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Chapter Twenty-six

No. 29 Hanbury Street, site of the second murder

T
h
e long line of attached
row houses on Hanbury Street, where Georgie Cross lived with his grandmother, rose up into the London sky like a steep, pockmarked cliff. Bird droppings and loose bricks gave the once beautiful eighteenth-century facades an air of nineteenth-century neglect.

And though the pilasters flanking the front doors showed decay, and the ornamental fretwork had long since been cut up for firewood, the Cockneys who lived on Hanbury were hardworking and respectable. At No. 29, in the middle of the street, the stoop had been newly scrubbed and the front door glistened with a fresh coat of shiny black paint. The heavy bronze doorknocker was so highly polished it glinted in the afternoon sun.

It was half-past three in the afternoon when Toby, Collin, and Katie began wending their way down Hanbury, leaving the Duke's carriage parked two blocks away on Brick Lane. All along the street dozens of children were jumping rope, tossing jacks, and playing hop-the-stone, their gleeful cries filling the air. The girls wore starched, white pinafores; the boys, knickers and paddle-boat jackets. And though their clothes showed patches and mending, none of the children were barefoot or wore rags, except for one boy with a deformed leg, who hobbled with a wooden crutch.

Around the communal water pump, resting on chairs brought outdoors for an afternoon of minding the children, sat a cluster of elderly matrons smoking pipes, knitting, and occasionally smiling indulgently at their charges, their heads covered with frilly white bonnets.

Most of the women who lived on Hanbury Street worked out of their front parlors gluing matchboxes, sewing bundles of artificial flowers, or making pennyworth sachets, called sweet lavender pillows. Others took in needlework and laundry.

But at No. 29, Mrs. Amelia Richardson, Georgie Cross's grandmother, was one of the lucky few who ran a thriving packing-case business. On any given day, including Sunday, cardboard boxes spilled out from her front parlor into the hallway, past the kitchen, and out into the tiny backyard, reached by a narrow set of steps. It would be here, in this recessed back garden, flanked left and right by neighboring fences, that the body of Annie Chapman, known as Dark Annie, would be discovered on the eighth of September.

Georgie Cross's grandmother would be the first to spot the dead girl. Gazing down from her second-story window, Mrs. Amelia Richardson would see what looked in the predawn light to be nothing more than a bundle of dirty rags against the dark patch of paving stones below.

Annie Chapman's body would be artfully arranged and carefully laid out. In terms of sheer brutality, Annie Chapman's evisceration would far surpass that of Mary Ann Nichols. The young woman's neck would be so severely severed that the killer, in a bizarre attempt to hold the head in place, would tie an embroidered handkerchief with the initials “CCT” around the victim's neck, securing it to the flesh above her clavicle with a large, rusty safety pin, and to the back of her skull, near the left earlobe with an onyx hatpin.

As Toby, Collin, and Katie approached the shiny brass doorknocker of No. 29 Hanbury, they were each lost in their own thoughts. Toby was thinking about Georgie Cross and how best to approach Georgie's grandmother to discover his whereabouts; Katie was thinking that somewhere here along Hanbury Street, Dark Annie would die at the hands of Jack the Ripper; and Collin, feeling moisture prickle across his forehead, was wondering where the devil he'd put his handkerchief.

“I'm always losing things,” Collin muttered under his breath, patting down his vest and greatcoat, searching for the pocket square with the family coat of arms—a unicorn leaping over a large stone—and embroidered with his initials, “CCT,” for Collin Chesterfield Twyford, so he could mop his brow.

“Oh, bother,” Collin chortled. But there were two dozen more at home. His manservant, Jeffries, would fetch him a new one when they returned to Twyford Manor.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Cobblestones and Daisies say the Bells of St. Maisy's

“O
kay,” Toby said, turning to Katie
as he reached for the doorknocker of No. 29 Hanbury. “Yesterday when Collin and I were here, Collin did not come in. I think it best if you both stay outside. Keep an eye out for the peelers.”

