I, Ripper

“He says he’s from O’Connor, and he’s here to take you somewhere you’re needed. I must say, this whole newspaper business you’ve got yourself in is very annoying to me. Now I find you have a Goliathan pistol over there, capable of blowing down a wall.”

“I’d be happy to loan it to dear sister Lucy, Mother. Perhaps she can play with it in the garden. Do tell her to look down the barrels and pull the triggers to see if it’s loaded.”

“You are too loathsome for words,” she said. “Now hurry. I am giving the cabman your tea this morning because he is working and you are lazing about like a dog. Hurry, hurry.”

She left in high snoot, as if that were different from any other form of being for her, and I pulled on my clothes, locked the Howdah in the desk drawer on the general principle that anything so dangerous should be locked away, and headed downstairs.

“Now, then, what’s all this about?” I demanded of the cabman.

“Sir,” he said, “Mr. O’Connor has requested that you be conveyed swift as possible to 13 Miller Court, Whitechapel.”

“God in heaven, man, why?”

“Sir, there’s been another one, that’s what Mr. O’Connor told me to tell you. This one beyond imagination, so the early reports suggest. You’re to get to it and get details fast for the next edition.”

November 8, 1888

Dear Mum,

I ain’t sent you the other letters but now my plan is to wrap them up with this one and send ’em all along, so you and Da can have a good laugh.

It’s a happy time down here. It’s been such a while since Jack has been about, we girls are sure he’s gone. They say he favors a quarter-moon, coming or going, but he’s missed a couple now.

Maybe he’s gone to try his luck in America! Maybe Sir Charles’s Peelers have done scared him off, as they’re everywhere these days. Maybe he fell in a hole and got eaten by rats, the cheesy bugger.

Joe says we are quit of him, and that he’s a lucky lad, because if Joe had gotten ahold of him, he’d of hammered and chopped him so bad, wouldn’t be enough to put on sale at the fish market.

Anyhow, thought you’d want to know.

I did get a little rowdy tonight after my gins, but didn’t have no customers, as it’s raining. I sang too loud and Liz upstairs pounded on the floor to get me quiet. Sorry, Liz! Hope I didn’t wake Diddles the cat! Sorry, Diddles!

Anyhow, I’m feeling right safe and good now. It’s pouring out and not even the Ripper would go out in that cold soaking. I’m locked in my little room, I’ve had my gin, the fire’s burned low and tomorrow’s a new day and I am full of hope.

Best and love, Mum.

Your loving daughter,

Mairsian

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN The Diary

November 9, 1888

got there around five A.M. If the world was expecting dawn, that was not yet evident. A gloom had clapped itself across the city and scored the night with bitter rain. A wind blew nails through the air, to chill the skin and the soul. The streets, even in the hustle-bustle of Whitechapel, where the ever rotating wheel of sex walk dominated, were quiet. Only now and then could a pedestrian be sighted in the shrouded element; all the Bobbies had retreated to warmer climes. Only a madman would be walking about with impunity.

Equally, Miller’s Court, a city in its own way, was empty of humanity. All the bad little girls, their thighs smeared with goo, their mouths slack and distended by cocks, were abed for a little peace and dreams of prosperity. Working families, of whom there were a few so unfortunate as to share whoretown with the Judys, had yet to arise for their twelve to sixteen hours of routine exploitation in whatever form of hired slavery it was their fate to endure. I went swiftly to the window of No. 13, reached in, feeling as my fingers found the lock button. I pulled it and heard the click that indicated the spring had sprung.

That easily I was in. Her little cave was dark, though embers glowed in the fireplace. It was no more than twelve by twelve, and whoever would consign a human being to so small a space was himself criminal, though since it was Mary Jane’s own fondness for the laudanum of gin that brought her there, it was she herself who was largely guilty of the crime against Mary Jane. Character, as much as system, was in play in this case. I was soon to add my meager share of woe upon the lady, but it was she herself and the society in which she existed that had engineered such colossal cruelty. I was merely the last in a long line of criminals who feasted on their victim’s weakness.