In short, I wanted what I couldn’t have.
I went far afield. I perambulated in my slow, easeful way down the Whitechapel High Street, beyond the intersection with Commercial, that hub of the flesh and sperm trade, passing as I went such lesser applicants to Sodom and Gomorrah as the Black Horse, the Black Bull, the Blue Boar, as if any such animals had been seen in the wild here in a thousand years. It was softer beyond Commercial, and the coster-squatters had relented, so no stalls had been spread about like obstacles against normal pedestrianism, and I hoped to find a softer woman. I walked, I walked, I walked. I cut down Angel Alley, I walked the Wicked Quarter Mile, I looked into Itchy Park at Christchurch and thence to the coagulation of flesh outside, within and around the Ten Bells. It was not as late as I prefer, but the quarter-moon stood guard, providing enough but not too much light, and now and then a gaslight flung its bit of glow off a corner, just enough to suggest safety without actually providing it.
I saw several. One, too old by far, turned out not to be in the life, and when I approached, she skittered away with a haughty tut-tut to her carriage to inform me that I had made a mistake, that she was not up for trade, and to chastise me for my impertinence with the suggestion that I return to busier thoroughfares. Another, alas, was too swift; I never caught up with her and lost her in a crowd on one of my peregrinations.
In time, I wore out and found a seat at the bar of the public house called the Three Nuns—not many of them about, either, I’ll tell you! In that rowdy place, among the many and anonymous, I refreshed with an ale, then another. Eventually I arose and escaped the clamor, then found that the beer had slowed and dulled me and moved my mood toward the sourly comic, in which everything was amusing and nothing meaningful. I knew I had no patience for the kind of careful stalk I had planned; the evening was well shot. Accepting defeat is sometimes the best way to assure victory, for as I began my desultory walk homeward, I saw her.
I dubbed her, in my mind, Juliet, after Shakespeare’s most tragic young lover. She was no thruppence Judy, that was for sure, and you saw them sometimes, for among the twelve hundred who plied their trade to stay alive down here in hell’s maw and Jack’s feeding ground, now and again a lass of some exquisiteness might appear. She’d be quickly bought up by a rich man for mistress or recruited by a house for the room of highest ceiling and reddest silk, but in this way she got her start and advanced in her trade and, who knew, ultimately made it to the arm of someone already chosen by society as a lucky fellow. The lucky get luckier, that’s the rub.
She was tall and thin and painfully young, as if untouched, even virgo intacticus, with a doll’s delicate translucent face and tendrils of curled blond hair framing it. Her hat was pert, her bodice tight, gathered in satin posies about her swan’s neck to emphasize an impossibly adorable bosom, the amenities contained within not heavy to flesh and droop, but all perfect in pouty haughtiness. She would do perfectly for the blasphemy I intended, and by the luck of He Who Does Not Exist, she was exactly where she had to be when she had to be there.
The quality of her clothing gave her away, I saw in a second. She was of a subspecies in the trade called a “dress lodger,” meaning, poor girl, that she was employed by a house, lent finer clothes than she could afford on her own and, in return for them, split the fee with the madam who ran the place and was further obligated to steer her client its way when all was done. It was a form of advertising, if you will, in the brothel industry. Whatever, I knew then she was no innocent. Oddly, that inflamed me even more.
I approached, brushed close by her, and smelled her—delicious, ambrosial—then turned to melt my eyes on her, noting a spray of youthful freckles across the bridge of nose, playing out on her cheeks. Our eyes beheld each other for just a second, but it was a long and, for me, a passionate one. As for her, nothing perturbs the calm of beauty, for she believes beauty is her Achilles’ potion, shielding her from all harm. Generally, that is a terrible mistake.
“Would the young lady care for an escort?” I inquired, removing my hat and bowing slightly.
“I know your sort,” she said. “Start off nice and friendly, all gentle-like, then directly comes the cuff and the fist and finally the kick.”
“I would slay any man who would kick, even slap, such a face, whose eyes, I might add, sparkle with intrigue, not the cow’s surrender to its fate.”
“He talks fancy, then, does this one. Maybe you’re Saucy Jacky, the one that rips, and it’s something sharp is my destiny, not something sweet.”
“Madam, this Jack works a later shift. As well, I invite you to examine my body and see it bereft of blade,” I said. “For who could see you and think of such?”
The poor thing. She had no idea with whom she spoke and how close was the Reaper’s—the Ripper’s, another hidden meaning in whatever hack had so coined the moniker—scythe.
“We’ll walk a bit now, and I’ll see if you’re one that I like enough.”
“You among all the birds can pick and choose,” I said. “Perhaps my luck is to be the chosen tonight.”
We fell into an easy rhythm, and for a second, as we passed along the way, I saw us as a perfect couple, he of property, she of beauty, both of style and wit and grace, and thought how London rewards such worthies, and how at a certain point I was convinced, goddess on arm, that such was my own destiny. Alas, and bitterly, it was not to be, and that outcome carried with it the mallet of melancholy. But this melancholy, like a headache, passed as we approached the structure around which I had planned tonight’s infamy, and in time we came under the shadow, had there been a sun or a moon bright and well placed enough, of that large entity.
She stopped as if she had made up her mind. “You smell good,” she said. “If it’s something you’d be wanting, I could provide, I think, if only for my dying mother.”
“I am happy to keep Mum alive another night or so.”
“And it’s not without considerable cost. I’m told I’m selling something above common, far above common.”
“Far, far above common.”
“I don’t do this all the time, you understand.”
“Nor I. It’ll be an adventure for both of us. Did I hear a figure mentioned?”
“Five, I think, would put me in the mind.”
Five! And it wasn’t pence she was talking but shillings. Good Christ, she thought highly of herself. But she’d read my want, my cleanliness, my prosperity, liked my smell since I’d bathed in anticipation, so she’d set the market to the customer. It was pure Bentham.
“That lightens my purse considerably,” I said. “But I shall happily meet the tariff on the condition that, for our privacy, it’s the building beyond us that contains our assignation. Having you in it makes it worth the five. In fact, I’ll give you six, my dear.”
She looked, reading the place up and down. It was a fragile moment, for some would panic at the prospect and others blush. But this Juliet was a bold young woman. “Six, then, for the Church.”
I pulled a crown from my pocket and fished the coinage of the rest and pressed it all into her hand. She tucked it in some pouch beneath her petticoats. “Then leave us proceed, sir,” she said.
We advanced up the stone walk. The spire of St. Botolph’s rose above us. It was not the loveliest church in London, or even Whitechapel, appearing prosaic next to the Methodist adoration of deity that propelled Christchurch to such height and glory, but it was not without its merits. It had been called the prostitute’s church, for it was on an island, surrounded on four sides by street or walk, and they could be in constant orbit and impervious to the reach of the rozzers. Its steeple was a pile of size-descending boxes, as a child might assemble from blocks of wood, each with its note of decoration, one being a Roman clock, another a square window, the third an arched window of louvers, and above that a cupola festooned in urns of some sort. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t lovely at all, and it was rather close to Mitre Square, which lay a bit down the street that we had just left. Still, I hadn’t come for the sightseeing, as there wasn’t much of a sight to see. I had come for the blasphemy.