Interestingly, a point that never emerged in the press but that Tim Donovan revealed to the police was that Annie had specifically “asked him to trust her” for that night’s doss money. This “he declined to do.”21 Had this incident become common knowledge, it’s likely that Donovan would have faced an even worse public backlash for his role in Annie’s demise.* “You can find money for your beer, and you can’t find money for your bed,” the deputy keeper is said to have spoken in response to her request. Annie, not quite willing to admit defeat, or perhaps in a show of pride, responded with a sigh: “Keep my bed for me. I shan’t be long.”
Ill and drunk, she went downstairs and “stood in the door for two or three minutes,” considering her options. Like the impecunious lodger described by Goldsmid, she too would have been contemplating from whom among her “pals” it might have been “possible to borrow the halfpence necessary to complete [her] doss money.” More likely, Annie was mentally preparing “to spend the night with only the sky for a canopy.” She then set off down Brushfield Street, toward Christ Church, Spitalfields, where the homeless regularly bedded down.
Her thoughts as she stepped out onto Dorset Street, as the light from Crossingham’s dimmed at her back, can never be known. What route she wove through the black streets and to whom she spoke along the way will never be confirmed. All that is certain is her final destination.
Twenty-nine Hanbury Street was typical of most dwellings in the area. At least a hundred years old and three stories high, it consisted of eight decaying rooms, inhabited by seventeen people. As rooms were rented out individually, no one paid much attention to the communal spaces—the passages, stairway, landings, or the yard behind, which formed part of the property. Neither the gate to the yard nor the door to the building was locked, and an assortment of people came and went through this public, though concealed, space at all times of the day and night. According to the police and the residents, the location was well known among the streetwise inhabitants of the area. Occasionally, “the yard was used for immoral purposes” by “strangers” and was just as regularly occupied by rough sleepers.*
Over the past two years, Annie, like any of Goldsmid’s dossers, would have become acquainted with the best corners, the most inconspicuous doorways, and the least traversed passages in which to lay her head. The yard adjacent to 29 Hanbury Street was not a place Annie stumbled upon accidentally in the early morning hours of September 8, but rather a familiar space sought for its solitude. She would have known about the gap between the house’s steps and the fence. It was an ideal spot in which to curl up with her back against the wall, and she would have been relieved to find it vacant.
Of the many tragedies that befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the most poignant was that she needn’t have been on the streets on that night, or on any other. Ill and feverish, she needn’t have searched the squalid corners for a spot to sleep. Instead, she might have lain in a bed in her mother’s house or in her sisters’ care, on the other side of London. She might have been treated for tuberculosis; she might have been comforted by the embraces of her children or the loving assurances of her family. Annie needn’t have suffered. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what drink had left behind.
Sometime around September 8 or 9, the Smith siblings—Emily, Georgina, Miriam, and Fountaine—received the dreadful news. Whether a police constable paid them a visit or they read the story in the newspaper, the realization that their sister had been the victim of a brutal murder would have devastated them completely. Emily, Georgina, and Miriam could not bear to tell their elderly mother that the child she had lost to alcohol had been killed in such a gruesome and dehumanizing way. They smothered their grief as they held the hands of Annie’s two children, who would never know the fate that befell their mother. The pain and humiliation Annie’s sisters suffered as story after story appeared in the papers, calling her a prostitute and describing her degraded life, cannot be imagined. For three devout women, the shame of this and the need to keep silent about their suffering would have been almost more than they could withstand.
As the man of the family, the worst tasks—the public ones—fell to Fountaine, who, in addition to his sorrow, carried in his heart his own private turmoil. He, like Annie, and like their father, was also an alcoholic. Perhaps, without his family’s knowledge, he had seen Annie only recently, handed her a few coins, and shared a few drinks. It was Fountaine who went to identify the torn, bedraggled body of his elder sister and later stood before the coroner. His distress on this occasion was so great that he was hardly able to make his voice audible.
Fountaine Smith was not a man built of strong stuff. He buckled under this misfortune, and as he fell, he grabbed for the one thing he knew would provide immediate, if fleeting, relief: the bottle. Within a month of the harrowing ordeal of his sister’s death, Fountaine suffered a breakdown. After stealing money from his employer to buy drink, he lost his job as a warehouse manager. Friends intervened and found him another position, but Fountaine’s misery followed him here too. One day, unable to cope, he filled himself with alcohol and his pockets with his employer’s money, abandoned his wife and two children, and disappeared.
A week later, the family received a letter from Gloucester; Fountaine had walked into a police station and surrendered. “Oh, my darling wife, it is all the cursed drink,” he wrote at the bottom of his confession; “for God’s sake don’t let the children touch it.”
Annie’s brother was taken back to London and tried at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court, where he was found guilty and sentenced to three months’ hard labor at Millbank Prison. Upon his release, Fountaine resolved to start his life over again and took his wife and children across the Atlantic to settle in the dust and heat of Texas.
