Ripper Read online

  I stopped.

  “On the other side of Annie, that bed belonged to Polly. He’s goin’ down the row, he is.”

  “Dotty … ”

  “Don’t hush me. He’s after us.”

  She let go of my hand and settled back on her pillow. She stared ahead, up to the ceiling.

  “Don’t matter much if he gets me.” She closed her eyes. “I’m not leaving ’ere alive. Whether he gets me or the disease gets me. As the Bible states, ‘There is a time to die.’ ”

  “Miss Sharp, Miss Abbie Sharp!” someone shouted.

  I looked up, recognizing instantly the girl I had given money to outside the grocer’s. She was calling out to me from the entrance of the second floor ward. Simon stood beside her, slight amusement on his face. Clutching the bundle of dirty bedsheets to myself, I hurried away from Dotty’s bed to meet them.

  “Miss Mary Kelly here says she has repayment for you.” Simon’s mouth twitched.

  “I’m sorry, I saw you go into the hospital earlier,” Mary said, slightly out of breath as if she had been running. “I went through the first floor looking for you. A nurse—large, big-boned lady, dressed like you but she had a cross around her neck … ” Mary had to pause to take a few breaths. “She confronted me and said the prostitutes were on the second floor.”

  Sister Josephine. I suppressed a laugh. Simon’s lovely long mouth broke out into a smile.

  Mary’s nose wrinkled in irritation. “Prostitute! I couldn’t believe it. Anyway, I told the lady that I had borrowed money from a young woman who I had seen walk in here, and that I had to find her. She told me to get out. I started to run up the stairs, seeing that you weren’t on the first floor and this kind gentleman here … Doctor … ?”

  “Simon.”

  “Simon.” She turned back to me. “He listened to me when I described you and said he thought Abbie Sharp might be the one who I was looking for. So—” She held out her hand with a few coins. “Here is your money back.”

  Then, proudly, “I told you I would repay you.”

  “Thank you.” I could tell by her expression that refusing the money would do no good.

  With a hurried stride, Dr. Bartlett and Dr. Buck entered the second floor ward. Dr. Bartlett possessed his usual poise, but his expression seemed troubled. I noticed Abberline’s hulking form shadowing the doorway.

  Dr. Bartlett spoke to me quietly. “I am afraid, Abbie, that I am going to have to take Dr. St. John away from you. I have no concerns; you will be quite capable here on your own for the time being. If you need any help, Sister Josephine is downstairs, and Dr. Siddal should arrive at any time.”

  I felt Abberline’s unnerving gaze upon me and tried to suppress my unrest.

  “Simon,” Dr. Bartlett continued, “I would like you to accompany Dr. Buck and myself to St. George’s Mortuary. The district surgeon has some ideas, and I would very much like to hear your opinion.”

  “Most certainly. If Abbie feels comfortable by herself here?”

  “Quite. I’ll summon Josephine for assistance if I must.”

  Mary stood by us, wide-eyed, taking in the whole conversation with curiosity. I wondered if she knew about the murders.

  As Dr. Bartlett, Dr. Buck, and Simon left the ward, I stared around at the many patients.

  “Do you have a job?” I asked Mary.

  “No.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “Yes … very much.”

  I was certain that I was breaking the rules, but it was an unusual day. And I knew that Dr. Bartlett would pay her for her work.

  I extracted an apron from a nearby supply closet and thrust it into her arms.

  “You’re employed.”

  Mary provided invaluable help on the second floor. She proved to be both efficient and stern with the patients. When Sue refused to take her medicine, Mary raised her voice to such a shrill pitch that I heard her from the other side of the ward. “Fine. Then I won’t empty your chamber pot. Sit in your piss all day. See if I care.”

  Sue promptly relented and drank the medicine.

  I felt curious about Mary’s story. She appeared desperate for money, but I did not think she was a prostitute—she had taken such genuine offense at Josephine’s words. Yet I heard her gossiping a bit with the patient Cate Eddows, and she seemed somewhat familiar with East End life.

