Read on for an exclusive excerpt of If Looks Could Kill by Julie Berry!
1888
Whitechapel, East London
Jack Has Thoughts Upon Reading the Morning Papers (Autumn 1888)
I was kinder than I could have been. Kinder to each hellcat than she deserved.
It isn’t pain that pleasures me. Nor am I mad, unless we all are.
Their suffering was brief. Instantaneous. They were asleep. They only felt a moment’s fear, if any, then slept for good. I freed them from their wretched lives while their minds reposed in peace. How much better do you treat the beasts you consume? Eat your breakfast bacon, you shopkeepers and clerks, you mistresses and mothers, and gossip about the Whitechapel horrors. Enjoy the entertainment with my compliments.
Disease and drink and poverty were killing them before your eyes, and did you lift a hand to help? How easily you looked away as they died by the score. Now, thanks to me, you cannot look away. Not anymore.
You who gasp at morning headlines, I laugh at your hypocrisy. You men who avail yourself of these wretched women’s disgusting delights, and pay less than the price of a loaf of bread, I know who you are. Far more are you scavengers of flesh than I.
Since they are cattle to you, I’ll be your butcher. You churchgoers, who want the streets cleansed of these wicked whores – you propose no better solution than to raise the rent.
But come. Be reasonable. Their bitter lives were fated to expire soon, existing as they do on gin. Mine is a life of grander stature. Nature fashioned me rare, unique. Mine is a deeper cunning, an intellect more refined. If offering fallen women upon an altar can preserve me, humanity is better served.
They were poor. I am rich. They were loathsome. I am pure. They were ignorant. I am a man of learning. They were hideous. I am beautiful. They were female. I am not.
Where is my sin? I am an angel of mercy, gently hastening a few across the valley of death, to leave their mortal woes behind. What happens to their corpses after they die – what of it? All decompose eventually.
I mold their clay into truer sculptures than those you jostle and queue to pay to see at your waxworks and dime museums. Behold the true Anatomical Venus. A once-living woman, opened for scientific study and aesthetic pleasure. My fleshy handiwork. Their carcasses are my canvas to show the filth, the taint, the reeking excrement behind whoring, seducing womanhood.
But even so, I am not cruel. Only when they were quietly gone did I set about my work.
So write your screeds, you moralizers, but do not pretend you care for those women. You wanted these demons off the street as much as anyone of sense.
Do not think you can know me. I walk among you daily with a seraph’s face. I sleep in peace when dawn approaches and I lay me down at last.
The Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Tabitha – The Fire of the Spirit (Autumn 1888)
Funny thing about the fire of the Spirit. It burns hot in Army meetings, when the captain’s preaching, the singers are singing, the guitar playing, the tambourines jingling, and the people on either side of you are receiving Jesus, dancing for joy, and saying praise be, hallelujah, I’m a new woman, I’m alive in Christ, and they’re begging to enlist in the Lord’s army. It burns bright and hot enough that when they say to you, Sister Tabitha, are you ready to give your life to the Lord and take up his cross and march all the way to Babylon? (Even though it’s actually a train to New York City. I, for one, am not walking.) Are you ready to enlist in God’s Army and carry his banner into war? Are you ready to leave the home to go save souls? Are you ready to rescue sinners and snatch them back from the jaws of a dreadful fate? Are you? Are you?
All that hot Spirit fire. It’s the kind of thing that makes you say yes.
(And, possibly also the image of the absolute conniption Aunt Lorraine will have if you say yes gives the idea a bit more sparkle.)
And you do feel something, just maybe not like what everyone else means by feeling the Spirit. Right in the middle of all that noise, there comes a quiet. You feel a warmth, a glow that fills you up from the inside, and all of a sudden your eyes are pricking and you fell as though beams of light are shooting out your fingers and toes. And it speaks to you. Tabitha, beloved daughter, here I am. I am with you, and I always have been. Come with me, dear one. I have a work for you to do. I need you to go find my other daughters who are lost and lead them home.
You can’t really argue with that, can you? Not when all that love is pulsing through you till your bones tingle.
In the meeting, with all the tambourines, you’re pretty sure “home” means the Heavenly Kingdom. The Pearly Gates. The Celestial City.
