Jack the Ripper Victims Series: The Double Event (22 page)

Conway’s coat was heavy, Katie was exhausted and her shoes were filthy with horse dung and other substances she could not identify. They had sold eight-hundred and seventy-nine copies of the chapbook. Conway was pleased.

“If you are willing,” he said, “I’d like your help with sales again soon.” 

“I would help now if I could,” Katie said.

“No, you must go home. I’ll collect you in a week for an execution at Southwark.”

She did not look forward to the inevitable confrontation with Aunt Elizabeth. “But I don’t have to return right away.”

“Yes, you do. I cannot take you with me. We must protect your reputation against the unkindness of the world.”

His concern was thoughtful, but Katie was not happy about it. She was quiet as he escorted her back to her aunt’s home in the early evening, first riding the omnibus and then walking. Perhaps her five percent earning of the day’s sales would be sufficient to soften Elizabeth’s heart.

When they arrived, sitting beside the back doorstep was her old travel bag stuffed to overflowing.

It might have been taken!
Katie plunged her hand into it and felt around. She took a deep breath and relaxed when her finger located her thimble. The bag held all her possessions except for her mother’s pillow.

Katie tried the door, but it was locked.

I have no home!
Images of the workhouse, conjured by Emma’s descriptions, filled her head. 

Her knock at the door was rapid and loud. With no response, she ran to the front of the house. The door was locked. She knocked, and when no answer came, she rattled it mercilessly.

Katie tried to look through the curtained windows when Conway caught up with her, toting her travel bag. “Come with me,” he said.

As he stood there, tall and proud, he
was
a protector.

I must make sure to please him.

Katie flew to Conway. He wrapped his arms about her and led her away.

Conway rented a single room in a tenement in Westminster with its own street level entrance. Having stopped at a tavern for a meal of potato pie and stewed mutton and ox cheek, they arrived late in the night. The richness of the meal and her fatigue left Katie warmly intoxicated. Her heart was telling her she could trust Conway, but she fought against her languor.  With no home to return to, and having to depend on his good graces, Katie was vulnerable.

Conway located his key and glanced up and down the street, seemingly concerned about their safety or, perhaps, merely being seen. Satisfied that all was well, he fitted the key into the padlock on the door and opened it. He ushered her inside and shut the door behind them.

When total darkness pressed in on Katie, her torpor fled and she was fully alert.

My life is all darkness now. I can’t see the future, how to live and earn a crust.
What will Conway expect of me?

None of it was clear. The combined blindness fed a rising panic.

As Conway fumbled about in the dark, perhaps locating a weapon with which to end her life, alarm rose in Katie, making its way to her throat. She would scream and then surely he would
have
to kill her.

A match was struck and a candle lit, and the scream died in her throat. She stepped back from her fear, and there was an avenue into the future. The room was neat as a pin, bed made, table in one corner with items, mostly paper, stacked evenly, shelving bearing folded clothing and organized chapbooks. The air smelled heavily of Conway. Also an odor of aged slops was present, perhaps from an overflowing cesspit in the basement, a common problem in these old tenements. A Soyer stove, its pipe routed through a makeshift hole in the wall, shared one corner with a tub for bathing. The room was a bit like a cell, having no windows. Still, it was not unwelcoming and it was well-organized.

She had little choice but to trust Conway, but it didn’t
feel
wrong to do so.

“Please sit,” Conway said, gesturing toward his bed. He took a seat at the table, lit a lamp and concentrated on counting his money. Katie stood for a moment awkwardly, unwilling to sit on a man’s bed, but since there was nowhere else, she finally sat on the edge and watched Conway.

She expected he would count out her earnings and offer them to her, but that wasn’t what happened. When he was finished, he scooped all the pennies into a blue and white crockery jar, placed a lid on it and hid it on a low shelf behind a stack of chapbooks.

I’ll ask him about it tomorrow
.

Katie was yawning as he turned to her with a smile. “If you have no nightdress, I have a one that belonged to my sister you can wear,” he said.

He lifted a white cotton chemise from a shelf holding other clothing items. The fabric was so much thicker and nicer than the one Katie had in her travel bag, she reached for it without hesitation, then blushed.

He’ll want to watch me put it on.

“Go ahead.” Conway said, turning away. “I won’t look.”

Katie quickly disrobed. She would keep the pillow ticking bag holding the table knife secured around her waist.

No, Conway might discover it.

She untied its bands and bundled it with her clothing and pushed it against the wall beside the bed, then pulled the chemise on over her head.

