At the very top of the house was the attic, which Thomas claimed as his study. He spent hours up there, isolating himself on the evenings when he did come home. It made no sense to me because there were plenty of other huge, empty rooms he could have used, rooms with windows and natural light. When I raised this with him, he complained that the noise from the street disturbed him, or the neighbour’s birds gave him headaches. He needed complete silence to work, he said. The servants were forbidden to go in there, as was I. Thomas kept the key on him at all times.
Not that I didn’t try. A little while after the embarrassing incident and him storming out for the first time, I thought I should try and give him some assurances. I crept up to the attic in the middle of the night in a clumsy attempt to seduce him. I had practised being the seductress in the mirror: my robe was unfastened, my hair was down and falling over my shoulders, and my nightgown was loose. Eight weeks earlier he had announced how well we fitted, but when I knocked on the door I heard the turn of the key as he unlocked it. Things that fitted together did not have doors bolted between them.
‘What is it, Susannah? Are you well?’ He had taken to asking me that often since we’d married. Was I ill? As if a woman seeking her husband’s attention had a disease.
‘Will you be coming to bed?’ I asked, attempting my best impersonation of Nurse Mullens with my eyes wide and gamine, though I probably looked more like a fish.
His eyes, on the other hand, were glassy, the skin of his face clammy. He must have seen me take this in, because he wiped his upper lip with his sleeve, which struck me as slovenly and not like Thomas at all. Not the man I knew. He stared at me with a vacant expression, flat and lifeless, and I suddenly felt the idiot with my robe dangling open, so I pulled it around myself. I had no need to pinch my cheeks, for they had gone red enough of their own accord. I made a dreadful Jezebel, and it was clear Thomas wasn’t remotely tempted.
‘I only wondered if you needed company,’ I said. ‘Or if you are working, perhaps I could help? It can be useful to have someone to talk to.’
He laughed. ‘You’re a doctor now, are you? Why don’t you go to bed.’ At which he leaned forward and gave me a brotherly peck.
I glimpsed over his shoulder nothing but dust-covered clutter, as you would expect to see in an old attic. Thomas reeked of alcohol, but another bitter, faintly floral scent crept up my nose. He had been smoking opium. Drops were one thing, but opium was something altogether different. I had seen opium eaters with my grandfather. He had shown me on purpose, made sure I witnessed the hollow shells of gaunt-faced men and women lost in their own fogged-up world and quite prepared to hasten their own death and even sell their children for the sake of a few hours within an impenetrable cloud of nothingness. I was still considering how this could be possible when Thomas closed the door in my face.
Thomas made intimations about having the attic decorated, putting in lamps, plumbing and a laboratory of sorts. None of this came to fruition. Instead, he hid himself away – in part to forget he was married, I feared. I did not complain, for there were enough empty rooms in the house for my own purposes. I had not thought much about his need to keep a private space. I had swallowed the handed-down belief that a man needed to unwind when he came home from work and should not have to subject himself to the demands or even voices of the women in his household until he was ready. Thomas, however, was never ready. Once he was holed up in that room, he was gone. Or he left the house altogether.
Unlike me, Mrs Wiggs had complete freedom to access his sacrosanct space. She had her own key and let herself in whenever it suited her, busying herself on one of his many errands or in duties of her own creation. On occasion, Thomas would shut himself in that room and then open the door and bellow for Mrs Wiggs. She would scurry up to meet him and if I tiptoed up the stairs and listened, I could hear their muffled voices playing together, rising and falling in a duet that often built to a crescendo of laughter. They clearly enjoyed each other’s company. Yet when I attempted to extract a sentence from Thomas, word by word, he submitted with a reluctant huff. There was no melody, and certainly no duet. It was the laughter that irritated me most. What on earth were they laughing about? What could be so hilariously funny? I began to think it was me.
I suspected that my attraction had diminished the second I was acquired. When I was beyond his grasp, I had been desirable. Now that I could be easily had, I was just another worn-out toy to abandon. Although I felt hopelessly adrift, I still thought I could learn to swim back to land. I wanted only to win them both over.