But when you get to Babylon, or in this case, the Salvation Army headquarters in the basement underneath Steve Brodie’s Saloon on the Bowery, and you see some of those lost daughters through smudgy saloon windows, you realize maybe home is a mother and a father, back in Poughkeepsie, or Scranton, or West Springfield, weeping over their girl who followed a liar to Gotham and disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Because she isn’t typing anybody’s letters, or bringing up the Missus’s breakfast tray, and she isn’t weaving cloth in a woolen mill. If only she were.
She is a prisoner on the Devil’s Mile, one of the forgotten girls of the Bowery. Behind the bright lights and tinkling ivories, the laughter and the liquor, there she is. Behind a beaded curtain. Behind a painted face. Neither her body nor her broken heart belongs to her anymore.
Tabitha – The War Cry (Friday, September 7, 1888)
Commander Maud Booth had warned me – well, all of us – that Satan would strew trials and adversities in our path to glory. I just never expected one of them to be Pearl Davenport, my roommate and companion soldier in the Salvation Army. Wherever I go, there is Pearl, and wherever Pearl goes, there am I.
I arrived in New York on Saturday. I spent Sunday attending rally meetings, then several days training at headquarters. By Wednesday night, I’d been assigned my base camp – the one on the Bowery – and my comrade-in-arms. Pearl.
I had brought a little present for my soon-to-be sister and absolute forever best friend, as yet unmet, likely to be the maid of honor at my wedding if I ever did marry: a bracelet of small coral beads. Modest and pretty. Not very expensive, but nice.
I handed her the tissue-wrapped package.
Some people look pleased when given a gift. Or, at least, they know how to fake it.
She couldn’t, Pearl explained gravely, indulge in such vanity, however, to please me, she would accept the gift and sell it to feed the poor.
And that was us, just getting started.
Maid of dishonor at my wedding. Silly, silly me to think joining the Salvation Army would ensure I’d make new friends.
I may have been somewhat snippish toward Pearl after the fourth or so little display of her precious piety. So much for new-roommate-sisterly-warmth. Grim politeness didn’t last a day before open hostilities broke out. Not for nothing are we called an army.
It was Friday evening. We’d been companions for 46 hours. We marched up and down the Bowery and surrounding streets, entering concert saloons and grimy dives before they’d gotten going for the evening, though the saloons were certainly never empty. Dressed in our military uniforms – long blue serge skirts, long matching jackets trimmed in yellow, and poke-bonnet hats – we called people to hear the brass band performing that night at our base camp.
This time, our fortunate host was O’Flynn’s Tavern, which meant that the proprietor and patrons would be Irish Catholic, and wouldn’t have any interest in a Salvation Army message.
Men slowly craned their necks around to look at us. At Pearl.
I might as well get this out of the way. She’d said little, but I felt I could construct her life story: Pearl was a bonnie farm lass from a poor but humble family who read their Bible nightly and held each other’s hands at prayer, when they weren’t ladling soup down the gullets of the sick and elderly. She was pure and holy, but with a feisty streak that fit her Army calling, and as pretty as Little Bo Peep. Strawberry blond curls and rosy cheeks. Her soul was clad in a blue gingham frock. Little lambs gamboled at her feet. (The feet of her soul. Never mind.) I didn’t know what “gamboling” looked like – not many sheep in my city home – but that’s what sheep would do around Pearl. Angels probably did, too. These men at the bar would gambol if it meant they could keep company with Pearl, except that Pearl was cemented, head to toe, to Jesus, who is almost as effective as a squinty-eyed maiden aunt at keeping male suitors at bay. My aunt Lorraine thwarted my chances of winning the only boy I thought I could love in high school, not that those chances were great, mind you; in my case, I didn’t blame Jesus.
Where was I?
As always: Pearl. Right now: O’Flynn’s Tavern. Staring men. I’ll proceed.
O’Flynn’s was your basic Lower East Side tavern, the bottom floor of a tenement on a side street, below pavement level. The men looked like they’d put in a long day’s grimy work.
The barkeep was young, with a wiry frame and a thick shock of dark hair. He was handsome, in spite of the toothpick jawing away at the corner of his mouth, which thing I never could abide. He took in Pearl and me as though he thought, well, now we’re in for some fun.
