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

Chapter 45

It’s a side of you,” said Henry. He was sitting at the little table in Alice’s bedroom, assessing the portrait and eating a scone with blueberry jam that Sally had made from her own recipe. William was expected. They had agreed to meet to discuss how they would proceed with the case, if indeed they would. The idea of more women being killed filled Alice with dread, but how could she, a bedridden invalid, really be of any use in hunting the killer?

“It was the Whistler connection that threw us,” said Alice. “It got us thinking in the wrong direction. You with your ‘ha ha.’”

“It was a normal sort of connection,” said Henry huffily. “I still say Whistler laughs that way.”

“We made too much of the ‘P of W,’” continued Alice. “It could stand for anything.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “The Prince of Wales, for example.”

“Exactly,” said Alice. It was as likely as anything else.

“And it’s not as though Whistler didn’t have other pupils,” noted Henry. “Legros said he had a habit of taking the Slade’s leavings.”

“There you are,” said Alice.

Before they could say more, they heard the downstairs door open and the sound of footsteps coming upstairs. William had arrived.

He strode into the room and over to the bed and then bent down and kissed Alice on the cheek. They had been exaggeratedly affectionate to each other ever since his “mad scene,” as she secretly referred to it to herself. She had always believed she understood him better than anyone, better even than his wife, but his outburst had surprised her, causing her to conclude that she had missed something—or been kept in the dark. The fact discomfited her, but on the surface she behaved as though nothing had happened.

“What do you think?” she asked, motioning to the portrait as he seated himself on the other side of the bed.

He turned to look.

“Do you like it?”

He did not respond. He was studying the painting more closely than would have been expected, his brow furrowed. “What’s that doing there?” He pointed with sudden vehemence to the bonnet in the lower left of the painting.

“It’s my bonnet,” said Alice, peeved by his focus on a minor detail. Although the floor and the bed had been painted in the impressionist style, the bonnet was, like the face, delineated rather clearly. “It’s a joke,” she explained irritably. It did not seem very funny to her now. “I had expected he would paint me with it on, but he said he wanted to see my hair.” She touched the cap on her head, recalling the incident in which he had thrown the cap to the floor and put his hand to her head. “Why do you ask?”

William again did not respond, but his face was deep in concentration and then seemed to shape itself into a grimace. “Your friend Sickert…do you know where he is?”

“He’s off to Cornwall,” said Alice with a certain indifference. “This time I believe he means it.”

“He must be stopped.”

Alice looked at him quizzically.

“We have let a guilty man get away.” William’s voice was high with restrained emotion. “The bonnet”—he pointed to the canvas—“there was a cap on the floor in precisely that spot in Mary Kelly’s bedroom. It struck Abberline and me at the time as an odd sort of thing for a woman of that type to have lying about, but I wouldn’t have noted its position had I not just seen the photograph of the crime scene this morning. And I understand it now. None of the other murders were in a bedroom, with the victim in a nightdress. This was different because it was inspired by someone in particular.” He looked at his sister, who was staring at him uncomprehendingly. “Don’t you see? The killer placed the cap on the floor of Kelly’s room in an effort to re-create the scene in your bedroom. I hadn’t realized until now how similar that room was to yours. And Kelly was your age, considerably younger than the previous Ripper victims.”

“Are you saying that Mary Kelly was killed because of me?” Alice asked. Her face had drained of color, and she was staring fixedly at the picture opposite her bed.

William nodded. “What we find to love or to hate comes to us as a substitute for something else. It wasn’t safe for him to attack you directly, so he found a way to duplicate the scene and put someone else in your place. But his need for substitution has given him away. Sickert must be Jack the Ripper. No one else would know about the bonnet.”

The three siblings were silent, taking in this conclusion.

William rose abruptly, strode across the room, and took the painting from the wall. “I must go immediately to Scotland Yard and present this as evidence,” he said. “We have allowed a murderer to slip through our fingers once; it would be unconscionable if we did so again.”

Before Alice could intervene—for an idea had flashed into her head—he was gone. Henry, however, was still with her, brushing the crumbs from the scone off his lap. She beckoned to him to pull his chair closer to the bed. “There is something I want you to do,” she said, keeping her voice as even as she could. “Now listen carefully.”