Plant’s Inn
‘A very large gin if you please, Humphrey, and pour one for yourself.’
‘Indeed, Sir, you appear as though you have sustained a shock to the system. Your colour is not the best.’
Whitty downs half the gin in one go. Too many shocks to the system. Humphrey is correct. As a precaution he takes a pinch of restorative powder; he counts himself lucky to have some on hand after his period of enforced abstinence.
‘I wish to speak with Mrs Plant. Is she in?’
‘She wishes to see you herself, Sir, on a matter of some consequence.’
Leaving two shillings on the bar after accepting a splash more gin as a healer, Whitty steps behind the frosted glass; there sits Mrs Plant, her whisky before her, her luxuriant hair piled carelessly with combs, her mouth pursed as though contemplating an unexpected problem.
‘How do you do, Mrs Plant. I’m very glad to see you and hope you are well.’
‘I’m doing nicely, Mr Whitty, but you appear to have relapsed. Do you have fever?’
‘No fever, Madam, thank you. It is another matter which concerns me.’
‘No more than I, Mr Whitty—a situation upstairs.’
‘Please elucidate, Madam.’
‘A gentleman has come to see you. Of the costermonger class.’
At which, Whitty experiences a terrible feeling.
Continues Mrs Plant: ‘I put him in the room upstairs. Here is the key. Something ghastly has happened, Mr Whitty, it made me weep just to look at him.’
Having ascended the stairs by threes, having fumbled with the key with his damaged hand, having entered the room with a great clatter (when it became apparent that the door was ajar), having peered about the unlit, silent room, Whitty faces the patterer – seated, or rather slumped, on the chair by the window.
Strangely, even in shadow Owler’s face has become almost luminous, in the way of the doomed stick-men of Seven Dials. His normally ruddy
complexion has acquired the pallor of tallow and the shine of tarnished silver. His ponderous shoulders are folded inward like the wings of a dead bird. His hands rest on his lap as though they have been broken.
Reluctant to disturb the man yet barely containing his own distress, Whitty sits quietly at the edge of the bed, on the spot which the body of Mrs Plant once occupied – an impression which remains fixed in his mind.
‘Mr Whitty, Sir. Is it you?’
‘It is I, Mr Owler. And how goes it with you?’
‘Things could be better, Sir. Much better if truth be told. I ’as been waiting to tell you, for you will want to know.’
‘I have already heard the terrible news, Mr Owler.’
‘Wery bad news, Sir.’
‘I extend to you my deepest sympathies. Dorcas was …’
At the sound of her name, Owler’s face crumbles like a dry biscuit; Whitty must now wait some few miserable moments before the man recovers his composure.
‘My Dorcas has been done for, Sir,’ says the patterer at last. ‘She were murdered. It was cruel and foul, in the way of the others, but worse yet.’
Whitty maintains his composure, with effort. ‘Mr Owler, this is the most dreadful thing I ever heard.’
‘The short of it is that it were Chokee Bill done it. It were none other. The scarf and the … the other things he done. It were Chokee Bill.’
‘Pray, Mr Owler, do not continue.’ Thinks Whitty: what a fearful triumph, to see an invention, Chokee Bill, come to life.
‘My Dorcas were a good girl. She were not a bad girl. Resisted her state in life, wanted a bit of fun, to get ahead – what girl wouldn’t, a pretty, spirited girl like that?’
Again Whitty must endure the sight of an adult gentleman weeping with complete abandon. In pursuing his profession the correspondent has heretofore witnessed such displays with clinical interest, in the way that he might observe an animal for a report on bear-baiting. Such detachment has now left him.
‘May I offer you a whisky, Mr Owler?’ Here comes the ever practical Mrs Plant, who has been watching silently in the doorway, goodness knows how long.
‘You’re kind, Madam, and I’m most grateful to you.’
Removing a bottle and glasses from the dresser, Mrs Plant pours three fingers for Mr Owler and two each for Whitty and herself. ‘It is a
terrible thing to lose a child. A misery of devastation and loss. There is nothing to compare with it.’
‘Werily, Madam. The more so with oneself to blame.’
A silence ensues, broken by the muffled voice of Fraser under their feet: he advances a quip, which earns a volley of hard laughter from the company.
‘Mr Owler,’ says Whitty at last. ‘May I ask if the blame you have taken upon your shoulders bears any relation to your mention of ‘others’, in speaking of Chokee Bill?’
‘Oh you are a cunning gentleman, Sir. I have always thought that of you.’
‘You knew, did you not? You set out to record William Ryan’s last confession, giving no credit to his claim of innocence, fully aware that the murders of Chokee Bill continued. You impress me, Sir; you have the markings of a journalist.’
‘True for you, Mr Whitty, and how I regret my cleverness! I knew, just as you say – as did the Peeler on the Haymarket and the offal-eater on New Oxford Street and the beet-seller in Covent Garden. We all knew, every coster in the Holy Land, but none of us did say so – not even to one another, not even to ourselves. Oh Mr Whitty, Sir, the depths one sinks to in the course of making a living!’
