What Alice Knew (28 page)

William addressed Newsome slowly and carefully, trying to incorporate his new understanding into his words. “I didn’t mean to disturb your privacy,” he said. “I was worried about Sally.”

Newsome continued to press the knife to Henry’s throat, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.

William continued. “We are all of us prone to do things that are…unseemly. What you did was unfortunate, but in no way deviant or unnatural. It was wrong to shame you.” He spoke gently, no longer as an investigator or even as a conventional scientist, but as a psychologist and a human being who could not only explain but soothe the turbulence of a disordered mind.

Newsome blinked again and then spoke in a wavering voice. “I didn’t mean to do it. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known anyone was there. I thought they’d all left.”

“Of course you did.”

“They called me an animal.”

“We are all animals. But like us all, you are a human being as well. What you did then was hardly the worst thing a man can do.” He did not say that Newsome had gone on to do the worst.

Newsome gestured desperately toward the alcove, and his voice became a pitiful groan. “I can’t paint!”

William considered this; then he walked slowly to the easel and turned the painting over. “There,” he said. “Now no one can see.”

Newsome’s face relaxed.

“Please take the knife from my brother’s throat. I know you don’t want to harm him.”

Newsome loosened his grip, and Henry staggered over to William’s side. Released from the pressure of the knife, he felt a surge of well-being. There was something to be said for having your life threatened; you appreciated being alive afterward—if you got away.

The atmosphere in the room had become almost serene. The man’s spiritual being had been awakened, William thought. He had been deprived of his humanity, which had destroyed his vocation, an irrevocable loss, deeply connected to who he was. William could understand this. He had suffered his own crisis of vocation, and it had almost cost him his sanity. For Newsome, it had, and worse—it had driven him to kill.

William looked at the man before him again. How could this quivering mass of fear and insecurity have brutally killed those women? He felt again a momentary doubt. It was ridiculous to doubt, when Newsome had just threatened to kill Henry. He had seen the man’s capacity for violence with his own eyes. Besides, Newsome had a motive, a psychological profile that explained the Whitechapel murders with an admirable completeness. And still, the shifting tendency of his own mind, his incapacity to arrive definitely at any solid conclusion frustrated and unnerved him. Couldn’t he ever be sure? How was it that others seemed to settle on things and be done? Of course Newsome was Jack the Ripper. Everything pointed to it.

“What should I do?” Newsome asked simply. He still held the knife, but he seemed more like a child than a threatening killer.

William would have liked to tell him to pray—a minister would tell him that—but he was not a minister. He said nothing. He only stared at the man before him, not knowing what to do or what to expect.

It was Henry who knew. As a novelist, he trafficked in endings, and he had found that life and art were not so very different in that respect. Besides, he had heard the sound of shouts outside the shop and could see that Newsome had heard them too. Abberline had found them; he would be inside in a moment, but it would be too late.

Henry averted his eyes, but William, who did not realize what would happen, saw it, in what seemed slow motion: the glint of steel against the pale throat, the slash, first only a sweep of the hand, then a red line, then a gush of vermilion.

By the time Abberline and his men clambered down the stairs, Peter Newsome’s body, his hand still clutching the knife, lay slumped on the floor beside a pile of newly stretched canvases.

Jack the Ripper was dead.

London. 1911.

Henry gazed around the gallery, looking for people he knew. Some seemed familiar. Perhaps he had met them at dinner parties or seen their pictures in magazines, but they were so young; really, too young for him to know. Beside him stood Sargent, his tall frame more hunched than usual. It was clear that John would have preferred not to be there at all.

“You know I don’t like to go out,” he had told Henry when the invitation had come. He had grown reclusive since the death of his mother and sister, content only during his sojourns to America, when he was painting the ceiling of the Boston Public Library. It was as though all the portraits he had painted had soured him on people’s faces.

Henry, by contrast, craved society even more now than he had in his youth. He had purchased a home in Sussex, where he lived most of the year, but he looked forward to his visits to London. The social chitchat was a relief from the locutions of his writing, which had grown more complex as he grew older. The weight of his verbiage was like his physical weight. It too grew greater every year, as Alice would have noted with disapproval. There was the weight of loneliness as well. Life in the country exacerbated it. When he wasn’t working, he had a tendency to brood, to recall a past that he could not change, that unlike his writing, he could not qualify or amplify with words.

The invitation to this event had been particularly welcome. It had brought to mind the great adventure of twenty-three years earlier. Henry touched his throat retrospectively, recalling the madman’s knife. How dreadful it had been, but how wonderful, a sublime interlude of family solidarity, a return of sorts to a childhood idyll.

They were both gone now, his brother and sister. Alice had been first; she had succumbed to a cancerous lesion on the breast, a paradoxical ailment, given the gruesome memento she had received from that notorious killer. But when the diagnosis had come, she had seemed almost pleased. She said she welcomed an illness that had the good taste to be real and malignant. “All those years in bed with nothing wrong with me. It’s a relief to finally suffer in a way that people can understand.”

