Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte

6

Saturday is market day in Whitechapel, and despite the rain, the East End of London was jammed with wagons and omnibuses. The crowds in the high street slowed the carriage in which I rode with George Smith. Piles of fruits and vegetables spilled from storefronts in tall buildings with slate roofs and smoking chimneys. Housewives bargained with vendors at stalls that sold toys, carpets, fish, crockery, furniture, hairbrushes, flowers, and all manner of other goods. In the meat market, hundreds of carcasses hung. I smelled cesspools and rotting garbage; I saw itinerant peddlers, legless beggars, organ grinders accompanied by monkeys, and women selling fortunes. This was not the elegant London of the fashionable literary set, but it had a raw, invigorating vitality.

George hadn’t wanted to come. The madman was better left to the police, he’d said. But I’d argued just as strenuously that I would not be able to rest until I’d done all I could to learn more about the madman I still believed was John Slade. In the end George had given in.

Our carriage turned off the high street, and we left the bright market-day bustle. The back streets of Whitechapel were narrow, the gray day darkened by buildings that towered and leaned. The odors strengthened into a powerful stench. This was London at its poorest and most squalid. Dank passages, doorways, and staircases swarmed with children. Women called out windows, speaking in languages I couldn’t identify. Stores displayed sausages and peculiar foodstuffs in windows labeled in Hebrew script. Immigrants from the Continent loitered, smoking pipes by a tavern. They eyed George and me with suspicion as we disembarked from our carriage outside Thrawl Street.

“I don’t like this,” George said.

Thrawl Street was a particularly malodorous, dim alley. Number Eighteen was one in a row of soot-stained tenements. A sign that said Rooms to Let hung by its doorway. A line of people extended along the sidewalk and up the stairs. The people included women with babes in arms, surly youths, and a dark, muscular man in a butcher’s bloodstained apron. When George and I attempted to climb the stairs, the butcher blocked our way.

“You wait your turn.” He spoke with a rough, foreign accent.

“Our turn for what?” George asked.

“To see the murderer’s room.”

A bad feeling crept into my heart. “What murderer?”

“The Pole,” said one of the mothers, a London Cockney holding a little boy. “Josef Typinski. The one what killed those three women. Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson.”

“Stabbed ’em and cut out their innards,” a youth said with relish.

George questioned these folk; I was too upset to speak. We learned that the three victims had been women of the street. They’d been killed in alleys late at night and found there in the morning, lying in pools of blood, their female organs missing. Rumors of a monster on the loose had spread through Whitechapel. A witness-nobody knew who-had seen Josef Typinski near the scene of the latest crime, which had taken place last summer. The woman with the little boy had seen the police drag Typinski out of his lodgings in Number Eighteen.

“He were in handcuffs,” she said. “They threw him in their wagon and took him away.”

“Well,” George said to me, “that explains why he was in the criminal lunatics’ wing in Bedlam. He’s not only a multiple murderer-he must be insane, to do such horrific things.”

“The landlady is giving a look at his room for a penny,” said the youth.

Londoners must be the most avid curiosity seekers in the world, I thought. They flocked to the Great Exhibition, to Bedlam, and to the lodgings of a murderer. “But maybe he didn’t do it,” I protested. “The witness only saw him near the scene. There’s nobody who saw him kill those women, is there?”

Heads shook, but an old man with a cane said, “He must have done it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been arrested.”

His statement was met with general agreement. George said, “Charlotte, we’ve learned enough.”

“No.” Although sickened by what I’d heard, I walked to the end of the line and stood there. “I want to see.”

George sighed in exasperation as he joined me. “You need to consider the possibility that even if this Josef Typinski is your friend John Slade, he’s not the man you knew.”

I wondered if something had happened to Slade, had changed him from a sane man of honor into a crazed murderer. As to what it might be, I couldn’t imagine. I had to know the truth, and Josef Typinski’s lodgings seemed the only source of clues.

We waited an hour, inching up a foul staircase so narrow that people coming down had to squeeze past us. Finally we reached the head of the line, outside a door on the second floor. There the landlady stood, like Cerberus guarding the gates to Hades. Indeed, she resembled a small, fierce bulldog. A neat black frock and white cap gave her a veneer of respectability, which was compromised by the tobacco pipe gripped between her sharp yellow teeth.

“That’ll be a tuppence,” she said. George paid. “You’ve got five minutes.”

We stepped into the room. The landlady hovered inside the door, to make sure we didn’t steal anything. The room was a tiny cell, its window so begrimed that little light came through, furnished with an iron bed and a washbasin on a stand. A travel-worn black valise stood in a corner. I breathed a scent that brought forth a flood of memories.

Scent is a time machine that can instantly transport one to places and people long lost. My surroundings faded. I lay in a forest with Slade, his arms around me, our mouths locked in a kiss. It was Slade’s scent-masculine, faintly salty with sweat, but fresh despite the squalid conditions in which he apparently now lived. The sensations of nostalgia and yearning were so powerful that tears sprang to my eyes.

“There’s not much here.” George Smith’s voice snapped me back to the present.

He was examining clothes strewn upon the unmade bed. I surreptitiously wiped my eyes before I joined him. The clothes were such as a poor European immigrant might own-worn trousers, shirt, undergarments, coat, a pair of socks. I didn’t think Slade would have left his possessions in such disorder. He had once stayed at my home for a while, and he’d been a tidy, self-contained guest.

George opened the valise. “This is empty.”

I eyed the landlady. She must have put all of Slade’s things out, the better for curiosity seekers to gawk at. I wanted to snatch up the shirt, bury my face in it, and inhale the vestiges of Slade’s presence, but I didn’t want to betray my feelings. The washstand held a towel, comb, soap, cup, and shaving brush. I saw a black hair tangled in the comb. My hand made an involuntary movement toward it, but the landlady snapped, “Don’t touch.” I snatched my hand back. She added, “The police took away his razor. They figured he used it on those women.”

I couldn’t control the shudder that passed through me. George said, “Even if he isn’t the killer, let us hope that your friend John Slade is not the same man as Josef Typinski. That he would use an alias is extremely shady.”

However, I could think of a legitimate reason why Slade would pose as an immigrant Pole. Maybe he was on a secret assignment for the Foreign Office, the branch of the British government that employed him. Maybe Slade hadn’t contacted me because he could-n’t risk breaking his disguise. But I couldn’t tell this to George. Not only was I sworn to secrecy; he would never believe me.

“Time’s up,” the landlady said.

“Not yet!” I couldn’t bear to leave without the answers to my questions, and here I felt close to Slade. I cast a frantic gaze around the room and saw, under one leg of the washstand, a folded piece of paper. It must have been put there to prevent the washstand from rocking. I bent and picked up the paper. The landlady was instantly at my side.

“What’s that?” she said.

I unfolded the paper. It was a handbill printed on cheap paper, which read, “The Royal Pavilion Theater Presents Katerina the Great in The Wildwood Affair.” A crude illustration showed a dark-haired woman with haunted eyes.

“Give me that.” The landlady snatched the handbill from me. She laid it on the bed with the clothing, for the next gawkers to view.

George shot me a look that said he knew what I was thinking. “No, Charlotte. I would do just about anything for you, but I am not taking you to see The Wildwood Affair.”

“That’s quite all right,” I said. “You needn’t.”

I had a better idea.