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

“And what does that consist of?”

He paused. “I don’t judge human desire, and I don’t deny my own.”

“But do you consider other people?”

He paused again. “Others must occasionally be sacrificed.”

“Sacrificed?”

“Inevitably, there is pain.”

Alice had grown pale and motioned to the door. “Can you call for some wine?” she said softly. “I feel a bit faint.”

Sickert put down his brush, went to the door, and called down the stairs. Almost immediately Archie appeared with a glass of wine. He handed the glass to Alice and stood waiting at the side of the bed as she took a few sips.

Sickert watched him curiously. “How old are you, young man?” he asked the boy.

“Twelve or thereabouts,” said Archie.

“You seem very attentive to this lady.”

“I does my best, sir. She been good to me.”

“And how did you come to this employment, may I ask?”

“Milady took me on after me mum died,” said the boy matter-of-factly.

“I see,” said Sickert gently. “You seem a very bright and responsible young man, if I may say so. I think your mother would be proud of you.”

The boy looked up but said nothing.

“You can go now, Archie,” Alice instructed. Her eyes lingered on Sickert as he returned to the canvas and picked up his brush. “I thought you didn’t believe in morality,” she said as he began to jab at the canvas again. “You seemed to feel for the boy.”

“Of course I feel for the boy,” said Sickert with some annoyance. “I’m not a monster or a stone.”

Alice nodded. She would have to tell Jane Cobden that her brother-in-law, despite his neglect of her sister, was kind. Watching his short encounter with Archie, her feelings had undergone a change, or rather had settled into a kind of certainty. She felt she had seen into Sickert’s character and could put aside any doubts she may have entertained about his guilt. A man who could speak with such simplicity of feeling to a child could not, she was convinced, be capable of murder.

“Tell me about your wife,” she said.

Sickert put down his brush as if contemplating how to answer. “I have great affection for her,” he said.

“But you are not faithful.” Alice completed the thought.

“I follow my inclinations.”

Inside the closet, William had become flushed with anger. The man was shameless, acknowledging his depravity so boldly. Who could doubt that he had murdered those women in the East End? He poked Henry again, to register his outrage, but his brother was not paying attention. The mold in the closet was seriously irritating his sinus cavity, and he had begun to sniffle loudly. Suddenly he sneezed, the sound reverberating beyond the closet into the adjoining room.

“I think you have a chaperone,” noted Sickert.

“He heard you,” whispered William furiously. “Go out there. Come up with an excuse.”

Henry stumbled out of the closet, taking a notebook from his pocket and nodding to Sickert. “Hello,” he said vaguely. “I was doing a little writing in the”—he motioned behind him and waved the tablet—“an enclosed space excites the imagination, you know.” He sneezed again. “But it’s moldy.”

Sickert laughed and offered his handkerchief, which Henry pressed gratefully to his nose. It was of fine cambric and smelled faintly of lavender.

After Sickert left, William burst out of the closet looking distraught. Henry had already seated himself at the little table and was pressing the handkerchief to his nose.

“There!” exclaimed William to Alice. “That finishes it! It’s clear we need to have Abberline arrest the man and formally begin interrogation.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Alice.

“He’s Jack the Ripper! He as good as confessed. You saw it! You almost fainted!”

“I had a moment of trepidation, I admit, but I was mistaken. Walter Sickert is as innocent as I am.”

William stared at her.

She continued. “The man is incapable of calculated brutality. He is a philanderer, to be sure—no doubt a source of misery to his wife—but he would never commit murder.”

“He has seduced you! Even as we watched, he exerted his animal magnetism and caused you to lose your reason.”

Alice laughed and protested that her reason was entirely intact. She had, she admitted, found Sickert appealing; for the first time in many years she understood the attraction that a man could hold for a woman. Indeed, though her condition made it impossible for her to act on her inclination, she could understand how other women might. She felt for Ellen Cobden, the long-suffering wife, but one ought to know what one was getting oneself into when marrying this sort of man. He belonged, one might say, to womankind.

William listened with mounting astonishment and disgust. He had never dreamed that his sister would espouse the notions of unfettered love or make excuses for an adulterer. But here he was, listening to her do so.

“Will you make her see reason, Henry?” he insisted, turning to his brother.

Henry, who had been pressing the handkerchief Sickert had given him to his nose (he had finally put it together and recalled the scene of his near death in the East End that night), looked up with surprise. “Oh,” he said dreamily, “Walter Sickert couldn’t possibly have killed those women in the East End. He’s a capital fellow. He saved my life.”

Sickert was not late the next day. He arrived at three p.m. as he had said he would. It was, Alice suspected, more than a matter of professional punctuality; he wished to see her again as much as she wished to see him. And why should this be surprising? Although she was not young or pretty, she was interesting. Why wouldn’t a man of exceptional sensibility enjoy her company? William could not be expected to understand it; his opinion of other men was too low to imagine that anyone might be as discriminating as he was.

Her conviction that Sickert was innocent of anything beyond excessive appreciation of the opposite sex had solidified, and in the face of her conviction, she had forbidden her brothers to spy on her. “If you want to come in to greet the artist and exchange a few words, you may,” she intoned regally, “but I will not permit you to stay.”

William knew that he was helpless to change her mind. From childhood on, there had been certain edicts that she would not allow to be breached; thus, when Sickert arrived for his next visit, William remained downstairs in the kitchen, fuming and pacing.

Henry, on the other hand, made a point of coming into the room to offer thanks to the man who had saved him from attack in the East End some weeks earlier. “I had no idea it was you,” he explained with a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment, “given my…confused…state of mind. But yesterday I recognized the scent of your handkerchief and then realized that was the event you were referring to when we spoke at dinner the other night.”

Sickert smiled affably and had the good grace to shift the focus of discussion from the victim to the attacker. “It was an unfortunate combination of circumstances,” he said. “You found yourself in the wrong place and collided with the wrong man. Such people are dangerous, because they want more than your money.”

“What do they want?” asked Henry.

“They want attention. They want to be heard. But they don’t know how to express themselves except by beating you senseless.”

“I see,” said Henry. “So you think my attacker was trying to express himself. And would you say the same for all criminals…for this Jack the Ripper, for example? Does he want to express himself by killing those women in Whitechapel?”