  We conversed briefly while stacking some folded sheets in the closet.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked. “Your accent’s Irish.”

  “Is that a problem?” Mary’s expression hardened.

  “It was just a question. I lived in Dublin for seven years.”

  She sniffed. “Two months. I’ve been here two months.”

  “Me too, actually.”

  I saw her glance at me sideways and relax her expression a bit.

  “Your friend the other day—the one who found the job,” I continued. “Did he come over with you?”

  “Aye, my friend Scribby and his sister Liliana both came with me. There wasn’t much for us in our village in Ireland; we thought we needed a change of scenery. London seemed exciting. Liliana found a job right away working at the Ten Bells pub on Commercial Street. Scribby and I have had a bit of a harder time. But now that we’re both employed, we might be able to make a go of it here. Liliana lives with me, and she has barely been able to make our rent.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Miller’s Court.” She shot me another look and I said nothing. Several of our patients lived in that area near Dorset Street—a particularly dodgy district. If Mary had trouble paying rent in that area, she must be hurting for money. I decided to speak to Dr. Bartlett about making her position permanent.

  I worked nonstop alongside Mary until early afternoon, when things slowed a bit and I checked the supply closet. We were completely out of one of our most necessary antiseptics: carbolic acid. Simon had told me earlier that the largest supply closet in the hospital—

  actually, more of a small room that also served as the hospital’s pharmacy—was on the fourth floor, attached to the laboratory.

  The fourth floor seemed quiet except for some whispers coming from an office on the right side of the hall, not far from the stair landing. I saw the large open doors to the laboratory at the end of the hall, near Dr. Bartlett’s office.

  As I started toward them, the voices from the open office seemed harsh and excited, as if the speakers were arguing. I realized that part of the reason I could not understand the conversation was because it was not spoken in English. I paused, listening.

  German. My knowledge of German was extremely poor.

  One voice belonged to Dr. Buck. He must have returned already from the mortuary.

  I could not recognize the other voice.

  Suddenly, the voices broke off. I froze. They must have heard my footsteps.

  Max Bartlett suddenly stepped out of the office, an annoyed expression on his face. Then he saw me, standing only a few feet away, and the look immediately dissolved. He smiled.

  He shouted something in German back to Dr. Buck before descending the stairs.

  As I walked past the office doorway, I saw Dr. Buck sitting behind a desk, bent over several books laid out in front of him. “Hello, Miss Sharp.”

  He awkwardly adjusted his spectacles and seemed uncomfortable. A great taxidermied horned owl, perched on a nest on the short bookshelf behind him, caught my eye.

  “I hope that your work on the second floor is going well, Miss Sharp.”

  “Yes, quite. I have help now.”

  “Excellent. Let me know if I can do anything.”

  “Thank you.”

  As I proceeded toward the laboratory, I wondered about what I had overheard. Neither Dr. Buck nor Max had any h
int of a German accent. Why were they speaking in a foreign language?

  The laboratory was larger and more interesting than I had imagined. Shelves lined with glass tubes, bottles of colorful fluids, and odd-looking instruments covered every inch of the walls. I saw dozens of labeled glass jars containing what looked like organs—though from humans or animals, I could not determine. One long shelf displayed jars of various fish specimens, such as shark and stingray fetuses, each organism suspended in blue liquid. Formaldehyde. The odor permeated the room.

  My eyes stopped at a giant, slablike table, on which a woman’s naked white corpse lay. Her hair was shaved off and her chest cavity opened. A stack of notes and a journal lay on the counter behind the table.

  I felt my body stiffen as an image of another corpse flashed through my mind. The vision lasted only a few seconds—I saw a woman’s naked, pale corpse floating in a large metal tub. The water surrounding her rippled red. Crude dark stitches stretched across her lower belly, along various places on her chest, and across her throat, and her graying brown hair billowed out like gritty tentacles from her face. Blurred figures shuffled around the body.

