Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (26 page)

“You want room?” He was stout and wore the sort of clothes common to London bankers. His hair was as sleek as mink's fur, topped by a black skullcap. “I landlord.”

I halted, intimidated by his size, his foreignness, and the suspicion in his dark eyes. “No, I am not looking for a room to rent.”

“Then what you want?”

“I'm looking for Dr. Niall Kavanagh. Does he live here?”

“He gone.”

I was disappointed, even though I'd known it was too much to expect that I would find Dr. Kavanagh on my first try. “When did he go?”

The landlord shrugged.

“Do you know where he went?”

“No.” Irritation darkened the landlord's features. “Why so many people come ask about Kavanagh?”

I shouldn't have been surprised to hear I wasn't the first. “Who else asked you?”

“A Russian. He didn't give name.”

Excitement filled me. “What did he look like?”

“Why I should remember?”

I felt sure the Russian was John Slade. He must have found out about this house from one of his mysterious sources. I had picked up his trail! “When was he here?”

“Two, three months ago.”

My heart sank: Slade's trail was very cold. Another troubling thought struck me: “Has anyone else asked about Dr. Kavanagh?”

“Two English policemen. They don't wear uniform, they don't say they were police, but I know police. They the same in every country.”

I had expected to hear that three Prussians—Wilhelm Stieber and his two henchmen—had come. I was very glad that they had-n't. “Did they say why they wanted him?”

“No, and I don't ask. I don't trust police, I don't poke my nose in their business. I tell them same thing I tell you: I don't know where is Kavanagh. Now I am tired of talking about him. Go!”

He pointed emphatically toward the street. His belligerence and my disappointment were too much for me. Tears welled up in my eyes. “I'm sorry to have bothered you,” I said humbly.

I started to tiptoe away, but the landlord underwent a sudden transformation. His anger melted; his hard gaze softened. “Please don't cry. I don't mean hurt you. I'm sorry.”

It appeared that some things were the same in every culture: some men cannot bear to see a woman cry. Many women take advantage of this fact, but I had always thought myself above employing feminine weakness to get what I wanted from the stronger sex. But now my involuntary use of the tactic served me well.

“I make it up to you,” the landlord said. “When Kavanagh go, he leave some things here. I show you. All right?”

My tears dried up. If Kavanagh's things should provide clues to his location, this peace offering would be a gift beyond compare. “Did you show them to the police or the Russian?”

“No. I don't go out of my way to help them. But for you, madam—” The landlord beckoned me down a flight of steps to the cellar. “Come.”

I know better than to go into cellars with strange men, but I ignored prudence. We stepped into a black cavern that smelled of damp and decay. The landlord lit a lamp and shone it around the room. The cellar looked to be a repository for items that no one wanted, that had accumulated since the house had been built. Picture frames, washboards, a laundry mangle, broken furniture, and pieces of machinery stood on the earthen floor. wooden boxes were stacked high against the brick walls. The landlord fetched two boxes that looked newer than the rest. He set them and the lamp on a desk that was missing its drawers and said, “I wait outside.”

My heart beat fast with anticipation as I opened the first box. It contained oddly shaped glassware—cylinders with measurement markings etched on them; flat, round dishes with lids; a rack of tiny tubes; a globe with a long, angled neck. If I were educated in science, they might have given me an idea as to the nature of Dr. Kavanagh's work; but alas, I have no scientific knowledge whatsoever.

The second box held dirty clothes. I wrinkled my nose as I examined them. Kavanagh had left nothing in the pockets. In the bottom of the box lay a journal bound in black leather. Under it was a mess of papers. I opened the journal. The pages were warped, some stuck together. The first bore the inscription, “N. K.” The next pages contained lines of handwriting that was full of dramatic flourishes. The ink had run in many places, and even where it had not, the text was unintelligible—scientific terms, symbols, and equations. Not until I had perused the journal almost to its end did I find any entries written in plain English.

The words “Mary Chandler” leapt off the page at me. That was the name of one of the women murdered in Whitechapel! My heart began to pound as I saw two other familiar names. The entries read:

I puzzled over these cryptic notations. It appeared that Niall Kavanagh had known all three murder victims. His notes suggested a scientific rather than a sexual interest in them. I remembered Dr. Forbes telling me about the students who'd claimed they'd been poisoned by Kavanagh. They thought he'd made them unwitting subjects in his experiments. Had he done the same with Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson?

The three women had belonged to the most impoverished, desperate class of humanity; their kind was at the mercy of the men they solicited. A nauseous chill crept into my stomach as I envisioned the scene that must have taken place on the dates when Niall Kavanagh had his “initial contact” with each woman:
On a dark, lonely street in Whitechapel, she stands under a gas lamp. His shadowy figure approaches her through the fog. She calls an invitation to him; he stops; they bargain. She takes his arm and walks off with him, never imagining what evil designs he has in mind.

I gazed upon the last word of each entry:
sacrificed
. One didn't need to be a scientist to deduce what that meant. A parson's daughter understood the word in all its permutations. To sacrifice was to destroy or surrender something for the sake of something else, as Jesus had sacrificed his life on the cross. To sacrifice meant to make an offering of a human, animal, food, drink, or other valuable thing, to a deity, as Abraham had been willing to slay his son Isaac at God's bidding.
Sacrifice
had age-old associations with violence and murder. As my lips silently formed the word, I could almost taste blood. A thunderous shock reverberated through me.

