People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  Whenever I asked where he disappeared to of an evening, he replied that he was working, he was seeing private patients, he was dining with his peers, making important acquaintances… The list of seemingly plausible and reasonable excuses was without end. My first thought was to fly across the table and give him some scratches of my own. I didn’t. I blamed myself: I should be more grateful. I was nowhere near the most attractive nurse at the hospital, and yet he had picked me. So I sat there like a resentful idiot with my temperature veering up and down, just like my self-doubt. I’m surprised I didn’t whistle. Two months!

  ‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘how did you come by those scratches on your neck?’

  He froze. It was as if every muscle in his body went rigid. He stopped chasing his devilled eggs around his plate and glared at me. I almost apologised. Thomas may have been blessed with long black lashes, but when he was angry his pale blue eyes turned cold as a fish’s and held you in a dead man’s stare.

  ‘What scratches?’ he said, then took a bite of toast and turned back to his breakfast. The sound of metal scraping against china filled the room again.

  I couldn’t believe it. Here we were dancing about in a pantomime of manners and he sat there with another woman’s branding on him, expressing no shame or apology. I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was still finding the required docility difficult. How was one meant to deal with such a blatant denial? I flicked through the newspaper as noisily as I could, waiting for him to ask me what was wrong. It didn’t work. My thoughts drifted to the woman who had made the marks on my husband. I hoped she was beautiful, because I would burst into flames if she were plainer than me.

  Mrs Wiggs was hovering as usual and came bursting in carrying a tray of tea and devilled kidneys that neither of us would eat and that would instead rise and create a stench between us like the fog on the Thames.

  ‘Mrs Wiggs, do you see the scratches on Dr Lancaster’s neck?’ I asked.

  I knew she would fuss. True to form, she slapped the tray down with a clatter and rushed to him. He attempted to swat her away like a fly.

  ‘Oh, good heavens, Dr Lancaster,’ she said.

  Thomas shot me a dark look and I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling.

  ‘You must be vigilant or else they will become infected. Was it a patient?’

  ‘It was a cat. I had forgotten – it’s only now I remember,’ said Thomas.

  I had to stop myself from laughing. Thomas hated cats. He hated all animals. Thought them dirty creatures. In no situation would he have allowed himself to come into such close proximity to a cat. Mrs Wiggs stood listening to his amazingly tall tale, lapping up every word. He conjured this fantastic story about a lady losing her cat as he was walking home. He took the time to mention how charming and elegant the young lady had been, while looking in my direction. The beautiful young lady’s cat had escaped and got stuck in the mud on the banks of Chelsea creek and he had climbed down to rescue it. Thomas detested dirt; the only mess he would tolerate was the blood and matter of surgery, and that purely because it paved the way to success. When he’d finished, Mrs Wiggs was full of pride, as if he were George fresh from slaying the dragon, when all he’d done was retrieve a mucky cat. An event I very much doubted happened at all.

  ‘Oh, Dr Lancaster, cats are wretched creatures. You should have let it drown, lady or not,’ she said.

  ‘One must do the right thing, Mrs Wiggs,’ he replied.

  If I’d known what he was, I wouldn’t have baited him about the blasted scratches. I would have scarpered right then, leapt up and raced out the front door and far away. If I’m truly honest, I already knew something was wrong, but I refused to accept I had made a mistake. I reassured myself by feasting my eyes on my diamond engagement ring. I liked to feel its weight, how it anchored me to that house in Chelsea and warded off any fear of hunger or the English winter. I was learning what money felt like. It felt like space, room to move and breathe, to stretch out my legs in comfort without worrying about falling. Being poor was to be small and cramped, a body bent over and locked up, folded in on itself. Stifled, trapped and unable to breathe. Here, I had room. Quite literally. There were rooms in the Chelsea house that I could roll about in without hitting the furniture for a good few feet. I know, because I’d tried it one aimless day.

  Thomas stood up, put on his jacket, paused to admire his reflection in the mirror over the mantel and smoothed down his impeccable black whiskers.

