People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  ‘Thomas?’ I called out.

  The murmurings outside fell silent, and I swear that even the light stopped flickering, as if it too was holding its breath.

  ‘Thomas!’ I called out again, bolder this time.

  Still nothing.

  I fumbled for the matches by my bedside, and the footsteps dispersed. We were in a race against each other. I lit the candle and flew across the floor like a banshee, nightgown billowing behind me. My first thought was he had brought another woman home, as he had brought me, that he was secreting his mistress in the freezing attic and somehow sneaking her out when they were done. I wanted to know what she was. Maybe an exotic bird, all orange hair and black feathers. My insides boiled from fear to fury. How dare he bring back his new whore and play with her above my head? He would curse us both with a disease.

  When I tore open the door there was nothing but darkness. My candle blinded me. The only sign that someone had been standing there was the unsettled dust now swirling in circles. I stepped out into the corridor and waited for my eyes to adjust. There was a creak to my left and I turned my head and held up my candle. Thomas was standing with his back to me, halfway up the attic stairs.

  ‘Thomas, what are you doing?’ This time there would be no denying what I could see with my own eyes.

  ‘Go to bed, Susannah. I must be up for work in the morning. I have to sleep,’ he said, and made to continue up the stairs.

  ‘No, you don’t! Where is she?’

  I ran to him and grabbed the sleeve of his coat, while trying to keep the candle away from my wild hair. The arm of his coat was wet to the touch with what I thought was rain.

  ‘Dr Lancaster was speaking to me, Mrs Lancaster. Only me.’ It was Mrs Wiggs at the top of the main staircase behind us.

  It was unsettling to see her in her nightgown. She looked much younger with her hair in a long plait over her shoulder, her gown as pale as her skin. She had a candle in one hand and a water jug in the other. She was staring down at my wet hand, so I glanced at it too. When I turned it over, it was bright red, bloodied. I looked to Thomas, who was facing me now.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said.

  Then I looked at Mrs Wiggs, who had her eyes on the floor. I knew something terrible had happened, and they had already agreed in whispers that it was to be kept from me. I felt frightened of them both then, and backed away, towards my bedroom door.

  ‘I don’t know what has happened, but shall we not pretend I don’t recognise blood when I see it,’ I said, and took another step in the direction of my room.

  Mrs Wiggs moved forward to speak, but Thomas rushed down the stairs and stopped her with a raised hand. Then he came slowly towards me with his palms up and his coat open, as if in surrender. His white shirt, undone, was covered in blood. I was reminded of arteries cut at the hospital and how the blood would spurt out with such force, it would hit me, the wall and the ceiling. A streak of scarlet. I felt sick.

  ‘What have you done?’ I said, inching away with my back to the wall, a bare foot over the threshold of my bedroom.

  ‘Mrs Lancaster, won’t you…?’ started Mrs Wiggs, but Thomas stopped her again with a glance. How close they must have been, to communicate with small gestures and looks.

  ‘Susannah, I’m not going to lie to you. It is blood,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to wake you. The truth is, I was in a fight and I asked Mrs Wiggs to fetch me some water.’

  ‘There is water in our room, and ample in the bathroom next door,’ I said.

  This Thomas, the one whose eyes were soft and blue, kept trying to make my gaze meet his as he came towards me. I refused.

  ‘I could hardly come and wake you like this. I didn’t want to scare you. You look pale, I’ve clearly given you a fright.’

  ‘Judging by the colour of your shirt, someone else is looking a lot paler than me,’ I said. ‘What fight? Why would you be fighting? Is the other man dead? What about the police?’

  ‘Mrs Wiggs, take the water to the attic. I’ll be up in a minute,’ he said. Then he lunged at me, tried to grab the arm of my nightgown, but I was ready and leapt into my bedroom.

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘You’re not coming in here. Go with Mrs Wiggs to your attic!’

