People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  He pulled the hatch down and peered at Kate, who was now sitting up with her back to the wall, her legs dangling to the floor, feet swinging.

  ‘Are you going to let me out yet?’ she asked, rubbing her eyes. The gesture made her seem like a little girl, though the cracks in her face said differently.

  ‘I’ll let you out when you are capable of taking care of yourself,’ said Mr Hull.

  ‘I promise I’m capable of taking care of myself now,’ she said in a girlish voice.

  He snapped the hatch shut. He would give it another fifteen minutes or so and then speak to Byfield on the desk.

  When eventually she was led out of the cell to the station office to be discharged, she asked Mr Hull what the time was.

  ‘Too late for you to get another drink, if that’s what you’re after,’ he said.

  ‘I must get myself home. My husband will give me a good hiding – he must be going spare worrying.’

  ‘Rightly so,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the time then?’

  ‘Gone one.’

  As if John would give a rat’s arse where she’d got to. He’d doubtless already spent any money he’d come by on himself and got his bed at Cooney’s Lodging House. But Kate was well in the habit of giving a certain impression to those she needed on her side – a habit she’d learned during her days selling ballads, singing on the street. If you presented yourself in a particular way, people warmed to you a little faster, treated you a little kinder, and you could sell them pretty much anything once they liked you. It was important to understand your audience, and the police had very traditional expectations of what a woman should be: respectable, demure, obedient, an ordinary wife and mother, just like her sisters. Certainly not a wandering balladeer with her husband’s initials tattooed on her arm.

  ‘Can you recall your name now, Mrs Nothing?’ asked Mr Byfield.

  ‘Mary Ann Kelly,’ said Kate.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘6 Fashion Street.’

  They returned her belongings: six small pieces of soap, a comb, a table knife, a spoon, tin boxes of tea and sugar, an empty matchbox, needles and pins, a thimble, a red leather cigarette case and her black clay pipes. She secreted each of them away in her skirts like a squirrel, taking pleasure in every one, smiling and poking her tongue out as she hid them in different places on her person.

  Mr Byfield ignored the fact that she had clearly given a false address. She was obviously of no fixed abode, for to carry such items was the habit of a dosser with no place to store tin pots or spoons. He very much doubted her name was Mary Ann Kelly either, but she seemed such a harmless little bird, burrowing her possessions away in her skirts.

  Mr Hull opened the big swing door onto the passageway out and held it as she tottered through. ‘That’s the door out, Mrs Kelly. Mind you take yourself straight home now,’ he said. ‘Be sure to pull that door to when you leave,’ he shouted after her, ‘or else it won’t shut properly!’

  ‘I will. Goodnight, old cock,’ said Kate, making sure not to close the door behind her.

  29

  My bedroom door never was kicked in that Sunday night on the last day of September. Neither my husband nor Dr Shivershev came thundering into the house baying for my blood. And so, eventually, I fell asleep.

  But, next morning, there was news.

  YET MORE WHITECHAPEL ATROCITIES WOMAN MURDERED NEAR COMMERCIAL ROAD WOMAN MURDERED IN ALDGATE THROATS CUT AND FACE SLASHED

  1 October 1888

  Two more women were found slain in London yesterday morning. The corpse of Elizabeth Stride was discovered in Berner Street, Whitechapel, with her head nearly severed from her body. Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square in Aldgate, in the City. Her throat had been cut and her body mutilated in the most hideous way.

  The gruesome injuries found on the past victims in this tragic series were almost exactly played out with these two new unfortunates. Both victims were known to be night wanderers and of a certain class.

  The murderer, who it seems is the same, lone lunatic, grows bolder with each crime. With unnerving precision, he slaughtered two in the same hour, under the night sky, his chosen charnel-house.

  No more is known at this time, and there is every likelihood no more will ever be known. It is impossible to avoid the depressing conclusion that the police will fail to find the murderer of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, as they have failed for Annie Chapman, Mary Ann Nichols, Martha Tabram and Emma Smith.

