“Think he’s gone? Been a bit.”

“Not Jack. That boy’ll ride his horse hard to the end.”

“Sooner or later, he’ll jigsaw a dolly and a copper will round the corner. Copper goes to whistle, gives chase, and soon enough the revolver squad arrives. One shot, and that’s the end of Jack.”

“One shot? More like fifty, and they’ll knock off a parson, two choir members, and a wee lassie in the volley!”

In time, I entered a conversation with one of the barmen, a burly chap with reddish muttonchops and hands and forearms that you might find on a dock worker. Tattoos, too, signifying naval or army service or to the East for John Company. He had the beady eyes of a man who noticed.

As for entrée into a conversational encounter, the universal welcome mat to chat was conjecture about Jack, every man’s obsession.

“I say, friend, I heard a rumor they got Jack already.”

“No such bloomin’ luck,” he said. “My wife’s brother’s a copper for Warren, and he’s telling us the boys in blue don’t have nothing, not a clue, not a direction, not even a scrap of evidence. Most of the witnesses is liars, and Jack’s by far a cleverer boy than anybody knows. It ain’t luck getting him by, it’s brains, it is.”

“I agree,” I said. “From what I hear, he’s been a hair away from apprehension four or five times, and the coppers just missed it together.”

“He’s clever and he’s got guts,” the barman said. “Bloke is mad as a hatter, but you’ve got to admire the cheek on the bugger.”

We lapsed into silence, he drifted off to fill glasses with gin or stout or beer, exchange cheer, josh a gal or two, and eventually return to my area for a lounge. But I knew the man, like all the men, wanted to talk Jack. I waited for him to think of something to say, and finally he did.

“Quarter-moon’s coming up. He’ll do it again, you watch. He’s got a thirst now, bad, likes the blood, but most of all likes the way the town is all rattled. Him, one lad, bringing five million people to a dead halt. Must be a feeling.”

“I’ll never know,” I said. “I’m too busy adding sums by gaslight to squash a fly.”

“That’s me, too, brother, slinging suds twelve long hours a day,” he said.

“Let me ask you something.”

At this point, another round of professional activity ensued as he tended to his customers, a rowdy lot, and when I caught an eye, I pointed to my empty glass, and he nodded and brought me another, almost black it was, with a cusp of foam like frosting on a Christmas cake. I took a mellow gulp, enjoyed, and then leaned a little closer. “I’m betting a feller like you, works in here, knows a thing or two. Pays attention-like. Hears a lot, forgets nothing.”

“Perhaps it’s so.”

“Yes, well, here’s the point. I’m a married man, see, but I likes the pleasure when it’s safe. I come down here once every two or three months off money I’ve cribbed up the wife don’t see. It don’t harm no one, is how I see it.”

“It sure don’t,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “Now, here’s my little issue. I can’t help think of what happens if I’m with Judy in the alley, all steamed up, boiler set to pop, and Jack comes along and decides to do two tonight instead of one.”

He laughed. That is, larfed. “Old son, Jack’s down on birds. He ain’t picking out men yet, is he now?”

“He ain’t till he is. I’d hate to be first. You don’t stand much chance against a fellow so right with a knife.”

“Not without the Royal Artillery, you don’t.”

“So here’s my play, friend. Worth a shilling. Would you know of a gal who’s got a room? You could visit her there, be all safe and tidy and away from Jack’s ways with the blade. I’d pay the tariff, knowing it’s more than the thruppence standard. The safety would be worth it.”

“Hmm,” he said, scrunching up an eye.

Then business called, and he tended some others, paused for a time to josh two men who looked like barristers slumming, poured three gins for a gal in the trade who wound her way back to a table where she sat with two friends, lit a fellow’s cheroot, then drifted back. The shilling was on the bar, under my hand.

He came close, I released, he snatched and pocketed. “All right, chum, you didn’t hear this from Brian Murphy, now.”

“Got it.”

“Fellow named Joe Barnett, lives with a gal off and on. Now I hear it’s off. She lets her friends double up when it’s cold out and they can’t make doss. He don’t like that, as the room is small. So off he goes, all the girls is talking about the poor thing. She’s a pretty thing, too, though somewhat gone to flab. Says she worked in a high-class house once. She ain’t in here now, but she’s on the streets most nights; believe me, she ain’t at choir practice.”

I laughed.

“Little heavyset, blond, though, like an angel you’d see in some old painting. Rosy-cheeked, bosom all aquiver, you’d enjoy a romp with her. Name’s Mary Jane Kelly, any of the girls knows Mary Jane, they does, and she lives just down the avenue in McCarthy’s Rents.”

“McCarthy’s Rents?”

“Fellow named McCarthy owns it. It’s really called Miller’s Court. Rank little place, one of them hole-in-the-walls, you go in a passageway, it’s all little rooms back there. She’s in thirteen, if I recall.”

“Mary Jane Kelly.”

“She was in earlier tonight. She’s in a lot. Or at the Britannia, drinking it up as fast as she earns it. Got the gin bug bad, poor thing, and when she’s all hooched up, she likes to sing. I cuts her a break now and then, slipping her a free one. But she’d be the one for you, friend.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Jeb’s Memoir

Major Pullham lived in a smart house on Hoxton Square in Hackney, perhaps a mile and a half north of Whitechapel. It was all gentry, the best sort of tidy, prosperous, upper-bourgeois London, the ideal toward which all Englishmen were instructed to strive. His—actually, Lady Meachum’s—house stood on a street of grace in a state of grace, happily a peer of its cohort, stately, refined, well kept, an ample recompense for a dashing cavalryman shot at ten thousand times in his career for the crown. Too bad he wasn’t satisfied with it alone, but then that’s the nature of the beast.

I arrived at eleven P.M. Indeed, the quarter-moon now and then shone through the rushing clouds and a brisk wind sent the branches of the abundant trees clackity-clacking. It was really late autumn, and they had changed color and wore scarlet and russet threaded through their crowns, and the leaves, upon achieving the perfection of dry death, fell in swirls to earth and clotted gutters and lawns. The suggestion of rain was heavy in the air, and I felt it would fall before dawn. I had accordingly worn an ancient, used-to-be-father’s mackintosh over my brown suit, and a plaid scarf around my neck and my crumpled felt hat, pulled low over my ears. I wasn’t going to let rain stand between myself and Jack.

I found Professor Dare exactly where we’d planned, at a bench in Hoxton Square a good hundred meters from the major’s dwelling, but with a plain view of it. The major could not leave without our knowledge, as the back-of-yards formed a nice parkground but held no exit, being buttressed on all sides by houses such as his.

“Is he there?” I asked.

“Indeed. He and Lady Meachum returned at ten from some sort of social gathering. They were all topped up in silks and diamonds, so perhaps it involved the Mayfair set or some other golden collection. The hansom dropped them off, they let the last servant return to quarter, and now they are in the bedroom. Perhaps he’s atop her now, shouting ‘Onward, old girl, let me into the breech!’ and that’s that for the evening.”