Death at Whitechapel by Robin Paige

Author:Robin Paige [Paige, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf

22

When we first came to the East End—to St. Jude's in Whitechapel, my hushand was told by the bishop that it was the worst parish in the district. There were some six thousand people crowded into a maze of insanitary courts and alleys. To get into the courts you often had to walk through tke stench of evil-smelling gases rising from sewage and refuse scattered in all directions. The sun never penetrates into them and they are never visited by a breath of fresh air.

Dame Henrietta Barnett wife of the founder of Toynkee Hall Settlement

Kate expected that her early years in New York would have prepared her for the streets of Whitechapel, but she was wrong. For one thing, her memories of sights and sounds and smells had been blessedly dulled by the passage of dme. For another, the New York in which she had lived had seemed somehow hopeful, and if lives were bleak and possibilities limited, the dream of a brighter future was compelling, the desire to change station was strong.

But there was nothing hopeful about the streets of Whitechapel. The spiritless faces Kate saw as she and Jennie trudged down Commercial Street were marked by the desolate, dreary, hopeless business of surviving the present day, with no energy or will to dream of a future. The figures seemed to move as if through a fog, slow and sad.

Commercial Street slashed a long diagonal through Spi-talfields from Shoreditch High Street to Whitechapel High Street. Christ Church loomed on the left, its massive bulk of Portland stone rising through the thickening mist like some monument to a forgotten god who offered only scant comfort to his followers. Attached to the church was a patch of bare dirt under a few trees, known locally as Itchy Park, owing to the many lice-infected, homeless people who passed their dme there. Now, Kate saw, its benches were filled with sleeping figures clothed in rags, huddled under newspapers or pieces of cardboard, taking refuge from the ravages of the day in the solace of sleep.

"This is the street where Mary Kelly lived," Kate said, pointing at a dirty sign that read Duval Street, direcdy across from the park, beside the Britannia Pub. "It was called Dorset Street then, but the notoriety was so great that the name was changed."

A raucous group of factory girls in dark stuff dresses and white aprons charged past them, pushing and shoving and calling out insults to one another. Behind them sauntered a pair of women rather more gaily dressed—prostitutes, Kate surmised—their eyes boldly searching out men's faces, their lips suggestively pursed.

Jennie had pulled her veil across her face, and behind it her eyes were deeply shadowed. She fixed diem on Kate, as if to avoid seeing anything else. "I still don't understand what you hope to learn in this awful place," she said. "It all seems so grim and hopeless."

Kate, her own spirit failing her, did not answer. What could she hope to learn, ten years after

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