Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

The Ripper Prince by James Powell

In this Ganelon adventure, one of the most persistent rumors surrounding Jack the Ripper is addressed: that he was really a member of Britain’s royal family. “The member of the royal family who is sometimes mentioned as a Jack the Ripper suspect was the Duke of Clarence,” Mr. Powell says. But in this story it’s Queen Victoria’s son Bertie.

In April of 1899 Ambrose Ganelon II, dressed for travel and carrying a suitcase, entered the second-floor library at 18 bis rue Blondin to say goodbye to Signor Vitelli, his houseguest, who sat working at the long table strewn with photographs.

Several years before, traveling through Europe in disguise with a horse and caravan, Ganelon had taken these pictures of the Continent’s greatest criminals, men possessing such well-developed bumps of vanity that the appearance of a photographer’s wagon brought them flocking in their finest gold chains and finger rings to stare defiantly at the photographer’s birdie as if it were honest society itself. Ganelon’s apparatus of lens and mirrors took a full-faced portrait and a left profile, photographs that would later serve Europe’s prefectures of police well.

Vitelli was a physiognomist and a student of Giovanni Della Porta, whose celebrated Fisonomia dell’Huomo published in Venice in 1668 compared men’s faces to those of beasts. He had come to examine these photographs because he believed the criminal’s features, above all, are closest to the animal and that therefore physiognomy was a worthwhile study for the policeman. Vitelli’s ideas had led to some lively dinner conversations.

Ganelon’s guest held up the photograph of Tibor Nachtigal, the Austrian slow poisoner, a man with a large brow, small eyes, and a hard, compressed mouth set in a heavy jaw. “This gentleman eluded me for some time,” said the physiognomist. “But I have him at last. He is the urus, a kind of wild European bull now quite extinct.”

“But of course, Vitelli,” said Ganelon, impressed by the comparison. He added, “And so is Nachtigal. Extinct, I mean.” He made a single chopping motion with the edge of his hand. “He was executed in Prague two years ago.”

Bidding Vitelli farewell, the detective turned to leave when the telephone rang on the wall by the door. Ganelon unhooked the earpiece and spoke into the cone of the receiver. He did not recognize the voice, but the words he heard were very familiar. He hung up before the end and went back out into the hallway, shaking his head. He remembered the first of these annoying telephone calls. A voice had asked, “Sir, is your grandfather clock running?” Now it so happened that Ganelon had just had the large clock that stood guard in the third-floor living quarters hallway sent out for repairs. Thinking the clockmaker had asked an assistant to call to see if the clock was operating correctly, Ganelon had answered, “Yes, it is.”

“Then shouldn’t you go catch it?” asked the now laughing voice, and the line went dead.

At the time, Ganelon remembered smiling to himself at the image of the streets of San Sebastiano filled with grandfather clocks at a running waddle with their owners chasing after them. But several times since then other voices had telephoned to inquire about his grandfather clock. Now he was no longer amused.

Remarking to himself that the history of science and invention was a necklace with many a prank in it, Ganelon hurried off to the railway station.

An envelope with an English stamp had come in the morning mail. Inside, Ganelon found a silver sixpence bearing the likeness of the young Queen Victoria. The back had been ground smooth and then inscribed with the initials “AG” in a light cursive of molten silver. The coin was a love token. Every country fair had someone who could make you one and pierce it so it could be worn on a chain. Fifteen years before, Ganelon had placed the mate to this love token marked with the initials “VR” around his dead father’s neck just before the coffin lid was closed over him. (Ganelon’s mother, with the charity that had characterized her life, only commented that she was queen of the kitchen and empress of 18 bis and that was enough for her.)

Ganelon immediately telephoned the railway station for a schedule of trains to Paris and on to Calais. For he had promised his father that should he ever receive a similar love token in the mail he would proceed at once to London and put himself completely at the service of the sender.

