Free Death at Whitechapel by Robin Paige Page B

branches of the copper beech outside the window. Climbing into bed, he answered Kate with a question.
    â€œHow much did you hear about the Ripper, over there in America?” He settled his pillow into a rest for his back and leaned against it.
    Kate stood beside the half-drawn drape, gazing through the window onto the wide sweep of moonlit lawn. “I read about him,” she said evasively. Then, because she had fallen into the habit of telling her husband almost everything, she turned and said frankly, “I read a great deal about him, I must confess. Even as recently as three years ago, I happened across an article—a reprinting of a piece in a Chicago newspaper—about an English medium who claimed to have led the police to the killer.” Actually, she had clipped the article and filed it away, thinking that it might prove to be useful material for one of Beryl Bardwell’s narratives. “In that version, the Ripper was a mad doctor. He later died in a lunatic asylum.”
    Charles folded his arms across his chest with a chuckle. “You are bloodthirsty, my dear. I should have thought that a proper lady would be repulsed by so much spilled blood.”
    Kate tilted her head and gave him an impertinent smile. “I am hardly a proper lady, m’lord. While your Ripper was reducing the population of Whitechapel, I was earning my own living in New York City—and Beryl Bardwell was just starting to write her first stories.”
    Kate had begun her literary career some years before. Writing under her own name, Kathryn Ardleigh, she had intended to compose tidy domestic narratives of the sort written by Louisa May Alcott —Little Women and Little Men. But the publisher to whom she offered her work, replied that while her stories were very fine, there was no market for morality.
    â€œSensation is what the public wants,” he had told her, thumping on the desk. “Excitement, suspense, stimulation—and the more, the better. Heap it on!” So Kate adopted the name of Beryl Bardwell and became a writer of sensational shockers, dramatic stories that she often drew from newspaper reports of real crime. The publisher had been right. The public was hungry for sensation, and the more lurid details she included, the sharper the readers’ appetites became. Her shockers had sold like hot pies on an icy street corner in winter.
    â€œI doubt,” Charles said with a crooked smile, “that you learned much of the Ripper. The newspapers were not accurate, of course. They printed what they chose to print—which was a good deal of sordid nonsense. Like that article about the clairvoyant.” He beckoned. “Come to bed, Kate.”
    The article had stayed in Kate’s mind, for it had had the ring of truth. But Charles was right. The newspapers rarely printed the truth—although that did not alter her interest in the crimes. “I suppose,” she said, “that I was repulsed by the idea that a man could despise women so much that he would kill and mutilate them. How many? A dozen, was it?”
    Charles shook his head ruefully. “More nonsense. Where the Ripper is concerned, there is far more fiction than fact in circulation—perhaps because the truth is so grisly that it can scarcely be imagined.” He pulled the covers back. “Please come, Kate. You’ll get a chill, standing by the window in that gown. Which is so thin,” he added meaningfully, “that I can see right through it.”
    Kate left the window and climbed into bed beside her husband. “Well, then,” she said, pulling the sheet up to her chin, “if not a dozen, how many did he kill?”
    â€œFive,” Charles said. He put his arm around Kate’s shoulder and pulled her close against him. “A number of other women, all of them unfortunates, were murdered in Whitechapel during that time.