Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (7 page)

I said I was. The black-coated man said, “Good, because I want a few words with you.” His high, stooped shoulders, black garments, and long face gave him the look of a vulture. His greenish eyes flicked over me as if I were a carcass he was wondering whether to eat. “I'm Detective Inspector Hart, from the Metropolitan Police.”

George rose and demanded, “What is going on here? Who were those men that were killed? Who killed them, and how did it happen?”

“Mr. Smith, is it?” D. I. Hart said with a humorless smile. “You bullied my constable into letting you into the crime scene. You hadn't ought to have done that. He's in trouble, and so will you be, unless you sit down and keep quiet.”

George reluctantly obeyed.

“That's better.” D. I. Hart pulled up a chair next to mine, turned it to face me, and sat. Matron Hunter remained standing near me, like a jailer. He asked my name, and after I gave it, said, “What do you know about this, Miss Brontë?”

My status as a famous authoress gave me the confidence to stand up to him instead of meekly surrendering. “I refuse to say until you answer Mr. Smith's questions.”

D. I. Hart looked surprised and vexed. I folded my arms. He put on a condescending expression and said, “The murder victims were nurses. It was an inmate who killed them.”

I had been so relieved to discover that Slade wasn't the victim, but now I felt a cold, ominous touch of dread.

“As far as I can deduce, they were removing him from the treatment table,” D. I. Hart said. “They thought he was unconscious, but he was faking. When they undid the straps, he attacked them. He hit one nurse on the head with a truncheon. He fought with the other, grabbed a hypodermic syringe, and stabbed him through the eye.”

George Smith shook his head in disapproving wonder. I could hardly bear to ask whether Slade was the murderer, but I had to know. “Was the inmate a tall, thin man with shaggy black hair and gray eyes, about forty years old?”

Interest kindled in D. I. Hart's gaze. He looked even more carnivorous than before. “So I'm told. How did you know?”

It was as I'd feared: the police thought Slade was the murderer.

“A nurse reported that a lady visitor had wandered into the criminal lunatics' wing yesterday.” Matron Hunter bent a speculative stare on me. “Was that you, Miss Brontë? Did you see the inmate then?”

“It was, and I did,” I said. “But he didn't kill those men!”

“What makes you so sure?” D. I. Hart said. “Do you know him?”

“Yes,” I said with passionate conviction, “and I know that John Slade is innocent.”

“It appears you don't know the man at all,” D. I. Hart said with a smug, unpleasant smile. “His name isn't John Slade. It's Josef Typinski. And it's highly unlikely that you've ever met him. He's a refugee from Poland.”

At first I was shocked by this news, and jarred out of my certainty that the man I'd seen was Slade.

“It's just as I suggested,” George said gently. “You made a mistake.”

Then I recalled that his work often required Slade to use aliases. Adept at foreign accents and languages, he could easily have styled himself as a Polish refugee. But I couldn't tell the detective inspector any of this, for I was sworn to secrecy.

“I want to see him,” I said. “Where is he?”

“I'd like to see him, too, but that's not possible at the moment,” D. I. Hart said. “He's escaped.”

Relief vied with fresh horror in me. Slade wasn't under arrest, but he was a wanted man, a fugitive.

“Why was this Josef Typinski committed to Bedlam in the first place?” George asked.

“I'm not allowed to say,” Matron Hunter answered. “Information about the inmates is confidential.”

I had to find Slade. I had to hear, from him, the truth about the murders. “Where might he have gone?”

D. I. Hart's eyes narrowed. “You wouldn't be thinking of looking for him yourself, now would you?” He rose from his seat and stepped back from me, as if he'd finished picking my carcass down to bare bones. “Information concerning police investigations is confidential. You'd better go home and stay out of this, for your own sake.”

Walking through the asylum with me, George said, “I didn't care for the detective inspector, but he's right. I'll take you home. You can rest and forget this whole business.”

“No! I can't!” As I resisted the pressure George applied to my arm, I saw some hospital staff members standing idle, watching me. One of them was the foreigner. I pointed and said, “That's the man I told you about—the one I saw with Mr. Slade!”

The foreigner met my gaze. His gaze was as pale as if bleached by lye, and menacing. I felt a chill, like a cold draft from a distant climate. Intuition warned me that I should avoid this man's attention, but it was too late, and he had knowledge I wanted.

“I must ask him what he was doing to Mr. Slade yesterday,” I said. “Maybe he knows what's become of Mr. Slade and who really killed those nurses.”

The foreigner turned and disappeared around a corner.

“What man?” George craned his neck, saw no one, and shook his head in confusion. “Charlotte, we must go.”

As we passed down a corridor in the women's ward, I heard a soft voice call, “Charlotte.”

I saw Julia Garrs peeking out of a doorway. She beckoned me. Today she didn't resemble Anne as much as I'd thought; today I knew she was a murderess who'd killed her own baby. But I pitied her because she was so young and apparently doomed to spend the rest of her life searching for the baby and incarcerated in Bedlam.

“Please excuse me a moment,” I said to George. I hurried to Julia. “Hadn't you better go back to your room before you get in trouble?”

Julia put her finger to her lips and pulled me into a closet that contained a washbasin, brooms, mops, and buckets. She shut the door and smiled her sweet smile. “You were so kind yesterday. I wanted to thank you.” She added wistfully, “I like you. I wish we could be friends. Nobody ever comes to visit me.”

