The Map of Time Collection, page 5
After more than an hour of strenuous, exhilarating riding, Andrew realized he still had a whole day to get through before he could return to Marie Kelly’s humble bed, and so he must find some way of distracting himself from the dreadful feeling that would no doubt assail him when he realized that irrespective of circumstances, or probably because of them, the hands of the clock were not turning at their usual speed, but were actually slowing down on purpose. He decided to drop in on his cousin Charles, which he usually did when he wanted him to share in his joy, even though this time Andrew had no intention of telling him anything. Perhaps he was simply curious to see what Charles would look like to his feverish gaze which had the power to enhance everything, to see whether he would also glow like the squirrels in the park.
IV
BREAKFAST HAD BEEN LAID OUT IN THE Winslow dining room for young Charles, who was doubtless still lazing in bed. On a table next to one of the French windows, the servants had set out a dozen covered platters, bread rolls, oranges, jams and marmalades, and jugs brimming with milk. Most of it would be thrown away because, contrary to all appearance, they were not expecting a regiment, only his cousin, who, given his famous lack of appetite in the mornings would almost certainly be content to nibble on a roll, ignoring the extravagant spread displayed in his honor. Andrew was surprised by the sudden concern he felt at such waste, for he had spent years contemplating tables like this, here as well as at his own house, creaking under the weight of food no one would eat. He realized this curious response was the first of many that would result from his forays into Whitechapel, that dung heap inhabited by people capable of killing one another for his cousin’s half-eaten roll. Would his experiences there stir his social conscience in the same way it had his emotions? He was the type of person whose cultivation of his inner life left little time for worrying about the outside world of the street. He was above all devoted to resolving the mystery that was Andrew, to studying his feelings and responses: all his time was taken up in attempting to fine-tune the instrument that was his spirit until he felt satisfied with the sound it produced. There were times, owing to the constantly changing and rather unpredictable nature of his thought patterns, when this task appeared as impossible to him as lining up the goldfish in their bowl, but until he succeeded he sensed it would be impossible for him to worry about what went on in the world, which for him started where his own pleasant, carefully scrutinized private concerns ended. In any case, he thought, it would be interesting to observe in himself how hitherto unknown preoccupations emerged through simple exposure. Who could tell: perhaps his response to these new worries might hold the key to the mystery of who the real Andrew Harrington was.
He took an apple from the fruit bowl and settled into an armchair to wait yet again for his cousin to return to the land of the living. He had rested his muddy boots on a footstool and was munching on his apple, smiling as he remembered Marie Kelly’s kisses and how they had both, gently but completely, made up for all the years starved of affection, when his eye alighted on the newspaper lying on the table. It was the morning edition of The Star, announcing in bold print the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute called Annie Chapman. The news item gave details of the horrific mutilation she had suffered: besides her uterus, which he had already learned about from Marie Kelly, her bladder and vagina had also been removed. Among other things, the newspaper also mentioned a couple of cheap rings missing from one of her fingers. It appeared the police had no real clues as to the murderer’s identity, although after questioning other East End whores, the name of a possible suspect had emerged: a Jewish cobbler nicknamed Leather Apron, who was in the habit of robbing the prostitutes at knifepoint. The article came with a macabre illustration of a policeman dangling a lamp over the bloody corpse of a woman sprawled on the pavement. Andrew shook his head. He had forgotten that his paradise was surrounded by hell itself, and that the woman he loved was an angel trapped in a world full of demons. He closely read the three-page report on the Whitechapel crimes committed to date, feeling worlds away from it all in this luxurious dining room, where man’s capacity for baseness and aberration was kept at bay as surely as the dust tirelessly polished away by servants. He had thought of giving Marie Kelly the money to pay off the gang of blackmailers she thought were responsible for the crimes, but the report did not seem to be pointing in that direction. The precise incisions on the bodies suggested that the killer had surgical knowledge, which implicated the entire medical profession, although the police had not ruled out furriers, cooks, and barbers—anyone, in short, whose job brought them into contact with knives. Queen Victoria’s medium was also reported to have seen the killer’s face in a dream. Andrew sighed. The medium knew more about the killer than he, even though he had bumped into the fellow moments before he committed the crime.
“Since when did you develop an interest in the affairs of Empire, cousin?” asked a beaming Charles behind him. “Ah no, I see you are reading the crime pages.”
“Good morning, Charles,” said Andrew, tossing the paper onto the table as though he had been idly leafing through it.
“The coverage given to the murders of those wretched tarts is incredible,” his cousin remarked, plucking a cluster of shiny grapes from the fruit bowl and sitting in the opposite armchair. “Although I confess to being intrigued by the importance they’re attaching to this sordid affair: they’ve put Scotland Yard’s finest detective Fred Abberline in charge of the investigation. Clearly the Metropolitan Police are out of their depth in a case like this.”
Andrew pretended to agree, nodding abstractedly as he gazed out of the window watching the wind scatter an air-balloon-shaped cloud. He did not want to arouse his cousin’s attention by showing too much interest in the affair, but the truth was he longed to know every detail of the crimes, apparently confined to the area where his beloved lived. How would his cousin react if he told him he had bumped into that brutal murderer in a murky Whitechapel alleyway the night before? The sad fact was that, even so, he was unable to describe the fellow except to say he was enormous and evil smelling.
