MS. RIPPER
The Wombed Aeon
A Novel
Gemini Cool
Crabtree Library
For the women of New Orleans, who were made prostitutes by a signature, and the women of Whitechapel, who were made symbols by a knife. Neither consented. Both are still here.
The mind is like a mirror. It gathers dust while it reflects. It needs the gentle breezes of Soul-Wisdom to brush away the dust of our illusions.
— H. P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence, 1889
As the women of New Orleans have thought proper to repeat their insults, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.
— General Order No. 28, Major General Benjamin F. Butler, New Orleans, 15 May 1862
Everybody wanted a man. That is the whole of the matter. The Yard wanted a man, the press wanted a man, the public wanted a man, and God help them, they got one — out of fog and nothing, the way you get anything you want badly enough. I was twelve years old and I said, quite loudly, at a dinner table in Warwickshire, that it was obviously a woman, and I was sent up to bed without pudding. I have been proved right about a great many things. That is the one I mind.
— Aleister Crowley, to a journalist he did not like, CefalΓΉ, 1923
Contents
Prologue
The Abbey of Thelema, CefalΓΉ, Sicily — April 1923
The man who answered the door had painted it himself, and badly, and was proud of it.
“You’re from the paper,” he said. “Come in. Mind the floor, it bites.”
The journalist’s name was Pettifer and he had come a long way to be disappointed. He had expected a sorcerer. He had been promised, by his editor, a sorcerer. What he found was a fat bald Englishman of forty-seven in a stained robe, barefoot, holding a cup of something that smelled of cloves and rot, standing in a whitewashed farmhouse that stank of goats and turpentine, on a cliff above a sea so blue it looked like an accusation.
“You’re Crowley,” Pettifer said.
“I am several things. Today I’m Crowley. Sit.” He kicked a chair toward the table with one yellow foot. “You want to ask me about the orgies. Everyone wants to ask me about the orgies. The orgies are tremendously overrated, chiefly by me, and I’d rather talk about something else.”
“What would you rather talk about?”
Crowley sat down across from him. He had small bright eyes set in a slack face, and when he looked at you directly it was like being read aloud from.
“Jack the Ripper,” he said.
Pettifer took out his notebook, because that was what he was for.
“It’s a woman,” Crowley said. “It was always a woman. I said so in eighteen eighty-eight, at my uncle’s dinner table in Leamington, and I was twelve and I was sent to bed. I said so in nineteen-oh-four, in print, and I was mad. I said so to Scotland Yard in nineteen-nineteen, by letter, and I was not answered, which is a form of being mad that costs the government nothing. So I’ll say it to you, and you’ll print the orgies instead, and in fifty years somebody will dig it out of a cellar and say good heavens, the old fraud was right, and that is the only revenge available to a man like me, so I take it in instalments.”
“A woman,” said Pettifer, writing. “Which woman?”
Crowley drank. He looked out the window at the blue, and for a moment the showman went out of his face entirely, the way a lamp goes out, and underneath there was something much older and much more tired.
“The one everybody had already decided was a fraud,” he said. “That’s the trick of it, you see. That’s the whole trick. If you are a woman, and you are enormous, and you smoke like a chimney, and you tell lies about Tibet, and you are hauled through every newspaper in the Empire as the greatest humbug of the century — then you can walk down Hanbury Street at four in the morning with a knife in your sleeve and three hundred constables looking for a tall man in a cape, and not one of them will see you. They will look through you. Being disbelieved is the finest cloak ever woven. She wove it herself. She wore it for twenty years. And under it—”
He stopped. He set the cup down.
“Under it,” he said, “she was doing the only piece of real magic performed in Europe in the nineteenth century, and she did it for a reason that nobody in England was capable of understanding, because it had nothing to do with England at all. It had to do with a room in New Orleans in eighteen sixty-two, and a piece of paper signed by an American general, and a promise made over a bowl of blood by a woman from Odessa who was thirty-one years old and had just watched an entire city of women be turned into whores by the stroke of a pen.”
“That’s a story,” said Pettifer.
“Everything is a story. The question is who’s paying for it.” Crowley smiled, and it was not pleasant, and it was not entirely unkind either. “Write it down, boy. I’ll give you the whole thing. You won’t print it. But I’ll give it to you anyway, because I am old and vain and I want the satisfaction of having told you so.”
Book One: The Woman Order
Chapter One — Buck’s Row — 31 August 1888, twenty minutes to four
The first thing to understand about Whitechapel at that hour is that it is not empty. People think of it as empty because the people in it did not count, and uncounted people leave no mark on a map. But there were carmen going to the markets, and women going nowhere at all, and a man slaughtering horses behind a wall on Winthrop Street, and the gas going blue and small in the lamps the way it did before dawn, and over all of it the smell: hops from the brewery, hot iron from the railway, the river, and under the river the slow sweet stink of three hundred thousand people living closer together than God intended.
The woman walking up Buck’s Row was called Mary Ann Nichols and she had been turned out of a lodging house on Thrawl Street at half past one for want of fourpence. She had got the fourpence three times that night and drunk it three times. She was forty-three. She had five children she did not see. She had a new black straw bonnet, trimmed with velvet, and she had told the deputy at the lodging house to save her a bed — see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now — and she was proud of it, and that is the detail that survives her, which is a cruel economy but it is the one we have.
She did not see the other woman until the other woman spoke.
“You are cold,” the voice said. It was a woman’s voice, low, foreign, warm as a stove. “Child, you are cold.”
Mary Ann turned. In the dark she saw a shape she took first for a pile of goods and then for a man in a greatcoat and then, as it moved, for what it was: an enormous old woman in a black cloak, her head bare, grey hair escaping in wires, a face like a landscape that had been worked by weather for sixty years and had won.
“I’m all right,” said Mary Ann, because that is what you say.
“No. You are not all right. Nobody here is all right.” The old woman came closer. She was not quick. She was slow, and her slowness was somehow worse, because nothing slow can be fled from without admitting fear. “I have a shilling.”
“Have you.”
“I have four.”
Mary Ann laughed. “And what would you want for four, mother?”
“I want to ask you something,” said the old woman, “and I want you to answer it honestly, which is a thing nobody has asked you to do in a long while, and you will find it costs you more than the rest.”
“Ask, then.”
“Were you ever made a whore by a piece of paper?”
Mary Ann stopped laughing.
“What?”
“A document.” The old woman’s hands had come out of the cloak. They were broad and swollen at the knuckles, a peasant’s hands, a pianist’s hands, hands that had been photographed a thousand times holding cigarettes in rooms full of lords. “An order. Signed, sealed, printed in a newspaper. Not a man who took you, not a hunger that drove you, not a husband who left — a paper, child, that said: from this day, by law, you are what we say you are, and if you spit at a soldier he may use you as he likes, and there is no court on earth that will hear you.”
“No,” said Mary Ann. “Nobody never needed paper for me.”
The old woman nodded slowly, as if this were the answer she had expected and it grieved her.
“No,” she said. “They did not. They needed paper for us. That is the difference between your city and mine. In mine it took a signature. In yours it takes nothing at all. The work is already done here. That is why the door is here.”
“You’re a mad old thing.”
“I am a great many things. Tonight I am sorry.” She put the coins into Mary Ann’s hand and closed the fingers over them, gently, the way you fold a child’s hand around a sweet. “Keep the bonnet on. It is a very fine bonnet.”
Afterwards, the police would establish that Police Constable John Neil walked down Buck’s Row and saw nothing, and that Charles Cross and Robert Paul found the body at a quarter to four, and that Doctor Llewellyn came out in his shirtsleeves and said she had not been dead five minutes. They would establish the wounds. They would establish that the throat was cut twice, left to right, by someone who knew which way to pull.
They would not establish that she was found with her hand closed, and that when the mortuary attendant opened it there were four shillings in it, and that he put them in his own pocket and said nothing, because he had a wife and the dead have no use for silver.
And they would never establish — because no man alive would have believed it, and the one boy who said it aloud was thirteen and was sent to bed — that the person who did it stood for a full minute afterward in the dark with her enormous head bowed and her bloody hands hanging, and said, in Russian, to nobody:
“One. Forgive me. One.”
Chapter Two — 17 Lansdowne Road, Holland Park — the same morning
The house smelled of tobacco, of patchouli, of printers’ ink, and very faintly of cabbage, because the cook was from Lithuania and would not be reasoned with.
In the front room on the first floor, which the household called the Den and which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky called my cage, my throne, my grave, bring me a light, the greatest living fraud in the British Empire sat in an armchair built to her specifications and rolled her eleventh cigarette of the day at ten minutes past eight in the morning.
She was fifty-seven. She weighed what a small horse weighs.
Her legs were a real ruin and a partial performance, and the proportions mattered. The rheumatism was genuine, the swelling was genuine, the stairs were genuinely finished with her. What was not quite genuine was the totality. On a bad day she could not cross the room. On a good day, braced on a stick, in the cold, with the pain running up into the hip like a wire, she could walk for something under half an hour — and would then lie in bed for two days afterwards, sweating, unable to hold a pen, and tell anybody who asked that she had a chill.
That half hour was the most valuable property she owned. She had spent sixteen years making certain that no one in England knew it existed. The invalid chair was wheeled out for visitors. The carriage was taken to the end of the street. Doctors were consulted loudly and ignored. And the world had come to understand that Madame Blavatsky did not go out, which was a fact of enormous convenience and had been arranged at considerable cost.
Around her, the room was a wreck of paper. Galley proofs lay in drifts to the depth of a man’s ankle. The Secret Doctrine was going through the press in two volumes, fifteen hundred pages, and every page of it had been argued over, rewritten, lost, found, and smoked beside.
“You have not slept,” said Mabel Collins from the doorway.
“I never sleep. Sleep is for people with consciences and digestion. I have neither.” Blavatsky did not look up. “Come in and shut the door, you are letting the century in.”
Mabel Collins came in and shut the door.
She was forty-seven and handsome in the sharp-boned way that made men nervous and women curious; a novelist of some real talent and more real sales, the author of The Idyll of the White Lotus and Light on the Path, which half of literary London believed had been dictated to her by a Master in the Himalayas and which had in fact been dictated to her, over four nights, in this room, by the woman in the chair, who had smoked throughout and corrected her spelling.
They had been lovers for two years. Nobody knew. That is not quite true: the servants knew, the way servants know, and Olcott suspected and had decided to be a man of the world about it from a great distance, and the Countess Wachtmeister knew and had never once mentioned it, which was her way of being loyal. But London did not know, and London was the point.
“There has been a murder in Whitechapel,” Mabel said.
“There are nine murders a week in Whitechapel. It is the only industry left there since the docks went bad.”
“Not like this one.”
Blavatsky’s hands stopped moving. Only for a moment — half a second, less — and then the paper went round the tobacco and her thumb sealed it and she put it in her mouth.
“No,” she agreed. “Not like this one.”
“Helena.”
“Light me.”
Mabel struck the match. Blavatsky leaned into it, and in the flare her eyes were small and pale and extremely awake, and Mabel thought, as she had thought perhaps a hundred times in two years: I do not know what you are. I have shared a bed with you and read your handwriting and held your foot when it swelled and I do not know what you are.
“It has begun, then,” Blavatsky said, exhaling.
“What has?”
“Nothing. An old woman’s nonsense. The newspapers will make a carnival of it and in a fortnight they will have found a Jew or a Pole or a mad doctor and hanged him, and the women will go on dying one a week as they always have, and nobody will write a word about those ones, because those ones are not a story.” She tapped ash onto the proofs of volume one. “That is the arithmetic of Whitechapel, Mabel. Five deaths make a legend. Five hundred make a district.”
“Five,” said Mabel. “There has been one.”
The pale eyes came up.
“Has there,” said Blavatsky.
And she smiled at her lover with enormous warmth, and the warmth was entirely genuine, and so was the lie, and in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky these two things had never once got in each other’s way.
Chapter Three — New Orleans — 15 May 1862
Twenty-six years earlier, and four thousand miles west, a city was being taken.
Farragut’s fleet had come up past the forts in April and the city had fallen without a shot fired in it, which was somehow worse than a siege; there was no ruin to point at, no honourable rubble. The men were gone — in Virginia, in Tennessee, in holes in the ground at Shiloh. What was left in New Orleans was women, and the enslaved, and the old, and the Union Army.
Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler, called Beast, called Spoons for what he was said to have taken from the houses he occupied, had a problem. The women of New Orleans would not stop. They crossed the street to avoid his officers. They left streetcars when his soldiers boarded. They wore Confederate colours in their hats and sang at the piano with the windows open when a Federal patrol passed. And one of them — history does not agree on her name, which is itself instructive — emptied a chamber pot from a second-floor balcony onto the head of Admiral Farragut himself.
Butler was a lawyer by trade. He solved it like a lawyer.
The order was printed on the fifteenth of May and pasted on walls all over the city by noon. It was ninety-one words long. The operative clause said that any female who by word, gesture, or movement insulted or showed contempt for an officer or soldier of the United States shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.
It worked perfectly. The insults stopped overnight.
It also meant — and every woman in New Orleans understood this before the paste on the posters was dry — that the status of whore was now, in that city, a thing the state could confer upon any woman it liked, for any reason it liked, by administrative decision. Not an accusation. A classification. Lord Palmerston raised it in the House of Commons. Beauregard read it to his troops to make them angrier. Jefferson Davis declared Butler an outlaw to be hanged on capture.
And a Russian woman of thirty-one, with cropped hair and a man’s coat and a false name on a false passport, stood in front of one of those posters on Chartres Street for a very long time, reading it over and over, as if it were a difficult language.
She had been in America for two years. What she had done there she would later describe in nine mutually incompatible ways, and historians would call her a liar for it, and they would be correct, and it would not matter. She had come down from the north on a riverboat. She had been in Texas. She had, she said, been shot. She had, she said, fought with Garibaldi, and would show you the scar, and the scar was real.
What is certain is this: on the fifteenth of May, 1862, Helena Petrovna von Hahn — not yet Blavatsky to anyone who mattered, not yet anything at all — read General Order No. 28 on a wall in the French Quarter, and did not move for eleven minutes, and then turned and walked north and east, through the Quarter and across Rampart Street into the TremΓ©, to a small yellow house with a fig tree in the yard, where she had been told an old woman could be found.
She had been told wrong, in a way.
The old woman was not in. The young one was.
Chapter Four — The house with the fig tree
Marie Laveau the elder was sixty-one that spring and ill and mostly in her bed and no longer, in any practical sense, running anything. The woman who received visitors in the front room of the house on St. Ann Street was her daughter, also Marie, thirty-five years old, taller than her mother and colder and in several important respects better at it.
She did not get up when the Russian came in.
“You’re the one from the boat,” she said. “The one who’s been asking.”
“I am.”
“Asking the wrong people. Asking loud.”
“I have found that asking loudly produces either an answer or a knife, and both are information.” Blavatsky sat down without being invited, which was a thing she did all her life and which worked perhaps one time in three. This was one of the three. Marie Laveau II watched her do it with the expression of a woman revising an estimate.
“Say what you came to say.”
Blavatsky put the newspaper on the table. The order was reprinted on the second column of the front page.
“Have you read this.”
“Everybody’s read it.”
“Yes. And what will you do?”
Marie laughed — one note, not amused. “Do? There’s eighteen thousand Federal soldiers in this city, and I have a house and a mother in it. What would you have me do, madame?”
“I would have you understand what has happened,” said Blavatsky, “because I do not think anybody here does, and I am a foreigner and I think I am the only person in Louisiana who is standing far enough away to see the shape of it.”
“Then tell me the shape of it.”
And Blavatsky — fat already, not yet enormous; young enough to be beautiful if she had ever consented to be, which she had not; filthy from the road, stinking of tobacco, with a cheap carpet bag and a false name and thirty-one years of a life that had already included a marriage she fled at seventeen, a circus, a shipwreck, and at least one war — leaned forward and put her finger on the newspaper and said the thing that would govern the rest of her life and the deaths of five women in London in the autumn of 1888.
“The world does not make us whores by force,” she said. “That is what we have always believed, and it is a comfort, because force can be resisted. The truth is worse. The world makes us whores by definition. By clerical act. A man sits at a desk in a requisitioned house on St. Charles Avenue, and he writes ninety-one words, and at noon every woman in this city is a prostitute in the eyes of the law, not because of anything she has done but because of what she is and what he has decided that means. And it is not an outrage. It is not a crime. It is an order. It has a number.”
Marie Laveau said nothing.
“And here is the part that matters,” said Blavatsky. “It will be revoked. Butler will be recalled, the war will end, the order will be struck out, and in forty years nobody will remember it. But the principle will not be struck out. The principle has been established. It has been proved, in public, in English, that a woman’s condition is an administrative category, and that it can be assigned. Once a thing has been proved it does not become unproved. It only waits.”
“Waits for what?”
“For somebody to use it properly.”
The younger Marie Laveau got up then. She went to the window and looked out at the fig tree, and at the street, and at a Union corporal going past with his collar open in the heat.
“My mother,” she said, “has spent forty years making this city need her. She does it with hair and gossip and herbs and two or three things I’ll not discuss with a white woman I met this morning. And what it comes to, in the end, is that she can get a girl out of a bad house, or get a man to marry, or get a sentence reduced. One at a time. One, at a time, for forty years.” She turned around. “You’re going to tell me you’ve a better arithmetic.”
“I am going to tell you that I am thirty-one,” said Blavatsky, “and that I have no talent for patience, and that I intend to find the place where the thing is made rather than the place where it lands. Your mother treats the symptom beautifully. I want the organ.”
“And if there isn’t one?”
“Then I shall have wasted a life, which is a common enough way to spend one.”
Marie Laveau II looked at her for a long time.
Then she said: “Sit down properly. I’ll get the bowl.”
Chapter Five — What was promised over the bowl
There are four accounts of what happened in the house on St. Ann Street that night and they do not agree, which is the usual condition of the only things that matter.
Blavatsky’s own account, given once, drunk, in WΓΌrzburg in 1885 to the Countess Wachtmeister, who wrote it down and then burned it and then wrote down what she remembered of what she had burned: I swore an oath with a Creole woman over a bowl of blood and chicory in a city under military occupation, and I have kept it, and it is the only oath I ever kept, and I shall be collecting on it for the rest of my life.
Mabel Collins’s account, given in 1927 to a young man who wanted to write a book and never did: She said there were five debts and the bowl told her where they’d be paid. She said she argued. She said she asked why it had to be London and the woman said because that’s where the paper came from. Not the order — the paper. The idea. She said: the ships sail west, Helena, and everything on them was loaded in England.
Marie Laveau II’s account does not survive, because she never gave one, which tells you which of the two women was the professional.
And the fourth account is the one in the ledger: a brown book, water-damaged, held now in a private collection in Baton Rouge, in which someone has written, in a careful convent hand, under the date 15 May 1862:
H.P.v.H. — Russian — admitted to the Magnolia. Terms: the long road. Debt five. Collection at the discretion of the Chapter, place to be shown. She asks for the organ and not the wound. Told her: the organ is in London and it is not a building, it is a habit. She says she will go and find out what habit. Mother says let her. Mother says she will be forty years at it and come back with nothing or come back with everything and either way we shall have learned something at no cost to ourselves.
