At last they came to a side street on the left, and I saw them put their heads together as they came to a halt, and then she giggled and he guffawed and they turned left.

“All right,” said the professor. “Now it gets dicey. Get that gun out so you don’t have to pull it while he’s cutting off your ears.”

I obeyed, sliding it out by one hand and easing it more or less under my mac, and we nodded, each took a deep breath, and steeled self against the upcoming. The rain was really falling now, cutting horizontally, propelled by angry wind, and a chill lay upon all and every. Perhaps hoarfrost in the morning? Who knew what morning would bring? At that moment, we took the corner hard and stepped into the blackness of an alley and saw in a second the figures of two people, enmeshed.

“Remember to cock the gun,” the professor whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The Diary

November 7, 1888

This was quite new. Before, they were apparitions in the night. I didn’t see their faces clearly until I’d killed them, hardly to their advantage. The slack of death did a great deal to undercut beauty, if any beauty there had been to begin with.

But Mary Jane, in full bloom, was a lively, roundish specimen who generated goodwill and happiness wherever she went. She was a full-bodied thing, just a bit beyond the age at which you could call her a girl, and it was hard not to desire her, with her blond hair and her buxom figure and her happy smile for each and all.

After the barman’s description, I simply observed and was surprised that I hadn’t noticed her before. I didn’t bother asking anyone to point her out, since it was unnecessary. She was clearly visible from the window of the Ten Bells, so I didn’t have to reenter and risk the barman fixing my face in his memory, as I was sure he had not previously. I could see her sitting at a table with a gaggle of “the girls.” For all their forlorn history, they were a gay, larky lot who enjoyed each other’s presence, enjoyed the hospitality that the Ten Bells offered, and most of all enjoyed the glass of gin set before them. Like women of all sorts, from the Hindu Kush to the Amazon and the Danube to the Yellow and the Mississippi to the Colorado, they spoke a private language of gesture and enthusiasm, loved the thrill of gossip and slander, were united in their contempt for the men who had ruined so many of their lives, and brought out absolutely the best in each other. I could tell all that from their animated postures around the table.

She was the lively one. One could hear her laughter through the glass, perhaps even feel it in the reverberations in the air. Her eyes were blue and her skin pink and firm. She seemed far from The Life, as it was called, even if she was famous within The Life. I knew tragedy haunted her, as it did so many of the girls. They all seemed to come from broken homes, were runaways or had been kicked out of hearth and home, some to turn to the streets, some already drawn to the streets. Her current torment came from the abandonment by the man in her life, a fellow named Joe Barnett, whom I watched visit her every evening. He was a shaggy brute by my standards but maybe a good-hearted man in the end, not too judgmental, willing to accept Mary Jane for what and who she was. His visits suggested some possibility of reengagement, as neither could quite let the other go. At the same time, it wasn’t as if she were making amends to Joe, for she still took tups for pay, let others of her trade sleep in her tiny room on cold fall nights, still hit the gin three, four, sometimes five times a day. She couldn’t say no to it, to her eternal damnation. I don’t know if she turned to drink for escape or she escaped to turn to drink, but it was the core of her existence, as I have observed her over the past few days.

The Ten Bells and the Horn of Plenty were her main spots. She’d wander outside and, sooner or later, find her beau for the next hour. Then the happy couple took a turn down Dorset. This was a dark scut of street that ran a few blocks until it came to an end, and its reality was elemental “English poverty,” if such a style were to be named, meaning brick tenements looming inward on each side, undistinguished by any wit or cleverness, just brick boxes laid end on end one after another, under low chimneys that spewed out coke fume, to combine with London fog into a yellow soup that sometimes smeared the streets. The housefronts were identical but for futile attempts at individuality, such as a flower pot here, a flag there, a yellow door, a rug hanging from a window, otherwise just the dullness of warehouses for forgotten people.

Mary Jane would take her beau a bit down Dorset, and thence—you had to know where to look for it, for it was easy to miss—she’d lead him into a passage wide enough for but one person. That was the entryway to Miller’s Court, and it cut between buildings for fifty feet of enclosed brick closeness, where it opened into the space that earned it the comic designation “court”: This was an interruption between the continuity of the buildings that offered yet more frontage for dwellings, apartments, or really rooms, chockablock, two stories in height, tiny in dimension, in which yet more desperate souls could be stockpiled until they died and were buried in nameless paupers’ fields. Someone owned it, someone collected rent, someone profited, but you wouldn’t house pigs in such shabby circumstances.

Mary Jane was in No. 13. I know because entry into the court was by no means guarded, and because so many of the inhabitants were prostitutes, men came and went without notice at all hours of the day, except perhaps those right before dawn, when even the most wicked seem to need their sleep. So I had, more than a few times at odd hours when I had no pressing business, ventured into it, poked about, nodded at the occasional neighbor who paid me no attention. I had my heart’s fill of preparation on this one. It goes to show that in England today, a fellow in a four-in-hand, coat, and bowler can go anywhere and remain unseen, for so universal is the uniform of Victoria’s tight little island that it confers instant invisibility.

Moreover, despite the hue and cry of the newspapers, I noted nothing in the way of Jack the Ripper fear or panic among even the denizens of Whitechapel, to say nothing of the city itself and the larger nation that encompassed it. There were more coppers about, of course, but they were worthless. They had been guided by that General Idiot himself, Warren, who proclaimed that they must be on the lookout for the “suspicious.” In that regard, I saw an amusing scene. Two constables had waylaid a bloke who indeed looked suspicious, as he wore an old shooting coat and a slouch hat; he looked like the very embodiment of seedy danger on the lurk. They had him buttressed against a wall and their billies out for a good cosh if he gave them business. One had already gone to whistle for more Bobbies, and through it all he was yelling, “But I am George Compton Archibald Arthur, Third Baronet of Arthur of Upper Canada and a lieutenant of the Second Life Guards,” while the bigger of the two bruisers was saying, “Sure you are, sir, now you just hold steady while we get to the bottom of all this,” all as I, Jack actually, perambulated by, looking as normal and unsuspicious as Mr. Jackson, traveling representative of Cooke’s Bone, Joint, and Teeth Elixir. That was the point: The beast himself would be unsuspicious, never suspicious.

The lack of general fear had a sound basis in human nature: Each person was secretly wedded to the fantasy of his own immortality and, as consequence, completely given over to the delusion that it couldn’t happen here, it couldn’t happen now, it couldn’t happen to him. I was aware that I was the malevolent god of here, now, you.