Death at Whitechapel (26 page)

Charles nodded. He hadn't known the young prince well, but he shared the same impression, that Eddy's deafness made him seem unresponsive and dull. The Queen was said to have thought her grandson mentally retarded.

Sickert's smile lightened his face. “Eddy and I had quite a time of it in those days. I had just started a series of music-hall etchings, and he loved to go to the music halls with me. It was a great contrast to life with that wretched old grandmother of his, I suppose. Such an old harridan, she was—at least where Eddy was concerned. Always dictating what he was to do. And he didn't mean to do
any
of it.”

“I'm not surprised,” Charles said with a smile. “He used a pseudonym when he was with you, I suppose.”

“He went about as my brother,” Sickert said. “He loved the anonymity, especially in Cleveland Street. That's where I had my studio, at the time. Number 15. The building's been pulled down, though.” Sickert paused, then frowned, as if coming back to the present. “I say, you're asking a great many questions, Sheridan. What's all this in aid of?”

Charles let a moment pass. “I saw Frederick Abberline yesterday,” he said, “in the line of some investigative work I've been doing. He recommended that I talk with you.”

There was a silence, into which the hiss of the kettle intruded itself. Sickert rose from the crate and poured water from the kettle into the china pot. “Freddy Abberline,” he said thoughtfully. “Haven't heard from him since James Stephen died. What's he up to these days?”

“He's retired, living in Bournemouth.” Hearing Abberline spoken of so familiarly, Charles exploited the opportunity. “He sends his regards, and says to tell you that anything you can do to help me shall be much appreciated.” He paused.
“Anything,”
he added, with a significant emphasis.

“Ah,” Sickert said. He picked up the teapot and cups. Not looking at Charles, he placed them, with a bowl of sugar cubes, on one of the crates. “Sorry, there's no cream,” he said.

“Sugar is fine,” Charles said, and waited for Sickert to pour the tea.

“And what is this project I am to help you with?” Sickert asked, handing Charles a cup.

“A friend of mine is being blackmailed. The leverage is a photograph—a forgery, as it turns out—of her husband, with the last of the Ripper victims.”

Sickert looked up with a start, his eyes intent. “Who?” Then, “Not Mary Kelly, of course. The husband.”

Charles didn't answer. Instead, he said, “You paid Mary Kelly's wages, I understand, when she was nursemaid to Annie's child.”

Sickert's cup stopped halfway to his mouth. “Did Freddy tell you that?” The tone was one of surprise, rather than resentment or anger.

“Yes,” Charles said—untruthfully, for the information had come through Kate. Then, mixing truth with a lie, he added, “He also told me about the wedding at Saint Saviour's, and Annie's basement flat in Cleveland Street, and the baby.”

Sickert's eyes widened. “How the devil did you get
that
out of him?” he exclaimed. “I thought his lips were sealed to eternity, on pain of losing that bloody pension of his!”

Charles said nothing, and after a moment, Sickert put down his cup with a clatter. “Well, then. Since he's told you all that, he must think you're trustworthy. And if he means me to help you, I suppose I must.” He became thoughtful. “I owe him that, for what he did for me—and for Stephen too, poor chap. It was all very hard, in those days.” He looked up. “What do you want to know?”

“The story. From the beginning. I know the general framework, but I need to hear the details.”

Sickert sucked in his breath, then let it out again. His voice was tight. “Including the ... killings?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “Including the killings. Begin with Eddy and Annie, please.”

For that, Charles knew now, was the incredible truth behind the secret marriage—that the bridegroom who had signed Saint Saviour's register as A.V. Sickert, who had dared to marry a Catholic commoner, and who had fathered a child within the sacred bonds of holy matrimony and without the permission of the Queen, was none other than the young Eddy—Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale and next in succession, after the Prince of Wales, to the throne of England and the British Empire.