When Katie protested, both Toby and Collin shot her scornful looks.

“You can't go in there, Katie.” Collin made a face. “If Georgie's grandmother spies you up close she'll know in an instant you're not a frumpy old lady. How are we going to explain that, eh? How do we tell her you're—”

“Not the real McCoy?” Katie made a face.

“The real what? No, indeed. I was going to say you're not the genuine article.”

Toby frowned at Katie. “Real McCoy? Cockneys say ‘real MacKay' or ‘real Magee.'”

“It's, er . . . a cowboy expression,” Katie improvised, thinking she'd heard it on a TV Western.

“Well, whether or not you're the real McCoy, MacKay, or Magee,” Toby said. “You're
not
my great-aunt Mildred or m'little old granny. So stay put. That's an order.”

Toby turned and rapped on the doorknocker.

Collin clamped on to Katie's elbow as an extra measure of protection against the possibility that she might charge through the door. He scrunched up his face again, and Katie thought he looked like a red-headed monkey about to scratch his head.

But when Mrs. Amelia Richardson swung open the door, Katie stayed put. Toby swept off his hat, mumbled his apologies for the intrusion, and asked if he could speak to her. Georgie's grandmother gave him a curt nod and beckoned him inside.

Stepping over the threshold and closing the door behind, Toby glanced around. Mrs. Richardson's front hallway was immaculately clean and well lit. He followed her into the front parlor where dozens of cardboard boxes were piled in corners and stacked along the walls in towering rows according to size. Glue pots and box cutters, set out on long tables by the front windows, had an orderliness to them; and the red damask curtains, tied to one side of these long windows, allowed bright, slanting wedges of afternoon sunlight to spill over the shoulders of two women sitting on stools, assembling boxes. The girl closest to Toby, wearing faded green velvet, raised her glue brush and smiled at him.

“Is Georgie here, then, Mrs. Richardson? Or have the peelers carted 'im off?” Toby asked, reverting to a thick Cockney accent. He jiggled a few coins in his pocket—an unwritten Cockney gesture that indicated he wasn't here to beg, borrow, or steal.

“Georgie's not home, m'lad, as well you know,” Mrs. Richardson said, leading the way into a tiny sitting room that held a row of framed black-and-white silhouettes above the fireplace.

Hands on hips, Mrs. Richardson turned to Toby. “The bluebottles come and went, but they wouldn't 'ave found my Georgie, not for all the tea in China, no thanks to you, Mr. Tobias Becket! If it weren't that I knew your grandmother since we were wee sprites, and she having been married to her third husband, me own dear cousin, under-footman to your grandfather—God rest their souls—I wouldn't be givin' you the time of day, now, would I?”

“What's this, Mrs. R? You've known me longer than me own father, who spent as little time with me as a pork chop in a fishmonger's window! What're you on about? Where's Georgie, and why would I know he's not here? And why am I getting the royal codswollop welcome, Mrs. R? What's happened since yesterday?”

“I'll tell you what, m'boy! After you left yesterday, John Davies, who rents out me third floor, overheard someone shouting at Georgie. This other bloke be wanting Georgie to do right. To give somefink over to the police. Now what might that be, eh?” she gave Toby the fish eye, employed by East End grandmothers far and wide as the don't-you-be-lying-to-me look. “And who else but you, Tobias Becket, be wantin' to muck round with them bluebottles?”

Toby shook his head. Cockneys were law-abiding for the most part, but deeply distrusted police officers, who were easily bribed. “ ‘T'wern't me, Mrs. R. I swear it. I wouldn't rat out Georgie to them bluebottles. On me honor, may God strike me dead if that ain't the truth.”

