The Whitechapel Club

Chapter 1

Late Fall 1889

The women were dead, of course. Dead and buried and lying in their graves an ocean away. Jenny knew all that and yet here they were, lying side by side in a Chicago alley, Emma Smith next to Martha Tabram next to Mary Ann Nichols next to Annie Chapman. Their dresses were a mercy, covering their slashed and punctured throats and the horrific mutilations of their bodies. Blood soaked their clothes, bled out into sticky pools on the cobblestones, and Jenny had to be careful where she stepped. She crossed gingerly over Annie and Mary Ann and Martha to crouch down next to Emma. Emma had been the first, the only one left alive, the only one robbed and raped, the only one not stabbed or slashed, the only one with a chance to identify her attacker. In the hours before she died, she said it had been two or three men that had brutalized her.

Two or three, Jenny thought. How could there be more than one of his kind?

It was first reported she had been done in by a street gang. It was the London newspapers that later connected Emma to Martha and Mary Ann. And it was the newspapers that had given the murderer his name.

But they never explained why Emma had escaped the knife.

That detail nagged at Jenny. She looked over her shoulder to the other three women, and felt her stomach drop. More women had been laid out in the alley. Five more, in fact, plus a woman's headless torso. A sound accompanied the new bodies - a thump thump thump, like the beating of a heart, only more insistent.

Jenny stood, her own heart beating faster. "Do you hear that?" she said aloud.

Annie Chapman huffed as she sat up on her elbows, exasperated. "We're dead, we're not deaf."

Jenny woke with a start in her attic room. The thump thump thump she'd heard in her dream was real. It came from the door, soft yet insistent. She could almost see Annie's piggy little face crinkled in amusement. He's here for you! But she knew that wasn't true. Killers didn't knock; they barged in.

Moonlight filtered through the octagonal window on the other side of the attic, making dark shapes of the boxes and cast-off furniture stored there. The knock came again.

She slipped on a robe and padded across the wooden floor. She opened the door and found Harry Townsend, the kindly old man who lived with his wife Ida in two rooms on the first floor. She opened her mouth to speak but he put an arthritic finger to his shriveled lips - shhhh. Jenny nodded, understanding he didn't want to wake Aunt Prue on the floor below. He motioned for her to follow him. Jenny gave him a questioning look. He frowned and ran his finger down his cheek, as though tracing tears from his eyes.

Jenny felt a panic rise in her. Had something happened to Mrs. Townsend? She was sickly, confined to a wheelchair, but had a fiery will. Mr. Townsend read her mind and shook his head no. He mouthed "Sabina," then leaned against the wall in the stairwell to let her pass.

Jenny hurried past the bedrooms of the second floor, avoiding the boards that squeaked, then down the next flight. What could drive Sabina out of her warm bed at this time of night? It had to be about Rupert. Everything was about Rupert these days. Did they have a fight? Had he called off the engagement? Worn the wrong tie to dinner?

She reached the entryway. The front door was ajar. She stepped out onto the wide porch and felt the cold bite of mid October through her thin robe and nightdress. She should have grabbed her blanket. And shoes.

Sabina Bauer paced the length of the porch, biting her thumbnail. They had been more like sisters than friends since they were ten years old. They'd met at the market, Jenny a lonely orphan living as a maid with an aunt who didn't want her, Sabina a sheltered middle class girl fascinated by Jenny's tales of traveling the countryside with her father. Then boys began buzzing around Sabina and she drifted away on a sea of parties and picnics. She'd met Rupert at the beginning of summer, and Jenny rarely saw her anymore. It was the natural order of things, Jenny knew, they would each marry and start families of their own. But it didn't make her miss Sabina any less.

"Hey, Bean," Jenny said.

Sabina turned. Her bright blue eyes were red and puffy. Her face, normally lit with an ethereal beauty from somewhere deep within her, twisted in torment. She fell into Jenny's arms.

"Oh Jenny!" she sobbed. "I'm sorry to wake you but I didn't know where else to go."

"It's fine," Jenny said.

"And please apologize to Mr. Townsend for me."

"He's fine, too. What's wrong, Bean? Is it Rupert?"

Sabina nodded.

"What happened?"