In the time that remained, she had rarely spoken of the Ripper investigation. When reference was made to the case, she changed the subject or announced she had a headache. And though Sargent would occasionally bring over his paintings for her to look at, she lost her interest in the fine arts. She ceased to follow the gallery shows and exhibitions or ask for the art-world gossip as she used to.

One incident during this period stood out for Henry. It had occurred one afternoon toward the beginning of her illness. She already understood the gravity of her condition, but the pain had not yet become debilitating, and the sickness seemed to make her, if possible, more alert than ever. They would spend some of their pleasantest moments together during this time, whiling away the hours, as she macabrely put it, awaiting the Angel of Death.

On this particular day, she was propped up in bed sipping a cup of tea in which she had added a generous quantity of brandy. Henry sat nearby reading the paper; he had taken his brandy without the tea. There was an air of mild debauchery in the air. Katherine was off visiting her sister’s family, and the siblings both felt free to drink not only earlier, but more than they normally would.

The girl, Felicity, had entered the room with the post. She had replaced Sally, who a few months earlier had taken a position as a downstairs cook in a grand establishment, where Archie, under the guise of being her brother, had been employed as well, possibly as assistant to the footman.

Alice had taken the letters from the girl and settled back to examine them. Although ostensibly occupied with his newspaper, Henry watched her out of the corner of his eye, as he often watched people when they were not aware of his doing so. On this occasion, he found his attention repaid. As he watched her flip through the post, he was struck by the sudden hardening of her features and the quick, almost brutal gesture with which she cut open one of the letters, glanced at the card inside, and then crumpled it in her hand. Later, when she went to do her necessaries, he reached under the blanket and found the crumpled card. It was an invitation to Sickert’s latest gallery exhibition. Across the top, in red ink, were the scrawled words “Please exert yourself and come—or I shall be desolate. WS.”

Her reaction had served as a cue. Walter Sickert would come to represent, for Henry, a private place in his sister’s emotional life. He would never know what the actual contents of that place consisted of; indeed, he had no wish to know, only that the place, heavily guarded and under lock and key, was there.

***

As for William, Henry had seen him at intervals since that exciting time, but these were short visits, hardly more than glimpses. William was much in demand by the scientific world and rarely available. Their longest time together had been a year ago, when his brother had made the crossing to consult a specialist on the Continent. He and his Alice had stopped over to stay with Henry in Sussex. The problem, William confided, was with his heart, an organ one thought nothing of, at least in the literal sense, until it failed. So much of life was like that.

In the final month of his brother’s life, Henry traveled to America to wait by his bedside. William had clung to his wife in those last weeks, never wanting her out of his sight, demanding that she read to him, bring him his papers, or take down his thoughts as the whim struck. It should have been trying—Henry could not have stood it—but William’s Alice was unstinting in her devotion. She did not complain and, indeed, seemed to enjoy these ministrations. It gave Henry pause. If only one could be certain to predecease one’s spouse, it might be worth all the bother to have a woman like that, constant and attentive, to ease the final passage.

It had all gone well enough, considering that it was death and the end. “He’s had more dire episodes than this,” his Alice had noted. Henry agreed. William’s fear had never been of death but of madness. He had always worried that he would succumb to another episode like the one he had suffered in his youth. It had not occurred. He had passed into the great unknown with dignity and quietness, rather in the manner one might have expected of a lawyer or a stockbroker.

His students flocked to the funeral. He was much loved, or at least in theory. Not that William wasn’t lovable, Henry thought, only that the many who claimed to love him had no idea what he was really like. But then, who could know another in any essential way? It was the great advantage of the writer to create characters and thereby know them fully. But with regard to real human beings, one saw only the outer shell.

***

The invitation to this evening’s event had come in a hand Henry recognized at once, though he had seen it only twice: on the card crumpled beneath his sister’s bedcover and, before that, in the reply to the invitation to his dinner party those many years ago.

“You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the Camden Town Group Show,” and scrawled in red ink at the top, words that mimicked those on the card to his sister: “Please exert yourself and come—for the sake of old times if nothing else. WS.” WS, not PW, thought Henry. Sickert was no one’s pupil now. He had forged a reputation of note, become an eminence in the art world.

Although Henry had not attended Sickert’s previous exhibitions, he was determined to go to this one. It was the lure of the past—not just the literal past referred to in the scrawled message, but the hidden, subjective past that lay buried with his sister.
I must go
, he thought,
in reverence to her
—oddly, since she had not wished to see the man again. But wasn’t that precisely the reason? Sickert had meant something of consequence or she would not have been so adamant about banishing him from her life.

There had been some difficulty persuading his friend to go. Sargent was resistant. The art world had changed, he said; the new people newer than they used to be. He feared being heckled or, at best, condescended to. Indeed, the crowd in the gallery did not seem congenial—young men with wispy beards, wiry little physiques, and sharp, unforgiving eyes. In the corner was Roger Fry, who had pilloried Sargent in the press the week before. Near the window was the wild female painter who, along with her sister, the supercilious Woolf girl, was like an Amazon, likely to throw a spear at you when you weren’t looking. Where were the artistic lions of yesteryear? Alphonse Legros had died. The bulwark had given way; the deluge had come.