“The bed is large enough for us both,” he said. “You mustn’t worry about the safety of your virtue.”

“Is that true?” Katie hoped her voice was steady. Whether or not she would give herself to him was dependent on how much she trusted Conway and what, if anything, was their future together. Again, her head and heart could not come to terms on how to proceed.

“You’re a pretty girl whose attentions I crave, but I have no desire for a woman who doesn’t want me.”

He doesn’t just take what he wants.

Katie climbed in the bed and moved to the side against the wall, pulled the covers up around her and lay back on a thin feather pillow. She should be on the side with the escape route, but how to say that to Conway?

“There may come a time when you might honor me in that way, but not tonight. We are both too tired.” He extinguished the lamp and the candle.

She heard fumbling that sounded like undressing. Despite his words, he might climb in bed naked and press himself against her.

Perhaps I’d like that.

Even so, she drew back against the wall as a draft of cool air hit her when he lifted the covers to climb in.

The warmth returned to the bed and he maintained a respectful distance.

I cannot tell if he’s naked
.

Both emotional letdown and a sense of relief took fear away. She folded the thin pillow and snuggled into it, breathing in Conway’s strong scent.

In her exhaustion, she had a guarded thought,
I could do much worse than to marry a poet.
 

How foolish that I’d thought he might kill me!
She suppressed a giggle.

As head and heart began to find common ground, Katie became giddy. She could reach for Conway, pull him to her and allow him to take her.

But she might not be ready.

Still, her heart insisted on some expression of her desire. She reached tentatively with a foot to touch him.

A thrill ran through her when he responded, his feet embracing her own.

Katie lay awake wondering what it all might mean until exhaustion claimed her.

The next day, Katie failed to ask Conway about her one-twentieth of chapbook sales. She didn’t ask about it the day after that either. Then, as the days turned into weeks and Conway provided everything in her new life, she decided she didn’t need payment.

Conway’s room was dry and cozy. Most of the time the smell from the basement went unnoticed. Even when evident, the odor paled in comparison to the Great Stink of two years ago, when the amount of waste entering the Thames and an unusually hot summer combined to create a miasma so potent it nearly shut down the government and brought the city to a halt. Those who could afford to do so evacuated the city. If she could survive that, there wasn’t much else to fear in the realm of odor. 

What little cooking Conway did, boiling vegetables and a bit of meat occasionally or water for tea, was done on the Soyer stove, which was also used to keep the room warm. But most of their meals were taken at the Adam and Eve Tavern a few streets to the West.

Conway’s straw bed was lumpy and sweat-stained. Katie cleaned the ticking and bedclothes and did her best to redistribute the straw. He was grateful.

She sang songs in the mornings, starting with popular folk tunes and then learning several of the gallows ballads Conway had written. 

“Your beautiful voice gives
life
to my lyrics,” Conway said.

“You must think I’m gulpy and flat!” Katie said.

“No, truly you do. If I were a different man, I’d have you singing in all the pubs to promote our ballads.”

So there it is.
Always some angle to what he says and does. Still, he’s good to me. And perhaps I do have a good voice.

With time,
Katie came to like Conway’s idea even if he didn’t. One of the Adam and Eve’s barmaids, Eloise Millican, told her that the landlord of the establishment had opened a back room for those willing to pay a little extra for some entertainment. “He listens to the sing-alongs among the customers,” Eloise said. “When he finds a woman of the right talent, one who can present herself properly, he hires her to sing in his back room. The room doesn’t have a name yet, but folks are calling it The Garden of Eden. I’ve heard that impresarios from some of the music halls are already coming to performances at The Garden, looking for talent.”

“Is the landlord Mr. Senters, the gentleman with the red beard?” Katie asked.

“Yes, but he doesn’t like folks to know he’s listening. He wouldn’t want me talking about it.”

“No one will know we spoke.”

Katie imagined herself fashionably dressed on stage in one of the great music halls in the West End, singing one of Conway’s sad ballads, the audience brought to tears by her exquisite performance. The clothes were the key, for it was all about appearances. The quality of the entertainment didn’t vary much between the aristocratic music halls of Leicester Square and those of less fashionable parts of town or even the poor and squalid districts. In entertainment, fine clothes made the person. With Conway’s income, acquiring such finery was within the realm of possibility. Then she might catch the eye and the ear of the Adam and Eve’s landlord, Mr. Senters.

Little time passed before Katie drew Conway into an embrace that led to sex. Unlike Uncle William, Conway
was
interested in how she looked under her skirts. She tried the trick she’d used on William, but Conway was not to be fooled. Penetration was indeed achieved, and Katie liked it.

