A Brutal Chill in August: A Novel of Polly Nichols, The First Victim of Jack the Ripper
Read A Brutal Chill in August: A Novel of Polly Nichols, The First Victim of Jack the Ripper Online
Authors: Alan M. Clark
Praise for A Brutal Chill in August:
Praise for
A Brutal Chill in August
:
“With
A Brutal Chill in August
, Alan M. Clark continues his terrific fictionalized accounts of the Ripper’s victims—always compelling, and always expertly evoking nineteenth century London. Gripping, suspenseful—written with sensitivity and heart.”
—Simon Clark, author of
Night of the Triffids
“A Brutal Chill in August,
one of a series wherein Alan Clark masterfully recreates the sorry lives of the Ripper’s victims, is awash in atmospheric detail of those dark days in 19th century London. Exhaustively researched, Clark brings to life the plight of London’s poor, and the extremes to which they must go in order to merely survive...or succumb as victims to disease, abuse, alcoholism, or worse. A great read.”
—Elizabeth Engstrom, author of
Lizzie Borden
“
A Brutal Chill in August
does a fantastic job of taking you on a mental time-travel jaunt. Full immersion, all too vivid and real. […] Alan M. Clark is as masterful a writer as he is an artist; sure to blow you away. […] Historical fiction done right. I cannot love it enough.”
—Christine Morgan,
The Horror Fiction Review
Other Books by Alan M. Clark
The Paint in My Blood
Siren Promised
(co-written with Jeremy Robert Johnson)
Pain & Other Petty Plots to Keep You in Stitches
The Blood of Father Time, Book 1, The New Cut
(co-authored with Stephen C. Merritt and Lorelei Shannon)
The Blood of Father Time, Book 2, The Mystic Clan’s Grand Plot
(co-authored with Stephen C. Merritt and Lorelei Shannon)
D.D. Murphry, Secret Policeman
(co-written with Elizabeth Massie)
Boneyard Babies
Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim
A Parliament of Crows
The Door That Faced West
Say Anything But Your Prayers
The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir
A Brutal Chill
in August
A Novel of Polly Nichols
The First Victim of Jack the Ripper
Alan M. Clark
Word Horde
Petaluma, CA
A Brutal Chill in August
© 2016 by Alan M. Clark
This edition of
A Brutal Chill in August
© 2016 by Word Horde
Cover art © 2016 Alan M. Clark
Cover design by Scott R. Jones
Edited by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN 978-1-939905-25-3
A Word Horde Book
For all the murder victims forgotten
in the excitement over the assholes who kill.
In an effort to bring life to an image of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, the author digitally manipulated a mortuary photo of the woman to arrive at this portrait.
Author’s Note
A Chill in London
This is a work of fiction inspired by the life of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, a woman believed to be the first victim of Jack the Ripper. For purposes of storytelling, I have not adhered strictly to her history and I have changed the names of the principal characters subtly. I have assigned to my main character emotional characteristics and reactions that seem consistent with her life and circumstances. This novel is not primarily about Jack the Ripper, but is instead about Mrs. Nichols’s survival within the increasingly difficult and dangerous social and economic environment of London, England between the years of her birth, 1845, and that of her death, 1888.
The summer of 1888 had been a chilly one. In suburbs of London, snowfall had been reported in the small hours of the morning on July 11. Since the cataclysmic eruption of the Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa, which had thrown fine ash high into the atmosphere five years earlier, the climate in the northern hemisphere had been significantly cooler.
In London, a cold-blooded killer would soon begin the work for which he’d be known. What we don’t know is how selective Jack the Ripper was in choosing his victims, whether he acted spontaneously or was attracted to prey with certain traits. The five canonical victims were women. They were impoverished. Each of them had engaged in prostitution. Most were in their forties. Perhaps all were alcoholics. All of these traits were to be found in his first victim, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols.
On the night of her death, August 30/31, a Thursday night and a Friday morning, the temperature in London hovered around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The social chill in the city that followed would be much worse, as the police were powerless to stop the killer and the murders continued into the autumn with at least four more victims.
To understand the extraordinary furor in London over the Ripper killings, one must know something about the frequency and variety of death that already occurred within the Whitechapel area of the time. The murder rate was quite low. Disease took most lives at a younger age than today. The rate of industry-related deaths (violent accidents or chemically induced) was quite high, as was the suicide rate and the infant mortality rate (at least 30%, but probably closer to 50% died before the age of 5). The average human being had an expected life span of around forty years. Many prostitutes were brutalized and much violent crime occurred during the years between 1887 to 1889, yet few who died were seen to be murders. Perhaps this is attributable to the desire of authorities to keep quiet about the crime rate during a time of swift economic change and social upheaval. Whatever the case, the violence characteristic of the Ripper killings, with multiple stabbings and apparent sexual degradation of the victims suggesting piquerism on the part of the killer, certainly surprised the citizens of London.
The city’s East End was filled with the poor, many of them immigrants. Most suffered under a class system that maintained a sharp division between the haves and have-nots. Due to the resentment this naturally caused, the idea that the killer might be a gentleman slumming in Whitechapel and killing for pleasure was not unbelievable to many in the lower class. Within the upper classes, many believed the lower classes were spoiling for a rebellion, and saw the murders as just another indication of the moral corruption of the denizens of the East End.
Fear on the streets resulting from the Ripper murders became so powerful that groups among all classes began to fight against it. Although many weren’t in agreement over the causes of or solution to the outrage, the conversation or argument that followed helped bring attention to the sad conditions in which people lived within the city’s East End. Their anger became a hot response to the chill in London in the summer of 1888, one that ignited a fire that slowly brought change to the city.
As we continually face questions about the worth of those with little versus those with much, the banked coals of that fire ignited in London in 1888 still smolder.
Likely, Mrs. Nichols would have been surprised to learn of the history that flowed from the moment of her death. Like many throughout history, she had a simple life, but not one without controversies and drama. As with all of our stories, simple or complex, rich or poor, it’s the emotional content and context that counts.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon
1
Tell Me a Dreadful
London, August 31, 1858, during the Great Stink
Polly knew the presence of the jar of gin troubled Bernice Godwin.
“Won’t we become drunk?” Bernice asked. The outer corners of her eyes angled downward, giving her a look too serious for a child.
Sarah Brown had complained about that look before. At present, she sat watching Bernice with contempt in her green eyes. Polly knew Sarah disliked Bernice because the Godwin girl had bowed legs and suffered frequent nose bleeds.
Martha Combs shrugged. “We all have gin when the air and water go bad.”
Bernice slowly shook her head. “
In
our
water
. Even then, I don’t like it.”
You’d better learn to like it,
Polly thought, remembering the misery her brother, Fredrick, experienced as cholera took his life a few years earlier.
Carrying the stench of the river Thames, a bitter haze in the hot autumn air swept by the girls and moved up the narrow lane between the leaning buildings toward the setting sun. For the past two months, during what was commonly called the Great Stink, Gunpowder Alley had belonged to Polly and her three friends since adults didn’t willingly endure the smell outdoors for long. In the late afternoon, the girls sat on the rotting crates and half-barrels normally occupied by hard-drinking men. They talked, played games, and shared what they could, like the gin.
Martha hid the jar of strong drink under the hem of her skirt as people walked by, yet the adults who used the alley on the way to their night shifts hurried past, intent on their own business, not the girls. Polly and Bernice knew most of them as neighbors in the lodging house behind them. All but Mr. Edgar completely ignored the girls. As he went by, he paused beside them. “You want to get in out of the stink before you catch your death,” he said, and quickly moved on.
