Chapel Noir (25 page)

Irene nodded, looking resigned.

He led us through a series of clammy rooms.

“Electrically powered refrigeration,” Irene whispered in my ear, her words icy. Despite the artificial chill, Death’s foul breath tainted the air.

Finally, we stopped outside an ajar door. Inside I saw a small bare chamber. Upon a stone slab lay a naked woman.

I had expected to see death. To see naked death.

I had not expected the vicious assault of those conditions on my senses.

The river roared in my ears like an ocean. The floor heaved and swayed beneath my feet. Irene’s hand clawed into my forearm, whether to brace me or herself, I cannot say.

Monsieur Bureaucrat melted like paint in my vision and wavered like a raindrop on a pane of glass as he left us to our macabre mission.

“You have influence with the Prefecture,” I said, concentrating on the minutiae so the grosser facts of our surroundings should not overwhelm me.

“Not much,” she said tightly. Her eyes met mine. “You are a woman of the world.”

“Miss Huxleigh, Nell, is rather more unworldly, I think.”

“You are right. I cannot subject her to what we will see here. She has more strength than is apparent, but I am unwilling to disillusion her of certain civilities.”

“She has an unsuspected taste for the Gothic, you know.”

“I know.” Irene pushed aside her dark muffler and smiled. “But this is more than Gothic. It would make sense only to a worldly woman, and you are that, are you not?”

“Of course,” I said. It was true. I had seen much that most women had never suspected. But I had also done less than one might imagine.

Irene Adler Norton’s remarkable brown-gold eyes seemed to burn like the electric lamp outside the primitive chamber as they measured the truth and the misrepresentations that have always been twin aspects of my soul.

“You may wish this revelation, Pink, but I am responsible for your presence. Can you withstand this?”

“I don’t know. I can try.”

“Honestly said.” She took a deep breath, one so deep that I thought it would never end. “The refrigeration process eliminates much that is unpleasant, and therefore real. We will not need Nell’s smelling salts here. Would that there were as useful a defense for the sense of sight.”

She took my wrist again, gently. “You have some knowledge of Jack the Ripper. I have greater knowledge. I have riffled through an entire chapbook of Jack the Rippers, and anything we may imagine about him and his ghoulish pursuits and ghastly killings is insufficient. I believe the wounds upon these women are fouler than anything anyone might have imagined about Whitechapel, than anyone might suspect.

“We have the privilege to see the truth, to face it, and to try to stop the evil that kills so vilely. I have decided that you can survive what would drive most women mad, and many men. Can you?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

“The truth, Pink? At last?”

“The truth at last.”

I swallowed. I had vowed to see life in all its ugliness. I had given myself up to witness what most people hoped never to meet in even their nightmares. Irene Adler Norton was offering me a new variety of nightmare, and I realized that we both would never be the same if we met it face-to-face.

But what is the use of living, if one cannot face death?

I squared my shoulders, a fruitless gesture, and nodded to the chamber awaiting us. To the naked woman who would never feel the chill of the Paris Morgue’s marvelous refrigeration system.

Would that I were not chilled to the bone and the soul myself.

Irene turned to enter the room, and I followed.

Just as I had when I discovered the bodies in the
maison de rendezvous
, I forced myself to study the larger surroundings before I let my eyes dwell on the object of our pity and horror.

The smallness and meanness of the viewing chamber struck me first. An arched ceiling made it seem like a tunnel, or a crypt or a wine cellar, save that the walls and ceiling were whitewashed to a deathly pallor.

The black bar of a wooden rail sat high on one wall, and from a series of iron hooks articles of the victim’s dress dangled like clothes on a macabre washline. High-button shoes as well as limp stockings, grimy bloomers, petticoat and apron, striped bodice and mended jacket hung from the long line of hooks. To see one woman’s entire habiliment strung out like this was both chilling and pathetic. The mottled brown-red on the bloomers and corset cover looked at first glance like some overblown floral fabric until one realized that blood had been the dye.

There was only the faintest putrid odor. I was glad no man was here to see me shiver from the cold, from the room’s centerpiece that finally became the only thing I had not studied.

The body lay on a stone bier, a slab perhaps two feet high from the floor, on its back, a dingy linen cloth draped from shoulders to knees.

Her face was pale, as I had expected. I had not expected it to look so ordinary, to seem so capable of animating in an instant, the eyes opening, the lips parting, vision and breath restored . . . stirring to acknowledge my presence.

She was neither particularly pretty nor plain. Her face was framed by brown hair pulled back without the relief of softening curls.

