Whitechapel Conspiracy

Remus grimaced. “How quaintly you put it. Yes, that’s where they met, if you like to phrase it that way.”

Tellman assumed from his words that it was more than a mere meeting. But the core of it all still escaped him. What had it to do with an insane murderer and five dead and mutilated women?

“You are not making sense.” He leaned a little forward across the table between them. “Whoever Jack was—or is—he wanted particular women. He asked for them by name, at least he did for Annie Chapman. Why? Why did you go asking after the death of William Crook in St. Pancras, and the lunatic Stephen in Northampton? What has Stephen to do with Jack?”

“From what I can tell …” Remus’s thin hands were clenched on his beer mug. It shook very slightly, rippling the liquid. “Stephen was the Duke of Clarence’s tutor, and he was a friend of Walter Sickert. It was he who introduced them.”

“The Duke of Clarence and Walter Sickert?” Tellman said slowly.

Remus’s voice was half strangled in his throat. “The Duke of Clarence and Annie Crook, you fool!”

The room whirled around Tellman as if he were at sea in a storm. The eventual heir to the throne, and a Catholic girl from the East End. But the Prince of Wales had mistresses all over the place. He was not even particularly discreet about it. If Tellman knew, then probably all the world did.

Remus looked at Tellman’s blank face.

“From what I know now, Clarence—Eddy, as he was called—was rather awkward, and his friends suspected he might have leanings towards men as much as women.”

“Stephen…”Tellman put in.

“That’s right. Stephen, his tutor, introduced him to a lot of more acceptable kinds of entertainment with Annie. He was very deaf, poor devil, like his mother, and found social conversation a bit difficult.” For the first time there was a note of compassion in Remus’s voice, and a sudden sadness filled his face. “But it didn’t work out the way they meant. They fell in love … really in love. The core of it is …” He looked at Tellman with a strange mixture of pity and elation. His hands were shaking even more. “They might have been married …”

Tellman jerked his glass so hard that ale slopped over the edges onto the table. “What?”

Remus nodded, shivering. His voice dropped to a whisper. “And that’s why Netley, poor Eddy’s driver, who used to bring him here to see Annie in Cleveland Street, tried twice to kill the child … poor little creature …”

“Child?” Now it was plain. “Alice Crook …” Tellman gulped in air and nearly choked. “Alice Crook is the daughter of the Duke of Clarence?”

“Probably … and maybe in wedlock. And Annie was Catholic.” Remus was whispering now. “Remember the Act of Settlement?”

“What?”

“The Act of Settlement,” Remus repeated. Tellman had to lean right across the table to hear him. “Made law in 1701, but still in effect. It excludes any person who marries a Roman Catholic from inheriting the crown. The Bill of Rights of 1689 says the same thing.”

The true enormity of it began to dawn on Tellman. It was hideous. It jeopardized the throne, the stability of the government and the whole country.

“So they forced them apart?” It was the only possible conclusion. “They kidnapped Annie and put her in a madhouse … and what happened to Eddy? He died? Or did they … surely …?” He could not even say it. Suddenly being a prince was a terrible thing, isolated, frightening, one individual lonely human being against a conspiracy that stretched everywhere.

Remus was looking at him with the pity still in his face.

“God knows”—he shook his head—“poor soul couldn’t hear half of what was going on, and maybe he was a bit simpler than some. It seems he was devoted to Annie and the child. Maybe he created a fuss about them. He was deaf, alone, confused …” He stopped again, his face filled with misery for a man he had never seen but whose pain he could imagine too vividly.

Tellman stared ahead at the scruffy posters and the scribbling on the pub wall, profoundly grateful that he was there and not in some palace, watched over by murderous courtiers, a servant to the throne and not master of anything.

“Why the five women?” he said at last. “There has to have been a reason.”

“Oh, there was,” Remus assured him. “They were the ones who knew about it. They were Annie’s friends. If they’d known what they were up against, they’d have disappeared. But they didn’t. Word has it they were greedy, at least one of them was, and led the others. They asked Sickert for money in exchange for silence. He told his masters, and the women got silence all right—the silence of a blood-soaked grave.”

Tellman buried his face in his hands and sat motionless, his mind in chaos. Was Lyndon Remus the real lunatic? Could any of this fearful story be true?

He looked up slowly, lowering his hands.

As if reading his thoughts, Remus spoke. “You think I’m mad?”

Tellman nodded. “Yes …”

“I can’t prove any of it … yet. But I will. It’s true. Look at the facts.”

“I am. They don’t prove it. Why did Stephen kill himself? How was he involved?”