Sabina's face crumpled. "I don't know!" Fresh tears fell from her eyes. Jenny's heart broke. She held out her arms.

"Oh, honey, come over here."

She led Sabina to the porch swing, sat her down, and hugged her. Sabina regained a modicum of composure, sniffing back tears and turning something over in her hands.

"Something happened, Jenny, something to Rupert."

Jenny nodded. "Alright. What happened?"

"I don't know but I know it's bad, I know it is..."

"How do you know?"

Sabina dug a small box out of her coat pocket. "This was left for me today," she said as she handed it to Jenny. Jenny opened it. Inside was a man's gold ring with a flat red stone in the center and two small diamonds on either side. It was simple yet elegant. A feeling of dread wormed its way into Jenny's gut.

"Is this...?"

"Rupert's mourning ring," Sabina confirmed. "He never takes it off. Ever. A lock of his mother's hair is underneath the stone, you know how close they were."

Jenny nodded. She knew his parents were dead, although she had no idea if Rupert had been close to his mother or not.

"A man who loves his mother will love his wife," Sabina continued. "But now, now, now --" She gasped big gulps of air, hyperventilating, verging on hysteria.

Jenny hugged her tight, cooing softly in her ear. "It's okay, Bean. Whatever happened between you two, I'm sure it'll all work out for the --"

"Oh, Jenny," Sabina said, with a flash of annoyance. "If he had just left me I would be home crying in my pillow instead of bawling on your front porch."

"Then who left it?"

"I don't know. I found it on my porch, all wrapped up like a present." Tears threatened to spill from her eyes once more. Jenny squeezed her hand in a futile attempt to stop them. "Something's happened to him, Jenny. I can't find him anywhere."

"I'm sure he's fine, Bean. He's probably working --"

"No! He's not!" Sabina nearly shouted. Jenny made a gesture for her to be quiet, her eyes darting to the house, praying Aunt Prue wouldn't come out and find them.

Sabina lowered her voice and put an edge of steel in it. "He's disappeared, Jenny. And I want you to find him."

"Bean, I'd love to but Aunt Prue --"

"I'm begging, Jenny, please. I'd look myself but my parents... You understand."

Jenny nodded. Dr. and Mrs. Bauer would consider it indecent, their daughter chasing after a man. Worse, the neighbors might talk. She looked at the ring again, a mix of doubt and excitement roiling through her.

"Please," Sabina said, taking her hand. "Rupert's disappeared. And you're the only one I can turn to."

Then she burst into tears again.

Chapter 2

Jenny had read about the Whitechapel killings with dark fascination for more than a year now. Curled up in the window seat of her aunt's parlor, one of Mr. Townsend's cast-off newspapers stretched out before her, she would immerse herself in the blood-soaked alleys and stairwells, sussing out clues, imagining herself alongside the detectives. She wanted to find the killer, knew she could, if only she could escape this house.

Aunt Prue had warned her against her obsession. She'd caught Jenny with a newspaper a few times, the last incident nearly a month ago. Jenny had been hidden behind the heavy floral curtains of the window seat, scanning the front page for news about him, then froze at the sound of something moving outside the curtains. She held her breath and listened. Tried to convince herself she'd imagined it.

SHRRRRRRIIIKKKK!

The metal rings rattled against the iron rod as the curtains flew open. Jenny looked up into the face of Aunt Prue. It wasn't a kind face. It was sour and wary, a face that never knew disappointment because Prudence Cooper had never had enough hope to be disappointed. She was round and plump, belying a softness that didn't actually exist in her. If she had been born with money, she would have been fat. As it was, her arms were thick from decades of hard work, her hands rough from too much bleach and lye. She looked down at Jenny with disapproval. She always looked at Jenny with disapproval. When she saw the newspaper, her disapproval turned to outrage, and she yanked it from the girl's hands.

"I've told you, decent young ladies don't read such filth!" she hissed. "You need to be worrying about the floors, not about what some maniac is doing to harlots in London!"

She watched her aunt rip off the front page and throw it into the fireplace, silently vowing never to read a newspaper in the parlor again.

"Whitechapel," Jenny said, momentarily surprised she'd said anything at all.

Aunt Prue stopped ripping. "What?" She seemed genuinely confused.

"You said London, but the killings are in Whitechapel. It's a very poor area," Jenny explained.