  The vision faded as I clutched the slab table and refocused on the corpse before me. I knew intuitively that in the vision, I was seeing one of the victims. Perhaps Annie Chapman, moments after her autopsy.

  Still shaking, not having had time to process too much of what I had seen, I heard water running loudly from a side room.

  William stepped out. He seemed surprised to see me. “If it were any woman up here other than Abbie Sharp, I’d be worried about her fainting,” he said.

  “As a woman, I take issue with that compliment,” I replied lightly, taking a deep breath and forcing myself to stop trembling.

  William returned to examining the chest cavity, alternating between looking at the open chest, checking his lightly bloodstained notes, and scribbling more notes into the journal.

  Something in the corpse’s left lung area interested William. He peered closer. “Interesting. This is what killed her. She has a blackening tumor in the lung. Small but quite malignant.”

  He wrote some notes.

  “Who is she?”

  William shrugged. “A corpse, donated to science. Family gave her to the medical school, so now she’s part of my own anatomy studies.”

  He moved across the table to where I stood. “Excuse me. I need to have a look at the right lung.”

  He bent over the corpse. I tried to ignore the cracking sound as he began breaking each rib with his hands. William turned around once again, his mouth twisted

  in amusement.

  Although I had seen plenty of blood and organs in Whitechapel Hospital, I could not feel unaffected by the sound of the breaking ribs, and this did not go unnoticed by William.

  “Don’t worry. When you become a surgeon, you’ll get used to it.”

  I thought that conversing might make me less queasy, but as I stared at the body, my mind had a difficult time getting away from the grotesque. I swallowed. “Dr. Bartlett and Dr. Buck took Simon to the mortuary to look at the latest victim. Dr. Buck is already back—I just saw him in his office. Do you know why Abberline would want them with him at the morgue?”

  William went back to writing notes.

  “Yes.” He peered again into the lung, and then began sketching a section of the lung into his notes. “Bagster Phillips, the district surgeon, seems to think that the murderer is a physician, or at least someone with anatomical knowledge.” Without looking up, absorbed with his sketch, he continued. “The speed at which the killer struck both victims was incredible, and he knew the exact locations of the organs he mutilated, particularly when he killed Annie Chapman. He removed her uterus, cutting it cleanly away from her abdominal cavity. Also, Dr. Phillips is nearly certain that a surgical knife was the murder weapon, similar to the one I am using here.”

  I stared at the sharp surgical blade laid on the table beside the corpse. A shudder swept through me as I recalled my vision of the victim, the long, stitched slashes across her body.

  “So why would Abberline bring Dr. Bartlett and Dr. Buck and Simon to the mortuary? Is he questioning Simon again? Does he consider Dr. Bartlett a suspect?”

  William clucked his tongue and lowered his voice before casting a glance toward the door. “No, no. Dr. Bartlett and Dr. Buck are above reproach. Abberline wanted them to view the body merely to confirm Phillips’ suspicions. I think that Abberline trusts Dr. Bartlett so much that he is confiding in him at every turn of the investigation. If anything, Dr. Bartlett has become an unofficial medical consultant.”

  “But why bring Simon?”

  William put down his notes, picked up the knife, and began slicing a small piece away from inside the lung tissue. “One of the reasons Dr. Bartlett is so respected, so admired as a physician, surgeon, and medical lecturer, is his unique relationship with his novice physicians. As you’re aware, he treats us, particularly his favorites, as colleagues rather than the subordinates that we are. He believes that he learns from us as much as we learn from him. I imagine that when Abberline asked Dr. Bartlett and Dr. Buck to accompany him, Dr. Bartlett insisted on including the fresh, unbiased eyes of one of his young physicians.”

  “Doesn’t that get a bit dicey, considering that Abberline has been questioning all of the physicians and medical students here?”