Probably her friends and family had disowned her. As a parson's daughter I felt a duty to comfort the unfortunate, but I was nervous being alone with Julia. “How did you get out?”

“A madman has escaped. There was so much confusion, someone left the door unlocked.” Julia studied me, her gaze frankly curious. “You're interested in the madman, aren't you, Charlotte?”

“Yes, but how did you know?”

A hint of slyness crept into her smile. “People talk. I listen.”

Gossip must have traveled through Bedlam even faster than it did through literary society. “What do you know about him?” I asked urgently.

“I saw the police bring him in. They said he'd done terrible things.”

“What kind of things?” I dreaded to hear, but I had to know.

“They didn't say. But they did say where they'd arrested him.”

My heart leapt at this meager clue. “Where?”

“At Number Eighteen Thrawl Street,” Julia said. “In Whitechapel.”

S
ATURDAY IS MARKET DAY IN WHITECHAPEL, AND DESPITE THE rain, the East End of London was jammed with wagons and omnibuses. The crowds in the high street slowed the carriage in which I rode with George Smith. Piles of fruits and vegetables spilled from storefronts in tall buildings with slate roofs and smoking chimneys. Housewives bargained with vendors at stalls that sold toys, carpets, fish, crockery, furniture, hairbrushes, flowers, and all manner of other goods. In the meat market, hundreds of carcasses hung. I smelled cesspools and rotting garbage; I saw itinerant peddlers, legless beggars, organ grinders accompanied by monkeys, and women selling fortunes. This was not the elegant London of the fashionable literary set, but it had a raw, invigorating vitality.

George hadn't wanted to come. The madman was better left to the police, he'd said. But I'd argued just as strenuously that I would not be able to rest until I'd done all I could to learn more about the madman I still believed was John Slade. In the end George had given in.

Our carriage turned off the high street, and we left the bright market-day bustle. The back streets of Whitechapel were narrow, the gray day darkened by buildings that towered and leaned. The odors strengthened into a powerful stench. This was London at its poorest and most squalid. Dank passages, doorways, and staircases swarmed with children. Women called out windows, speaking in languages I couldn't identify. Stores displayed sausages and peculiar foodstuffs in windows labeled in Hebrew script. Immigrants from the Continent loitered, smoking pipes by a tavern. They eyed George and me with suspicion as we disembarked from our carriage outside Thrawl Street.

“I don't like this,” George said.

Thrawl Street was a particularly malodorous, dim alley. Number Eighteen was one in a row of soot-stained tenements. A sign that said Rooms to Let hung by its doorway. A line of people extended along the sidewalk and up the stairs. The people included women with babes in arms, surly youths, and a dark, muscular man in a butcher's bloodstained apron. When George and I attempted to climb the stairs, the butcher blocked our way.

“You wait your turn.” He spoke with a rough, foreign accent.

“Our turn for what?” George asked.

“To see the murderer's room.”

A bad feeling crept into my heart. “What murderer?”

“The Pole,” said one of the mothers, a London Cockney holding a little boy. “Josef Typinski. The one what killed those three women. Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson.”

“Stabbed 'em and cut out their innards,” a youth said with relish.

George questioned these folk; I was too upset to speak. We learned that the three victims had been women of the street. They'd been killed in alleys late at night and found there in the morning, lying in pools of blood, their female organs missing. Rumors of a monster on the loose had spread through Whitechapel. A witness—nobody knew who—had seen Josef Typinski near the scene of the latest crime, which had taken place last summer. The woman with the little boy had seen the police drag Typinski out of his lodgings in Number Eighteen.

“He were in handcuffs,” she said. “They threw him in their wagon and took him away.”

“Well,” George said to me, “that explains why he was in the criminal lunatics' wing in Bedlam. He's not only a multiple murderer—he must be insane, to do such horrific things.”

“The landlady is giving a look at his room for a penny,” said the youth.

Londoners must be the most avid curiosity seekers in the world, I thought. They flocked to the Great Exhibition, to Bedlam, and to the lodgings of a murderer. “But maybe he didn't do it,” I protested. “The witness only saw him near the scene. There's nobody who saw him kill those women, is there?”

Heads shook, but an old man with a cane said, “He must have done it. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been arrested.”

His statement was met with general agreement. George said, “Charlotte, we've learned enough.”

“No.” Although sickened by what I'd heard, I walked to the end of the line and stood there. “I want to see.”

George sighed in exasperation as he joined me. “You need to consider the possibility that even if this Josef Typinski is your friend John Slade, he's not the man you knew.”

I wondered if something had happened to Slade, had changed him from a sane man of honor into a crazed murderer. As to what it might be, I couldn't imagine. I had to know the truth, and Josef Typinski's lodgings seemed the only source of clues.

We waited an hour, inching up a foul staircase so narrow that people coming down had to squeeze past us. Finally we reached the head of the line, outside a door on the second floor. There the landlady stood, like Cerberus guarding the gates to Hades. Indeed, she resembled a small, fierce bulldog. A neat black frock and white cap gave her a veneer of respectability, which was compromised by the tobacco pipe gripped between her sharp yellow teeth.