What Alice Knew (25 page)

William was seated in Abberline’s shabby office, going through photographs of the murder scene. Sickert had been released upon delivery of the statement by Jane Cobden, and William and the inspector were back where they started: a vicious killer on the loose and no apparent suspects. The delivery of the gruesome specimen to Alice, which had initially seemed to William a sure indication of Sickert’s guilt, seemed now to have a different connotation. After all, it was widely known that William had been asked to consult on the case; a little digging by the cunning murderer would have revealed that he had family in London. What better way to mock his efforts than to terrorize his invalid sister?

Abberline returned to the office that afternoon and immediately began to study the details of the Kelly murder, poring over the photographs of the scene that had been delivered by the police photographer a few hours earlier.

“What’s the point of looking at photographs when we saw the room firsthand?” asked William.

“Because,” Abberline explained, “at the scene of a crime, it is impossible to see things in any perspective. The details overwhelm the whole, especially in a case as vicious and bloody as this one.”

William nodded, remembering his difficulty taking in the room when he had first arrived on the scene. He also recalled the tirade he had earlier directed at Abberline. Seating himself at the table where the photographs were spread, he gently touched his colleague’s shoulder. It was his way of apologizing. He sensed that Abberline understood that he had briefly gone mad and had now come back. There was no need to speak about it.

William saw at once the value of the photographs. They presented an entirely different view from what he had looked at that morning. At the time, his mind had moved in and out, from horror to a kind of reverie, incapable of engaging for any sustained period with the scene itself. The pictures, however, placed him squarely in a middle ground—at once more bearable and more horrible. He had felt it when he had looked at the photographs of the other victims. Here, the effect was amplified. He had the image, freshly imprinted on his memory, of the scene as it had actually existed; these pictures were a kind of overlay on that. He saw again, though more clearly now, the hollowed-out eyes, the pools of blood where the breasts had been, the carved-up torso, the bespattered room. The photograph eliminated color, texture, odor—all the distracting variables that had overwhelmed his senses. It provided instead a simple clinical representation: the body laid out, the head propped up, the left knee bent, and the tatters of nightdress showing here and there amid the blackness that designated the soaking blood. He was again struck by the paradox of what constitutes reality. The photograph was a representation, without color or dimension, much of the detail subsumed in darkness or blurred images, yet it made the scene available in its entirety in a way that being there could not.

He and Abberline stared together at the image of the eviscerated woman in the darkly shadowed bedroom. It was like peering through a keyhole into hell.

Two days after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, Sickert appeared at the door of Alice’s bedroom holding Archie’s hand. The boy had let him in, and they had come up to the room quietly, “as a surprise,” Sickert had whispered, placing his finger to his mouth.

Alice, propped up in bed writing in her journal, looked up over her spectacles as though her visitor’s presence were the most normal thing in the world.

“Our young man informed me that you were awake,” said Sickert jauntily, “so I told him that we should sneak up on you. But you do not seem surprised.”

“Do you want me to be surprised?” she asked, returning automatically to the teasing tone that she had been used to taking with him. So much had happened in the interval, and yet at the sight of him, it all seemed to melt away.

“I don’t know if I want you to be surprised,” said Sickert, “or to be so anticipating my visit that you are not. Since you’re not, I’ll assume the latter.”

“You look well,” said Alice.

“I’ve had a hard few days, but I’m recovered.”

“And how was Cornwall?”

He held her eyes for a moment. “Oh, I didn’t go as planned. Something came up. But I’ll be leaving tonight; this time it’s certain. Still, I wanted to drop this off before I left.” He held up the canvas, its back facing to her. “I promised to hang it on the wall for a proper viewing, and I try to keep my promises, when I can.”

Without further explanation, he took out a hammer from his satchel and a nail from his pocket and strode over to the wall opposite the bed. He stood back a moment to establish the position and then hammered in the nail. “Now, close your eyes,” he said.

“I recall your telling me to do that once before,” said Alice, complying. “You said it would relax my face.”