“In any case, regardless of Scotland Yard’s involvement, for the moment all they have are suspicions, some of them quite preposterous,” his cousin went on, plucking a grape from the bunch and rolling it between his fingers. “Did you know they suspect one of the Red Indians from that Buffalo Bill show we saw last week, and even the actor Richard Mansfield, who is playing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum? I recommend it, by the way: Mansfield’s transformation on stage is truly chilling.”
Andrew promised he would go, tossing the remains of his apple onto the table.
“Anyway,” Charles concluded rather wearily to end the conversation, “the poor wretches in Whitechapel have formed vigilante groups and are patrolling the streets. It seems London’s population is growing so fast the police force can no longer cope. Everybody wants to live in this accursed city. People come here from all over the country in search of a better life, only to end up being exploited in factories, contracting typhus fever or turning to crime in order to pay inflated rent for a cellar or some other airless hole. Actually, I’m amazed there aren’t more murders and robberies, considering how many go unpunished. Mark my word, Andrew, if the criminals became organized, London would be theirs. It’s hardly surprising Queen Victoria fears a popular uprising—a revolution like the one our French neighbors endured, which would end with her and her family’s heads on the block. Her Empire is a hollow façade that needs progressively shoring up to stop it from collapsing. Our cows and sheep graze on Argentinian pastures, our tea is grown in China and India, our gold comes from South Africa and Australia, and the wine we drink is from France and Spain. Tell me, cousin, what, apart from crime, do we actually produce ourselves? If the criminal elements planned a proper rebellion, they could take over the country. Fortunately, evil and common sense rarely go hand in hand.”
Andrew liked listening to Charles ramble in this relaxed way, pretending not to take himself seriously. In reality, he admired his cousin’s contradictory spirit, which reminded him of a house divided into endless chambers all separate from one another, so that what went on in one had no repercussions in the others. This explained why his cousin was able to glimpse amid his luxurious surroundings the most suppurating wounds and forget them a moment later, while he himself found it impossible to copulate successfully, to give a simple example, after a visit to a slaughterhouse or a hospital for the severely wounded. It was as if Andrew had been designed like a seashell; everything disappeared and resonated inside him. That was the basic difference between them: Charles reasoned and he felt.
“The truth is these sordid crimes are turning Whitechapel into a place where you wouldn’t want to spend the night,” Charles declared sententiously, abandoning his nonchalant pose, leaning across the table and staring meaningfully at his cousin. “Especially with a tart.”
Andrew gaped at him, unable to conceal his surprise.
“You know about it?” he asked.
His cousin smiled.
“Servants talk, Andrew. You ought to know by now our most intimate secrets circulate like underground streams beneath the luxurious ground we walk on,” he said, stamping his feet symbolically on the carpet.
Andrew sighed. His cousin had not left the newspaper there by accident. In fact, he had probably not even been asleep. Charles enjoyed this kind of game. Certain his cousin would come, it was easy to imagine him hiding behind one of the many screens partitioning the vast dining room, and waiting patiently for his stunned cousin to fall into the trap he had laid, exactly as had happened.
“I don’t want my father to find out, Charles,” begged Andrew.
“Don’t worry, cousin. I’m aware of the scandal it would cause in the family. But tell me, are you in love with the girl or is this just a passing fancy?”
Andrew remained silent. What could he say?
“You needn’t reply,” his cousin said in a resigned voice. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand either way. I only hope you know what you’re doing.”
ANDREW OF COURSE DID not know what he was doing, but could not stop doing it. Each night, like a moth drawn to the flame, he returned to the miserable room in Miller’s Court, hurling himself into the relentless blaze of Marie Kelly’s passion. They made love all night, driven by a frantic desire, as though they had been poisoned during dinner and did not know how long they had left to live, or as though the world around them were suddenly being decimated by the plague. Soon Andrew understood that if he left enough coins on her bedside table, their passion could continue gently smoldering beyond the dawn. His money preserved their fantasy, and even banished Joe, Marie Kelly’s husband, whom Andrew tried not to think of when, disguised beneath his modest clothes, he strolled with her through the maze of muddy streets in Whitechapel. Those were peaceful, pleasant walks, full of encounters with the girl’s friends and acquaintances, the long-suffering foot soldiers of a war without trenches; a bunch of poor souls, who rose from their beds each morning to face a hostile world, driven on by the sheer animal instinct for survival, and whom a fascinated Andrew gradually found himself admiring, as he would a species of exotic flower alien to his world. He became convinced that life there was more real, simpler, easier to understand than in the luxuriously carpeted mansions where he spent his days.