The railroad people informed him that a “Special” stood waiting for him on the tracks at that very moment. So Ganelon made the trip to Calais in splendid isolation, arriving just in time to board the night ferry. The next morning he was met at the gangplank by Captain Ernest Childers, one of Queen Victoria’s equerries, who escorted him to the railway station and another “Special” for London.

Ganelon judged Childers to be in his late thirties although his round boyish face and fair hair and moustache gave him the appearance of being younger. While the countryside slid by, the detective and his traveling companion ate a substantial English breakfast. During the meal Ganelon had the peculiar impression that the equerry was quietly sizing him up like a hangman measuring his next customer.

Afterwards, Childers pushed his chair back, took a small bulldog pipe from his pocket, and filled it with tobacco.

“Did you enjoy your service in South Africa?” asked Ganelon.

“Indeed so,” came the reply. “All this talk of war is foolishness. The Boers are farmers, not soldiers.” Here he stopped and gave Ganelon a quizzical look. When the detective nodded at the pipe, the kind preferred by the Boer settlers, Childers’s face brightened with understanding.

Ganelon smiled to himself, amused by the connection between war and tobacco. The Napoleonic wars had knocked out the snuff box and replaced it with the short cigar. The British had learned about the cigarette from the Russians during the Crimean War. And now the British were taking up the Boers’ bulldog pipe. Ganelon was not as sanguine about the South African situation as Childers.

“Do you miss active duty?” asked the detective.

The Englishman thought for a moment. “I’m not quite sure,” he said. “My father served as equerry before me. He was a personal friend of Prince Albert, the queen’s late consort. But he came to the post with many accomplishments behind him while I still dream of new worlds to conquer.” For a moment Childers’s face took on a faraway look.

Then the train passed a small station and Childers gave the platform his careful attention. And the next station. And the next. At last Ganelon had to ask the man what he was looking at. “The signboards which advertise various products,” said Childers. “I think they have great potential. In a business sense. One day I would like to form a company which would offer its clients signboards presented with more dash and imagination than Keen and Colman.”

When Childers spoke of worlds to conquer, Ganelon had thought he meant Samarkand or deepest Africa. But he had to admit that the mustard rivals’ ubiquitous signs were pedestrian, the first with its name in yellow letters on a black background, the second black on yellow. “Well, if you do,” said Ganelon, “I hope you don’t have both these companies as your clients.”

When Childers asked why not, Ganelon gave his long smile and replied, “Scripture forbids it. No man can serve two mustards.”

Childers led Ganelon deep into Buckingham Palace until they reached a gilded room with an elaborately coffered ceiling and a pleasant bay of windows. His guide told him that it had once been the queen’s sitting room. As a boy he’d come there with his father and had been fascinated by a birdcage topped by a fishbowl that stood on a piano there. But now the room was used for receiving guests privately.

In a moment Queen Victoria entered the room looking as sturdy as a small turnip in spite of her age. Her widow’s black stood in contrast to her gilded surroundings. In Ganelon’s talks with Vitelli over dinner, the Italian had mentioned John Varley’s book Zodiacal Physiognomy, where it was maintained that people resemble in some fashion the sign under which they are born. Ganelon was far from sure what that meant. Cancer the crab would be easy enough. And he could imagine a Libra being a person with eyebrows that went up and down like a balance. But Ganelon had looked up Victoria’s sign. She was a Gemini, the Twins. And how could one person be two? Unless her widow’s weeds and the quiet sadness in her face represented her other half, her lost Prince Albert.

Childers presented Ganelon to the queen and left the room. Victoria said, “You were kind to come on such short notice, Mr. Ganelon.” Then she held out her hand. “Before we begin, the item I sent you, I wish to have it back. It is a memento of a very happy incident of my youth long before I met my beloved husband Albert.”

Ganelon set the love token in her palm. Her hand closed over it and disappeared into her small black reticule.

“Mr. Ganelon,” she repeated, leaving him with the distinct impression she liked to say the name, “did your father ever explain the circumstances which led to our exchange of — items?”

