• Home
  • Alan M. Clark
  • A Brutal Chill in August: A Novel of Polly Nichols, The First Victim of Jack the Ripper

A Brutal Chill in August: A Novel of Polly Nichols, The First Victim of Jack the Ripper Read online




  Contents

  Praise for A Brutal Chill in August:

  Other Books by Alan M. Clark

  A Brutal Chill in August

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  Polly Nichols

  Author’s Note

  1: Tell Me a Dreadful

  2: A Song

  3: Labor

  4: Selfish Prayers

  5: Risk

  6: The Dead Lie Quiet & Still

  7: Adventures

  8: Fragile Abstinence

  9: Something in Common

  10: Scheming

  11: Mistrust

  12: With Time

  13: A Tempting Choice

  14: Obsession

  15: While She Was Out

  16: Negotiations & Changes

  17: Lonely Hearts

  18: A New Routine

  19: Pursuit

  20: A Promise of Lessons

  21: A Need for Worry

  22: The Girl’s Decision

  23: Reprisal

  24: Unexpected Allies

  25: A Timely Amendment

  26: Routine Reestablished

  27: Exhaustive Search

  28: Bed Rest

  29: Reunion & Departure

  30: Census

  31: A Precipitous Decline

  32: The Workhouse

  33: Bargaining

  34: The Lush

  35: Visitation

  36: Many Need Help

  37: Paupers

  38: A Position

  39: A New Friend

  40: Temperance

  41: The Price of Solace

  42: Storm

  43: One Last Client

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for A Brutal Chill in August:

  “With A Brutal Chill in August, Alan M. Clark continues his terrific fictionalized accounts of the Ripper’s victims—always compelling, and always expertly evoking nineteenth century London. Gripping, suspenseful—written with sensitivity and heart.”

  —Simon Clark, author of Night of the Triffids

  “A Brutal Chill in August, one of a series wherein Alan Clark masterfully recreates the sorry lives of the Ripper’s victims, is awash in atmospheric detail of those dark days in 19th century London. Exhaustively researched, Clark brings to life the plight of London’s poor, and the extremes to which they must go in order to merely survive...or succumb as victims to disease, abuse, alcoholism, or worse. A great read.”

  —Elizabeth Engstrom, author of Lizzie Borden

  “A Brutal Chill in August does a fantastic job of taking you on a mental time-travel jaunt. Full immersion, all too vivid and real. […] Alan M. Clark is as masterful a writer as he is an artist; sure to blow you away. […] Historical fiction done right. I cannot love it enough.”

  —Christine Morgan, The Horror Fiction Review

  Other Books by Alan M. Clark

  The Paint in My Blood

  Siren Promised (co-written with Jeremy Robert Johnson)

  Pain & Other Petty Plots to Keep You in Stitches

  The Blood of Father Time, Book 1, The New Cut (co-authored with Stephen C. Merritt and Lorelei Shannon)

  The Blood of Father Time, Book 2, The Mystic Clan’s Grand Plot (co-authored with Stephen C. Merritt and Lorelei Shannon)

  D.D. Murphry, Secret Policeman (co-written with Elizabeth Massie)

  Boneyard Babies

  Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim

  A Parliament of Crows

  The Door That Faced West

  Say Anything But Your Prayers

  The Surgeon’s Mate: A Dismemoir

  A Brutal Chill

  in August

  A Novel of Polly Nichols

  The First Victim of Jack the Ripper

  Alan M. Clark

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  A Brutal Chill in August © 2016 by Alan M. Clark

  This edition of A Brutal Chill in August

  © 2016 by Word Horde

  Cover art © 2016 Alan M. Clark

  Cover design by Scott R. Jones

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-1-939905-25-3

  A Word Horde Book

  For all the murder victims forgotten

  in the excitement over the assholes who kill.

  In an effort to bring life to an image of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, the author digitally manipulated a mortuary photo of the woman to arrive at this portrait.

  Author’s Note

  A Chill in London

  This is a work of fiction inspired by the life of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, a woman believed to be the first victim of Jack the Ripper. For purposes of storytelling, I have not adhered strictly to her history and I have changed the names of the principal characters subtly. I have assigned to my main character emotional characteristics and reactions that seem consistent with her life and circumstances. This novel is not primarily about Jack the Ripper, but is instead about Mrs. Nichols’s survival within the increasingly difficult and dangerous social and economic environment of London, England between the years of her birth, 1845, and that of her death, 1888.

  The summer of 1888 had been a chilly one. In suburbs of London, snowfall had been reported in the small hours of the morning on July 11. Since the cataclysmic eruption of the Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa, which had thrown fine ash high into the atmosphere five years earlier, the climate in the northern hemisphere had been significantly cooler.

  In London, a cold-blooded killer would soon begin the work for which he’d be known. What we don’t know is how selective Jack the Ripper was in choosing his victims, whether he acted spontaneously or was attracted to prey with certain traits. The five canonical victims were women. They were impoverished. Each of them had engaged in prostitution. Most were in their forties. Perhaps all were alcoholics. All of these traits were to be found in his first victim, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols.