Aunt Prue was annoyed. "Whitechapel is part of London."

"Yes, but it's like saying Chicago when you mean the Levee. If you say London without saying Whitechapel, someone could think he's killing people outside Buckingham Palace."

That hadn't made Aunt Prue happy.

"They're not people, they're whores. He could cut up the Queen herself for all I care, but if I catch you reading one more word of it, you'll be out on your ass again!"

Jenny flinched. Aunt Prue smiled. She had thrown her niece out for a night last January. Jenny had gone to St. Michael's to seek sanctuary but the doors were locked, and she was forced to spend the night huddled in the alley behind the church. She could feel the rough bricks of the building through her thin coat, the cold coming up from beneath the cobblestones, the wind from the lake cutting through like a thousand knives. She'd realized the preachers were wrong - Hell wasn't a fiery pit; it was a cold, indifferent howl.

"What would your mother think if she saw you rolling around in such garbage?" Aunt Prue continued. "She would be ashamed of you, that's what she'd be! God rest her soul."

Jenny tried to picture a woman she didn't remember.

She had only been a few months old when her mother was killed in... Muncie? Fort Wayne? Jenny wasn't sure. She knew it was after the Great Fire of 1871, for Jenny had been born the summer before. She'd spent her childhood traveling with her father from town to town, following the work, he'd said. But she'd learned the truth when her father brought her to Aunt Prue's and she overheard them arguing. He had been tracking the man who'd stabbed her mother, a man who left her to bleed out in an abandoned stable after she refused his advances. Her father was close to catching the man but it was too dangerous to take Jenny along. He promised to be back in a week, two at the most, and couldn't Prue just watch over her little sister's only child?

It had taken three months for the news of her father's murder to reach the boarding house.

"This is the kind of thing that idiot father of yours would do," Aunt Prue went on. "Reading and scheming and chasing phantoms and look what it did for him! Dead in a back alley and me stuck with you. What kind of thoughts are you inviting into your head with this wickedness?"

Jenny wondered that herself. She feared she was inviting that kind of violence into her life by reading about the Whitechapel killings. She knew she shouldn't be soaking up the viscera of Whitechapel or reading the killer's own words printed in the papers. She had tried to stop but couldn't. Worse, she had begun keeping a scrapbook of the murders, and taking notes in hopes of identifying him. Sabina was the only one she had told.

Jenny's days were filled with sweeping floors, washing dishes, emptying chamber pots, cooking stews, counting and recounting silverware Aunt Prue was sure the boarders were nicking.

But at night...

At night she would lie on her narrow bed in the attic and listen to the house falling asleep - the click of a door closing on the floor below, a distant cough from the floor below that. When all was still, she would push back her blankets and go to her bureau, reach behind it and pull out the contraband scrapbook. It helped scratch that restless itch, but it also made her uneasy. She would curl up on the floor beneath the octagonal window to read and reread the articles - by the light of the moon if it was bright enough, or a candle stump if it wasn't. She memorized the victims' names, the dates and places they died, the atrocities done to them, the public's fear and reaction. She read the killer's letters and rolled his name around on her tongue - Jack the Ripper.

It had been months since the last murder. There were still stories, plenty of them, but the same information. It gnawed at her that there was nothing new, that Scotland Yard hadn't figured out who he was. She hungered for answers and found herself holding her breath as she turned the pages of each moonlit newspaper, looking, waiting. But waiting for him to be captured, or to commit another murder? She wasn't sure, and that gnawed at her as well.

She read of other crimes - lately she had been tracking a series of murders that were happening there in Chicago, murders of negro prostitutes in the red-light district known as the Levee. There were three so far, their throats slashed, their bodies disemboweled. They were found in the river, prompting the papers to dub whoever was responsible the Blood River Killer. She thought the name was a way to give the killer more prominence, more importance in the eyes of the public. But these were black prostitutes. The story didn't sell papers, so was lost somewhere in the middle pages. But she couldn't help wondering if the Blood River Killer was a man who'd learned you didn't want your crimes to make the front pages. She knew monsters lurked in places other than the streets of Whitechapel, but with how quiet it was in London, was it possible the Ripper had crossed the ocean and taken up residence in Chicago?