 

 

T
he story began, Sickert said, in Cleveland Street, where in the autumn and winter of 1883, Eddy, masquerading as the painter's younger brother, began to visit the studio at Number 15. He did a little sketching, met other artists, and in general, enjoyed the bohemian life, a marked contrast from his grandmother's straitlaced and ritually formal court. Across the street from the studio was a tobacconist's shop run by Charlotte Horton and a confectioner named James Currier. Annie Crook, who lived a few doors down in the basement of Number 6, was employed in the shop and occasionally came to Sickert's studio to model for him.

Sickert introduced Eddy to Annie and the two young people became friends. While someone from the court might have seen it as an unusual relationship, Sickert did not: Annie was loving and lively, he said, and she bore a strong resemblance to the person Eddy loved most in the world, his mother, Alexandra. For a time, Annie did not know the prince's real identity, and behaved toward him as she would any young man whom she fancied. For Eddy's part, he found Annie's honesty and openness a refreshing change from the pretense and artifice of the court. At some point, he told her his secret, and was delighted when it made no difference between them. She was just as natural and easy with the prince as she was with the boy, and he treasured the time they spent together.

The friendship between Eddy and Annie ripened into love, and she became pregnant. Loving his Annie, Eddy insisted that they be married, although Sickert counseled against it. In fact, according to Sickert, they were married twice: once in an Anglican ceremony and afterward in a Roman Catholic ceremony held in Saint Saviour's Chapel. Annie gave birth on 18 April, 1885, to their daughter Alice Margaret, in the infirmary at the Marylebone Workhouse in Euston Road. She might have borne Alice at Middlesex Hospital, which was very nearby, but she preferred to seek the greater anonymity of Marylebone.

Sickert paused and added, in an explanatory tone, “Eddy didn't have to marry her, you know. He could have sent her off somewhere with an allowance, and been done with the whole affair. That's the way it's done at court. That's the way his father did it, over and over.” His eyes grew sad. “But Eddy loved Annie—that was his great tragedy. He loved Alice, too, and that mean little basement where Annie lived. He told me once that it was their secret trysting place, and should be forever sacred to him. In his romantic naiveté, he believed he could keep the marriage hidden, a special, private thing, safe from the clutches of the Queen.” He shook his head. “I tried to tell him how futile it all was, but Eddy had been raised as a Royal. He
would
have it his way, whether or no.”

“I don't suppose the marriage was ever valid, legally speaking,” Charles said. “The prince was under twenty-five, and he married without the Queen's consent, which the Royal Marriage Act requires. It could have simply been set aside, and there would never have been any question of the child's inheriting.”

“That might have been the Crown's view,” Sickert said, “although the Church would have held the marriage canonically valid. But that wasn't the problem. The common people and their attitude toward the royal family at that time—that was the problem, you see. Eddy's father was constantly the subject of scandal, and the Queen herself was not a great deal liked. She had hidden behind her widow's weeds too long to suit the populace. And there was the Fabian Society, and the socialists, and the anarchists. I don't suppose I'm telling you anything new,” he added.

It was all true, Charles thought. In the mid-eighties, it was well known that the Queen lived in deathly fear of revolution—had even been, herself, the target of an assassination. She would have feared that Eddy's marriage to a Catholic commoner, valid or invalid, could bring down the Throne, and with it, the Empire. And well it might, Charles thought, given the popular sentiment against the royal family. But that was another chapter, and they needed to get on with the central narrative.

“What about Mary Kelly?” Charles asked.

“Ah, yes, Mary,” Sickert said, and took up the story again.

A friend of Sickert's, a man named Bellord, a partner in a Cleveland Street firm of solicitors, had founded the Providence Row Night Refuge for Women, at Crispin Street and Raven Row. When it became clear that Annie was pregnant and should soon have to stop working, the shop owner, through Sickert, asked Bellord to find a replacement from among the young women who came to the refuge. He chose Mary Kelly, who seemed bright and ambitious, and she was trained to take over Annie's job. But after the child was born, Eddy decided that Annie should have a companion and help with the child, and gave Sickert the money to pay Mary to move into Annie's basement and take care of Alice.

