What Alice Knew (15 page)

William and Henry were seated at the little table in their sister’s bedroom the next morning. Henry was eating a large bowl of the oatmeal with brown sugar that Sally had made for him (Archie, Sally had announced proudly, had already eaten two bowls). William ate a banana (as part of his Fletcher diet), and Alice, excited to hear her brothers’ news, had eaten nothing, despite the protestations of Katherine that she must keep up her strength if she were going to expose a murderer.

She listened to Henry’s account first. He tried, as far as he could, to relay the sense of importance he felt attached to Sickert’s imitation of Whistler’s laugh. Katherine and William didn’t see much in it, but Alice was more encouraging. “Henry’s instincts are the most developed in the family,” she asserted. “If he senses something worth pursuing in this Sickert, then it must be respected. Interesting how we seem to return to Whistler; but you say that he’s out of the question as a suspect?”

“Yes,” said Henry. “He’s in Paris on his honeymoon and hasn’t been in London since July. I have ample correspondence from Bourget and others to that effect. Besides, someone who laughs like Jimmy is hardly likely to render laughter that way in writing.”

Alice nodded. “You’re saying it’s laughter
someone else
might notice and imitate. It’s the parodic aspect that struck you.”

“Precisely,” said Henry, pleased to have it put so well. It was indeed the element of parody that impressed him in the Ripper letters and that the young Sickert had echoed in his verbal imitation.

“Sickert,” Alice ruminated. “A name worthy of a murderer. William says that we mold our personalities to our physical characteristics. Why not to our names? Had I been named Dolly or Daisy, I’m sure I would have been gay and pretty instead of grim and plain.” She sighed and returned to the topic at hand. “You also said Sickert had a gift for mimicry and comfort with costume and that he is an artist with a dark and macabre palette. It’s all very suggestive.”

Henry nodded complacently. It was pleasant to have his sister’s approval, especially as her subsequent response to William’s findings was less enthusiastic.

“How do you know that the essay is even related to the photograph?” she said, looking skeptically at the book that William handed to her. “Perhaps one of the police planted the picture in order to frame this social revolutionary Cohen.”

“It’s possible,” acknowledged William. Cohen had said he saw an officer find the photograph, but sleight of hand was not to be discounted.

“The essay is fairly well-known,” continued Alice. “It’s likely to elicit interest on a purely academic level from many readers.”

“Gosse often mentions the piece,” piped in Henry. “His father used to read it to him as a child. Scared him half to death.”

“But the underlined sentence and the initials,” insisted William, pointing to the volume. It had seemed compelling at the time. Now it seemed less so. Could Cohen himself have introduced the volume in some effort to throw the police off track?

“Have you been able to make sense of the initials?” asked Alice. “PW crossed out?”

“No,” said William. “None of the murder victims have those initials.”

“There’s a mark between the letters,” noted Henry, peering over his brother’s and sister’s shoulders. “Perhaps an ampersand. Sickert’s first name is Walter. Polly and Walter,” he suggested.

“Then, the
X
would make sense,” agreed William grudgingly. He was always somewhat annoyed by his brother’s quickness. “Though it is a bit infantile. The sort of thing a child might carve into a tree.”

“And our killer is too sophisticated for that.” Alice smirked. “He only carves up bodies.”

There was silence as the three of them pondered the conundrum. Katherine, who had been sitting quietly in the corner of the room, then spoke up. “Walter Sickert is married to Ellen Cobden,” she said.

Everyone looked at her, surprised.

“Jane Cobden’s sister,” she clarified. Katherine and Alice were both friendly with Jane Cobden, daughter of the noted liberal reformer Richard Cobden. He had four daughters, all known for their beauty and intelligence, of whom Jane was the most politically engaged and the best known to Alice and Katherine.

“That’s interesting,” said Alice. “How old is Sickert?”

“Quite young,” said Henry. “Late twenties at the most.”

“Jane is my age, and Ellen is older by a few years, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” agreed Katherine. “I haven’t met her, but I know she’s older than Jane.”

“That would put her close to forty,” said Alice. “So much older than her husband—and the age of the Ripper victims.”

They all considered this information a moment. Henry then shifted uncomfortably as he began to turn against the idea he had originally proposed. “Just because Sickert said ‘ha ha’ doesn’t mean he murdered five women on the East End.”

“Of course not,” said Alice.

“And theatrical talent means nothing. We don’t suspect Henry Irving.”

“Certainly not,” said Alice.

“And because the fact that his wife is older than he is shouldn’t be held against him.”

“On the contrary,” agreed Alice.

William intervened. “None of this is of any consequence unless we can find a motive that ties it all together. If our speculation about the murders is true, that they represent a kind of frustrated artistic expression, then there must be something to bear that out in this man’s career.”

