“You need to go where you’ll be cared for,” he pleaded with Newsome. “You need to be helped.”
“Helped?” The man’s voice had grown louder and more shrill. “Where they’ll know and stare? Like you and him and all the others!” He spit out the words wildly and pressed the knife with still more force against Henry’s throat. Henry’s eyes rolled up in his head.
William paused. What he was doing wasn’t working. Indeed, it was making things worse. He must reevaluate, rethink the context in which he was responding. This was how he came up with original ideas: reseeing a situation from another angle, one that had been ignored because of convention or habit. Except it was one thing to resee in the pleasant confines of his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another to do so in a dark basement where a deranged killer had a knife at his brother’s throat. But this was precisely what he had to do. What use were his powers of thought if they could not be employed now, when Henry’s life was in danger?
He willed himself to concentrate, to block out everything but the problem before him. What was inciting this man to such a frenzy? What was he afraid of? Suddenly he saw why Newsome was painting in a dimly lit basement alcove; why he painted with spasmodic, uncontrolled brushstrokes and responded with fear and then fury at being interrupted. He had not been following the pattern of the man’s increasingly enraged responses. Newsome’s mind was not on the women he had killed; they were only the by-products of the initial trauma of being discovered in the act of self-abuse.
Brand a man a deviant, and you are likely to make him one. Newsome could not recover from what had happened to him that day at the Slade. He replayed that traumatic episode every time he tried to paint a picture, and it was the failure to paint that must have driven him to kill. The murders were repetitions too—furtive and performed with the repetitive stabbings that he had seen in the bodies of Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. They too were a reenactment of that original trauma. At the root of it all was shame. That had been the root of Pizer’s rage. The lesson was clear: deprive a man of his humanity, and be prepared for the consequences: a human being capable of God knows what.
William addressed Newsome slowly and carefully, trying to incorporate his new understanding into his words. “I didn’t mean to disturb your privacy,” he said. “I was worried about Sally.”
Newsome continued to press the knife to Henry’s throat, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.
William continued. “We are all of us prone to do things that are…unseemly. What you did was unfortunate, but in no way deviant or unnatural. It was wrong to shame you.” He spoke gently, no longer as an investigator or even as a conventional scientist, but as a psychologist and a human being who could not only explain but soothe the turbulence of a disordered mind.
Newsome blinked again and then spoke in a wavering voice. “I didn’t mean to do it. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known anyone was there. I thought they’d all left.”
“Of course you did.”
“They called me an animal.”
“We are all animals. But like us all, you are a human being as well. What you did then was hardly the worst thing a man can do.” He did not say that Newsome had gone on to do the worst.
Newsome gestured desperately toward the alcove, and his voice became a pitiful groan. “I can’t paint!”
William considered this; then he walked slowly to the easel and turned the painting over. “There,” he said. “Now no one can see.”
Newsome’s face relaxed.
“Please take the knife from my brother’s throat. I know you don’t want to harm him.”
Newsome loosened his grip, and Henry staggered over to William’s side. Released from the pressure of the knife, he felt a surge of well-being. There was something to be said for having your life threatened; you appreciated being alive afterward—if you got away.
The atmosphere in the room had become almost serene. The man’s spiritual being had been awakened, William thought. He had been deprived of his humanity, which had destroyed his vocation, an irrevocable loss, deeply connected to who he was. William could understand this. He had suffered his own crisis of vocation, and it had almost cost him his sanity. For Newsome, it had, and worse—it had driven him to kill.
William looked at the man before him again. How could this quivering mass of fear and insecurity have brutally killed those women? He felt again a momentary doubt. It was ridiculous to doubt, when Newsome had just threatened to kill Henry. He had seen the man’s capacity for violence with his own eyes. Besides, Newsome had a motive, a psychological profile that explained the Whitechapel murders with an admirable completeness. And still, the shifting tendency of his own mind, his incapacity to arrive definitely at any solid conclusion frustrated and unnerved him. Couldn’t he ever be sure? How was it that others seemed to settle on things and be done? Of course Newsome was Jack the Ripper. Everything pointed to it.
“What should I do?” Newsome asked simply. He still held the knife, but he seemed more like a child than a threatening killer.
William would have liked to tell him to pray—a minister would tell him that—but he was not a minister. He said nothing. He only stared at the man before him, not knowing what to do or what to expect.
It was Henry who knew. As a novelist, he trafficked in endings, and he had found that life and art were not so very different in that respect. Besides, he had heard the sound of shouts outside the shop and could see that Newsome had heard them too. Abberline had found them; he would be inside in a moment, but it would be too late.
Henry averted his eyes, but William, who did not realize what would happen, saw it, in what seemed slow motion: the glint of steel against the pale throat, the slash, first only a sweep of the hand, then a red line, then a gush of vermilion.
By the time Abberline and his men clambered down the stairs, Peter Newsome’s body, his hand still clutching the knife, lay slumped on the floor beside a pile of newly stretched canvases.
Jack the Ripper was dead.
Epilogue
London. 1911.
Henry gazed around the gallery, looking for people he knew. Some seemed familiar. Perhaps he had met them at dinner parties or seen their pictures in magazines, but they were so young; really, too young for him to know. Beside him stood Sargent, his tall frame more hunched than usual. It was clear that John would have preferred not to be there at all.
“You know I don’t like to go out,” he had told Henry when the invitation had come. He had grown reclusive since the death of his mother and sister, content only during his sojourns to America, when he was painting the ceiling of the Boston Public Library. It was as though all the portraits he had painted had soured him on people’s faces.
Henry, by contrast, craved society even more now than he had in his youth. He had purchased a home in Sussex, where he lived most of the year, but he looked forward to his visits to London. The social chitchat was a relief from the locutions of his writing, which had grown more complex as he grew older. The weight of his verbiage was like his physical weight. It too grew greater every year, as Alice would have noted with disapproval. There was the weight of loneliness as well. Life in the country exacerbated it. When he wasn’t working, he had a tendency to brood, to recall a past that he could not change, that unlike his writing, he could not qualify or amplify with words.
The invitation to this event had been particularly welcome. It had brought to mind the great adventure of twenty-three years earlier. Henry touched his throat retrospectively, recalling the madman’s knife. How dreadful it had been, but how wonderful, a sublime interlude of family solidarity, a return of sorts to a childhood idyll.