  I tried to close the door on him, but he butted a shoulder against it and thrust it open. I ran to the other side of the room and stood with my arms wrapped about me as he tore off his bloodied shirt and wiped down his arms and chest with it. I shuddered as he threw the bloodied rag on the floor. He looked at me, his torso blue in the moonlight filtering through the curtains. He stood there for an age, staring at me as if considering what he should do. I felt my own blood drain from my body, because I was frightened of him.

  It is a strange sensation to be frightened of someone to whom you thought yourself close. Although the clues are there when you look back, it is still a shock. The understanding that I had no idea of who or what I had married came rushing up to meet me all at once. I could only curse myself for having been so stupid. I had good reason to be fearful too, because after this period of cold regard, he exploded.

  ‘I had a fight. A fight – that’s it! As my wife, you might be pleased the other fellow came off worse than me.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me why you were fighting.’

  ‘He owed me money.’

  ‘Money? For what? Why would someone owe you money?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘You don’t need to know!’

  ‘It would seem there are many things I don’t need to know. Like where you go to get in such fights.’

  ‘What are you talking about? This is just like you! Making everything about yourself!’

  ‘I am your wife,’ I said. ‘I am under no illusions that you have your secrets. I don’t know where you go, or whose company you keep—’

  ‘I have given you everything you wanted. You wanted out of the hospital; I took you away. You wanted money; now you have it. But still you complain. Is it any wonder I have to escape from the woman who finds fault with everything – because I work or see my friends, because I want to relax without her whining in my ear. You were never happier than when I was lying in a hospital bed in fucking agony!’

  He spat the words with such fury and hatred, and as he shouted, his chest hardened and his veins swelled like worms under his skin. I worried that the blood might burst out. I must have done something wrong, but I could not remember how the argument came to be my fault. Hadn’t we been stood in the hallway with him covered in blood? I was still blindsided by this turnabout when he flew at me and grabbed me by the shoulders. I dropped the candle and it rolled about the floor in its brass holder, still alight, until it stopped by the bedclothes.

  ‘The candle! The candle!’ I shouted.

  He shoved me away from him and I stumbled backwards into the chest of drawers with the arch of my back. My head hit the mirror on the wall behind and cracked the glass. Thomas tried to stamp on the candle, missed it several times as it rolled around and taunted him, then trapped it and the light was snuffed out. We were in the dark, with only his laboured breathing for sound.

  Mrs Wiggs pushed the door open; she held her own candle, which trembled as much as her voice.

  ‘Dr Lancaster, is everything all right?’

  I touched the back of my head; it was wet with blood.

  Thomas kicked violently at the brass candlestick. It bounced off the wall and nearly hit both Mrs Wiggs and myself as it ricocheted about the room. We both yelped as it sailed past. His hair was wet and hanging over his face.

  ‘I gave you what you wanted,’ he said. ‘And what do I get?’

  At that moment I found him utterly repugnant and couldn’t even look at him.

  I didn’t dare say a thing. A watery trickle was snaking its way through my hair and down my neck. He shoved his face right up close to mine. I could feel his breath on my cheek and smell the alcohol on him. My nerves screamed a
nd my heart all but stopped; I thought he was going to hit me. I kept my eyes nailed to the floor.

  ‘I get nothing!’ he shouted in my face. Then he spat at me.

  I flinched and shut my eyes. He stormed out, stomped up the attic stairs and slammed the door behind him.

  I burst into tears, and Mrs Wiggs quietly retreated, taking the light of the candle with her. I was left alone to feel my way back to bed. After that, I locked my bedroom door at night.

  14

  I was woken by Mrs Wiggs rattling my bedroom door. Her thin voice called out to me between huffs of frustration at the new barrier between us. The memories came flooding in, making me shiver. I threw off the bedclothes, sat up and touched the skin at the back of my head. It was pulled taut into a tender, scabby seam. Mrs Wiggs continued pestering the door handle as if it would change its mind about being locked. In a daze, I stomped over and released it. She swooped in like a buzzard circling for rabbits: all grey skirts and pointed features. I sloped back to bed and pulled the blankets over me. It was Saturday and I had decided I would not get up again that day.