  ‘Is there anything interesting in the news, my dear?’ he said, turning his head this way and that to make sure he saw only perfect symmetry.

  Thinking it prudent to avoid angering him, I looked down at the newspaper I had been wrestling with all morning. A small paragraph caught my eye.

  ‘Only that a woman has been murdered in Whitechapel.’

  ‘How unusual,’ he said. Without looking, he tossed the Evening News onto my lap. ‘Here, why don’t you turn your attention to something more cheerful. There is news of the prince’s bad foot.’

  He bent down and gave me an aggressive peck on the cheek, said goodbye, spun on his heel like a German count, and left.

  I was more than a little bewildered by the denial of the scratches and then the ridiculous cat story. It was as if when a man was within his own household the credibility of his stories was beyond reproach, regardless of their ridiculousness to anyone else with eyes and ears. I put this down to my not knowing anything about being married or being upper-middle class. It was all strange, practically foreign, in truth. We might use the same words, but at times they seemed to mean entirely different things. My earlier passion to carve out an influential position in the house had already dissipated, and for now I could only muster the energy to try and fit in. But at least I wasn’t emptying bedpans or nursing men with hernias the size of Wales. It was my fault. I kept putting my great clumsy feet in all the wrong places and had difficulty keeping my mouth shut. I had screamed at him like a fishwife when he’d mentioned my age. That hadn’t helped, but it would not be the last time I would fail to grasp what was expected of me.

  It was in this reflective sulk that I found my eyes drawn back to the news story Thomas had dismissed so flippantly. It wasn’t very large, or by all accounts unusual, but the scant details leapt out, as they always do when there is news about one’s home town.

  A WHITECHAPEL HORROR

  A woman, now lying unidentified at the mortuary, Whitechapel, was viciously stabbed to death between two and four o’clock this morning, her outraged corpse found on the landing of a staircase inside George’s Buildings, Whitechapel. George’s Buildings are tenements occupied by the labouring classes.

  The woman was stabbed in twenty-four places. No weapon was found and the murderer left no trace. She was of middle age and height, with black hair and a round face. It appears she was a woman of the lowest class.

  There wasn’t much in that first report; a few cursory lines notable only for their sparsity and violence. For some stupid reason I thought of Thomas and his scratches, but he was not the type to loiter in Whitechapel. Twenty-four stab wounds…

  A few days later, more pages were given to the murder. One paper stated that the woman had been stabbed thirty or forty times, not twenty-four. Some poor tenant had come down the stairs of his block and stumbled over her body. He wasn’t the first to pass by her either; another man had stepped over what he thought was a sleeping vagrant and continued to his bed at three thirty. By quarter to five the next man to pass could see the woman was lying in a swamp of her own clotting blood and ran to find a policeman.

  There were reports of two soldiers from the Tower being arrested; then the soldiers were released without charge.

  I found myself thinking about the story throughout the days that followed. Finding a dead body on the streets of Whitechapel or on a landing in a Nichol terrace was not that unusual, and there were murders over mundane things such as tobacco or soap, but this woman had suffered stab wounds all over her chest and to
the rest of her body. As a nurse I had tended to many such injuries, inflicted with all manner of sharp objects and sometimes more than once, but the effort and time it would have taken to stab that poor woman some thirty times, over and over again, shocked me. It was dispiritingly common for men to beat their wives to death in a frenzy of rage or passion, using whatever came to hand, either stabbing or strangling them, but this was mutilation for the sport. For a person to have expended such energy and at so much risk, he must have anticipated deriving a huge amount of pleasure from it.

  Everything else about this woman was unremarkable: she was of average height, aged between thirty and forty, dressed in dark, dirty and torn clothes and carrying no discernible possessions. Someone who would likely not be missed. The only remarkable thing the poor cow achieved was to have been found on a stairwell, punctured like a sieve, and to have died silently, because none of the seventeen lodgers in that building heard a thing.

