unknowingly—doing the Lord’s work. You have sacrificed yourself that I may live.”
“What are you gibbering about? I’ve sacrificed naught!”
“Your immortal soul, sir.”
“Superstitious claptrap!” He held up the pound notes I’d given him. “This is what’s real, and it can’t be spent in no bloomin’ afterlife!”
I stared into the furnace. “In that, we are agreed. When payment is demanded of you, those notes will be worthless.”
“The only payment you need worry about, lad, is the one you’ll hand over after I’ve spent this lot. My silence don’t come cheap! Now get out of here! But don’t think this business is finished, ’cos it ain’t—not by a long shot!”
Tanner was wrong. His bribery of me ended there and then—Clarissa and I never saw him, his family, or Theaston Vale ever again. A few days later, we left town and travelled by train to the capital.
°
London. 1888. God in Heaven. What a place.
It was a city divided. Its opulence was incomparable, its sophistication astonishing, its indulgences entrancing, its poverty terrifying, its ruthlessness overwhelming, its vileness unremitting.
The capital’s split personality was perfectly embodied in a sensational novella published two years before my arrival, entitled The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by a Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson. It told of a rather immoral man who, by means of a chemical formula, embodied his weakness of character in an alter ego, which then rampaged about the city.
The tale unnerved me, for Alice Tanner’s wickedness had given such strength to the aspect of my character which, in Theaston Vale, had felt frustrated, isolated, trapped, and inadequate—adding to it a ferocious resentment against the woman who’d spurned and humiliated me—that I could almost believe it might overtake me.
“It’s an inner darkness,” I told Clarissa, “and it won’t be quelled. I hate it!”
“It’s just a phase,” she advised. “Most young men go through it, especially after their first rejection. It’ll wear off.”
She was wrong. London made it worse.
We had enrolled in the Missionary Society upon our arrival in the city, and for a year I’d been taught how to disseminate my religion to those who worshipped at pagan altars. My companion also received instruction as my sexton, and as a part of our training we were assigned three days a week to a workhouse in Whitechapel.
Despite being within reasonable walking distance of the glamorous West End, the district in which we now found ourselves might have been a different world altogether. Overcrowded, filthy, noisy, stinking, and vicious, it was a place where emotions were stripped to their most wretched essence. Need was surpassed by desperation. Hopelessness was eclipsed by utter despair. Love was obliterated by lust. Conditions there had pushed its inhabitants to the brink of animalism, making the men loutish beyond belief, but reducing the women in particular to such a state of bestial savagery that no social propriety or boundary survived in them. I could not walk down a street without being mocked, pawed at, and propositioned by these dreadful creatures. They uttered every blasphemy, put every perversion up for sale.
Whitechapel was a nightmare made real, and every day that I endured it saw an increase in my loathing of the place and its despicable inhabitants.
On the penultimate day of August, I was sent to a lodging house on Thrawl Street, where I was supposed to offer comfort to the fallen women who crowded into its small, damp, mildewed rooms. I arrived there at seven o’clock in the evening and spent the next few hours being regaled with appalling tales of destitution, vice, and violence, all the while trying to remain impassive while seething with detestation.
It was well past midnight by the time I left that awful house and made my way back toward the rooms the Missionary Society had assigned to me. I was tormented and confused, and, inevitably in the warrens of Whitechapel, my preoccupied state caused me to quickly lose my bearings.
Splashing through sewage and bound by the slumping walls of half-derelict and overcrowded tenements, I wandered from alleyway to alleyway, and the voices that jeered and threatened and wheedled suggestively from all around me seemed to close in, until I felt I was drowning in them.
I trudged on, closing my ears to the catcalls, averting my gaze from the ragged clothes and pockmarked faces, from the rotting teeth and alcohol-reddened eyes, from the taunting expressions and obscene gestures.
I wanted to be somewhere else.
No, it was more than that.
I wanted to be someone else, someone immune to all this hatred