Part III
Elisabeth
November 27, 1843
September 30, 1888
The Girl from Torslanda
The candles spread a warm yellow light through the wood-paneled rooms of the farmhouse. They and the hearth fire worked together to cast out the darkness of a Swedish late November, a time when the skies shift swiftly between shades of gray and the black of night. In one room of the four that belonged to Gustaf Ericsson, his wife, Beata, lay on her back, laboring with their second child. Three years earlier, she had brought a daughter, Anna Christina, into the world. On this occasion, the farmer would have hoped for a son to assist him in managing the livestock and bringing in the harvests. He had no such luck; on November 27, 1843, little Elisabeth’s newborn cries filled the couple’s bedroom.
The Ericssons were more fortunate than many who tended the land in Torslanda, an area that lay roughly sixteen kilometers to the west of the city of Gothenburg. Although Elisabeth had been born during a period of drought, which had begun in the early 1840s, the family remained relatively prosperous. Not only could Gustaf Ericsson afford to cultivate fields of grain, flax, and potatoes, but he also owned a barn, several cows, pigs, chickens, and a horse. The clapboard house in which Elisabeth, her elder sister, and eventually her two younger brothers, Lars (born in 1848) and Svante (born in 1851), were to share was considered spacious, with a large kitchen in which the household took their meals, a sitting room, and at least three bedrooms arranged on the ground and upper floors.
As a farmer’s daughter, Elisabeth would have been initiated into the routines of agricultural life as soon as she was steady enough on her feet to carry pails and gather eggs. When older, she would have assisted with the basic chores of milking, tending the chickens and pigs, making butter, and, as was traditional in Swedish households, learning how to distill aquavit, the alcoholic liquor offered at mealtimes. In the winter months, the mor
nings would begin many hours before dawn, when she, her sister, or her mother would rise in what felt like the middle of night, and light the fires and lamps. In the summer, the men and women in the fields would work long into evening, beneath an almost never-ending twilight. Where previously, farmers’ wives would have toiled alongside their husbands in the fields, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the availability of cheap labor meant that the more demanding tasks could be performed by hired help, freeing Beata and her daughters to tend primarily to affairs within the home. Notwithstanding this privilege, daily rural life was fairly egalitarian. Little distinction was made between master and servant; “they all sat at the same table and ate off the same plate,” reminisced a farmhand of the era, who also recalled that everyone in a household “did the same jobs, and the daughters of the farmer shared the bed with the maids.”1
In the small settlement of Stora Tumlehed, they also prayed together. Sundays in this conservative Lutheran community were reserved for church and close study of the Bible. As the head of the household, Elisabeth’s father would be expected to shepherd not only his family but also his hired help in their daily religious duties. Prayers would have punctuated the day: prayers before meals, prayers before bed, and prayers upon waking, offering thanks to the Lord for seeing his sheep safely through the long night.
It is unlikely that Elisabeth ever imagined she might depart from the constant rhythm of farm life: the turning of the seasons, the cutting of the fields, the freezing of the earth, the thaw of the ice, the sowing of seeds. As a girl, little was expected of her beyond a mastery of housekeeping, childcare, and basic animal husbandry, all of which she could learn from assisting her mother. Her minimal schooling reflected this. Rural parents often thought that anything but the most basic education amounted to “superfluous knowledge,” something that distracted children from the business of agriculture. Though by the mid-nineteenth century each parish was required to establish a common school for local children, the learning offered there extended little beyond reading and arithmetic, as well as writing lessons for the boys.
Among Lutherans, the ability to read was considered of prime importance, as the study of the Bible and the understanding of catechism lay at the center of all devotions. Elisabeth and her siblings would regularly make the nearly hour-long walk to the church in Torslanda to receive tutelage in scripture in order to prepare them for confirmation. As children, they were taught the Small Catechism from Martin Luther’s 1529 Book of Concord, which set out the tenets of the Lutheran faith. Elisabeth’s instruction included memorization of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, the Office of the Keys and Confession, and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. However, as it was also necessary that all members of the faith possess a thorough comprehension of God’s word, her education would have included an analysis of scripture and a regular drilling by the parish priest and her father as to its meaning.
“What are the Ten Commandments?” the priest would ask.
“The Ten Commandments are the law of God,” Elisabeth would be expected to answer.
“How did God give His Law?”
“When God created people, He wrote the Law on their hearts. Later He arranged the Law in Ten Commandments, wrote it on two tablets of stone, and made it known through Moses” was the anticipated response. Such statements were then bolstered with relevant quotations from scripture.
“What is the sixth commandment?” Elisabeth was asked on numerous occasions.
“One shall not commit adultery.”
“What does this mean?”
“We should fear and love God so that we lead a sexually pure and decent life in what we say and do, and husband and wife love and honor each other. Carnal relations are reserved for matrimony and that we should not give in to base lusts,” she would have been taught to respond.
By these means, Elisabeth was prepared to assume her role as a committed member of the faith. At the age of fifteen, on August 14, 1859, she stood before the congregation in the ancient cottagelike church at Torslanda and was confirmed. In doing this, Elisabeth demonstrated that she was prepared to enter the adult world, armed with a strong knowledge of the word of God, to face the trials and temptations that might await her.