The dark line at the base of her neck resembled a fine cord from which perhaps some trinket had hung. It took an act of will to see it for the thin chasm between life and death drawn by a fine steel blade.

“Throat cut, as with the Ripper,” Irene said.

I realized that she had been studying me as I observed the room and its occupant.

“It looks so . . . clean,” I said.

“They have washed away the blood for photographs, no doubt. I wonder how much they washed the face.”

“Why?”

“She does not look like a woman of the streets, but rather a laundress or some other toiler. A prostitute would have used cheap paints, and I’d think the morgue authorities would leave them in place if they wished her to be identified.”

“You are saying they don’t wish her to be identified?”

“I am saying I would like to know if her face was ever painted or not. And men are so strange about such matters. They might have cleaned her face in an attempt to give her the dignity owed the dead, never realizing they were washing away the chief means of recognizing her. If she was a prostitute and if she wore paint.”

“What of the . . . wounds.”

She nodded at the linen that seemed to dissect the body into a magician’s illusion of a sawed-in-half lady: the dead white feet and lower limbs, the bare shoulders, neck, and head.

Who had sawed her unseen in half, and how?

Irene bent over to lift up the top of the linen covering.

I curled my gloved fingers into my palms until I felt a dull fire like invisible reins being wrenched from my grasp.

I heard a strangled moan. Mine. This woman had no breasts, merely gaping holes where slick underlying tissue showed through.

I imagined the medical men and police investigators who had seen these mutilations wincing at the sheer savagery of the wounds, despite their endless exposure to the worst that may be done to the human body.

Still, only a woman could feel such personal devastation at seeing a portion so unique to her sex hacked away.

For some reason my mind went to the corset with its trailing gray laces hung above her head, to the roses of blood blooming along its upper edge, smearing the limp corset cover.

Had she survived these injuries, these items would be an empty mockery of her woman’s dress.

Irene’s face was frozen into an expression of utter self-control. She glanced at me as if judging my own command of myself, then let the linen down so gently it settled back on the abused body like the mistiest veiling.

Her hand moved to the bottom edge, then her eyes consulted me. Last, she consulted me vocally.

“Are you able to continue?”

“No such choice was given her. Yes.”

Her glance was already on the linen she lifted.

This violation of privacy was really too much to bear. I reminded myself that doctors had stood here in this morgue building and done as much, and more. That male attendants had. That we were women and looking on one of our own, for the purpose of preserving others of our own.

Still . . . the linen lifted up, and I moved beside Irene so I saw what she saw.

She captured a deep breath and held it. Held it so long that I wondered if she would ever exhale again. I certainly had seemed to stop breathing altogether. My head grew . . . giddy. The clothing rack was pushing nearer and retreating like a weapon, its few empty hooks seeming to strike at my eyes. Strike my eyes blind from what they had seen . . .

“The injuries appear to be external,” Irene said at last, having drawn on her indrawn breath to speak.

I felt my eyelids flutter and dug my gloved fingernails deeper into the flesh of my palms.

“This is very strange, Nell,” she went on, her voice sounding hollow in my ears, and then fading.

I was unable to react, not even to her calling me by the wrong name.

Her sudden grasp dug into my elbow. “Don’t swoon; there is no place to sit down here, except the slab, no place to lie down, except the floor.”

I lowered and shook my head, waved the buzzing phalanx of flies from my ears, grasped hard on to Irene’s wrist with one hand.

“Think of the larger picture,” she urged me. “What this means. This woman’s private parts have been . . . not surgically removed, but hacked off. The rest of the body is untouched, except for some bruising. There are no entrails, no slashing of the eyes. Why has the Ripper changed? The London victims were cut internally. I suspect if we get honest answers about the women on the rue des Moulins, they were treated similarly.”

The thought that such terrible mutilations lurked under that bloody froth of lace and silk on the Prince of Wales’s
siège d’amour
was almost enough to tip me over into the swoon of the century.

But then I reflected that I was privileged--yes, privileged—to know and confront such things so that perhaps other women in this city would not have to do so. And I took a deep breath, surprised that the thick metallic reek of blood did not dominate the air, that although I felt hideously hot, as if incarcerated in the lowest circle of hell, the room was actually chilly. That the flies had buzzed away, that I still stood upright, and that the linen was falling like a curtain to obscure the dreadful wound.

“Did you expect this?” I asked Irene.

“I expected carnage. Not this. We have been indeed drawn into something unique in the history of inhumanity.”

“She
was
killed first, as the Ripper’s victims, and carved up later?”

