed houses on streets that led nowhere, reached another intersection, and saw illumination a long block away. The child was light as a leaf. I thought at one point she perhaps had died, and it occurred to me that if so, I could be arrested and hanged for a crime I had not committed, and that might have been God’s way of showing me what an idiot I was to disbelieve in Him. But that was a petty hack’s irony, and our Father who art not in heaven or any place clearly saw through such a tinny conceit and stayed far away.