On a whim I bought some cheerful yellow and red tulips from a street vendor. Mrs Wiggs’ campaign to buy fresh flowers daily had not lasted long, for the flowers hadn’t lured Thomas home, so the pleasure they gave the rest of us in the house was deemed irrelevant. Nonetheless, I saw the tulips and bought them. I felt braver and happier for it, and I trimmed the stems, put sugar in the water, and arranged them into a display such that whoever saw them couldn’t help but be uplifted. They had not been on show for more than two hours before I walked past and found them gone, replaced with a vase of violets.
Violets were Aisling’s favourite flowers. Mrs Wiggs couldn’t have known this, but it made me think of her when I didn’t want to be reminded, and I was quite unprepared for it. Mrs Wiggs simply laughed when I questioned her, and in the most condescending tone said, ‘I’m afraid red and yellow tulips send the wrong message, Mrs Lancaster. One doesn’t put such a display in the hall. It was frankly overwhelming, and a little… How do I say this without offending you…? Gauche. We are not French; we have no need to inflict our passions upon everyone who should happen to walk through the door. I thought you might not be aware of the subtlety of such matters, so I replaced them with violets. Violets convey discretion, loyalty and devotion. A more appropriate message.’
Seeing violets, Aisling’s violets, in the hall was like being struck about the face with a bat. It upset me more than it should have. I was trying to forget about her, yet she kept sidling in, reminding me how lonely I was. I was hopeless at this. I was no sort of wife at all. I needed Aisling back. I wanted her to come and tell me to pull myself together and make fun of Mrs Wiggs and tell me Thomas was an idiot. Instead, I ran to my room and buried my face in the pillow so that Mrs Wiggs could not gain any satisfaction from my tears. I would not cry in front of people. Not if I could help it. I would rather die.
*
Living with Mrs Wiggs was like being under permanent attack, only she sliced at you with tiny invisible blades so you didn’t know you were being cut until you were nearly drained of blood. It was exhausting. She was never happier than when Thomas needed her, but if I plucked up the courage to request something, it was as if I had asked her to send the tide back in the other direction. She stiffened wherever she found me, as if surprised to find I was still there, disappointed I hadn’t been collected with the ashes.
I tried to discover more about her, but she was no more forthcoming regarding her history than I was. All I learned was that she had started with the Lancasters as nanny to Thomas and his twin sister Helen. She had been Helen’s governess when Thomas was sent away to school in Winchester, then a lady’s maid, and eventually housekeeper of Abbingdale Hall. Now that Helen was in charge there and could cope with a less experienced housekeeper, Mrs Wiggs was spared to look after Thomas in the wilds of London.
I could only assume that she had shown more deference to her employers at Abbingdale Hall. On one occasion she told me that I did not have the correct number of hairbrushes for a lady. ‘What will you do if a lady friend calls and has need to clean the city dust from her hair?’ she asked, her eyes wide, as if this were one of life’s greatest questions.
‘Well, I don’t have any lady friends, so it shouldn’t cause too much of a problem,’ I replied. It was true, I didn’t have any lady friends, not a single one, not any more.
She next developed a preoccupation with my usage of the water closet. She was appre
hensive of the water closet, being that it was new, and technical, and she worried it would break. I think she perceived it as dark magic. She was petrified of the noise the flush made, and of it exploding. She said she had heard many stories from other households of maids burning to death after lighting a candle and igniting the gases that had leaked back into the bathroom from the pipes. ‘The announcement of effluent is at once reprehensible and morally repugnant,’ she said. She then attempted to decree that I should only use the water closet between certain hours of the morning and then again for an hour in the afternoon.
I could endure being nagged and marginalised and made to feel irrelevant and stupid, but I would not have anyone take control of my bodily functions. Lord knows, even I couldn’t predict those with any surety.
‘No, Mrs Wiggs, I will use the water closet as and when I, or nature, dictates, and I shan’t be consulting anyone for permission to do so.’
I didn’t wait for a response. I walked away, my pathetic sparrow heart fluttering in my chest.
Mrs Wiggs was somehow able to look straight through me and see the peasant, no matter how much I convinced myself she was gone for good. The girl who had hoarded food beneath her bed, raced barefoot across the mud and dug out worms with her fingers was not so far from the surface. Mrs Wiggs had sniffed her out and sought to chase her into the light.
