When I woke on the first day, I screamed, as anyone would have, at the discovery that my wrists and ankles were bound by leather straps. I was trapped, tethered to the bed like a lunatic at the asylum. Hearing my shrieks, Mrs Wiggs and Thomas both marched in, one behind the other, like stoic little guards at Buckingham Palace. They stood at the foot of my bed, side by side, and when I begged to be told what was going on, it was Mrs Wiggs who spoke. Thomas just stared at me with flat, dead eyes, a raised eyebrow, and both hands in his pockets.
‘You were dressed as a man and you attacked me,’ she said. ‘I feared for my life.’
‘You have made a habit of hurting yourself,’ said Thomas. ‘It is only a matter of time before this escalates. It looks like we caught this just in time. This type of condition is… progressive.’
Mrs Wiggs looked at him and he looked at her, and she left the room. Thomas and I were alone. I stared at him, I don’t think I even blinked, while his eyes moved over the floorboards and his hands stayed buried in his pockets. He didn’t meet my gaze once, not without Mrs Wiggs there to protect him. When she came back, she was carrying a silver tray. In my enduring stupidity, I assumed it was my breakfast.
‘Where did you go last night, Susannah?’ asked Thomas.
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ I said. ‘Your turn first.’
Mrs Wiggs cleared her throat, nervously and needlessly. She walked to the dresser and tinkered with something metallic. It made a clattering noise.
Thomas drew breath and started a monologue; I had the feeling he’d been rehearsing this for some time.
‘Mrs Wiggs has informed me of your bizarre adventures. Those who love you are very concerned, Susannah, and have been for some while, but it is time to face the fact that your condition is getting worse. I had hoped you would settle into marriage. I can only imagine it’s the combination of traumas you have endured – the adjustment to your new surroundings, and your upbringing – and that this has expressed itself in unhealthy behaviours, obsessions with murders and such. You are very sick indeed.’
‘Just because you say the words aloud doesn’t make them true. I’m no sicker than you.’
‘Oh, but you are, Susannah. You are very sick – so much so that we can’t look after you any more. You have become a danger to yourself and others.’
‘Oh God, go on, how on earth am I a danger to you, Thomas? Please, I’m dying to hear.’
‘I’m referring to your relationship with Nurse Barnard, Susannah. There, I’ve said it. There’s no ignoring it any more. You are… morally defective. It was an unhealthy interest and the hospital proved the perfect breeding ground for it. Women like Matron Luckes don’t understand the degree to which they encourage such unnatural friendships between women with their adoption of masculine ambitions. They don’t see the damage they cause with their careers and pursuits outside of the home.’
‘Where did you gather your opinions on all of this – from the surgeons’ lounge?’
‘Oh, please, it was common gossip at the hospital. There are always the odd ones who prefer the company of their own gender. “Susannah is in love with me,” I said. But I was naive. I was unable to see; being besotted, I failed to identify such a clear case of moral insanity – and myself a doctor!’
‘One of several ironies!’ I threw him a cold, sarcastic smile. ‘What treatment do you recommend? Are you going to tie me up for ever like a prisoner? Are you going to lock me away in your attic?’
‘Mrs Wiggs said she would look after you, and we had hoped we could care for you at home, which is certainly a lot less expensive, but you’ve made that impossible. Your illness is much worse than we anticipated.’
‘There is nothing wrong with me – any doctor worth his salt will see this. You can’t just have me locked away. There are laws.’
He sat down beside me and brushed the hair from my face. I shrank from him, but the restraints held me rigid. I could only turn my head.
‘Do you remember when you smashed your head in the looking glass and scared Mrs Wiggs to death? She thought you were possessed. Then you threw yourself down the stairs. And what about your wanderings around Whitechapel in searching of the murderer? Dr Shivershev even saw you in the Ten Bells, of all places. Do you know how embarrassed I was when he told me that? This macabre determination to loiter on streets with whores and murderers, the hysterical behaviour that drove the household staff away, your tearing your room apart and accusing Mrs Wiggs of stealing a bloody hairbrush. In front of the servants too. For crying out loud, Susannah, how can you not see that you are very ill? And the finale of last night, dressing up in men’s clothes. I must accept that I cannot treat you myself.’
I wanted to scream and shout and call him a liar, tell him that I knew exactly where he’d been the night before and had seen his own debauchery myself, but I knew to keep my mouth shut. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t be twisted to suit his story.
‘You know, I thought you avoided intimacy because you were naive, but now I understand you had… other preferences. I couldn’t help but blame myself when I learned that you threw yourself down the stairs because you thought you might be carrying my child.’