“I wasn't in favor of it,” Sickert said. “Mary was young and had no training as a nursemaid. But she was strong-willed, ambitious for better things, always on her dignity.” He grinned ruefully. “She didn't think I treated her with enough respect, but she wasn't above leaving the baby in my care when she trotted off to the East End to see her friends. Then back she would come, Miss High-and-Mighty, to pick up the Little Princess, as she called the child.” He made a face. “If it hadn't been for Eddy, I should have told her to shove off. But I loved him, you see, and I felt that this marriage was good for him, that it gave him a genuine love and warmth that he could find nowhere else. And I was fond of Annie—she was a dear, good girl, and utterly faithful to him. Eddy was her whole life.”

Charles could not help but be struck by the pathos of the account, but he kept his voice steady. “How long did this arrangement go on?”

The prince's secret marriage was kept from the royal family for a surprisingly long time—perhaps in part because Sickert had taken the little group to France with him a time or two—but could not be hidden forever. The unhappy end came some two years after the birth of Alice Margaret. A gang of ruffians, strangers to the neighborhood, appeared on the corner of Howland Street. They began to quarrel loudly among themselves and then broke into fisticuffs, attracting the attention of neighbors and passersby. While everyone was watching the fight, two coaches that had been waiting in Goodge Place turned the corner into Tottenham and thence into Cleveland Street, stopping outside Annie's basement. Eddy, who was there at the time, was seized and borne off, to be confined to court under the supervision of the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. Annie was taken to Guy's Hospital, where she was kept for five months or so and then released as a certified lunatic.

“And she was, by that time,” Sickert said bitterly. “The game was up. Gull had done his work, and—”

“Gull?” Charles asked, thinking of what Robert Lees had told Kate. “Sir William Gull?”

“Yes, Gull. Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen. Eddy's doctor. Doctor as well to the Prince and Princess of Wales.” Sickert's mouth twisted. “The great Gull performed some sort of operation on poor Annie's brain, and when he was finished with her, she was partly paralyzed, given to fits, and amnesic. She was infected with syphilis, too, by being injected with tainted blood.” His tone was corrosive. “I owe that little piece of intelligence to Bland-Sutton, a surgeon at Middlesex Hospital, who got the gory details straight from Gull himself.” He laughed harshly. “You might say that our Annie was the first of the Ripper's victims.”

That last remark was extraordinarily tantalizing, but Charles decided to leave it for the moment. “Where is Annie now?”

Sickert shrugged. “Anywhere, everywhere. Saint Pancras Workhouse, the last time I knew of her, a year or more ago. She doesn't remember me, and she's deeply suspicious of any attempts to help her. I've long ago reconciled to letting her fend for herself.”

“And Mary Kelly?”

Mary Kelly, Sickert went on, had been out with Alice on the day Annie disappeared. She was frightened and distraught when she learned from the neighbors what had happened. She left Alice with Sickert and fled back to the East End, to Dorset Street, where a friend of hers, a woman named McCarthy, kept a lodging in Millers Court. Sickert followed Mary there a few days later and warned her to keep quiet, or she might find herself in the hospital, with Annie. But Mary—self-willed, impulsive Mary—had not listened. She began to drink heavily and regularly, and her tongue wagged, and before long she had confided her experiences to three friends, Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, and Elizabeth Stride. Like Macbeth's witches, they had brewed trouble, concocting a scheme that would bring enough money for a new start in life. They sent Sickert a blackmail letter to be forwarded to “the appropriate persons,” threatening to make the whole story public. And not just the story of Eddy's marriage, either, although that was bad enough. They intended to tell about Annie's shameful treatment and reveal who was behind it, unless they were paid for their silence. Ironically, the amount they demanded was pitifully small. To women who sewed sacking or glued a gross of matchboxes for tuppence farthing or sold a night's lovemaking for fourpence, a guinea was a small fortune, ten guineas unimaginable wealth.