The Cutthroat

Bell settled his hotel bill with the Savoy’s cashier and exchanged pound notes for a sack of shiny half-crown coins. In an old-clothes shop at St. Katharine Docks, he bought a sailcloth seabag, a pair of rugged trousers, a rough wool undershirt, a frayed jacket bursting at the elbows, a pair of heavy boots that the shopkeeper said came from a steamship stoker’s widow, a length of rope for a belt, and a sweat-stained stoker’s cap that he inspected closely for lice.

He hailed a hansom to Euston, and changed clothes in the station lavatory. His disguise passed early tests with flying colors. The train ticket clerk assumed without asking that he was traveling third class, and a porter who bumped into him barked, “Make a lane, mate,” instead of, “Beg your pardon, governor.”

Drawn by the new Prince of Wales class 4-8-0 locomotive, the Manchester Limited glided from the station. Bell’s train, a local destined to make many stops, chugged after it, accelerated in fits and starts between dark, seemingly endless walls of slab-sided brick factories, and lumbered suddenly into open fields that seemed impossibly green in contrast to the city. The fields were speckled with snowy sheep and, as the train continued north, were laced by narrow canals.

In four and a half hours, the train passed through factory towns on the outskirts and arrived in Manchester, an industrial city of immense modern cotton mills and a thousand tall chimneys. The opulent railroad station, banks, stock exchange, and sumptuous hotels and palaces, were monuments to the yearly weaving of eight billion yards of cheap checked gingham cloth that made “Cottonopolis” so wealthy that the only city richer in the world was London.

Isaac Bell walked to the slums. It was raining hard. The last time he had seen smoke so thick was Pittsburgh’s infamous oily “black fog” that hurt to breathe.

* * *

Twelve pence made an English shilling, twenty shillings a pound. For fifteen pounds, grandees like the Earl of Milton and Lord Strone could charter a private train. Or a village could pay a schoolteacher’s salary for a year. The prostitutes Jack the Ripper murdered had been hoping to earn four pence to sleep indoors.

Isaac Bell’s half crowns — two and a half shillings — equaled thirty pence, and word raced like fire through the narrow lanes and fetid alleys that ringed the thundering mills. A tall sailor with yellow hair was handing out “two-and-six” to anyone who could tell him anything about an old woman known as London Emily.

Astonishment on the slum dwellers’ faces told Bell that a single shilling would have done the job. Work in the mills was sporadic, depending on the markets, and low-paying. There were lines outside the workhouses that traded a night out of the rain for a day of work, breaking rocks or picking oakum out of old hemp rope. The Salvation Army soup kitchens were crowded.

He described London Emily as short and thin, with gray or white hair. Even if she had been only sixteen when Jack the Ripper attacked her, from what he saw of Angel Meadow, twenty-three years in the slum would have long since turned her into an old woman.

A pale creature dressed in a ragged shawl tugged his sleeve. “I’m her. I’m London Emily.”

19

Isaac Bell shook his head. “I’m sorry, but you’re half a foot taller than she was on her best day.”

Against his better judgment, Bell gave her a half crown. It was a mistake that he would not make a second time. Flocks of old women descended from every point of the compass. Fights broke out as they struggled to get near him.

Bell took off at a long-legged run down lanes and through alleys until he lost them. But soon another flock gathered.

He was thinking he had to come back another day in a different guise when he heard a frightened cry. “Scuttlers.”

The women scattered.

The street gangs had come hunting for the sailor with half crowns.

Bell had not seen a bobby since he entered the slum and did not expect to meet one now. They came at him from two directions. It took a moment to realize they were separate groups who had spotted him simultaneously and would fight for the right to attack him. Swinging spiked pickax handles, short, thin, scarred, and tattooed men and boys exploded into bloody battle. The winners dispersed the losers with a bombardment of dead dogs and rats, stomped the fallen with nail-studded clogs, and charged Isaac Bell.

Bell had already fished the derringer out of his seabag. Waiting for the leaders to close within fifteen feet, he braced against the recoil and fired one barrel. The hail of lead pellets knocked the legs out from under four men leading the charge. The remainder gazed into the as-yet-unfired second barrel and cocked their skinny arms to throw their clubs.

Bell fired his second barrel and ducked the only club they managed to launch. His hands flew. He broke the gun open, pulled the spent shells, loaded in fresh ones, flicked it shut, and took deliberate aim.