The Night of the Ripper

~ ONE ~

On the night of August 5, 1888, Eva Sloane stepped out of the Paragon Music Hall and emerged in Hell.

Hell is murky.

That’s what Shakespeare wrote, long ago, but he might have used the same words to describe London.

Beneath the black pall of smoke shrouding the city the gaslights flared and flamed as the lost souls stumbled down the shadowy streets of Inferno.

Demons dwelt here — drunken navvies reeling into suckcribs, mucksnipes lurking before netherskens, square-rigged swells prowling in search of buors.

Eva wondered what Papa would say if she told him. A respectable country vicar wasn’t likely to know that a “suckcrib” was a beer-shop, that “mucksnipes” were down-and-outers, “netherskens” were cheap lodgings, and “square-rigged” swells seeking “buors” were well-dressed dandies looking for prostitutes.

But after these months in the city she’d learned the language of the streets, and visiting music halls added to her education.

Papa didn’t approve of music halls. For that matter, he didn’t approve of London. And he knew nothing of Hell, though he preached against it every Sunday. How he’d shudder if he could see the reality through her eyes!

Now Eva kept her own gaze discreetly lowered as she hurried along the pavement. Experience had taught her it was best to remain inconspicuous and avoid chance encounters with strangers here. Perhaps she should have hailed a hansom when she left the Paragon but it was too late now and all the cabs were taken. The only sensible thing was to make her way as quickly as possible.

Passing an alleyway she was startled by a sudden burst of sound from a barrel organ, blaring out a tune she’d just heard in the music hall. She remembered the words of the song.

Eva had laughed with the rest of the audience when the song was sung but she found no reason for amusement now. Laughter had little place in the streets of Whitechapel with its teeming tenements, filthy courtyards reeking of sweat and sewage. Instead one heard the endless echo of sobs and curses, the voices the poverty and pain. Not everyone could afford to drown sorrow with a trip to the Waxworks; alcohol was the cheaper solution. Here even infants were put to sleep with a nip of gin.

But not all infants were so fortunate. As Eva moved on, a small figure stepped out of a doorway — a thin-faced, straggly-haired little girl, barefoot and clad in a patched hand-me-down dress. Cradled in her arms was a crying baby.

The girl herself made no sound, and Eva was silent as she reached into her purse and proffered a penny. The child took it and turned away, bearing her squalling burden.

Eva sighed, wondering if she should have spoken, told the youngster she was wise to her dodge — the beggar’s trick of sticking the baby with a pin to make it cry. Like the pet-shop owners here, who used pins to pierce the eyes of canaries on the theory that blind birds make better singers.

“Chamber of ’Orrors”?

This was the real chamber of horrors, for birds and babies and little girls alike. No point in condemning the child; she’d already been condemned at birth to a life sentence of imprisonment in the slums. There was no escape from the tiny overcrowded lodgings where often a family of a half-dozen or more shivered through winters and sweltered through summers in a single squalid room. The girl was born to endure disease and malnutrition, raised in risk of rape by a drunken father or sale to a house of assignation where jaded gentlemen came in search of “unripe fruit.” And if she was somehow spared such a fate, it would be only to join the ranks of the miserable menials who slaved as servants, nursemaids or factory workers, underpaid and underfed, who offered themselves for pennies on the streets. No wonder Mother smiled when she strangled Father!

Eva counted herself fortunate. Though her mother died in childbirth, her father and a maiden aunt saw to it that she had a good country upbringing and decent schooling in Reading. But continuing her education had been her own idea — one which Papa didn’t approve. He held fast to the notion that a woman’s place was in the home, and why would any decent female seek a life in London? Even Victoria preferred the quiet seclusion of Sandringham or faraway Scottish estates. God Save Our Noble Queen—and protect her from the violence of these savage streets!

Now a young man in a deerstalker cap sauntered by, winking at her as he passed. Eva averted her eyes and moved forward before he could speak, but the coincidence startled her. Here she’d been thinking of the Queen and this well-dressed, mustached stranger looked exactly like the pictures she’s seen of Victoria’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence. Prince Eddy, that’s what they called him in the penny press — but what would he be doing here on an East End street at midnight? Still, the resemblance was unnerving.

Eva hastened on and the distant din of the barrel organ was lost in the surging sound of raucous voices as a tipsy troupe of costers in pearl-studded costumes lurched by to her left.

Suddenly another sound rose from the right. The deep growl echoed and Eva turned to confront the shape of nightmare. Something huge and black and menacing towered before her, its red eyes glaring, its cruel claws raised to rake and rend.

The dancing bear reared up on its hind legs, mouth muzzled and neck securely collared and leashed with a stout chain held by a long-haired gypsy carrying a sharp-pointed pole. Now he yanked the beast back, brandishing his weapon. Pawing at the pole in sullen defiance, the beast hunkered down and its master grinned at Eva, his smile serrated by a mouthful of stained and rotting teeth.