Mother says: that one does not know yet that she is grieving. She thinks she is calculating.
Underneath, in a different ink, added much later and in a harder hand:
Mother was right. It was both.
Chapter Six — Leamington Spa, Warwickshire — 2 September 1888
The boy was twelve, nearly thirteen, red-faced, overfed, and under-loved, and his name at that time was Edward Alexander Crowley, which he loathed on the grounds that it did not scan.
His father had died the year before of cancer of the tongue, and this had been the ruin of the boy’s life in a way nobody around him understood: Edward Crowley senior had been a brewer turned Plymouth Brethren preacher, a fanatic, a fool by most measures, and the only adult who had ever treated his son as a creature with a mind. After he died the household passed to the boy’s mother and her brother Tom, who were pious in the other way — the small way, the mean way, the way that counts your sins and not your soul.
His mother had taken to calling him the Beast. She had meant it as a rebuke. She had got it from Revelation. It had not occurred to her, and it had occurred to him almost instantly, that a boy who is called the Beast at eleven by a woman he despises will spend the rest of his life finding ways to agree with her.
At dinner on the second of September his uncle Tom read aloud from the paper about the Whitechapel horror, with relish, pausing for effect, as a treat.
“— the unfortunate woman’s throat having been cut from ear to ear, and further injuries inflicted upon the abdomen of so dreadful a character as to be unfit for publication —”
“Then why are you publishing them,” said the boy.
“Alick.”
“He is. He’s publishing them. Round the table. Unfit for publication and here he is, doing it, with gravy.”
“Alick, you will apologise to your uncle.”
“They’ll never catch him,” Uncle Tom said, “because he’s a maniac, and a maniac has no reason, and where there’s no reason there’s no trail. Mark me. A butcher or a sailor or one of these foreign Jews. A man with blood on him already so nobody notices more.”
The boy — and this is the moment, this is the one he told to Pettifer in Sicily thirty-five years later with the sea going dark outside, this is the only thing he ever boasted of that was actually true — the boy put down his fork and said:
“It’s a woman.”
There was a silence of the particular quality that only Victorian dining rooms could manufacture.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a woman. Obviously. You’ve all decided it’s a man because you’ve decided what a woman is, and she knows you’ve decided, and she’s walking about inside it like a house. Nobody looks at an old woman. Nobody stops an old woman. An old woman can be covered in blood at four in the morning and three men will help her into a cab.” He was speaking quickly now, the way he did when the thing was arriving faster than the words. “And she’d know how to cut, because women know how to cut — fish, fowl, the midwife, the layer-out of the dead. Uncle, who in your acquaintance has seen the most blood in their life? Honestly. Not a soldier. A woman who’s buried children.”
“Edward Alexander Crowley—”
“And the parts taken,” said the boy, who had read the parts in the paper he was not supposed to read, “are the parts a man thinks of as the woman. That’s not rage. That’s an argument. He’s not killing them, he’s quoting something—”
He was sent to bed without pudding.
He lay on his back in the dark in the attic room and listened to the pipes and thought, with the clean fury of a clever child who has been right in front of stupid people, I will be right about this for the rest of my life and nobody will ever give me the pudding.
He was correct.
Chapter Seven — Hanbury Street — 8 September 1888, half past five in the morning
Annie Chapman was forty-seven and dying anyway.
This is not a mitigation. It is a fact that the inquest established and that nobody has ever known what to do with: she had tuberculosis of the lungs and membranes of the brain, and the doctors who opened her said she would have been dead within months. She was five feet tall. She was called Dark Annie. She had been a soldier’s wife; there had been a pension once, and children, and then a daughter died and another was crippled and the drink came in through the hole that left, as it does.
On the night of the seventh she was turned away from Crossingham’s lodging house in Dorset Street for want of eightpence. She said: Don’t let the bed. I shall not be long. She had three brass rings on her finger that a man had sold her, and she believed, or had decided to believe, that they were gold.
At half past five in the morning in the back yard of number 29 Hanbury Street, a house in which seventeen people were sleeping behind thin walls, she sat down on the step because she could not stand up any longer, and a very large old woman sat down beside her, with difficulty, holding the rail.
“My legs,” the old woman said, “are a disgrace.”
Annie Chapman laughed. It hurt her chest and she laughed anyway.
“Mine an’ all.”
“Yours are young.”
“Mine are forty-seven, missus.”
“Then you are a child.” The old woman got her breath. She smelled of tobacco and something sweeter underneath. “Listen to me. I am going to ask you a question, and you must answer honestly.”
“‘S’a shilling for honest.”
“I have four.”
“Four!” Annie turned her head. “What’s the question, then, for four?”
“Did anyone ever write you down?”
“Eh?”
“Put you in a book. A register, a list, a return. Chapman, Annie, of no fixed abode, common prostitute. Did some clerk ever write that, and the writing of it make it so?”
Annie Chapman thought about it, which is more than most people did when Blavatsky asked them things.
“Infirmary,” she said at last. “Workhouse infirmary. They write what you are at the top. An’ then that’s what you are, after, to everyone what reads it. Yes. They done that.”
“Yes,” said the old woman. “They did that.”
“Does it matter?”
“It is the only thing that matters. A man who hurts you is a crime. A man who files you is a government.” The old woman’s hand had gone inside her cloak. “Tell me, child. If you could have the whole machine — not the men, the machine, the desk and the pen and the printed form and the two hundred years of it — if you could have all of that in a room, and a knife, what would you do?”
Annie Chapman, who would be dead in ninety seconds, said: “I’d burn the papers.”
“Yes,” said Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, with great tenderness. “But the papers are not the thing. The papers are only where it is written down. You have to go to where it is thought.”
“Where’s that then?”
“Here,” said the old woman. “I’m sorry, child. It is here.”
Afterwards she laid the three brass rings in a row at the dead woman’s feet, with the pennies from her own pocket, and she arranged them carefully, and the police would spend thirty years arguing about whether this was a ritual or a lunatic’s tidiness or an invention of the first constable on the scene. One of the inquest witnesses said the rings had been wrenched from the fingers. One said they were placed. The coroner, Wynne Baxter, said — and was mocked for it in every paper in London — that the murderer had taken an organ, and that someone had recently offered twenty pounds apiece for such organs to an American medical school, and that this ought to be looked into.
Baxter was wrong about the American and right about everything else, and he never knew it, and he died disappointed.
Chapter Eight — Lansdowne Road — the evening of the eighth
“You went out,” said Mabel.
“I never go out. I am an invalid. It is in all the newspapers.”
“The carriage was gone from one until half past six.”
“The carriage goes where it likes. It is a very independent carriage. It has been reading Mill.”
“Helena.”
Blavatsky put down her pen. Around her the proofs of the Secret Doctrine lay in their drifts; she had been working on the Stanzas of Dzyan, the seven verses she claimed were translated from a palm-leaf manuscript in a Himalayan monastery and which were, as everyone in the room knew and nobody in the room said, verses she had written herself and then antedated by several hundred thousand years, which is a thing one can do if one is brave enough.
“Ask me properly,” she said.
Mabel Collins stood in the middle of the ruined room with her hands at her sides and found that she could not.
This is the thing about love in a house of secrets: it is not that you do not suspect. It is that suspicion has a price list, and you read it, and you decide. Mabel Collins was forty-seven years old, a successful woman in a trade that did not want her, and for two years she had woken in a bed that smelled of patchouli beside the only person who had ever found her interesting all the way down. She had a choice between a question and a life.
“Are you ill?” she said. “That’s all. You’ve been grey for a fortnight.”
Blavatsky’s face did something complicated.
“Yes,” she said. “I am ill. Come here.”
Mabel came. The old woman took her hand in both of hers and held it against the side of her face, which was a thing she did perhaps twice a year and which undid Mabel entirely every time.
“Listen to me,” Blavatsky said. “I am going to finish a piece of work this autumn. When it is finished I will be either a great deal better or dead, and I am not being poetic, I am being actuarial. Until then you must not ask me where the carriage goes. Not because I will lie — I will lie, obviously, I lie the way other people breathe — but because if you ask and I lie, you will have to decide what to do about the lie, and I would rather you were not put to it.”
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Yes. Horrible, isn’t it. Never again.” She let go of the hand. “Now. There is a woman coming to see me on Thursday who hates me more than any living creature hates any other, and I want you in the room, and I want you to say nothing, and I want you to watch her hands.”
“Which woman?”
“Which woman,” said Blavatsky, and laughed her great booming laugh that was too large for the room, “is a question with four answers, and I am afraid all four of them are coming.”
Book Two: The Dry Chapter
Chapter Nine — Four old women in a room in Kensington — 11 February 1888
Seven months before Buck’s Row.
They came on a Thursday in February, in the worst weather of that winter, and Mabel Collins — who had been told to say nothing and watch their hands — understood within ninety seconds that she was watching the oldest war in the world.
The first was Eleanor Sidgwick, who was forty-three and the only one of them Mabel liked on sight: a Balfour by birth, a mathematician, a woman of ferocious and entirely honest intelligence who had spent twenty years trying to find one single genuine instance of the supernatural and had failed, and whose integrity consisted precisely in her willingness to go on failing in public. Three years earlier her Society had sent a young man named Hodgson to India to look into the business of the Coulomb letters, and Hodgson had come back and written a report declaring Helena Petrovna Blavatsky one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history, and that sentence had gone round the world twice and would outlive everyone in the room.
The second was the Baroness von Ehrenfels, who was eighty-one, Austrian, almost entirely deaf, and who had buried three husbands and a revolution.
The third gave her name as Mrs Hollis, which was not her name. She was sixty-four, grey, pleasant, and entirely unmemorable, and she sat nearest the door and said nothing for two hours and missed nothing at all.
And the fourth, who came last and slowest, carried in a chair by two servants because her heart had gone wrong in the autumn and would finish the job inside a fortnight, was Anna Kingsford.
“Helena,” said Anna Kingsford.
“Anna,” said Blavatsky.
They looked at one another the way two people look who were once, very briefly, nearly friends.
Anna Kingsford was forty-two and dying and beautiful in a terrible, lit-from-inside way: a qualified physician — one of the first Englishwomen to take a medical degree, which she had done in Paris because England would not have her, and which she had done as a vegetarian who refused to attend a single vivisection and still came top of her year. She had been President of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society until she and Blavatsky had quarrelled so comprehensively that the Lodge had split in half. She believed in the coming of the feminine. She believed in it with a purity that made Blavatsky look like a bookmaker.
That was the problem. They wanted the same thing. They had looked at the same nineteenth century and seen the same wound. And they had come to conclusions so opposite that there was nothing left between them but the mathematics of annihilation.
“You are going to do something stupid,” said Kingsford.
“I am going to do something large. You have always had difficulty distinguishing.”
“I know what you were promised in America.”
The room went still.
“Do you,” said Blavatsky.
“Delphine wrote to me.” Kingsford’s voice was thin; she had to stop for air every few words, and she went on anyway, which was her entire character in miniature. “In ‘seventy-nine. She was frightened of you. She said you had understood the terms better than her mother had, and that was never supposed to happen, and that you would collect in a city with a river and a fog.”
“Delphine was a gossip and a coward.”
“Delphine was a bookkeeper, which in your trade is the same as a prophet.” Kingsford leaned forward in the carried chair. “Helena. Listen to me as a physician and not as an enemy. The Aeon is coming. On that we agree, you and I, and nobody else in England agrees with either of us. The age of the masculine principle is finishing. It has eaten itself. It will go down in blood and machinery within thirty years and take a generation of boys with it—” (she was right; it took two) “—and something will come after. We agree. We agree. Where we differ is what the thing after should be born from.”
“And you want it born from nothing.”
“I want it born from nothing of this.” Kingsford’s hand came up, trembling, and swept the room, the window, the city beyond. “Not from this. Not from blood, not from sacrifice, not from the old terrible arithmetic of a life laid down to buy a door. That is their mathematics, Helena. The altar, the scapegoat, the lamb, the wound that redeems — that is five thousand years of men killing something to make something. If you build the woman’s age out of that, you have not built the woman’s age. You have built a second men’s age with a woman’s face on it, and it will be worse, because it will believe itself innocent.”
“So you would have it barren.”
“I would have it chaste of their methods. That is not the same word.”
“It is exactly the same word,” said Blavatsky, “and you are a doctor and you know it is, and you have chosen it because it sounds better. You want a conception without a conception. You want the new age to arrive like a letter. And in the meantime, Anna — in the meantime, while we wait for it to be delivered — every single day in this city, women are being ground up by the machine we both agree is going to die. Today. This morning. While we have been having this conversation, in a parish three miles east of this chair, a woman has been written into a register as a thing rather than a person, and that writing will follow her to her grave, and nothing you or I believe will unwrite it.”
“And what do you propose to do about it? Precisely. Say the number out loud in this room.”
Blavatsky said nothing.
Mabel Collins, who had been told to say nothing, found that her hands had gone cold.
“You will not say it,” said Kingsford, “which is an answer. Very well. I shall put my side of it in writing and you may burn it at your leisure; I set it all down last April and the Chapter has it. And I will tell you now what we have decided, because I have a fortnight and I would rather spend none of it being tactful.”
“Decided.”
“The Chapter has voted. We will not denounce you. We have no evidence, and if we had it we should not be believed, and in any case denunciation would make you interesting.” She lifted her hand; the servants came forward and she waved them back. “We will do the other thing. We will make you ridiculous. Completely, finally, internationally ridiculous. The Hodgson Report was the beginning and we have another nine years of it in hand. By the time we are done the name Blavatsky will be a byword for humbug in every drawing room from Boston to Bombay, and no serious person will ever be able to say it without a little smile. That is our sentence. We thought about it a long while.”
And Blavatsky — fifty-six years old, eight hundred pages into the greatest book she would ever write, with a debt in her chest she had carried for twenty-six years and had not yet decided how to pay — began to laugh.
She laughed until she had to hold the arms of the chair. She laughed until the Baroness, who could hear almost nothing, asked loudly what the joke was. She laughed until Mabel was frightened.
“Oh, Anna,” she said at last, wiping her eyes. “Oh, my dear, you poor magnificent idiot. You have just told a woman who may shortly need to walk through the most heavily policed city on earth that you intend to spend the next decade convincing everybody in it that she is a joke.”
Anna Kingsford’s face changed.
It changed slowly, the way a face changes when a very intelligent person understands, all at once and much too late, exactly what they have handed to an enemy.
“No,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Blavatsky. “Genuinely. Thank you. I could not have bought it. I could not have built it. And you have voted for it unanimously, in committee, with minutes.”
Mrs Hollis, by the door, wrote something very small in a very small book.
Anna Kingsford died on the twenty-second of that month. She was forty-two. Her memorandum of April 1887 — eleven pages, on the question of whether a working may be interrupted or must be spoiled — went into the Chapter’s papers, where it sat for nine months, and was read aloud in a drawing room in Kensington on the second of November 1888 by a woman who did not want to read it.
Chapter Ten — What the Dry Chapter was
It had no name on paper and it was not, in the proper sense, an order.
It had begun in the 1840s as a correspondence between four women who could not publish under their own names and had therefore got into the habit of writing to each other instead — a Quaker in Philadelphia, an Austrian baroness, a Scottish geologist’s widow with a telescope, and a Frenchwoman who had survived 1848 by being underestimated. By the 1880s the correspondence had become a network of perhaps two hundred women across six countries, almost all of them over fifty, almost all of them widowed or unmarried, almost all of them in possession of the one thing that Victorian society handed to old women without noticing it had done so: invisibility combined with access.
They sat on charitable boards. They ran subscription libraries. They were on the committees of hospitals and asylums and refuges. They copied the correspondence of great men because great men dictated to women and did not look at them while doing it. They were the ones who had read the Hodgson Report before it was published, who knew which Member of Parliament had which arrangement, who could get a girl into a laundry or out of one.
Of those two hundred, four sat on what the letters called the Thursday Committee and everybody else called nothing at all, because everybody else did not know it was there.
They called themselves nothing. Blavatsky called them the Dry Chapter, and it was a filthy insult and it stuck, even among themselves, as the best insults do.
Their doctrine, in the one document of theirs that survives, runs to a single paragraph:
We hold that the age to come must not be purchased. Every advance made by the sacrifice of a woman is a loan taken against women, and the interest has always been paid by the poorest of us. We hold that the method is the thing and not the aim; that she who kills to liberate has liberated nothing but her own hand; and that it is better the age should come late and clean than early and bought. We are aware that this may mean it does not come in our lifetimes. We are old. We have made our arrangements.
It is, as a moral position, almost unanswerable.
It is also the position of women who were safe. Not one of the four who sat in that room in February had ever been turned out of a lodging house for fourpence. Eleanor Sidgwick was a Balfour; her brother-in-law would be Prime Minister. The Baroness had an estate in Styria. Anna Kingsford was dying in a carried chair with two servants to lift it.
Blavatsky, who had been penniless, shipwrecked, shot at, divorced, and laughed at on three continents, never once failed to notice this, and never once said it, because she understood that it was the strongest card in her hand and that a card said aloud is a card played.
Chapter Eleven — The Golden Dawn, founded that March, and what Mathers thought of all this
In March of 1888, in a rented room, three Freemasons of the Rosicrucian persuasion signed a document founding the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, on the authority of a cipher manuscript found in a bookstall which was certainly a forgery and of a German adept named FrΓ€ulein Sprengel who certainly did not exist.
Within a decade it would include Yeats, Machen, Florence Farr, Maud Gonne, and eventually a young man calling himself Frater Perdurabo who had been christened Edward Alexander Crowley. Within two decades it would tear itself apart in the most entertaining series of lawsuits in the history of English occultism.
In September of 1888 it had eleven members and a profound opinion of itself.
Samuel Liddell Mathers was thirty-four, a translator of genius, a fencer, a crank, and a man who had never in his life been wrong in his own hearing. He had met Blavatsky twice. He had come away both times with the conviction that she was a Russian peasant woman of limited education who had got hold of some genuine material and ruined it with theatre.
“The woman is a conduit,” he said to Westcott, in the room off Great Queen Street, with the Whitechapel papers spread on the table between them because everyone in London had the Whitechapel papers spread on a table that autumn. “Not an adept. A conduit. Something speaks through her and she has no more notion of what it is than a drainpipe has of rain.”
“You think there is something to be read in it at all? Two women dead in a slum. There were nine last year.”
“Not nine like these.” Mathers had marked the two sites on a map with a compass. “Buck’s Row. Hanbury Street. Now — a line is nothing. Any two points make a line; give me any two deaths in London and I will give you a sign of power and a pamphlet to go with it, and so will every fool in Bloomsbury before Christmas. That is not what interests me.”
“Then what does?”
“The interval.” He tapped the dates. “Eight days. Not eight hours, not a month. Somebody is working to a figure. If a third falls, and it falls where I think, then we are not looking at a maniac. We are looking at a working, and it is the largest performed on English soil since Dee, and it is being done by somebody who has not applied to us, which I consider a discourtesy.”
“Could it be the Russian?”
Mathers laughed.
