Castle Rouge by Carole Nelson Douglas

have been of help!”
    “You could not have saved her, Watson.”
    “I might have stayed as you pursued Schwartz, seen something, prevented the brute from acting this time.”
    “Ah, Watson, I can tell you from experience that imagining what one might have done is just that, an exercise in fancy and the very opposite to the stern logic I live by. And the reason for your absence that night was also just that: you are a doctor.”
    “But,” I began, recognizing I was in danger of resorting to an indignant sputter, always a disastrous position in a debate.
    I then grew silent as the true import of his words weighed on me like stones. I was a doctor . Jack the Ripper’s dissections had been accorded almost medical skills. Any doctor loitering in Whitechapel that terrible autumn stood in danger of being accused of the Ripper’s crimes.
    My friend Sherlock Holmes sought to shield me even as he walked the streets with Jack the Ripper and his victims.
    “I would have come anyway, Holmes,” I muttered testily to hide my confusion.
    “I know you would have, Watson, but the woman was beyond any human help.”
    Now I gazed in my own turn at the closed gate, picturing a woman’s life blood coagulating on the pavement as she lay dying alone.
    “She would not have felt much after the throat slash,” I observed, more to comfort myself than to contribute to the knowledge of the death. As one trained to ease and save life, it opens abysses of speculation to contemplate the mind that can end life with one or two savage saws across the throat. It is not easy to accomplish with one clean cut, as I recalled had been the case with Elizabeth Stride, but great rage would do it. Or great skill.
    “You wish to enter that building, don’t you, Holmes?” I said, returning to the present and our reason for being here on this street, at last, together, pursuing a belated investigation.
    “No, Watson, I wish to enter that building’s cellar. Unless you care to dig, I suggest that the direct approach will be more convenient.”
    The building in question did not need a sign to announce its purpose as the International Working Men’s Educational Club. Even as we had kept watch I had observed individuals of a working-class and Jewish appearance disappearing into its unimpressive portals.
    Although I have traveled the globe far too widely to hold a man’s race or religion against him, I feared that the opposite might be true. The Jews of Whitechapel were often made scapegoats for gentile debaucheries in the poorer quarter. We might not be welcome.
    “We wear no suitable disguise,” I pointed out.
    “I hold the passkey of the rabbi’s name. Besides, I could enter here at any time in appropriate guise. I wish you also to observe the place and its denizens.”
    So we climbed the few steps to the ground floor of that sectarian club. As I suspected of a working man’s association, the men within were earnest if not highly educated.
    No well-read Englishman could be unaware of the social unrest among the less-prosperous classes. None could argue that the crowded and corrupt conditions found in Whitechapel were not only intolerable but had made Jack the Ripper’s attacks impossible to stop.
    Whitechapel had become a cesspool, the stopped drain into which poured the dregs of the British Isles and Eastern Europe. The times had created a vast, shiftless population of former peasants clogging the great cities, flowing inward in a never-ending stream. The pogroms in Russia forced the Jews to choose death or flight. The Poles fled a variation brought by the same Eastern invaders who had bedeviled their land for centuries, along with many from many lands to the east. Ironically, these refugees came to the East End of London. Such people were poor, seldom spoke English, had few skills to sell.
    All sank like stones into the lowest sections of our great city to mingle uneasily with our own unfortunates. These last were the legions of displaced farm