Stalking Jack the Ripper

Audrey’s father returns from his month in the country just as two bodies are discovered in Mitre Square. Audrey joins the crowd at the scene the next day; she feels guilty about being glad that these deaths will help to prove her Uncle’s innocence as he is still locked up at Bedlam. Blackburn finds Audrey and asks her to inspect the scene with him.

Audrey is shocked by the gory sight of the murdered woman but tries to hide this from the onlooking policemen. She notes that the intestines of the woman have been pulled out and thrown over her shoulder and concludes that the killer first cut her throat before mutilating her further. She notes that, as promised in the letter, one of the girl’s ears has been cut off. Furthermore, Audrey concludes that the woman’s body has organs missing; she suspects that the uterus has been taken, as well as possibly a kidney and gallbladder. Blackburn is sickened by the sight and also struggles to maintain his composure.

Suddenly, Audrey’s father appears with some shocking news: Blackburn is her intended suitor. Audrey is furious to learn that the much older Blackburn is the man about whom her aunt and brother have been talking. She feels deceived. Her father is angry at Blackburn for involving Audrey in such “masculine matters” (209) as crime scene investigations.

Furious, Audrey’s father bans her from assisting her uncle in his lab and from further investigating the murders. He threatens to throw her out of the house if she refuses.

Nathaniel tells Audrey that Thomas’s mother died of an illness to her gallbladder, and that Uncle Jonathan (as was the case with their mother) tried to medically intervene but could not save her. Audrey remembers Thomas instructing Audrey to remove the cadaver’s gallbladder at his apartment, as well as the missing gallbladder of the recent murder victim. She wonders whether there could be a connection.

Audrey reads the latest letters from Jack the Ripper, which have been published in the newspaper. She bids farewell to her Aunt Amelia and her cousin Liza; though Audrey does not agree with Aunt Amelia, Liza has proven to be an ally, and Audrey is sorry to see her go.

Seeing the newspaper, Audrey’s father asks what she is reading. Instead of answering, Audrey declares that she would rather live on the street than live under her father’s rules. She leaves to go to her uncle’s laboratory, shocking her father by wearing riding breeches instead of rustling skirts.

She arrives to find her uncle angrily taking stock of his wrecked laboratory. Thomas is there, too, helping clean up the place. Audrey asks them about the experiments they have been conducting since Thomas’s mother’s death, and they tell her that the most dramatic experiment they’ve conducted on a living patient has been reattaching a finger.

Next, she asks about his former fiancée, Emma Elizabeth Smith. Uncle Jonathan explains that she asked him to choose between her and his scientific work, and he ultimately chose science.

Audrey attends the funeral of Catherine Eddowes, the woman whose body she inspected in Mitre Square. Audrey and Thomas speak to a man at the funeral, Robert James Lees, who claims to be a medium and a spiritualist; he reveals details about Audrey’s late mother and describes a locket she had worn. Audrey is shaken by the accuracy of his details. He offers to take them to his parlor for a conjuring. Although skeptical, Audrey agrees.

Thomas and Audrey place their hands flat on Lees’s table and close their eyes as instructed while Lees communes with Miss Eddowes’s ghost. Lees shocks Audrey by telling her that Eddowes recognizes her as the person who looked at her body with a blond-haired man (i.e., Blackburn). Lees, through Eddowes, says that the murderer is someone Audrey was angry with the day she looked at Eddowes’s body. Lees then declares that Audrey has been marked for death by Jack the Ripper; panicked, he advises that she leave London at once.

Audrey wonders whether her father is Jack the Ripper, and she discusses this theory with Thomas in Uncle Jonathan’s library. Shortly after, a footman arrives, saying that Uncle Jonathan requires both of their presences at Scotland Yard.

At Scotland Yard, they inspect the rotted half of a kidney, which Uncle Jonathan suggests likely came from Eddowes, who was missing a kidney on the corresponding side. It is accompanied by a note allegedly from Jack the Ripper, claiming that he ate the other half of the kidney. Uncle Jonathan predicts that Jack the Ripper will take the heart of his next victim.