Niall Kavanagh had killed those women. I'd come looking for a scientist who'd invented a gun that could change the world, and I'd discovered the identity of the Whitechapel Ripper.

J
OHN SLADE WAS INNOCENT OF THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS, I now knew beyond doubt.

Even as my spirits soared with elation, the weight of reason hauled them down to earth. The entries in the journal were not a confession of Niall Kavanagh's guilt. I reread them, hoping to find evidence I'd missed. What exactly had happened between Kavanagh and the women? Had he poisoned them as he'd done his students? Was that what “exposed” meant? I surmised that he'd examined the women in the manner that a physician examines his patients; but what had Kavanagh been looking to find?

Nothing in the entries answered my questions. I turned to the next page. It bore a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman, simple but skillfully done. She was naked, her fleshy body and her breasts and genitals accurately depicted; yet the drawing didn't look erotic. It reminded me of the illustrations in a medical text I'd once seen. Under the drawing was written “C. Meadows.” Her curly hair and facial features were lightly sketched. The detail rendered in the heaviest line was a Y-shaped mark, its fork on her chest, its vertical line running down her stomach. A sense of dread gripped me. As I turned the page, my hand trembled.

Another drawing of the same woman appeared, but here her torso was depicted as if the skin, underlying muscles, and ribs had been cut away. I knew that scientists performed dissections in front of public audiences, but I'd never witnessed one, and I'd never seen the inside of a human body. A tube ran down the woman's throat and branched into two lobes that appeared to be her lungs. Blood vessels fed into a fist-shaped heart. Another tube extended from her throat to a curved pouch that I took for her stomach, which was connected to a mass of coiled, sausage-like bowels. I felt as fascinated and ashamed as if I were poring over indecent pictures. I remembered that the Whitechapel Ripper had mutilated his victims, and shock hit me as I comprehended what I was seeing.

Niall Kavanagh had dissected the women he'd killed, as part of his scientific experiments. Here was the evidence. The police must not have recognized what he'd done; they'd thought the murders and mutilations were sheer, meaningless carnage. A wave of nausea sloshed through me. I turned to the last page, even though I dreaded finding something worse.

It showed an enlarged view of the woman's body from waist to groin. The bowels were parted to show a pear-shaped organ attached to two thin tubes, each ending in a clot of fibers and a little round sac. At first I couldn't imagine what these organs might be. A lady is conditioned not to think of what is inside her body that cannot be mentioned in public. A detail at the side of the page showed the pear-shaped organ removed from the abdomen and cut open. Inside was nestled a creature like a salamander, with a black spot for an eye. Realization struck.

These were the female organs. The pear-shaped one was the womb, the creature inside an unborn baby. The Whitechapel Ripper's victims had been found with their female organs missing. Niall Kavanagh had removed them before he'd dumped the bodies in the streets. Catherine Meadows had been with child. How would Kavanagh have known, and how could he have drawn the child unless he'd sliced her womb and looked inside?

Although my powers of imagination serve me well when I write my stories, they were my undoing now. I pictured a nude woman laid on a table, and a knife slicing through her flesh. Hands reached inside the slit, pushed aside red, glistening bowels. They cut out the female organs and held them aloft, crimson and dripping. My mental picture was so vivid that dizziness swept over me. Black dots stippled the room and coalesced. On the brink of fainting, I grasped the desk for support. I bent my head and breathed deeply until the blackness receded. As I hastily closed the journal, I became aware of voices outside.

“Kavanagh not live here anymore,” the landlord said.

Another man asked a question, too quietly for me to discern his words, but his voice was too familiar, and the last one I wanted to hear.

“I don't know,” the landlord said impatiently.

The man spoke again. He was Wilhelm Stieber. He was still looking for Niall Kavanagh, and had somehow tracked him to this house.

“No, you can't look around,” the landlord said.

I crouched, paralyzed by terror that Stieber wouldn't take no for an answer.

“This private property,” the landlord said. “You trespassing.”

I crept to the stairs and looked up them. The open door framed a rectangle of daylight. In it stood four men, my view of them limited to their trousers and shoes. The landlord's backed toward the house as those of the other men advanced on him. Stieber had brought his two henchmen. Would the landlord tell them I was here?

Looking around, I saw a door at the back of the room. I ran for it, then reversed and picked up Niall Kavanagh's journal and papers. I fled through the door just as footsteps descended toward the cellar, and I bolted up slippery stairs to a fenced yard. Racing for the gate, I dared not look behind me: if I should see Wilhelm Stieber, I would die of fright. I burst through the gate; I ran through yards behind other houses. I didn't stop until I reached the Whitechapel high street. There I stood, panting from exertion, amid the crowds.

A block away was an omnibus—a long carriage drawn by a team of horses. It stopped to let out passengers. I hurried to it, climbed aboard, paid the fare, and sat beside an old woman with a basket of smelly fish. I traveled a mile or so; the London scenery blurred past as I watched to make sure that no one was following me. Then I felt safe enough to let down my guard and attend to the prize I'd stolen. I examined the papers. Anticipation turned to disappointment: page after page was covered with equations and scientific language. I found reprints of articles from learned publications, and incomprehensible diagrams featuring lines, arrows, numbers, and geometric figures. The two sheets I could read were a grocery list and a bill from a tailor.