“You’re all invited, gentlemen,” declared Pearl, “to tonight’s Hallelujah Spree. 8 o’clock at the Salvation Army outpost beneath Steve Brodie’s saloon on the Bowery.”
Silence greeted this announcement.
The undaunted Pearl went on. “Tonight’s meeting will be better than any show on earth.”
“What’ve you got,” said a grizzled older man, “a circus?”
“Bigger than a circus,” cried my companion. “We’ll have music and singing, and a marching band, and preaching that’ll curl your hair!” This drew some laughs.
“That’d be quite a job, Ronnie,” said the barkeep, “seeing as you’ve got none.”
His voice lilted like a true Irishman’s. Musical.
We sang them a hymn. “I’m a soldier, bound for glory.”
I love Jesus, hallelujah!
I love Jesus, yes, I do;
I love Jesus, he’s my Saviour,
Jesus smiles and loves me too.
Pearl is, of course, the soprano. But: our voices blend nicely, and the music always is, in its way, its own reward. A few of the patrons of O’Flynn’s closed their eyes to listen.
The chorus ended. The sullen stares wore on, and I wanted to die, but Pearl’s cheeks flushed red with triumph. She was doing heroic work. A true soldier in God’s army.
She held a handful of copies of “The War Cry,” the Salvation Army’s gospel newsletter, high like Lady Liberty with her torch. “Who will buy a copy of ‘The War Cry?’” she asked the room. “It’ll be the best penny you’ll ever spend. The one that changes your life forever.”
No one wanted a copy of “The War Cry.”
She looked about the room expectantly.
No one wanted a copy of “The War Cry.”
She gave her papers a flourish like a baton. Splendid wrist action.
Strangely, still, no one wanted a copy of “The War Cry.”
I cleared my throat. “It has a very interesting article in it,” I said, feeling I ought to make an attempt, “of a man who got a raise in pay after he turned his life over to the Lord.”
A few coughs ensued, some waggling eyebrows from the barkeep, some shifting and pawing through pockets. Pearl sold five copies of “The War Cry” and collected her pennies.
Bald Ronnie rolled the paper into a tube. “See here,” he said, “what’s in this thing?”
“The latest bulletins from the battlefield,” Pearl told him.
He scratched his nose. “You mean, that war in Africa?”
“The war for souls.” She was enjoying herself, and oddly, so were the men at the bar.
“Anything in it about the election?” asked the young bartender.
“Everything you need to know,” she said, “about blessings poured out upon God’s elect.”
“Elect,” crowed Ronnie. “She’s got you there, Mike.” The bartender, evidently Mike, grinned good-naturedly and dried another mug with his towel.
“Got any fighting news in it?” asked a huge fellow, getting in on the spirit of the thing. His build and mashed nose suggested a side career in basement boxing.
“Absolutely,” declared Pearl. “Every detail of the fight to win souls for the Lord.”
Now is not the time, I had to remind myself, to slink out of the room.
I sidled over to the bar and extended a hand to the barkeeper. “I’m Tabitha,” I whispered. “We might as well get acquainted.”
He grinned. “Mike.”
“I know,” I said. “I mean, I heard.”
“Spying on me, eh?” He dried his hand on the towel at his waist and thrust it at me. “I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of you two, now, won’t we?”
I smiled in spite of myself. The voice. “Probably.”
He waved a mug he was drying in Pearl’s direction. “Who’s your friend?”
She’s not my friend. “Pearl.”
A fellow seated nearby chimed in. “Poil, the Goil with the Coils.”
I will never get used to these New York accents.
“I’m guessing you two haven’t been working together long,” said Mike.
My heart sank. “Is it obvious?”
He leaned closer to whisper conspiratorially. “The look on your face. Like she was a rotten egg that had just bust open. Might’ve been a clue.”
“Oh.” I felt my face flood with embarrassment. “I’ll have to work on that, won’t I? Not very good for the cause, I mean.”
“P ’raps not,” Mike agreed, “but entertaining. Pleased to meet you, Miss Tabitha.”
“And you,” I said, “Mr., er, Mike.”