“And it did. As you’ll see. Now open.”

She opened her eyes and looked at the picture. It was dark. She had heard he had a dark palette. In this case, he had painted her as though it were twilight. Much of her figure was blurred in the impressionist manner, but the head, though not in the style of high realism, had been delineated with a greater attention to detail. The face itself was pale and stood out against the dark background. The eyes were bright and hooded, and the mouth straight, but with the faintest touch of a smile. Her head was bare; he had painted the cap where he had thrown it to the right of the bed. The effect was of her having uncovered herself for the observer, if only in a slight way, but with a certain passionate determination.

“It’s an interesting portrait,” she noted ruminatively. “I look like one of those ecstatic saints or martyrs.” It was true that the frame of the bed might have been an altarpiece, and flecks of yellow used to highlight the dark background gave a suggestion of fire.

“Do you think I have made you look spiritual?” asked Sickert.

“You have made me look otherworldly,” said Alice.

“But you
are
otherworldly,” he insisted. “You are a woman beyond my reach.”

She laughed.

He had been looking at her as she looked at the painting, and Alice felt herself shiver slightly under his gaze. Neither one of them had noticed that Katherine had entered the room until she crossed over to seat herself in the chair next to the bed.

“And what do you think, Miss Loring?” said Sickert, with a trace of irritation in his voice.

“It’s not my place to say,” said Katherine in her usual mild tone. “It’s Alice’s portrait.”

“You don’t like it!”

Katherine shrugged. “We see the subject differently.”

“And how, pray tell, do you see her?” He asked the question automatically, as though not really wanting to know the answer.

“I see her as an island of reason in a world of irrationality, cruelty, and turmoil,” responded Katherine.

“An island of reason who lives her life as a professional invalid?”

“It’s how she pays for her rationality,” said Katherine quietly.

“And how do you think Mr. Sickert sees me?” Alice asked, intervening and addressing her companion.

“As a feral animal, caged,” said Katherine shortly.

“I thought he made me look like an ecstatic saint.”

“Perhaps it’s the same thing,” said Sickert. He turned quickly to Alice. “I’m sorry that I have not pleased your friend, but perhaps that is inevitable. One cannot please everyone.” His voice had grown distant, and he seemed to have become restless and less at ease.

“That’s true,” murmured Alice.

Sickert was not listening. He had reached for his hat. His impatience to be gone had become almost palpable. “I’m afraid I must bid you ladies good-bye.”

Alice looked at him, but he did not look at her. His eyes grazed the room, and a look bordering on disgust seemed to cross his features. Katherine had disturbed something. Or the portrait, being finished, had brought the disturbance. Whatever it was, Alice felt the bond between them had dissolved, leaving nothing but the painting behind. Perhaps it was at the root of his art—that the past held no meaning for him once the work was through; that his relationship to life was entirely a matter of impressions and observations as they occurred in the present. He had connected profoundly with her because she had consumed his imagination in the act of painting her, but the painting was done. She had become what ostensibly she had always been: an invalid spinster taking up his time. It was as though a spell had lifted.

But not just for him. Looking at him within the circle of Katherine’s cool gaze, she saw an arrogant stranger. What could she possibly know about this man’s character and motives? She felt herself blushing at the thought of what she had once felt. It was time, indeed, that he left.

“Thank you for the portrait,” she said, taking Katherine’s hand and leaning her head back on the pillow. “You should hurry, or you’ll miss your train.”

It’s a side of you,” said Henry. He was sitting at the little table in Alice’s bedroom, assessing the portrait and eating a scone with blueberry jam that Sally had made from her own recipe. William was expected. They had agreed to meet to discuss how they would proceed with the case, if indeed they would. The idea of more women being killed filled Alice with dread, but how could she, a bedridden invalid, really be of any use in hunting the killer?

“It was the Whistler connection that threw us,” said Alice. “It got us thinking in the wrong direction. You with your ‘ha ha.’”

