The Map of Time

After guiding him along Hanbury Street, a muddy alley dimly lit by a single oil-lamp sputtering on a corner, Marie Kelly beckoned him down a narrow passageway leading into pitch darkness. Andrew followed her, convinced he would meet his death, or at least be beaten to within an inch of his life by a couple of ruffians much bigger than him who, having stolen everything including his socks, would spit contemptuously on his bloody remains. That was how they did things here, and his idiotic adventure richly deserved such an ending. But before fear had time to take hold, they came out into a filthy, water-logged backyard where, to his surprise, no one was waiting for him.

Andrew glanced warily about him. Yes: strange as it might seem, they were alone in that evil-smelling place. The world they had left behind was reduced to a muffled rumble in which a distant church bell’s chimes rang out. At his feet the moon, reflected in a puddle, looked like a crumpled letter some unhappy lover had tossed on the ground.

‘We won’t be disturbed here, mister,’ Marie Kelly reassured him, leaning back against the wall and drawing him to her.

Before he knew it, she had unbuttoned his trousers and pulled out his manhood. She did so with startling ease, without any of the provocative foreplay to which the Chelsea prostitutes had accustomed him. The matter-of-fact way in which she manoeuvred his sex beneath her hiked-up skirts made it clear to Andrew that what to him was another magical moment was to her no more than routine.

‘It’s in,’ she assured him.

In? Andrew had enough experience to know the whore was lying. She was simply gripping him between her thighs. He assumed it was common practice among them, a trick to avoid penetration, which, if they were lucky and the client failed to notice or was too drunk, reduced the number of hasty intrusions they were forced to undergo each day, and with them the unwanted pregnancies that such might bring about. With this in mind, he began to thrust energetically, prepared to go along with the charade.

It was enough for him to rub himself against the silky skin of her inner thigh, to feel her body pressed against his for as long as the pretence lasted. What did it matter whether it was a sham if this phantom penetration allowed him to cross the boundary imposed by good manners and force his way into the intimacy that only lovers share? Feeling her hot breath in his ear, inhaling the delicate odour of her neck and clasping her to him until he felt the contours of her body merge with his was worth infinitely more than thruppence. And, as he soon discovered when he ejaculated into her petticoats, it had the same effect on him as other, greater, undertakings. Slightly ashamed at his lack of endurance, he finished emptying himself in quiet contemplation, still pressed against her.

Eventually he felt her stir impatiently. He stepped back, embarrassed. Oblivious to his unease, the whore straightened her skirts and thrust out a hand to be paid. Trying to regain his composure, Andrew hurriedly gave her the agreed sum. He had enough money left in his pockets to buy her for the whole night, but he preferred to savour what he had just experienced in the privacy of his own bed, and to persuade her to meet him the next night.

‘My name’s Andrew,’ he introduced himself, his voice high-pitched with emotion. She raised an eyebrow, amused. ‘And I’d like to see you again tomorrow.’

‘Certainly, mister. You know where to find me,’ the whore said, leading him back along the gloomy passageway she had brought him down.

As they made their way towards the main streets, Andrew was wondering whether ejaculating between her thighs entitled him to put his arm around her shoulders. He had decided it did, and was about to do precisely that, when they ran into another couple walking almost blindly towards them down the dim alley. Andrew mumbled an apology to the fellow he had bumped into, who, although scarcely more than a shadow in the darkness, seemed quite a burly sort. He was clinging to a whore, whom Marie Kelly greeted with a smile.

‘It’s all yours, Annie,’ she said, referring to the backyard she and Andrew had just left.

Annie thanked her with a raucous laugh and tugged her companion towards the passageway. Andrew watched them stagger into the blackness. Would that fellow be satisfied with having his member trapped between her thighs? he wondered. He had noticed how avidly the man clutched the whore to him.

‘Didn’t I tell you it was a quiet spot?’ Marie Kelly remarked, as they came out into Hanbury Street.

They said a laconic goodbye in front of the Britannia. Rather disheartened by the coldness she had shown after the act, Andrew tried to find his way back through the gloomy streets to his carriage. It was a good half-hour before he came upon it. He avoided Harold’s eyes as he climbed into the brougham.

‘Home, sir?’ Harold enquired sardonically.