“Sickert appears to be quite successful,” noted Henry. It struck him that he had more of a motive than Walter Sickert, if one went by that.

“External success and internal fulfillment can differ widely,” warned William. “He may feel himself inhibited or overshadowed in some way that we do not know.”

“The relationship to Whistler,” proffered Alice.

“Jimmy is overbearing and egotistical,” agreed Henry, “but this Sickert doesn’t seem the type to be intimidated.”

“Vulnerability is not always apparent on the surface,” William noted again. “Or at least not on the surface that we are aware of. One has to see the context thoroughly before passing judgment on a subject’s mental health.” He glanced at his sister who, by all accounts, was a strong-minded woman, apart from the fact that she could not get out of bed.

“We must find out more about Walter Sickert,” concluded Alice. “I will make it my business to speak to Jane Cobden about him. It is up to you to research his past—his career, his education, his friendships. He is no doubt entirely innocent. But…” Her face clouded. “What if he’s not?”

“I will ask Abberline to place him under watch,” said William.

Alice nodded. “One more thing,” she added casually, as they were about to leave. “I must meet him.”

The brothers stopped at the door.

“It is the surest way for me to know if there’s anything to it. Henry, you must have a dinner party to honor our brother’s visit to London, and you must invite Walter Sickert, perhaps as a stand-in for Whistler. I’m sure you and John Sargent can come up with a convincing pretext. Arrange it for Sunday evening,” she instructed peremptorily. “We cannot afford to waste time.”

Henry looked uneasy. He doubted very much if Mrs. Smith would be up to a dinner party. Especially on such short notice.

“Katherine will help,” said Alice, as if guessing his concern. “I know it is not in your line to host such things. It isn’t in my line to attend them. But we must both exert ourselves.”

The prospect of doing so, however, had already brought on a headache. She waved her hand to indicate that the visit was over. She would exert herself, as she said she would, to find out if Walter Sickert was involved in these heinous crimes, but that would be later; for now, she would rest.

Asher Abrams?” said Sargent. “Of course I know him. He’s a dealer but also a generous patron. I’ve painted his family half a dozen times and been very well paid for it.”

William had explained his desire to trace the source of the De Quincey volume that had been stamped with the imprint of Abrams & Son, and Sargent had quickly gotten him an invitation for Friday dinner at the Abrams home on Connaught Square. “If you do not get satisfaction in your search,” his friend promised, “you will at least spend an entertaining evening. Asher Abrams has a lively family. They may not have pedigree, but they have life. Everything about them is colorful.”

As Sargent had promised, the Abrams home, into which William was ushered by a white-capped Irish maid, was a feast for the eyes. It was not just that the furnishings were lavish, though they were. There were marble floors and crystal chandeliers and furniture, rugs, and drapes of the most luxurious and costly variety. But there were also more exotic items mixed profligately with this opulent fare: inlaid furniture from Persia, screens and wall hangings from China and India, and large numbers of ornaments and relics—candelabras and samovars, scrolls and urns. Most compelling amid this riot of rare and exotic things were the pictures. Asher Abrams’s walls were covered in every possible space with paintings of the highest quality. Many featured biblical scenes, not just from the Old but the New Testament (for Abrams, art had obviously been uncoupled from its religious associations), but there were also still lifes and portraits by recognized old masters as well as paintings by more modern artists of note—the French Corot and David, the English Gainsborough and Reynolds.

As William was gazing at a painting by the hand of the Dutchman Vermeer, a young woman entered the room and walked with a purposeful stride to greet him. On Mansell Street, he had experienced a jolt at the thought that Cohen had fled the area; now, at the sight of the figure before him, he experienced another sort of jolt. The woman was young, in her early to midtwenties. She had dark, straight eyebrows, large, heavily lashed eyes that looked to be a bright violet, a coil of shiny black hair atop her head, a rounded face, square jaw, rather pointed chin, and an ample mouth that managed to be both extremely sensual and extremely refined. The nose was prominent and dipped slightly in the fashion he associated with caricatures of the Jewish physiognomy, but in this case, the effect was astonishingly appealing, giving a touch of dramatic vulnerability to the otherwise large, regular features. William thought of the Song of Solomon, that ode to female beauty. It must surely have been written to someone who looked like this.

The effect of the face on William was both delightful and disturbing, and he realized that this combination of feelings carried him back to his youth. When he had begun his medical training and linked himself in matrimony to his Alice, there had been a welling of relief at disaster averted. He had, after much thrashing about in turbulent waters, finally found the shore. But there had also been a residue of regret. He had left indecision and solitary search behind; had chosen science over art, the stability of the mind over the sensuality of the body. It was the exchange required for his sanity. Yet there were times, wandering through a museum or sitting at the opera, when he felt a surge of desire for the life he had not lived. It even struck him sometimes that his impatience regarding his brother’s writing was connected to his own buried past.

