Bruce Alexander - Person or Persons Unknown

Disguising my disappointment, I said most brighdy, “But, Sir John, I am quite overwhelmed.”

“Indeed it is you who deserve it,” said he. “It was you risked your life. It was you recognized him. You did all but put the pistol to his head.”

“Well, thank you, sir. I hardly know what to say.”

“There is no more need be said — except p)erhaps from me, my repeated apology for putting you in danger as I did. Do forgive me please.”

“I feel there is naught to forgive, but if it is my forgiveness you seek, you have it a thousand times over.”

“Thank you, lad.” He turned to go, then added just at the door: “Well, at least Hosea Willis is now in Newgate, assured of a swift trip to the gallows.”

“Hosea Willis? Who …?”

“That is the Raker’s given name. Vd no idea of it. Even he had to think a bit before he could produce it. What a strange and unfortunate man he is — or was.”

And so saying, he left me.

Indeed it was true. I recalled what I had heard of the Raker — Hosea Willis, if that be his name. He had inherited his strange calling from his father, who had it from his father before him, and now he would be the last in the line. The Raker had always seemed to me in my many meetings with him to be, as Sir John described him, half-mad. Had the work he did made him so? Who could say? Did he deserve Bedlam rather than the hangman’s noose? Again, who could say?

Mr. Donnelly’s call upon me began most professionally. He had found me sitting up in bed, which I think displeased him, though he said nothing of it. Instead, after a word or two of greeting, he set about unwinding that great turban of a bandage he had round my head so that he might inspect the wound. He touched the cut tentatively with a finger, and I flinched slightly.

“Does that hurt?” he asked.

“A bit,” said I.

“I’ve no doubt that it does.”

Then did he take a bottle of gin from his bag, soak a bit of cotton with it, and apply it to the cut. That produced a sharp, stinging pain. Taking another rolled bandage, he then wrapped me Mussulman-style as before.

“You’re lucky you’ve a good thick skull, Jeremy. A fracture of your head would have put you in serious danger. What about pain inside your head? I take it that must have abated, or you wouldn’t be sitting up as you are.”

“I feel it only when I turn my head sharply.”

“Well, don’t. Let me now have a look at your eyes.”

He lit the candle and, as he had the night before, he waved it back and forth before my face, asking me to follow it with my eyes. Then did he blow it out and peer into them.

“They seem right enough,” said he. “Not seeing two where one should be? Or getting a blur anywhere, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Well and good.”

“May I read?”

“I see no reason why you should not, so long as you do not strain your eyes. Not by candlelight, I should say.”

“May I be up and about?”

“Not yet. A day or two more in bed should put you right, though.”

“What about food?” said I. “I’ve had only a bowl of broth this day.”

“You held it down? No nausea?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you may eat what the rest eat. Perhaps Annie could make up a tray for you so that you could eat here in bed. I’ll mention it to her.” Then he nodded, apparently satisfied. “You’ve come through it well, Jeremy.”

He began to pack up, rolling the soiled bandage and tucking away the gin bottle. As he did, I put a question to him.

“Mr. Donnelly,” said I, “you have good Latin, have you not?”

“I should think so,” said he. “Medical Latin, Church Latin, what have you. Why do you ask?”

“Sir John used a Latin phrase describing the capture of the Raker which quite baffled me. He said that he had been found ‘in flagrante delicto.’ What did he mean, sir?”

Mr. Donnelly, who usually seemed ready to smile or break into a laugh, looked at me quite soberly. “That would translate roughly as ‘caught in the act,’ ” he said.

“Caught in what act, sir?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, Jeremy, situated as you are here in Covent Garden, you must be aware of what is done between men and women, the commerce in prostitution and so on?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

“Then I may tell you that that creature, the Raker, was caught in the act of sexual intercourse with the corpus of a woman.”

“A dead woman? Is that possible? Can it be done?”

“It can be, and it was. Even I, who have seen a good deal more than I would wish to tell, was quite shocked by what I saw there in that barn. You see, Jeremy, the sex function is very powerful in men, a very great force indeed, and if it be thwarted, madness of a sort can result in some. In the case of the Raker, because of his gruesome reputation and the tales told of him, not to mention his hideous appearance, even the prostitutes of the street rejected him. The method he chose to satisfy his lust is not so very strange, considering his familiarity with the dead; they were his subjects; he was their master. With that little stiletto of his, he could change those who had rejected him, or might reject him, into his compliant partners. Sir John blames himself for not realizing the Raker’s guilt earlier, since he was always about. I blame myself for not understanding the significance of the peculiar, virtually bloodless nature of the wounds he inflicted. For in death, his victims seemed always quite lifelike.”

I listened most solemnly to all that Mr. Donnelly had to say. Inwardly, I was quite agog, amazed at the twisted logic he suggested. Yet my response to all this was a rather weak one.

“I had no idea.”

“Nor, for that matter, did the rest of us,” he said.

I sat there in bed, considering all this for a long space of time. Then, thinking to put my attention to practical matters, I said: “So as I understand it, he had a new victim — a new … partner?”

“That is correct.”

“Would it be helpful for me to write out a new item for the Public Advertiser to call for those who knew her to come and give her proper name? I have little to fill my time here.”

“That should not be necessary, Jeremy. The Raker himself knew her after a fashion, for she had so vociferously rejected him that he learned what he could of her and vowed that one day he would have her in his own way. She was an Italian girl known as Mariah — or Maria, more likely. No one on the street seems to know her family name.”

Stunned, as I might have been from a great blow, I leaned back on the pillow with my eyes closed, striving to hold back the tears. Yet they came.

Mr. Donnelly grasped me by the shoulder. “Jeremy,” said he, “1 had no idea — Why, you must have known her.”

Hosea Willis was brought before the Lord Chief Justice the next day at Old Bailey. The remarkable swiftness with which he went from capture to conviction came through the Earl of Mansfield’s desire to have done with the matter as quickly as possible. There was nothing could be said in his defense, and nothing was what he said. He simply plead guilty to the three homicides with which he was charged, and allowed that there had been four previous which had gone undetected. With that, the Lord Chief Justice asked him if he felt remorse. I was told that the Raker did no more than look at him blankly and rep)eat the word as a question — “Remorse?” — as if to say he had no understanding of it. Then was the sentence of death by hanging pronounced upon him and the gavel brought down, effectively ending the Raker’s life but for the formalities on Tyburn Hill.