People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  ‘That he’d heard bad things about Thomas, and Thomas was worried about how this would affect this other work he has, for a group of doctors – sponsored work. He tells me it is more profitable, but I don’t know much about it. This is what he blames for having to spend so much time away, but I don’t believe him. Oh, I am frightened, Dr Shivershev. I have married a dangerous man, one who may have done terrible things to the women who owned those clothes.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Lancaster, I am listening. You are safe here. Please go on.’

  I explained how I had come down the stairs and found the hairbrush and what that meant to me, but I kept getting events and explanations in the wrong order so they didn’t make sense. He frequently told me to slow down and to repeat myself. I was aware I was excitable, maybe a little hysterical, but I never got the sense he didn’t believe me. I felt I was doing the right thing by telling him absolutely everything.

  ‘She put the hairbrush there so I would pick it up, then she pushed me.’

  ‘You believe this… Mrs Wiggs, the housekeeper, tried to kill you?’

  ‘Yes! Who else could it be? But that’s not all, Dr Shivershev. There’s more, much, much more. I think the necklace he took from me that night belonged to one of the women whose clothes are in the attic.’

  ‘Why would your husband be stealing women’s clothes, Mrs Lancaster?’

  ‘I think he kills them.’

  ‘You think he murders women for their clothes?’

  ‘No! Well, not exactly, but yes, perhaps! Not for their clothes, but for something. He keeps their clothes for some reason. I… He goes missing sometimes. Often. He doesn’t come home for days at a time. When he does come home, he is bad-tempered and cruel… He is not…’

  ‘Not what?’

  I just couldn’t bring myself to talk of Thomas’s urges in the bedroom. Dr Shivershev was taking everything down, and I didn’t want that part to be written down and made permanent with ink.

  I changed the subject. ‘Have you heard anything of Mabel? It’s just I haven’t—’

  Out of nowhere, he stood up and banged his hands down on the desk. I nearly leapt out of the chair. His eyes were wild as he stared down at me. I was so shocked, my cheeks tingled.

  ‘No, Mrs Lancaster. We had an agreement – you are not to mention that again.’

  I shrank like a child. ‘I’m sorry.’ I sat with my hands bunched together and felt small and drained. I was stiff and sore from falling down the stairs and had lost my train of thought.

  Dr Shivershev composed himself in seconds and was calm again, as if the eruption had never happened. He picked up his pen and calmly continued.

  ‘You believe your husband harbours violent impulses towards women?’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ I nodded. ‘He has a vicious streak. I think him quite capable of terrible things.’

  ‘And this, er, hairbrush you talk about, can I ask its significance? It is an object of… importance to you?’

  ‘It belonged to a friend. Mrs Wiggs stole it from me to hurt me, to make me think myself mad.’

  ‘Nurse Barnard?’

  ‘Yes.’ I wasn’t sure if I should have said that. I should have lied and said it was my mother’s.

  He nodded, as if confirming something he had long suspected, and then he was furiously writing again. I tried to see what he wrote, but it was illegible.

  His office had descended into a state of neglect again, with dust on the glass jars and books on the floor. Worried I had lost a little of my currency with my indiscretion over Mabel and then with talk of Aisling, I felt I ought to win his loyalty back. I needed to have at least one person planted firmly on my side.

  ‘There’s more, Dr Shivershev,’ I said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When we argued in the coach, the subject of the argument was you.’

  He stopped, put down his pen and looked up. ‘Oh? How so?’

  ‘My husband didn’t approve of my choice of physician. He’d picked one for me himself, but I disobeyed him and found you. He doesn’t appear to like you very much.’

  ‘What exactly did he say?’

  I had him now; his eyes were fixed on me. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms, as if creating a barrier to the words he already knew I would unleash.

  ‘He disapproves of you because you are Jewish, and, he said, because you are known to seek out the company of women of… immoral earnings.’

  To his credit, Dr Shivershev remained expressionless, but I knew this had rattled him, for how could it not?