The following night he arrived at the Britannia determined to behave like a self-assured man instead of the fumbling, timid dandy of his previous encounter. He had to overcome his nerves and prove he could adapt to his surroundings if he was to display his true charms to the girl, the repertoire of smiles and flattery with which he habitually captivated the ladies of his own class.

He found Marie Kelly sitting at a corner table, brooding over a pint of beer. Her demeanour unnerved him, but as he was not the sort to think up a new strategy as he went along, he decided to stick with his original plan. He ordered a beer at the bar, sat down at the girl’s table, as naturally as he could, and told her he knew of a guaranteed way to wipe the worry from her face. Marie Kelly shot him a black look, confirming what he feared: he had made a tactless blunder. Andrew thought she was going to tell him to clear off with a simple wave of her hand, as if he were an irritating fly, but she restrained herself and gazed at him quizzically for a few seconds.

She must have decided he was as good a person as any to unburden herself to because she took a swig from her tankard, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and told him that her friend Annie, the woman they had bumped into in Hanbury Street the night before, had been found that morning, murdered, in the same yard they had been in. The poor woman had been partially decapitated, sliced open, her intestines pulled out and her womb removed.

Andrew stammered that he was sorry, as shocked by the killer’s attention to detail as he was to have collided with him moments before the crime. Evidently that particular client had not been satisfied with the usual service. But Marie Kelly had other concerns. According to her, Annie was the third prostitute in less than a month to be murdered in Whitechapel. Polly Nichols had been found dead with her throat slit in Bucks Road, opposite Essex Pier, on 31 August, and on the seventh of that month, Martha Tabram had been found brutally stabbed with a penknife on the stairs of a rooming house. Marie Kelly laid the blame on the gang from Old Nichol Street, blackmailers who demanded a share of the whores’ earnings.

‘Those bastards will stop at nothing to get us working for them,’ she said, between gritted teeth.

This state of affairs disturbed Andrew, but it should have come as no surprise: after all, they were in Whitechapel – the putrid dung-heap upon which London had turned its back, home to more than a thousand prostitutes living alongside German, Jewish and French immigrants. Stabbings were a daily occurrence. Wiping away the tears that had finally flowed from her eyes, Marie Kelly sat, head bowed, as though in prayer, until, to Andrew’s surprise, she roused herself from her stupor, grasped his hand and smiled lustfully at him. Whatever else happened, life went on. Was that what she had meant by her gesture? After all, she, Marie Kelly, had not been murdered. She had to go on living, dragging her skirts through those foul-smelling streets in search of money to pay for a bed.

Andrew gazed with pity at her hand lying in his, the dirty nails poking through the frayed mitten. He, too, felt the need to concentrate for a moment in order to change masks, like an actor who needs time in his dressing room to concentrate on becoming a different character. After all, life went on for him, too. Time did not stop because a whore had been murdered. He stroked her hand tenderly, ready to resume his plan. As though wiping condensation from a window pane, he freed his young lover’s smile from its veil of sadness and, looking her in the eye for the first time, said: ‘I have enough money to buy you for the whole night, but I don’t want any fakery in a cold backyard.’

This startled Marie Kelly, and she tensed, but Andrew’s smile soon put her at ease. ‘I rent a room at Miller’s Court, but I don’t know as it’ll be good enough for the likes of you,’ she remarked flirtatiously.

‘I’m sure you’ll make me like it,’ Andrew ventured, delighted at the bantering tone their conversation had taken – this was a register at which he excelled.

‘But first I’ll have to turn out my good-for-nothing husband,’ she replied. ‘He doesn’t like me bringing work home.’

This remark came as yet another shock to Andrew on an extraordinary night over which he clearly had no control. He tried not to let his disappointment show.

‘Still, I’m sure your money will make up his mind for him,’ Marie concluded.

***

So it was that Andrew found paradise in the dismal little room where he was now sitting. That night, everything had changed between them. When at last she lay naked, Andrew made love to her so respectfully, caressing her with such tenderness, that Marie Kelly could feel the hard shell she had carefully built around her begin to crack. To her surprise, Andrew’s kisses, marking her body like a pleasurable itch, made her own caresses less mechanical, and she quickly discovered she was no longer a whore lying on the bed, but the woman crying out for affection that she had always been. Andrew also sensed his love-making was freeing the real Marie Kelly, as though he were rescuing her from one of the water tanks in which stage magicians immersed their beautiful assistants, bound hand and foot, or as though his sense of direction had saved him from getting lost in the maze, like her other lovers, allowing him to reach a secret corner where the girl’s true nature survived intact.