“Oi, Mr. Mike,” said a young tough at the bar, “pour the ale, and leave the Sallys be.”
Mike gave me a wink, then turned back to the tap and his other customers. Pearl stood at the door, watching me curiously, then exited. I hurried out after her into the twilit street.
Tabitha – Soldiers, Sallys, and Hallelujah Lasses (Friday, September 7, 1888)
“Where to now?” I asked Pearl.
She hesitated. “Downtown,” she said. “Let’s take Chrystie down as far as Canal, and see what we find, then make our way back to base for supper. Preaching all the way.”
I groaned inwardly but said nothing.
Pearl invited everyone we passed on the street. She urged them to visit our Hallelujah Spree. She offered them The War Cry. People laughed, or ducked down and pretended not to see us. Some heckled and jeered. She tried the ballyman at one of our dozens of dime museums, this one promising a preserved mermaid, but he waved her away. She even tried her luck on a teenaged girl in pigtails who stopped to ask us for directions.
“Pardon me,” the girl said, “can you point me toward Spring Street?”
“We’re soldiers in the Lord’s army of salvation,” Pearl told her proudly. “Would you support our cause by buying a copy of The War Cry, our news bulletin? It’s only a penny.”
I cringed. Not now, Pearl!
The poor girl looked stricken. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I used up my money to get here, and then the fare on the Elevated…”
“That’s all right,” I said quickly. “There’s no need to buy a paper.”
Pearl scowled.
The girl thought the scowl was for her. She backed away. “I…can find my own way.”
“No, don’t,” I told her. “We can help.” I couldn’t direct her myself, so I cast a pointed glance at Pearl, who rolled her eyes as though this was the absolute last straw.
“Back up to Delancey,” Pearl told her tersely, gesturing up Chrystie, the way we’d come. “Take a left, then a quick right onto the Bowery, and Spring Street will be your next left.”
“Thank you.” The girl took off up Chrystie with her little suitcase swinging at her side.
Pearl chafed. “What a waste of time. Think of all the passersby we didn’t invite.”
I thought of them, all right. They were the lucky ones.
It was now the hour when the last waves of working men and women tramped home, when the odor of boiled cabbage rivaled the ever-present smell of beer. A steely sky overhung the city, and not just from coalsmoke. Saloons blazed with electric light, while from their upper rooms, red lampshades cast a lurid glow down upon the pavement. In side streets, kerosene lamps lit tenement windows. Everywhere except on Hester Street, where candles gleamed. This, Pearl had explained earlier, was a largely Jewish neighborhood. The sun had not quite yet set, so the Jewish Sabbath was about to start. The sense of expectancy was tangible.
Some passerby made a crack about a ‘pair of Sallys.’ This gave Pearl a new vent for her anger. Other than me, I mean.
“‘Sallys,’” she muttered. “I hate it when they call us that. We’re soldiers.”
“It’s not so bad,” I reminded her, “as ‘Hallelujah Lasses.’”
She directed a sideways glance my way. “You know, for someone so reluctant to enter that pub,” she said, “you certainly had a hard time tearing yourself away from the bar.”
I marched on, avoiding her gaze.
“Or was it the barkeeper?”
“I was just doing my job.” I spared her none of my indignation. “Commander Booth says we should make friends with the barkeepers.”
“Friends?”
“I merely shook hands,” I said, “and politely introduced myself.”
A corseted older woman laden down with parcels paused to regard us curiously.
Once again, Pearl switched modes instantly. “Good evening, ma’am,” she told the startled woman. “We are soldiers in the Lord’s army of salvation. Would you buy a copy of our bulletin, The War Cry, for one penny, detailing our rescue labors on behalf the working poor?”
“Ah.” The woman’s face melted like lard in a pan. “I’ve read about you dear girls,” she gushed. “You’re doing a necessary work for the poor, God love you. Yes, I’ll buy one.”
But her hands were too full of parcels. Soon I staggered under the weight of what felt like cast-iron pans for seventeen of her relations, so she could obtain the precious penny.
At last the woman and her penny, and Pearl and her War Cry, were properly parted, and we continued our walk. Nighttime was now full. The Bowery’s lights flaunted their brilliance in defiance of the gathering dark.