“Blavatsky? My dear fellow. She weighs twenty stone and cannot climb a stair. She has not been east of Regent Street in three years.” He folded the map. “No. It will be a man. A doctor, or an officer. Someone with training and a grievance. It is always a man with training and a grievance.”
He said it without thinking about it at all, in the middle of being brilliant about something else, and then he went to dinner.
Chapter Twelve — Robert Donston Stephenson, who wanted so badly to be guilty
He was forty-seven and he had a wound in his thigh he said he got with Garibaldi, and a medical training he said he had from Paris, and a knowledge of Egyptian ritual he said he had from a Frenchwoman in Pontefract, and the truth was that he had a little of each and a great deal less than he claimed, and he had been drinking since 1869.
In the autumn of 1888 he admitted himself voluntarily to the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road, suffering from neurasthenia, which is what they called it when a man of a certain class came apart. From a bed on the ward he wrote an article for the Pall Mall Gazette, published that December, arguing that the Whitechapel murders were the work of a black magician performing a rite from a French grimoire, that the sites formed a figure on the map, and that the police were looking for a lunatic when they should have been looking for a ritualist.
He was, in every particular that mattered, correct. He went to his grave in 1916 believing nobody had listened. Nobody had.
He had met her in 1884 at a lecture.
“You are the Russian woman,” he had said.
“I am the Russian woman.”
“I have read Isis Unveiled nine times.”
“Then you have read it eight times more than I have, and I wrote it.”
He had laughed. He had a good laugh; it was the last good thing about him. And Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had looked at Robert Donston Stephenson — at the drink in him, at the wound he half-invented, at the vast and hungry vanity that wanted so badly to be the villain of something because being the villain is at least a part — and she had seen exactly what he was, which was a man who would confess.
Not under torture. Not under pressure. Voluntarily, elaborately, in print, in detail, with footnotes, to anybody who would sit still; and who would be disbelieved, every time, by everyone, because the one thing the Victorian mind could not accommodate was a murderer who volunteered.
She cultivated him for four years. She gave him just enough to be dangerous with and never enough to be right about. She let him believe that he had impressed her.
What she sent him, and when, belongs later in this account. It was not in September. In September she still needed what she sent him, and it was still in a hatbox under the window in her own bedroom, where anybody might have found it, and where somebody did.
Chapter Thirteen — 221B Baker Street — the second week of September
“I will not take it,” said Sherlock Holmes.
Inspector Frederick Abberline, who had come up the seventeen steps with his hat in his hand because the matter was beyond pride now, sat down heavily in the basket chair.
“May I ask why not.”
“Because there is no client, there is no fee, and there is no puzzle.” Holmes was at the window with his hands behind his back. He was thirty-four that year, and at the height of it, and had just finished the business of the Sholtos which had cost him more than he admitted. “A puzzle, Abberline, is a locked room, a stopped clock, a single thread of tweed. What you have is an open city. Four hundred thousand people, nine hundred unlit courts, a victim population that nobody counts and nobody misses and nobody can account for the movements of, and a killer who requires no alibi because he requires no identity. There is nothing to deduce. There is only a great deal to search.”
“Then help me search.”
“The Metropolitan Police have thirteen hundred men on it. I have myself and a doctor with a bad leg.”
Watson, from the other chair, said: “The leg is better.”
“The leg is a barometer and we both know it.” Holmes turned round. “I will give you what the newspapers have already given me, free of charge, and you will notice that it is not very much, and that is the point I want you to take away.”
“Give it me anyway.”
Holmes held up a finger.
“One. He has anatomical knowledge — that has been said in every paper in London. What has not been said is that he has it in the dark and at speed, and that is a different and much rarer accomplishment. Your surgeons work in daylight with a lamp and an assistant. Whoever did Hanbury Street worked blind, by touch, in under a quarter of an hour, in a yard where seventeen people were sleeping.”
“Where would a man learn that?”
“A war. A field hospital. A butcher’s yard. A famine.” He paused. “Or a trade in which the work is done quickly and privately in rooms, by women, for women, and is never written down anywhere, because it is a hanging matter.”
Watson looked up sharply. “Holmes.”
“I am aware, Watson, thank you. I said it was a list, not a conclusion.”
“Say it plainly,” said Abberline.
“I am saying that the number of persons in London who have opened a living human abdomen in the dark, in a hurry, and in silence, includes rather more midwives and backstreet abortionists than it does Harley Street men, and that the police have not interviewed one of them, because the police have been looking for a gentleman in a cape since the second of September. I do not say that is your man. I say it is a door you have not opened, and you have opened every other door twice.”
Abberline was writing.
“Two,” said Holmes. “The organs are being taken away and I cannot account for it. They are not being sold — there is no market in this city so discreet that I should not have heard of it inside a week. They are not being eaten; that is a newspaper’s idea of madness, not madness. They are not being studied; a student does not require a second specimen, let alone a third.”
“Then what?”
“Then I do not know,” said Sherlock Holmes, “and I dislike saying so, and I am saying so because the alternative is to invent something that sounds better. The only remaining purpose I can construct for a human organ removed with care, carried away, and not used, is that it is being kept. As a receipt is kept. But I cannot tell you what the debt was, or who holds it, and until I can, every word of this is weather.”
“And the eight days? The papers say he’s a frenzy.”
“The papers say a great many things.” Holmes sat down at last. “Eight days is the one fact in this business I find genuinely interesting, and it is also a sample of two, which is to say no sample at all. If it is eight days again, I shall want to hear from you the same morning. If it is three days, or thirty, then I have no pattern and neither has anybody else, and I shall say so in those words.”
“You think there will be a third.”
“I think it would be remarkable if there were not, and I decline to put a date on it, because a man who guesses a date and happens to be right is afterwards believed about everything else, and that is how investigations go wrong.” He showed them out himself, which he did not often do.
At the door he said, not quite casually: “Abberline. When the third one comes — send for me before you let anybody move the body. Before. Not after. Not when the Commissioner has stood in the middle of it in his boots.”
“You said you wouldn’t take it.”
“I said there was no puzzle,” said Holmes. “I did not say I was not interested.”
Chapter Fourteen — Mabel Collins finds the ties, and does nothing, which is worse
She was not searching. This is important, and Mabel maintained it to the end of her life, in the one letter in which she discussed any of it: I was not searching. I have never searched anyone’s rooms. I was looking for the second volume of the Dzyan proofs because Keightley wanted them at the printer by six.
The proofs were not in the Den. They were not in the study. And so she went into the bedroom, which she had been into perhaps four hundred times, and which she had never once been into alone.
They were in a hatbox, under the window, beneath a fall of unanswered correspondence.
Five white dress ties. Laundered. Folded. Identical, bought as a set — the paper band from the hosier was still under them, with the date of purchase on it in pencil: the ninth of August.
Two of them were stained. Not soaked; washed, and washed again, and still brown at the fold, because blood does not come out of silk, not really, not ever, and any woman who has kept a house knows it.
Three of them were clean.
Mabel Collins sat down on the edge of her lover’s bed with a hatbox in her lap for a period she afterwards estimated at twenty minutes and which was probably nearer an hour.
Here is what she thought, in order.
She thought: this is Donston’s. She is keeping it for him, or hiding it from him, or she has taken it from him, and I must warn her.
She thought: the ninth of August. Three weeks before the first one.
She thought: there are five, and two are used.
And then she understood what the three clean ones were, and that was the moment, and she knew it was the moment even while it was happening, the way you know in a dream that you are about to wake. They were not trophies. A trophy is kept because of what it was. These had been bought in a set, before anything had happened, because somebody had known in August exactly how many there were going to be.
They were not souvenirs. They were a receipt book. And three of the pages were still blank.
Then she thought the thing that condemned her, and she knew that too.
She thought: if I take these to the police I will be in that witness box in four months and the counsel will ask me, in open court, in what capacity I resided at Lansdowne Road.
It was not fear of prison. There was no law against what they were; that was the English genius, to refuse to name a thing and thereby make it unspeakable rather than illegal. It was simpler and smaller and more human than that. Mabel Collins was a woman who made her living by her name, in a trade that tolerated her, and she had precisely one thing of her own: the right to walk into a publisher’s office and be taken seriously.
She would lose it in an afternoon. Every book she had written would be re-read backwards. Light on the Path would become a filthy joke in the clubs. And the woman in the chair downstairs — the woman who had held her hand against her own face and said I would rather you were not put to it — that woman would be hanged at Newgate in the spring, and Mabel Collins would be the one who put her there.
She folded the ties. She put them back. She put the correspondence back on top of them in the same disorder, which took her four minutes and which was the most skilful thing she ever did.
Then she went downstairs and said, “The Dzyan proofs aren’t anywhere. Keightley’s going to have a seizure.”
And Blavatsky, without looking up, said: “They are under the cat.”
They were under the cat.
Mabel Collins went back up to that hatbox twice more that autumn — on the ninth of September and on the first of October — and counted. She never told anybody that she had counted. It is in the letter, in a single line, with no comment attached to it:
The second time there were three stained. The third time there were four, and I understood that I had become a person who checked.
Chapter Fifteen — Annie Besant, who had done it in a fortnight without any magic whatever
In the third week of September a note went from Lansdowne Road to a house in St John’s Wood, and it was four lines long, and it was the only letter Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ever wrote that contained no boasting of any kind.
Madam — I am told you broke Bryant and May in a fortnight with nothing but a newspaper. I am fifty-seven and I have been at this for thirty years and I should like to know how it was done. I am a fraud, as you will have read. Come anyway. — H.P.B.
Annie Besant was forty-one, and at that moment the most famous radical woman in England. In July she had organised the matchgirls — fourteen hundred of them, girls of thirteen and fourteen with phosphorus rotting their jaws out of their faces, a condition the trade called phossy jaw and the company called nothing at all — and she had won. In a fortnight. Against a board of directors, the press, and the entire apparatus of the thing.
She was also a militant atheist of twenty years’ standing who regarded Theosophy as expensive nonsense for people with servants, and she came, as she said afterwards, mainly to be rude to somebody in person.
“You are the matchgirl woman,” said Blavatsky.
“I am. And you are the Russian fraud.”
“I am. Sit down. You have a face like a hatchet. I approve.” Blavatsky did not offer tea. “How did you do it. Not the speech. The mechanism. I want the mechanism.”
“Why?”
“Because I am engaged in a piece of work,” said Blavatsky, “and it is going badly, and I have begun to suspect that it is going badly for reasons of method rather than reasons of strength, and you are the only person in England who has broken anything this year.”
Annie Besant considered her.
“The company’s case,” she said, “was that they were a mass. Hands. Girls. Labour. You cannot pity labour, you can only budget for it. So I printed the names. Sarah Chapman. Mary Driscoll. Three hundred of them, in a newspaper, with their ages and what they were fined for — threepence for dropping matches, sixpence for talking. And the thing fell over.”
“That is all?”
“That is all, and it is not all at all, because it took a strike fund, and a hall, and twelve hundred women willing to starve for a fortnight, and a solicitor, and the entire Fabian Society running errands, and I did nothing whatever that was clever.” Besant’s mouth went hard. “It is not complicated, madame. It is only expensive and extremely dull and they sue you. Everyone wants the trick. There is no trick. There is a list and a printer and four years of your life.”
Blavatsky sat with that for a long time.
The fire moved. Somewhere below, a door.
“Say the first part again.”
“Which part?”
“You cannot pity labour. Say it again.”
“You cannot pity labour. You can only budget for it.” Besant frowned. “Why?”
“Because I have spent thirty years,” said Blavatsky slowly, “looking for the place where the machine is made, on the assumption that it would be hidden, and guarded, and would have a door with a word on it. And you have just told me that the machine is not hidden at all. It is a category. It is the act of putting a woman into a class and then budgeting for the class.” She was not looking at Besant any more. “And you do not break a category by killing the people in it. You break it by printing their names until it will not hold them.”
“Well — yes,” said Annie Besant, in the tone of a woman explaining water. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” said Blavatsky.
They talked for four hours. What else was said in that room is not recorded. Besant walked into it an atheist and a Fabian and walked out of it unsettled, and read The Secret Doctrine in proof that winter, and reviewed it in the spring, and joined the Theosophical Society in 1889 and lost half her political friends over it, and within three years was running the thing, and within twenty was presiding over the Indian National Congress and had a street named after her in Madras.
At the door she turned round.
“You said your work was going badly.”
“I did.”
“What is it?”
“A long debt,” said Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, “in a bad currency, and I have an appointment at the end of this month that I cannot now get out of.”
Book Three: The Double Event
Chapter Sixteen — The Lyceum Theatre — 29 September 1888
Henry Irving was playing The Bells, as he had been playing The Bells for fifteen years, and would go on playing it until he dropped dead in a hotel corridor in Bradford, which he did.
Backstage, his business manager was not watching the stage. He was writing in a notebook. He was a big red-bearded Irishman of forty-one named Abraham Stoker, who had a wife, a job, a mortgage, and a secret conviction that he was going to write something enormous one day if the theatre would ever let him alone for six months.
“You’re at it again,” said Irving, coming off in the interval, sweating through his collar.
“The murders.”
“Everyone’s at the murders.” Irving took the towel. “The house was restless tonight. Did you feel it? Fifteen hundred people in London and not one of them in the room with me. They’re all in Whitechapel.”
“That’s what I’ve been writing about.”
“Oh, spare me.”
“No, listen—” Stoker turned the notebook round, though Irving did not look at it. “It’s not the killings. There’s a killing a week in this city and nobody buys a paper for it. It’s that nobody can see him. A constable walks down Buck’s Row and there’s nothing, and he walks back and there’s a body. In a yard with seventeen people asleep in it. In a square with a policeman passing every fourteen minutes.”
“He’s quick.”
“He’s not quick, he’s invisible, and those are different things, and the second one is far more interesting.” Stoker tapped the page. “Harry. What if that’s the whole of it? Not strength. Not cunning. Just — not being seen. A thing that walks through the middle of the most crowded city in the world and is not registered by any eye that falls on it, because the eye has already decided what it’s looking at and moved on.”
Irving, who was the greatest actor in England and had spent his entire life on the opposite problem, looked at his manager with real attention for perhaps the fourth time that year.
“That’s rather good,” he said. “Make it a foreigner.”
“Why a foreigner?”
“Because an Englishman can’t be invisible in England, we’re all looking at each other all the time to see who’s above us.” Irving threw the towel at him. “Make it a foreigner, from somewhere east, with an old title and no money and very good manners. And don’t make it a man, exactly. Make it something that used to be. Beginners, please.”
Stoker wrote Transylvania? in the margin. It took him nine years. He got the title from a library book in Whitby in 1890.
Chapter Seventeen — Berner Street — 30 September 1888, one o’clock in the morning
Her name was Elizabeth Stride and she was forty-four and Swedish, and the thing everybody knows about her is the thing that is not true: that she lost a husband and nine children on the Princess Alice when it went down in the Thames in 1878. She told that story for ten years. She had no husband aboard and no children at all. It was a lie she needed and she told it beautifully, with a detail about the mast that made people cry.
Blavatsky, who had told nine incompatible versions of her own life and defended every one, would have recognised a professional.
It was raining. There was a club at number 40, the International Working Men’s Educational Club, mostly Jewish socialists, and they were still going at one in the morning — there had been a debate that evening on the necessity or otherwise of religion among Jewish socialists, which had run long, because it always did, and about thirty people were upstairs singing.
Louis Diemschutz drove his costermonger’s barrow into the gateway at one o’clock exactly. His pony shied left and would not go in.
He got down. He prodded the dark with his whip. He struck a match.
The woman on the ground had had her throat cut within the previous few minutes and nothing else had been done to her at all.
That is the record. Here is what the record cannot hold.
Blavatsky was in the yard when the pony shied. She was eleven feet away, in the dark against the wall, with her back to the brick and her hands at her sides and her eyes shut.
She had got Elizabeth Stride to the gateway and asked her the question, and Elizabeth Stride — who was drunk, and cold, and clever, and tired of the whole business — had said:
“What, like a licence? Like the Contagious Diseases Act, you mean?”
And Blavatsky had stopped.
Because that was the right answer. That was the exactly right answer, out of the mouth of a drunk Swedish woman in a Berner Street gateway at one in the morning: the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, under which, in garrison towns and port towns across England, any woman a plain-clothes policeman believed to be a prostitute could be seized, taken before a magistrate, and subjected to a forcible internal examination; and if she refused, imprisoned; and if she submitted and was found diseased, confined in a lock hospital for up to nine months; and the point, the whole point, the point that Josephine Butler and the Ladies’ National Association had hammered at for seventeen years until the Acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886, was that there was no requirement to prove she was a prostitute at all. The policeman’s belief was the whole of the evidence. The classification was the conviction.
England had had its own General Order No. 28. It had had it for twenty-two years. It had had it at home, in peacetime, by Act of Parliament, and it had been struck down two years ago by women with subscription lists and public meetings and no magic whatsoever.
“Say that again,” Blavatsky had said.
“The Act. They done it to my friend in Plymouth. Twice.”
“And it was repealed.”
“Was it?” Elizabeth Stride had laughed. “Nobody told the coppers.”
And Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had stood in the rain in a gateway in St George’s-in-the-East with a knife in her sleeve and understood, with the total clarity that comes perhaps three times in a life and never at a convenient hour, that she had made an error of thirty years’ standing.
She had gone to America looking for the organ and not the wound. She had been told the organ was in London. She had come to London and spent sixteen years circling it, and she had assumed — because she was a Russian aristocrat’s daughter, because she had come up through courts and salons and lodges, because every structure she had ever known was a structure of initiation — that the organ would be occult. Hidden. A sanctum. A chamber. Something you got into by knowing a word.
It was not. It had never been. The organ was a committee room. It was Hansard. It was a Select Committee minute, a magistrate’s discretion, a form with a tick-box, a man at a desk deciding what a woman was and writing it down, and the way you killed it was not with five seals and a knife at four in the morning. The way you killed it was the way Josephine Butler had killed it and the way Annie Besant had killed the matchgirls’ silence in a fortnight that July:
You printed the names. You made the meeting. You made it boring and public and expensive, year after year, with minutes.
Anna Kingsford had been right.
The Dry Chapter had been right.
She had killed three women for a theory, and the third was still warm on the stones at her feet, and she had done it four minutes ago, while the question was still in the air.
She was standing in the dark with that arriving in her — not a thought, a collapse, the floor of thirty years going out all at once — when the pony shied and the match struck and the yard filled with shouting in Yiddish and Russian and English, and nobody saw her, because she was an enormous old woman standing still in the dark in a city that had decided what old women were.
She walked out of the gateway at one o’clock while they were still crowding round the body. She walked past Diemschutz. He stepped aside for her. He told the inquest he had seen nobody. He was not lying.
It is three-quarters of a mile from Berner Street to Mitre Square. A fit man walks it in a quarter of an hour. She did it in twenty-five minutes, on a stick, in the rain, weeping, on the half hour of walking that she had left in her and that nobody in England knew she possessed — and she was in the square, in the corner by the empty house, at twenty-five minutes past one in the morning.
She paid for it. She was in bed for nine days afterwards and told Mabel it was a chill.
Chapter Eighteen — Mitre Square — twenty-five minutes later
What happened next is the hardest thing in this history to set down, and it is the reason the whole of it has to be told at all.
