The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (9 page)

I ran home as quickly as I could, across Battersea Fields, and as soon as I entered our lodgings I knew that my old life had already come to an end. I gathered the rest of my money from beneath the floorboards, and placed it neatly on my mother’s dirty bed. There was an old tin trunk against the wall, which we used as a seat when we were sewing together; it held nothing but some scraps of her religiosity, some ragged hymnals and the like, which I gladly chucked out of the window. Then I took out all of our clothes, plain though they were, and folded them neatly within it. I could have carried it on my own shoulders, it was light enough, but I did not want to show myself as in any way unladylike; so I dragged it only as far as St. George’s Fields, where I hired a horse cab which took me to the New Cut for threepence.

Number 10, New Cut, was a neat little house in a new terrace, and I felt quite a princess as the cab came to a halt and I stepped out onto the pavement. The driver was a scrawny piece of meat, with a stovepipe hat to hide his baldness, but very gallantly he carried my tin trunk to the door. He had a little mustache, and I could not resist making a joke out of it when I gave him an extra penny. “Has your wife been punching you?” I asked. “There’s a bruise under your nose.” He put a hand up to his mouth, and rushed away.

“What is it?” As soon as I had knocked upon the door, I heard a female voice bellowing in the passage.

“It’s the new girl.”

“What is her name?”

“Lizzie. Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.”

“Is she from Dan?”

“Yes. She is.”

The door was opened suddenly by a man wearing a seedy frock coat and huge bow cravat, just like the comic singers I had seen in the Craven Street theater. “Well, my dear,” he said. “You look rather like a low-comedy granddaughter. Come.” Obviously I had been mistaken about hearing a woman’s voice: it was his own, but so high and tremulous anyone would have judged it to be of the opposite sex. “I’m putting you with Doris, the goddess of wire-walking. Do you know her?” I shook my head. “Lovely party. She can spin upon a penny. Great friend of mine.” I could tell from his flushed face, and his trembling hands, that he was a drinker; he must have been no more than forty, but he looked too frail to last. “I would carry your trunk myself, dear, but I’m prone to faintness of the arteries. That’s why I gave up the profession.” He was mounting the stairs, talking as freely and as gaily to me as if we had known each other for many years. “Now I’m a landman. Do you get it? Landlady. Landman. I don’t like landlord, do you? It sounds too beery, too saloony. I’m known to all the hall folk as Austin. Simply Austin.” I ventured to ask him what he once did upon the stage. “I was a blacked-up turn, and then a funny female. I only had to pop on a wig, and they would all yell. I killed them stone dead every time, dear. Here we are. Goddess? Are you in?” He put his ear to the door in a very extravagant manner, and waited there for a few seconds. “And answer came there none. I think we’ll just push our way through, don’t you?” He knocked again, and then slowly opened the door upon a scene of great disorder: there were plumed hats and pieces of corsage, lace drawers and crumpled skirts, tights and shoes, littered all over the room. “She is not a very neat creature,” Austin said. “She has the soul of an artist. Your bed is over there, dear. In that corner.” There was indeed a second bed, although it was covered by clothes, hat boxes and clippings from the newspapers. “I wondered what
happened to that teapot,” he said, and removed a brown enamel article from what was now my pillow. “Doris loves her tea.” He was about to leave the room when he suddenly turned upon his heels, in what I later discovered to be a comedy way, and said in an exaggerated whisper, “It’s ten shillings a week to share. Dan says he’ll take it out of your packet. Is that all right?”

I nodded. I felt that I had already entered a new life, and was so delighted by my transformation that I even looked with pleasure upon the confusion of this little room. As soon as Austin had gone I cleared the bed and placed all my clothes upon a nearby chair and side table. There were some withered flowers in pots upon the windowsill and, when I looked out, I could see the new railway and a row of warehouses beneath it. It was all so astonishing and so unfamiliar that I really felt as if I had been taken out of the old world and raised to some blessed place of freedom. Even the lines of the railway track seemed to glow.

“I know what you’re thinking,” a woman said behind me. “You’re thinking, why ever did I leave my little back room in Bloomsbury?”

“I come from Lambeth. Lambeth Marsh.”