“Isn’t it wonderful, Sister Tabitha,” Pearl said, “that we are counted worthy to suffer ridicule for the Lord’s name?”
I’m not making this up.
“No, it isn’t wonderful,” I said. “It’s awful, and miserable, and embarrassing. I hate it.”
She gave me a wide-eyed look of righteous horror.
“You just said it yourself,” I told her. “You hate it when they call us ‘Sallys.’”
“If I didn’t hate it,” she said primly, “then it wouldn’t be persecution, and if it weren’t persecution, we wouldn’t receive the blessings promised to those who suffer for Christ.”
“Seems it would be a lot more efficient,” I told her, “for you and for Jesus, if you just admitted that you like it.”
That got in amongst her. More efficient for Jesus! What a sacrilege.
“Make up your mind,” I said. “Hate it or love it. Wonderful or persecution. You can’t have both.”
Words failed her. Her retort was pathetic. “Oh? And what do you have, Miss Wise One?”
“A blister on my little toe,” I said, “from tramping around in wet stockings in the rain.”
Pearl smiled sweetly. The thought of my blister must have delighted her rotten heart. “‘Count it all joy,’ the Bible says,” she told me. “From the Epistle of James.”
“‘Stay home in bed,’” I replied. “From the Epistle of Me.”
She shook her head. “I keep asking myself, why are you even here?”
I choked back a bitter laugh. “You and me both.”
Pearl was now jumping up and down, and waving on tiptoe to a figure across the street.
“Yoo-hoo,” she shrilled. “Mr. Laurier!”
“Mister” Percival Laurier was all of nineteen years old, a new soldier in the Army, fresh from Pittsburgh, the rising star of our rallies and nightly preaching. Laurier, unlike the farm and factory lads the Army usually attracts, came to us with a passionate conversion story, a towering charisma, an athlete’s build, a Grecian profile and, the absolute coup de grace, wavy dark curls. Young female attendance at rallies, thanks to this paragon, was soaring.
May heaven help us all.
Whitechapel, East London
Jack After Annie (Saturday, September 9, 1888)
He pockets a pair of rings he found on her fingers; a souvenir, then wraps his prizes in butcher’s paper and folds the parcel into his inside coat pocket along with the blade.
Footsteps approach. Time to be gone. He is on his feet, slipping through a back gate and then a darkened court without a look back. The rising sun hasn’t found the East End yet.
It’s so easy. Each time heightens his danger in a city now searching desperately for him. Official vigilance prowls the streets, those terrified dopes, marching about with their torches and rattles while inside, trembling in fear. He will laugh at their impotence tonight, back at his lodgings, enjoying a cigar after a decent wash.
There. The constable on patrol has already found her. That’s the bloke now, bleating for help. He slows his steps. He is not a man escaping the grisly scene of a human butchery, no. He’s just been out drinking. He’s on his way home. That’s all. He has no reason to dread the weak light cast by one of Whitechapel’s sparse gas lamps, up ahead.
A rag in his pocket makes quick work of the blood on his hands. He’ll have to check his trousers. He felt her pooling blood as he knelt about his quick work. Trousers can be burned.
A figure steps out from a doorway up ahead, in the glow of that lamp. Female. He tugs the brim of his hat low over his eyes. All Whitechapel is an eyewitness suddenly, and the papers are full of their stories of how they saw the killer himself, in the flesh. He delights in their ludicrous descriptions of him.
The woman accosts him. Thinking to make a quick conquest. No, not a woman. A girl. Too slender of waist to be older as most are, and too plump of flesh to be as hungry as most are. He can’t see much of her face. She wears a wide-brimmed hat fringed with dark lace.
“’Scuse me, sir,” she says. “Lend a poor girl fivepence? For my lodgings?”
It’s how they all start in. “Lend” her indeed. “No.”
“Where are you off to, then?” Playfully, like any East End street-walker plying her trade.
He turns away and shoulders past her, but she seizes a fistful of his coat.
“You’re too young,” he tells her. “Be off with you.”
“I smell her on you,” she tells him. “Blood. Entrails.”
He freezes. That’s not possible. No one saw. No one knew. She’s bluffing.