She should have gone home.
The seal was broken; the night was ruined; the yard behind the club was full of shouting men; and she had, forty minutes earlier, understood that the entire enterprise was wrong at the root.
She did not go home. She went west, and the walk cost her nine days in bed, and she did not do it because the working required it.
She did it because she could not bear to stop and think, and the whole of the rest of this book is about the difference.
She was in the square at twenty-five past one, sitting on a bollard in the corner by the empty house with her face in her hands and her stick across her knees, and she was still there five minutes later when Police Constable Edward Watkins of the City Police came in from Mitre Street with his lamp.
He walked the whole square. It took him a minute and a half. He looked into the three dark corners because looking into the three dark corners was the job.
He passed within eight feet of her.
He did not see her, and what happened in that minute and a half is the only event in this account that cannot be reduced to arithmetic, and it needs stating carefully, because every other strange thing in this book is theatre, fraud, suggestion, or the ordinary unaccountability of people.
Blavatsky described it exactly once, to Mabel Collins, in bed, in the dark, in March of 1891, eight weeks before she died:
It is not that they cannot see you. Nothing makes a person blind. It is that the eye reports to the mind, and the mind has a list of what a thing in a dark corner at night may be, and on that list are: a man, a drunk, a dog, a bundle, a shadow. There is no entry for me. And where there is no entry the mind does not say “unknown” — the mind is not so honest — the mind says “nothing”, and files it, and the man walks on.
I did not become invisible, Mabel. I was never visible. I have been forty years finding out exactly how not-visible I am, and the whole of my art consists in standing very still inside the hole where somebody has decided I am not.
And the terrible part — are you listening — the terrible part is that every woman over fifty in this city can do it. Every one. Not one of them knows. They walk about inside their own vanishing and they think it is grief, and it is a weapon, and nobody has ever told them.
Watkins went out by Mitre Street at about half past one. The square was empty behind him, except that it was not.
Catherine Eddowes came into it five minutes later, from Church Passage, and she was forty-six years old and she had been let out of Bishopsgate police station at one o’clock that morning, having been arrested at half past eight for being drunk and doing an imitation of a fire engine in Aldgate High Street. She had slept it off in the cell. The gaoler, Constable Hutt, let her out and said this way, missus, and she said, “All right. Good night, old cock.”
She gave her name at the station as Mary Ann Kelly. This is true. It is one of those facts the case is full of, that sit there for a hundred and thirty years waiting to mean something and never quite do.
She turned left instead of right, which took her toward Houndsditch, and the passage, and a very large old woman sitting on a bollard in the rain with her face in her hands.
“Here now,” said Catherine Eddowes. “Here. What’s all this?”
“Go away.”
“That’s nice, i’n’t it.” She came closer anyway. That was the kind of woman she was; three separate people said so at the inquest. “You’re soaked through, love. You’ll die of it.”
“I have killed three women this month.”
Catherine Eddowes stopped.
Then — and here is the thing about the women of Whitechapel that a century of books about the man who killed them has contrived almost entirely to miss — she sat down on the wet stone beside the enormous weeping foreigner and said:
“Did you now.”
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
“On purpose. For a reason. I had a reason and I had it for twenty-six years and it was a very good reason and about half an hour ago I found out it was wrong.”
“Ah,” said Catherine Eddowes.
And she put her hand on the old woman’s back, between the shoulder blades, the way you do with a sick horse or a crying child, and she said:
“That’s the worst of ‘em. Being wrong late. I been wrong late. You want to not do the next one, then.”
“I want to not do the next one.”
“Then don’t.”
“I have sworn an oath.”
“Oh, sworn,” said Catherine Eddowes, with forty-six years of contempt in it. “Men swear. Look where it gets ‘em.”
She laughed. She had a good laugh too. Everyone said so.
“What’s your name, love?”
And Helena Petrovna Blavatsky — who had used nine names on four passports, who had been von Hahn and Blavatsky and Madame Laura and Metrovitch’s woman and H.P.B. and the Old Lady and Jack Blavatsky when it suited her to be taken for a man at a card table in Cairo — opened her mouth to lie, and could not.
“Helena,” she said.
“That’s a pretty one. I’m Kate.” She stood up and put out her hand to pull. “Come on then, Helena. There’s a coffee stall on Aldgate’ll be open. I’ll stand you one, and you can tell me what the reason was, and then you can go home and not do the next one.”
Blavatsky took the hand.
She was eleven stone heavier than Catherine Eddowes and her legs had gone and she came up off that bollard with the smaller woman’s whole weight braced against her, and for about four seconds they were simply two women in the rain in Mitre Square, one helping the other to stand.
They did not reach the coffee stall. They were nine minutes from the end of it and they got about four feet.
Police Constable Edward Watkins came back into Mitre Square at a quarter to two.
He said at the inquest, and said it again twenty years later to a journalist, and said it on his deathbed: I would have seen a rat in that square. I would have seen a cat. The gas was poor but there was no place to stand that I could not see, and I looked, because looking is the whole of the job, and there was nothing there at half past one, and at a quarter to two there was a woman cut to pieces, and no man came out past me, and no man came out past Harvey into Church Passage, and I have thought about it every day of my life and I have no answer and I would be obliged if you would stop asking.
There was no man.
She was still in the square when he came back. She was in the corner by the empty house, eight feet from him, and she was an enormous old woman in a black cloak soaked with rain and with blood to the elbows, and Constable Edward Watkins looked directly at her for approximately two seconds, from a distance of eight feet, while blowing his whistle for assistance, and did not see her.
He had not seen her at half past one either, when there was nothing to see but an old woman crying on a bollard, and that is the part that ought to be frightening, and is not, because nobody finds it strange at all.
Chapter Nineteen — Goulston Street — twenty past two
Part of Catherine Eddowes’s apron, cut away and bloodied, was found in the doorway of a tenement at 108 to 119 Wentworth Model Dwellings, Goulston Street, by Constable Alfred Long, who passed the spot at twenty past two and saw nothing, and passed it again at five to three and found it. It had therefore been left between those two times, by somebody walking north-east away from the square at the pace of a woman on a stick.
Above it, written in chalk on the black brick of the jamb, in a schooled and legible hand, was a line that has been reproduced in perhaps nine thousand books and never once agreed upon, because three officers copied it down and all three copies differ:
The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing
Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, came in person at five in the morning and ordered it washed off before it could be photographed, on the grounds that dawn was coming, the market was opening, and an anti-Jewish riot in Whitechapel would kill more people by Sunday than the murderer had killed all autumn.
He was almost certainly right. He was crucified for it, resigned in November, and it is the only decision any senior policeman made that entire autumn that was both correct and brave.
The sentence has been read as a Masonic reference, a misspelling of Jews, a misspelling of juvenile, a red herring, a graffito six weeks old that happened to be there, and the ravings of a lunatic.
Here is another possibility, which has the merit of making grammatical sense, and which no inquiry has considered, because it requires the reader to believe the writer was neither English nor a man.
In Russian, and in the French of a Russian aristocrat’s schoolroom, a double negative is not a contradiction. Ne budut obvineny ni za chto. They will not be blamed for nothing. They will not be blamed for anything at all. It is not a riddle. It is a flat, exhausted statement of fact.
And the word was not Juwes.
It was Juges.
Judges.
She wrote it in the French she thought in when she was tired, with a Cyrillic habit in the hand, in chalk, on wet brick, in the dark, badly. Three men copied it and all three made it English, because they were English, and what they were looking at was not on the list of things it could be.
The judges are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.
The organ. Not the wound. The desk, the discretion, the magistrate, the classification — the signature on General Order No. 28, and the signature on the Contagious Diseases Act, and the signature on the workhouse register that wrote common prostitute at the top of Annie Chapman’s page.
She had found it at last. She had found it half an hour after it stopped mattering, and she wrote it on a wall like a woman leaving a note for somebody who was not coming home — twenty minutes after killing the woman who had offered to buy her a cup of coffee.
Then she washed her hands in a horse trough on Commercial Street and walked as far as Aldgate and could not walk any further, and sat on the step of a shut shop for forty minutes until the first cabs started, and paid a driver double not to talk, and let herself in with her own key at ten past five in the morning.
Mabel Collins was sitting on the stairs in the dark, fully dressed, and had been for six hours.
Neither of them said anything.
Blavatsky sat down on the stairs beside her lover, which took her the better part of a minute and hurt her enormously, and put her head against Mabel’s shoulder, and Mabel Collins put her arms around a woman covered in another woman’s blood and held her until it got light.
That is the whole of the scene. There is no dialogue in it. Mabel told it twice in her life and both times she stopped there, and the second time, in 1927, the young man who wanted to write a book asked her what she had been thinking, and she said:
“That I was in it now. That I had been in it since the hatbox, really, but that there is a difference between knowing a thing and having it bleed on your dress.”
Chapter Twenty — Sherlock Holmes in Mitre Square, 30 September, eight in the morning
Abberline had sent for him before they moved her. It was the one promise he kept that autumn and it cost him his career.
Holmes was in the square for two hours and eleven minutes. He did not speak for the first forty. He walked the perimeter three times, then walked it again counting paces, then stood in the corner by the empty house with his back to the wall and his eyes shut.
“Watkins,” he said at last.
“Sir?”
“You passed through at half past one.”
“I did, sir.”
“Where did you look?”
“Everywhere, sir. It’s a small square.”
“No. That is what you have told the inspector and it is not true, and I am not accusing you of lying; I am telling you a fact about human beings. Nobody looks everywhere. Show me, physically, where your eyes went.”
Watkins, baffled, showed him.
Holmes watched the constable’s head turn. He watched it stop twice. He watched where it did not stop.
“There,” he said. “And there. You passed over that corner twice without registering it, and you have just done it again while demonstrating, with a man watching you. Why?”
“There’s — nothing there, sir.”
“There is a corner there.”
“Yes, sir, but—” Watkins stopped. His face did something.
“Go on.”
“It’s where the old women stand,” he said slowly. “At the market, sir. The square backs on the market. There’s always one or two old women stood in that corner out of the wet, waiting on the carts. Ten year I’ve walked this beat. There’s always an old woman in that corner.”
Holmes said nothing for a moment.
“Thank you, Constable. Write that down in your own words before you speak to anybody else about it, and date it, and sign it, because you will be persuaded out of it by Thursday.”
He went to the corner and crouched and was there a long time.
“Abberline. Three observations, one inference, and one guess, and I shall tell you which is which, because the newspapers will not and you are going to have to live on the difference.”
“Go on.”
“Observation. The stone in this corner is wet everywhere except a patch about fourteen inches across, which is dry, and which is therefore where something sat long enough to keep the rain off it. Half an hour. Possibly more. The bollard there has been leaned against hard enough to take the grime off the top in a band. Somebody was in this square, stationary, before your constable’s first pass.”
Abberline looked up from his notebook.
“Observation. Here” — he pointed — “a double scuff, four inches apart, heel-shaped, driven deep on the left. And a second pair, much lighter, in front of it. Observation ends there.”
“And the inference?”
“That the deep pair belongs to someone heavy who was being pulled upward, and the light pair to someone smaller braced against the pull. That is not a struggle; a struggle scatters, and this is a single committed effort in one direction. My inference is that one person helped another to their feet in this spot within an hour of the murder.” Holmes stood up. “I will give you the alternatives, since nobody else will. It may be two market women from yesterday afternoon. It may be a drunk being got up by a friend at midnight. It may be your own constables, this morning, in which case somebody has been careless and I shall want to know who. I cannot exclude any of those, and you should write that down too.”
“But you don’t believe them.”
“I believe the dry patch,” said Holmes. “The dry patch is not an opinion.”
“And the guess?”
Holmes looked at the corner.
“The guess,” he said, “is a hypothesis so grotesque, so offensive to every instinct I possess, and so completely impossible to prove by any method known to me or to the Metropolitan Police, that if I state it aloud in this square I will be removed from this case within the hour, the newspapers will have it by Tuesday, and the entire investigation will be destroyed by ridicule. And the person responsible will read it over breakfast and will be, at a stroke, permanently safe.”
“Say it to me.”
“No.”
“Mr Holmes—”
“No. Not to you, not to Warren, not to Watson. Not yet. I have precisely one advantage over this person, Inspector, and it is that they do not know I have begun to think in the right direction, and the instant I open my mouth I trade it for nothing at all.” He put on his hat. “I shall want the mortuary photographs, the Berner Street timings to the minute, every charge sheet from Bishopsgate for the last six months — and a list. This is the one that will cost you your pension, so think before you agree.”
“A list of what?”
“Every woman in Greater London over the age of fifty who has held or lost a midwife’s licence, assisted at a coroner’s examination, given evidence as an expert witness, or been struck from a hospital register.”
Abberline stared at him.
“How many is that?”
“I have no idea. Eight hundred. Fifteen hundred. It is not a solution, Inspector, it is a net, and nets are mostly holes, and it is the only one I have.” He was already walking. “And it is probably the wrong net. I want you to remember that I said so, afterwards, when somebody tells you I was never wrong.”
Chapter Twenty-One — A boy writes a letter
On the fourth of October a letter arrived at Scotland Yard among the fourteen hundred others, and was read by a sergeant whose job it was to read them, and was marked with a pencil cross meaning lunatic and filed, and survived, and is in the Metropolitan Police files to this day in a box nobody opens.
It is in a round schoolboy hand. It is not signed. It is postmarked Leamington Spa and dated the second.
Sirs,
You are looking for a man and there is no man. I am aware I am a boy of twelve and that this will be thrown away but I shall write it anyway so that afterwards it is on record that somebody said it at the time.
1. Nobody sees her because she is an old woman and you have all agreed what an old woman is. 2. She is not mad. Mad people do not keep to a calendar. 3. She is not from here. The way the bodies are left is foreign. I cannot say how I know this and I am aware that is not evidence. 4. She is taking the parts away because she owes somebody and is paying. 5. When you catch her nobody will believe you, and I expect you will not catch her, and I expect in a hundred years there will still be men in rooms arguing about which gentleman it was, and the answer will be that it was a woman and she was standing right there the whole time.
I am sorry about the spelling. I am thirteen in ten days.
P.S. If you do catch her I should very much like to meet her.
The sergeant’s pencil cross is in the top corner.
Underneath it somebody else — not the sergeant; a different hand, older, in ink, at an unknown date — has written three words:
Nor shall we.
Interlude: A catalogue of things Londoners believed in the autumn of 1888
They believed it was a Jewish butcher, because there was a man called Leather Apron who had frightened women in Hanbury Street for threepence and whose real name was John Pizer and who was arrested, and cleared, and whose life was over anyway.
They believed it was a mad doctor. They believed it was a Russian secret agent sent to discredit the Metropolitan Police. They believed it was a Malay cook off a ship, on the strength of a letter from a man in Manila. They believed it was a midwife — this one got into the papers twice, under the name Jill the Ripper, and was dismissed both times as a fancy, and the ground for dismissing it was never once stated, because it did not need to be.
They believed it was Spring-Heeled Jack, who had been leaping over walls in the suburbs since 1837 and who had a blue flame and iron claws and who had been seen, that autumn, in Peckham, by four separate people, because of course he had.
They believed that a gentleman had been seen washing his hands in the Thames at dawn. They believed the police had a photograph of the dead woman’s eye in which the killer’s face was printed, because a doctor in Paris had said that the retina retained the last image, and the Yard did in fact photograph Mary Jane Kelly’s eyes, which is a fact that the literature mentions in a single line and then hurries past.
They believed that the Queen had written to the Home Secretary. She had.
They believed that the bloodhounds had been lost on Tooting Common. They had. Their names were Barnaby and Burgho and they had been trialled in Hyde Park with Sir Charles Warren himself running across the grass as the quarry, in a top hat, at six in the morning, in front of reporters.
At a house in Tite Street, Chelsea, on an evening in the second week of October, a large man with a soft voice held a glass of hock and said:
“The thing nobody has remarked upon is that it is the first murder in history to be serialised.”
“Oscar.”
“I am perfectly serious, which I find is the only way to say anything frivolous and be heard.” Oscar Wilde was thirty-four and had published almost nothing and was already, by general agreement, the most dangerous conversationalist in England. “There have been atrocities before. There have been atrocities in this city within my lifetime that make this one look like a parish quarrel. But they happened, and were reported, and were finished. This one is in instalments. There is a gap, and the gap is the point. The public has been given a story with a serial number and a release schedule, and the extraordinary thing — the thing that will be true long after the wretched man is caught and hanged and forgotten — is that four hundred thousand people in this city are now waiting for the next one. With dread, certainly. But waiting. And a man who has made the British public wait for anything has achieved something that no artist in this room will achieve in his lifetime.”
“That’s disgusting,” said a young woman by the window.
“Yes,” agreed Wilde placidly. “It is also the case. Those are not opposites, though the English have spent two hundred years insisting that they are.”
In the corner, a thin man with a sketchbook had not looked up for twenty minutes. He was twenty-eight, a painter, formerly an actor, and he had rooms in Cleveland Street and a habit of walking the East End at night because he was interested in the light in the music halls and in the faces of women who were not pretty, which was a radical interest in 1888 and remains one.
His name was Walter Sickert, and sixty years after his death four separate authors would accuse him of these murders in four separate books, chiefly on the grounds that he painted dark rooms and was interested in the case, which was true of approximately eleven thousand Londoners.
“What are you drawing, Walter?”
“The room,” said Sickert, without looking up.
“How dull of you. Draw me.”
“I am drawing the room,” said Sickert, “because in forty years nobody will be able to remember what a room looked like when the people in it were frightened, and they will reconstruct it out of novels, and they will get it wrong, and the wrongness will become the thing everybody knows.” He turned a page. “You are talking about serials, Oscar. I am telling you about the other half of it. They will not remember this autumn. They will remember a picture of this autumn — fog, and a cape, and a gaslight, and a figure. There was no fog in September, it was clear and dry all month, you can look it up. But there will be fog. There will be fog for ever.”
He was right about that, too.
And at a dinner in Southsea, a doctor of twenty-nine with a failing ophthalmic practice and one modest novel in print was asked by his hostess what he made of it all.
Arthur Conan Doyle put down his knife.
“I should look for a woman,” he said.
There was laughter.
“No, you are quite wrong to laugh. Consider.” He was enjoying himself; he had the trick of it already. “The great difficulty is the blood. Whoever does this must be soaked to the elbow and must then walk away through streets full of people. Now: a man covered in blood at four in the morning is stopped by the first constable who sees him. But suppose the killer wears a woman’s dress over his clothes — he does his work, he removes the dress, he walks away a respectable gentleman, and the dress goes in the river.”
“A man in women’s clothes.”
“A midwife,” said Doyle. “That is what I should look for. Someone who may walk the streets at any hour of the night with a bag, who is expected to be bloody, and whom no one on earth would stop or search or even remember passing. Jill the Ripper, if you like. I shall write to the papers about it one day.”
He did, in 1892. It was reprinted everywhere and treated as a charming eccentricity of the man who wrote the detective stories.
He never followed it up. He was busy. Within five years he would try to kill Holmes and fail, and spend the rest of his life being dragged back to Baker Street by a public that would not let go, and in his old age he would believe in fairies on the strength of two photographs taken by schoolgirls in Yorkshire — which tells you something true and uncomfortable about the exact distance, in any given mind, between the faculty that sees clearly and the faculty that wants very badly to be told a story.
