“Would the gentleman care to buy a flower?” she said. She held out a single wilted rose.

Was this a scene from Old Man Dickens? Perhaps Mrs. Ward, who produced her share of the lachrymose treacle for genteel, tea-sucking lady readers, or even the humorless Hardy? They’d both killed off lads and lasses every fifty pages or so to make a dime or so off their penny dreadfuls. But this was not literature, it was real, this thin-shouldered beauty standing for all the dispossessed, the impoverished, and the slowly starving, cowering under their bridges and by the railway tracks in the cruel London night, aware that even crueller temperatures lay a month anon.

“What on earth are you doing out by yourself, child?” I said.

“Wasn’t no room in the doss ternight, so me mum took me under the bridge. I think she’s dead, though. She’s been coughing up blood awful bad. I could not wake her. I been walking an hour. Found a rose, thought I might sell it to a gentleman. Please, sir. It would mean so much.”

“You cannot be out here alone. It’s a dangerous time and place. Have you no people but your poor mother?”

“No, sir. We moved in from the country some months ago, for work, but Dad could find none. He went away some time ago, don’t know where to. Been alone with Mum ever since.”

“All right,” I said, “I shall find you a place to be.”

“Sir, just a penny for the rose is all I needs.”

“No, no, that will not do. The rose is worthless, you are without price. You come with me now, child.”

And so, the message unfinished and forgotten, I wrapped the child in my coat and lofted her to my torso, where she soon fell asleep across my shoulder. I headed up Goulston. At a certain point I looked back at what I had abandoned, wondered if I could get back to finish once I had attended to the girl, but instead saw, a block behind and approaching the nook where I’d paused for labor, the bull’s-eye lantern of a copper, swinging to and fro, at the end of the fellow’s long blue arm as he bumbled along, searching for rapers, robbers, bunco artists, pickpockets, and even the odd whore murderer such as myself.

Good Lord, I thought. Had this small girl not interrupted me, I’d be there still, finishing up my task. But no, she came along, I forgot that which had brought me there, and I abandoned my post. So once again my escape was too narrow to calculate, my luck too vast to appreciate. The whole episode seemed divinely plotted, though there was no room for divinity in my thoughts.

I carried the broken, tiny thing with me for several more blocks, past dark and sealed houses on streets that led nowhere, reached another intersection, and saw illumination a long block away. The child was light as a leaf. I thought at one point she perhaps had died, and it occurred to me that if so, I could be arrested and hanged for a crime I had not committed, and that might have been God’s way of showing me what an idiot I was to disbelieve in Him. But that was a petty hack’s irony, and our Father who art not in heaven or any place clearly saw through such a tinny conceit and stayed far away.

The girl stirred, rearranged herself to increase comfort against my shoulder, and I turned toward the incandescence, and in a bit found myself and my new charge in the gaslight of Commercial Street, perhaps a mile north of its intersection with Whitechapel Road. It was not crowded, but neither was it quite empty; a few public houses were open, spilling good cheer into the night; a few Judys patrolled this way or that; a few costers hawked meat and vegetables and candy to the indifferent after-midnighters.

I passed by several of the working gals and finally came upon one who seemed somehow less desperate than the others. I put up a finger to halt her. She showed no fear of the Whitechapel Murderer, as the street was well lit and I was with a child.

“See here, madam,” I said, “I found this poor girl wandering about a few blocks back with no place to go. Could you take her somewhere?”

“It’s a shame about the wee child, who reminds me of my own two girls,” she said. “But I’m a down-and-outer trying to earn me doss money for the night, guv’nor.”

“If I give you money for doss, will you first find a place for the girl, a church, a home, or something? I must be off. No gin, now. You’ve had your gin for the evening, haven’t you?”

She narrowed an eye at me, looked me up and down, and I prayed that whatever violence I had done back in the square or before, in the yard, had not left a scarlet letter on my face or chest.

It had not.

“All right, give me the girlie. There’s a home down the way for the wayward kiddies of the workers. Reckon she’ll fit right in.”

I handed my charge over to her, then pulled out a few quid and crunched them into her fist. Only a Rossetti could capture the soft light for The Good Whore, the Destitute Child, and the Insane Killer on a Whitechapel street late Saturday’s eve turning to Sunday’s morn; too bad he was dead. But then I thought: We are so beyond the artist’s ability to record that it nears a sort of black comic spiral of absurdity.

“I see you’ve a kind face,” she said, “as well as a kind heart. God will look after you.”

“Doubtful,” I said, and walked away.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jeb’s Memoir

By the time I arrived at 108–119 Goulston, the idiot Warren had already ordered the inscription washed off.

“What?” I barked at the constable who told me this as I stood in a cluster with the gentlemen of the Times, the Evening Standard and the Mail, the Pall Mall Gazette, and others outside the doorway into the tenement. That vast building was known humorously enough as the Wentworth Model Dwellings—yes, they were a model, all right, for how to debase the worker by cramming him and his into a brick cracker box twelve to a room, hot in summer and cold in winter, with the crapper out back so that all who used it were degraded by its squalor.

“He ordered it removed?” seconded Cavanagh of the Times. We were astounded, restless, and I suppose quite rude. In other words, we were doing our jobs.

“Sir, he—”

“What’s the damned bother with these unruly gents now?” Somebody interrupted the poor constable’s excuse-making, and I looked away from the clearly troubled face of the messenger and thus encountered Sir Charles himself as he clomped over like Mrs. Shelley’s beast or the golem of Jewish lore, a brutish man, all ancient muscle and large bone and imperturbable glare in his beady eyes. Sir Charles Warren was made to wear a uniform—even as head of the Met’s HQ, known as Scotland Yard, he wore his like something you’d wear on the foredeck of HMS Pinafore; stuffed into civilian garb, he looked about to take a deep breath, expanding his chest explosively so that shards of black wool were blasted about without mercy. I will give the man this: He had a presence. His was the Gordon-at-Khartoum sort of Englishman, a human fortress of rectitude, self-belief, conviction of superiority, and view of world as only glimpsed down the barrel of a rifle at a running wog. A shame, then, he was so stupid. He was stout, bull-chested, bowler-hatted, waistcoated, and his blunt features were somewhat obscured behind one of those walrus mustaches that certain men of power found appealing, two great triangles of fur that both encircled and camouflaged his mouth. His chin looked as if it was made of British steel, and if you smacked it bang-on with more British steel, sparks might fly, but no damage to either piece of steel would be recorded.