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“Who?”
“A Miss Martha Tabram. She was a prostitute who earned a living in the East End.” Thomas watched me carefully before rummaging through the stack of journals, finding the one he’d been reading. “Nathaniel saved several newspaper clippings discussing her death. Apparently she’d been stabbed thirty-nine times with two different knives. One was
thought to be a pocketknife, and the other was described as a dagger. Judging from what we know of the other Ripper killings, it was probably a long, thin surgical knife.”
I turned the information over in my mind. The urge to scream was still present, but the need decreased as I shifted into mystery solving. “Did Uncle attend the murder site?”
“No.” Thomas shook his head. “A Dr. Killeen was called to inspect her body at the scene, and another coroner is quoted in a second article. I’m not sure why Dr. Wadsworth wasn’t consulted.”
“Probably because Scotland Yard had no need of his expertise yet.” I stared at the headline. My uncle was a brilliant professor of forensic medicine and often assisted on a case when invited, but he was not an official member of Scotland Yard. “As you’re well aware, prior to Jack the Ripper, a repeat murderer was practically unheard of. I imagine they used whichever coroner was available and didn’t give it a second thought.”
Neither one of us mentioned a more glaring reason why they hadn’t called in an expert: our society was unkind to women. Especially those who were forced to survive any way they could. Sure, the papers would claim they’d exhausted all possible inquiries, but it was another filthy lie told to enhance their tale. To sell their papers. To make them sleep better at night.
I inhaled deeply, channeling my returning rage into something usable. Anger wouldn’t resolve problems, but action would. I inspected the first article with a cool head.
THE HORRIBLE AND MYSTERIOUS MURDER AT GEORGE’S YARD, WHITECHAPEL ROAD.
“‘The August Bank Holiday murder took place in George Yard Buildings.’” I read the first few lines of the article aloud. “Her body was discovered in the morning of the seventh of August.” My blood chilled. “That’s nearly three weeks prior to Miss Mary Nichols.”
The first—supposed—victim of Jack the Ripper.
“What’s interesting,” Thomas said, grabbing another journal from the pile, “is Miss Emma Elizabeth Smith was also murdered during a bank holiday.”
I closed my eyes, recalling all too clearly that she’d died on the fourth of April. My mother’s birthday. Another fact from her case rose to the surface of my mind. “She lived on George Street. This murder took place in George Yard. It might mean something to the killer.”
Thomas seemed intrigued by this new thread. He got off the bed and sat at a small writing desk, jotting notes down. While he lost himself with that task, I turned my attention back to the newspaper clippings regarding Miss Martha Tabram’s death. My brother didn’t claim her murder in his journal—at least he hadn’t done so in this volume—but his interest was no coincidence.
The East London Advertiser proclaimed:
The circumstances of this awful tragedy are not only surrounded with the deepest mystery, but there is also a feeling of insecurity to think that in a great city like London, the streets of which are continually patrolled by police, a woman could be foully and horribly killed almost next to the citizens peacefully sleeping in their beds, without a trace or clue being left of the villain who did the deed. There appears to be not the slightest trace of the murderer, and no clue has at present been found.
I rubbed my temples. I hadn’t heard of this murder, though if I recalled correctly, the first part of August had been unusual in my home. My brother was preoccupied with his law studies, and my father was in one of his especially gruff moods. I’d attributed Nathaniel’s absences to Father’s growing agitation and had thought my father was upset by the approach of my seventeenth birthday. Every morning, he’d taken the newspapers and had them burned before I could read them.
Now I knew why. It wasn’t madness, but fear. I turned the next page of the journal and silently read a quote clipped from an article.
“The man must have been a perfect savage to inflict such a number of wounds on a defenseless woman in such a way.” This from a George Collier, deputy coroner for the district.
Hastily scratched below, in Nathaniel’s frantic hand, was a passage from our favorite gothic novel, Frankenstein.
… if our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us. We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but mutability!
I’d read the book so many times during chilly October evenings that it took only a few moments to place the scene. Dr. Victor Frankenstein had traveled to a land of snow and ice to confront his monster. Before his meeting with the creature he so despised, he’d hinted that nature could heal a man’s soul. Did my brother fancy himself as Dr. Victor Frankenstein?
I’d always thought he’d considered himself the monster based on previous passages he’d underlined months ago. How well could I claim to know him, though? How well did any of us truly know one another? Secrets were more precious than any diamond or currency. And my brother had been rich with them.
I found a nib of ink and began scribbling my own furious notes on a blank page, adding dates and theories that seemed as unhinged and untamed as Frankenstein’s monster. Perhaps I was becoming my own mad, feral creature.
Movement caught my attention a second before Thomas knelt in front of me, his expression uncharacteristically kind. For a fleeting moment, I wondered how I looked through his eyes. Did I seem as wild as I felt? My heart thumped as quickly as a rabbit’s, but my instincts weren’t to flee; I wished to draw blood. Thomas touched my brow, then traced his finger across my hairline, soothing a knot I hadn’t realized was forming. I relaxed at his touch. Marginally.
“You’ve got a certain aura of murder that’s—quite honestly—a strange mixture of alluring and troubling. Even for me. What is it?” he asked. I turned the journal around, pointing out the Frankenstein passage. He read it, then searched my face. “I remember your brother was intrigued with Galvani’s experiments with electricity and dead frogs, and Shelley. But that isn’t what’s bothering you.”
“In one article the wounds described on Martha’s body were focused around her throat and lower abdomen.”
Thomas’s gaze moved back over the Frankenstein passage, his own brow creasing at my seemingly abrupt change in subject. “Emma’s wounds were thought to be too different from the five murders that took place in Whitechapel,” I said, growing more confident as I spoke. “Her attacker neither went for her throat nor stabbed her.”
Thomas swallowed hard, no doubt remembering with vivid detail the atrocities that had been done to her. “No, she’d been brutalized in other horrific ways.”
“Indeed.” Someone had ruptured her peritoneum by inserting a foreign object into her body. We’d never been sure if it was machinery or something else that had done the damage. Gears were found at the scene, something we later realized were part of my brother’s plan to pass electricity into dead tissues. “Nathaniel speaks of Jekyll and Hyde in his letter,” I continued, “but this passage points back to his preoccupation with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.”