  ‘Why do I get the feeling I’m being drawn into something, Mrs Lancaster?’

  ‘He tore the necklace from my throat and hit me – you would have seen the bruises on my face that day in the Ten Bells. You must have seen them, surely?’

  He said nothing, of course. I was not meant to mention the Ten Bells.

  ‘He does other things too. He is unpredictable. I will tell you one last thing, but you must promise not to write it down.’

  He nodded again, so I continued. ‘On every occasion there has been a Whitechapel murder, I could not tell you where my husband was at the time. He was not at home. More significantly, each time he reappeared, he came with injuries.’

  Dr Shivershev appeared particularly interested in this. He seemed to write down every word as I described Thomas’s various wounds.

  ‘Don’t you think it odd, Dr Shivershev?’ I asked by way of conclusion. ‘I know he’s involved in something troubling because he’s told me as much. Do you think it possible, Doctor, that my husband could be the Whitechapel murderer?’

  ‘There are murderers, Mrs Lancaster. I suppose at least some of them might be married.’

  ‘Then it’s fair to assume that any woman could be married to the Whitechapel man, and it is logical to assume that it could be a man of a medical education. In which case, could it be me? Could I have married the Whitechapel murderer?’

  ‘I think,’ he said, after a long intake of breath, ‘that, given all the things you’ve told me, you have genuine cause for concern. But apart from these strange bloodstained clothes in your attic, is there anything else? This other work, for instance… You’ve said that it is more profitable, and that he is secretive about it, and that this gentleman at the restaurant with the medals may also have some involvement. What is this work exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know. He won’t tell me.’

  ‘Have you told anyone else about anything? What about the police?’

  ‘Oh no.’ I shook my head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Think of the scandal! What if I were wrong? Thomas is a gentleman and I’m just… the daughter of a whore. It wouldn’t be hard for people to find that out, if they were to look, if I were to cause trouble. Who would believe me? The wealthy stick together – you know that. The rest of us are always set apart. Even if the only thing we have in common is our supposed inferiority to the rich, Dr Shivershev, we must be careful not to cause trouble for each other.’

  ‘I do understand your hesitancy. Thank you for telling me all of this, Mrs Lancaster. I think perhaps a holiday would be a good idea. Is there somewhere you can go, even for a few days, to be safe from your husband and this housekeeper?’

  ‘A holiday? Good grief, this is no time for a holiday.’

  ‘I mean somewhere you can go to be safe and out of the way while I… think about this. How do you know this other work is legal, Mrs Lancaster? Have you considered your husband might be involved in something he shouldn’t?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘And you are sure you don’t know anything about it, or what it is? There have been no clues or indications? He hasn’t said anything?’

  ‘No, nothing, not a word, and I have asked him.’

  ‘Right, right.’

  ‘I have a house in Reading, but there are tenants who live there. Thomas knows of that, so there’s no point running there.’

  ‘I understand.
But you must understand that I now have a duty to your care. I am concerned for you, Mrs Lancaster.’

  ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you? I must make a plan, but please wait, please promise me you won’t tell the police, or anyone.’

  ‘I promise. But for now, why don’t you come back in a few days and we’ll discuss things further then. Let’s see how that lump is doing and make sure there aren’t any new ones. I will need time to digest what you have told me. Perhaps we can make this plan together, Mrs Lancaster.’

  I exhaled air that felt as if it had been trapped in my lungs for a lifetime, a poisonous mess of sulphur and lead. It felt so good to tell someone who didn’t react as if I were delusional. If I were to be lost or killed, or if something else were to happen to me, at least I had Dr Shivershev, and he would ask questions, I was sure of it. It was a desperate kind of insurance, but it was a comfort.

  ‘There is one thing you can do for me, Mrs Lancaster.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I would like you to reduce your consumption of laudanum.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your eyes are not responding to the light the way they should, and you’ve been scratching at your arms the entire time you’ve been here.’