Nobody in London believed it was an elderly Russian lady of letters who could not climb a flight of stairs.
In the whole of the surviving record — fourteen hundred letters to the Yard, two thousand newspaper columns, nine suspects arrested, forty years of memoirs — there is exactly one document that says so.
It is in a round schoolboy hand, it is postmarked Leamington Spa, and there is a pencil cross in the corner.
Book Four: The Chapter Moves
Chapter Twenty-Two — The forty days
Between the thirtieth of September and the ninth of November, 1888, nobody died in Whitechapel by that hand.
It is the longest gap in the sequence and it has never been explained. The literature offers: the murderer was in prison on another charge; the murderer was at sea; the murderer was ill; the murderer was abroad; the murderer had been frightened by the near-miss in Berner Street.
What the city did in those forty days is better documented than what the killer did, and is in some ways the more interesting story.
It panicked, which was expected. It also organised, which was not.
The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee was formed by local tradesmen and patrolled the streets with whistles. The Star sold two hundred and thirty thousand copies in a day. Bloodhounds were brought in and lost on Tooting Common. George Lusk received a parcel containing half a human kidney and a letter beginning From hell, and the kidney was probably genuine and the letter probably was not, and he kept both in his house for a week with his wife screaming at him.
And something else happened, in the way that large things happen, invisibly, in committee rooms.
For the first time in the history of the city, middle-class England looked directly at the East End.
Not at the murders — at the rooms. The inquests had to establish where these women had slept, and so the inquests established, in open court, reported verbatim in every newspaper in the Empire, that a woman could be turned into the street at two in the morning for want of fourpence, and that there were two hundred thousand people in this condition within four miles of the Bank of England. The Lancet wrote about it. The Church wrote about it. George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the Star of such pure and vicious clarity that it is still quoted — observing that private enterprise had been unable to rouse the West End to the condition of the East, and that an independent genius had taken the matter in hand, and by murdering four women had converted the press to communism more effectively than fifty years of argument.
He meant it as a sneer at the West End. It was also simply true.
Blavatsky read it in bed. She read everything in bed that October, because the walk from Berner Street had cost her nine days flat on her back and the margin had never come back. In August she had half an hour in her. By the middle of October she had perhaps ten minutes, and paid for each of them with a day.
The invalidism that had been three-quarters true and a quarter theatre was closing the gap on its own. The cloak was becoming the thing itself, which is what cloaks do if you wear them long enough.
She read Shaw’s letter three times. Then she put it down and said to the empty room, in Russian:
“Fifty years of argument. Four women. And I was the one who thought I had found an efficiency.”
Chapter Twenty-Three — Emma Coulomb comes to collect
She came alone and she came in the afternoon and she did not sit.
“They sent you,” said Blavatsky.
“No.” Emma Coulomb had a small flat accent, Levantine under the French. She had been born in Alexandria. She had kept house for this woman for three years in Bombay and in Adyar and had loved her, in the way that housekeepers love the monsters they serve, and then had been offered money, and had taken it, and had been poor ever since anyway because that is what happens. “They would not send me. I am not respectable enough for their committee. I am the one who did the actual work, so I am the one they will not have in the room.”
“Then why are you here.”
“To tell you what they are going to do, and to be paid for telling you.”
Blavatsky laughed. “At last. A professional.”
“Twenty pounds.”
“Ten, and the truth.”
“Fifteen, and I will throw in what Madame Kingsford said in February when they carried her back from this house, which I heard because I was laying the fire in the next room, because they do not look at me either.”
“Done.”
Emma Coulomb took the money and counted it, which Blavatsky respected.
“February, madame. Nine months ago, before any of this. Kingsford said: we have given her a mask and she has put it on in front of us.” The housekeeper’s face did not move. “She said: she will walk out of this with the whole world laughing at her and she will walk through the laughter for the rest of her life and we shall have built the laugh ourselves, with subscriptions. And then she said a thing I did not understand and the Baroness said shh, in front of the girl.”
“What thing?”
“She said: then we must do it ourselves, and it must be worse than hers, and it must be the last one, or the ledger will not close.”
The room was very quiet. Out in the street a cab went by, and a boy shouting the evening edition.
“Say it again,” said Blavatsky.
Emma Coulomb said it again.
“And the Baroness said shh.”
“In February,” said Blavatsky. “She said it in February. Before Buck’s Row. Before any of it.”
“Yes, madame.”
“She was not predicting me at all. She was making an arrangement in case of me.”
“The Baroness said shh. And Madame Sidgwick said nothing at all, and Madame Sidgwick is the one I would watch, madame, because Madame Sidgwick has never in her life said a thing she had not already finished thinking.”
Blavatsky sat in her chair with her ruined legs under a rug in the warm room full of paper.
“Emma,” she said. “Sit down.”
“I will not sit down in this house.”
“Sit down, you obstinate Egyptian woman, I am asking you something and I will not look up at you to do it.” And Emma Coulomb, after a moment, sat down on the very edge of a chair, as she had for three years in two countries. “The letters. In ‘eighty-four. The ones you sold to the missionaries.”
“I am not going to say they were forged.”
“I know they were forged. I am asking something else. Did you write them alone?”
Emma Coulomb looked at the carpet.
“No,” she said.
“Who helped you.”
“A lady came. From England. In the January. She was very kind and she was very old and she brought a letter of introduction from a bishop’s wife and she stayed four days and she helped me with the English, because my English was not good enough to be believed, madame, that was the problem, the forgeries were in my English and nobody would believe you had written in my English.” She was speaking very quickly now. “And she said it was a mercy. She said: we are going to make her ridiculous and it will save a great many lives, and when you are old you will understand it. And I am old now and I do not understand it, and I have no situation, and my husband is dead, and you are sitting in a warm room, and I have been the villain in your story for four years in six languages.”
Blavatsky said nothing for a long while.
Then she said: “You were the only person in Adyar who ever told me when the fish was off.”
“The fish was always off.”
“Yes.” Blavatsky reached down beside the chair, into the gap where she kept the things she did not want Mabel to find, and took out a bank note and held it out. “Take this and go to Nice and do not come back and do not write your memoirs, and if any lady with a letter from a bishop’s wife comes to see you, you will tell her nothing and you will write to me the same day.”
“You are not angry.”
“Emma,” said Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, “I have killed four women since August. I have forfeited the right to be angry about a forged letter, and the arithmetic of it is the single most disagreeable thing that has ever happened to me.”
Emma Coulomb stood in the middle of the Den and looked at her for a long moment.
“Four,” she said.
“Four.”
“They will make it five,” said Emma Coulomb. “Whatever you do. You understand that. That is what Madame Kingsford meant. If you stop at four, they will make the fifth, because an unclosed working is a door standing open and nobody in that committee will leave a door open for a hundred years.” She picked up her bag. “They are not wicked, madame. That is what you have never understood about them. They are correct. It is much, much worse.”
Chapter Twenty-Four — The London Hospital, Whitechapel Road — mid-October
There was a man in the attic of the hospital whom London had decided to be kind to, having first decided to make money from him, and then having decided to be ashamed, which is the usual sequence.
Joseph Carey Merrick was twenty-six years old. He had been exhibited in a shop on Whitechapel Road directly opposite the hospital he now lived in, which is the sort of geography that makes novelists give up. He had been robbed and abandoned in Belgium and had got himself home with a card in his pocket bearing the name of a surgeon who had once examined him, and the surgeon, Frederick Treves, had taken him in, and the hospital had raised money by public subscription to keep him for life, and the Princess of Wales came to visit and shook his hand, and he wept, and that story has been told so many times that it has stopped being about a person.
He was, by every account of everybody who ever sat with him, extremely intelligent, extremely well-read, sentimental in his taste, funny in a dry way, and desperately interested in other people’s ordinary lives.
Blavatsky went to see him four times that autumn. It is in the hospital day-book: Mme B., Thursday, 2 hrs. Treves noted it with mild disapproval because he thought she was a charlatan and he was concerned she would fill Merrick’s head with spirits.
She did not. They talked about Russia.
“You can’t walk,” he said, the second time. His speech was very hard to follow; you had to learn it, like a dialect, and she had learned it in an afternoon, because she had an ear.
“My legs are a disgrace.”
“Mine too.” A sound that was a laugh. “We are a pair of ruins, madame.”
“We are. Shall I tell you the difference between us?”
“Please.”
“You are stared at,” said Blavatsky, “and I am not seen. We are the two ends of the same thing. There is a man in this hospital who would recognise your silhouette in a fog at four hundred yards. There is nobody on earth who would recognise mine at eight feet.” She was rolling a cigarette; she did not smoke it, out of courtesy, which was the only courtesy she observed in her entire life. “And which of us, Joseph, do you suppose can do the most damage?”
He considered it seriously. He considered everything seriously.
“You,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But I’d rather be me.”
She looked up.
“Say why.”
“Because they look at me,” said Joseph Merrick, “and after a while — not at first, after a while, if they stay — they stop looking and start talking. Treves does. The nurse does. The Princess did. They come to look and they stay to talk, and then I am in the room with them.” His ruined hand moved on the counterpane. “Nobody ever gets to be in a room with you, madame. You’ve arranged it. You’re very clever and I should think you’re the loneliest person I have ever met, and I have been in a shop window on the Whitechapel Road.”
Nobody else said anything like that to her in the last four years of her life.
She did not answer him. She sat with him for another forty minutes and they talked about the Volga and about a cathedral he had seen a picture of, and when she left she stopped in the doorway with her stick and said:
“If I had come to you in August instead of October, four women would be alive.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“No,” she said. “Good. Keep it that way, and I am sorry to have brought it into the room.”
Joseph Merrick died in his sleep in April 1890, aged twenty-seven, of a dislocated neck, having lain down to sleep lying flat like other people, which he had wanted to do all his life and which his head would not permit.
Chapter Twenty-Five — Marie Laveau II comes to London
She arrived on the twenty-second of October on the Umbria out of New York, and she was sixty-one years old, and she had never been further from the parish of her birth than Mobile.
She did not send word ahead. She came to Lansdowne Road at nine in the morning in a hired carriage, in black, with a single bag, and she came up the stairs past Mabel Collins without a word and stood in the doorway of the Den.
Blavatsky, in her chair, went white.
“You walk badly,” said Marie Laveau.
“I do not walk at all.”
“Good. Then you cannot do the fifth one, and we can all go home.” She put her bag down and sat without being invited, which she had learned from this woman twenty-six years before. “Introduce me to the lady on the stairs, Helena, she is listening and she will do it better in the room.”
Mabel came in. She was shaking slightly.
“Mabel Collins,” said Blavatsky. “Marie Laveau. The second.”
“I know who she is,” said Mabel.
“Of course you do, child,” said Marie Laveau. “Everybody knows who I am. That is my mother’s doing and it is the worst inheritance a woman ever left a daughter. She made the name so big I have spent forty years living inside it like a rented room.” She looked at Blavatsky. “Which is why I came myself instead of writing. Because the name travels and I do not, and I wanted to see with my own eyes what my mother’s bowl has been doing in England.”
“You have come to release me.”
“I have come to correct you.”
“It is the same thing.”
“It has never once been the same thing.” Marie Laveau took off her gloves, finger by finger. “Helena. You swore a debt of five and you have paid four. You believe that if you do not pay the fifth, the thing turns on you. That is what you have believed since May of ‘sixty-two. Who told you that?”
“Your mother.”
“My mother,” said Marie Laveau, “was the finest liar in the state of Louisiana, and she lied in only one direction: she lied to keep hold of people. And you were the most interesting white woman who ever walked through that door, and you were going to England, and she wanted a string on you, and so she gave you a debt with a number on it, because a number is a leash, and you have carried it for twenty-six years like a good girl.”
Blavatsky did not move.
“It was never five,” said Marie Laveau. “It was never a number at all. The bowl does not count. You asked her a question — you asked where the machine was that turns a woman into a category — and she told you the truth, which is that it is in London, and that it is not a building, it is a habit. And then she added a price, because she was a professional and professionals do not give it away.”
“You are telling me,” said Blavatsky, very slowly, “that there is no oath.”
“I am telling you there was never an oath. There was a woman of sixty-one in an occupied city, dying, who met somebody with more fire in her than sense, and who could not resist putting a hook in her. And I have come four thousand miles in a steamship to take the hook out, because I buried my mother in ‘eighty-one and I have spent seven years going through her ledgers, and yours is the worst thing in them, and I am the only person alive who can tell you and be believed.”
Mabel Collins sat down on the floor. There was nowhere else and her legs had gone.
“Four women,” said Blavatsky.
“Four women.”
“For nothing.”
“For nothing,” said Marie Laveau, and there was no mercy in it at all, and that is why Blavatsky believed her; because a person who had come to comfort her would have softened it, and this woman had come four thousand miles to put it in her like a nail. “You did not kill them for a working, Helena. You killed them because you were thirty-one years old in a city where they had just turned every woman into a whore with a signature, and you could not do one single thing about it, and the helplessness of it went into you like a splinter and you have spent twenty-six years building a cathedral around it so that it would be about something.”
“That is not—”
“That is exactly what it is. Grief with a method is still grief. You dressed it as a calculation because you are the cleverest woman in Europe and the clever ones can always find a shape to put it in.” Marie Laveau leaned forward. “My mother saw it in an afternoon. She said: that one does not know yet that she is grieving. It is in the book. You can read it. I brought it.”
She took the brown ledger out of her bag and put it on the table.
Blavatsky did not touch it for a long time.
Then she said: “Then there is nothing to finish.”
“No.”
“And if I stop now.”
“If you stop now,” said Marie Laveau, “you are a woman who killed four people for a reason that was never there, and you will live with that, and it will not get better, and there is no door at the end of it. That is what I am offering you. It is worse than the oath. I am aware.”
Blavatsky began to laugh, and then stopped, because it turned into the other thing.
“They will make the fifth,” she said at last.
“Who will?”
“The old women. The Chapter. Coulomb heard Kingsford say it. If I leave the working open they will close it themselves, because they cannot bear an open door, and because they want it closed by the wrong hand so that it buys nothing.”
Marie Laveau went very still.
“Say that again,” she said.
She said it again.
“Then tell them,” said Marie Laveau. “Tell them what I have just told you. Tell them there was no oath, there is no number, there is nothing to close, and the whole thing was a hook my mother put in a white woman in 1862 because she could not help herself. Write it tonight. I will sign it. I will swear it in front of a magistrate if that is what it takes.”
Blavatsky began to laugh, and it was the worst sound Mabel Collins ever heard out of her.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my dear. Think for a moment about who would be telling them.”
Marie Laveau opened her mouth and then did not say anything.
“I have spent twenty years,” said Blavatsky, “teaching the civilised world that nothing I say is true. I have done it deliberately, continuously, and with enormous success, because it was the only roof I could build over my head. Hodgson wrote it down and the Society published it and the newspapers finished the job, and Anna Kingsford voted in committee to spend nine more years on it, and it has worked. It worked in Buck’s Row and it worked in Mitre Square and it worked eight feet from a constable’s lamp.”
She spread her hands.
“And now I must go to four women who have spent four years proving in print that I am a liar, and tell them that the dangerous thing they are about to do is unnecessary, on my unsupported word, with no evidence, concerning an oath that only I ever heard, sworn in a room in Louisiana twenty-six years ago, to a woman who is dead.”
“They might listen.”
“They will not listen, and they will be right not to listen, and that is the part I cannot get round.” She was not laughing now. “If a woman who had killed four people came to you and said do not act, I have discovered my own doctrine was nonsense — would you stay your hand? Or would you think: she has lost her nerve, or she wants the fifth for herself, or she is lying, because she has always lied, because lying is the only thing anybody has ever been able to prove about her?”
Nobody answered.
“I built the cloak,” said Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. “I built it to be impenetrable and I succeeded, and it has one property I did not consider in 1868, which is that it cannot be taken off. There is no longer any sentence I can say to an Englishwoman that will stop her doing anything whatever.”
Chapter Twenty-Six — Four hours in a drawing room in Kensington, 2 November 1888
There were three of them in the room and a fourth in a folder.
Eleanor Sidgwick was forty-three and in the chair. The Baroness von Ehrenfels was eighty-one and had her ear trumpet on the arm of the sofa and used it selectively, which everybody understood. Mrs Hollis, who was sixty-four and whose name was not Hollis, sat nearest the door with the minute book open on her knee, because she always took the minutes and nobody had ever proposed anybody else.
The folder on the table contained eleven pages in Anna Kingsford’s hand, dated April 1887, and they had been read aloud at the start of the meeting because the Chapter’s rule was that the dead voted by document or not at all.
It took four hours, and the thing to understand is that nobody in that room wanted it.
“Read the operative paragraph again,” said the Baroness.
Mrs Hollis read it again.
A working interrupted is not a working ended. It is a debt in default, and a debt in default is not forgiven; it is reassigned. If she is prevented at four, the obligation does not dissolve. It passes to whoever stands nearest it — her household, her Society, her heirs, and in the ordinary run of these things, the poorest women within reach of whoever inherits her papers. The only safe terminations are completion and spoliation. Of the two, spoliation is the only one we may use, since completion would deliver into her hands precisely the instrument we exist to deny her.
“That is a theological argument,” said Sidgwick.
“It is Anna’s argument.”
“It is Anna’s argument and Anna is dead and it is still a theological argument.” Eleanor Sidgwick had her hands flat on her knees. “I want to say this once, plainly, and then I will not say it again, because I can see where this meeting is going and I would like it in the book that I said it at the beginning and not at the end. There is no evidence that a working exists. There is no evidence that an oath was sworn. There is no evidence that an interrupted anything can be reassigned to anybody. I have spent twenty years looking for one — one — instance of the supernatural that survives examination, and I have never found it, and I do not believe in this one either.”
“Then there is nothing to decide,” said Mrs Hollis, “and we may all go home.”
“No. There is a great deal to decide, and it has nothing to do with whether the thing is true.”
“Explain that.”
“She believes it.” Sidgwick looked up. “That is the whole of it. The Russian woman believes there is a debt of five, and she has killed four people on the strength of that belief, and she is the most inventive and least stoppable person any of us has ever met. If she stops at four she stops because she has lost her nerve or her legs, and both come back. And if she resumes — in a month, in a year, in Naples, in Madras, in some city where we have no correspondent — she will do it in a condition of total impunity, because the world has decided she is a joke, and we built that.”
The Baroness put down the trumpet.
“We built that,” she agreed.
“We built it in this room. In February. By vote.” Sidgwick’s voice did not change at all; that was the worst of it. “So the question is not whether an occult account stands open. The question is whether a woman who has killed four people believes her account stands open, and what she will do about it, and whether anything short of making it impossible for her to believe it will stop her.”
“And spoiling it does that,” said Mrs Hollis slowly.
“Spoiling it does that. If the fifth happens and it is not hers — if it is done by another hand, in another manner, and done so excessively that no reading of it can be made to resemble a rite — then her working is not completed, it is ruined. There is nothing left for her to finish. Whatever she thinks she swore, she cannot now pay it. The door she has been trying to open is bricked up by somebody else and she can stand in front of it for the rest of her life.”