“He did not, ma’am,” said the detective.

“Then let me say that in the second month of my reign, some sixty years ago, your father’s archrival, Dr. Ludwig Fong, in one of his schemes to rule the world, had me kidnapped and replaced me with a look-alike, his niece Abigail Fong-Smythe of the English branch of his family. Do you know of them?”

Ganelon indicated he did. The Ganelons kept close watch on all the Fongs. From offices in Paris the Fong-Smythes operated a chain of low newspapers throughout England and Dragon House, a publisher of sensational books.

“I’m told her resemblance to me was extraordinary,” continued the queen. “All I remember is entering a room in the palace to have a burlap bag thrown over my head and a hand clasp my mouth. Then my outer garments were taken and, bound and gagged, I was lowered from a window to a waiting carriage. It was Abigail who walked from that room in my place.

“The crime might have gone undetected. But Lord Melbourne remarked on a certain earthiness in his young queen’s sense of humor and an unfamiliar bray in her laughter. He called in your dear father to investigate. Ambrose discovered what had happened and at great personal risk he rescued me from the slave-pens of Timbuktu where Fong had sent me.” The memory of the place caused the queen to lay the back of her hand across her brow. “Oh, the noise and the heat!” she said. “And how people poked at one through the bars of the cage! But your father saved me and brought me back to England. Abigail and the Fong-Smythes fled to the Continent and I resumed my proper place.”

“A happy conclusion, ma’am.”

Victoria inclined her head in agreement. “But that is not why I asked you here,” she said. After a pause the queen asked, “You remember Jack the Ripper, of course.”

Ganelon started. Who could forget the madman who killed and mutilated eight women in London’s Whitechapel ten years before and escaped the law? “Don’t tell me the killer has resumed his bloody career.”

“Thank heaven, no,” replied the queen. “But did you know that the Ripper’s reign of terror ended just about the time my eldest son Bertie, Albert Edward the Prince of Wales, left on a trip to Paris?”

“I did not, ma’am,” said Ganelon. “A coincidence, I am sure.”

Victoria’s voice turned sharp. “Of course it was a coincidence,” she said. After a moment she continued in a gentler voice, “Even so, it was remarked upon. The gutter press even dared to wonder if Bertie’s return would mean a resumption of the Ripper killings.

“But I’ve only myself to blame for much of what followed. You see, on the eve of his trip I chastised Bertie for his stiff and haughty manner in his dealing with our subjects. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ I told him, ‘loosen up a bit. Bend a little. Smile. Try not to be such a prig.’

“Well, during his stay in Paris my son took his mother’s words to heart. His first day back in London Bertie even took a ride in an open carriage sporting this foolish grin. When the people saw him and began to cheer he stood up, doffed his hat, and blew kisses to them. Several times he ordered the carriage to stop and descended, shaking hands with the crowd and chucking the children under the chin. Was it any surprise that some began to doubt this man was the aloof prince they knew?

“From there it was an easy step to the story that Bertie had committed Jack the Ripper’s heinous murders, been apprehended by the police, and, wearing a black mask to conceal his identity, had been tried by a secret court. Convicted, the story went, he had been confined to an asylum for the criminally insane and some grinning look-alike put in his place.”

The queen’s story left Ganelon speechless.

“Help me, Mr. Ganelon,” continued Victoria. “And quickly. I am an old woman. These rumors could destroy any chance of Bertie succeeding to the throne.”

“Mere rumors, ma’am?” protested Ganelon.

Victoria shook her head. “There is nothing ‘mere’ about them,” she replied. “You will see. Tonight I invite you and Captain Childers to a very special social event where you will learn how very deeply these stories pervade the minds of our common people.”

Ganelon dined with Childers in his quarters. Over preliminary whiskeys and soda the equerry pointed out the signed photograph of Albert the Prince Consort on the mantel, a gift to Childers’ father. It showed the prince in a frock coat with a corsage in his buttonhole, holding a cane in his left hand. “This was my father’s most valued possession,” he said. “When confronted by a social situation where he was unsure how to proceed, my father always asked himself what Prince Albert would have done and he never came out wrong.”