  The most agonising of the East End mysteries is the incompetent paralysis of the police, who flounder while the most vulnerable inhabitants of the East End must continue to live in fear.

  I could not deny that this ‘double event’, as the newspapers were calling it, had me enthralled, just as its gruesome precedents had. Reading the stories that Monday was a welcome distraction from my own troubles – or at least I allowed myself to see it as a distraction, despite the concerns about the increasingly bizarre situation I found myself in. I sent Sarah out at two-hourly intervals, bidding her come back with the new editions, and I took up residence in the back dining room, devouring the reports, clipping out the columns and pasting them into my scrapbook.

  Sarah also returned with snippets of gossip overheard at the newsstands. Ladies who had, like me, enjoyed their perverse slumming tours were now feeling rather differently, since the killer had moved beyond the East End and into the City. What an outrage! Sympathy for Long Liz and Kate appeared to be muted: to the comfortable of the west, these two latest victims morphed into a single composite image of a wretched, self-destructive, alcoholic whore, defined only by her fecklessness, poverty and diseases. This ‘other’ woman, this creature who must live at the bottom and stay there so they could keep their rightful place above, had begun to encroach into their territory.

  To return some dignity to Long Liz – or ‘Elizabeth the Melody’, as I came to see her – and to my sparrow-like Kate of want and plenty, I took up my notebook again. I had plenty of material. There were acres of newsprint on the poor women, and out of them I fashioned my own dramas, as I had with Little Lost Polly and Dark Annie. I wanted in my own way to accompany them through their last evening on this earth, grimy and lacking though it surely must have been. Who knew how long it would be before I joined their ranks.

  On the Berner Street yard where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found there was a club that was popular with socialists, political radicals and Jews. The evening of her murder, there’d been a debate on why all Jews should be socialists, and afterwards people had stayed on, singing and dancing late into the night. It was they who’d found Liz, flat on her back with her throat cut, lying in a slimy pool of congealing blood. The police treated every male among them as a suspect. They tore the club apart, even had the men stand in line so their hands could be examined for bloodstains. They banged on every nearby door, woke the sweatshop workers, cigarette makers and tailors and searched their houses too, accusing them of harbouring the murderer. This went on until five in the morning, by which time news had spread that a second body had been found a mile away.

  It was as if the killer had been disturbed on the first kill, and was so enraged, he determined to find another at all costs. Poor Kate Eddowes took full force; he slashed her throat, made a huge gash across her right cheek which severed the tip of her nose and part of her right earlobe – these tumbled out of her clothes when they were removed at the morgue – sliced her open from rectum to breastbone, and disembowelled her in a frenzy, pulling her entrails from her, tossing them over her shoulder and leaving them in a jellied heap on the pavement.

  By late evening, Sarah was bringing back tales of a surge in the heckling and goading of Jews on the streets, and even some attacks. Mobs had been heard chanting ‘Down with the Jews’. I wondered how Dr Shivershev would feel about that, if a privileged and educated Jewish man like him would feel the same fear as the sweated Jew on the street must, or if like us women, Jews relied on there being a lesser
kind of themselves to play the scapegoat. The police were clearly no closer to finding the perpetrator and one of the letters pages printed a solution that had me in fits of giggles: The police should be given noiseless boots so they can sneak up on the Whitechapel fellow.

  The real breakthrough came when an eyewitness emerged. Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew, had been walking down Berner Street at around the time Liz Stride was presumed to have been murdered. I pored over the descriptions, read them again and again, pictured Israel Schwartz in all his terror and wrote him into my little drama to try and fathom it better. Though Schwartz reported what he saw the police, the public called him a ‘hen-hearted coward’, for not intervening. I thought that a harsh judgement, what men stopped other men from beating their wives? No one called them cowards. Schwartz said he’d seen a man and a woman having an argument – the man being of medium height and broad shouldered and with dark hair, a full face and a small moustache. And there was a second man too – tall, at around five foot eleven, with brown hair, a moustache and a dark overcoat. There was no getting away from it: when I read these words, I saw Thomas and Dr Shivershev.

