Whitechapel Read Online Free Page A

London’s well to do West End where she had got on with her work well and had made a good impression on the family for whom she worked.
    Unfortunately, this was doomed to come to an end when she took up with a man called Bill Morganstone, a thief and a drunk. She fell into ways of drunkenness quickly and became slacking in her work for her employers in Knightsbridge. They asked her to leave as a result and she was forced to move full time to London’s East End where she now found herself struggling to make ends meet. With Morganstone’s drunken and often violent ways she very quickly left him and fell back into prostitution to live. With her looks she was fortunate to be able to be more selective with ‘clients’ and command a better price.
    However, time with Morganstone had left its mark with Mary; she never fully was able to kick the alcohol habit. Living with a succession of men on and off she finally took up with a local man called Joe Barnett. Although they appeared to get on as a friendly couple, Mary, who was also known as ‘Black Mary’ due to her frequent choices of clothing, ‘Fair Emma’, due to her complexion or sometimes just as ‘Ginger’, they also had frequent disagreements and separations. Mary was lucky that the years of abuse had so far not taken their toll on her looks.
    She had parted company with Mary Nichols in Commercial Street not long after seeing Robert Ford and now turned up at 13 Miller’s Court surprisingly sober and was greeted by Barnett just as he was going off to work, a local grave digger.
    “Mary, love, why can’t you give it up? We could move away and make a new start if you did,” pleaded Barnett. He knew only too well of the profession that Mary plied on the filthy streets of Whitechapel. Although uncomfortable, it was not unusual for wives or partners to sell themselves in this way.
    “I like it here and we’ve got to eat. Can you think of what else I could do? I’ll hardly get a reference from that old banshee Mrs Buki now, will I?” Mrs Buki had been her former employer in Knightsbridge.
    “Then get yourself a sewing job or something else local and honest.”
    “Oh, get to work with you, Joe Barnett; I am too tired to bicker about it now. If you keep on about it I’ll go back to Paris.”
    Mary had eloped to Paris for a short time between her time of living in Liverpool, albeit briefly, and then coming to London. She only stayed a fortnight having travelled out there with a ‘gentleman’ that she met whilst working in Liverpool, who after a short time in the French capital started to scare her and make her feel uncomfortable. He had claimed to be an artist having travelled many parts of the world including British colonial Africa and he insisted on sketching her frequently which she enjoyed, but one day as a result of her own suggestion she posed naked. The whole incident was bizarre and she discovered he was paying obsessive attention to the parts of her body that made her a woman. This, he claimed, was because that not only was he an artist but also a medical practitioner specialising in gynaecological issues. He persisted in wearing a very flashy uniform wherever they went and would scurry off to hospitals by himself and come back with specimen jars all wrapped up and never let her see what was in them. The jars were kept in a kind of leather carpet bag that he referred to as his ‘art materials’ bag, an item of luggage he was very possessive about and asked her to refrain from touching it ‘and messing my art things and instruments.’
    He was an American and sported a long bushy moustache and boasted of his medical achievements in various parts of the United States saying he had perfected many miracle cures for common yet persistent ailments. He frequently complained of missing his hunting hounds while they were in Paris and whenever in the street with dogs around he would pay them more attention than anything else. It didn’t take too much time