I, Ripper

She was the lively one. One could hear her laughter through the glass, perhaps even feel it in the reverberations in the air. Her eyes were blue and her skin pink and firm. She seemed far from The Life, as it was called, even if she was famous within The Life. I knew tragedy haunted her, as it did so many of the girls. They all seemed to come from broken homes, were runaways or had been kicked out of hearth and home, some to turn to the streets, some already drawn to the streets. Her current torment came from the abandonment by the man in her life, a fellow named Joe Barnett, whom I watched visit her every evening. He was a shaggy brute by my standards but maybe a good-hearted man in the end, not too judgmental, willing to accept Mary Jane for what and who she was. His visits suggested some possibility of reengagement, as neither could quite let the other go. At the same time, it wasn’t as if she were making amends to Joe, for she still took tups for pay, let others of her trade sleep in her tiny room on cold fall nights, still hit the gin three, four, sometimes five times a day. She couldn’t say no to it, to her eternal damnation. I don’t know if she turned to drink for escape or she escaped to turn to drink, but it was the core of her existence, as I have observed her over the past few days.

The Ten Bells and the Horn of Plenty were her main spots. She’d wander outside and, sooner or later, find her beau for the next hour. Then the happy couple took a turn down Dorset. This was a dark scut of street that ran a few blocks until it came to an end, and its reality was elemental “English poverty,” if such a style were to be named, meaning brick tenements looming inward on each side, undistinguished by any wit or cleverness, just brick boxes laid end on end one after another, under low chimneys that spewed out coke fume, to combine with London fog into a yellow soup that sometimes smeared the streets. The housefronts were identical but for futile attempts at individuality, such as a flower pot here, a flag there, a yellow door, a rug hanging from a window, otherwise just the dullness of warehouses for forgotten people.

Mary Jane would take her beau a bit down Dorset, and thence – you had to know where to look for it, for it was easy to miss – she’d lead him into a passage wide enough for but one person. That was the entryway to Miller’s Court, and it cut between buildings for fifty feet of enclosed brick closeness, where it opened into the space that earned it the comic designation “court”: This was an interruption between the continuity of the buildings that offered yet more frontage for dwellings, apartments, or really rooms, chockablock, two stories in height, tiny in dimension, in which yet more desperate souls could be stockpiled until they died and were buried in nameless paupers’ fields. Someone owned it, someone collected rent, someone profited, but you wouldn’t house pigs in such shabby circumstances.

Mary Jane was in No. 13. I know because entry into the court was by no means guarded, and because so many of the inhabitants were prostitutes, men came and went without notice at all hours of the day, except perhaps those right before dawn, when even the most wicked seem to need their sleep. So I had, more than a few times at odd hours when I had no pressing business, ventured into it, poked about, nodded at the occasional neighbor who paid me no attention. I had my heart’s fill of preparation on this one. It goes to show that in England today, a fellow in a four-in-hand, coat, and bowler can go anywhere and remain unseen, for so universal is the uniform of Victoria’s tight little island that it confers instant invisibility.