“It’s not a thing the army wants out, you see. It could help the foe, this year’s or next year’s.”
“I do understand that, Penny,” I said, although it had just occurred to me, for concerns of empire had never been prominent in my thinking, “and I can assure you that the interest is purely domestic, in re: our Jack. The only nation of concern is the nation of Whitechapel and its civilian population of twelve hundred whoregirls.”
“They be citizens, too, even if they pay no taxes, and they deserve the same protection of any major general surrounded by Lancers. Can’t say I’ve never had a bounce in my long gaudy life, so you’ll get no moral posturing from me.”
“I’ve seen the bodies, Penny, hacked as if in the cross fire at Balaclava.”
“All right, that’s a good case you make.”
“So you’ll assist?”
He considered, quaffing and squinting, quaffing and squinting, and at last said, “All right, if only because I think you’ve done bang-up work, and I love to see a professional breaking the news. You’ve given that dumb bugger Warren a few hard, dry shits a long time over the hole. And you’ll not be giving my name to nobody, is that understood? I can’t give up my fellow, so you can’t give me up.”
“It’s a bargain,” I said.
Feeling quite healthy toward myself, I set out to return to the office. My step was light, almost a dance, a waltz, say, full of love, not for women but self-directed, toward me, Jeb, hero of the Jack saga, and I was so in love with myself that I paid no attention to what lay about. In a few days, Penny would give me his list, and with the professor, we would somehow examine the lives of each man on it, and surely if one were Jack, there’d be a manifestation available to plain eye. We’d inform someone we trusted at the Yard—Ross, I was thinking—and he’d go and arrange a meet with the mystical Inspector Abberline, and the trap would be set. A raid would spring it, for surely the knife, bloody clothes, perhaps even, God help us, Annie’s wedding rings or, as we referred to them in the Star, ANNIE’S WEDDING RINGS would be found, and then the world was ours. I was famous, I had entree everywhere, my good friend Professor Dare would go emeritus at any Oxbridge house he chose, and Saucy Jacky would go for a long walk off a short gallows, to everybody’s pleasure. It might even be that his horrors, horrific horrors though they be, would shine light enough on the appalling reality of Whitechapel that some benefit to the population, especially those hard workers of Angel Alley and Fashion Street, might come about.
Yes, I was mighty pleased and—
A hand clapped hard and sudden upon my shoulder. “’Ello, your ’onor, ’ow’s about a nice sip with your fine friend ’arry.”
I feign the swallowed H’s here to convey the comic fraudulence of the attempt at cockney. Harry thought it was funny because it was so grotesquely unfunny in his Yank accent, full of elongated vowels, misunderstood rhythms, and fractured timing; perhaps it was also an indicator of the full strangeness of the American mind. I turned, and yes, it was he, Harry Dam, in full boating regalia, waiting for the coxswain to start beating time so that his eight could beat Magdalen’s eight. He came stepping out of an alleyway across from the Pen and Parchment, where he had clearly followed me.
“Harry, where’s your megaphone?”
“Eh?”
“To count cadence for the oar strokes.”
“Oh, the boating stuff. You guys sure think that’s funny! Come on, chum, I’m serious. We need to powwow.”
“What on earth does ‘pow-wow’ mean?”
“You know, chitchat, palaver, yakkity-yak, have a sit-down, that sort of thing. A meeting!”
“Not now. It’s late and—”
“It may be later than you think,” he said. “Really, this is for your own good, pal. I could be with my girl—let’s see, Tuesday, yes, that would be Fran—I could be with Fran, but I’m here looking out for you.”
He was so absurd, standing there in his comically inappropriate wardrobe, complete with white suede shoes and straw boater, but nevertheless so beaming confidence and self-adoration that I let him steer me into a place called the Farmer’s Pig, and there we found a booth in a dark corner, and he went and got a beer for self and a frothy ginger beer for me.
“This ain’t the moment for you to start drinking, friend, believe me,” he said, and drained half his glass, then licked the foam from his upper lip. I assumed he was cheesed off because I was on this “secret project” and he was not, and I was off “making inquiries” while he was not. He was planted at the Yard, waiting for something to happen, a hard sit for a go-and-grab-it fellow like him.
“Harry, believe me, nothing is going on, I am not plotting against you, I just—”
“It’s not that. If you break the story, makes no dif, because there’ll be other stories that I’ll break, you can be sure. No, it’s this. I’m worried about you, pal. You’re overconfident but underexperienced. I’m worried you’re getting yourself in way beyond your depth, and it’s you we could next find in the gutter.”
“Whatever are you talking about?”
“What do you know about this Thomas Dare?”
“How do you even know the name?”
“I heard J.P. tell Bright your caper. I’m good at overhearing stuff. It’s sort of my trade, you might say. Anyhow, I heard it, and I didn’t get a schoolboy crush on him like you did, and I thought he ought to be the one we look at, so I took the liberty.”
“He’s a brilliant man!”
“How’s he know so much?”
“That same brilliance.”
“Too brilliant, if you ask me.”
“There are such men. Rare, to be sure, but genius is not without documentation. Surely Darwin, his cousin Galton, Matthew Arnold . . .” But I had been so taken by the brilliance of Professor Dare’s explanation that I had never questioned its origin. Surely he was a shrewd analyst, but he was so far ahead of the others that it might mean he had some kind of inside information. Inside what?
A far more likely explanation involved Harry, not Dare. Was Harry a more jealous type than I had figured, and was he working now to drive suspicion between me and Dare? That would be a sure way to destroy our partnership, and Harry might benefit, picking up the pieces we’d left on the floor and assembling them. Such deviousness seemed not only beyond Harry but beyond the American mind. Now, were he a Hungarian, one might think it plausible, but a son of the middle prairie, with those broad, flat vowels and that total absence of irony, much less subtle thinking, nuanced calculation, patience, cleverness? Hardly likely, I’d have thought.
“What are you here to tell me?” I said.
“It took some digging, some bribing, some considerable yakkity-yak and palaver, but the second best kept secret in London after Jack’s identity is that your Tom Dare has a violent streak in him.”
I looked at Harry, searching for signs of jest. I knew irony was well beyond him, but his crude American mind might conceive of a crude practical joke. “What are you talking about?”
“A few years back, he almost went on trial for assaulting a colleague. He and this guy, they got into it over a project they’d been working on, and Tom Dare jumped him, smashed him, shoved him down the steps, and was throttling him, only to be pulled off by cooler heads. This was at the school, you know, the University of London, where he was some mucky-muck-mullah type. You know how discreet your own people are, chum. It was, what’s the word, ‘hushed up.’ Can’t have a high-up professor at a high-up school acting like a low hooligan, cracking pals over the head and all. Tut-tut, old chap, we just cannot have it.”
“I have never heard of such a thing.” And I hadn’t. No, it was not done. Among “our” class of folk, that is, those of us with higher mental function, exposure to education, mastery of culture, familiarity with the genius canon of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, proficiency in the dead languages, the brightest, the best, the most gifted, it was understood that the laying on of hands was strictly off limits. One did not do such things. That was for Kipling’s sort of brutes. If there was to be pugilism, it would be at the gymnasium, under the regulations of the marquis of Queensberry.