‘That’s a lie!’
‘I try and tell myself it isn’t your fault, that it’s the disease.’
I didn’t answer. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from screaming at him, so I shut my eyes. But he carried on.
‘Of course, knowing what we know about your mother, how you were born a bastard, without a father, and her still a child, it’s clear that this is hereditary feeblemindedness. We should be thankful that there will be no more children to inherit your defective inclinations.’
I couldn’t help myself: I opened my eyes, and saw that he was laughing at me. There was only one person who could have told him about my mother – Dr Shivershev. It was the biggest betrayal of all. I was such a fool for trusting him. I felt my cheeks turn purple and my body tremble at the thought of his name. I’d kept my mouth shut about Mabel, just as he’d requested. All in it together. Not bloody likely. All the time I’d wasted in not running away, because I was worried about being poor again, that was my own fault. Men would always stick together. I’d been an idiot to think any different.
‘You were naughty not to tell me, Susannah.’
He winked at me. I could have ripped the skin from his cheeks with my nails. It was the self-assured gloating of a winner, of a man who would always win. I spat in his face, a token act well worth whatever consequence it prompted; anything to dislodge his smug expression. He stood up, disgusted, and wiped my saliva from his jaw.
‘We will try our best, to manage your… aggression.’
Mrs Wiggs came towards me carrying the tray from the dresser. On it was a large metal syringe and a rubber tube. They were going to inject me.
‘Thomas, for God’s sake, you can’t really intend to let her use that on me?’ I kicked up the bedclothes and struggled, but Thomas pinned me down. I screamed and called for Sarah.
‘All the servants are gone, Susannah. Remember how you frightened them? Please calm down…’ His face hung down over me – saggy-skinned, like a bloodhound, just as it had been that night in the coach, the night of Annie Chapman’s murder, just like the man with the gold tooth. I tried to recall all the details, all the dates: the nights he’d gone missing; each murder. I would need to recount all the facts when I found someone who would listen.
The rubber was pulled tight against the skin of my arm. Thomas barked instructions at Mrs Wiggs as he sat on me and held me down while the fluid forced its way into my blood. When it hit me, a pressure at the back of my skull, I thought my eyeballs would burst. A rush swirled about my head, and a smothering darkness like a wet sackcloth was draped across my face. All the lines and edges softened, and everything fell together into one soft cloud.
‘It’s the best way of getting it into you, Susannah. Relax and enjoy it.’
Their faces went l
umpy and misshapen. Their outlines leaked into the air around them, liquefying. I fell, backwards, deeper, into the bed and into the floor. My limbs became heavy, melted.
My last memory was of Mrs Wiggs as she said to Thomas, ‘Is this really necessary?’
*
Mrs Wiggs drugged me several times a day after that and was terrible at it. Her hands shook, and she was both brutal and hesitant at the same time. I was bruised up and down both arms. I kept offering fresh pieces of flesh for her to mutilate. She didn’t trust me at first, was suspicious that with my nursing background I was trying to fool her in some way. But after a few days she realised I was genuinely trying to save myself the pain and her the bother. The process was painful for her to administer as well as for me on the receiving end.
When I offered to do it myself, under her supervision, she hesitated for a moment, then untied my restraints and observed me as I injected the muscle in my thigh. After that, she didn’t restrain my wrists at all, just left the ankle binds in place. I was still very much tied to the bed, couldn’t reach far or escape. I had to kneel on the edge of the bed to use the chamber pot on the floor. Mrs Wiggs struggled with the indignity of that more than I did. I’d been treated little better than an animal in that bedroom many times before, so why would taking a shit over a pot bother me?
The laudanum delivered under the muscle had an intense, stupefying effect at first, but quickly faded. My secret little habit had rewarded me with tolerance. I looked forward to my injections; they broke up the boredom and the tyranny of my own punishing thoughts. I was docile, quiet and obedient, which I’m sure Mrs Wiggs attributed to the drugs, but after the first few days I was a lot more coherent and lucid than she realised. It was the only advantage I had. I did think about throwing a shit at Thomas, should he come through the door, but knew that it wouldn’t do me any good in the long run.
I was saving my energy for when I’d be put in front of someone who wasn’t under his influence. I would need to choose my words very carefully, so that anything I said could not be used in the argument against me. There could be no mention of my husband being the Whitechapel murderer, or talk of Mabel and her baby being cut out and put into glass jars, or accounts of fighting with Mrs Wiggs over a bloody hairbrush. I had an interest in the murders, but, I would say to the doctor who interviewed me, did not his own wife read the newspapers? Had not his own daughters been to visit the murder spots? If they were to lock me away for having a macabre interest in the slaughter of prostitutes, they would have to put half of the ladies of London away too. Thomas did have connections, though; he was a physician at the hospital, after all. And Mrs Wiggs had been with the Lancasters for years. Who was I? Who knew anything of me?