There was a silence of some length.
“You are describing,” said the Baroness, “the murder of a woman who has done nothing, in order to cure another woman of an opinion.”
“Yes.”
“Say it in those words for the book.”
“I have just said it in those words,” said Eleanor Sidgwick, “and Mrs Hollis will write it down, and I would be obliged if she wrote down that I did not flinch from the formulation, because I will be reading this page for the rest of my life.”
At the third hour Mrs Hollis unfolded a square of newsprint she had brought with her — the facsimile the Telegraph had run of the letter the Central News Agency had received in September, the one signed in red — and read out, without any particular inflection, the name that was by now in every mouth in England.
“Jack the Ripper.”
“Ms,” said the Baroness.
She had used a form of address that would not come into common use for the better part of a century; she was, in most things, early. But the other two understood it on the instant, which is the whole of the point — they were the only room in England that could have understood it — and it went round the way the best things do, half a second late and then all at once, and the three of them laughed. Properly. The Baroness from the shoulders, Mrs Hollis behind her hand, and Eleanor Sidgwick last and most helplessly, the way the gravest person in any room laughs hardest once it has finally got her.
It lasted perhaps four seconds and then stopped as though a tap had been shut, because all three had arrived together at the same place, which was that it was the funniest thing any of them had heard in a year, and that they were the only people in England who could possibly find it so, and why.
“Write that we laughed,” said Sidgwick. “Not the joke — that we laughed, and the hour. I should like whoever opens this book one day to have it. It is the truest thing that will happen in this room today, and it is the single thing none of us will ever be able to explain.”
Mrs Hollis wrote one line. She did not read it aloud. It is on one of the three leaves that are no longer in the book.
They argued for two more hours and the arguments are all in the book and they are not interesting, because they are the arguments every committee in history has used to arrive somewhere it had already arrived.
That the woman would die anyway, in that street, that winter. That four were dead already and a fifth prevented five hundred. That the Chapter had means and was therefore obliged. That doing nothing was also a choice and would also be paid for by poor women, and at least this way it would be one.
Twice the Baroness said: we are the thing we oppose. Twice it was agreed that this was so, and noted, and the meeting went on, because agreeing that an objection is correct turns out to be one of the most efficient ways of getting past it.
The thing that actually carried it was none of these.
At about the fourth hour, Mrs Hollis — who had said almost nothing, who took the minutes, whose name was not Hollis — put down her pen and said:
“I should like to ask the Chair a question and I should like it off the record.”
“Nothing is off the record.”
“Then on the record. Mrs Sidgwick — if we do nothing, and she resumes in the spring, and there are nine, and in 1894 somebody opens a box and finds our February minute and sees that we knew, in this room, with a name and an address — what do you suppose will be said about four respectable women who had the whole of it in their hands and chose to be clean?”
Eleanor Sidgwick did not answer for a long time.
“That,” she said at last, “is the worst thing anybody has said in this room today, and it is the reason I am going to vote for it, and I want both halves of that sentence written down.”
They voted. It was unanimous. It took about forty seconds, after four hours.
Then they drew lots for the person, and the woman who drew it said at once that she would not, and could not, and that she had been wrong in February and was wrong now, and that she wished to resign from the Chapter with immediate effect.
And the Chapter sat for a further four hours.
Nobody shouted at her. Nobody threatened her. There was tea. Every one of them was kind to her, in turn, at length, for four hours, and at the end of it she said that she saw, and that she would do it, and she went home.
The minute for the second of November is eleven lines long, in Mrs Hollis’s hand, which is small, upright and entirely legible. The minute book was deposited under a will in a county record office in Scotland in 1934, in a bequest of family papers that nobody examined until 1979.
Present: three. Mrs K. deceased 22 Feb and her vote recorded as given in her lifetime by memorandum of April 1887, read to the meeting.
It is agreed that the Russian woman has ceased for the present and that her ceasing is not to be relied upon.
It is agreed that a working believed by its maker to stand at four is more dangerous than one spoiled at five, for the reasons rehearsed in Mrs K’s memorandum, which members have before them, and for the further reason given by the Chair, which is not occult and which members accept.
It is agreed, with the greatest reluctance, and no member dissenting, that the fifth must be made by us; that it must be made in such a manner that no part of its virtue can accrue to her or to her lineage; and that it must therefore be in every respect excessive, so that the account is spoiled and not merely settled.
The Baroness asks whether we have become the thing we opposed. The Chair answers that we have; that this is understood; that each of us will carry it; and that the alternative is that the door stands open for a century and is used by somebody who is not in this room and has not read Mrs K’s memorandum.
It is agreed that no member outside this room shall be told, and that the Chapter’s correspondents shall be told nothing whatever, now or at any future time.
The question of the person was then considered.
The minute ends there. The following three leaves have been cut out of the book with a blade, close to the stitching, by somebody in no hurry.
Chapter Twenty-Seven — Sherlock Holmes, 4 November, with a list
He came to Lansdowne Road at four in the afternoon and sent up a card with nothing on it but his name.
She had him shown straight up, which surprised him, and which she did deliberately, which he knew.
“Mr Holmes.”
“Madame Blavatsky.”
“Sit down. You will want tea and you will not drink it and we may as well have it in the room so that we both have something to do with our hands.”
He sat. He looked at the room for eleven seconds — the drifts of proof, the cigarettes, the stick, the rug over the legs, the hatbox under the window with correspondence on it — and she watched him do it and let him.
“I have a list,” he said.
“Everyone has a list. It is the century for them.”
“Eleven hundred and six names. It took the Metropolitan Police five weeks and it has, I should say, ended Inspector Abberline’s prospects of promotion.” He laid his gloves across his knee. “Your name is not on it. You are not a midwife.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Here I am.” Holmes put his fingertips together. “I am going to tell you what I have, madame, and I am going to be exact about what each piece is worth, because you are the only person I have met this autumn who will be able to tell the difference, and I should like one conversation this year that is not conducted with a man holding a hat.”
“Begin.”
“Fact. The Goulston Street chalk is not an English sentence. Three constables transcribed it and all three produced an English word where a French one would fit the letter-forms better, and the resulting sentence is grammatical in Russian and in French and nonsense in English. That is not proof of anything. It narrows the field from four million to perhaps forty thousand.”
“That is an honest number.”
“Fact. In the corner of Mitre Square there was a dry patch and a scuffed bollard, consistent with somebody sitting there for upwards of half an hour, through a constable’s pass, before the murder. Inference: that person did not arrive with the victim, and was not pursuing her, and in all probability was already in the square when she entered it. I cannot exclude a market woman, and I never shall.”
“Go on.”
“Fact. Between Berner Street at one o’clock and Mitre Square at approximately twenty-five past, there is a walk of three-quarters of a mile. Any reasonably fit adult does it in a quarter of an hour. Somebody did it in twenty-five minutes — slowly, that is, but not infirmly. Inference: your murderer walks badly, and walked anyway.”
“That is a very great deal of weight on a quarter of an hour.”
“It is. I have put no weight on it at all; I have merely declined to throw it away.” Holmes did not move. “And now the part that is neither fact nor inference, and I am going to say it once. You keep a hatbox under that window. There is a hosier’s paper band visible under the lid, and it is Gieves, and Gieves do not sell to women, and the lid has been lifted often enough that the correspondence on top of it has worn a channel in the dust. I am not going to ask you what is in it. If I ask, you will laugh, and I shall have spent my single question.”
Blavatsky took the tea. She did drink it.
“That is extremely good,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Not the tea, the reasoning; the tea is appalling, Mabel buys it from a man who robs us.” She set the cup down. “You cannot take any of that to a magistrate.”
“No. Let me be precise, since you will enjoy the precision. I could probably obtain a warrant — Abberline could swear an information on the chalk and the walk and a man’s reputation would do the rest. I could very likely get you before a magistrate. What I could not do is convict you, because every single item I have just recited is consistent with innocence, and because the moment your name is read out in a police court, the whole thing becomes a story about Madame Blavatsky, and the Hodgson Report is quoted by the defence inside ten minutes, and the jury laughs, and you are acquitted in a day and can never be tried again.”
“Then why have you come?”
“To ask you to stop.”
Blavatsky looked at the fire for a long moment.
“I have stopped,” she said.
“Forgive me, but—”
“I stopped on the thirtieth of September at one o’clock in the morning in a gateway in Berner Street, when a drunk Swedish woman said the words Contagious Diseases Act to me and I understood that I had wasted my entire life.” She said it flatly. “And then I went and killed Catherine Eddowes anyway, forty minutes later, because I could not bear to stand still and think. You may put that in your notebook. It is the only confession you will get, and you know what it is worth.”
Holmes did not move.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you are the only person in England who has worked any of it out,” said Blavatsky, “and within the week somebody is going to kill a fifth woman in Whitechapel, and it is not going to be me, and when it happens you are going to be certain that it was, and your being certain is the entire purpose of it.”
“Within the week. Which night?”
“I do not know. That is not evasion; I genuinely do not know. They will not use a calendar. They will use whichever night a particular room is empty and a particular woman is alone in it, and they will know that before I do, because they sit on the board of the refuge she will have applied to.”
“Who are they?”
“No.”
“Madame—”
“I will not give you the names,” said Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, “because you cannot touch them, and because if I give you three names and you go and knock on three doors, you will not stop the fifth, you will only make certain it happens on Thursday instead of Friday. Think, Mr Holmes. Who would they be? A Balfour. An Austrian baroness of eighty-one. A woman who takes minutes. Women who sit on the boards of the hospitals your witnesses are treated in and the refuges your witnesses sleep in and the asylums your witnesses are committed to. You could not get a warrant. You could not get an inspector to take the statement. You could not get a magistrate to look at you.”
“I have got rather good at not being looked at.”
“You have had four months of it,” she said. “I have had forty years. I have spent my life being the most notorious woman in London precisely so that nobody would examine me. They have spent theirs being the most respectable, for exactly the same reason, and theirs is better. Mine requires talent and a certain amount of luck. Theirs requires only a subscription to the right charity and a dead husband.”
Holmes stood up. He went to the window and stood with his back to her for some time.
“Indoors,” he said. “You said indoors.”
“I said it because it is the only thing I am sure of. All four of mine were in the street, because the street is where you do a thing quickly and leave. If you mean to spoil an account rather than settle it, you need hours, and a door that shuts, and nobody passing.” She closed her eyes. “God help her, whoever she is. That is the thing I cannot get out of my head. Of the five, the one it happens to will be the only one who had a door of her own.”
Interlude: The figure on the map
There is a thing that every writer on these murders does sooner or later, and it is always the same thing, and it is always wrong, and it is irresistible.
They get a map.
They mark the five sites. Then they draw lines between them and discover that the lines make a shape, and the shape is always significant, and the shape is never the same shape twice. It has been a cross. It has been a Star of David. It has been an arrow pointing at the Houses of Parliament, a vesica, the sign of Saturn, and — in one book published in 1976 — the letter M.
You can make a figure out of any five points on a city map. This is not mysticism, it is geometry: five points admit ten lines, and ten lines admit a shape that looks like whatever you were already thinking about. A man who believes in Freemasonry finds a square and compasses. A man who believes in the royal family finds a crown. The map is a mirror and it gathers dust while it reflects.
Blavatsky knew this better than anybody.
She knew it because she had spent her entire working life exploiting it. It is the engine of Isis Unveiled and of half of The Secret Doctrine: put enough correspondences in front of a reader and the reader will do the work of belief for you, free of charge, and will defend the result as his own discovery. She had made a fortune out of it and an international reputation and a great deal of trouble.
So when Robert Donston Stephenson published his article in December arguing that the sites formed a figure on the map, and when Mathers in his room off Great Queen Street set a compass to the thing and said look at the geometry, William — she read both, and what she felt was not alarm.
It was something much worse, and she wrote it down, in the margin of her own copy of the Pall Mall Gazette for the first of December 1888, which survives, in Russian:
They have found the figure. Of course they have found the figure. There was no figure. I chose Buck’s Row because she was alone, and Hanbury Street because the gate was open, and Berner Street because the club was singing and would cover a cry, and Mitre Square because I was already walking west and could not stop walking, and the fifth was not mine at all.
Four accidents and a committee. And they will draw lines between them for a hundred years and find a sign of power, because the alternative is to look at four women who were in that place at that hour for the same reason every poor woman in this city is in that place at that hour, which is rent.
This is the whole of occultism. We did not invent it. We only noticed it first and set up a stall.
And yet.
There is one piece of this that does not reduce, and it has to be set down, because the whole of this book has been an argument that there was no magic in it, and that is not quite true, and the not-quite is the part that matters.
Three weeks before Miller’s Court, on a night in late October, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky could not sleep and did not try. She sat in her chair in the Den with the lamp out and the fire low, with her ruined legs under a rug, and she did the one thing she could still do.
She went out.
Not in a carriage. Not in the way the Theosophical Society understood it, with chalked circles and Sanskrit and a great deal of incense, and not in the way the Golden Dawn understood it either, with godforms and vibrated names. She had been doing it since she was eleven years old in a house in Yekaterinoslav and she had never once been able to explain it, and the explanation she gave in print — the astral body, the silver cord, the subtle vehicle — was something she had assembled out of borrowed Sanskrit and French mesmerism to make it sellable, and she knew it, and it embarrassed her.
What she actually did, as she described it exactly once, to Mabel, was this:
I stop being the thing in the chair. That is all. It is not travelling. Nothing goes anywhere. It is that I ordinarily spend all day insisting I am Helena, and I stop insisting, and when I stop insisting I am also, a little, the street, and the fog, and the cat on the wall, and the man asleep over the brewery, and a girl in Poplar who is nine and awake and frightened, and I can hold it for perhaps forty seconds before the insisting starts again.
And nothing is learned. That is the part nobody will print. One learns nothing. There are no messages and no Masters and no instructions from Tibet and I have invented every one of those because people will pay for instructions and will not pay for the truth, which is that the universe is enormously large and entirely occupied and has nothing whatever to say to you.
What there is, is this. For forty seconds I am not the only one.
I have spent my life being the loneliest woman in Europe by construction, Mabel, by deliberate architecture, because I understood at nineteen that if nobody can get at you then nobody can stop you. And four or five times a year I let go of it for forty seconds and I am not alone, and then I come back and I am, and I light a cigarette.
And I think — I have thought this since September and I cannot get rid of it — I think that if I had done it more often, and for longer, and with less cleverness, I should never have been able to raise my hand to Mary Ann Nichols in Buck’s Row. Because you cannot cut a woman’s throat forty seconds after you have been her.
That is my entire occultism. Twenty-eight years, nine thousand pages, two continents, four languages and a reputation as the greatest humbug of the age, and what it comes to is: do not be alone, because being alone is what makes it possible.
Print the names. Do not be alone. It fits on a postcard and I have made a religion of the packaging.
On that night in late October she let go for rather longer than forty seconds, and she went over the city the way the smoke goes over it, flat and without intention, and she did not find a figure.
What she found, she wrote down afterwards on the back of a proof sheet, badly, in a hand that is nearly illegible because she was weeping:
Not five points. One field. The whole of it is one field — Dorset Street and Lansdowne Road and the committee room in Kensington and the office in Whitehall where the Order was drafted and the parish where they file the dead — all of it one thing, one organ, breathing, and the five are not points on it, they are the places where it broke the skin.
I have been looking for the heart of it for twenty-six years and there is no heart. It is a habit. Marie’s mother told me so in 1862 in four words and I did not believe her because four words cost nothing and I wanted a cathedral.
You cannot stab a habit. God forgive me. You can only outlive it, in public, in writing, in committee, with other people, for fifty years, boringly.
I have three years.
She had two and a half.
Interlude: Five women, going about their business
What follows has nothing to do with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She is not in it. She does not appear, she is not referred to, and not one of these five women ever heard her name. That is the point of including it. Everything else written about them in the last hundred and thirty years has been organised around the person who killed them, which is a second thing done to them without their consent, and this account has been doing it for two hundred pages.
In the middle of August, Mary Ann Nichols spent four shillings on a bonnet.
This was an absurd thing to do and she knew it was absurd and she did it anyway. Four shillings was two nights’ bed and a meal. She had been in service that spring in Wandsworth — a decent place, a Mr and Mrs Cowdry, teetotallers, who gave her a position out of the Lambeth workhouse and were kind to her — and she had stayed two months and then taken clothing worth three pounds ten and gone. She wrote to her father afterwards. The letter survives. It says: I hope you will forgive me. I am all right at present. I have not forgotten you. Her father read it out at the inquest and could not finish.
The bonnet was black straw, trimmed with black velvet. She showed it to everyone. She showed it to the deputy at Wilmott’s and to a woman in the kitchen at Thrawl Street and to Emily Holland on the corner of Osborn Street at half past two in the morning, drunk and happy, leaning on a wall, saying see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.
Nobody has ever been able to decide what to do with the bonnet. It is in every book. It is always presented as poignant. It is never presented as what it obviously was, which is a woman of forty-three, three days into a run of bad luck, buying the one thing she could still buy.
In the last week of her life Annie Chapman was trying to get to Vauxhall.
Her sister lived there and had money, a little, and had given her some before and might give her some again, and Annie had been saying for a fortnight that she would go on Monday, and then that she would go on Wednesday. She had a cough that bent her double. She had been in a fight with another woman at the lodging house over a bar of soap and had come off badly and had a bruise on her temple and one over her eye that was still showing when she died.
She did crochet work. Antimacassars, mostly, and she sold them, and she sold matches, and she sold flowers when there were flowers. Her friend Amelia Palmer said at the inquest that Annie was not given to drink as much as the others and that she would say I must pull myself together and go out and get some money or I shall have no lodgings, which is the most exhausting sentence in the whole of the inquest record, because she said it the way a clerk says I must catch the 8:40.
She owned three brass rings. A man had sold them to her as gold. She knew perfectly well they were not gold. She wore them anyway, and when anyone said anything she said they did the job, which they did, which was to be rings.
Elizabeth Stride, in the last week of September, had a quarrel about a man and won it.
This is barely recorded, because the inquest was interested in her movements and not her opinions. She had been living on and off with Michael Kidney for three years, and leaving him regularly — she had been gone for most of the year, in bursts, three weeks here, five there, always coming back and then always going again — and Kidney told the coroner, with a straight face, that he had sometimes padlocked the door to keep her in, and that she always got out anyway, and the coroner did not ask the obvious question and nobody since has made much of it.
She cleaned for the Jewish families in Devonshire Street and was liked there. She spoke Swedish, Yiddish and English. She told everybody she had lost a husband and nine children on the Princess Alice, which was a lie of considerable craft — she had picked a real disaster, in the right year, with six hundred and fifty real dead, and she told it with a detail about the mast that made people put their hands over their mouths.
She told it, as far as anyone can tell, because it converted a woman who had been a prostitute in Gothenburg at twenty-two into a woman who had been a mother. It is the single most understandable thing anybody does in this book.
On the night itself she was wearing a flower pinned to her jacket — a red rose backed with maidenhair fern. Somebody had given it to her. Nobody has ever established who, and it is nice to think that the one unexplained fact in that whole over-explained night is a present.
