Whitechapel Conspiracy

He drew breath as if to add something further, an additional urgency to his request, then changed his mind. He smiled with sudden charming warmth. “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Fetters. I am sure that together we shall be able to create an article that will stand for the best memorial to your husband, the one he would wish, which will be a forwarding of the great cause of social justice and equality, a real freedom for all men. And it will come. He was a great man, a man of vision and brilliance, and the courage to use them both. I was privileged to know him and be a part of what he accomplished. It is a tragedy that he had to be lost to us so young, and when he is so desperately needed. I grieve with you.”

Juno stood motionless, her eyes wide. “Thank you,” she said slowly. “Thank you, Mr. Dismore.”

When they were outside and safely back in the first passing hansom, she turned to Charlotte, clutching the papers in her hand.

“He’s read them, and there’s nothing.”

“I know,” Charlotte agreed. “Whatever it is that is missing from the papers, it’s not what he gave us today.”

“Do you suppose they are incomplete?” Juno asked, fingering the manila envelope. “And he kept the rest? He’s a republican, I’d swear to that.”

“I don’t know,” Charlotte admitted. The core of Dismore eluded her. She felt less certain of him now than she had before they met.

They rode back to Juno’s home in silence, then together looked at all that Dismore had given them. It was vivid, beautifully written, full of passion and the hunger for justice. Once again Charlotte was torn by her instinctive liking for Martin Fetters, his enthusiasm, his courage, his zeal to include all mankind in the same privileges he enjoyed, and at the same time a revulsion for the destruction his beliefs would cause to so much that she loved. There was nothing whatever in any of the new material to suggest he knew of the Whitechapel murders, their reason, or any plan to involve Remus to reveal them now, and the rage and violence that could bring.

She left Juno sitting and reading them yet again, emotionally exhausted, and yet unable to put them down.

She walked to the omnibus stop, her own mind in turmoil. She could not speak to Pitt, which was what she wanted above all else. Tellman had very little knowledge of the world in which people like Dismore and Gleave lived, or the others who might be high in the Inner Circle. The only person she could trust was Aunt Vespasia.

Charlotte was fortunate in finding Vespasia at home and without company. She greeted Charlotte warmly, then looked more intently at her face and settled to listen in silence while the story poured out: everything that first Tellman had learned, and then Gracie’s realization of the truth as she stood alone in Mitre Square.

Vespasia sat motionless. The light from the windows caught the fine lines on her skin, emphasizing both the strength of her and the years. Time had refined her, tempered her courage, but it had also hurt her and shown her too much of people’s weaknesses and failures as well as their victories.

“The Whitechapel murders,” she said softly, her voice hoarse with a horror she had not imagined. “And this man Remus is going to find the proof and then sell it to the newspapers?”

“Yes—that is what Tellman says. It will be the biggest story of the century. The government will probably fall, and the throne almost certainly,” Charlotte replied.

“Indeed.” Vespasia did not move, but stared with almost blind eyes into some distance which lay within her rather than beyond. “There will be violence and bloodshed such as we have not seen in England since the time of Cromwell. Dear God, what evil to match evil! They would sort out one corruption to replace it with another, and all the misery will be for nothing.”

Charlotte leaned forward a little. “Isn’t there anything we cando?”

“I don’t know,” Vespasia confessed. “We need to learn who it is that is guiding Remus, and what part Dismore and Gleave play in it. What was Adinett doing in Cleveland Street? Was he seeking to find the information for Remus, or to prevent him from finding it?”

“Prevent him,” Charlotte replied. “I think …” Then she realized how little she knew. Almost all of it was conjecture, fear. It involved Fetters and Adinett, but she was still not certain beyond doubt how. And there was no room for even the smallest mistake. She told Vespasia about Gleave’s visit and his desire to find Martin Fetters’s papers. She described her own sense of threat from him, but said here in this clean, golden room it sounded more like imagination than reality.

But Vespasia did not decry the impression. She continued to listen intently.

Charlotte then went on to tell her about Juno’s conviction that there were new papers, and their visit to Thorold Dismore, and Juno’s belief that he was a true republican and fully intended to use all he could find or create to bring to pass his own purposes.