  I was in the habit of saving news stories and so I saved each one I found on this murder. I had kept stories and articles of memorable events since the day we were wed, hoping to build a scrapbook, moments in time that would document our marriage. A stupid idea, a pathetic attempt at romanticism on my part. I wasn’t very good at it, finding myself drawn to the more macabre articles. Thomas found my morbid fascination hilarious, an indication of my naivete, and he would laugh and pat me on the head like a child. Had he learned of my true knowledge of such matters, I doubt he would have found it so amusing. What kind of romantic reflection would my habit inspire twenty years hence, I wondered. Oh look, do you remember this murder, darling? Wasn’t it gruesome! In truth, my interest came in part from my desperate desire to find something to do. The boredom was torturous and I missed having a purpose, now that I wasn’t nursing and had to keep myself occupied. I was intrigued by those stories that were at once familiar and thankfully distant.

  Mrs Wiggs attempted to throw my clippings away when she saw them scattered over the table in the dining room. ‘The macabre recordings of depravity covered in the fingerprints of a thousand filthy men, and who knows where their hands have been,’ she said as I gathered them up.

  I filed them away in a sideboard in the back dining room, a space largely forgotten. We were a small household and we could easily accommodate ourselves in the front part of the room, closing off the rear section behind folding wooden doors. The back room had remained cold and dark, its fire and lamps unlit, until I claimed it as my own space.

  ‘Mrs Lancaster, I only ask that you think of the germs on those dirty newspapers, which are now contaminating the house,’ Mrs Wiggs would say at regular intervals.

  ‘It is only so I might discuss current affairs with Dr Lancaster, Mrs Wiggs. I must work to keep his attention, for he is so very clever, as you well know.’

  *

  Mrs Wiggs was the only servant who lived with us. Cook, and Sarah, the scullery maid, came every day. Cook may have sometimes slept in the kitchen, although I never had the need to go out there, and after the last debacle I never wanted to. She could have had her entire family living there for all I knew. Sarah was a frail and thin-lipped girl with wispy hair and sharp features who always appeared to be glowering. I think she found my newspaper collection odd, and I’m sure she had hoped for a real lady once her master married, one who would throw dinner parties and fill the house with ribbons and bonnets – things I had been taught were wasteful and frivolous. I confused her. I confused myself.

  Wherever I retreated to in the house, Mrs Wiggs did her best to seek me out, chasing me from room to room, forever dragging Sarah behind her, making statements for my benefit. ‘The home is a battleground, Sarah. We feeble women can never rest or declare the enemies of cleanliness conquered.’ She would strut about like an officer inspecting the aftermath of a land war, giving Sarah seven tasks to complete at once.

  Mrs Wiggs had convinced herself she was dying because of the city air. If the London air itself wasn’t trying to assassinate her, then its vermin were. They were plotting a coup and would take over should she rest for a minute. Poor Sarah was the henchwoman of her defence plans. She had her making up flypapers and hanging them all over the house, especially in the passageways and the kitchen, because this was where the flies collected. When she wasn’t battling flies, she was making up plates to kill the cockroaches, using red lead, molasses and baking soda. They were in the corner of every room. Thomas put his foot in one once and went mad, hopping all over the house, cursing and shouting. I had to disguise my giggles with a coughing fit and run into another room.

  ‘I have a persistent cough I cannot shift,’ Mrs Wiggs would say. ‘It must be the fog. It creeps under the doors, along with the soot and filth and the disease that floats this way from that stinking pit they call the Thames. And the smell…! I cannot open a window for fear of inhaling poison and I cannot open the back doors because we will be taken over by flies. I cannot breathe in this city. What if the bad air has given me consumption? I wonder how long I have left.’

  ‘It is not the bad air, Mrs Wiggs. Those are old-fashioned ideas. We have germ theory now. It’s the diseases lurking inside other people that will kill you. If they cough or sneeze, you will be done for, so you best not invite anyone in.’ I could not help but tease her from behind whatever newspaper I was devouring in search of more news on the murder, pulling faces like a child as I did so.