  On the night of her death, August 30/31, a Thursday night and a Friday morning, the temperature in London hovered around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The social chill in the city that followed would be much worse, as the police were powerless to stop the killer and the murders continued into the autumn with at least four more victims.

  To understand the extraordinary furor in London over the Ripper killings, one must know something about the frequency and variety of death that already occurred within the Whitechapel area of the time. The murder rate was quite low. Disease took most lives at a younger age than today. The rate of industry-related deaths (violent accidents or chemically induced) was quite high, as was the suicide rate and the infant mortality rate (at least 30%, but probably closer to 50% died before the age of 5). The average human being had an expected life span of around forty years. Many prostitutes were brutalized and much violent crime occurred during the years between 1887 to 1889, yet few who died were seen to be murders. Perhaps this is attributable to the desire of authorities to keep quiet about the crime rate during a time of swift economic change and social upheaval. Whatever the case, the violence characteristic of the Ripper killings, with multiple stabbings and apparent sexual degradation of the victims suggesting piquerism on the part of the killer, certainly surprised the citizens of London.

  The city’s East End was filled with the poor, many of them immigrants. Most suffered under a class system that maintained a sharp division between the have
s and have-nots. Due to the resentment this naturally caused, the idea that the killer might be a gentleman slumming in Whitechapel and killing for pleasure was not unbelievable to many in the lower class. Within the upper classes, many believed the lower classes were spoiling for a rebellion, and saw the murders as just another indication of the moral corruption of the denizens of the East End.

  Fear on the streets resulting from the Ripper murders became so powerful that groups among all classes began to fight against it. Although many weren’t in agreement over the causes of or solution to the outrage, the conversation or argument that followed helped bring attention to the sad conditions in which people lived within the city’s East End. Their anger became a hot response to the chill in London in the summer of 1888, one that ignited a fire that slowly brought change to the city.

  As we continually face questions about the worth of those with little versus those with much, the banked coals of that fire ignited in London in 1888 still smolder.

  Likely, Mrs. Nichols would have been surprised to learn of the history that flowed from the moment of her death. Like many throughout history, she had a simple life, but not one without controversies and drama. As with all of our stories, simple or complex, rich or poor, it’s the emotional content and context that counts.

  —Alan M. Clark

  Eugene, Oregon

  1

  Tell Me a Dreadful

  London, August 31, 1858, during the Great Stink

  Polly knew the presence of the jar of gin troubled Bernice Godwin.

  “Won’t we become drunk?” Bernice asked. The outer corners of her eyes angled downward, giving her a look too serious for a child.

  Sarah Brown had complained about that look before. At present, she sat watching Bernice with contempt in her green eyes. Polly knew Sarah disliked Bernice because the Godwin girl had bowed legs and suffered frequent nose bleeds.

  Martha Combs shrugged. “We all have gin when the air and water go bad.”

  Bernice slowly shook her head. “In our water. Even then, I don’t like it.”

  You’d better learn to like it, Polly thought, remembering the misery her brother, Fredrick, experienced as cholera took his life a few years earlier.

  Carrying the stench of the river Thames, a bitter haze in the hot autumn air swept by the girls and moved up the narrow lane between the leaning buildings toward the setting sun. For the past two months, during what was commonly called the Great Stink, Gunpowder Alley had belonged to Polly and her three friends since adults didn’t willingly endure the smell outdoors for long. In the late afternoon, the girls sat on the rotting crates and half-barrels normally occupied by hard-drinking men. They talked, played games, and shared what they could, like the gin.

  Martha hid the jar of strong drink under the hem of her skirt as people walked by, yet the adults who used the alley on the way to their night shifts hurried past, intent on their own business, not the girls. Polly and Bernice knew most of them as neighbors in the lodging house behind them. All but Mr. Edgar completely ignored the girls. As he went by, he paused beside them. “You want to get in out of the stink before you catch your death,” he said, and quickly moved on.

  Even fragile Bernice rolled her eyes at that. Her uncle, Benjamin Sand, worked the sewers as a tosher. His two sons had recently joined the ranks of countless mudlarks, who scavenged along the banks of the river. They earned their crust working amidst the worst of the smell. “Would he have us shut up indoors in this heat?” she scoffed.

  “Not me,” Polly said. “I’m with you.” For much of July, when the extraordinarily high reek coming from the Thames was at its worst, she’d stayed indoors. Fear of the various diseases borne on bad smells had fed the city-wide uproar over the Great Stink. Those who could, had fled London, at least temporarily. Parliament had shut down. While those of a higher station had the luxury of avoiding exposure, the lower classes took their chances in order to keep their livelihoods. Although much of Polly’s work was done indoors, she had become so lonely, hot, and miserable through July that enduring the odor for a bit of freedom didn’t seem so bad in August, especially as the stink had lessened somewhat.

  “Bernice,” Sarah said, sneering, “you don’t have to have any of the gin. Leaves more for the rest of us.” As Bernice looked downcast, Sarah turned to Martha. “How did you get so much?”

