He paused to be sure that he still had the card for Ella Abrams’s shop in his pocket. It pleased him to finger it and remember its gold border and simple black script: “Abrams & Son.” Despite the appellation, the card put him in mind of Ella; gold and black were colors one would associate with her. He recalled the painting Sargent had done in which her arms were encased in gold bracelets, and her hair, emerging from a colorful scarf, was jet-black with flecks of white. It was Sargent’s hallmark to do hair that way so as to suggest thickness and glossiness and thus flatter his sitters, though in this case, there was no need to flatter; if anything, the representation fell short of the original.
He was thinking of how much nicer Ella’s hair was in reality than it was in Sargent’s painting, when he heard it, and the lurch of fear it precipitated was greater, in coming in the midst of such pleasurable calm. What he heard was breathing, soft and regular, faint yet distinct. There was no body attached to it, no evidence of anyone in the vicinity, no footsteps. If someone was near, it was someone who had matched William’s tread so as to follow unnoticed. Only now, pausing, he could hear the soft intake and outlet of breath.
Where was this person? William’s mind raced. He must be very near, in the trees a few feet away. He might be only a thief, he tried to assure himself, yet he knew it was unlikely. His mind had gone immediately to the letter Abberline had passed on to him. Until now, he had pushed that threat to the back of his mind. It was the familiar reflex of denial, a defense against the kind of morbid thinking that had engulfed him at the time of his breakdown, yet he ought to have understood that to push the possibility of danger out of consciousness was as foolhardy as to see danger everywhere.
He began to walk faster, panic beginning to mount in his body. No one was about. The prospect of calling out would be of no use. His hands reflexively burrowed in his pockets, but all he found there was the card for Ella’s shop. He felt a welling of sadness as the thought occurred to him that he might never see her again—not her, not his wife and children, not his brother and sister. He felt his shirt grow hot with perspiration against his chest, and for a moment wished only to be able to remove his coat and jacket. What a relief it would be to strip off these clothes, to stop planning and desiring and thinking, to be done with it all at last.
He realized that the predator was holding off attack until the edge of the path, where, at the turn, he would be enclosed entirely by trees. In the shrubbery, the violence could take place with no possibility that a passerby would see. He could picture his own death in his mind’s eye, the pale throat beneath the thicket of whiskers suddenly spurting bright red. His hand automatically went to his neck, touching the solid flesh that might, in a few seconds, be ripped open. The image brought a wave of pity for his own frailty. He felt his skin turn cold under the wetness of his perspiration; his teeth began to chatter, and his head grew light as the pressure in his body dropped.
He slowed his pace. He could make out over the din of his pulse that the person behind him was light-footed and agile. He could hear the other’s breathing, loudly now; he even imagined he could feel the breath on the back of his neck.
The turn was less than twenty feet away. He had perhaps three seconds before he reached the spot where he would be set upon. In the nightmare ordeal of his youth, when he had suffered from a lack of will, the crisis had been long and difficult, a slow and fitful return from numbness and inertia to active life. But there was no time for such a recovery now. He must either fight against what threatened him or succumb to it. It was the simplicity of the choice that galvanized him.
It happened with remarkable speed. He spied a large branch on the side of the path and made a quick lunge to reach it; then, with it firm in his grasp, he swung. It was the same movement he had once used in his youth to swing a baseball bat. The movement had been embedded deep in the memory of his muscles.
As he pivoted on his soles, turning his body almost completely around, he saw the figure who had stalked him, enveloped from head to toe in a thick cloak. From the folds of the cloak an object flashed, sweeping in countermovement to his own. There was a tremendous crack as he completed his swing. The figure staggered back.
William dropped the branch and ran, not stopping until he had reached the other side of the park. When he glanced down, he saw there was a tear of about four inches across the breast pocket of his coat. The copy of Marx’s Capital, the gift from Benjamin Cohen, had been sliced neatly in half.
Even as the horror of what he had escaped coursed through him, he felt gripped by a sense of wonder. How fortuitous life was, how sublime the conjunctions of divine intervention: American baseball and a German utopian philosopher had saved his life!
Chapter 28
Although it was late, William immediately sent a message to Abberline to meet him at his office in Scotland Yard. He realized that the attack might result in clearing the suspect—or incriminating him. If Sickert had been kept under watch that evening, he could not have staged the attack. If, on the other hand, the police had lost his trail in the vicinity of Hyde Park, his guilt would seem all but certain.
Neither situation turned out to be the case. When William arrived at the precinct office, Abberline’s face was taut with anger. Anderson, he explained, had taken all his men off surveillance that night to suppress a demonstration in favor of Irish Home Rule. “It was a quiet gathering that he chose to call an unruly mob,” fumed Abberline, “which means that we have blundered on two fronts: we have falsely characterized a public event and we have lost evidence that might have identified our murderer.”
Abberline was diverted from his tirade, however, when he saw the tear in the breast pocket of William’s coat. “It’s the work of a medium-sized, sharp knife, the sort that killed the Whitechapel women,” he said with concern. “You are clearly the target of this maniac. I have put the watch back on our suspect, but that doesn’t guarantee your protection. You must take special care.”
William assured him that he would take care, but the reflex of denial was already reasserting itself, his mind recoiling from the memory and blocking off the dread that had engulfed him less than an hour earlier. In the future, he would be more alert, avoid isolated settings, and try not to walk alone at night. But he would not tell Henry or Alice what had happened, and he would not think more about it.
The next morning he and Henry rose early and headed for Gower Street, where they had an appointment at the Slade School of Fine Art. Henry had learned from an English art club catalog that Sickert had attended the Slade, a fact William thought was worth investigating. “One can learn a great deal about a man from his professional training,” he said.
Henry agreed. Hadn’t many of his own choices been made in opposition to his earliest teacher, his brother?
The Slade was a relatively new building with no particular distinction, and they might have passed it by, had they not seen several young men lugging large canvases entering its portals. Inside was a series of cavernous rooms connected by narrow, chilly corridors, not at all the sort of space likely to inspire the muse. Not that this was unusual, William thought, recalling his own experience as a student; the aim of most education seemed to be to strangle the creative impulse as efficiently as possible. The current director of the Slade was the French master painter Alphonse Legros, whose concern for upholding the school’s reputation ensured that it taught nothing that deviated from aesthetic convention, and thus nothing that anyone would care much about.