“I am not sure.” Irene sounded as troubled as I had ever heard her. “I am not sure of that at all.”

If I had been disposed to faint, then is when I would have had full title to the state. But it was too late; I had drawn again upon my eternal resolve that nothing in life, or death, should abash me. I would be permitted no merciful moments of forgetfulness tonight, or ever after.

This is the terrible drawback of wishing to be a woman of the world.

27.
The Skull Beneath the Skin

The horrid fascination which the morgue has for the female
mind, both foreign and native, is one of those phenomena
which observers note in going through life, but cannot
understand
.
—
THE LONDON MORNING ADVERTISER

FROM A JOURNAL

Side by side, we leaned against the wall outside the chamber many minutes later, its cold leaching the warmth from our bodies, unable to move except in our minds.

“So nothing in the London crimes was as horrific as what was done to that woman in there?” Irene asked.

I stirred against the wall, which was as cold and hard as a stone slab. I felt emptied, emotionless, like a vertical corpse, as I considered the hard facts of so many deaths in a not-so-long-ago London.

“There, I did not see for myself. But from what I have heard, the acts were more in the nature of sheer butchery, like some autopsy gone terribly wrong or performed by an ape. This is pure, premeditated defacement and mutilation, and to me even more horrific.”

“I was right to spare Nell this, then. Was I right to think that you could better face it?”

“It is not the sheer gore, Irene, but the nature of these attacks. They have become more—”

“More difficult for women to face. Yet the throat is cut in every case.

“In London, at least, it was a mercy cutting. All the butchery took place afterward.”

Irene nodded. “Jack the Ripper was a monster, but he performed his most monstrous acts on dead women. Believe it or not, this is not unheard of. If he has truly relocated to Paris, he has grown crueler. I am not a surgeon, but the mutilations performed on this woman, and perhaps the other two, would seem to have been made prior to, or simultaneous with, death.”

I bit my lip and took a breath as deep as those Irene had practiced this night to calm her emotions. “While the London Ripper attacked the internal organs, the Paris Ripper has become more superficial. The breasts hacked off, and what was done between their legs . .

Irene nodded, as if to stop my description. “The areas violated are so specifically female, sites of both pleasure and pain in a woman, a mother.”

“That is it! He attacks the maternal apparatus.”

“Or what is most female in a woman, before she becomes a mother, and after. Many of the Whitechapel victims were mothers, but not Mary Jane Kelly?”

“No. You’re right.”

“She was the youngest, and most attractive??”

“Lordy, yes.” My voice broke despite my best efforts. She had been only twenty-five, my own exact age. I gritted my teeth and stuck to what had always saved me from the warm, oozing trap of sentimentality: the cold facts. “The others were missing teeth and showed twenty more years’ wear and tear, but still one of them could take pleasure in ‘a jolly bonnet,’ for all the threadbare desperation of her life. Except for Catharine Eddowes. She sounded almost pretty, with her auburn hair and hazel eyes. She even dressed with style, a black jacket with false fur at collar and cuffs, and a bonnet trimmed with green-and-black velvet and black beads. It sounded much ‘jollier’ than Mary Ann Nichol’s bonnet.”

“And yet she was the most savagely attacked thus far, the next-to-last victim before Mary Jane Kelly. And didn’t Catharine Eddowes use the name Mary
Ann
Kelly when she was arrested?”

“Yes. She lived with a man named Kelly.”

“And an earlier victim was named Mary Ann?”

“The first. Mary Ann Nichols. You think that the killer was confused by the victim’s name? That he was searching for a particular woman, and when he found her, his rampage ended?”

“I don’t know. Hearing the details of the Ripper’s crimes and victims is like listening to a satanic symphony. There are movements and themes, motifs and reprises, but still the Devil is conducting the orchestra, and we must dance to his demented tune.”

She pushed herself away from the wall, forcing her backbone to support her on its own. “I have a devil’s dictionary back at our hotel that I will share with you. You will learn what I have: that such crimes, such atrocities, are not uncommon, though not commonly made public. Not even the vile Ripper letter talking about eating the victim’s kidney. ‘It was very good,’ I believe he said. Even that has precedent.”

She moved down the passage, but I caught her coat sleeve in my hand.

“Mrs. Norton. Irene. You have not asked why or how I know so much of the London crimes.”

Her eyes regarded me with almost childlike clarity. “You were banished to your room to study Nell’s and the Rothschild newspapers and the police reports, while she and I interviewed Bram Stoker. I assume you are a quick study.”