They burned with a single flame, and when it waned, and Marie Kelly began to talk about springtime in Paris, where she had worked as an artist’s model, and about her childhood in Wales and on Ratcliffe Highway in London, Andrew understood that the strange sensation in his chest must be the pangs of love: he was experiencing all the emotions of which the poets spoke.

He was touched by the tone her voice took on when she described the Parisian squares with their riot of gladioli and petunias, and how on her return to London she had insisted everybody say her name in French, the only way she had found of preserving intact the distant fragrance that softened life’s sharp edges. He was equally moved by the hint of sadness in her voice as she described how they had hanged pirates from the Ratcliffe Highway Bridge until they drowned in the rising waters of the Thames. This was the real Marie Kelly, this bitter-sweet fruit, nature’s flawed perfection, one of God’s contradictions.

When she asked what work he did that could apparently allow him to buy her for the rest of his life, he decided to risk telling her the truth. If their love were to exist it must be nurtured in truth or not at all, and the truth (of how her portrait had sent him on his foolish quest to find her in a neighbourhood so different from his own) seemed as beautiful and miraculous to him as those stories about impossible love you read of in books. When their bodies came together again, he realised that, far from being an act of madness, falling in love with her was possibly the most reasonable thing he had ever done. And when he left the room, with the memory of her skin on his lips, he tried not to look at her husband, Joe, who was leaning against the wall, shivering with cold.

It was nearly daylight when Harold delivered him home. Too excited to go to bed, if only to relish the moments he had spent with Marie Kelly, Andrew went to the stables and saddled a horse. It was a long time since he had woken at dawn to go riding in Hyde Park. This was his favourite time of day, when the grass was still dewy and everything appeared untouched. How could he waste such an opportunity? Within minutes, he was galloping through the trees opposite the Harrington mansion, laughing to himself and occasionally letting out a cry of joy, like a soldier celebrating victory, because that was how he felt, remembering the loving look she had given him before they had said goodbye until the following night. It was as though she could see in his eyes that, unwittingly, he had been searching for her for years and perhaps I should take this opportunity to apologise for my earlier scepticism and confess that there is nothing that cannot be expressed in a look. A look, it seems, is a bottomless well of possibilities.

And so Andrew rode on, seized by a wild impulse, overwhelmed by a burning, pulsating sensation that might reasonably be described as happiness. Prey to the effects of such a violent infatuation, everything he rode past appeared to sparkle, as though each of its elements the paths strewn with dead leaves, the rocks, the trees, even the squirrels leaping from branch to branch – were lit by an inner glow.

But, have no fear, I shall not become bogged down in lengthy descriptions of practically luminous parkland, because not only do I have no taste for it but it would be untrue. Despite Andrew’s altered vision, the landscape clearly did not undergo any transformation, not even the squirrels, which are well known as creatures that pursue their own interests.

After more than an hour of strenuous, exhilarating riding, Andrew remembered he had a whole day to get through before he could return to Marie Kelly’s humble bed, and must find some way of distracting himself from the dreadful feeling that would assail him when he realised that the hands of the clock were not turning at their usual speed but were actually slowing down on purpose. He decided to drop in on his cousin Charles, which he usually did when he wanted him to share in his joy, even though this time he had no intention of telling him anything. Perhaps he was simply curious to see what Charles would look like to his feverish gaze, which had the power to enhance everything. Would he glow, like the squirrels in the park?

Chapter IV

Breakfast had been laid out in the Winslow dining room for young Charles, who was doubtless still lazing in bed. On a table next to the French windows, the servants had set out a dozen covered platters, bread rolls, jams and marmalades, and several jugs brimming with grapefruit juice and milk. Most of it would be thrown away because, contrary to appearance, they were not expecting a regiment, only Andrew, who, given his famous lack of appetite in the mornings, would almost certainly be content to nibble at a roll, ignoring the extravagant spread displayed in his honour.