Just over a year later, and a month before her seventeenth birthday, Elisabeth Gustafsdotter set out for Gothenburg to seek employment as a servant. In 1857, Anna Christina had undertaken the half-day walk to the city for the same purpose. In Sweden, as in other European countries, it was traditional for young women to gain experience of domestic life beyond the confines of their homes and communities. For many, the years prior to marriage spent in the kitchens, the nurseries, or scrubbing floors under the auspices of other women functioned as a type of apprenticeship before they assumed command of their own households. This period of labor also offered girls the opportunity to earn dowries, money that would assist in purchasing the clothing, linens, and other items required for married life and childbearing. For young women like Elisabeth and her sister, who came from rural communities, a move to the city also broadened their prospects of meeting an appropriate husband. Though the daughters of land-owning or land-leasing farmers were raised alongside agricultural laborers and others of a lower social status, marriage between the classes was actively discouraged. In an urban center, filled with the sons of craftsmen and shopkeepers, there was a greater possibility of finding a suitable spouse.
In this regard, Anna Christina was especially fortunate. Not only was she able to secure a place working in the home of Bernhard Olsson, a shoemaker, but also, after seven years of service, in 1864 she married her master. This situation was not uncommon when employer and servant were of a similar class.2 In many cases, elder sisters already established in service were able to assist younger ones in obtaining positions, sometimes within the same household. By these means, it is likely that Anna Christina had some influence in obtaining work for Elisabeth in Gothenburg. According to her residency records, Elisabeth was living in Majorna, a working-class suburb of Gothenburg, by October 5, 1860; four months later, in February, her name appears officially on the census as a maidservant to the family of Lars Fredrik Olsson.3
Like Anna Christina’s employer, Olsson and his family were not wealthy, but rather were members of the more comfortable segment of the lower middle class. His employment as a månadskarl implied that he performed the role of a caretaker, possibly for the block of apartments in which the family lived on Allmänna Vägen, a hill above the port.* Olsson’s fortunes appear to have been on the rise, and by the 1870s, he had purchased further property in Majorna.
The social line dividing Elisabeth from her employer would have been a relatively thin one, but as the Olssons’ prospects were improving, they would have been keen to demonstrate their resources to their neighbors and associates. As female labor in Sweden was extremely cheap and the Servant Act made it compulsory for those who did not have an income through land to find employment in service, families with even meager means were able to hire girls to work in their homes. Lars Fredrik and his wife, Johanna, were able to afford two: Elisabeth and Lena Carlsson, who would have shared a bed in a loft above the family’s rooms. Indeed, how much work might have been found to occupy two women, as well as their mistress, in maintaining a handful of rooms and caring for the couple’s three- and four-year-old sons is questionable. Nineteenth-century Swedish commentators such as Henrik Cornell often remarked that lower-middle-class families frequently employed more servants than there were tasks to occupy them. Cornell, reflecting back on his childhood, recalled a middle-class wife who busied her bored, underemployed maids by making them carry wet linen through the rooms in order to catch the dust before it settled.4
Swedish law was fairly explicit about the relationship between a master and mistress and their employee. While the employer may have had an obligation to house, feed, clothe, and tend to a servant while ill, in return, a servant was expected to
offer complete obedience. “Unfounded discontent over the food” or “treating a fire or the master’s property in a careless way” constituted grounds for dismissal, as was the “visiting of inns or other places where alcoholic beverages were served.”5 Once such agreements were struck, they were considered binding, and a servant was required to work out her term of employment unless both parties agreed to dissolve the contract.
Why precisely Elisabeth’s term of employment with the Olssons was dissolved in early February 1864 is likely to remain a mystery. Census records indicate that on the second of that month, she moved no more than a short walk along the cobbled streets of brightly painted clapboard buildings to the neighboring district of Domkyrko.6 When the clerk who added her name to the register asked her occupation, she told him that she was a servant, but the address where she was employed was not recorded, and neither was the name of her master or mistress. It is possible that this was simply an omission, an oversight on the part of the clerk, or perhaps it points to something else: that Elisabeth herself was uncertain of her future and into whose hands she was placing it.
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In the nineteenth century no household could operate efficiently without female labor, yet bringing unknown young women into a home was a risky business. Most employers knew the dangers of hiring girls from outside the city. Still, there was a preference for them; the pink-cheeked daughters of yeomen, who smelled like grass and goats, who had not yet learned how to dissemble or steal, who had been raised in close-knit communities where the parson presided over everyone’s business. Urban girls, having been exposed to avarice and licentiousness, and who had witnessed the worldly ways of their betters, were considered more corruptible. While city girls might appear untrustworthy, their country sisters seemed innocent and vulnerable. Living in alien surroundings, in the households of complete strangers, they were prone to homesickness and loneliness. Their inexperience of metropolitan life rendered them perfect victims for the unscrupulous. Although it was a master’s or mistress’s responsibility to keep them from harm, frequently, the injury they suffered came from within the very place where they were employed.
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