Paula Cohen - What Alice Knew - A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

“Yes.” William nodded. “There is generally a method in madness if one supplies the right context. Knowing childhood influences, forms of abuse, disappointments, rivalries, and so forth can provide the logic for seemingly incoherent behavior. There is never an effect without a cause.”

“That’s a law to be respected in the writing of fiction,” piped in Henry, who was feeling left out. “It’s Louis Stevenson’s problem, in my opinion. His effects exceed their causes.”

Neither his brother nor sister appeared to care.

“When you see the letters, perhaps you’ll be able to supply the context and deduce the cause,” Alice instructed William. “Pay special attention to the quality of the paper and the ink. Look for patterns in the formation of letters. Note the sentence formation, the use of fragmentary exclamations, and repeated words.”

“I think, as a trained scientist, I know what to look for,” William responded. “I am familiar with standard methods of research and investigation.”

“Yes, but it’s always good to be reminded. And you’re not trained in the investigation of murder.”

“And you are?”

“No,” acknowledged Alice, “but I’ve had more time to think about it. I lie in bed and imagine what might have happened. I have been doing such things since childhood.”

“Are you saying that you have feared being murdered by us?” Henry laughed.

“Yes, and of murdering you,” she added gravely. “It is in the nature of the nervous invalid to create such extreme scenarios. We get ill because imagining them is enough to scare us out of all action.”

William considered the comment. “And Jack the Ripper is somehow empowered to live out the fantasy that frightens the neurasthenic. He is the obverse of what you are, your imagination turned real.”

“Yes,” said Alice, “which is why I am the person to catch him.”

With luncheon concluded, William rose and announced that he was going back to the East End. “Half of problem solving has to do with posing the right questions,” he explained. “The other half with listening to the answers. It’s what I learned teaching undergraduates, which qualifies as a form of detective work, the goal being to figure out how to make mostly uninterested students learn. I hope to bring some of this skill to the interrogation of witnesses. After that, I will proceed to Scotland Yard to examine the letters.” He nodded to Alice, whom he knew was eager for a full report on this aspect of the case.

“Bring them back with you,” she ordered.

“It’s highly unlikely that they’ll allow them to leave headquarters.”

“Try!”

William waved his hand in exasperation. His sister made him feel duty bound to fulfill her requests, even when they were utterly impractical. He didn’t know whether it was respect for her opinion or deep-seated guilt that made him so solicitous of her. Whatever the motives, he knew that, if he could, he would bring the letters back.

As he moved into the foyer, he was surprised to find his brother beside him, buttoning a cashmere topcoat and reaching for a bowler hat and silver-tipped cane.

“I thought I’d come along,” Henry explained casually. “Very important to cover the throat,” he noted, tucking a silk scarf around his neck. “Most vulnerable part of the anatomy.”

William stiffened. Henry, with his Savile Row wardrobe and effete manner, was bound to be out of place among the poor people of Whitechapel. Besides, he didn’t want his little brother tagging at his heels. He had discouraged it when they were boys, and the same reflex made him discourage it now.

“I know what you’re thinking, that I’d be in the way,” said Henry placidly, anticipating William’s protest. “But it’s not as though you’re going off to play ball or something strenuous and manly in that line. I’ve lived in this country for a while, you know. I have a sense of the people.”

“In the East End? Among the squalid tenements and boardinghouses of the poor? Really, Henry, they’re not the sorts with whom you eat your dinners.”

“No, they’re the sorts who serve me my dinners. I have observed them; indeed, I have talked to them. You’d be surprised how even the lower orders hold to ideas that Americans don’t understand.”

“And aren’t you an American?”

“Not really. Not anymore. I have thrown off the yoke of my native country, or if you prefer, I have assumed the yoke of my adopted one. Which is to say, I think I could be useful to you in your present mission.”

William paused, sensing that Henry was not about to give way. “All right, you can come,” he conceded in the manner of the slightly coerced but magnanimous older brother. “Just don’t lord it over these poor people. And keep your sentences short.”

Henry smiled but said nothing. He secretly believed that of the two of them, William was the greater snob. As a professor at Harvard, his brother dealt almost exclusively with intellectuals and scholars, people who lived a relatively comfortable and cloistered life. He, on the other hand, consorted with a far more eclectic mix of people: old-moneyed dowagers; newly minted millionaires; aspiring, often impoverished, artists; not to mention domestics of various sorts who were constantly on hand to carry his bags or serve him his meals. He was convinced he had the broader, more ecumenical view of human nature, despite the fact that William saw himself as the man of the people.

The brothers took a hansom cab to George Yard, where Martha Tabram had been stabbed two dozen times. William had the address of one Rosie Tynan, who had told the police she saw someone she thought was Martha speaking to a gentleman on the evening of the murder. Rosie Tynan’s house was empty, and the neighbors had, like vultures over a corpse, descended to take it apart. The glass in the windows was gone; the steps broken up; the shutters pulled off. William knocked on the house next door, where a disheveled woman, gripping a crying child tightly by the arm, informed him curtly that Rosie had left the area. “Went south ’cause she got sick of it all,” said the woman, motioning with her free hand to the area around her. “Don’t know if it’s better where she is, but it coulden be worse.”

“Did she ever talk to you about seeing Martha Tabram before her death?” asked William.

“Naw,” said the woman. “She hardly knew what she seen, and the police badgered her till she knew less. That’s what they do; they get hold of something they think will make things easy for them, and then they try to make you say what they want. Rosie seen nothing but some woman, who she thought might be Martha, speaking to some gentleman near the corner by the pub. Martha spoke to gentlemen all the time; it was her living.” The child began to cry loudly, and the woman paused to pinch its arm, along which there was already a string of bright purple bruises. “You woulden learn no more from her than you done from me.”

Leaving George Yard, William and Henry walked farther east to the upper end of Whitechapel Road to look for Patrick Mulshaw, who had said he saw someone suspicious near the site of the Polly Nichols’s murder. Mulshaw, however, was gone too, according to a man standing at the corner with a tray, on which were arranged an assortment of tobacco butts. “Who knows where he’s at?” The man shrugged. “Probably went up to Belfast. Pat said there weren no point hangin’ round here; he’d do as well to starve to death with his own people.”

William looked at the informant, whom he realized was in a striking state of emaciation and whose livelihood apparently was made by selling the cigarette butts that he picked up from the street. William put a pound on the tray and hurried off, only to have his brother catch up with him a few minutes later, breathing heavily.