“It’s just a song, dear.” I had turned around to find myself addressed by a tall young woman with very long dark hair. She frightened me a little, because she was dressed all in white. “I’m the goddess of wire-walking,” she said. “Doris to you.” She took my hand very kindly, and we sat down together upon her bed. “Dan told me to expect you. Why, you look half-starved.” She went over to a little chest of drawers and came back with a bag of monkey nuts and a bottle of lemon fizz. “I’ll make us some nice toast and butter in a minute.” We sat together for the remainder of the afternoon; I told her that my parents had died when I was very young, that I had earned my living as a seamstress in Hanover Square, and that I had run away from a hard mistress before I had found lodgings with a sail-maker in Lambeth
Marsh. After that, I had been found by Uncle and Dan Leno. Of course she believed my story—who would not?—and throughout my narrative she patted my hand and sighed. At one point she began to cry, but then wiped her eyes, saying, “Pay no attention to me. It’s just my way.” We were having a very comfortable cup of tea, after my story, when there was a tap on the door.

“Five o’clock, dears.” It was Austin’s high, womanly voice. “Overture and beginners, all down for the first scene.”

“Don’t mind him,” Doris whispered to me. “He’s in the inebriate way. Do you know what I mean? Only the one?” Then she called out to him, “All right, my darling! We’re getting ourselves fully prepared!” She got up from the bed, and began undressing in front of me. My mother had always hidden herself when she washed, so furtive and ashamed of her flesh was she, and I stared at the sight of Doris’s fair skin and breasts. She was what they call in our trade statuesque. I washed myself quickly as well, and, when she saw the plain gown I had put on, she gently draped a fine wool coat around me before we left the house together.

I did not know how or when I was to begin my work but, obedient as ever, I went with Doris to the Washington. It must have been near our diggings, but she put out her hand and waved to a brougham. At first I thought she had hired it but when the driver looked down, and addressed her familiarly as “Goddess,” I realized that he must have some connection with the company. “Is it Effs tonight,” he said, “or the Old Mo?”

“We’re starting at Battersea, Lionel, and then we’re working our way around.”

“Who’s the new cub?”

“Never you mind, and keep your eyes on the road.” As soon as we had entered the brougham Doris whispered to me, “Lionel
may seem very nice to you, dear. But he is not a gentleman of the old school.”

We arrived at the Washington just a few minutes later and, as we hurried towards the side door, a young man approached Doris with a notepad. “Can I have a word?” he said. “I’m from the
Era
.” He was well-spoken, and his eyes were as pale as the marshes. Of course I could never have known that one day he would become my husband; that he was John Cree.

S
EPTEMBER
12, 1880: What a wonderful spread in the
Police Gazette
, although the rough engravings scarcely did justice to the business. They had depicted me with a top hat and cloak in general theatrical representation of a swell or masher—I suppose that I was grateful for the recognition, since only a member of my class could have performed such a delicate feat, but I would have preferred more authenticity in the composition. Dear Jane’s body could also have been more perfectly drawn, and lacked certain subtle effects of light and shade; mezzotint or stipple are so helpful in conveying atmosphere without the general prettifying of color, although I suppose that an act such as mine can be represented by the simple force of the engraver’s old-fashioned burin. There was also something wanting in the style of the newspaper reports: they smacked too much of the Gothic, and were woefully inadequate in syntax. “Two nights ago, a human fiend perpetrated the foulest and most horrid murder ever seen in this city …” and so forth. I knew that the common people preferred to turn their lives into the cheapest melodrama, with the taint of the penny gaff, but surely the more educated classes of the newspaper world might aspire a little higher?

And then I recalled the scholar. It was an easy thing to kill a whore, after all, and there could be no real or lasting glory in it. In any case, so strong is the public lust for blood that the whole city would be waiting in anticipation for the killing of another flash girl. That would be the beauty of the Jew: it would throw
all into confusion, and lend such splendor and excitement to my progress that each new death would be eagerly awaited. I would become the model of the age.