  ‘It is gone midday, Mrs Lancaster. I was concerned that something might be wrong. Are you well?’

  It appeared my fragile health was a concern for the servants now. ‘I am well, Mrs Wiggs. What could possibly be wrong with me?’ I gave her my best wide eyes, and was met with a narrowing of hers.

  ‘You haven’t eaten since Thursday evening. Neglect of one’s appetite can make a person… hysterical,’ she said. ‘You’ve not emerged from this room since—’

  ‘Since the early hours of Friday morning. When my husband dragged himself home.’ I lay down and stared at the ceiling. ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No, Mrs Lancaster, he went out early this morning. I shall have the mirror replaced today, and take some of these clothes to the laundry. I assume that is why they are on the floor?’

  I was not a tidy mistress and left my clothes scattered about my room. Having the privilege to do so was a novelty I still enjoyed.

  ‘You should leave the mirror, if only to remind us to agree on who should get the bad luck, Thomas or myself. It was my head that cracked it, after all.’

  ‘It will do no good to make a catastrophe of a silly accident, Mrs Lancaster. We shouldn’t punish ourselves.’

  ‘Not when we have others to punish us,’ I replied.

  My comment was met with silence as dense as any Embankment mud. Eventually she sighed and said, ‘I shall send Sarah up with breakfast.’ She walked towards the door with an armful of laundry.

  ‘No need for breakfast. Just send Sarah, please.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I have an errand for her.’

  ‘I can tell her.’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  More silence.

  ‘Very well.’ Then she departed, and I locked the door behind her.

  Two minutes later, Sarah knocked and I gave her my instructions and sent her away. While I waited for her to return, I worried. My security depended on being sure of Thomas’s affection. My position as his novelty had been tenuous, I knew that, but it seemed my day in the sun was over already. I had not even managed a brief spell in the territory of the comfortably familiar, hadn’t had the chance to insinuate myself like a pair of worn slippers he would be hesitant to throw away. I had travelled straight to inconvenience; surely exile or death would follow. My young husband had a dreadful temper, and I feared for the person who had been on the receiving end of it the night he returned home wearing their blood. No, I couldn’t leave my room that day. I had too much to think over, too many possibilities to consider.

  I remembered the shirt, leapt up and scoured the room for it, but it was gone. Of course! I had to laugh. Mrs Wiggs had only come to retrieve Thomas’s shirt from where he had thrown it.

  Blood didn’t pour like that from punches; there must have been a knife, and Thomas’s bare chest hadn’t had a mark on it. What if the man he had fought with was now dead? The police might even be on their way. What would I say if they should question me?

  Finally, Sarah returned.

  ‘Here, Mrs Lancaster,’ she said, struggling with the load. ‘Mrs Wiggs said you weren’t feeling right. She did give me a look when she saw me bringing these up – she doesn’t approve, you know, thinks it morbid. Anyway, I told her it would do you good, get the heart beating, because everyone’s in such a state over it. See, it’s on every front page. It’s what you and the rest of London’s been waiting for, missus. I don’t know how you read it – gives me the shivers.’

  She heaved the bundle onto the top of the dresser and I snatched the top one: The Daily News from the first of September.

  ANOTHER BRUTAL MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL

  Another woman was found brutally slaughtered in Whitechapel yesterday.

  Shortly before four o’clock in the morning, Police Constable Neil discovered the woman lying in her own blood in Buck’s Row. Her throat had been savagely cut from ear to ear. PC Neil raised the alarm and a doctor was summoned.

  Dr Llewellyn of Whitechapel Road inspected the body and pronounced the woman dead. The corpse was swiftly removed to Bethnal Green Police Station and upon further examination the horrifying details of the crime were revealed. The poor woman’s lower half had been mutilated by deep gashes.

  The body was taken to the mortuary of the parish in Old Montague Street and the police made efforts to identify the woman.

