It was brisk out, and I decided to walk. I had not gotten far when I came upon a crippled old gent by the wayside, his mangled leg affecting his whole progress, sending tremors through him, and suddenly he seemed to stumble, and I reached magnanimously to help him. He pivoted not to accept aid but to ram a Webley revolver into my guts.

“Ought to blow a big, bloody hole in you, sir,” he said, “and dance a jig as you empty out.”

It was Lieutenant Colonel H. P. Woodruff (Ret.) (VC, KCB).

III

IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Jeb’s Memoir

“You are dead,” I gasped.

“It’ll take more than a locomotive to kill this old buzzard. I still have a cat’s reflexes. I went flat, and the beast lumbered over me. I crawled to safety.”

“Then, sir, you are Jack the Ripper.”

“I am no more Jack the Ripper than you are Queen Victoria. What madness has Dare infected you with, you bottlehead? Convince me you’re his dupe and not his partner, and maybe I won’t plug you before I plug him.” He rammed the hard barrel of the revolver deeper into my flesh.

My mind, as it so often does when confronted with naked aggression, simply collapsed into shards. I was worthless.

“Bunny brain! Cat ate your tongue, the whole thing? Now, you walk with me over to Russell Square all nice and happy-like, and we’ll sit under a tree and have a little chitchat. Move to get away, and I’ll finish you here.”

The gun—and the limp—disappeared under his cape; he straightened and pushed me gently across the street. I could see the vaulted arches of the elms ahead. We entered the park and found a quiet bench. The cheek on the fellow. He held me at gunpoint in the middle of the most civilized square in the world, and all about me, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of the British empire, wandered to and fro, oblivious to the mortal drama in which we were locked.

We arranged ourselves, though I could make out the shape of the big revolver under his topcoat, easily at hand. He could draw and shoot in a second.

“What is Dare to you?”

“We have been looking into the Ripper. Our investigations have indicated that he is you and that you are mad. You have Annie Chapman’s rings, I saw them in your hand in the opium parlor. You confessed to killing her. ‘The blood,’ you said, ‘her guts were pulled out.’ More, you share a spelling impediment with him in the form of the rogue vowel U you dropped into the Goulston graffito.”

“You are a buffoon,” he said, “a tweedy twit with aspirations of grandeur and the sense of a frog in a hot pan. The rings were brought to me by my betrothed, Emily Standwick, God bless her gentle soul, who was murdered and butchered by Sepoy on the road to Lucknow on the first night of the Great Mutiny of 1857, thirty-one years ago. I have carried them with me ever since, as I have carried the image of what was done to her. Yes, I smoke a pipe, because sometimes the memories are too savage and I long to end them with a large piece of lead from the revolver.”

“A convenient story.”

“Easily verified.”

“Dare is—”

“A madman.”

“Sir, he has a profound moral vision of the world, which he hides behind witty cynicism. But he believes in the possibility of world peace and the equal sharing of material goods. He believes that differences in language keep us apart.”

“I’ve read his book,” he said.

“He believes in universal language, universal culture, no national disciplines, no reason for war or poverty, no hate, no jealousy. It’s utopian, I admit, but it shows a profound moral sense.”

“Ask the girl chained in his cellar how profound his moral sense is.”

I let this ominous declaration hang in the air a bit. No need to prompt him. The pause was theatrical, and when, with his superb sense of timing, he’d milked all the drama out of it, he proceeded. “Allow me to tell you a thing or two about the moral Professor Dare. About five years ago he was done with the theorizing. He decided on an experiment. The idea was to take an unfortunate off the streets who swallowed her H’s, washed when she could, and perhaps even once in a while said yes to a thruppence offered by a fine English gentleman for a lean-to in a dark alley.”

I said nothing.

“So he finds a cockney waif. And he works on her. And I do mean works. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just a few voice lessons. He had to tear her down and build her up again new. It was a battle almost to the death: screams, threats, hysterics, sleepless nights, even those chains in that cellar.”

As he spoke, I could see it. Behind Dare’s languor and sarcasm, a crazed zealot could have existed. The sarcasm, the wit, the grace—maybe that was all camouflage for the elemental Thomas Dare.

“Where is this going?”

“After six months of grinding, he reintroduced her to H. ‘In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen,’ over and over again, night after night, until the poor child was in hysterics. He brought her to the miracle of the vowel A. ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.’ Over, over, over yet again. Mad to begin with, he made her half mad, the poor child, with no defenses, no place to run, no inner strength. And yes, he did it. I must say, near-on destroying her, he beat her until she spoke like a true lady of means. Not only that, cleaned up, put in fashionable gowns, she turned out to be, God in heaven, beautiful. He squired her about town for a bit, showing her off, showing off his triumph. Was he using her for immoral purposes? You’re a man. You tell me.”

I let this sit where it was. I had no comment. It disappointed me how right it felt, as ascribed to Thomas Dare.

“I hope you’re not waiting for the happy ending,” said the colonel.

“Please continue.”

“It seems another man was involved.”

“She met someone?”

“Someone was living with Dare. Nobody got a good look at him, but he was gone every day, then up every night late, writing in his attic room. Anyhow, it seems that even as Dare fell in love with his creation—”

“Pygmalion,” I said.

“This isn’t literature, you bloody fool. This is what’s real and dark in the world. This is what bites. The core of the situation is that Dare’s in love with this girl, but in the end the other man cannot stand what Dare’s doing to her. Maybe she reminded him of someone he knew and loved thirty-one years earlier. So one night, the other man gives her a pile of money and urges her to run away, to get away from Dare because she is too much Dare’s toy; he will crush her to nothingness. Dare wants a statue, not a wife. She knew that, she saw that in him. So just before Dare is about to announce his betrothal to Miss Elizabeth Little, she disappears.”

I tried to justify it. If true, it meant merely that Dare was a bastard, but he had tendencies toward being a bastard anyhow, as that is so often the penalty of greatness. “I’m trying to think how this fits in. It speaks to character, not action.”

“Character is action,” said the colonel.

It was here that it finally occurred to the idiot inside my head to ask about the mysterious “roommate” who seemed to be the servomechanism for all the turmoil.

“I say, even for having spent so much time reading, you are thick,” said the colonel. “I was the other fellow.”

I must have gulped or swallowed or blinked, for I could not have encountered this without an appalled reaction. The colonel, however, kept his disinterested duty face square to me, betraying nothing.