“It was a normal sort of connection,” said Henry huffily. “I still say Whistler laughs that way.”

“We made too much of the ‘
P
of
W
,’” continued Alice. “It could stand for anything.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “The Prince of Wales, for example.”

“Exactly,” said Alice. It was as likely as anything else.

“And it’s not as though Whistler didn’t have other pupils,” noted Henry. “Legros said he had a habit of taking the Slade’s leavings.”

“There you are,” said Alice.

Before they could say more, they heard the downstairs door open and the sound of footsteps coming upstairs. William had arrived.

He strode into the room and over to the bed and then bent down and kissed Alice on the cheek. They had been exaggeratedly affectionate to each other ever since his “mad scene,” as she secretly referred to it to herself. She had always believed she understood him better than anyone, better even than his wife, but his outburst had surprised her, causing her to conclude that she had missed something—or been kept in the dark. The fact discomfited her, but on the surface she behaved as though nothing had happened.

“What do you think?” she asked, motioning to the portrait as he seated himself on the other side of the bed.

He turned to look.

“Do you like it?”

He did not respond. He was studying the painting more closely than would have been expected, his brow furrowed. “What’s that doing there?” He pointed with sudden vehemence to the bonnet in the lower left of the painting.

“It’s my bonnet,” said Alice, peeved by his focus on a minor detail. Although the floor and the bed had been painted in the impressionist style, the bonnet was, like the face, delineated rather clearly. “It’s a joke,” she explained irritably. It did not seem very funny to her now. “I had expected he would paint me with it on, but he said he wanted to see my hair.” She touched the cap on her head, recalling the incident in which he had thrown the cap to the floor and put his hand to her head. “Why do you ask?”

William again did not respond, but his face was deep in concentration and then seemed to shape itself into a grimace. “Your friend Sickert…do you know where he is?”

“He’s off to Cornwall,” said Alice with a certain indifference. “This time I believe he means it.”

“He must be stopped.”

Alice looked at him quizzically.

“We have let a guilty man get away.” William’s voice was high with restrained emotion. “The bonnet”—he pointed to the canvas—“there was a cap on the floor in precisely that spot in Mary Kelly’s bedroom. It struck Abberline and me at the time as an odd sort of thing for a woman of that type to have lying about, but I wouldn’t have noted its position had I not just seen the photograph of the crime scene this morning. And I understand it now. None of the other murders were in a bedroom, with the victim in a nightdress. This was different because it was inspired by someone in particular.” He looked at his sister, who was staring at him uncomprehendingly. “Don’t you see? The killer placed the cap on the floor of Kelly’s room in an effort to re-create the scene in your bedroom. I hadn’t realized until now how similar that room was to yours. And Kelly was your age, considerably younger than the previous Ripper victims.”

“Are you saying that Mary Kelly was killed because of me?” Alice asked. Her face had drained of color, and she was staring fixedly at the picture opposite her bed.

William nodded. “What we find to love or to hate comes to us as a substitute for something else. It wasn’t safe for him to attack you directly, so he found a way to duplicate the scene and put someone else in your place. But his need for substitution has given him away. Sickert must be Jack the Ripper. No one else would know about the bonnet.”

The three siblings were silent, taking in this conclusion.

William rose abruptly, strode across the room, and took the painting from the wall. “I must go immediately to Scotland Yard and present this as evidence,” he said. “We have allowed a murderer to slip through our fingers once; it would be unconscionable if we did so again.”

Before Alice could intervene—for an idea had flashed into her head—he was gone. Henry, however, was still with her, brushing the crumbs from the scone off his lap. She beckoned to him to pull his chair closer to the bed. “There is something I want you to do,” she said, keeping her voice as even as she could. “Now listen carefully.”

Alphonse Legros greeted Henry in his office. There were no classes that day, and he was sitting, looking weary and a little sad, under the large painting by Poussin, that exemplar of the neoclassical style he was constantly exhorting his students to study and imitate.