Childers also told Ganelon that the evening’s social event was a costume ball and that they should both consider themselves honored to be invited. “The guests are restricted to members of a certain secret society within the palace,” he explained.

After dinner Ganelon was taken to his own rooms where he found his costume laid out for him. Childers had said it was the queen’s idea that he go dressed as a popular fictional detective of the moment in a tweed suit with Knickerbocker trousers, a deerstalker hat, and an Inverness cape. There was also a calabash pipe whose tobacco so reeked of old Persian slipper that Ganelon chose to carry it unlit, cradled between a thumb and forefinger. Examining himself in the cheval glass, Ganelon had to admit that Childers had taken his measurements well when he sized him up on the train.

When Childers arrived to take him to the ball the equerry’s own costume quite filled the doorframe. The queen had decreed Childers go as a guardsman sentry in a tall bearskin hat. The outfit included a striped sentry box, a thing of wire and canvas supported by a yoke over his shoulders.

The affair took place in the high-ceilinged Green Drawing Room. At one end stood a broad refreshment table decorated with flowers. From behind the curtain at the other the orchestra was tuning its instruments.

In between, a most extraordinary collection of guests awaited the queen’s arrival. Among them were several pearly king costermongers and their wives, two ragged little boys with bootblack boxes on their shoulders, and several women in flower sellers’ shawls with baskets of violet nosegays.

A man Ganelon first took to be a headhunter wearing his terrible shrunken trophies on a chain around his neck turned out to be a Punch and Judy showman decked out with his cast of hand puppets. Another man wore a thick overcoat and a curious stovepipe hat pierced about with as many round holes as a Swiss cheese. The placard on his back announced him to be King of the Black Bug Exterminators Without Harmful Poisons. When he saw Ganelon reading his sign he opened his vast coat and whistled to demonstrate. Immediately young hedgehogs peeped from the holes in the man’s hat and the many pockets in his coat lining. Then his wife used sugar tongs to reward each creature with a black bug from a fine-meshed metal cage she carried over her arm.

On the edge of the crowd an old crossing-sweeper in a broken-brimmed hat was demonstrating his tip-earning broom work by pretending to sweep the flickering light from the chandeliers into the darker corners of the room.

A musical flourish from the orchestra silenced everyone. In a moment Queen Victoria entered. Amidst all the bows and courtesies she motioned Ganelon to her side. “In days of old,” she told him, “rulers like Haroun al-Raschid used to visit Baghdad’s lower town in disguise to discover if the ordinary people considered themselves governed well or ill. But with my face on every coin and postage stamp I can go nowhere anonymously. Instead I send out through the city select members of my household — I call them the Buckingham Palace Irregulars — lords- and ladies-in-waiting and pageboys, all masters of disguise and mimicry, to read the hearts of the ordinary people. Tonight you may ask them what those hearts say.”

Now the queen led Ganelon down the line of guests, introducing him to the costermongers as Lord and Lady This and Lord and Lady That, who greeted the detective with a cheery “Guv” or “Ducky.” The Punch and Judy man, who was the Earl of Something, shot him a wink. The young bootblacks, who were the Honorable Chalk and the Honorable Cheese, tugged their forelocks and looked critically at the shine on Ganelon’s shoes.

Afterwards the queen left Ganelon and took her place in an armchair on a low dais. “I declare this, the Eighteenth Annual Buckingham Palace Irregulars’ Costume Ball, well and truly open,” she said.

The first dance was the traditional quadrille. As Ganelon and his partner, the bug exterminator’s lady, waited for their turn she assured him that, indeed, the people she met as an Irregular believed that Bertie had committed Jack the Ripper’s crimes and was now confined to an insane asylum. She even named the institution of confinement. It was the Criminal Asylum at Norwich, where a whole ward of patients believed themselves to be the Prince of Wales.