  CAST OUT OF LODGING HOUSE

  A petticoat worn by the woman was marked with the stamp of Lambeth Workhouse and the only personal effects found in the pockets were a comb and a piece of looking glass.

  As news of the crime travelled, it was discovered that she met the description of a regular at a lodging house in Thrawl Street. Women from this particular house were summoned and recognised the deceased as ‘Polly’, who had frequently taken a bed on the usual terms of the nightly fee of 4d.

  IDENTIFICATION OF THE DECEASED

  An inmate from the Lambeth Workhouse later identified the deceased as Mary Ann Nichols, 42, commonly known as Polly, who had been in the aforementioned workhouse in April and May of last year.

  Mary Ann Nichols left the workhouse in May to take a position as a domestic in Wandsworth Common, but this did not last and soon she was wandering the streets and staying at lodging houses or the workhouse.

  Nichols was married but had lived apart from her husband and children for years.

  NO ONE HEARD ANYTHING

  It is extraordinary that the noise of this brutal slaying seemingly did not arouse the sleeping tenants in the area. Buck’s Row being a street tenanted by a respectable class of people, far superior to the surrounding streets.

  There was a mark found on the jaw on the right side of the face as though made by a thumb, and another bruise on the left side. There was a cut under the left ear, reaching the centre of the throat, and another from the right ear to the centre. The neck was severed down to the spine. The gashes in the abdomen must also have been inflicted with extreme savagery.

  Dr Llewellyn stated that the injuries were the most severe and shocking he had ever seen in his career.

  *

  Just like Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols had been walking those Whitechapel streets in the early hours. The papers reported that the police thought she’d been killed by a person whose company she was keeping, a polite way of saying she was a prostitute, also just like Emma and Martha.

  I kept seeing Emma Smith, the bag of broken twigs, lying there bleeding to death on the hospital bed. I thought of her birdlike legs and the little dunnock and how Emma had been put in a box but did not fly away come the morning. I began to wonder how these women must have felt. What was going through their minds when they realised what was about to happen to them? Did they fight? What does a woman feel in the moment she is murdered?

  I found the newspaper reporting frustrating. I consumed newspaper after newspaper, in the hope of filling in gaps in the detail, but to
no avail, most simply rehashed the same old facts, which were thin on the ground to begin with and some were more like directions as to what opinions we should form of the women. As a way of making sense of it all, and for something to do – I decided I would walk in these women’s shoes, and surmise some of this missing detail myself. I was going to try and thread their stories together, like stitching up my own Frankenstein’s monster, but instead I would create the victims, these forgotten and discarded women, and I would bring them back to life in their last moments. I understand this to be weird, macabre and a little indulgent in what some might call the perverse. God knows what Thomas and Mrs Wiggs would think of it, they would call me twisted, immoral or sick, but my own physician had advised that I might find some therapy in writing my thoughts down. I was curious to see where it would lead me. I only wanted to bring these women back and spend a little time with them, have them speak and for me to listen and understand. The moment you realise you are to be murdered and your life is to end in such a miserable way must be the loneliest of all. Someone should have the courage to accompany them in this and I found myself compelled to do so.

  I scoured the million theories and opinions that filled the papers, I analysed the articles that were fleshed out from the most meagre of ideas and the ones that had been fabricated around eyewitness accounts that were nothing at all. I curated my scrapbook of snippets, and from all that text and supposition I fashioned my own account of the last moments of Little Lost Polly. And I felt better for it. Then I hid these scrawls in the dresser in the back dining room.

  It became very difficult to read the information and maintain a rational thought which wasn’t excited by a most paranoid fear. Commentators variously held that it had been a case of mistaken identity, the revenge of a jealous lover, the work of a maniac, an escaped lunatic… The perpetrator had to be foreign for no Englishman could have done such a thing. It was a lunatic Jew down on whores. The murderer was left-handed. It was a gang of body-snatchers… Some newspapers said Polly lost a tooth during the attack, others said she lost five and that the murderer had kicked them loose. It turned out she was missing the top five but had lost them years ago.