  *

  When Thomas eventually came home that evening, I waited for the truth to come out, but there was nothing. No explosion of outrage from him about the details of all that I’d shared, in confidence, with Dr Shivershev. No admission, even, that he’d met with Dr Shivershev. The uncertainty and disingenuousness was driving me insane. I was convinced I had seen the two of them together in the Princess Alice and yet now I doubted myself. I wondered why I continued with my inaction, when everything, every clue and warning, was telling me to run. What was I waiting for?

  The reality was, I still thought my fate unchangeable, as I always had. I had made plays at a career as a nurse, and then as a wife, but I carried the fear that I had no real place as either. I had to assume this was why I had found both so difficult to make successful. I had whipped up an ambition that didn’t belong to me, forced my way into a profession I didn’t suit and found a husband that shouldn’t be mine. I had set out consciously to trap someone I thought I could manage and now I was the fool who was trapped. All I could do was wait, resigned to the inevitable end.

  This was a story with an ending that had been written long ago. I had merely managed to defer it the first time. I somehow knew all along that I would meet my end at the hands of a violent man. Why else would the man with the gold tooth keep visiting me in my dreams? There was no point running, because wherever I went, I carried him with me.

  The man with the gold tooth had at one point merely been one of the many men in my mother’s bed. I would hide under the bed in our room in the Nichol when he came to visit, as I did with all of them.

  That night, I’d kept quiet as a mouse, as I’d been taught, even as the bed shook with my mother and the man above me. At first the noises had made sense – the rhythm, the business of fucking – but then my mother started to make strange gaspings and gurglings, and the bed jumped and bowed, almost touching my face. I lay there willing the floor to swallow me up.

  My mother’s white foot twitched in the way I’d seen a chicken twitch when its neck was broken. I was five years old and more scared than I’d ever been. I wet myself. The piss began trickling down my leg, but, young as I was, I knew I mustn’t let it pool on the floor and betray me. The man must not find out that I was there. I stuffed my fingers under my skirt, tried to stem the flow. But it came out anyway, hit the heel of the man’s boot and flowed around it like syrup.

  I was frozen, stiff as a board, when the man bent down to see where the water was coming from. His head was as big as a bear’s and the skin of his face was all jowly, like an upside-down bloodhound. There was a black beard and a pair of red, swollen eyes with bright blue circles. He grinned at me, showed me his gold tooth, and left.

  My mother’s foot hung over the side of the bed. For two days I watched as it turned from white to purple as the blood settled. I was meant to die in that room, but I didn’t because the landlord came to collect his rent. Pure chance.

  30

  There were now just three of us in the house, three souls living in purgatory, no more connected than floating pieces of driftwood. I could feel something coming; an oppressive cloud suffocated the house, filling every room, like the odorous fog that crept under the door. Cook had found another position in Kensington, and Sarah followed a week later. The gardener, who used to work for us on the second and fourth weekend of every month, simply stopped turning up. My house was shutting down from the inside, and those who were not in the eye of the storm could see it approaching and jumped. Autumn became winter, the house grew dark and cold, and everything inside it turned a listless shade of blue. Now that Mrs Wiggs had no one to bark orders at, the house fell silent.

  One evening, Thomas and I had an encounter on the landing. We stopped on sight of each other. I hesitated, I wasn’t sure why, and he took this as an invitation. He smiled at me, and I felt immediately guilty.

  ‘How are you, Susannah?’ he said.

