Page 74 of The Extraordinary Florence Stoker

I recalled the reception of his Romeo; the American reception of Faust. While I didn’t care about Henry, I did care about Ellen and Bram. If Henry failed, so did they.

‘I gather Henry didn’t listen to you?’

‘When does he listen to anyone?’ replied Ellen.

‘So, Burnham wood will remove to Dunsinane.’

‘Aye. Along with Henry, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ said Ellen dolefully.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

London, 1888 to 1889

We arrived back from our Scottish research trip to a London in the grip of panic. Every newspaper carried the same story; from Charing Cross to Victoria Street Station, headlines were shouted to appalled and curious crowds.

Woman Brutally Murdered!

Blood and Horror!

Death Haunts the Streets!

According to the Pall Mall Gazette, which Bram purchased the moment we stepped off the train, the mutilated body of a prostitute, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, was found in Whitechapel. Her throat had been so ferociously slashed, her spine was exposed.

I felt sick as Bram read the report aloud; sick and very frightened.

As soon as we got home, I read the article for myself.

The London newspapers were always filled with terrible stories of murder, yet there’d been nothing like this before. To think a man could enact such violence upon a woman; tear her apart with a knife like a butcher an animal carcass. Did he know her? Had he followed her? Had he been watching before he decided to pounce? Did she do something to make him behave so violently towards her? Or was it because of her profession she was killed?

I began to imagine the terror she must have felt when she saw the knife; understood what was intended. Her helplessness … and yet, she’d fought for her life. The poor, poor woman.

Mary Ann Nichols. Her name was on everyone’s lips, known in death, though she’d been judged and disregarded in life.

She was still being judged.

Just over a week after Miss Nichols was murdered, the body of another woman, Annie Chapman, was found in the same parish, killed in a similar manner.

It was all anyone could talk about. As if speaking about the horrific details helped us to understand the crime. But there was no understanding it.

Bram ordered that no actress was to leave the theatre unaccompanied. After performances, Henry paid for cabs and broughams for those who lived further afield.

By early November, three other women were added to the tragic toll. I determined to remember their names: Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Younger than the rest, Miss Kelly was described by the Daily Telegraph as having a ‘fair complexion, with light hair, and possessing rather attractive features’. I thought of Ellen, and of the actresses who worked at the Lyceum, the Adelphi, and the many other theatres and music halls springing up around the city. Women who were often regarded as common streetwalkers and, once they left the stage door, were vulnerable and usually alone. For the first time, I thought kindly of Henry, his generosity in ensuring the safety of his actresses.

I thought, too, of my own safety. There wasn’t a woman I knew who didn’t.

What if this man, the one they first called ‘Leather Apron’ but now referred to as ‘Jack the Ripper’, as if he were an adventurous rogue rather than a cold-blooded murderer, tired of killing prostitutes and sought to find richer game over in the west?

In Chelsea.

I paused my salons; it was not the time for gatherings.

My spectral tormentor began to appear more frequently, disrupting not just my sleep, but my quietude. I started to leave the lamp on at night; darkness no longer offered succour for the weary but became a terrifying state where nightmares came to life. My mind filled with blood-soaked notions. Dear God. What if the phantom posed a greater danger to me than I believed? What if he wasn’t a demonic imagining but flesh and blood? After all, he’d manifested at the train station, in the steamship, and since then, had begun to infest my waking moments too. While he’d posed no real threat on those occasions, what if that changed?

What if he was the Ripper?

When I finally expressed my fears about the killer to Bram, he gathered me in his arms and held me tight.

‘Do you think he’ll be caught soon?’ I asked, my cheek resting against his broad chest. The last time he embraced me like this was in France, after Noel and I survived the shipwreck. I could hear the steady beat of his heart, feel the comforting strength of his arms.