Catherine Eddowes spent the last week of September hop-picking in Kent and came back broke, which is what happened to everybody who went hop-picking in Kent.
She went every year with John Kelly. It was a holiday with wages attached and there were seldom wages. They walked back to London, got in on the Thursday, and had between them the price of one bed; so Kate went to the casual ward in Mile End and Kelly took the bed at Cooney’s, and on the Friday she pawned his boots for two and sixpence and they had breakfast, and he said at the inquest, in that flat way men have at inquests, that they had had tea and sugar and that was all.
On the Saturday she told him she was going to Bermondsey to find her daughter Annie and get a few shillings off her. She did not know that Annie had moved specifically to avoid being found, because her mother always wanted a few shillings.
So she did not find her. And she got drunk instead — comprehensively, publicly, on the pavement in Aldgate High Street, where she drew a crowd by doing an impression of a fire engine.
That is in the police report. A woman of forty-six, on the last day of her life, with no money and no daughter and no bed, standing in the road doing a fire engine for strangers.
She was good at it, apparently. They had to get two constables.
Mary Jane Kelly, who was twenty-five, spent the evening of the eighth of November trying to find the rent and then gave up and sang instead.
She was twenty-nine shillings behind. McCarthy, who owned the room and the chandler’s shop on the corner, had not pressed her very hard, which is why he sent Bowyer rather than going himself. She had lived in that room for ten months with Joseph Barnett, and he had moved out eight days before after a row about her letting another woman sleep on the floor — a woman called Julia, who had nowhere, which is the whole of the argument on both sides.
Barnett came to see her that evening and stayed an hour. He said at the inquest that he had told her he was sorry he had no money to give her, and his voice went, and the coroner let him sit down.
What is known about her is mostly what she said about herself, and almost none of it can be checked: Limerick, Wales, an ironworks, a collier called Davies killed in an explosion, a house in the West End, a gentleman who took her to France. She may have been inventing a life. Elizabeth Stride invented one. It was an available trade.
She was heard singing for about an hour after midnight. Three people heard it, through the wall and down the court, and they all remembered which song, because everybody knew it.
Scenes of my childhood arise before my gaze, Bringing recollections of bygone happy days.
A music-hall ballad about standing a long way from home and remembering a mother who is dead.
She sang it over and over. Mary Ann Cox heard it at one, when she came in out of the rain, and again at one o’clock when she went out, and she said it was still going.
Nobody in the court banged on the wall. In Dorset Street in November, at one in the morning, a woman singing was not a nuisance. It was a sign that somebody in the building was all right.
Book Five: The Wombed Aeon
Chapter Twenty-Eight — 13 Miller’s Court — 8 November 1888
She was twenty-five years old and she was the only one of them who was young, and she was the only one of them who had a door.
That is the fact that organises everything about Mary Jane Kelly, and it has been buried for a century under the other facts, which are all of them disputed. She said she was Irish, born in Limerick, raised in Wales. She said her father was a foreman at an ironworks. She said she had been married at sixteen to a collier named Davies who was killed in an explosion. She said she had been in a house in the West End and had been taken to France by a gentleman and had not liked it and had come back. Nobody has ever verified a single word of it. There is no record of her birth, her marriage, her family, or her existence prior to 1884.
She may have invented all of it. Elizabeth Stride invented a shipwreck. Blavatsky invented Tibet. It was a century in which a woman’s history was something that happened to her, and a number of them decided to write their own instead, and were called liars for it by people whose histories had been written for them by solicitors.
She was tall and fair and well-made and people remembered her as pretty, which in the literature of these murders is used as a kind of apology, as though the others had been less of a loss.
She had a room. It was twelve feet by ten, at the back of 26 Dorset Street, reached through an arch, and it had been partitioned off the back parlour, and the rent was four and sixpence a week and she was twenty-nine shillings behind. There was a bed, a table, two chairs, a small fire, and a print on the wall called The Fisherman’s Widow. The window had been broken in a fight with her man Joseph Barnett and stuffed with a coat, and the door had been locked since the key was lost, and you got in by reaching through the broken pane and drawing the bolt, and half of Dorset Street knew it.
Barnett had moved out on the thirtieth of October, after a row about her letting another woman sleep on the floor. He came to see her on the evening of the eighth. He stayed an hour. They parted friendly. He said at the inquest, and his voice broke, that he had told her he was sorry he had no money to give her.
At about midnight, Mary Ann Cox, who lived at number 5, came into the court and saw Kelly going into her room very drunk with a stout man in a billycock hat, and said good night, and Kelly said:
“Good night. I’m going to have a song.”
What she sang, and for how long, is set down elsewhere in this book, in the one chapter of it she is entitled to.
When Mary Ann Cox came into the court again at three there was no light and no sound.
That is the last thing anybody in the world can say for certain about Mary Jane Kelly, who was twenty-five, and had a door that did not lock.
Chapter Twenty-Nine — The same night
They went in a closed carriage: two old women who could not walk, and a third who could, and Mabel Collins, who drove, because she would not let anybody else and because she had never driven anything in her life and did it anyway, badly, down the Bayswater Road at half past two in the morning.
Marie Laveau had found it in three days, which is a long story in itself and involves a laundress in Bloomsbury, a Jamaican dispenser at the Middlesex Hospital, and the simple fact that the servants of great houses have their own post and it is faster than the Royal Mail. The Chapter had taken a room. Not in Whitechapel — in Spitalfields, three streets off, a respectable lodging kept by a respectable widow, paid a month in advance by a lady’s companion acting for a charitable committee concerned with the welfare of fallen women.
It was all perfectly documented. That was the thing about them. Every step of it was minuted, receipted, and above suspicion.
“Faster,” said Blavatsky.
“I am going as fast as the horse goes,” said Mabel.
“Then hit the horse.”
“I will not hit the horse, Helena.”
They came into Commercial Street at ten minutes to four. The rain had stopped. The gas was going blue and small in the lamps, the way it did before dawn, and Blavatsky — who had not been east of Regent Street since the thirtieth of September, and who had sworn in a room in Holland Park four days before that she would never come again — looked out of the window at Dorset Street and said:
“It is the worst street in London.”
“It’s a street,” said Marie Laveau.
“They call it that. In the papers. The worst street in London. They have been calling it that for nine years, in print, every few months, as a kind of feature. The worst street in London, with photographs.” Her hands were shaking. “And nobody has ever once asked the obvious question, which is: if you have known for nine years exactly which street is the worst, and precisely where it is, and you have the richest empire in the history of the world — then what are the nine years for?”
Mabel stopped the carriage at the archway.
There was a light in the court.
Not in number 13. In number 13 there was no light at all. The light was two doors down, a candle behind a curtain, and as they watched, it went out.
Blavatsky got out of the carriage.
There was no mystery in it and the mystery has been manufactured since. She had perhaps ten minutes of walking left in her that month and she spent four of them in Miller’s Court, and she was carried up the stairs of her own house afterwards by Mabel and a cabman, and she did not get out of bed again until the twenty-second of November.
Mabel Collins put it more plainly than anybody: People ask me how she walked. She walked the way you walk on a broken ankle to get your child out of a fire. Anybody can do it once. You simply do not do it twice.
She was in the court for four minutes.
She did not go through the arch alone — Marie Laveau went with her as far as the corner and stopped there, because she had been asked to, and because somebody had to be able to swear afterwards where everybody had been.
The door of number 13 was shut. The pane was broken and stuffed with a coat as it always was. There was no sound at all.
Blavatsky reached through the broken pane, as half of Dorset Street knew you could, and drew the bolt, and opened the door of the room six inches, and did not go in.
She stood in the doorway for perhaps forty seconds with the door open six inches and her hand on the frame.
Then she closed the door, and drew the bolt again from the inside through the broken pane, which is why the police had to break it down eleven hours later with a pickaxe, and walked back down the court, and was sick against the wall of the archway, and Marie Laveau held her head.
“Is it done,” said Marie Laveau.
“It is done.”
“How bad.”
And Helena Petrovna Blavatsky — who had killed four women with her own hands in ten weeks, who had opened bodies in the dark and taken parts away in her pockets, who had spent twenty-six years constructing an architecture of necessity around the worst thing she ever did — stood in the archway of Miller’s Court and said:
“They have made mine look like mercy. That was the point. That is what spoiled means.”
Thomas Bowyer, sent to collect the rent, looked through the broken pane at a quarter to eleven on the morning of the ninth of November. Inspector Abberline would not let the door be opened for two and a half hours because Sir Charles Warren’s bloodhounds had been sent for, and nobody had told the inspector that Warren had resigned the previous day and the dogs were no longer available. The room was photographed. The photograph exists. It will not be described here.
Doctor Thomas Bond, who examined the body, concluded that the work had taken two hours.
He also wrote, in a report to the Home Office dated the tenth of November, the first offender profile in the history of English policing, and in it he said that the murderer was a man of great physical strength and great coolness and daring, subject to periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania, probably solitary and eccentric, possibly of respectable appearance, probably in the habit of wearing a cloak, and quite possibly in receipt of a small private income.
He got every single thing right except the number of people and the fact that not one of them was a man.
Chapter Thirty — Baker Street, 10 November
“You were wrong,” said Watson.
Holmes was at the window. He had been at the window since seven.
“Yes.”
“I have never heard you say it so quickly.”
“I have never been wrong so completely.” He did not turn round. “I had her, Watson. I had her at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon in a warm room in Holland Park, and I had every chain of it, and she sat and drank my health and told me the one thing I did not believe, which was the only true thing she said, and I walked out of that house certain that she was lying and that I had six days to prevent her.”
“She told you?”
“She told me it would not be her. She told me it would be indoors. She told me it would be excessive, and she told me why it would be excessive, which was the piece I could not make fit and therefore discarded.” He put his hand flat on the glass. “I discarded it, Watson, because it required me to believe that four elderly ladies of unimpeachable character had voted, in committee, to commit the most appalling crime of the century in order to prevent somebody else from benefiting morally from a lesser one. And I could not hold the idea in my head. Not because it was illogical. Because it was vulgar. Because some part of me, which I had not known was there, refused to entertain a hypothesis in which the Honourable Mrs So-and-so was the one holding the knife.”
“Then go to Abberline.”
“With what?” Holmes turned round at last, and Watson, who had been at Maiwand and had seen men come apart in several ways, said afterwards that he had never seen that particular expression on a human face before. “I have a dead woman’s minute book which I have not got and could not obtain, a chain of inference I cannot utter without being certified, and the uncorroborated word of a Russian murderess who would deny every syllable from a witness box and would be believed, because she would make it funny. And the alternative, Watson — the only prosecution actually available to me — is to pursue the woman in Holland Park for four murders she did commit, which would take me five years, which I would probably lose, and which would in the meantime permanently and finally conceal the fifth.”
He sat down.
“There is no move,” he said. “I have looked at the board for forty hours. There is no move. It is the only position of that kind I have ever been in and I did not know they existed.”
“What will you do?”
Sherlock Holmes thought about it for a long time.
“I shall write it all down,” he said. “Every step. The timings, the chalk, the Berner Street walk, the corner in Mitre Square, the whole of it. And I shall put it in the tin box with the other things that cannot be published, and I shall tell you that when I am dead you may do as you like with it, and you will be dead too, and so will Abberline, and so will she, and so will the four of them, and in a hundred years a man in a reading room will come across it and will not believe a word.”
“And that’s all?”
“No,” said Holmes. “That is not all. There is one further thing and it is the only useful act available to me, and I have been thirty-six hours working out that it is useful.”
“What?”
“I am going to make certain that she lives,” said Holmes. “The Russian. I am going to see to it that nobody ever gets near her, that no file is opened, that no inspector with ambition and a theory ever gets a hearing — and I am going to do it by the simplest method in the world, which is the one she taught me herself. I am going to make sure that every time her name comes up in connection with this business, somebody in the room laughs.”
“Holmes, in God’s name, why?”
“Because she is the only living witness against them,” said Sherlock Holmes, “and the day she becomes credible is the day she hangs. And they know that. That is why they did it the way they did it. They have built a thing so monstrous that the only person who can name them would have to confess to four murders to do it, and would be laughed out of court before she got to the names.” He picked up the poker and looked at it and put it down again. “It is the most elegant piece of work I have ever been beaten by, Watson, and it was done by four women with a subscription list and a minute book, and not one of them has ever committed a crime that could be put to a jury, and they will all die in their beds surrounded by grateful relatives.”
They did.
Chapter Thirty-One — Eleanor Sidgwick, in a garden in Cambridge, the following spring
She was forty-four and she would live to be ninety-one, and she would be Principal of Newnham College, and she would be, by the universal testimony of everybody who ever worked with her, one of the most scrupulously honest people in English public life.
Blavatsky came in a bath chair, pushed by Mabel Collins, up a gravel path between beds of nothing in particular, in April, in the cold.
“You are dying,” said Mrs Sidgwick.
“Yes. Bright’s disease, the heart, the legs, and a quantity of tobacco. Two years, they say, which means three, because they always flatter the dying, it is the only flattery that costs nothing.”
“Will you have tea?”
“No.” Blavatsky looked at her. “I have come to ask you one question and then I shall go away and we shall never meet again, and the question is not why, because I have read your Chapter’s doctrine and I understand it perfectly and in every particular except one I agree with it.”
“Ask.”
“The three leaves.”
Eleanor Sidgwick’s hands stilled in her lap. It was the only thing about her that moved in the whole conversation.
“You cut three leaves out of the minute book,” said Blavatsky. “The entry for the second of November ends the question of the person was then considered, and then there is a blade mark. Why cut them out? You minuted the decision. You minuted the Baroness asking whether you had become the thing you opposed. You minuted the reasoning. You are the most honest woman in England and you left all of that in. So what was on the three leaves that you would not leave in?”
Mrs Sidgwick looked at the garden for a while.
“We drew lots,” she said.
“I assumed as much.”
“No. You do not understand. We drew lots, and then the person who drew it said that she would not, and could not, and that she had been wrong in April and was wrong now and would resign.” Her voice did not change at all. “And the Chapter sat for four hours. And at the end of four hours we did not release her and we did not replace her. We persuaded her. Four hours, madame, in a drawing room, by argument, with everybody being extremely kind. And she went and did it, because we had made it impossible for her not to, and she came back, and eleven days later she went into the river at Battersea, and the inquest said accident, and the Chapter sent flowers.”
The garden was very quiet.
“I cut out the three leaves,” said Eleanor Sidgwick, “because they contained her name, and because she had a sister who is alive, and because I decided — alone, without a vote, which is the only improper thing I have done in twenty years — that the one thing I could still give her was that she should not be the person who did it. The Chapter did it. We have all got it. I would rather carry a fifth of a monstrous thing than let a dead woman carry the whole of it in a book in a record office in a hundred years’ time.”
“That is a kindness,” said Blavatsky.
“It is a falsification of the record. I have never done such a thing. I have spent my life insisting that the record is the only defence anybody has.” She folded her hands. “And I would do it again, and that is what I have instead of sleep.”
Blavatsky nodded slowly.
“Mrs Sidgwick. One more and then I go. You were right. About the method. About all of it. I want you to hear me say it, because you will not hear it from anybody else and because I have had seven months to arrive at it and I am not a woman who concedes.” She was breathing badly. “You said that she who kills to liberate has liberated nothing but her own hand. You were right. I have proved it on four bodies and you have proved it on a fifth, and the only difference between us is that I did it out of grief and you did it out of principle, and I am no longer certain which of those is the worse engine.”
“Nor am I,” said Eleanor Sidgwick. “And I have thirty more years of it to find out in.”
She had forty-six.
Chapter Thirty-Two — Lansdowne Road, that night — April 1889
“Ask me,” said Blavatsky.
Mabel Collins stood at the end of the bed with a candle.
“I don’t want to.”
“You have wanted to since the eighteenth of September when you found the hatbox and put the correspondence back on top of it in the same disorder, which took you four minutes and which was the most skilful thing you have ever done, and you have been wanting to for seven months — it is April, Mabel, I have counted them too — and I am going to be dead inside three years, and if you do not ask me now you will ask me for the rest of your life in rooms where I am not.”
Mabel set the candle down.
“Did you love them?”
Blavatsky’s eyes opened.
“That is not the question I expected.”
“I know. Everyone else will ask you why. I am asking you whether, at the moment, in the street, with the knife — whether you loved them.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t.”
“Mabel—”
“Don’t say yes to that. Say you hated them, say you despised them, say they were nothing to you, say they were symbols — I could carry any of those, I have been rehearsing carrying them since September.” Her voice went. “Not love. If you loved them it’s not a madness, it’s not a possession, it’s not a working. It’s just a thing a person did, deliberately, to someone she was fond of, four times, with a reason she’d made up.”
“Yes,” said Blavatsky. “It is exactly that. I am sorry. I will not lie to you about this one thing and it is the only kindness I have left and it is a very poor one.”
Mabel Collins sat down on the edge of the bed.
They were quiet for a long time.
“Why did you never tell me?” she said at last. “In twenty-six years. Before any of it. Why did you never once say: Mabel, there is a thing I swore in New Orleans.”
“Because you would have talked me out of it,” said Blavatsky, “in about forty minutes, in 1886, over supper, without raising your voice. I knew that. I have always known that. I did not tell you precisely because you were the one person capable of stopping me, and I did not want to be stopped, and I have had seven months to understand that the whole architecture — the oath, the Masters, the Chapter, the geometry, the fifteen hundred pages — was scaffolding erected around a single decision not to let anybody talk me out of it.”
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said.”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to confess?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the four of them,” said Blavatsky. “If I confess, I hang, and I deserve to hang, and I would rather like to hang, which is the strongest argument against doing it. And the moment I hang, the fifth is mine too. All of it. The entire thing closes into one mad Russian woman and a cape, and it is a story, and England loves that story, and it will tell it for a hundred years and never once look at the room.” She turned her head on the pillow. “There are two hundred thousand people living four miles from the Bank of England in conditions that killed those women long before I got to them. And for nine weeks this autumn, the whole Empire looked at it. The Lancet. The bishops. Shaw. For nine weeks. And the instant they are given a face to hang it on, they will stop looking, and the rookeries will still be there in 1920. I will not give them the face. It is the only useful thing I have left and it costs me the gallows, which I want, which is how I know it is the right one.”
“That’s a very convenient morality.”
“It is extremely convenient. It is also true. Both things, Mabel. Always both things. That is the entire trouble with me and it always was.”
Chapter Thirty-Three — The fifth seal
The Secret Doctrine was published on the first of November 1888, in two volumes, by the Theosophical Publishing Company, Limited, 7 Duke Street, Adelphi, in an edition of five hundred copies, priced at one pound twelve and six.
It sold out before publication.
It is, by any reasonable standard, an extraordinary book: fifteen hundred pages of cosmology, comparative religion, invented scripture, genuine scholarship, outright theft, visionary synthesis, and some of the worst organised prose in the English language. It argued that matter and spirit are one substance, that consciousness is prior to the physical, that evolution is not blind, and that the universe has a purpose — at a moment when the entire weight of European science was moving the other way. It influenced Yeats, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Scriabin, Gandhi, and a generation of people who would have been appalled by each other.