Looking at this woman brought his unsettled youth back to him in a rush. He did not know why he associated her face with that past life. Perhaps she reminded him of one of the artist models during his failed apprenticeship as a painter. Or perhaps her exotic beauty and her ethnicity suggested something forbidden, outside the realm of the familiar New England world in which he had settled. Or perhaps it was simply that her face, even at first glance, was so expressive that it seemed to have a capacity for the kind of deep and powerful feeling he associated with his younger self. Whatever it was, the face was arresting in its beauty and vibrant humanity in a way that drew him up short. Added to this was the disorienting impression that he had seen it before—an impossibility, surely, but an impression, nonetheless, of which he instantaneously felt certain.

As the woman approached, the contradictory feelings she aroused of both otherness and familiarity made him almost lose his balance, and he grabbed the back of the armchair close by.

“Are you well, Professor James?” she asked, raising a dark eyebrow as she registered his distress. “You seem agitated.” Her voice was low, and there was a touch of the melodious foreign lilt that William had noted in many Jews, even those native to a locale.

William assured her that he was fine. “Have we met?” he asked, trying not to stare but doing so all the same.

“We have not,” she replied. “But I was pleased to hear from Mr. Sargent that you wanted to meet us. I am familiar with your work and admire your attempt to connect philosophy, a science devoted to the general, with mental operation, a science concerned with the individual. It is something that Hebraic law—perhaps all religious law—attempts to do in its clumsy way. But you give it secular expression, which strikes me as useful. We may worship different gods, but we must all live on the same earth together, and it would be best, if we could, through the establishment of certain principles of behavior, transcend the sectarianism of any particular religious system of belief.”

William continued to stare at the speaker. It was rare for a woman to have an opinion on such matters, much less to speak about them with this sort of eloquence. His sister was possibly the only woman he knew capable of doing so. But here was a stranger who had performed the impressive feat of simplifying his philosophy in terms that were at once accurate and unique.

“And with whom do I have the honor of speaking, who knows my philosophical goals so well?” he asked, trying to keep his voice as detached and casual as he could.

“Ella Abrams,” said the young woman. “Or rather,
Miss
Ella Abrams. The English are very keen on letting a gentleman know one’s marital status at once.” She spoke jauntily, and William was not certain whether she was being dismissive of the practice or subtly flirtatious—possibly both.

“I assume you are here because you have an interest in something that my father has to sell,” she continued. “That’s generally why gentlemen come to dinner. We are not yet at the stage where our visits are purely social. Except for Mr. Sargent, and even he has an interest in us as exotic specimens, though of course we are also great friends.”

With the mention of Sargent, William suddenly realized where he had seen the girl before. It was at a gallery show in Boston the year before. It had been Sargent’s first American exhibition and had featured some two dozen paintings, mostly portraits of dowagers and society debutantes, but with a few Italianate scenes and one of a striking young woman in Persian costume, now identifiable as Ella Abrams. He recalled at the time staring raptly at that painting, until his Alice pulled him away, saying that she was growing jealous of the model. He had assured her that it was the brushwork that intrigued him—only John could do so much with the color black—and had even convinced himself that it was true. But now, looking at the woman in front of him, he realized it was the face that had mesmerized him on canvas as it now did in life.

She was wearing a dark blue velvet gown, very simple but well cut, with a sapphire necklace that matched the dress and accentuated the sweep of her long neck. She turned to take his arm and lead him into the dining room, and he was aware of the pressure of her fingers and the proximity of her body to his. Every fiber in him seemed alert to her presence and her touch. They walked through the drawing room, then through a long hall, lined, William vaguely noted, with a collection of the new impressionist painters—Asher Abrams’s taste was obviously for the new as well as the old—and into the dining room, where once again, he was dazzled by the spectacle that confronted him.

If he had been struck by Sargent’s painting of Ella Abrams at the Boston exhibition, he now saw the same effect multiplied. On the walls of the spacious room, in which a large table had been elaborately set for dinner, were five life-size portraits of the Abrams family, all unmistakably by the brush of John Singer Sargent.

“It
is
a bit extreme,” admitted Ella when she saw William’s expression as he gazed at the collection of paintings around them. “My father believes that without a dramatic showing, we are likely to be swept under the carpet. As it is, although we may be accused of questionable taste, we cannot be ignored.”

