What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

Chapter 11

With luncheon concluded, William rose and announced that he was going back to the East End. “Half of problem solving has to do with posing the right questions,” he explained. “The other half with listening to the answers. It’s what I learned teaching undergraduates, which qualifies as a form of detective work, the goal being to figure out how to make mostly uninterested students learn. I hope to bring some of this skill to the interrogation of witnesses. After that, I will proceed to Scotland Yard to examine the letters.” He nodded to Alice, whom he knew was eager for a full report on this aspect of the case.

“Bring them back with you,” she ordered.

“It’s highly unlikely that they’ll allow them to leave headquarters.”

“Try!”

William waved his hand in exasperation. His sister made him feel duty bound to fulfill her requests, even when they were utterly impractical. He didn’t know whether it was respect for her opinion or deep-seated guilt that made him so solicitous of her. Whatever the motives, he knew that, if he could, he would bring the letters back.

As he moved into the foyer, he was surprised to find his brother beside him, buttoning a cashmere topcoat and reaching for a bowler hat and silver-tipped cane.

“I thought I’d come along,” Henry explained casually. “Very important to cover the throat,” he noted, tucking a silk scarf around his neck. “Most vulnerable part of the anatomy.”

William stiffened. Henry, with his Savile Row wardrobe and effete manner, was bound to be out of place among the poor people of Whitechapel. Besides, he didn’t want his little brother tagging at his heels. He had discouraged it when they were boys, and the same reflex made him discourage it now.

“I know what you’re thinking, that I’d be in the way,” said Henry placidly, anticipating William’s protest. “But it’s not as though you’re going off to play ball or something strenuous and manly in that line. I’ve lived in this country for a while, you know. I have a sense of the people.”

“In the East End? Among the squalid tenements and boardinghouses of the poor? Really, Henry, they’re not the sorts with whom you eat your dinners.”

“No, they’re the sorts who serve me my dinners. I have observed them; indeed, I have talked to them. You’d be surprised how even the lower orders hold to ideas that Americans don’t understand.”

“And aren’t you an American?”

“Not really. Not anymore. I have thrown off the yoke of my native country, or if you prefer, I have assumed the yoke of my adopted one. Which is to say, I think I could be useful to you in your present mission.”

William paused, sensing that Henry was not about to give way. “All right, you can come,” he conceded in the manner of the slightly coerced but magnanimous older brother. “Just don’t lord it over these poor people. And keep your sentences short.”

Henry smiled but said nothing. He secretly believed that of the two of them, William was the greater snob. As a professor at Harvard, his brother dealt almost exclusively with intellectuals and scholars, people who lived a relatively comfortable and cloistered life. He, on the other hand, consorted with a far more eclectic mix of people: old-moneyed dowagers; newly minted millionaires; aspiring, often impoverished, artists; not to mention domestics of various sorts who were constantly on hand to carry his bags or serve him his meals. He was convinced he had the broader, more ecumenical view of human nature, despite the fact that William saw himself as the man of the people.

The brothers took a hansom cab to George Yard, where Martha Tabram had been stabbed two dozen times. William had the address of one Rosie Tynan, who had told the police she saw someone she thought was Martha speaking to a gentleman on the evening of the murder. Rosie Tynan’s house was empty, and the neighbors had, like vultures over a corpse, descended to take it apart. The glass in the windows was gone; the steps broken up; the shutters pulled off. William knocked on the house next door, where a disheveled woman, gripping a crying child tightly by the arm, informed him curtly that Rosie had left the area. “Went south ’cause she got sick of it all,” said the woman, motioning with her free hand to the area around her. “Don’t know if it’s better where she is, but it coulden be worse.”

“Did she ever talk to you about seeing Martha Tabram before her death?” asked William.

“Naw,” said the woman. “She hardly knew what she seen, and the police badgered her till she knew less. That’s what they do; they get hold of something they think will make things easy for them, and then they try to make you say what they want. Rosie seen nothing but some woman, who she thought might be Martha, speaking to some gentleman near the corner by the pub. Martha spoke to gentlemen all the time; it was her living.” The child began to cry loudly, and the woman paused to pinch its arm, along which there was already a string of bright purple bruises. “You woulden learn no more from her than you done from me.”

Leaving George Yard, William and Henry walked farther east to the upper end of Whitechapel Road to look for Patrick Mulshaw, who had said he saw someone suspicious near the site of the Polly Nichols’s murder. Mulshaw, however, was gone too, according to a man standing at the corner with a tray, on which were arranged an assortment of tobacco butts. “Who knows where he’s at?” The man shrugged. “Probably went up to Belfast. Pat said there weren no point hangin’ round here; he’d do as well to starve to death with his own people.”

William looked at the informant, whom he realized was in a striking state of emaciation and whose livelihood apparently was made by selling the cigarette butts that he picked up from the street. William put a pound on the tray and hurried off, only to have his brother catch up with him a few minutes later, breathing heavily.

“That was very rude of you!” exclaimed Henry with annoyance.

“Giving the poor man money?”

“Running off and leaving me there to deal with his excess of gratitude. He took hold of my waistcoat and wouldn’t let go. Wanted me to take all his cigarette butts, and I had to assure him that we were Americans and didn’t smoke. Next time you want to be altruistic, please don’t leave me holding the bucket—or, as it were, the butts.”