Unlike his brother, Henry felt sympathy for Legros. It was hard work protecting the artistic establishment against the corrosive forces of the new. He himself sometimes felt prompted to say “no more” when he heard about some of the latest experiments in literary expression: the lady who decided to eschew use of the comma; the young man who insisted on describing fornication. An artist was an individual, but also part of a social system, and thus had a responsibility to stem the tide of vulgarity as far as it was possible to do so. Of course, the new always looked vulgar until one had moved on a bit. Who could tell, but the very things that seemed outrageous now might come to seem routine in time? Knowing this kept Henry from wagging his finger too vigorously, yet he could sympathize with, even envy, Legros for being without such foresight.

Legros proved far more congenial that day than during Henry’s last visit. Perhaps he was feeling lonely and was pleased by the distraction. Whatever it was, he shook his guest’s hand with enthusiasm, offered him a brandy, and bid him take the most comfortable armchair in the room. Best of all, he praised Henry’s work, making special mention of his early novel,
Roderick Hudson
, whose hero was an artist who had gone to Italy to paint. “I am a strong advocate of the Italian
séjour
,” said Legros. “I shall recommend your novel to my students.”

Henry felt himself swell with pleasure. He was as vain of his books as other people were of their children, and he could listen to them praised for hours. But not today. Alice had sent him on an errand, and there was no time to waste. He hurried to get to the point.

“I have come to ask about a statement you made when my brother and I visited you a few days ago. You said that Sickert was not the first difficult student Whistler had hired as an apprentice. You said that he had ‘taken the Slade’s leavings before,’ or something to that effect. What were the leavings you were referring to? Was there someone in particular?”

Legros shifted in his chair. “Yes,” he said carefully, “but it was a shocking case.”

“You can rely on my discretion,” Henry assured him.

“Well then,” said Legros, settling back to embark on the story with a certain prurient relish. “The student’s name was Peter Newsome, a boy of modest circumstances from East London. During his early months, he showed considerable promise, copying the head of a Raphael Madonna extremely well. I recall making a note of it.” He paused.

“Go on,” prompted Henry.

“There was no reason for concern until the life-drawing class during our winter term. It seemed to disturb his…
équilibre
.” Legros paused again.

“Yes?” prompted Henry.

“Some of our students are always unsettled at first.” Legros cleared his throat. “They have never seen a woman…uncovered. But a woman, a man—in the end, it is the same thing. We teach them to see the body as it has been rendered through the ages, as a matter of proportions and properties. Generally, they become…habituated.”

“But this Newsome did not become…habituated?”

“No,” said Legros.

Henry had begun to feel vaguely alarmed. “And?” he prompted again.

“And one day we found him…in an indecent posture after one of the classes.”

“An indecent posture with the model?”

“
Mais non!
” said Legros, as if this would have been far more acceptable. “An indecent posture…with himself!”

Henry drew a breath. It was as he had somehow expected. “And what was done to the student?”

“His belongings were removed from the premises, and he was asked to leave at once for fear of contamination. It was a great humiliation for the school, though we tried to keep it quiet. It would be assumed that the boy’s career would be over, but Whistler, as I said, took him on.”

“Whistler knew the circumstances?”

“It seems likely that he did. But then, it was Whistler’s way to court scandal and to thumb his nose at established ideas. But he could do nothing with Newsome.”

“Did Newsome…abuse himself again?”

Legros shook his head scornfully. “I have no doubt he continued on the course he had begun, but that was not the issue. Apparently the abuse began to affect the man’s brain and, with it, his art. Whistler wanted no part of him when he found he could no longer draw.”

“He ceased to be a ‘pupil of Whistler’?”

Legros nodded. “It was around this time that he took on Walter Sickert as an apprentice.”

“And what happened to Peter Newsome?”

Legros shrugged. “I cannot say. Perhaps he continues to live off his poor father. Or perhaps he is on the streets or in the workhouse. But as is well-known with regard to such cases, it is only a matter of time before he descends into madness and finds his way to the lunatic asylum.”