We called a truce on the water closest. But that same week, I went into what was meant to be our private bathroom and found her bent over the bath tub in a cloud of steam. She was scrubbing what appeared to be Thomas’s shirts.
‘What are you doing, Mrs Wiggs?’
‘I should think it terribly obvious what I’m doing. I assume you would like to use the water closet? On this occasion, while I know you have opinions on this, I would ask that you use the privy.’
Her face was wet from the steam, her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and even her hair was damp. Wiry tendrils had escaped her torturous bun and were making wild springs about her temples. I had never seen her so ruffled.
‘What’s the matter, Mrs Lancaster?’ she continued.
White shirts were swirling in a pink pool of scalding water and there was a bottle of kerosene to the side of the bath.
‘Why haven’t you sent the laundry out or at the very least had Sarah do it?’ I asked. ‘Come to think of it, did poor Sarah have to carry all this up the stairs? Why not wash linens in the scullery? What is that smell?’
She stood up, put both hands on the arch of her back and then wiped her forehead with her forearm. ‘They are Dr Lancaster’s shirts. He asked me to have them cleaned quickly as they had stains. I didn’t have the time to send them out.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense. Why not have Sarah do them downstairs? And why are you using kerosene? Is that blood?’
‘It’s useful for removing stains.’
She shooed me out of the bathroom and I gave up with the questions. It had never been as bad as this at the hospital. Mrs Wiggs was worse than sharing a bathroom with thirty other nurses.
*
I retreated downstairs, to take refuge among the newspapers, my collection of clippings, and my unhealthy obsession with the Whitechapel murder.
The story about the stabbed woman had not had the good grace to die as quietly as she did. Inches and inches of newsprint were dedicated to unravelling the mystery of her identity. Several different families came forward to claim the deceased as one of theirs, but it took about a week before she was formally identified. She was called Martha Tabram, she was thirty-five and she’d been living with a hawker on Commercial Road.
The investigation floundered, leaving a gaping space for speculation about the maniac who did it. The doctors believed that three different blades may have been used on poor Martha: a penknife, a long knife and a bayonet. The popular theory was that it had been a group of drunken sailors, though in truth rusty old bayonets could be bought from any number of stalls on Whitechapel Road.
And what of the other missing persons whose families had tried to claim Martha Tabram as theirs? Were there more bodies to be found?
‘That I cannot say,’ said a detective. ‘Whitechapel is not like any other part of London.’
This was a truism that I was only too well aware of, and something the fancier newspapers – the sort Thomas preferred to take his opinions from – spent a vast quantity of words discussing. I didn’t need The Times to tell me that Whitechapel had a great many more people crammed into its shoddy tenements than most other parts of London – one hundred and ninety per acre, apparently, compared to the average of forty-five per acre in better-off neighbourhoods like Chelsea that I had managed to save myself a place in. Nor was I surprised when the police estimated there were some twelve hundred prostitutes working there. These women had to eat and pay their board, what else had they to sell?
I laughed at my strange fascination with seeing the home of my early years paraded through the papers like this. At other times I wondered why I was so drawn to it, as if I couldn’t truly believe I had escaped and I was preparing myself for when I inevitably found myself back there, trying to scrape by and stay alive.
Either way, scouring the papers for updates and new theories on the murder had become the high point of my day. And that morning’s report in the Echo did not disappoint. It made the blood drain to my feet.
THE WHITECHAPEL MYSTERY: NO TRACE OF THE MURDERER
Observations have been made of the apparent similarity between the outraged corpse of Martha Tabram and another woman, brutally murdered in April.
This woman, a widow aged 45, was also of the lowest class and was brutally assaulted along the Whitechapel Road on bank holiday night. She was taken to the London Hospital, Whitechapel, where she later died of her injuries.
The coroner said the woman had been most barbarously assaulted. Such a despicable deed he had never seen before. A verdict of wilful murder against person unknown was returned by the jury.
The police are now investigating a theory that the killer or killers of Martha Tabram are the same ones that attacked the victim in April.