Mrs Plant refreshes the patterer’s whisky. ‘Mr Whitty does not grasp how children make cowards of their parents. Being a bachelor, his principles are as fresh as a daisy.’
‘That is true, Madam,’ says Owler. ‘If any fear unmans one, it is the fear that one cannot put food on the table. And during the garrotting panic it near came to that. Had the arrest come a week later, it would have been the workhouse for us, with starvation to come. Best that Ryan confess and hang for it, was my judgement.’
‘And that of every father in London. Are you following any of this, Mr Whitty?’
‘I take your point, Madam. There is no need to harp on the shallow egotism of bachelorhood.’
‘That is your interpretation, not mine.’
‘It is well known, Mrs Plant, the tragic effects of a superficial confluence of interest, especially among the poor.’
‘True, Mr Whitty. There is among the poor a shared interest in remaining alive.’
Whitty does not accept poverty as an excuse for immorality; nonetheless, he maintains a professional aspect. ‘Mr Owler, did it not alarm
you to see your girls unprotected, on the very streets you knew Chokee Bill to wander at will?’
‘No, Sir. The Fiend is but one man. With one murderer loose, what has changed? What greater menace is Chokee Bill to a child of the Holy Land, than is ordinary life? Like others I balanced the sums. I weighed risk and the benefit. And for my blasphemous calculation, I lost my lovely Dorcas …’
Whereupon Owler cannot continue.
Whitty partakes of his whisky and accepts another, having nothing further to say.
At length, Owler recovers his composure. ‘Sir, I have no doubt that you will take a dark view of me. Bear in mind that I am not the quality, I’m an ignorant man who has no ethics what have been bred into a gentleman like yourself.’
Whitty manages neither to laugh nor to cry. ‘You embarrass me, Sir. I had assumed you to understand that a journalist’s ethics are but a tactic for the purpose of obtaining co-operation from the public. I am no honest man, Sir. Nor am I a moralist, nor a pastor, and in the course of a day’s work I regard ethics as pests. Dear Mr Owler, I beg you to see me as I am – a dissipated, curious chap, whose adherence to any code of conduct is a matter of context and whim.’
‘And drink,’ adds Mrs Plant, helpfully. ‘In his cups, Mr Whitty presents no ethics whatsoever.’
‘Very helpful, Madam,’ replies Whitty, evenly. ‘A further splash of whisky, if you please.’
Mrs Plant pours the last of the bottle equally into three glasses. While filling Owler’s glass, she looks him over carefully, then proceeds: ‘You have a second dependant, I’m told, Sir. And what is her situation?’
‘Phoebe will have taken it hard, Madam.’
‘Indeed she will,’ replies the correspondent, choosing not to say what he knows.
‘She is a good girl, but I despair of what she will take it into her head to do.’
‘To what do you refer, Sir?’ asks Mrs Plant. ‘What is it you fear she will do?’
‘I fear she will go in search of him, Madam. And I fear that she might indeed find him – for she is that clever. And that would be the end. If she was to go the way of Dorcas, that is the end of the world.’
‘Dorcas was your ward I believe, Sir?’
‘Werily, Madam, she were, though she took my name.’
‘In other words, you are not her father.’
‘True, it were a former associate, long dead, as left her in my care.’
Whitty watches and listens and takes notes, saying nothing. Crisp copy indeed, thanks to the perspicacious Mrs Plant.
‘Mr Whitty, I believe there may be another bottle in the drawer.’
Four large whiskies having gone down the neck, Whitty makes his way with care up Whitechapel Street toward the Strand, through a fog smelling of wet coal, a colour that turns the surrounding buildings to leprosy, a fog of sufficient thickness to provide a room-like effect, with a strange, muffled echo to the ubiquitous clatter of men and animals, the voices raised in anger, the rasp of metal, the perfunctory snort of a horse at the kerb, as though they were wrapped in bandages, head to toe.
The ear being thus rendered unable to distinguish one source of sound from another, the combined harmony becomes the utterance of the city as a creature unto itself, breathing, rolling and stretching its limbs. Thanks to medicinal powder, the pain in Whitty’s rib-cage has receded so that he can move more easily now. Thus freed from the rigors of the body, the correspondent turns his attention to the pain in his mind – the perception that he did not have the moral courage to tell the patterer of the correspondent’s encounter with his daughter, standing over the corpse of his ward, and what it may portend.
Whitty longs for an overview, to soar to some general truth, to rise above the muddle to the rooftops like a Hindoo on a rope, there to perch among the black cathedral spires that prick the overhanging cloud, to peer through the black smoke roiling upward from a thousand chimneys, and see everything …
Far below him Piccadilly churns in a grey whirlpool of hard-shelled beings like stones in a river, clattering across the cobbles. He fancies he can discern a pair of solicitors comparing fees, and the impatient curse of a gentleman upbraiding a crossing-sweeper, and the seductive laughter of a woman accepting an item of jewellery. As his ears become accustomed to sound in the way that eyes become accustomed to light, he hears in the surrounding narrow lanes and alleyways the growl of starving stomachs, the rustle of hands, groping for warmth or a weapon …
‘I say, old man, are you quite all right?’
