Page 140 of When We Touch

His victim was different as well in that she was young, and pretty. Once.

But not when the killer finished with her.

He attacked her in her room, in Miller’s Court. She was very late with her rent money, and hadn’t had the money to repair a broken glass pane in her window. That was how those who discovered her body came in the next day.

Mary Kelly. Twenty-five years old, not yet worn down by the life she had come to lead. Not being on the street, the killer had taken his time, and his frenzy had seemed to know no bounds.

It was in the afternoon, two days after the killing had taken place, that Merry had brought the papers back to the cottage. She had been deeply disturbed to do so, but there was no way out of the fact that it was deeply disturbing.

Maggie couldn’t help but wonder if she hadn’t known the killer. Jamie had talked to her about his conversation with Abberline. People wanted to make something different of the killer. They wanted a conspiracy, a political movement; indeed, they even wanted to be able to say that the killings had been committed by a demented person among “the highest of the high.” No one wanted to accept the fact that the killer could be a simple criminal, a man capable, at times, of appearing completely normal when he walked on the streets.

Arianna, Justin, Cecilia, and even Mireau were back in the city, and she sat up late that night, chilled, tending the fire. The baby was peacefully sleeping, as were her “aunties.”

Maggie wrapped her shawl tightly around her shoulders, musing over the state of her life. The murder of Mary Kelly had made her feel that, whatever her worry about her life, and with the scandal that always seemed to surround her, with her love for Jamie, and his true feelings for her, she was blessed. She had never had to live in the East End. She had never known that kind of desperation.

She had learned a taste of fear.

And it appalled her to think of what the women had gone through in the hands of the man becoming known to history as Jack the Ripper.

It was as she sat there thus that she heard the snap of a twig outside the window.

* * *

London was in a frenzy such as it had never seen before.

The last murder was bringing about a state near chaos. People protested the police action in the streets. They shouted accusations.

Everything had been tried.

A fiasco with bloodhounds.

Handwriting experts.

Dreams.

Psychics.

Mesmerists, spiritualists.

The police were bombarded with those who had dreamed of the Ripper, with those who had seen him when they were hypnotized. A woman claimed that the ghosts of the victims came to her each night, and that if she was to stand on a certain street on a certain date, the Ripper would appear.

Jamie decided his best assistance to the police and the situation would be to follow up some of the more bizarre leads given to the police. Someone was certain, having seen some of his work and his strange behavior at times, that the artist Walter Sickert could just be the murderer. But friends stated that he had been in France at the time of several of the murders, and so Jamie had taken a ferry across the English Channel. He had found not just a few, but several people who swore that yes, Sickert had been there, and so, it seemed that he might be eliminated.

Two foreign men, both totally erratic in their behavior, threatening people with knives, getting into brawls, and making other certain statements, were taken into custody and jailed. The police became convinced that one of the them was the murderer—only to find out that he had been in jail already on the night of the double event.

And so it went. There were whispers among those who believed in a royal conspiracy—that since Eddy had been proved to be in Scotland on certain dates, Sir William Gull, the steadfast physician, had done the killing for him.

One had only to look at Sir William and know that the man had been incapable of the killings and the mutilations in the amount of time in which they had occurred. He could scarcely move on one side of his body.

Jamie was also convinced that fine carriages were noted in the East End. He watched for them constantly himself.

And, of course, he was left to wonder if he’d nearly had the murderer in his grasp, only for the man to escape. It was a bitter question, and a frightening one.

He spoke again with Abberline the day after the discovery of Mary Kelly’s body.

“What now?” Abberline asked woefully. “Such a terrible blood bath, good God, man! If I live to be one hundred, I will never forget what I saw in that room. So, where does a man go from there? Would a man’s sanity snap entirely?”

“I wish I could say,” Jamie told him.