Mrs. Richardson wasn't wearing a frilly white cap like the grandmothers sitting outside around the water pump. Her grey hair was pulled severely off her face in a tight bun with no adornments; and like Katie, she was dressed head to toe in black. But unlike Katie's, Georgie's grandmother's face showed a webbing of deep wrinkles around her mouth and eyes as if etched with a straight razor.

“You best be tellin' the truth, Master Tobias, for all your high-and-mighty bloodfolk relations with the Duke of Twyford, who can kiss my rump. Who else but you would be demanding that my Georgie hand over somefink to the peelers, eh? And none but you has a voice like a bleedin' toff when it suits him, but can talk like a Cockney easy as pumping water.

“Answer me wiff the truth, boy, or your dead granny will rise from her saintly grave and haunt you for the miserable, lying, harmful boy that you are!”

It took several minutes and much remonstration on Toby's part to convince Mrs. Richardson that he wasn't the one who had been arguing with Georgie yesterday. At long last, after Mrs. Richardson grudgingly admitted that she never truly believed Toby would harm her Georgie, she explained in a rambling monologue that George and this mystery man must have come to fisticuffs because there was an obvious scuffle. “George got his head bashed against the kitchen hearth, and I found him bleeding and moaning on the floor. Wasn't barely conscious, my poor Georgie. Great, fat lump rising on his pate.” She made a hand gesture indicating how large the lump on his head was. After she learned that Georgie was being summoned to testify at the murder inquest, she had spirited him away to a secret place.

“He was running a fever and moaning ever so much, poor lad. I wasn't about to let 'em throw him into prison or worse, Bedlam Hospital. You're as good as dead already when you enter one of them hospital jails. And you know right well my Georgie wouldn't harm a flea, much less a defenseless girl. That brown-bread girl who got chived must have been a strumpet right fair, and got what was coming to her. More's the reason Georgie shouldn't be mixed up in this business. It will all quiet down. You'll see. Such a fuss about a girl who was no better than she ought to be.”

“Mary Ann Nichols weren't no strumpet, Mrs. R. I'd stake my life on it.”

“Mary Ann Nichols was a swinging door, sure as I'm standing here.”

“So where's Georgie, mum?” Toby tried to steer the subject away from the murdered girl who was obviously guilty of being a whore in Mrs. Richardson's eyes.

“Georgie's in a safe place. Being nursed back to health. I ain't saying where. Hummph.” She crossed her arms over her voluminous chest.

“Does he have a raspberry tart, then? Did she take him somewhere? The bluebottles will track him down, Mrs. R. Tell me where he's hiding and I'll help him, God's truth.”

“He's safe with a friend of mine, not a raspberry tart. He's sick with the fever. My friend has potions. She'll fix him. He'll be up and about in no time. But if I find the coward that whacked my Georgie on the head . . .” She clamped her lips together, and no matter how hard Toby tried to convince her to tell him where Georgie was hiding, Mrs. Richardson wouldn't budge. Toby tried a different approach.

“Mrs. R, there be a friend of Mary Ann Nichols at the inquest who said she saw Mary Ann's killer. Didn't get a good look at his boat race, but would recognize his clothing”—Toby was stretching the truth here—“and said she took notice of the church pews and billy goat he be wearing. The police will come back, Mrs. R, demandin' to see the tips and toes Georgie be wearing that night. Them lot's probably outside right now, ready to pound on this here door. If you don't want Georgie thrown into a flowery dell, you'd best give me over his clothes or the bluebottles be all over 'em like flies on butter. We gots t'hurry, Mrs. R.”

Mrs. Richardson frowned. She didn't want her grandson thrown into a flowery dell—a prison cell—so she grudgingly nodded, on the condition that Toby promise to return them when all the fuss had died down. When Toby agreed, Mrs. Richardson clumped wearily up the stairs to fetch the clothes Georgie Cross had been wearing the night Mary Ann Nichols was murdered.

“Don't forget the church pews, Mrs. R!” Toby hollered up the stairs after her.

Georgie's shoes.