  Martha shrugged, pushed the red hair out of her round face, and pulled the jar out from under the hem of her skirt. “Last night, when Da sent me to the Black Dog with his bottle to fetch his drink, I poured off half of the pint into the jar. Filled his bottle back up with water, I did. He calls the publican a macer for giving me watered-down drink, but he never suspects me. I’ve done it twice before for my brother. Today, it’s for us. We’re celebrating Polly’s birthday.”

  “That were five days ago,” Polly said.

  “So, we’re late,” Martha said. “Let this be your new birthday.”

  “Yes. Why not? Papa and Eddie didn’t remember me on the twenty-sixth. My new birthday is August thirty-first.”

  “In honor of your birthday,” Martha said, holding the jar up in a toast. She took a sip of the filched gin, made a face, and passed the jar. Polly accepted the drink eagerly since she hadn’t had anything to eat since early morning. Her father had promised to bring home potatoes. Although Fridays were usually a short day for him, had he come home on time, she would not be with her friends, but busy fixing supper. She’d done her piece work, fur pulling, for the last ten hours. Polly relished the break in the monotony of doing what she considered her mother’s work. She had few fond memories of Caroline. With her death, Polly had left school and her friends there to begin a life of toil.

  Polly raised the jar to her lips, held her breath, and swallowed quickly to avoid tasting the horrible liquid. Unadulterated and fiery, the gin forced a painful cough from her. She quickly offered the jar to Bernice. Predictably the girl shook her head. Polly passed the gin to Sarah.

  Polly’s Papa wasn’t the drunk Martha’s Da was, nor as gullible. He and her brother, Eddie, locksmiths by trade, worked a barrow with a foldout workbench on the street most of each day. If she did her chores and her piece work, her father didn’t bother to keep up with her activities. In what precious free time the young girl had, she did as she pleased.

  “Bernice lost the game last time, so she has to go first,” Martha said, “and then it’s my turn.”

  Bernice smiled nervously, nodded, and swallowed hard. Sarah mocked her. Clearly, Bernice didn’t like the game, but as clearly, she wanted the other girls to like her. The late light caught her face as she narrowed her pale blue eyes with a defiant look, glancing left and right along the alley before beginning. “The Bonehill Ghost has been at it again. He violates at least one girl a night—” She paused, looked at Sarah, and added, “—always the selfish ones.”

  Sarah huffed.

  “He grabs them in his metal claws,” Bernice continued, “and makes them look him in the face. The girls fall insensible at the sight of his fiery eyes.” Finished, she looked down, apparently disinterested in the reaction her words had on the others.

  Polly took Bernice’s words as fact because such stories about the Bonehill Ghost were common. The idea that he went after selfish girls was the only part of her statement new to Polly.

  Sarah’s expression suggested she thought little of Bernice’s offering. Even so, she grinned and that made Martha grin. They had spoken of the Bonehill Ghost before. Martha had brought to their gatherings stories about the demon from her mother, who had been friends with Mary Evans, one of his early victims. “His name was Mr. Macklin,” Martha had said. “He was an Irish rummy who jumped off the Blackfriars Bridge, and was buried in hallowed ground at Bunhill Fields. Because he took his own life, he cannot rest. He’s half ghost, half demon, doing the Devil’s work, stealing souls. He goes about his work with a tippler’s glee. The glow of Mr. Macklin’s eyes is the devil’s brand. They are red because they’re bloods
hot from too much drink. A bottle of gin that never empties, no matter how much he takes from it, hangs from a chain round his neck. His rummy breath is so potent, he can set it ablaze, and breathe blue flame. He’s not fixed firm to the ground, but bounds about, leaping over houses at great speed to catch his prey.”

  Polly had thought the Bonehill Ghost sounded much like Spring-Heeled Jack of South London folklore. He had the same ability to jump high, the metal claws, and flaming blue breath. Such menacing spectres added a frightful element to the considerable mystery and danger of a London night.

  Dusk descended and shadows crept up on the girls. Telling such tales at that hour, they knew they tempted fate, yet that was part of the game they called “Tell me a dreadful.”

  Martha’s and Sarah’s grins loomed skeletal in the dimming light. Their faces are enough to scare away death itself, Polly thought. Since the Grim Reaper had crept close enough to steal family from each of the girls, perhaps defiance of death was what the game was all about. The contest started with the recounting of something dreadful. Then each of the other girls in turn had to add to the tale with a fact, a lie, or a guess. They drew liberally from local folklore in an effort to frighten. The first to flee for the safety of home became the loser, the winner the one who provoked the response.

  Facts rarely surprised Polly, and she believed she could spot a lie. The folklore fell somewhere in between, punching holes in the wall between the prosaic world in which she lived and worked in daylight and the supernatural possibilities of the night. Polly found the glimpses through the holes exciting. She’d never lost the game. Occasionally, she’d won.

  “Do you know what ‘violate’ means?” Sarah asked.