Jack the Ripper Victims Series: The Double Event (2 page)

Say Anything but Your Prayers

A novel by

Alan M. Clark

Whitechapel, London, September 30, 1888

Chilled from standing on Berner Street in the damp night, watching for her client’s return, Elizabeth cursed herself silently, and decided that if the fellow didn’t come back by the time she finished her grapes, she’d give up on him.

She had met the gentleman on Aldgate High Street and they’d spent a couple of hours together, eating and drinking at the Bricklayer’s Arms pub a short distance away, and then walking to Berner Street. All the while, they’d talked, laughed, and paused occasionally for a bit of canoodling. Old enough to be established, but young enough to have kept his looks in a square-built manner, the man had an attractive, even-tempered presence. His odd accent was perhaps American. In his dark suit, overcoat, and billycock, he appeared to be a man of business, not a laborer.

The gentleman bought her black grapes at Packer’s greengrocer down the lane. Although pleased with the gift, Elizabeth had to be careful with grapes since all except the juice of the fruit gave her a stomach ache. She rolled one grape around in her mouth to extract its nectar, while he ate a handful of them.

Most men simply bought her drinks. The purchase of the fruit suggested that her client had imagination and quite possibly saw their time together as more than merely a transaction. Indeed, she and the gentleman got along so well, she’d begun to think he might be the one who would take her away from the East End and provide for her in years to come. Elizabeth had been looking for something better throughout her life; a better home, better health, better employment, better food, better friends, and, of course, a better man.

Before her husband, Jon, died, he had asked her to find another man to take care of her. She had been with her cash carrier, Mr. Kidney, for several years now, and though she had sexual relations with him, he was a ponce. Almost any situation would be better than what she had with him.

Elizabeth was trying to think of a way to draw her client closer, to encourage his tendency to treat her as a lover, when he’d given her a big smile, and said, “You hold here. I’ll go to my room and be back in a trice with a bottle of fine, sweet wine.”

“You could get a bottle at The Nelson, there on the corner” she said, pointing.

“Not like the bottle I’ve got in my room.”

Elizabeth didn’t want him to get away. “I’ll go with you.”

He looked down, shaking his head slowly, and she knew he didn’t want to be seen entering his home with a woman of her caliber. “It’s not far,” he said, looking up again. “I’ll be right back with the sweetest wine you’ve ever tasted.”

His words further increased her craving for sweets and alcohol, tempting Elizabeth to risk the separation from him to gain the wine. She also needed to spit out the grape skin, seeds, and pulp, and not wanting to be indelicate in his presence, she had merely nodded her head.

Bloody Hell, I should have got his name before he walked away!

The dampness from the evening’s scattered rains had brought out the ache in her old injury. Elizabeth bent and rubbed the unevenness of her right shin, where the bones had not been set correctly after her fall in the barn thirty-five years earlier. A drink would help ease the pain, and she thought about going into The Nelson and trying to find a fellow to buy her one. No, she might miss her client’s return.

She ate her grapes slowly. Seven remained in the sack she held in her left hand. One stem of the fruit lay on the wet footway at her feet. As she wiped grape juice from her lips with one of her handkerchiefs, Elizabeth peered into the gloom, looking out for her client among the people moving about the area. Although after midnight, the neighborhood was remarkably busy. Despite the numerous street lamps, her myopic sight left people walking along the lane a blur until they were almost upon her. Accustomed to the risks of waiting alone on the street, she restrained her unease. For good or ill, she had the voices of her two selves to keep her company; Bess, the callow child of hope, and Liza, the cynical, hardbitten opportunist.

Hisingen, Torslanda, Sweden, mid-summer 1855

Elizabeth’s mother, Fru Beata Carlsdotter, was clearly in a mood. Placing a breakfast of bread and butter on the kitchen table before her daughter, she said, “Foolish girl.”

“How many times must you say that, Mother?” Elizabeth asked.

“Every time I have to do for you what you cannot with a cast on your leg.” Fru Carlsdotter pushed a dark curl of hair away from her green eyes, wiped sweat from her plump face, and turned away to clean pots and pans.

Elizabeth couldn’t blame all her irritation on her mother’s insult. Something had changed in the girl’s outlook since the accident. A darker voice had emerged within her thoughts. Sometimes the thoughts themselves did not seem to be the notions of a twelve-year-old. She didn’t think she liked the new facet of her temperament.

She wanted vodka.

A loud rap came from the corner of the room. One of Elizabeth’s crutches had fallen to the floor. Fru Carlsdotter dried her hands and moved to the corner. Struggling against her own plump belly, she bent slowly to pick up the crutch. She leaned it into the corner with the other one. “Foolish girl,” she said.

“Mother!”