When the waltzes began, Ganelon returned the lady to her exterminator husband and spent the next hour talking to any guest who was not at the moment dancing. The woman’s story was confirmed on every side. The crossing-sweeper further informed him that the common people believed another inmate of that ward had been chosen to act as the prince’s double. This impostor was always followed by a carriage of the Black-Maria sort filled with asylum warders with strait-waistcoats over their arms ready to act should the impostor deviate from his instructions or alter the speeches written for him.

The Punch and Judy man, who followed the theatrical news, said that journals like Backstage or Playland were now regularly covering the double’s public appearances with criticisms of his acting and use of makeup.

When Ganelon visited the refreshment table where the two Honorable shoeshine boys were demolishing a chocolate cake, young Chalk even showed Ganelon a Dragon House penny-dreadful entitled The Ripper Prince, whose lurid cover depicted a man wearing the regalia of the Order of the Garter, knife in hand, stalking a woman down a dark street.

Ganelon drew off by himself to a corner to make something of all this. Clearly the Fong-Smythes, operating their gutter-press empire from abroad, had been waiting to revenge themselves on the British royal family. Had Jack the Ripper given them that opportunity? Or had they played a more direct hand? There was talk of the Ripper’s skill with the knife. And wasn’t Rupert Fong-Smythe professor of surgery at the École de Médecine in Paris? Ganelon made a mental note to look into the man’s whereabouts during the Ripper’s heyday.

And here was the paradox. Having failed to palm off their Abigail as a counterfeit Queen Victoria, the Fong-Smythes had set about to convince the English underclass that the real Prince of Wales was an impostor. Over the last ten years they had entangled the popular imagination in their web of lies and insinuations. What could Ganelon do in a mere few days to foil a plot so long in the making?

Then he saw moon-faced Childers standing across the dance floor in his sentry box looking for all the world like the grand-father clock in the third-floor hallway at 18 bis rue Blondin. And suddenly this gave the detective an idea. He went over to Childers and explained what he had learned from the Irregulars.

The man did not seem surprised. “We’ve all heard a few of those stories,” he said with a smile directed, Ganelon was sure, at the credulity of the masses.

Then Ganelon described what the Fong-Smythes had really been up to and the violent social unrest it could provoke when the queen died and a Prince of Wales so many believed to be bogus tried to ascend the throne.

Childers turned pale with alarm and burst out, “But this could mean the end of our beloved monarchy. We have to do something!”

“We will,” Ganelon assured him. “First we will ask the queen to send the Prince of Wales abroad for a bit. Then we must bring this whole Ripper Prince business out into the open.”

Childers shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

Ganelon asked him, “Does this British sense of fair play I’ve heard so much about really exist?” Childers assured him that it did. Ganelon continued, “Then if he is Jack the Ripper or not, doesn’t the Prince of Wales deserve a public trial like any other Englishman?”

Childers knit his brow in incomprehension.

“Here’s our job,” said Ganelon. “We must convince enough people that a great miscarriage of justice has taken place to prompt a parliamentary inquiry.”

“But that could take years,” insisted Childers.

“Not if we use modern technology,” replied Ganelon.

The next day Childers called from the palace and commandeered several public cabinets at Telephone House. The Irregulars were eager to be part of the endeavor. Ganelon coached them about the questions they were to put to the people they called. “First time around you’ll ask if they think we have the Prince of Wales in the Criminal Asylum at Norwich. If they say no, as most probably will, you’ll ask, ‘Are you sure about that?’ and hang up. That’ll give them something to think about. Others may say they don’t know. Then you ask, ‘Well, shouldn’t you find out?’ and hang up. We’ll let them stew in the good old British sense of fair play for a bit. Like Captain Childers here, I’m sure they’ve all heard a rumor or two about the Ripper Prince.