She quickly came to see herself as invaluable to Conway. He worked hard to provide for them, and did well. Katie worked equally hard alongside him. She could never be an equal partner, but she wanted his respect and for her feelings and opinions to be a matter of consequence to him.

One afternoon as they were ducking out to get a bite to eat, Katie became annoyed with Conway furtively glancing up and down the street before they exited his room. “Must you sneak me in and out of your room day and night?” she asked.

“The neighbors will talk.” He had a dismissive tone. “I’m protecting you from scorn.”

“The neighbors have seen me,” Katie said flatly. “They work too hard to care what you do.”

Conway opened his mouth, clearly about to argue his point, then apparently thought better of it. “If the landlord hears about you, he’ll raise my rent.” He paused for a moment, then said, “I’ll have a talk with him.”

His decision to be honest was a good one. He was a different sort of man.

Conway was a teetotaler, who saved earnings he might have spent on drink. He had a pension from his years in the Eighteenth Irish Regiment, but his main source of income was his chapbooks.

Conway had a confederate at the Sessions House, the Criminal Court in the Old Bailey, and the new Court adjoining it, who brought him the latest news of cases that might end in a sentence of death. He had friends who sent him news from the legal courts in other cities. Conway worked on ballads for those he believed would be convicted. His goal was to have a ballad completed by the time the sentence was handed down. Rarely did one of his ballads go unpublished.

They traveled to Warwick, Worcester and Stafford to sell chapbooks at public hangings. Katie prepared several necessities for their trips, a flannel and soap, another with pins and needles, a ball of hemp, a tin box with tea and another with sugar, and loaded them into her travel bag along with extra clothing for Conway and herself.

In the past, Conway hired young men to travel with him and help with sales, but presently Katie was all he needed. To draw more attention to their product, he encouraged Katie to sing the ballads they were trying to sell. She had a good ear and a pure voice that she could project with great clarity over the din of the crowd. She was delighted by the admiring looks she got and frequently imagined herself to be singing from a stage.

Most often Conway wrote his ballads at the Adam and Eve Tavern after he and Katie had eaten their evening meal. Sitting and smoking his pipe, obsessively sharpening the point on his pencil with a table knife, as if that might sharpen the effect of his words, Conway would grumble and scribble a line or two, then read it to Katie. She tired of it one evening and set aside the newspaper she was reading.

Looking around the tavern, she found Mr. Senters sitting alone at a table with a pint. Perhaps he was listening to the sing-alongs, looking for talent.

“If I had better clothing,” Katie told Conway, “something more like a music hall singer might wear, I’d attract more of the crowd when I sing.”

“I should say so,” he said. “But a constable would come ‘round and haul you off for indecency.” He chuckled then. “I’ve been to music halls and seen the female singers.  They can’t sing two songs without a change of clothing. I can’t afford that.”

“Something with silk and velvet and a bit of color,” she said. “Perhaps green. With that I might well find myself singing in a music hall one day.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he said. “We’re doing quite well as it is.”

A group of young men and women at a nearby table, sang popular songs drunkenly. With her ability to project her voice, she could fill the tavern with song and draw everyone’s attention.

If Conway watches me capture the hearts of these people, he won’t be able to deny my need for fine clothes. And if Mr. Senters is pleased with my voice, I might go on to sing in his back room.

“I’m going to ask those people if I might sing with them.” she said.

But as Katie made to get up, Conway grabbed her roughly by the arm. “You’ll not be associating with those who drink.” The look in his eye was severe and frightening.

“I’ll sing here, then.”

“You’ll not make a scene,” he demanded. He squeezed her arm uncomfortably, then let it go.

Katie, her plan thwarted, was ill-tempered, but didn’t want to admit what she was up to. Still, she was not going to take his abuse. She plucked the pipe from his mouth and stuck it in her own, she slouched in her seat to match his posture, she grumbled and pretended to scribble lines of poetry, all to mock him.

Conway chuckled at her antics, and she found it disarming. The spell cast by his anger was temporarily broken.

“Sitting with you while you write is tedious.” Katie said. “If you want me to stay here, you’ll speak to me.”

Anger flashed briefly in his eyes, and then he relaxed. “I suppose there are times when I may be sitting next to you, but I’m not here. When I’m writing, my mind wanders off.”

Katie watched Mr. Senters finish off his pint and slip behind the bar to continue his work.

Conway was in no mood to consider her needs.

Her plans would have to wait.