Passersby joined in his amusement but she moved on quickly, shaken by the instant intrusion of possible peril.

The black beast was the very symbol of the violence hovering here. Leashed and muzzled, perhaps, but there’d be no restraint once it got free. And what violence hid behind the gypsy’s jagged smile, what anger was buried beneath the drunken oaths and leering laughter of poverty’s prisoners? And was poverty alone to blame? Doesn’t a portion of that rage reside in all of us? Conceal it though we may, the beast is always there, waiting to escape. And once the violence is unleashed, once the lurking lust is loosed—

Eva shook her head, shedding the thought. The bear was an animal, nothing more. And the grimacing roisterers under the gaslight were merely giving vent to their animal spirits, in anticipation of tomorrow’s Bank Holiday.

Still, she was relieved to turn away from the turmoil, heading right into the deserted silence of Brady Street.

The light was dimmer but she welcomed both darkness and solitude. Here, only a stone’s throw from the thronging thoroughfare, was a haven of security, a link to quieter ways of life.

Or was it life?

She glanced to her right, where iron railings loomed before the expanse of a graveyard.

In the gloom she could see the outlines of marble vaults, several with gateways guarded by bars against the intrusion of bodysnatchers who had once prowled these purlieus. Closer by, surfacing in all directions, were the mounds heaped over the remains of the poor and humble. Some boasted headstones or markers, but none had crosses, for this was the Jews’ Cemetery.

There were many Jews in Whitechapel, Eve knew; immigrants from Poland, Russia and the Balkans. The fortunate few owned shops or small businesses, and it was for them that the vaults had been erected to preserve their final resting places. Beneath the massed mounds reposed the bodies of toilers in the sweatshops, the hawkers and street vendors, the porters, dockhands and slaughterhouse workers. Cramped and crowded together in life, their confines were no less narrow in death.

There was a miasma, a haze of fog, shrouding the vaults and hovering over the mounds. Hovering — or rising from them? The aura of death.

Not that she was afraid of death; she was familiar with its presence after all these months of work here and its image held no terrors for her. It was what lay beyond that Eva feared.

Papa preached of Heaven and Hell, but when he stepped down from the pulpit and removed his robes he was only a man. Perhaps he truly believed in the hereafter, but he didn’t know. Only the dead knew what death was like.

Eternal bliss or eternal damnation? Was it merely an endless, dreamless sleep or did awareness remain, trapped within a body rotting in the grave? Could restless spirits wander the earth as phantom presences?

Unscientific, Eva told herself. One must face the unknown, not fear it.

But when she heard the first hint of sound in the distance her pulse and pace quickened, her footsteps echoing in the night.

Echo?

No, it couldn’t be — the tempo was different. Someone else was here, moving in the darkness.

In spite of herself, Eva sought and searched the foggy fastness of the graveyard, knowing as she did so that the effort was absurd. There are no ghosts. And even if there were, phantom footsteps make no sound.

Eva started to glance over her shoulder, then realized the noise was growing louder; now it seemed to come not from behind her but from the street ahead. Suddenly the cobblestones were shaken with a clatter, a clatter that rose to a rumbling roar mingled with a hoarse bellowing.

Looking up toward the intersection before her she saw the source.

Curling around the corner came a plunging mass of monstrous figures, horned and hooved like the hordes of Hell. The bulk of their bodies filled the street as the surging shapes thundered toward her.

For a moment she stood transfixed, then recognized the reality. The creatures were cattle, not demons; cattle stampeding from the pens of the slaughterhouse beyond in Whitechapel Road. Somehow they’d burst their barriers to run rampant, wild-eyed with terror of impending doom.

And it was doom they were bringing now — blanketing the street and the walks on either side as they bore down upon her, braying in mindless panic; heads lowered, curved horns hooking, heavy hooves pounding to crush all that lay in their path.

Eva turned to run but they were already upon her, mouths foaming, red eyes glaring, and there was nowhere to flee, no escape—

Then, out of nowhere, a hand gripped her upper arm, tightened, yanked her back against the iron railing of the graveyard. Legs buckling, she shrank against the bars as the maddened beasts thudded by. Running behind them, a half-dozen drovers cursed and shouted, brandishing whips and staves.

Eva’s gaze blurred momentarily; fighting the weakness invading her, she clung to the rails until the frantic flow vanished and the drumming din died away in the night beyond. Only then was she conscious of escape, and with it came the realization that her arm was no longer being held.

Now she turned to face her rescuer, but too late. As vision cleared she caught only a momentary sidelong glance of the figure disappearing into the fog — the distant figure of a mustached man in dark clothing, wearing a deerstalker cap.