The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(14)

But, as everyone knows, no paradise is complete without a serpent, and the sweeter the moments spent with his beloved, the more bitter the taste in Andrew’s mouth when he realized what he had of Marie Kelly was all he could ever have. Because, although it was never enough and each day he yearned for more, this love that could not exist outside of Whitechapel, for all its undeniable intensity, remained rather arbitrary and illusory. And while outside a crazed mob tried to lynch the Jewish cobbler nicknamed Leather Apron, Andrew quenched his anger and fear in Marie Kelly’s body, wondering whether his beloved’s fervor was because she too realized they had embarked upon a reckless love affair and that all they could do was greedily clasp this unexpected rose of happiness, trying their best to ignore the painful thorns. Or was it her way of telling him she was prepared to rescue their apparently doomed love even if it meant altering the very course of the universe itself? And if this was the case, did he possess the same strength, did he have the necessary conviction to embark upon what he already considered a lost battle? However hard he tried, Andrew could not imagine Marie Kelly moving in his world of refined young ladies, whose sole purpose in life was to display their fecundity by filling their houses with children, and to entertain their beloved spouses” friends with their pianistic accomplishments. Would Marie Kelly succeed in fulfilling this role whilst trying to stay afloat amidst the waves of social rejection that would doubtless attempt to drown her, or would she end up perishing like an exotic bloom removed from its hothouse? The newspapers” continued coverage of the whores” murders scarcely managed to distract Andrew from the torment of his secret fears. One morning, while breakfasting, he came across a reproduction of a letter the murderer had audaciously sent to the Central News Agency, assuring them they would not catch him easily and promising he would carry on killing, testing out his fine blade on the Whitechapel tarts. Appropriately enough, the letter was written in red ink and signed Jack the Ripper, a name that, however you looked at it, Andrew thought was far more disturbing and imaginative than the rather dull Whitechapel Murderer by which he had been known up until then. This new name was taken up by all the newspapers, and inevitably conjured up the villain from the penny dreadfuls, Jack Lightfoot, and his treatment of women. It was rapidly adopted by everyone, as Andrew soon discovered from hearing it uttered everywhere he went. The words were always spoken with sinister excitement, as though for the sad souls of Whitechapel there were something thrilling and even fashionable about a ruthless murderer stalking the neighborhood with a razor-sharp knife.

Furthermore, as a result of this disturbing missive, Scotland Yard was suddenly deluged with similar correspondence (in which the alleged killer mocked the police, boasted childishly about his crimes, and promised more murders). Andrew got the impression that England was teeming with people desperate to bring excitement into their lives by pretending they were murderers, normal men whose souls were sullied by sadistic impulses and unhealthy desires which fortunately they would never act upon.

Besides hampering the police investigation, the letters were also involuntarily transforming the vulgar individual he had bumped into in Hanbury Street into a monstrous creature apparently destined to personify man’s most primitive fears. Perhaps this uncontrolled proliferation of would-be perpetrators of his macabre crimes prompted the real killer to surpass himself. On the night of September 30, in the timber merchants” at Dutfield Yard, he murdered the Swedish girl Elizabeth Stride—the whore who had originally put Andrew on Marie’s trail during his first visit to the neighborhood—and a few hours later in Mitre Square, Catherine Eddowes, whom he had time to rip open from pubis to sternum, remove her left kidney and even cut off her nose.

Thus began a cold month of October, in which a veil of gloomy resignation descended upon the inhabitants of Whitechapel, who despite Scotland Yard’s efforts felt more than ever abandoned to their fate. There was a look of helplessness in the whores” eyes, but also a strange acceptance of their dreadful lot. Life became a long and anxious wait, during which Andrew held Marie Kelly’s trembling body tightly in his arms and whispered to her gently she need not worry, provided she stayed away from the Ripper’s hunting ground, the area of backyards and deserted alleyways where he roamed with his thirsty blade, until the police managed to catch him. But his words did nothing to calm a shaken Marie Kelly, who had even begun sheltering other whores in her tiny room at Miller’s Court to keep them off the unsafe streets. This resulted in her having a fight with her husband Joe, during which he broke a window. The following night, Andrew gave her the money to fix the glass and keep out the piercing cold. However, she simply placed it on her bedside table and lay back dutifully on the bed so that he could take her. Now though all she offered him was a body, a dying flame, and that look of grief-stricken despair she could not keep out of her eyes in recent days, a look in which he thought he glimpsed a desperate cry for help, a silent appeal to him to take her away from there before it was too late.

Andrew made the great mistake of pretending not to notice her obvious distress, as though all of a sudden he had forgotten that everything could be expressed in a look. He felt incapable of altering the very course of the universe itself, which for him translated into the even more momentous feat of confronting his own father. Perhaps that was why, as a silent rebuke for his cowardice, she began going out looking for clients and spending the nights getting drunk with her fellow whores in the Britannia.