The deuce!
Whitty opens his eyes to discover that he is lying on the cobblestones.
Around him are passing feet. Above him dangles the cherry-cheeked face of a man – a clerk, to judge by the condition of his boots, his gloves, his collar, and the greasiness of his black suit.
‘May I help you up, old man?’
‘Bless my soul. Keeled over, did I?’
‘Jolly well did, Sir. Felled like a tree.’
‘Blast! Touch of ague I expect.’
‘Shouldn’t be surprised. A dose of the London particular is what I call it.’
‘Quite. Much obliged to you.’ Whitty retrieves his walking-stick from the cobblestones while waiting for his head to clear. A bit too much powder, obviously. Damn the inconvenience. Having deprived his body of a normal, day-to-day medicament, the correspondent must entirely recalibrate the dosage.
In the meanwhile, his rescuer continues to peck at him like a hen. ‘Sure you’re fit, old trout?’
‘Fit as a fiddle. Cheerio, then.’
‘And a good evening to you, Sir.’
Whitty continues on his way up the Strand, unsteadily, unnerved by the incident, a chilling reminder of what a disaster it is to lose one’s health. His ribs are mallets beating on a thin membrane of alcohol. He will be howling soon if he doesn’t partake of something. Morphine is called for, obviously – but how much? What is the correct dosage? Bloody Hell!
Having left Mr Owler, drunk, in the care of the surprisingly useful Mrs Plant (the latter having succeeded where the correspondent failed in extracting from the patterer a coherent picture of the situation as it stands), Whitty, upon consulting his notes (a poor substitute for a memory), begins in his mind to compose the most difficult narrative of his life, one which will require his undivided attention.
A SINISTER ASPECT
The Strand Transformed by Shocking Revelation
Notes on the Town
by
Edmund Whitty, Senior Correspondent
The Falcon
Following the terrible death of Dorcas Owler, it has become clear to every Londoner of sound mind that she is Chokee Bill’s seventh victim. Hence,
notwithstanding the identity of the Fiend in Human Form, he is at large. In spite of the urgency indicated by this self-evident fact, Under-Inspector Salmon, with the zeal of a deluded Muslim, persists in the persecution of a gentleman who, at the time of this selfsame murder, languished in a hole in Newgate Gaol.
An excess of zeal? Or is it the over-commodiousness of the ambitious, following orders from above?
While the health of an innocent man deteriorates in the most feared gaol in the realm, a murderer continues to take his grisly pleasure with the tacit approval of our city fathers. Having for decades countenanced and upheld the daily horrors of the rookeries, these fine gentlemen have little difficulty applying similar humbug to the murder of a Dorcas Owler, thereby turning Nelson’s blind eye to the Fiend in Human Form.
All of which moves your correspondent to ask: If the worthy gentlemen of the City will tolerate such an enormity — what, then, is the City? Are we in Sodom? Are Londoners turning into pillars of salt?
While William Ryan continues to languish in a death cell, the City takes on a monstrous quality, which aspect presents itself plainly to your correspondent as he walks the Strand through poisonous wisps of yellow fog, exchanging nods with top-hatted sporting gentlemen – any one of whom might be a murderer – and turning away from strolling streetwalkers (a march-past of doomed women), any one of whom may be sacrificed to the Fiend.
Goode, Rochampton, Courvoisier, Chokee Bill: in truth, did these monstrous men, as we remember them, ever exist? Or did we make them into token villains, to be lanced like boils from the hindquarters of the City, then to disappear behind the walls of Newgate – while in London the infection continues? What folly, that such symptoms are hidden for cosmetic effect; that leprosy might be covered up so that the face of business can present a smooth smile to the customer.
When the City, to do its business, steps over the mutilated body of Dorcas Owler, is it so outlandish to imagine that the Fiend – whatever human form he takes – could be any man in London? Could he be, indeed, Everyman?
As your correspondent turns on to Piccadilly, a public omnibus passes, and for an instant he sees dreadful Greenacre seated within, a severed head carefully wrapped in a handkerchief and cradled in his lap, on his eternal journey about the City, flinching each time the conductor announces the fare as ‘Sixpence a head!’
In the meanwhile, on the walkway near the omnibus, a workman pushes a cart containing a large trunk, eternally transporting a dissected victim of Mr Goode’s.
Thus, as the city creates its villains for its own ends, it is in turn defined by them, at the cost of an ongoing procession of innocent dead. While William Ryan draws ever closer to the scaffold, while Chokee Bill goes
uncaptured, the murders will continue. Savagery for the good of the city, and an ancient liturgy from our barbarous past.
And questions to be put to Under-Inspector Salmon.