Henry gazed around himself at the paintings in the gallery. There were half a dozen artists on display who called themselves the Camden Town Group. Some were conventional postimpressionists. Such a name. It sounded like a contradiction, but in fact, innovation had become formulaic. The tradition that Legros had championed—scrupulous schooling in the old masters—had been superseded by a rote taste for the primitive, the geometric, and the abstract. “Modern” was the term. Henry himself had been called it in one breath and castigated for not being enough of it in the next. The whole thing gave him a headache.

The paintings around him were not pleasant, and he could see that Sargent, for one, was put off. He peered at a group of canvases by Wyndham Lewis, who stood nearby, surrounded by an admiring throng. Lewis was the great star of the moment, acclaimed far beyond such elder statesmen as Sargent. It must rankle, to have such a young man eclipse you. It was a problem
he
didn’t have, Henry thought bitterly; he had never sold well enough to suffer eclipse. Of course, he was idolized by some, he reminded himself.
The happy few
, he thought,
select, discriminating, but sadly few
.

Sargent had been collared by a group of young artists who were likely to bait him like a muzzled bear. It could be painful to watch. Henry wandered to the other side of the room.

A spry, middle-aged man with thick, wavy gray hair and sharp features approached. He was accompanied by a woman of the same age, elegantly dressed with a dark, exotic physiognomy. Her hair was piled fashionably on the top of her head. It was lustrous and black but shot through with a white streak that made her look even more striking. As the man drew nearer, Henry met his eyes and saw they were piercingly blue. Sickert.

“It was good of you to come,” Sickert said, smiling. “I would only wish that your brother and sister could have been here too. I deeply regret their passing.”

Henry nodded. He could still see the music hall performer in the established artist, the young man in the older one. The change really wasn’t very great. There was something sharp edged about Sickert even now, something young and saucy. He was the sort of man who would always appear to be new, no matter how established and successful he became. There was a talent in that.

Sickert gestured to his companion. “This is my friend, Mrs. Cassel.”

The woman smirked slightly and extended her hand. “I was a great admirer of your brother’s,” she said.

Henry bowed. During William’s lifetime, a comment like this would have annoyed him, but now he was willing to be magnanimous. After all, he had, in the most literal sense, won that battle in being the one still alive. “He was a genius,” he acknowledged.

“I didn’t mean his work,” said the woman with surprising directness, “though I admired it as well. I was speaking of the man. I knew him, though only briefly, during his visit to London many years ago. We were quite…simpatico.”

Henry blushed. Though the woman spoke without shame, he felt that she meant something more than simple friendship. He recalled his brother’s strange behavior during the Ripper case and was swept with the conviction that this woman must have had a part in it. The De Quincey volume had been connected with a woman, he recalled.

“Have you seen my work yet?” asked Sickert.

“Not yet,” said Henry, looking dazedly around the gallery. “There are so many pictures. Please show me.”

Sickert led him over to one wall where a half dozen paintings were displayed. Henry remembered the watercolor Sargent had found in his studio, done early in Sickert’s career. It was odd how much these works reminded him of that, done, it must be assumed, when the man had been no older than twenty-two or twenty-three. He had struck his keynote even then, when he was still a “pupil of Whistler.” Again, he thought of the appellation that had set them all going, at first, in the wrong direction. His eyes darted to inspect Sickert. Was it so wrongheaded? The man was quick, furtive, comfortable in costume, odd with women. He could, if one had an imagination, be conceived of as a murderer.

Henry turned and looked at the picture before him. It showed a woman in tattered underclothes beside a man in evening dress, skulking—the word seemed apt—in a dark room. He read the tag: “Camden Town Murder.”

He shrank back as though slapped.

“What is it?” said Sickert, looking at him with his sharp blue eyes.

“It’s a provocative title,” murmured Henry.

“It’s a subject that interests me,” said Sickert, “for reasons that go back. The perpetrator in this case has not been caught either.”

Henry shuddered slightly. It was true that Abberline had found it impossible to confirm Newsome’s guilt. It required imagination to put it all together, and that, Abberline said, was the problem; the facts were sparse. Nothing in Newsome’s shop had linked him to the murders. The gist of the thing lay in his relationship to Sickert, in his access to Sickert’s things: the writing materials, the De Quincey volume, the costumes, the goad of the paintings. It required that Newsome be a failed version of Sickert, an idea at once powerful and elusive. In the end, Newsome’s death had been judged a suicide due to masturbatory insanity. The siblings had been content to know what others didn’t, and to register the implications: no more women hacked to death in the East End. Until now.

Sickert’s blue eyes met Henry’s. “Perhaps Jack the Ripper is back.”

Henry remembered what he had read about these murders. In one article, the inspector—not Abberline, who had long retired—had noted that they were “worse even than the Ripper murders of ’88, if such were possible.”