As Fru Carlsdotter turned back to her work, tears threatened to spill from her eyes. She wiped her face quickly.

“Why are you crying?” Elizabeth asked without sympathy.

“Your father wants Kristina to leave home. I suppose I should thank you. Your sister was to go to Gothenburg today to apply for her change of address certificate, but instead she works with your father, doing
your
work. She’ll be home a little longer.”

Elizabeth might have guessed the sadness had something to do with Kristina. Their father, Herr Gustav Ericsson, was a hard man used to having his way. Her older sister, beautiful blonde and blue-eyed Kristina, currently seventeen years old, had refused to marry any of the three young men who had asked for her hand. All three were men of her father’s choosing. Herr Ericsson, disgusted with Kristina’s unwillingness, had put his foot down. “If you’re not wed by the end of spring,” he’d said last autumn, “you’ll be going into the city to look for work. The farm can’t continue to support us all.” Summer had come and Kristina remained unwed, while the price of milk, butter, and potatoes continued to fall.

Kristina didn’t want to leave home. Elizabeth couldn’t understand her sister’s desire to stay. Life on the farm was monotonous, full of hard work with little social contact. Elizabeth yearned for something better, to be away from her family, to start a new life with an opportunity for adventure. She looked forward to a time when she’d be old enough and smart enough to find her own way.

Elizabeth heard her father come in through the front door. As he passed by on his way out the back door, Herr Ericsson glanced into the kitchen. He was tall and thin, with a dour face framed by graying brown hair and whiskers. He didn’t smile for her. The only time he seemed happy with her was when she made his morning coffee and brought it to him. She hadn’t been able to do that since breaking her leg. Though quite good in the kitchen, her mother couldn’t seem to make good coffee. Being the only one within the household to consistently make a good cup had become a point of pride for Elizabeth. The trick was getting the cast iron roaster heated properly in the fireplace coals before putting the beans in it. The grinding and boiling was much easier to get right. Once Elizabeth left home, Herr Ericsson would surely miss her every time he wanted a cup.

“I’m certain you will not cry for
me
when
I
leave home” she said. The bitter words surprised Elizabeth. They seemed to come from the new unnamed voice within her thoughts.

Fru Carlsdotter spun around and glared, her face reddening and her hand raised to strike. “If not for your injury, Liza Black Tongue, I would slap your mouth.”

Elizabeth cringed.

Fru Carlsdotter lowered her hand, and turned away to clean up the kitchen. “You have been lashing out with that tongue ever since you broke your leg,
foolish
girl.”

Normally, Fru Carlsdotter used the name Liza Black Tongue when Elizabeth was caught in a lie. Lately, however, her mother also called her that when Elizabeth spoke angrily.

Since breaking her leg, Elizabeth had been unaccountably disagreeable with her mother. Kristina had always been Fru Carlsdotter’s expressed favorite child, and received preferential treatment, but Elizabeth had never before shown resentment regarding that.

Even as she tried to dismiss her spiteful attitude as unworthy childishness, the new voice within her thoughts spoke up.
She would send you away now if she could keep her precious Kristina.
The bitterness of the voice surprised her; so much so that the words she’d heard in her head seemed to have come from someone else.

Ever since she could remember, she’d thought of herself as Bess, after her early childhood mispronunciation of her name as Elizabess. Bess, a gullible innocent, always seeking approval, frequently trusted others and anticipated only the best. She rarely spoke with bitterness. The new voice was different; mistrustful of others, even her parents.

But, then, Elizabeth
was
different since the injury. She had been tricked by the oldest of her two younger brothers, Caspar, on the day she fell in the barn.

“The beam is only fifteen feet above the floor,” he’d said. “Mother says you’re light as a feather, so, if you tumble, the hay will break your fall.”

If Fru Carlsdotter had said that Elizabeth was light as a feather, that stood out as a rare expression of approval. She usually reserved her praise for Kristina alone.

Their father had warned against jumping from the loft into piles of hay much higher than the one to which Caspar referred. Herr Ericsson had forbidden the children to walk out on the beam from which depended pulley blocks, hooks and ropes. Father had said there might be tools hidden beneath the hay that could seriously harm a falling child. But Elizabeth knew there were no tools beneath the hay on that day. She had no intention of falling, and she liked the idea of proving her mother right. Nimbly traversing the beam that ran across the open space between the loft and the splintery wall would be demonstration enough. If she slipped, the consequences could not be
too
severe.

Caspar’s mischief wasn’t unusual. Elizabeth might fault him for trying to trick her, but knew he wasn’t to blame for what happened. Although she’d wanted to believe otherwise, she had understood the dangers of walking on the beam in the barn.