A paragraph at the bottom and I nearly missed it. The other woman had been savagely raped and beaten. A stick had been forced inside her, tearing her from one end to the other, and she had died from her injuries. The paper didn’t state the victim’s name or these details, but I knew them. Her name was Emma Smith. I was at the hospital when she was brought in.
9
When I left Reading to begin a new life as a nurse at the London Hospital, I was conscious of the paradox. Returning to the place I’d been rescued from two decades earlier did seem a strange choice. Was it the inevitable pull of fate or an unwitting attempt to help others from a privileged position? I honestly didn’t know.
On seeing Whitechapel again as a naive twenty-seven-year-old, I could not believe that a prestigious hospital, famed for its matron and the skill of its surgeons, could exist in such a neglected district. Men and women were wandering the streets with black eyes and missing teeth, many of them drunk, stumbling towards their next gin or the doss house. Everything was bleak and drained of colour. And yet, standing amidst this grey gloom as if it had been lowered from the heavens on winches, was the London Hospital: a white-fronted beacon dumped on a wasteland.
I arrived a day too early for my hospital interview and was dispatched to a boarding house, instructed to go straight there, with no messing about. ‘There are no sights worth seeing here,’ I was warned. ‘Get yourself a room, something to eat, stay inside, and come back tomorrow.’ I spent that night listening to freakish, animalistic howls coming from the street outside. I stared at the ceiling that sagged above my head, convinced it would collapse if I shut my eyes. In the morning, the landlady told me, in a voice like a pipe-smoking mariner, that I could not have porridge that morning because a mouse had drowned in it.
The next day at the hospital, when I saw the nurses gliding about like starched icebergs, it was impossible to imagine I c
ould ever be one of them. Matron’s portrait hung on the wall outside her office and may as well have been Queen Victoria herself. Nursing positions were hard to come by. There were applications and interviews, and a girl’s background had also to be examined. For Matron Luckes’ nurses were a new breed, an attempt to professionalise the care of the sick, to employ educated women, and to submit them to a regime of intense and militaristic training. They were to work alongside doctors, and as such would have to demonstrate they could conduct themselves appropriately, behave with discipline and follow instruction to the letter. This was not an easily won opportunity; the support of doctors and governors had to be extracted over years. The wrong recruit could contaminate this brave new experiment, and there were already too many who felt threatened by the concept of a troop of professional women, an oxymoron in their view, and wanted it to fail. Despite the obstacles, I was accepted as a sister probationer.
The London Hospital offered care to the working classes of the East End. It was funded by donations, but that was never enough. Surgeons didn’t get paid at the hospital; they worked there for the experience and the reputation it earned them, and they made their money by private practice. We took all emergencies and accidents, being so close to the docks and located among the abattoirs, the bell foundry and the factories that crushed bones. A person could get drunk enough to forget their own name on fourpence worth of gin, but could not earn enough to eat, so most patients were malnourished. In Whitechapel, the music halls, the travelling navvies, the sweeps and the sailors were all thrown together. Desperation and lunacy were provoked by starvation, laudanum and alcohol; it was inevitable this would erupt on occasion, and that gave surgeons their opportunity. It was why they all came to the London; it was why Thomas came. Like vultures, to pick over the broken bodies and chase glory.
I soon learned it was best not to think about the scale of human despair or the sheer pointlessness of healing. The destitute were sent to the workhouse, the wealthy rooted out and sent away, but they all came and tried. There were syphilitic women with noses half sloughed off and swollen bellies that carried the same disease. There was the tide of infants brought in already dead, poisoned with opium or gin by their halfwit mothers. These women would cry and beg for help, wail about how they hated their children and couldn’t afford to feed or clothe them, but if ever I dared suggest they avoid having more, the abuse would come like a flood. Ceaseless childbearing was an inevitable curse to these women and they accepted their fate without question. When finding food and keeping warm was an all-consuming occupation, it left little appetite to improve one’s circumstances. I learned to keep my mouth shut, for no one wanted a priggish nurse lecturing them about abstinence. I’m sure I was most annoying when I was still trying in earnest.
People of Abandoned Character Page 7
