There were many Jews in Whitechapel, Eve knew; immigrants from Poland, Russia and the Balkans. The fortunate few owned shops or small businesses, and it was for them that the vaults had been erected to preserve their final resting places. Beneath the massed mounds reposed the bodies of toilers in the sweatshops, the hawkers and street vendors, the porters, dockhands and slaughterhouse workers. Cramped and crowded together in life, their confines were no less narrow in death.
There was a miasma, a haze of fog, shrouding the vaults and hovering over the mounds. Hovering — or rising from them? The aura of death.
Not that she was afraid of death; she was familiar with its presence after all these months of work here and its image held no terrors for her. It was what lay beyond that Eva feared.
Papa preached of Heaven and Hell, but when he stepped down from the pulpit and removed his robes he was only a man. Perhaps he truly believed in the hereafter, but he didn’t know. Only the dead knew what death was like.
Eternal bliss or eternal damnation? Was it merely an endless, dreamless sleep or did awareness remain, trapped within a body rotting in the grave? Could restless spirits wander the earth as phantom presences?
Unscientific, Eva told herself. One must face the unknown, not fear it.
But when she heard the first hint of sound in the distance her pulse and pace quickened, her footsteps echoing in the night.
Echo?
No, it couldn’t be — the tempo was different. Someone else was here, moving in the darkness.
In spite of herself, Eva sought and searched the foggy fastness of the graveyard, knowing as she did so that the effort was absurd. There are no ghosts. And even if there were, phantom footsteps make no sound.
Eva started to glance over her shoulder, then realized the noise was growing louder; now it seemed to come not from behind her but from the street ahead. Suddenly the cobblestones were shaken with a clatter, a clatter that rose to a rumbling roar mingled with a hoarse bellowing.
Looking up toward the intersection before her she saw the source.
Curling around the corner came a plunging mass of monstrous figures, horned and hooved like the hordes of Hell. The bulk of their bodies filled the street as the surging shapes thundered toward her.
For a moment she stood transfixed, then recognized the reality. The creatures were cattle, not demons; cattle stampeding from the pens of the slaughterhouse beyond in Whitechapel Road. Somehow they’d burst their barriers to run rampant, wild-eyed with terror of impending doom.
And it was doom they were bringing now — blanketing the street and the walks on either side as they bore down upon her, braying in mindless panic; heads lowered, curved horns hooking, heavy hooves pounding to crush all that lay in their path.
Eva turned to run but they were already upon her, mouths foaming, red eyes glaring, and there was nowhere to flee, no escape—
Then, out of nowhere, a hand gripped her upper arm, tightened, yanked her back against the iron railing of the graveyard. Legs buckling, she shrank against the bars as the maddened beasts thudded by. Running behind them, a half-dozen drovers cursed and shouted, brandishing whips and staves.
Eva’s gaze blurred momentarily; fighting the weakness invading her, she clung to the rails until the frantic flow vanished and the drumming din died away in the night beyond. Only then was she conscious of escape, and with it came the realization that her arm was no longer being held.
Now she turned to face her rescuer, but too late. As vision cleared she caught only a momentary sidelong glance of the figure disappearing into the fog — the distant figure of a mustached man in dark clothing, wearing a deerstalker cap.
~ TWO ~
Promptly at midnight on August 6 the bells of St. Jude’s tolled an end to Bank Holiday.
No one heard them in the Angel and Crown Public House. Here the chimes were only a faint counterpoint to the chorus of “What Cheer, ’Ria?” as a dozen revelers grouped around a huge table competed with the clamor of the crowd. Market porters, slaughterhouse workers, sailors and soldiers from the garrison at the Tower of London thronged before the bar or paired off at tables with street-women flaunting their bedraggled Sunday best.
Seated at a smaller table in the far corner. Dr. Albert Trebor studied the scene, gray-green eyes mirroring a mixture of interest both clinical and cynical. Although well past his middle years, the tall, thin physician still served as a consultant on the staff of nearby London Hospital, but that seemed his only apparent link with the customers here. His quiet dress and demeanor marked him as a toff, as was the young man sitting across the table with a deerstalker cap pushed back over a broad forehead.
Trebor’s gaze shifted to his companion. “Well now,” he said. “What do you make of it, Mark?”
Mark Robinson shrugged. “Hard to say. It’s all still so new to me.”
“Nothing like this in your Wild West, eh?”
“Michigan is neither wild nor western.” Mark tweaked the corner of his mustache. “But you’re right, there’s nothing quite like this in Ann Arbor.” He smiled at Trebor. “It’s good of you to look after me like this — the sightseeing, a night on the town—”
“Nonsense, my boy. You came over here to study our professional procedure, but there’s more to it than just observing hospital routine. Consider this part of your education.” Trebor sipped his beer. “I’ve been in practice for almost forty years now and I’m still learning.”
“What was it like when you started?”
“Quite primitive, really. Surgical techniques were crude, no anesthesia, no qualified assistants or female nurses, just mucking about in a bloody butcher shop. Not like London Hospital today. Think of what we do there — four hundred outpatients treated daily, seven thousand bed cases a year—”
“Everything changes,” Mark said.
“Perhaps.” Trebor glanced toward the carousing crowd gathered before the bar. “But Whitechapel hasn’t changed all that much since Mr. Dickens wrote about life in the streets. Oh, we’ve had a go at reform movements, but laborers still live in squalor, the serving class is pitifully underpaid, our prisons and workhouses and asylums are hellholes.” He frowned. “We used to think progress would take care of conditions — steam engines, machinery, the telegraph, that sort of thing. It didn’t work out that way. Now we have eleven postal deliveries a day here in London alone, but what’s the good of it when the majority of our population can’t read or write a proper sentence? What point in an Education Act when children begin slaving in sweatshops and factories almost as soon as they learn to walk?”
“It’s almost as bad in America.” Mark nodded. “That’s one reason I entered medicine, to help relieve some of the suffering—”
“There’s more to medicine than alleviating physical pain,” Trebor said. “Mental anguish, that’s the real problem. Work that cripples bodies also cripples the mind and spirit. The trouble with our profession lies in thinking we’re only dealing with patients. We forget that patients are human beings. Now that I’ve retired to a consultant’s post I’ve shifted my attention from the study of patients to the study of people.” He gestured toward the bar. “That’s why I take time to frequent places like this. Not for amusement — who can enjoy the spectacle of misery drowning its sorrows in drink and debauchery? — but to learn the real causes of distress rooted in the human condition.”
“You sound like a philosopher,” Mark told him.
“Or an idiot.” Trebor gulped his beer. “If there’s any distinction between the two.”
“Damn your eyes!” This from the group at the large table, now chanting the refrain of “Samuel Hall.”