Under his jacket, he curls his fingers around the haft of his knife.
She must be silenced, now, while the constables stare at his earlier handiwork. His gaze rakes the square. That forlorn little court is dark enough. Two in one night. Two within minutes.
She takes a little promenade around him till he’s turned about with his back to the light.
“Look me in the eye, and tell me what you see.”
“Let’s go where we can be alone,” he whispers. “I’ll look into your eyes a long while.”
“I hope so.”
She raises her chin and flips upward the dark lace rimming the brim of her hat.
Lamplight gleams in wet sheen of her eyes.
And he’s falling, falling. His shin bones liquefy, his bowels turn to dust. A high wind shrieks around him, tugging at his clothes, eroding his face.
But he’s just standing there, and so is she.
A reflected flame pulses in her eyes. Inside it, a woman. His latest victim. Her, and not her. Not the pungent, pathetic drunk he’d found, but a goddess of wrath, clad in queenly silks, yet wearing his victim’s fresh-killed face. She glides toward him, propelled by rage.
His vision swims before him. Her fingers aren’t fingers, but intestines. No, snakes. No, daggers in the hand of a hideous, loathsome monster. No, tendrils of hair waving in the night wind, around the face of a young girl with a smooth young mouth, and wet, luminous eyes.
He staggers backward, and catches her gaze. Now she’s the one who looks unsure.
“How—” she begins. “Look at me.”
He’s powerless to resist. He looks at her. She is standing in a different place. But where before, she seemed commanding, she now looks agitated, confused. She shakes herself as if waking from a dream. As if making up her mind, resigning herself to something.
The light, somehow, feels changed. Dawn is faintly visible in the sky now. A man and a woman, fresh from an all-night tavern, pass by on the opposite side of the street, singing loudly and out of tune. He didn’t remember them being there before.
He looks back at the girl, now settling the lace once more over the brim of her hat.
“We’re coming for you,” she tells him. “Run if you like, but we’re coming.”
~
The last thing a man should do on the streets of Whitechapel, just after the police discover another of his victims, is run.
The only thing a man can think of to do, when he has met his doom, is run.
The most useless thing a man can do when his own flesh itself is cursed is run.
Run, Jack, run, fast as you can.
The Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Tabitha – Reasons (Friday, September 7, 1888)
To Pearl’s point, to her question, why was I here?
First, it was because I thought I felt God calling me to come.
Then it was because Aunt Lorraine loathed the idea with a quivering passion. I could stop right there.
Then, it was because I had all the arguments with her and my dad about it, in which I vowed that I knew what I was doing, and was dead set upon going, so to give up now and go back would be to eat crow. No, thank you.
Then, it was because I’d been feeling restless, and a bit adrift, ever since my dearest friend and beloved cousin, Jane, only one year my senior, had had the cheek to leave me bereft by getting married and moving to Boston. She was nauseatingly happy. She barely had time to write, so busy was she in feathering her nest. Her Gerald was, I suppose, acceptable, as bridegrooms go, though I certainly couldn’t see what Jane saw in him. But I needed something to fill the void her abandonment and betrayal had opened. Not that I was bitter. Ahem.
Then, it was because I had promised I would, and then because I had taken the train to the city, and was here now, and so I might as well stay, there being no pressing engagement calling me elsewhere.
And then it was because I met our Co-Commanders, Mr. Ballington Booth, and his young wife, Mrs. Maud Booth. I would follow Mrs. Booth to Mars if she was forming an expedition, and if she got wind of any poor, lost souls up there, that’s just what she would do. Both she and her husband are wonderful, and she, so bold! Such an outspoken leader. Beloved by audiences of both men and women. I don’t believe she and her husband ever sleep. They work and work for the good of the poorest people in New York. They embody what we’re all supposedly trying to be. Where they lead, I’d like to follow. Even if it means living ‘round the clock with Pearl.
So the Commanders Booth were two of my reasons.
But then it was because I arrived in town and saw the need. So much need. That’s what hooked itself into my heart.
And God’s call? I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know it felt real then. I know I’ve felt nothing like it since. I don’t know if it was a trick of the preaching, or the music.
But I know there are an awful lot of folks here needing help.
I think, perhaps, that’s all I know.
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