During the next hour, the brothers wandered through the area, where none of the witnesses associated with the Annie Chapman or Elizabeth Stride murders could be found, though they did unearth a young woman who had gone to dinner with Catherine Eddowes early in the evening of her murder and who said that there had not been any rendezvous arranged for later, as far as she knew. “Katie met her gentlemen where she could, and took care of business on the spot,” the woman asserted. “It wasn’t her way to plan ahead.”

William fleetingly wondered if the failure to plan ahead in such matters was another facet of what the great Darwin would argue served to winnow the species of its less adaptable specimens.

As the brothers moved through the neighborhood, William noted that Henry remained quiet. Not that there was anything for him to say, but since when had that ever stopped him before? Occasionally one of the respondents would address themselves to him, which gave William the annoying suspicion that they thought his brother was the higher-ranking official.

“That’s all the witnesses I have on my list,” he finally concluded somewhat apologetically after they had trudged through the maze of streets for several hours. They had arrived near the spot where Catherine Eddowes had been killed, and William noted that the pail with the placard was still there. He walked over and, once again, dug in his pocket and dropped in a coin.

“Perhaps a little random investigation would be helpful,” suggested Henry, looking around at a group loitering nearby. There were several young women, their blouses all but unbuttoned, and a shifty-eyed youth, who seemed on hand to retrieve the coin just dropped into the pail as soon as the men turned their backs.

William nodded at the suggestion and addressed the motley group. “Do you know the family?” he asked, motioning to the sign over the pail. “Do you know where we can find them?” He had checked the police records and had noted that there was no mention of a family for Catherine Eddowes.

The women with the unbuttoned blouses looked at him blankly, but the shifty-eyed young man stepped forward and responded in an aggressive tone. “What’s it to you?” he asked, spitting a wad of tobacco onto the pavement in front of the brothers and narrowing his shifty eyes.

William was about to turn away in disgust, when Henry addressed the man sharply. “We have reason to want to meet with the family,” he said in a crisp, authoritative tone. “Kindly tell us where we can find them.” As he spoke, he put his hand in his pocket as though suggesting that reimbursement for information would be forthcoming, though the gesture seemed as much threatening as potentially generous.

The young man’s posture straightened. “They’s not here, sir,” he said. “They’s been out of the area since Lord knows when; it’s to gather the coins that the people put that up.” He indicated the sign.

“You, you mean,” said Henry sternly.

“Not me,” said the man defensively. “I sometimes stop by to see what’s been put in, but it weren’t my idea.”

Several older women who had gathered on the steps of the building nearby approached, and the shifty-eyed young man, who must have decided he was out of his depth, sought their assistance. “These gents say as they have matters to discuss with Kate’s family,” he explained to one of the older women.

She had a square red face and a stout build and looked like she could wrestle half a dozen men to the ground if it were required of her. A flowered apron was the only indicator of some link to domesticity. “Katie had no family,” the woman said shortly. “What she had, gone off to Liverpool years ago, poor girl. What would you be snooping here for, anyway? The police are always snooping. Never gettin’ anywhere for it, though.”

“We’re not police,” William reassured her. “We’re Americans.”

Some members of the group nodded, as though they understood these sets to be mutually exclusive. “Maybe you’ll shoot the bastard who did this,” one of the women said. “You Americans at least know how to bring ’em to justice.”

“Bang! Bang! Shoot ’em up,” said a man without teeth, who had appeared out of nowhere. He looked at William, whose disheveled appearance was probably not reassuring, though perhaps he could pass for a cowboy.

Henry moved in to clarify. “We are here in an unofficial capacity to help with this sorry case. We are convinced, you see, that the American point of view may shed light on what may have been overlooked.”

There was more nodding among them. Henry’s courtly manner and clipped enunciation had drawn the respect of the crowd, and William realized that he had been wise, after all, to let his brother accompany him.

“Them Americans are smart,” called out one of the women. “Even the poor ones are rich over there.”

“We’re seeking additional views on what happened,” said William, taking the lead now that Henry had eased the way. “Anyone who might have theories or information that they wouldn’t want to share with the police, we’d be pleased to hear. We promise to keep what we’re told in confidence as far as possible.”

“Maybe Mary Wells’ll talk to ’em,” suggested one of the women. “She knew Polly Nichols.”

“Mary wouldn’t open ’er mouth to the police,” said another woman, “ever since they arrested her Tom for pilferin’.”

“Mary’s Tommy?” said someone else in the group. “Everyone knows ’e got sticky fingers.”

“She don’ deny it, only says ’e didn’t steal that time; they hung it on ’im ’cause he took the horse the week before. ’Er boy may be a thief, she says, but that don’ mean they can say anythin’ stolen, ’e done it. That’s corruption, she says, and it’s worse than stealin’.”

“She has a point,” said William.

“She might speak to you,” said another woman, “seeing as you’re American and she has that daughter in America.”

“Where does her daughter live in America?” asked Henry.

“She’s in some city. Milarky, I think it’s called.”

“Milarky?” asked William.

“She probably means Milwaukee,” said Henry. He then addressed the group. “It’s a fine city in the great state of Minnesota.”

“Wisconsin,” William corrected his brother under his breath.

“Yes,” continued Henry, undeterred, “we’ve spent quite a bit of time in Milwaukee. We might even have met her daughter.”

“In that case, you should talk with Mary for sure. She’ll want to hear any news about Tessie. She’s around the corner, two houses on this side. It’s the one with the yellow curtains. And she’ll be wearing a red apron. She goes in for the colors. What with Tessie gone and Tommy ’n prison, it’s the least she can do to keep ’er spirits up.”