The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (28 page)

“You have hit the nail on the head again, Eric. The ether. Electromagnetism. The whole lot.”

“That is not the same thing as the Golem, George.”

“I am not so sure of that as you are. We have created so many wonderful inventions in the last few years. We have seen so many changes. Do you think that the Golem might be one of them?”

Inspector Kildare got up from his armchair, and went over to his friend. “You say some very curious things, George, when you’re contemplating a problem.” He reached down and stroked his friend’s mutton-chop whiskers.

“All I am saying, Eric, is that you must look for a material cause.”

S
EPTEMBER
30, 1880: I have been confined to bed with a weakness in my stomach, while my dear wife ministers to me with her usual care. I had wanted to continue with a little business in Limehouse, but in these cases art must wait upon life.

O
CTOBER
2, 1880: My wife caught me reading an account of the funeral in the
Graphic
: the Gerrard family has been dispatched to the little graveyard off Wellclose Square. I was satisfied, on their behalf, that they had been placed in their native soil. Of course I would have preferred to attend the ceremony, but my indisposition has prevented me. I did truly mourn their passing, since they had left the world without having the chance to acclaim my artistry—the flick of the knife, the pressure of the artery, the whispered confidence, are all, to quote Lord Tennyson, “unknown to name and fame.” That is why I have come to detest this phrase, the “Limehouse Golem”; it is no true title for an artist.

O
CTOBER
4, 1880: Mrs. Cree came into my room this morning with an article of clothing and I admit that, for a moment, I lost my self-possession. It was the blood-stained scarf which I had kept after the Gerrard killings; it was dyed with the deepest red of the carotid artery, and I had wanted to preserve it as a memento. I had hidden it within the plaster head of William Shakespeare
which rests on a plinth in the hall, and I had expected no one to find it. “What is this?” she asked me.

“A nosebleed. I had nothing else to stanch it.”

She looked at me strangely. “But why did you put it in the bust?”

“It is a head, not a bust. I came in when you were playing at the piano, and I did not want to concern you. So I placed it there. How did you find it?”

“Aveline has broken the head. She was dusting.”

“So Shakespeare is shattered?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

We said no more on the subject. My wife left the scarf upon my desk, and I pretended to return to my newspaper.

O
CTOBER
5, 1880: Let me recall the chain of events today. I felt quite recovered from my indisposition, and so I came down for breakfast. Aveline told me that Mrs. Cree was asleep still, and I finished my egg in peace. I was glancing over the front page of the
Chronicle
, where there was an interesting item on the police investigation, when I thought I heard a footfall in my study: it is just above the breakfast room and, as I looked up in the direction of the sound, I heard the unmistakable creaking of a floorboard. I left the table and mounted the stairs as quietly as I could; then I marched straight to my study and opened the door with a flourish, but there was no one within. So I walked down the passage and knocked on my wife’s door. “Who is it?” She did indeed sound as if she had been roused from sleep.

“Can I bring you anything, my dearest?”

“No. Nothing whatever.”

I returned to my study. I am meticulous by nature, and all my books and papers are arranged methodically: it took me only a few moments, therefore, to realize that my black bag had been
moved slightly to the left of my chair. Naturally it was locked—it is the bag in which I keep all the tools of the trade—but it was plain to me that someone had been curious about its contents.

O
CTOBER
6, 1880: I do believe now that my wife suspects something. She had been asking me very casually about the night I had “visited a friend in the City,” which was the night of the Ratcliffe Highway ceremony, and I answered her casually in return. Nevertheless she observed me very closely and very strangely. I comfort myself with the reflection that she could not possibly imagine her mild and patient husband to be the killer of women and children, the Limehouse Golem itself. It would be too great a mystery to comprehend.

O
CTOBER
7, 1880: Today she asked me where I had purchased the shawl which I had given her some weeks ago. “From somewhere in Holborn,” I replied easily enough. Then it occurred to me that, since I had bought it in Gerrard’s shop, it might have his name or address marked somewhere upon it. I waited until she had left the house, in search of something “fresh” for dinner as she put it, and I hurried up to her room. The scarf was draped over a small gilt chair in the corner: yes, there had been a tag attached to it. It had been ripped off.

O
CTOBER
8, 1880: But what if she does suspect? Is she likely to communicate with the police authorities? No, she cares too much for her station in life to hazard it. And if her suspicions were to be proved false, how would she ever be able to justify her actions to me? Who, in any case, would believe her? A respectable and prosperous man such as myself—a scholar, a gentleman,
a householder—could hardly be capable of such monstrous bloodshed. The Limehouse Golem living in a villa in New Cross? She would be treated with derision, and I knew her pride to be such that she would not willingly undergo the ordeal. No. I am safe.