It was a most generous and even disingenuous view of my role. I could not let it stand.

“I went to London. To see the world. And to work in a West End establishment. It was quite nice, actually. I thought that we were a world away from the ‘abyss,’ which is how Jack London, the American author, described London’s East End not long ago. Yet we girls were all . . . riveted by the Whitechapel murders. We were so far away from, so far above those sad East End prostitutes, safe and well clothed, warm and even paid decently, but—”

“You were just as susceptible.” She brushed off my hand, not with distaste but with true disinterest in my role as a professional fallen woman, in even the details of that life that I confessed. “I don’t think that Jack the Ripper is so much ‘down on whores’ as that he knows the rest of the world is, and that therefore they are helpless targets for his inhuman appetites.
Jack l’Eventreur
, the French call him, and now they have him in their midst.”

“You believe it is the same man?”

“I believe it is the same mania.” She consulted a pocket watch on a chain. “It is late. We must hurry back to the hotel. Soon hansoms will not stop for even respectably clad clients.”

With that she wound the scarf over her lower face, donned her top hat, and offered me her arm.

How very odd. I have always considered myself an independent and typically American woman, needing no man’s gentlemanly escort. Yet I was very glad to have this particular woman in man’s guise accompanying me back to the life and lights of our hotel, especially after what we had seen.

The guard nodded brusquely at us as we departed the morgue.

Outside of the building, we could hear the river Seine lapping at the stone embankments like a huge invisible cat consuming cream.

The towers of Notre Dame snagged fast-flying clouds.

We walked along the Seine, alone with the fog that the river exhaled like fine veiling. Streetlights spangled the distance like stars. Such beauty, such peace ahead of us, and behind us, ruin.

I would have to revisit the
maison
to discover the names, ages, habits, and heights of the dead women. Irene’s musical mind was struggling to discern a design in the madness, and I saw now that even the most aberrant acts of human nature must hide some unseen pattern.

Our footsteps pattered like slow-tempo sleet on the stones along the river. Andante, andante.

We spoke not a word. Every four steps, Irene’s walking stick would strike the stones. Rather like the triangle in an orchestra, a tiny sound lost in the vastness of the night, yet as regular as rain or a ringing mantel clock.

The shuffle of other shoes came in our train as we neared the pierced, clifflike ramparts of Notre Dame.

“I feel a sudden need for religious observance,” Irene whispered suddenly. “Quick! Into Holy Mother Church.”

She steered me through a side entrance into the grande dame of Gothic cathedrals.

I was not so sure we were seeking shelter. Oh, it was dark inside, save for a tiny red gleam of a vigil light in the distant sanctuary, like a rat’s eye in the dark, and the mass of lit candles before the statues of the saints.

Scents of liquid beeswax and charred wicks filled my nostrils, along with the slightly stale yet peppery miasma of incense that had lofted into this soaring nave for more than seven hundred years.

Irene was pulling me down the side aisle.

Our footsteps sounded like tocsins, and behind them came other steps.

She guided me toward the great front entrance, where we slipped through a small door in the massive facade. Ancient but squat outbuildings clustered, an architectural mob, in the open area before the cathedral’s front doors.

Irene took my wrist and pulled me toward the shadowy mass.

At that moment a squeal like a pig erupted from the very buildings we ran toward. A sleet of stone fragments blasted my right cheek.

“A bullet,” she said in a deep hush, thrusting her cane into my free hand. “It’s a sword-stick. Pull the cane top free if you need to use it. Hurry. In here.”

She pushed forward on the first bit of wall that collapsed and proved itself a door. We moved into absolute interior darkness.

My gloved hand lifted the decorated cane top and I heard the metallic slither of a blade pulling free of a sheath, a harsh, sharp sound that challenged the darkness and silence all around us.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

“Inside, away from whoever’s shooting at us. That’s all I know.” She prodded me forward into unknown territory.

Our feet and hands and bodies collided with unknown shapes and borders in the dark, but none of them was animate. The smell was dank and musty. Despite our slow, painful progress, we made no racket, although we heard muffled banging at the fringes of the compound.

Still Irene pulled and pushed me forward. A piece of wall gave way again, and I found my boots stuttering down some narrow, swaybacked stone stairs.

Immediately I was struck by two conflicting sensations: the chill breath of an underground draft, and the scent of warm wax. That heavenly odor mixes with the incense that perfumes the wooden pulpits and altarpieces of the great cathedrals of Europe and England and for me embodies the notion of the Old World.

“Hurry,” Irene whispered. “This time we may not be too late.”