  ‘Have I?’ I pulled up my sleeves and saw that my forearms were covered in red scratches and there were scabs on the backs of my hands I hadn’t even noticed. I was still staring at them, bewildered by the sight, when Dr Shivershev almost lifted me out of the chair by my arm.

  ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I really have to leave. I have an important meeting to attend. Very wealthy clients – you know how they can be.’

  As he hustled me to the door, we passed the shelves crammed full of specimens. My attention was drawn to the sole dust-free cloche, and I recognised it immediately: it was the specimen from Thomas’s attic, the baby inside the womb.

  All the blood ran to my feet and I thought my knees would give way. Luckily, Dr Shivershev still had hold of my arm.

  ‘Are you well enough to get home?’ he said. He must have felt my trembling.

  ‘I’m fine. I’m only tired. I think I shall go home and rest.’

  ‘Of course. It can’t have been easy speaking about all this. Try to be calm, please. Everything will work out, you’ll see.’ He glanced at my face and saw that my eyes were fixed on the new specimen. ‘Ah, I forget that you are a fellow medic! So of course you have noticed my latest addition.’

  With my arm still in his grip, he guided me over to examine it.

  ‘This is an amazing piece, quite artfully removed. What we are looking at here is a uterus during pregnancy. The foetus is perfectly intact and, I think, between fourteen to sixteen weeks. Isn’t it spectacular?’ He pointed a stubby finger. ‘That part there is the placenta. It’s beautiful, really, don’t you think? Women truly are creators – look what they can grow inside them. No one can replicate their gift. It’s fascinating.’

  He stared at it as if it were a piece of art. He really did believe it was beautiful – his eyes glistened and I’d never seen him so in awe. For my part, I felt nauseous. Sicker than sick. Mabel had been around that stage in her pregnancy when I’d passed her on to her abortionist. Was it possible that we were admiring the baby that had been cut from Mabel? My whole body quivered at this horrific thought. Was my grip on reality so weak that I had delivered Mabel into the hands of someone who had then carved her insides out? Had I done this? My mind was so thick with fog, I simply couldn’t think straight or sensibly.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ I said.

  ‘From a dealer in a coffee house. You’d be surprised what you can buy in such places.’

  ‘I doubt I’d be surprised, Doctor, not by that,’ I said. I looked along the rest of the shelves, filled with organs split in half, body parts, veins and arteries filled with wax. The shelves were cluttered with every part that could have been extracted; still, sombre and silent, like my women were now. Yet they had all belonged to living creatures with aspirations and fears. ‘What is it about these specimens that fascinates you so? You must have seen many cadavers opened up, why keep collecting?’

  ‘Didn’t you ever find the carcass of an animal and poke it with a stick as a child?’ asked Dr Shivershev, almost before I’d finished talking. He turned to look at me and smiled. ‘I am willing to wager that you did, Mrs Lancaster.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure I did.’

  ‘Well, you tell me, what compelled you to keep poking, to keep looking, to roll the carcass over and see what was on the inside?’

  ‘Curiosity, intrigue, I wanted to understand…’

  ‘So you have it,’ he interrupted. ‘You wanted to understand. And understanding is knowledge. Knowledge is progress, it doesn’t always make sense in the beginning, Mrs Lancaster. It can appear grotesque, amoral, perverse. It is difficult to imagine where the curiosity and intrigue will take you, but still, you want to see what’s on the inside because you wish to understand, you wish to know something.’

  I thought of my macabre scrawling of the dead women’s last moments, and wondered if somehow, Dr Shivershev was talking about the same compulsion I had found in myself. The execution may be different, but the urges sounded as if they came from a similar place. He continued,

  ‘And why do we wish to understand, Mrs Lancaster?’

  ‘I don’t know, I… it is ultimately a selfish pursuit, I think. Perhaps to make ourselves feel better about … something.’