O
CTOBER
9, 1880: Something else has happened. I had brought to her attention a little item in the
South London Observer
, about a pickpocket who had been apprehended in the neighborhood, when she looked wildly at me and began muttering about punishment. I think she intends something.

T
hree weeks had passed since the murder of the Gerrard family in Ratcliffe Highway, and the identity of the Limehouse Golem had still not been discovered. Dan Leno had already been discounted as a most improbable suspect, and the investigation of the police detectives turned into a series of profitless and haphazard speculations. A seaman was arrested because he had blood upon his clothing, and an itinerant cage-maker found himself in the cells of Limehouse Division simply because he had been seen in the vicinity of the last crime.

There had been more sinister consequences, however. After the burial of the Gerrard family in the cemetery by Wellclose Square, a mob ransacked the house of a Jewish tea merchant in Shadwell since his misanthropic habits led the more credulous inhabitants of the East End to the conclusion that he was also a golem; in Limehouse itself a group of prostitutes savagely beat a German on the grounds that he looked “as if he might do a mischief.” There were also foot patrols of “interested citizens” who spent the night drinking in the various public houses along their route before careering down the streets in search of any Jew or foreigner.

Other activities were of a more benevolent nature. There were questions in the House of Commons once more on the conditions of the East End poor, and parties of respectable ladies were to be seen wandering through the less salubrious areas of Limehouse and Whitechapel in search of deserving cases. Charles Dickens and certain “problem novelists” had described
the horrors of urban poverty before, but these accounts were characteristically sentimentalized or sensationalized to take account of the public taste for Gothic effects. Newspaper reports were not necessarily more accurate, of course, since they tended to follow the same patterns of melodramatic narrative. But the pressure of parliamentary questions, and the lengthy expositions which appeared in the intellectual quarterlies, encouraged a more sober analysis of urban conditions in the late nineteenth century. It was no coincidence, for example, that a program of slum clearance began in the area of Shadwell only a year after the crimes of the Limehouse Golem were first revealed.

But the Golem itself had vanished. After the killings in the Ratcliffe Highway, there were to be no more deaths. Some newspapers speculated that the murderer had committed suicide, and the Thames was watched by eager river men for weeks, while others suggested that he had merely switched his attention to other cities and might even now be in the industrial areas of the Midlands or the North. Inspector Kildare’s own private theory, which he put to George Flood before supper one evening, was that he had fled the country on a steamship and was probably somewhere in America. Only the
Echo
surmised that the killer had himself been killed—perhaps by a wife or mistress who had found evidence of his crimes.

But the most bizarre speculations came from those people who really believed in the legend of the Golem: they insisted that this man-made creature, this automaton, had simply disappeared at the end of his career of death. The fact that the last killings had taken place in the same house where the Marr murders had been enacted, almost seventy years before, only confirmed their belief that a secret ritual had been performed and that the clothes shop in the Ratcliffe Highway had once been some temple to a strange god. The Limehouse Golem had
faded away within the blood and limbs of its victims, and would undoubtedly re-emerge in the same spot after a period of years.

There was some discussion of these matters at the monthly meeting of the Occult Society in Coptic Street, only a few yards from the Reading Room of the British Museum. In fact the secretary of the society spent most of his time among the books of the library and, for the benefit of the other members, he had already transcribed certain old texts on the subject of the golem and its mythic history. For him, as for many others, the Reading Room was the true spiritual center of London where many secrets might finally be revealed. Indeed, if he had known it, he could have solved the riddle of the Limehouse Golem beneath the great dome—if not precisely in the manner he might have expected. All the participants in the mystery, willing or unwilling, had come to this place—Karl Marx, George Gissing, Dan Leno and, of course, John Cree himself.

In fact there had been one other significant visitor; Elizabeth Cree had forged two letters of recommendation and, on the added strength of her husband’s long use of the library, had been admitted as a lady reader in the spring of 1880. She had sat at the special row of seats reserved for her sex, and had called for the collected works of Thomas De Quincey as well as Daniel Defoe’s
History of the Devil
. While she waited for these books to be delivered to her, she contemplated the shabby clothes and awkward manners of those who, in George Gissing’s words, lived “in the valley of the shadow of books.” She pitied them for it, even as she despised her husband for sinking so low. She did not know that Dan Leno had encountered Joseph Grimaldi here, and had thereby found his inheritance; that Karl Marx had studied here for many years, and out of his books had created a giant system; that here George Gissing had been led towards the mysteries of Charles Babbage’s analytical machinery; that here her
husband had dreamed of future fame. Elizabeth Cree had finished De Quincey’s essay on the Ratcliffe Highway killings before ordering other books which would have some effect upon the lives of the characters in this history; she asked for certain volumes on contemporary surgical techniques.