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I can read my husband well and I know that, underneath the ordinariness of his manner, there is something troubling him. “There has been another murder,” he tells me at last, handing me the newspaper. I read the front page with a feeling of increasing dread.
“We have to tell her,” I say firmly. “I’ll do it now, when I take her tray.” He nods, and with a determination I don’t feel, I fold the newspaper and carry it out of the room.
When I reach her room, she turns to greet me with her striking smile. I place the newspaper on the table between us, smoothing it down flat, so that we can both see the front-page article. Her silver head bends close to my dark one, and we read together in silence. At one point she reaches out her hand for mine. I clasp it, my heart sighing at the delicacy of her old, brittle fingers.
Another murder of the foulest kind was committed in the early hours of yesterday morning. An examination showed the horrible nature of the crime. The unknown woman had been dead some three hours. The body had thirty-nine deep stabs, there being other fearful cuts and gashes. The throat was cut from side to side. The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung was penetrated in two places. The heart was penetrated in one place, and that alone would be sufficient to cause death. The liver was healthy but was penetrated in five places; the spleen was penetrated in two places; and the stomach, which was perfectly healthy, was penetrated in six places. One of the wounds went clean through the breastbone. There were other lacerations of an unmentionable nature. The doctor’s opinion was that the wounds were inflicted by some kind of dagger, and that all of them had been caused during life. Each of the women has been murdered in a similar fashion, and doubt as to the crime being the work of one and the same villain vanishes, particularly when it is remembered that all were carried out within a distance of 300 yards in the Whitechapel district. These facts have led the police to the opinion that only one person, and that a man, committed all of the murders.
When we finish reading, Lucia Jago, Dowager Countess of Athal, turns to look at me with eyes that are still as blue as sunlit cornflowers.
“Eddie is not dead.” My words are a statement, not a question. Flat, devoid of the emotion they deserve.
“I know.” Her next sentence answers the twenty-year-old question my lips have never dared to ask. “I have always known.”