S
EPTEMBER
16, 1880: By a stroke of luck my darling wife, Lizzie, decided to spend the evening with a friend in Clerkenwell—one of her old theatrical pals who, I suspect, has become an inebriate. But it gave me a wonderful opportunity to create my little surprise. I knew Scofield Street well enough, and I perfectly remembered the house where I had left the Hebrew on that foggy night, so I decided to spend the day in the Reading Room to complete my study of Mayhew before embarking on my quest. I saw him in his customary place; he did not notice me at all, but I marked him well. When he left his seat to consult the catalogue, I made my way over to his desk as casually as if I were merely walking by—who could resist the temptation of seeing the last book on earth such a man was about to read? He had left one volume open, and its title was obscured—I glimpsed only tables of cabbalistical and hieroglyphical figures which were no doubt the offspring of some Asiatic mind. But there was also a new book lying on top of a catalogue from Murchison’s in Coveney Street, so I knew that he had just purchased it. It was entitled
Workers of the Dawn
; I could not make out the author’s name as I passed by, but it seemed a peculiar choice for a German scholar. Then I returned to my own place and read Mayhew until my friend left the Reading Room and walked out into the dusk.

There was no need to follow him, since I knew his destination, and on such a fine night I decided to stroll towards the river with my bag of tricks. (Perhaps someone would need the services of a surgeon along my path!) I came up by Aldgate and the Tower before turning down Campion Street. It was so clear a
night that I could see the towers of the churches of the East, and it seemed to me as if the whole city were trembling in anticipation of some great change; at that moment, I felt proud to be entrusted with its powers of expression. I had become its messenger as I walked towards Limehouse.

There was a gas lamp at the top end of Scofield Street where it comes out by the Commercial Road, but the patch which led down towards the river was now quite dark: Number 7, with the brown door, was situated just on the borders of light before the street melted into shadow. It was a common lodging house, and the door was still unbolted: I glanced up at an oil lamp gleaming within the upper story, and judged pretty well where I would find my scholar bent over his books. I climbed the stairs softly so as not to disturb his labors, and then knocked gently on his door three times. He asked who it was.

“A friend.”

“I know you?”

“Surely.”

He opened the door a fraction, and I pushed it wide with my bag. “Good God,” he whispered. “What is that you want from me?”

It was not my Jew; it was another. But I showed no surprise and stepped forward with my left hand outstretched. “I have come to make your acquaintance,” I said. “I have come to discourse with you about death and everlasting life.” Then I held up my bag. “Herein lies the secret.” He made no move, but watched me as I opened it. “You and I both have a sense of the sacred, have we not? We understand the mystery.” I took out the mallet and, before he could cry out, I struck him down. I had given him a powerful blow but he was not dead yet; the blood soaked down through the threadbare carpet from his open wound, and I knelt beside him to whisper in his ear. “In your
cabbala,” I said, “all life is an emanation from
Ain Soph
. So now flee from the dregs of matter, I pray you, and return to the light.” I took off his black robe and his cotton undergarments; there was a basin of water on a table beside his bed, and reverently I washed him with my own handkerchief. Then I brought out my knife and began the work. The body is truly a
mappamundi
with its territories and continents, its rivers of fiber and its oceans of flesh, and in the lineaments of this scholar I could see the spiritual harmony of the body when it is touched by thought and prayer. He lived yet, and sighed as I cut him—sighed, I think, with pleasure as the spirit rose out of the opened form.

I had a great desire to cut his penis, and so complete the rituals of his faith. I took it off and then, holding it up to the oil lamp, inspected its intricate curves and lines. Here, truly, was another work of God. There was an open book beside the lamp, and I placed the penis upon it—where better for the generative organ of a scholar to be found? But what was this? On the page was delineated the image of some mighty demon and, beside it, a short history of the golem. I knew that such a thing was fashioned like a homunculus, from red clay; but now I read with interest how it preserved its life by feeding from the human soul. Of course it was fanciful nonsense, one of those bugbears from the night of the world, but there was an amusing coincidence in the blood of the scholar running across the very name of the creature as if it were a richly delineated page from an illuminated manuscript. The severed penis and the golem had become one. I left the room and hurried down into the street; when I came to the corner of Commercial Road I was about to set up a cry of “Murder! Oh God! Murder!” when a black cat of ill fortune crossed my path. So I shook my fist at the animal from hell, and kept my peace.