  ‘I think it is a way of fighting back?’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘Not sure myself, you?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, if you find out, please let me know, I’ll spread the word, we can all move straight to confirming what this is all about and leave all the mess and blood and suffering that God seems compelled to throw at us and live in blissful rapture,’ he said.

  ‘Is she dead?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’

  Mabel, I nearly said. ‘The mother.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He laughed. ‘That’s the entire uterus.’ He tapped the glass. ‘And the cervix is that part there, it stretches out like the branch of a tree.’

  ‘How did the mother die?’

  ‘I have no idea. It was removed at autopsy. Besides, it’s not the mother I feel sympathy for.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ I looked at him, shocked by his lack of feeling.

  ‘There’s likely a man somewhere who lost a wife and child in one day. Now, I really must leave, Mrs Lancaster.’

  28

  After I was hustled out onto the street by Dr Shivershev, I felt more terrified and confused than ever. My head hurt. I wanted to be at home in my locked bedroom. I wanted my drops and my bed, but when I looked at my arms, I was ashamed at how I had lost myself, scratched my own arms red raw and not even noticed.

  I walked. My brain was a bursting mess, all the threads tangled with each other. I couldn’t identify an end to pick up and follow. How could that specimen have found its way from Thomas’s attic to Dr Shivershev’s office without the two of them having some sort of relationship?

  I walked until I found myself outside Thomas’s rented office on Harley Street, further up from Dr Shivershev’s. I rang the doorbell and when a bespectacled young clerk answered, I asked if Dr Lancaster was at work today.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. Are you a patient?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Would you like to make an appointment with one of our doctors?’

  ‘Where is Dr Lancaster?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but he doesn’t work here any more. If it’s him you really must see, you might try the London. I hear he still works there – on occasion.’

  All that fantastical talk of becoming the finest surgeon in England, and he couldn’t even master the discipline of turning up to work every day. I wanted to laugh out loud at my idiocy. I had believed every yarn Thomas had spun for me, taken everything at face value. He’d made sure to persuade me that h
e was ambitious and driven, but it was all an illusion, words crafted to impress. Thomas had neither the talent nor the work ethic to succeed. Putting in the hard graft required to become a surgeon was just too expensive an investment for him. Too dirty, too boring and too painful. The only sustainable advantage he had was family money, doled out in careful rations by his sister, Helen. Only now did I realise that this too was suspicious. Why would a sister play banker to her brother? The answer was obvious: because he could not be trusted. I began to wonder if he might be the black sheep, kept at a distance in London with his old nanny sent to keep an eye on him – or me. But Mrs Wiggs was too loyal to Thomas to be a spy; she worshipped him.

  An hour later, I was standing opposite the London Hospital. The weather was mild but grey; it threatened to rain but was not cold. Whitechapel Road was heaving and groaning like an endless sea; heads were bobbing, and carts were jostling for space with omnibuses and cabs, none of them proceeding at a notable speed. I leaned against a lamppost and stared at the archways of the entrance to the hospital and the clock on its facade. Apart from the occasional scream from a hawker in my ear, and children trying to access the contents of my pockets, I was largely ignored.

  I had stood there for what seemed like hours and had almost given up when I finally saw Thomas’s slim frame spring from the shadows like a gazelle. He danced down the steps with one hand on his hat, the other holding an umbrella under his arm. He skipped, carefree and gay. Men like him fished for idiots like me. What a desperate stench I must have given off.

  He strode through the streets like a fucking dandy, and I followed him. We went down Whitechapel Road, Montague Street and Wentworth Street and came out on Commercial Street, whereupon he walked into the Princess Alice pub. The sight of the Alice made me unsteady. It was well known for trouble, and the Thomas I was familiar with was far too much the snob to rub shoulders with the dockers who drank there. Of much more significance, though, was that the man who took Aisling from me had been drinking in the Princess Alice before he landed in our emergency room. His name was Henry White. Merely thinking his name brings me a gloom I find difficult to shift.