Sept. 5, 1888

Dear Mum,

I know how you worry, so I thought I’d write and tell you that all is fine here, even if you never answer me, even if I never send it. I know how disappointed you are in me, at the low way I turned out, and I wish it had been different, but it ain’t, and there you have it.

Anyhow, I didn’t know the girl that got cut. There’s a lot of us down here and our friends are usually in the same area, a block or so, and poor Polly was out east, near a mile. Never laid an eye on the poor thing. We’re all talking about it, and we all feel pretty safe down here. We’re always together, and as I gets it from the newspapers, poor Polly was all alone on a dark road and the fellow that done her just did it for her purse and the thrill it gave him, and now he’s gone and won’t be back again. They’ve increased the coppers everywhere because the newspapers have made such a big skunk about it, so all of us believe he’s long gone and won’t be coming back, and if he does, it won’t be this year or even the next.

Other than the fright it give me at first, I am fine. I have so many things to say to you, I wish I talked and wrote better to get them all out. I know what upsets you and Da the most is the s-x. Really, that’s the smallest thing in my life. You get used to it early, and it comes to not mean nothing. It just happens, it’s over in a second, and you go on, it’s all forgotten.

As for the blokes, you’d think I’d be down on them, but I’m not. Most seem like gentlemen. I’ve never been cuffed about, nor coshed, nor robbed. Nobody has ever forced himself onto me against my will. Even the coppers, at least the ones in uniform, are nice enough to us gals. They have no interest in hurting us or “punishing” us, we’re just something they get used to fast down here, and they don’t want no bother from us, only to get through the day like we do, and go on home to the missus.

My problem ain’t never been the blokes, or the s-x they wants. Don’t all men want that? They’re going to get it one way or the other, is how I sees it. No, what my problem has been, ever since I were a little girl, is the demon gin. I do like my gin. I like my gin so much. All the girls down here drink it for the way it makes them feel and the happiness it brings. You and Da and Johnto never had no idea how young I was when I started it and how it explained all the trouble that I got into and why no matter how the nuns and priests talked to me and Da smacked me and you squashed me with that look you get when you’re disappointed—do I know that look!—it was always the gin that was behind it, and here I am all these years later, sometimes down and out, having lost everything, even a bed to sleep in, and all I think about is the gin.

I call it my disease. I can’t do nothing without thinking about it, and when I have it, I am happy. My happiness comes out in my singing, which I love, which is my way of telling the world that don’t otherwise notice I exist. Sometimes, too, I know, I can get pretty uppity on gin. I won’t let nobody tell me what to do when I am fortified up, because it don’t seem nobody knows any better than me, that’s how strong and good I feel.

I will tell you, Mum, they’ll never take the gin away. If reformers close the shops and burn down the gin factories, someone’ll figure out how to do it under the tracks or in a cellar nobody don’t know about, and it’ll be back on the streets in a day and I’ll be first in line.

Mum, I know you don’t want to hear that, but I have to tell it anyway, because it’s the truth. Mum, I miss you so much and remember such good times and how tender you always was with me before the sickness. I remember Johnto and Paul and the others and how happy we all was. I wished it had never changed, but it did and we went where we did and done what we done.

I love you, Mum.

Your daughter

Mairsian

CHAPTER FIVE

The Diary

September 5, 1888

As I had anticipated, the excess butchery of my method, satisfying though it might be to mind and soul in and of itself, had an electric effect on London journalism. It was the new rag, the Star, that took up the clarion most energetically. It is run, so it is said, by an Irishman; therefore all is understandable by virtue of the cruder Irish temperament, their propensity for the bottle, their impulsiveness and natural tendencies to violence, all of which are manifest in the Star.

MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN, it announced in a headline smeared across leader boards all throughout London. The newsboys bustled about, screeching, “Mad butcher, mad butcher, mad butcher!” You could not escape these tribes of annoying urchins, noses all runny, pouty faces red, the glee of greed in their beaming little rat eyes. I’m betting the dim, dull shopkeeps and salesclerks of the town couldn’t resist such titillation. More deliciously yet, an artist had provided a detailed drawing of the poor woman’s major wounds, by my memory quite accurately evoked. There, in all their glory, were the two fatal cuts, deep and profound, that settled the issue. And, flirting with the very limits of propriety, there was the abdominal excursion, with its sloppy jag halfway down as it veered to center.

A debate soon developed in the rags as the week wore on. This is excellent. Now, five days after the event, they have yet to put this bone down. It seems to be breaking along evening and morning lines. The Star and the Pall Mall Gazette, our leading afternoon exponents, are purveyors of the single-killer theory. Can you see why? It’s obvious. Unlike their morning brethren, whose product arrives by discreet carrier, the unruly afternoon boyos must sell their wares to walkers-by, people headed to the train stations or coming off shift from some coal-powered hellhouse or waiting to get aboard the horse trams or looking to amuse and edify themselves as they are trotted crosstown in a cabriolet. Thus, the fare offered them will be more salacious, more provocative, more tainted with the odor of sex, blood, and ruin. Their baser natures must be appeased. At the same time, at the end of their journey home, the dirty rag itself, sucked dry of the lubricious, can be stuffed in a refuse can, and our hero may enter his home under the fraud of being morally sacrosanct, ready to speak the blessing before the dinner of meat and potatoes that his spouse has so dutifully and lovingly prepared.

The morning papers, by contrast, do go into the home, to be devoured along with breakfast. They are limited in the extent of the gore and nastiness they can allow; it is of significantly lesser denomination than among their opponents. No filth can be allowed to besmirch the purity of the hearthside and the little nippers frolicking there before being shipped off at age seven to a decade of buggery and horsewhipping, plus proficiency in Greek. The same rags are also more likely read by women, whose delicacy in most cases cannot stand exposure to the rawness of life and death.

The morning fellows—the Times, the Mail, the Sun, the Standard, all the others—backed the gang theory. It held, quite absurdly, that possibly the lady, in her peregrinations for customers, had bumbled into a robbery by a set of hooligans and, as a witness, had to be silenced. Had the poor girl failed to pay up or witnessed a robbery? Was it part of some initiation rite by which a novice proved himself manly enough? The gang theory was meekly buttressed by the lack of blood along the street, held to be evidence that she had been killed elsewhere and deposited along Buck’s Row. Obviously, the authors of this nonsense had not looked at the soppage in her knickers, which had absorbed all those pints of the vital life fluid.