  “Probably,” William said, digging at something again in the lung tissue.

  “Dr. Bartlett is confiding in students … so I assume he does not suspect any of his own physicians in these murders?”

  “Exactly. He confides in all of us too much. That’s why I know all that I do about the murders. And I don’t think the murderer is anyone here, either.”

  Finally, William looked up from the corpse. “No one here is that interesting, strong, or clever.” He smiled at me. “Except perhaps you.”

  I heard a throat clear in the doorway.

  William’s eyes narrowed. “Why hello, Simon.”

  I turned to see Simon’s long figure in the doorway. I had never seen him cross. Mary stood beside him, equally angry. Staring from me to William, and then back again to me, she snapped, “I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

  Simon finally spoke.“William, don’t you think it’s completely unnecessary to dissect a corpse in front of Miss Sharp? None of our female staff would welcome this scene.”

  I spoke up in William’s defense. “I came here on my own accord, to get some supplies. The corpse really doesn’t bother me.”

  “Still,” Simon said, continuing to glare at William, whose hands and forearms were now very bloody as he probed deeper into the corpse’s lung. “You might have ceased your anatomical studies with Miss Sharp up here. Have a little decency.”

  Crack!

  Without breaking his gaze from Simon’s, William flashed a large smile as he cracked the last rib of the corpse.

  I suppressed a laugh with such difficulty, my chest ached.

  Simon merely turned to me. “Abbie, would you mind coming with me? We have a delivery downstairs.”

  After bringing the infant that Simon had delivered into the nursery, I stopped to check on Lizzie. Her crib lay in a stream of sunlight, and she was kicking her feet weakly.

  “How is she doing?” I asked Josephine.

  She came to stand beside me in the front of the crib. “She is not feeding well. Rose Elliot’s milk has dried up. Also, particularly at night, we are short-staffed and cannot give her all the special care that she needs.”

  My heart sank.

  Then a reckless plan entered my mind.

  Ten

  That night, after Richard, Ellen, and Grandmother had gone to bed, I slipped out of the house. Near the Thames, I hopped onto the back of a carriage heading east and reached the hospital before too very long.
Although I saw constables patrolling sporadically along Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street, no one questioned me about being out at night. I cynically observed that Scotland Yard seemed more interested in catching the murderer than in making sure women were safe from him.

  When I entered the hospital, patients slept soundly, and I did not run into a single nurse. Some light streamed down the stairs. Perhaps the few night nurses were busy up there. Either way, I made my way to the nursery, took a bottle, and fed Lizzie until about four o’clock in the morning, when I made my way home.

  The next morning, I could barely keep my head up at breakfast. I needed to find more time to sleep. Perhaps, after these nights that I worked at the hospital, I could leave a little earlier in the afternoons. Dr. Bartlett’s carriage would soon arrive for me and I felt as if I had already worked a full day.

  “Arabella? Are you unwell? Did you hear me?”

  I was so tired, I think I might have fallen asleep briefly at the breakfast table.

  “I asked you how you have liked your work at the hospital.” Grandmother’s thin lips pursed. After a quick look at my face, she put her morning spectacles on and resumed reading her morning mail.

  “You look awful, Arabella,” she added. “Absolutely awful. I only required that you work at the hospital for one week.”

  “I’m going to continue.”

  The eagle-eyed gaze and pursed lips again. “Very well. I’ll have my carriage bring you home at one o’clock today.”

  “Why?”

  “My official answer is that we are invited to tea at Lady Violet’s house.”

  “And the unofficial answer?”

  A great pause, as Grandmother put down her mail and took off her spectacles. She glanced toward the doorway and lowered her voice.

  “Lady Violet’s ward, Mariah, has been quite restless as her wedding approaches. When Mariah is restless, she … misbehaves.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Don’t let your imagination run too wild, Arabella. Violet is just concerned. That is all.”