“Then we call them back. This second time around some, if only a few, are going to say, ‘Yes, we do have Prince Albert in the Criminal Asylum at Norwich.’ That’s when you say, ‘Then shouldn’t we let him out?’ That’ll get the groundswell going. And we’ll keep calling until we get solid results.”

The Irregulars broke up into teams and went through the London telephone directory and made trunk calls all around the country. In the course of the first few days they focused these calls considerably. They found it better to call during mealtime when the family was gathered together at table. Also, as the Honorable Chalk (or was it young Cheese?) pointed out, the term the Criminal Asylum at Norwich only confused the people on the other end of the line. Most knew the place better by its initials, the CAN.

By the beginning of the second week, letters to the editor appeared in The Times of London and respectable people were discussing the matter on the street. By the week’s end a motion had been placed before the House of Commons calling for an official inquiry into the rumors that the Prince of Wales had been imprisoned in the Norwich facility without due process.

Within days, a board of inquiry visited Norwich and interviewed those inmates of the ward in question who had been admitted to the facility immediately after the Ripper killings and the supposed secret trial. These they eliminated for a variety of reasons. (One, for example, spoke nothing but Welsh. This combined with the fact that none of the other inmates spoke a word of that language went to the heart of his claim to be the true Prince of Wales.)

The official inquiry made public its report that Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, had never been confined to the Criminal Asylum at Norwich.

A rumor persisted that an inmate who arrived within the proper time frame had escaped not long afterwards, prompting the story that the queen’s people had abducted the Prince of Wales from the hospital to hide him in plain view as his own double, a story so absurd that even Dragon House could make nothing of it in the penny-dreadful line.

When Queen Victoria’s Bertie returned from his trip abroad as his haughty old self, England breathed a sigh of relief and the tales of his being an impostor were forgotten completely. Ganelon returned home to San Sebastiano with the queen’s warmest thanks.

The detective kept up a correspondence with Captain Childers for the next few years. The man’s regiment was soon called back to South Africa by the outbreak of the Boer War. With the close of hostilities, Childers’s dream of new worlds to conquer took him to New York, where the kind of advertising billboard work he was interested in was already a reality. Then he settled in North Carolina and went to work in the publicity department of a large tobacco company about to introduce a new pipe tobacco in a convenient pocket tin. They brought Childers in to come up with an elegant name for the product, something to appeal to the carriage trade. Ganelon was not surprised when Childers chose to call the pipe tobacco “Prince Albert,” in honor of his father’s friend and Queen Victoria’s beloved consort.

A few months later, the detective passed between the twin cigar-store Indians flanking the door to Chez Rick, the American-style tobacco store on the rue de Rigolo, and entered the spittoon-littered premises. Old Vitelli the physiognomist had recently written from Naples asking Ganelon to send him an American Indian peace pipe for his grandson, who was in love with the Wild West.

As Ganelon stood examining the beribboned pipes in the counter display case the telephone on the wall rang. With a smile to his famous customer the proprietor put the receiver to his ear. “Chez Rick,” he said. “Rick speaking.” Then, after a moment, he hung up the receiver and turned his scowling face to Ganelon. “It’s been like this all month,” he said. “Wiseacre children of American tourists, they call up and ask if I’ve got Prince Albert in the can.” The tobacconist gestured to a shelf of dark red tins decorated with a black-and-white photograph of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, a picture the detective remembered having seen before. “When I say, ‘Yes, I have,’ they laugh and say, ‘Then shouldn’t you let him out?’”

Ganelon looked away in embarrassment. Of the many pranks in the necklace of science and invention, this one appeared to be of his own making.

Just then another customer approached the counter. Ganelon recognized him as an American by his celluloid collar and the stylographical pencil in his pocket.

“Do you have Prince Albert in the can?” he asked.

Monsieur Rick gave the man a dark look. Then through clenched teeth he replied, “Yes, we do.”

To Monsieur Rick’s great relief and Ganelon’s, the American said, “Fine. I’ll take one.”

Copyright © 2006 James Powell