Occasionally, he had to pull his cap down over his eyes in order not to be recognized by the bands of wealthy young men who laid siege to the neighborhood some nights. They arrived in luxurious carriages mobbing the streets like rude, arrogant conquistadors, in search of some miserable brothel where they could satisfy their basest instincts with impunity, for, according to a rumor Andrew had frequently heard in the West End smoking clubs, the only limits on what could be done with the wretched Whitechapel tarts were money and imagination. Watching these boisterous incursions, Andrew was assailed by a sudden protective instinct, which could only mean he had unconsciously begun to see Whitechapel as a place he should perhaps watch over. However, there was little he could do confronted with those barbarous invasions, besides feeling overwhelmingly sad and helpless, and trying to forget about them in the arms of his beloved, who appeared more beautiful to him by the day, as though beneath his loving caresses she had recovered the innate natural sparkle that life had robbed her of.
But, as everyone knows, no paradise is complete without a serpent, and the sweeter the moments spent with his beloved, the more bitter the taste in Andrew’s mouth when he realized what he had of Marie Kelly was all he could ever have. Because, although it was never enough and each day he yearned for more, this love that could not exist outside of Whitechapel, for all its undeniable intensity, remained rather arbitrary and illusory. And while outside a crazed mob tried to lynch the Jewish cobbler nicknamed Leather Apron, Andrew quenched his anger and fear in Marie Kelly’s body, wondering whether his beloved’s fervor was because she too realized they had embarked upon a reckless love affair and that all they could do was greedily clasp this unexpected rose of happiness, trying their best to ignore the painful thorns. Or was it her way of telling him she was prepared to rescue their apparently doomed love even if it meant altering the very course of the universe itself? And if this was the case, did he possess the same strength, did he have the necessary conviction to embark upon what he already considered a lost battle? However hard he tried, Andrew could not imagine Marie Kelly moving in his world of refined young ladies, whose sole purpose in life was to display their fecundity by filling their houses with children, and to entertain their beloved spouses’ friends with their pianistic accomplishments. Could Marie Kelly succeed in fulfilling this role whilst trying to stay afloat amidst the waves of social rejection that would doubtless attempt to drown her, or would she end up perishing like an exotic bloom removed from its hothouse?
THE NEWSPAPERS’ CONTINUED COVERAGE of the whores’ murders scarcely managed to distract Andrew from the torment of his secret fears. One morning, while breakfasting, he came across a reproduction of a letter the murderer had audaciously sent to the Central News Agency, assuring them they would not catch him easily and promising he would carry on killing, testing out his fine blade on the Whitechapel tarts. Appropriately enough, the letter was written in red ink and signed Jack the Ripper, a name that, however you looked at it, Andrew thought, was far more disturbing and imaginative than the rather dull Whitechapel Murderer by which he had been known up until then. This new name was taken up by all the newspapers, and inevitably conjured up the villain from the penny dreadfuls, Spring Heeled Jack, and his treatment of women. It was rapidly adopted by everyone, as Andrew soon discovered upon hearing it uttered everywhere he went. The words were always spoken with sinister excitement, as though for the sad souls of Whitechapel there were something thrilling and even fashionable about a ruthless murderer stalking the neighborhood with a razor-sharp knife.
Furthermore, as a result of this disturbing missive, Scotland Yard was suddenly deluged with similar correspondence (in which the alleged killer mocked the police, boasted childishly about his crimes, and promised more murders). Andrew got the impression that England was teeming with people desperate to bring excitement into their lives by pretending they were murderers, normal men whose souls were sullied by sadistic impulses and unhealthy desires which fortunately they would never act upon. Besides hampering the police investigation, the letters were also involuntarily transforming the vulgar individual he had bumped into in Hanbury Street into a monstrous creature apparently destined to personify man’s most primitive fears. Perhaps this uncontrolled proliferation of would-be perpetrators of his macabre crimes prompted the real killer to surpass himself. On the night of September 30, in the timber merchants’ at Dutfield Yard, he murdered the Swedish girl Elizabeth Stride—the whore who had originally put Andrew on Marie’s trail during his first visit to the neighborhood—and a few hours later in Mitre Square, Catherine Eddowes, whom he had time to rip open from pubis to sternum, remove her left kidney, and even cut off her nose.
Thus began a cold month of October, in which a veil of gloomy resignation descended upon the inhabitants of Whitechapel, who despite Scotland Yard’s efforts felt more than ever abandoned to their fate. There was a look of helplessness in the whores’ eyes, but also a strange acceptance of their dreadful lot. Life became a long and anxious wait, during which Andrew held Marie Kelly’s trembling body tightly in his arms and whispered to her gently she need not worry, provided she stayed away from the Ripper’s hunting ground, the area of backyards and deserted alleyways where he roamed with his thirsty blade, until the police managed to catch him. But his words did nothing to calm a shaken Marie Kelly, who had even begun sheltering other whores in her tiny room at Miller’s Court to keep them off the unsafe streets. This resulted in her having a fight with her husband Joe, during which he broke a window. The following night, Andrew gave her the money to fix the glass and keep out the piercing cold. However, she simply placed it on her bedside table and lay back dutifully on the bed so that he could take her. Now, though, all she offered him was a body, a dying flame, and that look of grief-stricken despair she could not keep out of her eyes in recent days, a look in which he thought he glimpsed a desperate cry for help, a silent appeal to him to take her away from there before it was too late.