Andrew was surprised by the sudden concern he felt at such waste. He had spent years contemplating tables like this, creaking under the weight of food no one would eat. This curious response was the first of many that would result from his forays into Whitechapel, inhabited by people capable of killing one another for a half-eaten roll. Would his experiences there stir his conscience as they had his emotions? He was the type of person whose cultivation of his inner life left little time for worrying about the outside world of the street. He was above all devoted to resolving the mystery that was himself, to studying his feelings and responses: all his time was taken up in attempting to fine-tune the instrument that was his spirit until he felt satisfied with the sound it produced.

There were times, owing to the constantly changing and rather unpredictable nature of his thought patterns, when this task appeared as impossible to him as lining up the goldfish in their bowl, but until he succeeded he sensed he would be unable to worry about what went on in the world, which for him started where his own pleasant, carefully scrutinised private concerns ended. In any case, he thought, it would be interesting to observe in himself how hitherto unknown preoccupations emerged through simple exposure. Who could tell? Perhaps his response to these new worries might hold the key to the mystery of who the real Andrew Harrington was.

He took an apple from the fruit bowl and settled into an armchair to wait yet again for his cousin to return to the land of the living. He had rested his muddy boots on a footstool and was smiling as he remembered Marie Kelly’s kisses and how they had both, gently but completely, made up for all the years they had been starved of affection, when his eye alighted on the newspaper lying on the table. It was the morning edition of the Star, announcing in bold print the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute called Anne Chapman. It gave details of the horrific mutilation she had suffered: besides her uterus, which he had already learned about from Marie Kelly, her bladder and womb had also been removed. Among other things, the newspaper also mentioned a couple of cheap rings missing from one of her fingers. It appeared the police had no clues as to the murderer’s identity although, after questioning other East End whores, the name of a possible suspect had emerged: a Jewish cobbler nicknamed Leather Apron, who was in the habit of robbing prostitutes at knife point. The article came with a macabre illustration of a policeman dangling a lamp over the bloody corpse of a woman sprawled on the pavement.

Andrew shook his head. He had forgotten that his paradise was surrounded by hell itself, and that the woman he loved was an angel trapped in a world full of demons.

He closely read the three-page report on the Whitechapel crimes committed to date, feeling worlds away from it all in this luxurious dining room, where man’s capacity for baseness and aberration was kept at bay as surely as the dust tirelessly polished away by servants. He had thought of giving Marie Kelly the money to pay off the gang of blackmailers she thought were responsible for the crimes, but the report did not seem to be pointing in that direction. The precise incisions on the bodies suggested that the killer had surgical knowledge, which implicated the entire medical profession, although the police had not ruled out furriers, cooks and barbers – anyone, in short, whose job brought them into contact with knives.

Queen Victoria’s medium was reported to have seen the killer’s face in a dream. Andrew sighed. The medium knew more about the killer than he, even though he had bumped into the fellow moments before he had committed the crime.

‘Since when did you develop an interest in the affairs of empire, cousin?’ asked Charles’s voice from behind him. ‘Ah, no – I see you are reading the crime pages.’

‘Good morning, Charles,’ said Andrew, tossing the paper on to the table as though he had been idly leafing through it.

‘The coverage given to the murders of those wretched tarts is incredible,’ his cousin remarked, plucking a cluster of shiny grapes from the fruit bowl and sitting in the armchair opposite. ‘Although I confess to being intrigued by the importance they’re attaching to this sordid affair: they’ve put Scotland Yard’s finest detective, Fred Abberline, in charge of the investigation. Clearly the Metropolitan Police are out of their depth in a case like this.’

Andrew pretended to agree, nodding abstractedly as he gazed out of the window, watching the wind scatter an air-balloon-shaped cloud. He did not want to arouse his cousin’s attention by showing too much interest in the affair, but the truth was he longed to know every detail of the crimes, apparently confined to the area where his beloved lived. How would his cousin react if he told him he had bumped into that brutal murderer in a murky Whitechapel alleyway? The sad fact was that, even so, he was unable to describe the fellow except to say he was enormous and evil-smelling.

‘In any case, regardless of Scotland Yard’s involvement, all they have are suspicions, some of them quite preposterous,’ his cousin went on, plucking a grape from the bunch and rolling it between his fingers. ‘Did you know they suspect one of the Red Indians from that Buffalo Bill show we saw last week, and even the actor Richard Mansfield, who is playing in Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde at the Lyceum? I recommend it, by the way: Mansfield’s transformation on stage is truly chilling.’