  She kept a detailed account of whenever there was a light mist on the Thames. It was as if she believed the underworld would creep out of the river.

  ‘It is impenetrable! I cannot see more than twelve feet in front of me. No wonder criminals and thieves come to London; it gives them the perfect conditions for their deviancy. The smell sticks to the drapery, the linens, the rugs. I cannot rid my nostrils of this foul odour.’

  ‘I thought your nose was blocked because of the consumption?’ I said.

  ‘Unlike you, Mrs Lancaster, I am not a city dweller. I miss the clean air and flowers of the country. I suppose it is the river’s revenge for having all that effluent flushed into it. One day it will rise up and come back to kill us. I do wish we could go back to using cesspits. Life seemed much simpler then.’

  ‘It is much healthier sending the waste into the sewers.’

  ‘I’m not convinced these modern solutions are as good as we are led to believe,’ she replied, covering her mouth and nose with a scented handkerchief. ‘One must take responsibility for one’s output; you cannot simply flush it away.’

  Aside from fretting about the murderous germs, she was also convinced we were wasteful and would go about the house turning the gas lamps off, or refusing to put them on altogether, issuing candles and hiding the rest in her bedroom. I began to harvest half-burned candles and then ask for more, although I swear she routinely searched my room for contraband. I learned to feel my way around the house soon enough, but in the beginning I was forever bumping into furniture and stubbing my toes, bruising my knees, straining my eyes and cursing in the dark. We always had the drapes closed to keep the filth out, the lights off to save the gas, and the candles rationed to save money. It was as if we were in hiding, waiting for some horrible event to be over before we could start living.

  The one time I challenged her on her candle rationing, I soon came to regret it. She gave me a lecture on the prudent running of a house for at least half an hour – as if she would let me have anything to do with it.

  ‘Running a house economically is a virtue unto itself, Mrs Lancaster. Regardless of income, a thrifty woman is a morally upright woman. We are using six pounds of candles in a week! Are we eating them? Whoever heard of burning six pounds of candles in a week in a house as small… as… as this?’ She glanced about herself, as if she were standing in a fourpence-a-night doss house. ‘At Abbingdale Hall we used twenty pounds of candles and I do not need to tell you – or I suppose I do, as you have never been there – it is a great deal larger than this house.’

  I hadn’t felt so managed
at the hospital, and there I’d had Matron to report to. I was mistress of this house in name only. I felt like an imposter. I had not been to Abbingdale Hall to meet my in-laws. I had not met a single relative and I wondered if they even knew of our marriage. What kind of husband failed to take his wife to meet his family? Mrs Wiggs liked to remind me of this at regular intervals. She saw it hurt me once and kept trying to find the same spot.

  8

  Chelsea was a confused area: neglected in parts and immaculate in others. It had a small parade of shops and big shady trees along the shore where the boats were moored. When there was a strong wind, I could sometimes catch the scent of tar and oil from the shipyards. Our road was a clutter of tall, shallow-faced houses with iron-railed fronts and flagstone paths, and a pavement lined with lime trees.

  The house itself was old, spacious and well built and would doubtless survive long after I was gone. Each storey extended at least forty feet, which felt huge compared to what I was used to. It was almost strange not being cooped up in an attic, as I had been at the hospital, with the water dripping down the walls. Everything had been freshly painted and repaired when Thomas moved in. The hardwood floors gleamed and the hundred-year-old pine panelling of the entrance hall and staircase had been papered over, which I actually thought was a shame, but what did I know of style? Towards the back of the house a narrow staircase led down to the pantry and the kitchen, which had a new range oven and a door to the garden. The cellar also had an outdoor hatch into the garden for hot ashes. We had three bedrooms upstairs and – my favourite luxury of all – a bathroom with a flushing water closet! This was the room I was most excited about. The servants had to use the outside privy – all of them but Mrs Wiggs, of course. Somehow, she was exempt from that irksome rule, although it was she who invented it.