It also contains, in the middle of volume two, in the course of a long and furious passage about the Fall and the nature of generation, a short section that has puzzled every commentator who has ever read it, because it is in a different voice and has nothing to do with anything around it.
It describes an age to come. It does not call it the Age of Woman. Blavatsky disliked that phrase to the end of her life and said so in a letter to Olcott — the Age of Woman is what a man would call it, it is a season, it implies a turn, it implies that we are to have the next dance — and she used a different one, four times in the book, which no previous occult writer had used and which has never been satisfactorily traced:
the Wombed Aeon.
Not the aeon of the woman. The aeon with a womb. An age that can carry something and bring it out alive.
And the passage says — in a book otherwise entirely concerned with Himalayan Masters and root races and the chronology of impossible epochs — that this aeon cannot be purchased; that every attempt to buy it with a death is a loan taken against the poorest women alive and the interest will be paid by their daughters; that the only working which has ever opened it is the public, tedious, expensive, unglamorous work of naming; and that the magician who understands this will give up magic within the hour, because she will have realised that a subscription list is a stronger instrument than a knife and that this is the single most disappointing discovery available to a human being.
It was not in the book as it went to press. The Secret Doctrine was printed off on the first of November 1888, eight days before Miller’s Court, and the passage is not in the first impression; collectors know this and have always assumed a printer’s accident. It appears first in the second impression of 1889, on four leaves that do not match the gathering, inserted at page 410 in a rebuild the publisher charged her forty-one pounds for and that she paid out of her own pocket in a year when she had none.
Nobody has ever been able to explain why she bothered.
In the archive of the Theosophical Society there is a sheet of foolscap in Blavatsky’s hand, undated, headed only v. ii, insert at p. 410, which was clearly the draft of that passage, and on the back of which, in the same ink, somebody has written out five names in a column:
Mary Ann Nichols, 43 Annie Chapman, 47 Elizabeth Stride, 44 Catherine Eddowes, 46 Mary Jane Kelly, 25
and underneath, in Russian:
Print the names. It is the whole of the art. I was forty years finding it out and a girl of forty-one told me in a fortnight for the price of a subscription. Teach it to Besant. Teach it to anybody. It is the only thing I know that is worth anything and I paid five lives for it and it was not mine to pay.
The sheet was catalogued in 1907 as autograph fragment, unidentified, poss. memorial verse.
Chapter Thirty-Four — 19 Avenue Road, St John’s Wood — 8 May 1891
She died on a Friday afternoon of influenza, in a chair, at sixty, with her legs under a rug and a cigarette unlit beside her, in the middle of an argument.
The household kept the day afterwards as White Lotus Day and has kept it every year since, and they read aloud from the Bhagavad Gita and from The Voice of the Silence, and they have no idea.
Mabel Collins was not in the room. They had quarrelled publicly in 1889 — a real quarrel, over the authorship of Light on the Path, conducted in print, extremely ugly, ending in a libel action and a complete and permanent breach. Half of it was genuine. Half of it was constructed by both of them with enormous care over several months, because Marie Laveau had said one thing before she went back to New Orleans and had said it twice to be sure:
Separate. Not next year. Now, publicly, over something stupid, in print, where everyone can see it. There is going to be a day, child, maybe in thirty years, when somebody opens a box and works it out, and on that day the only thing between you and the rope is that everybody will remember you two hated each other.
They never spoke again. Mabel Collins lived until 1927. She wrote forty books, campaigned against vivisection, and was good at it.
Annie Besant was in the room. She was handed, at the end, a sealed envelope with instructions not to open it for twenty years, and she honoured that to the day, and opened it in 1911 in Adyar, and read it, and sat with it for an afternoon, and burned it in 1912 — and then, in a lecture in Madras the following year, departed entirely from her text to say something that her stenographer took down and that nobody understood:
They will tell you that the great work is secret. It is not secret. The great work is a list of names, printed, with ages, where everybody can see them, and it is unbearably dull, and it is the only thing that has ever moved an inch of this world, and the people who tell you otherwise are selling you a knife.
Her last words, Blavatsky’s, according to the three people present, who agreed about nothing else, were:
“Keep the link unbroken.”
According to Annie Besant, who was the only one of the three who had been sitting close enough to hear the rest of the sentence, and who did not repeat it for twenty-two years, and then only once, to a woman in Madras who wrote it in a diary:
“Keep the link unbroken. Do not let my last incarnation be a failure.”
Chapter Thirty-Five — The making of the Beast, 1891–1904
He was fifteen when she died and he read the obituaries in his uncle’s house with his heart going like a bird.
They were, almost without exception, contemptuous. The Times gave her four inches. The Pall Mall Gazette, which had published Besant’s review three years earlier, printed a piece on the Hodgson Report and the word impostor appeared twice. The New York Times called her the most remarkable woman of the age and could not resist adding and the most unscrupulous. The Westminster Gazette would run a series five years later demolishing what was left.
The Dry Chapter’s sentence had been carried out in full. It took them nine years and it worked completely and it is still working, and if you say the name Blavatsky in a room of educated people in any country on earth you will get, nine times in ten, a small smile — the exact small smile that Anna Kingsford designed for her in a drawing room in Kensington in 1888, by committee, with minutes.
Edward Alexander Crowley, fifteen, cut out every obituary, and pasted them into a book, and under them wrote:
They are laughing. Why are they all laughing so hard and so long at one fat old woman who has been dead a week? Nobody works this hard at a joke. You do not spend nine years demolishing a nobody.
Something is being covered. I do not know what. I shall find out.
He went up to Cambridge. He climbed mountains, badly and famously. He joined the Golden Dawn in 1898 under the name Perdurabo and quarrelled with Mathers within three years and took Mathers’s order apart in the courts with a thoroughness that is still taught, and he spent the whole of that time asking the same question of every old magician he could get in a room: what was she actually doing in 1888?
Mathers said: nothing; she was a conduit; a drainpipe has no notion of rain.
Westcott said: she was finishing a book.
Yeats said, over whisky, in 1900, carefully: I think she was the only one of us who had ever actually done anything, and I think it was something frightful, and I think that is why she drank the way she did and talked the way she did and never once stopped moving her hands.
And an old woman at a meeting in Bayswater in 1902, who gave her name as Mrs Hollis and who was almost certainly not Mrs Hollis, said to him in a doorway:
“Young man. You are the boy who wrote to Scotland Yard in October of ‘eighty-eight.”
He went cold to the soles of his feet.
“How could you possibly—”
“We kept a copy,” she said. “We kept copies of everything. It is the whole of our method and it is why you have never heard of us.” She patted his arm with a gloved hand. “You were right, dear. Entirely right, in every particular, at twelve years old, and nobody has ever told you so, and I am told you have grown up to be a very tiresome man about it, which is exactly what happens. I am old and I am going to be dead by Christmas and I find I would like one person to have been told.”
“Told what? Told what?”
“That it was a woman,” said Mrs Hollis. “And that you were out in your count.”
“Out in my count—”
But she had got into a cab, which is a thing women of that age could do in a crowded street in broad daylight without any man present afterwards being able to describe them.
He spent twenty-one years on out in my count, and worked it out, in the end, the way he worked out everything: too late, in public, drunk, and correctly.
Epilogue
The Abbey of Thelema, CefalΓΉ — April 1923, evening
The sea had gone the colour of a bruise and somebody down the hill was burning olive prunings and the smoke came up over the cliff in a flat sheet.
Pettifer had filled forty-one pages. His hand hurt. He had stopped asking questions around four o’clock and had simply been writing, which is the only skill the trade actually requires.
“So,” he said. “Blavatsky.”
“Blavatsky.”
“Jack the Ripper was Madame Blavatsky.”
Crowley lit a cigarette off the lamp. He was forty-seven and enormous and in four years he would be bankrupt and in nineteen he would be dying in a boarding house in Hastings on heroin prescribed by a doctor, and right now, at this moment, on this cliff, he was the happiest he had been in a decade, because somebody was writing down what he said.
“No,” he said.
Pettifer looked up.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said it was a woman. I have been saying so since I was twelve years old — twelve, and three weeks short of thirteen, and I have rounded it up for thirty-five years, which tells you everything about me you require.” Crowley blew smoke at the ceiling. “But I was out in my count. An old woman in a doorway in Bayswater told me so in 1902 and I have spent twenty-one years finding out what she meant, and I found out, and I am going to tell you, and this is the part you will certainly not print, because this is the part that is actually dangerous.”
“Go on.”
“There were five killings and there were not five killers and there was not one killer. There was one woman who did four, for a reason she had carried for twenty-six years out of a city under military occupation, and who found out in a gateway in Berner Street at one in the morning that the reason was rubbish — not evil, not insufficient, rubbish, a thing she had made up to put her grief in — and who went and did the fourth one anyway, forty minutes later, because she could not stand still.”
He held up a second finger.
“And there were four women who did the fifth. Four. In committee. With minutes, and a vote, and apologies for absence. The best women in England — and I do not say that with a sneer, boy, write it down straight: the best. Honest, brave, unbuyable women who had spent their lives arguing that you must never, ever purchase the future with a woman’s body, and who then, having drawn lots and spent four hours persuading the loser not to resign, purchased the future with a woman’s body. And they did it specifically and precisely so that nobody would get anything out of it. They made it worse than anything the Russian had done, deliberately, as a matter of doctrine, in order to spoil the account.”
“That’s monstrous.”
“It is the most moral act of the nineteenth century,” said Crowley, “performed by the most moral people in it, and it produced the worst thing anybody did in that entire ten years, and I want you to sit with that for a minute before you decide where you stand, because every man I have ever told it to has decided where he stands in about four seconds and he has always been wrong.”
The smoke came up over the cliff.
“Why do you care?” said Pettifer. “Honestly. Why has a man like you spent thirty-five years on this?”
Crowley was quiet for long enough that the journalist thought he had given offence.
“Because I was twelve,” he said at last, “and I said the true thing at a dinner table, and they sent me to bed without pudding. And I decided that night, on my back in an attic in Leamington Spa, that if being right got you nothing then I would be enormous instead. Loud and filthy and famous and impossible to ignore. The Beast. My mother’s word, and I took it, and I have spent a fortune and a liver and two marriages and the whole of my reputation on making certain that no one would ever again be able to look straight at me and see nothing.”
He leaned forward. In the lamplight he looked, briefly, exactly like a very clever fat boy who has been sent upstairs.
“And she did the opposite,” he said. “Precisely the opposite. The same century, the same city, the same hunger, the same quality of mind — and where I made myself a spectacle so that I could not be overlooked, she made herself a joke so that she could not be seen. And hers worked. Mine never did. Mine has got me a crumbling abbey, a reputation as the wickedest man in the world, which is pure journalism, and you, sitting in that chair, waiting for me to say something about orgies so that your editor will pay for your boat.”
“You’ve not said anything about orgies.”
“No,” said Crowley. “Haven’t I.”
He stood up, with difficulty, and went to the window.
“Here is the last of it and then you can go and find your dinner. The old woman in the Bayswater doorway — I have thought about her for twenty-one years. She said: we kept copies of everything, it is the whole of our method and it is why you have never heard of us. And that is the thing, boy. That is the entire thing. Everybody in my trade spends their lives looking for the secret word, the secret name, the sealed book, the inner order, the Master in Tibet. I have looked. I have looked in nine countries and I have paid for it with everything I had, and the one genuine piece of magic I have ever established the existence of was performed by a fat Russian woman standing still in a corner of Mitre Square while a policeman looked through her — and her art consisted entirely of understanding, better than anyone else alive, exactly how little the world was prepared to see.”
“And the four?”
“The four were better magicians than she was,” said Crowley, “and they never did a single piece of magic in their lives. They had minute books. They had subscription lists. They had the names and ages of fourteen hundred matchgirls printed in a newspaper, and a fortnight later the company caved, and that did more than every grimoire in Europe.” He laughed, once, without much in it. “That’s the joke, and I have been the butt of it since 1888. The real Work is clerical. It is a committee and a printed list and forty years of being extremely boring in public. I could never have done it. I haven’t the character. I’d rather be the Beast in a ruin on a cliff with a journalist, and I knew that about myself at twelve, and the whole of my life has been a very long argument with a boy in an attic who was right.”
Pettifer closed the notebook.
“They’ll never print it,” he said.
“No.”
“My editor wants the orgies.”
“Your editor is a sound man and he knows his market.” Crowley put out the cigarette. “Print the orgies, boy. Print every word of the orgies, and put in the goats and the blood and the woman who went mad, half of which I made up this morning. And then, when you are old — and you will be old, it happens with no warning whatever — go to a record office, and ask for the papers of a family in Scotland, and look for a minute book for the years ‘eighty-six to ‘ninety-one, and turn to the second of November, and you will find a page with three leaves cut out of it close to the stitching, by somebody who was in no hurry.
“And on that day you will remember a fat man on a cliff in Sicily, and you will say: the old fraud was right.
“And I shall have been dead for forty years, and I shall not hear it, and it will not do me the smallest good.
“And that,” said Aleister Crowley, “is the only kind of being right there has ever been. I told you so. Mind the floor on your way out. It bites.”
A Note on the Record
This is a novel. Its central claim is false. What follows separates what is documented from what is disputed, what is invented, and where the chronology has been bent on purpose. A book about the power of records should not be vague about its own.
I. Documented
General Order No. 28 was issued by Major General Benjamin F. Butler in New Orleans on 15 May 1862, and provided that any woman of the city who insulted or showed contempt for a Union officer or soldier should be “regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” It was raised in the British House of Commons. Jefferson Davis proclaimed Butler an outlaw. It lapsed with Butler’s recall in December 1862 and was never formally rescinded.
The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 permitted the detention and forcible internal examination of any woman in certain English garrison and port towns whom a policeman believed to be a prostitute. No proof was required. The campaign against them was led by Josephine Butler and the Ladies’ National Association; the Acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was in London in 1888, at 17 Lansdowne Road and later at 19 Avenue Road. The Secret Doctrine was published in two volumes on 1 November 1888. She had been declared “one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history” by Richard Hodgson in the Society for Psychical Research’s report of 1885. She died on 8 May 1891.
Mabel Collins lived in Blavatsky’s household and collaborated with her on Light on the Path. They quarrelled irreparably in 1889, in a dispute conducted partly through the courts.
Anna Kingsford, physician and president of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, died on 22 February 1888. Emma Coulomb produced the letters that broke Blavatsky’s reputation in India. Eleanor Sidgwick, nΓ©e Balfour, was a member of the Society for Psychical Research and later Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.
Annie Besant organised the Bryant and May matchgirls’ strike in July 1888, which the company settled in a fortnight; she reviewed The Secret Doctrine in 1889, joined the Theosophical Society that year, and later became its President and president of the Indian National Congress.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in March 1888 on the authority of a cipher manuscript and a German adept who did not exist. Aleister Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley on 12 October 1875; his father died in 1887; his mother called him the Beast.
Robert Donston Stephenson was a patient at the London Hospital during the murders and published an article in the Pall Mall Gazette of 1 December 1888 arguing that they were the work of a ritual magician. Joseph Merrick lived in the attic of the same hospital and died in April 1890.
Bram Stoker managed the Lyceum for Henry Irving in 1888 and published Dracula in 1897.
Constable Edward Watkins passed through Mitre Square at 1:30 a.m. on 30 September 1888 and found Catherine Eddowes there at 1:44. Eddowes had been released from Bishopsgate police station at 1:00 a.m., having given her name as Mary Ann Kelly, and had been arrested earlier that evening for drunkenness in Aldgate High Street. Elizabeth Stride was found in Dutfield’s Yard at about 1:00 a.m. with her throat cut and no other injury. The chalk writing in Goulston Street was erased on the orders of Sir Charles Warren before it could be photographed; three surviving transcriptions differ. Mary Jane Kelly was heard singing “A Violet from Mother’s Grave” after midnight on 9 November. Dr Thomas Bond’s report of 10 November 1888 is generally regarded as the first offender profile in English criminal history.
George Bernard Shaw’s letter to the Star observing that an independent genius had done more for the East End than fifty years of argument was published on 24 September 1888.
The biographical details of the five women in the interlude — the bonnet, the brass rings, the Princess Alice story, the rose and maidenhair fern, the hop-picking, the pawned boots, the fire engine, the twenty-nine shillings of arrears — are drawn from the inquest testimony.
II. Disputed, or weaker than this novel implies
Blavatsky’s American years are largely unverifiable. She claimed at various times to have travelled in the American South, to have studied voodoo in New Orleans, and to have been wounded in battle, in accounts that contradict one another. The novel treats one version as true. There is no evidence that she ever met either Marie Laveau.
In 1986 the Society for Psychical Research published Vernon Harrison’s detailed critical reassessment of the Hodgson Report in its Journal, concluding that Hodgson’s methods were seriously defective. That is a major scholarly reversal within the Society’s own pages. It is not the same thing as a formal institutional retraction, and an earlier draft of this note said so and was wrong.
Walter Sickert has been accused of these murders in several books on evidence that would not detain a magistrate. He appears here as a painter, which is what he was.
The identity of the woman who emptied a chamber pot over Admiral Farragut is not established.
III. Invented
Everything that matters.
Blavatsky did not kill anybody. There was no oath in New Orleans, no bowl, no ledger, no debt of five. The Dry Chapter did not exist; neither did the Thursday Committee, Mrs Hollis, the Baroness von Ehrenfels, the minute book, the memorandum of April 1887, or the three cut leaves. Anna Kingsford never threatened anyone with ridicule in a drawing room in Kensington. Eleanor Sidgwick, who was by every account one of the most scrupulous people in English public life, did not conspire at murder, and the portrait of her here is a slander committed in the service of an argument.
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character and did not investigate anything.
Also invented: the ties and the hatbox; Mabel Collins’s discovery and her silence; the Goulston Street reading of juges; the parcel sent to Donston Stephenson; Marie Laveau II’s voyage to London; Blavatsky’s visits to Joseph Merrick; her meeting with Annie Besant in September 1888; the “Wombed Aeon” passage and the inserted leaves at page 410; the list of five names on the back of a proof sheet; the sealed envelope given to Besant; Blavatsky’s last words beyond “keep the link unbroken”; the boy Crowley’s letter to Scotland Yard; Mrs Hollis in the Bayswater doorway; and the journalist Pettifer, CefalΓΉ, 1923.
All dialogue is invented, including the dialogue of people who really said things, who did not say these.
IV. Deliberate departures
Annie Besant met Blavatsky in 1889, after reviewing The Secret Doctrine. The novel moves their first meeting to September 1888 and makes the matchgirls’ strike its occasion, because the argument of the book required Blavatsky to hear about the strike while the murders were still running.
Mabel Collins was probably not Blavatsky’s lover. Nobody knows. The novel decides.
The Whitechapel murders are presented here as the work of five people, four of whom are elderly women. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. It is a story about what the nineteenth century could not see, and it required a culprit the nineteenth century could not have seen, and that is the only argument for it.
The five women in this book were real and were killed and did not consent to becoming a figure of speech. Their names, which are the only part of this that is worth anything:
Mary Ann Nichols, 43. Annie Chapman, 47. Elizabeth Stride, 44. Catherine Eddowes, 46. Mary Jane Kelly, 25.
— G.C.