  I ignored him. Even then, I feared that if I were to sympathise with him, I would be underneath him within the hour, if only for the sense of normality it might offer. I hurried into my bedroom, pressed my ear to the door and heard him come closer. I could sense him outside, knew his face was inches from my own. I put a hand over the handle and it turned a fraction. I held it still, felt him try to turn it the other side. I held my breath until he gave up and went away. I never knew if it was a performance; trick or truth.

  Another time we met in the hallway. He was about to leave and was wearing his long blue coat with the skin of thirty-two wolves. The sun was just rising and light was streaming through the glass either side of the front door. He made a thin silhouette, a slender black shape in a top hat with a black bag, and in this featureless shadow I could perceive the devil the papers wrote of. He tipped his hat, wished me a good morning, and left.

  I could not stop thinking about my grandmother’s words. They were like a generational curse to me now, the notion that my father’s badness – whatever that was – ran through me like black tar. I had begun to believe that the bad blood she spoke of had sought out my devilish husband, so that I had not acquired him consciously but in a prehistoric, animalistic way. I had found the husband I deserved. If we were both cut open, the badness would run from the both of us.

  One day in early November I heard voices near my bedroom door again. I crept over and took the key out of the lock, knelt down and squinted through the keyhole. I could see Mrs Wiggs’ head and shoulders. She was standing on the stairs. Thomas was on a higher step and I could make out his torso but not his head. Mrs Wiggs’ face was turned up to him in blind adulation, as if he were the son of God; a religious rapture. She reached up an open palm, and in a gesture of tenderness extended it lovingly towards his face – or so I had to assume. Thomas put up an arm, I supposed to cover her hand with his own, also in affection.

  I fell back in shock. My first reaction was disgust, but when I looked again, I understood that the gesture was not passionate but maternal. Even so, this was not normal, surely, between nannies and their adult charges?

  The intensity of their mutual devotion bothered me. I made it my new vocation to study them and drew up mental notes of their physical attributes. They were both tall and slim, with loping strides and a swift gait, but it was their ears I became obsessed by. Thomas had such small and feminine ears, with barely any lobes at all, and so did Mrs Wiggs. I had a suspicion that somehow they shared blood. That was the epiphany I needed.

  The next day I wrote a letter to Mr Radcliffe, my solicitor. I told him I would need to return to Reading imminently and I would be taking ownership of my house so the tenants would need evicting. I would find work as a private nurse or in the hospital, even the workhouse infirmary if I had to. I could forge a reference, but maybe I wouldn’t need to. Matron might provide one now that several months had passed since she’d fired me. I would take
in lodgers in the upstairs rooms and live downstairs as landlady. I posted the letter.

  Some days later, I returned home from an outing to the shops to discover an envelope addressed to me on the sideboard. I tore it open in a frenzy. I thought it was from Mabel and took that to be a good omen, but when I saw it was from Dr Shivershev my heart sank. I had missed our last appointment. It had been a long while already since I had told him everything like a babbling child. In the letter he asked if I was well, said he had concerns for my safety, and requested that I come in to confirm my good health. I threw the letter into the fire and made sure it burned down to nothing.

  All of them were wicked tormentors and schemers, liars and murderers. Perhaps when I was free, I would find the courage to write a letter to the police, anonymously of course, and tell them everything. I would give names and dates.

  There was a real possibility that Thomas would hunt me down in Reading, harass me and demand I return to him. I was his property after all. I needed to protect myself from this dire eventuality. Thomas could only be hurt in two ways: financially or by reputation. I had no money or way of disinheriting him or damaging his income, and besides, he was doing a fine job of that by himself. I would have to target his reputation. I needed something compelling with which I could threaten to shame him publicly, something to keep him on the back foot and far away from me, something that neither he nor Mrs Wiggs would want to risk drawing attention to.

  31

  Not long after the clock struck nine, the front door slammed, and sent its thunderous crack through the house, making the legs of my bed shake. I was ready. I looked outside and saw Thomas striding down the garden path. Mrs Wiggs had retired to her bedroom just after eight.