Elizabeth had started out across the dusty timber like a music box ballerina, humming a ballad from a broadside her father had brought home from a visit to Gothenburg, taking mincing, delicate steps over the draped lengths of rope and the metal fasteners of the tackle, her arms outstretched. She felt beautiful in her light green morning shift and undergarments. The view from the height and the risk were exhilerating. Elizabeth would have willingly suffered her father’s punishment if only her mother could see her.

Her left foot hung under one of the loops of rope and she teetered toward the left. A sudden rush of energy made her skin feel tight. Too late, she bent to her right and thrust out her arms in that direction to compensate. Even so, she believed she’d checked her fall, and grinned uneasily. But as she fell past the beam, her smile fled and she gulped a breath to scream. Striking the floor with a loud snap in her shin, the scream flew from her lungs along with her breath. Elizabeth lay stunned, an odd numbness in her lower right leg.

Caspar appeared above her making a fuss, his eyes wide and his mouth working, but she couldn’t understand him.

Elizabeth tried to rise, and the pain struck her. She saw the lower portion of her right leg and foot lying at an odd angle, and her voice returned along with her scream.

Caspar put his hands to his ears and ran from the barn. He returned shortly with their younger brother Sveinn and their father. Mercifully, Elizabeth lost awareness for a time until she found herself on the kitchen table. Her mother and Sveinn braced her upper body and Caspar held her left leg down while her father worked to set her broken limb. Excruciating pain tore away all hope for escape, as he pulled and twisted the lower portion of her leg, trying to position the ends of the break together. Elizabeth cried out for him to stop.

Frustration contorted of his features as he worked. Was he so angry with her for walking on the beam that he would punish her by making the setting of her break more painful? He looked at her with a grimace, and made one last effort to twist her shin. The agony and pressure on her leg became so unbearable, Elizabeth convulsed with a sudden strength born of desperation. She wrenched her left leg free of Caspar’s grip, and kicked her father in the face. Blood sprayed from Herr Ericsson’s nose and he backed away, cursing.

Elizabeth screamed with the pain. She couldn’t catch her breath, and her vision darkened. With that, the pain lessened. She gulped for more breath and gratefully moved toward the darkness.

The last thing she heard before she slept was her father’s voice. “That’s the best I can do.”

~ ~ ~

The pain dragged her back to the waking world, and she awoke to find her leg splinted and covered with starched bandages. Fru Carlsdotter fed her vodka to ease the pain. Herr Ericsson avoided looking at her most of the time, and when he did, his gaze wasn’t a kindly one. His nose had swollen to twice its normal size and turned and blue and purple.

Eventually a doctor came to the house and examined Elizabeth.

“The break was not set perfectly, but it will have to do,” he said. He put a proper plaster cast on it.

Your father has left you a cripple
, Elizabeth heard herself thinking. Cold and bitter, the thoughts sounded out of place in her head at the time. That cynical voice of caution—so distinctly different from the naive child, Bess, she’d always heard before—had been with her since her fall, its presence growing steadily stronger.

As she toyed with her buttered bread and watched her mother clean the kitchen, the new voice gave her a bit of advice.
Your brother tricked you because you trusted him
.
A mistrustful nature will help to protect you.

That is Liza Black Tongue speaking
, Elizabeth told herself, and she wondered if she should listen. For a twelve-year-old with little worldly experience, the message seemed to be good advice, yet she hesitated to encourage the cynical facet of herself. She wasn’t sure she liked Liza.

Fru Carlsdotter slammed pots and pans around, a sure sign of her continuing irritation with Elizabeth.

You’d better be good or she will have your father send you away soon
, Liza warned.

She’s right,
Elizabeth thought.

Possibly, Liza had her uses.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” Elizabeth said. “The ache in my leg makes me irritable.”

“It’s been two months, now,” her mother said without turning. “That excuse has worn thin.”

Make her feel sorry for you
, Liza said.
Tell her a lie if you have to
.

Elizabeth didn’t want to tell a fib. Still, if she must be mistrustful of others, there was no reason
she
should remain trustworthy. “A beetle crawled into my cast last night while I was in bed, and chewed my leg. When it crawled out this morning, I smashed it.”

Fru Carlsdotter set down the cleaning rag she’d been using and turned, a skeptical look on her face.

Elizabeth donned her most innocent Bess expression and gave her mother an even gaze. “The itch of it kept me from sleep, and you know the break hurts most when I’m weary.”

Fru Carlsdotter looked troubled for a moment, then said, “Perhaps you need a bit of vodka and a nap.”

Elizabeth had to control herself to keep from showing her delight. She hadn’t had vodka for over a week. Although she didn’t need the intoxicant for pain, she had been craving it, and didn’t want her mother to see her eagerness.

Yes, Elizabeth decided, she did like Liza, after all.