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The other thing is that poor A
I don’t know what makes a fellow want to do that. We girls never hurt nobody, and only a few of us gets involved in any bully game, and then only when a boyfriend threatens with a whipping or worse. But mostly we get along with each other, with the blue bottles, as we call coppers, and with the boyos who come down here for their bit of dirty.
See, Mum, I’m always with other girls, and we’ll be walking round and round and keeping an eye out for each other. And we’ll only go with a gentleman if he’s nicely dressed and polite and don’t smell too bad. It’s said this fellow is a Jew called Leather Apron, as all the Jew butchers seem to wear such a thing. One of our better coppers, called Joh
Sometimes you do see the Jews down here, but usually they stick to their own section, which ain’t far, but almost always they’re doing some business, they’re always buying for three and somehow turning it about to sell for four, so I’m not one who thinks it is a Jewish fellow. They’re too busy counting their gold, ha-ha! More like a sailor or a soldier, they can be brutes and want what they want. I don’t like soldiers; hurting is what they does.
But as I say, even after the job he done on poor A
But still it makes me feel so close to you and to all that I miss so bad. I keep hoping that someday I’ll wake up and the thirst will be gone and I can go back to having a nice life like everybody else. I hope that so bad and I love you so much.
Your loving daughter
Mairsian
CHAPTER NINE
The Diary
September 24, 1888
To quote my many Cockney friends, it only hurts when I larf. And there is much about which to larf. I ca
Forget the idiocy of competing, distracting witnesses, the crushing of the crime scene until, if it wasn’t clueless to begin with, it was quickly rendered thereup, forget that one thing, they dismiss their own surgeon, according to the Star, who correctly placed the time of A
No, the issue here is Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Warren, the soldier fellow who runs the coppers in his dotage, a gift, one supposes, from the monstrous dowager Vicky as reward for having sent so many heathens to heathen heaven, so our merchants could move in and rob the survivors blind. Note how a certain pattern holds true: The more honorifics before a man’s name and the more initials after them, the bigger an idiot he is likely to be. Thus, he is at his worst when his best is most demanded by the situation. How our empire managed to crush all those wogs under such fools is a mystery, the answer, I suspect, having to do with a superior mechanical imagination as to machines than its poor victims as opposed to any genius among its leaders. We had got the Gatling, and they had not. Sir Charles is so pressured by my predations that he has lost all ability to discriminate. What is needed is the sharp intelligence of a single man who has the wisdom to penetrate the obvious nonsense and press hoo-hah and understand exactly how it happened and from that deduce who did it. Alas, such a man only exists in the fancies of a fellow named Conan Doyle, and his portrait is an ideal, not an actuality. I would tremble in my boots if Sherlock Holmes were after me, but dear Sherlock exists only in the vapors of the Conan Doyle mind, not on the cobblestones of Whitechapel! Ha, and double ha.
But idiocy doesn’t stop there. Even Dr. Phillips, whose expertise, if ignored, specified the deed’s time, is not immune. Upon discovering some sweetbreads gone from A
The only sensible man alive appears to be this Jeb of the Star, who quite helpfully noted and played all ruffles and flourishes with the missing rings. ANNIE’S WEDDING RINGS! The fiend even took poor A
Yet in all the mirth, a certain melancholy ca
Like that of Polly before her, A