William felt the force of this statement. It was not just the number and size of the paintings that were arresting. It was also the unique appearance of the subjects and the unconventional way in which they had been painted. The Abramses had not held Sargent to the standard of propriety favored by most of his clients. Perhaps they did not understand that standard or did not like it. The figures represented in each of the paintings had vibrancy and color that seemed excessive. These were unruly, possibly indecorous people, though the paintings also made clear that they had a great deal of money and life.

The family members were all present in person as William entered the room, so that the relationship between the paintings and their subjects was immediately thrust upon him. Ada and Greta, the Abramses’ eight-year-old twins, who had been rendered by Sargent with their dog, as though they were three small animals playing together, were quarreling obstreperously under the table. Fiona, sixteen, was fidgeting near her seat, dressed in an extravagant evening gown of gold silk that accented her unaccountably blonde hair, the dress similar to one that her likeness was wearing on the opposite wall. Sargent had painted her in a double portrait with Ella. The two girls, their arms around each other’s waists, stared boldly at the observer, a study in dark and light. Alfred, the son and heir, who stood looking bored in the corner, had been portrayed holding a palette and brush (Sargent had mentioned that he was a painter, or at least an aspiring one). The red lips and supercilious expression on both portrait and man branded him the petulant aesthete. Esther Abrams, the matriarch, appeared in person precisely as she had been painted: a small, straight-backed woman in black with an expression of what could be described only as fierce timidity. She gave William a quick, frightened smile and turned to whisper something to her son.

In the midst of this tumultuous scene, in which life and art seemed to be vying for priority, stood the patriarch, Asher Abrams, directly below his own portrait. Sargent had painted him in the formal evening dress he was wearing now, but in the painting he held a ledger book as if to emphasize that, though a gentleman, he was never beyond the call of his business. The image, like the man, exuded power and cunning, a combination that William supposed was precisely the way Abrams wished to be portrayed. As Ella led William over to meet him, Abrams’s canny eyes surveyed his guest much as he might appraise a piece of good furniture or a fine picture.

“This is Professor James, Father,” Ella said, “the man Mr. Sargent wrote to you about.”

Abrams nodded, as if he had already taken his guest’s measure. “A friend of John Sargent’s is bound to be someone we will like,” he said, extending his hand in greeting. “And we are pleased you have chosen to come to us this evening. It happens to be our Sabbath. We are not strict practitioners of our faith, but we hold to its basic rituals, which I hope you will find of interest.”

William murmured that he was more than happy to be included, and Abrams motioned for him to take a seat beside Ella. “Mrs. Abrams will now light the Sabbath candles and say the
barucha
, the prayer to commemorate the beginning of the day of rest,” Abrams explained for William’s benefit.

“Not that we rest,” muttered Fiona, clearly at odds with her family’s decision to maintain a footing in the Old World. Ella darted her sister a disapproving glance, and Fiona bowed her head.

Esther Abrams moved forward with a large taper, pulled up her shawl so that it draped over her head, lit the candles, and recited the prayer in mumbled Hebrew. William noticed that the twins were kicking each other under the table and that Ella had to pinch one of them to stop.

“We start with a chicken consommé with egg noodles,” said Ella, taking over the narration from her father and motioning to the maid to bring the soup. “I hope you like chicken consommé.”

William said he did, though he found he had little appetite. The atmosphere around the table was not serene. A good deal of fighting was going on between the twins, and a dispute had erupted between Fiona and her father over her curfew that evening.

“You will be home by ten,” pronounced Asher Abrams. “You are only sixteen, and this is London, where Professor James will tell you that it is not wise for young ladies to be gallivanting late at night.”

“I won’t be gallivanting,” protested Fiona petulantly. “I will be with Billy Sassoon.”

“So much the worse,” said Asher. “Boys of that type are entirely untrustworthy.”

“Billy’s mother was Jewish,” protested Fiona.

“Yes, but she has forgotten it. We have not.”

Fiona pouted, obviously wishing that they had.

“It is very difficult, Professor James, to raise a child in our circumstances. I want my children to be English, but I do not want them to forget their ancestors. Can you understand that?”

William said that he did. There had been a similar kind of balancing act in his own home, where the intellectual aspirations of his father had rubbed up against the more mundane social realities of their wealth and position. The result of this dual pressure had not been entirely successful, if judged by the condition of his younger siblings, not to mention certain facets of his own mental health.

A brisket with apricots and crisply fried potatoes had made an appearance, along with greens and haricots verts. The food was served in the American style, he noted, which might well be the Jewish style. Ella had passed him the potatoes, and his hand had brushed hers; his skin seemed to burn at the touch. The idea was ridiculous, yet he found himself unable to turn his head to look at her.