They ended up on Petticoat Lane, and Ms. Lilly watched in astonishment as Sickert and his black bag disappeared along mean streets as “the fog exceeded our worst fears” and it was almost as dark as night, she wrote. The women chased Sickert “up and down endless side streets until we were exhausted” as he stared at poor wretches huddled on steps leading into their slums, and joyfully exclaimed, “such a beautiful head! What a beard. A perfect Rembrandt.” He could not be dissuaded from his adventure, which had taken him within blocks of where the Ripper’s victims had been murdered exactly thirty years earlier.
In 1914, when World War I began and London was dark with lights unlit and blinds drawn, Sickert wrote in a letter, “Such interesting streets lit as they were 20 years ago when everything was Rembrandt.” He had just walked home “by bye-ways” through Islington at night, and he added, “I wish the fear of Zeppelins would continue for ever so far the lighting goes.”
I questioned John Lessore about his uncle’s Gladstone bag, and he told me he wasn’t aware of anyone in the family knowing about a Gladstone bag that might have belonged to Walter Sickert. I tried very hard to fir.: that bag. If it had been used to carry bloody knives, DNA could very well have come up with some interesting findings. Since I am speculating. r may as well add that for Sickert to paint “The Shrubbery” on his bag seems crazy, but then it may not be. During the Ripper murders, the police found a bloody knife in shrubbery close to where Sickert’s mother lived. In fact, bloody knives began to turn up in several places, as if left deliberately to excite police and neighbors.
The Monday night after Elizabeth Stride’s murder, Thomas Coram. 2. coconut dealer, was leaving a friend’s house in Whitechapel and noticed a knife at the bottom of steps leading into a laundry. The blade was a foot long with a blunted tip, and the black handle was six inches long and was wrapped in a bloody white handkerchief that had been tied in place with string. Coram did not touch the knife but immediately showed it to a local constable, who later testified that the knife was in the exact spot where he had stood not an hour earlier. He described the knife as “smothered” with dried blood and the sort a baker or chef might use. Sickert was an excellent cook and often dressed as a chef to entertain his friends.
While police were interrogating the members of the socialists’ club who were singing inside the building when Elizabeth Stride was murdered, Jack the Ripper was making his way toward Mitre Square, where another prostitute named Catherine Eddows had headed after being released from jail. If the Ripper took the direct route of Commercial Road, followed it west, and turned left on Aldgate High Street to enter the City of London, his next crime scene was but a fifteen-minute walk from his last one.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THESE CHARACTERS ABOUT
Catherine Eddows spent Friday night in a casual ward north of Whitechapel Road because she did not have fourpence to pay for her half of John Kelly’s bed.
It had been seven or eight years now that she had been living with him in the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Before Kelly, she was with Thomas Conway, the father of her children – two boys, fifteen and twenty, and a daughter named Annie Phillips, twenty-three, who was married to a lampblack packer.
The sons lived with Conway, who had left Catherine because of her drinking habits. She had not seen him or her children in years, and this was by design. In the past when she would come around, she was always in need of money. Although she and Conway had never been married, he had bought and paid for her, she used to say, and his initials were tattooed in blue ink on her left forearm.
Catherine Eddows was forty-three years old and very thin. Hardship and drink had given her a pinched look, but she may have been attractive once, with her high cheekbones, dark eyes, and black hair. She and Kelly took one day at a time, holding themselves together mostly by hawking cheap items on the streets, and now and then she cleaned houses. They usually left London in the fall because September was harvest season. They had only just gotten back on Thursday from weeks of “hopping” with thousands of other people who had fled the city for migrant work. Catherine and Kelly had spirited themselves away from the East End to roam the farming districts of Kent, gathering hops used in the brewing of beer. The work was grueling, and the couple earned no more than a shilling per bushel, but at least they were far away from smog and filth and could feel the sun on their bodies and breathe fresh air. They ate and drank like royalty and slept in barns. When they returned to London, they had not a cent.