I didn’t see Thomas for many days after that first morning, until one day much later he came and spoke to Mrs Wiggs through a gap in the door. He told her she would need to reduce the dosage, as I was to be awake when Dr Shivershev came to assess me.
‘He won’t sign if he thinks we’re drugging her,’ I heard him say. ‘He’s being difficult, argumentative. He is one of God’s chosen people, after all; he can be a pious little bastard. I can manage him, just make sure she’s awake.’
As the dosage got lower and lower, the syrup sludge in my brain cleared. I was kept company at all times by Mrs Wiggs, who sat on a chair at the foot of my bed. I ignored her at first, and she ignored me, concentrated on the needlework on her lap. She squinted as she sewed, her face pinched and screwed together, the lines across her forehead deeper than I had seen. She was anxious, worried.
‘You need spectacles,’ I said. The light was clear and bright, the weather cold and brittle. The pale light leached the colour from the room and turned everything black and white, like a photograph, but it was she who was in shadow. I was a ghostly white, translucent; only my bruises gave me colour.
She looked up at me, caught me with those heavy lids. ‘You know, Susannah, I think you’re right.’
‘Whatever happened to “Mrs Lancaster”?’
She sighed. ‘It was never a name for you, my dear,’ she said, and returned to her sewing.
*
We started to exchange words, little more than two cats that hissed at each other, but it was better than silence. It was dull, routine conversation, about the weather and how cold it was getting, or how she was struggling to keep the house clean without any help. I asked if there was any news on the Whitechapel murders, but she said she wasn’t following the reports. To my surprise, later that afternoon, she came back with the day’s newspapers. I struggled to focus, my eyes danced about and I couldn’t see the words properly because of the drugs, so she read them to me. She read very well, putting energy and feeling into it as if she were reading a story. She raised her eyebrows in shock and wrinkled her nose as she became involved. She explained how a series of letters had been written by the killer himself – exciting, but I was sure it was a hoax. There had been three all in all, and now the Whitechapel man had a new name: Jack the Ripper.
‘Jack the Ripper? Much better than Leather Apron, I think. Like Spring-Heeled Jack, but it is not very… sophisticated. I wonder what the real killer thinks of it.’
‘Sophisticated? What a strange mind you have, Susannah. I cannot think how a man who goes about the business of ripping street walking women is concerned about whether or not he is deemed sophisticated. I should imagine such a monster is not capable of lucid thought at all. But it has caught on, all the papers now refer to him as “the Ripper”,’ she said.
She told me how Kate Eddowes was found to have been missing a kidney. Half a kidney had been sent to the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and the other half, the letter said, Jack had fried and ate. Mrs Wiggs didn’t like that bit.
There was still no clue as to who the murderer really was, just a lot of suspects, and theories, all of them barking mad or desperate. Not once did Mrs Wiggs intimate that she knew of the things I’d told Dr Shivershev about Thomas. Had Dr Shivershev kept those details to himself? But why would he tell Thomas about my mother and then hold back from that?
‘They will catch him eventually,’ she said.
‘I doubt that very much. He’ll have died of old age before they get round to working it out.’
‘I wouldn’t mention these theories too much where you’re going,’ she said.
‘Where am I going?’ I asked.
She put her newspaper down on her lap in a crumpled mess, gave a heavy sigh and stood up. With the key to my bedroom, which she kept tied to her wrist with a red ribbon, she unlocked the door and went out. A few minutes later she returned with a pamphlet and handed it to me. It had a drawing of a grand house in parkland, and bonneted ladies with their hands in muffs walking in pairs on the grass in front of a lake. It was called Aphra House and it was in Surrey.
‘It’s only for ladies. I had to press quite hard for Thomas to consider this place – it’s not the cheapest. You’ll be well cared for, if you behave and don’t babble on about this Jack the Ripper or silly hairbrushes. It will be just like the hospital, except this time you will be the one being cared for. Now, doesn’t that sound lovely?’
‘What did Thomas want to do with me?’ I asked, but she was looking at the leaflet, pleased with her selection.
Her eyes flicked towards me, back to the leaflet. I knew she’d heard.
‘Mrs Wiggs, what did my husband propose to do with me?’
Still she didn’t answer.
‘I’m going to leave you for a while. Here, look at the pamphlet, you might be happy there. Didn’t you marry him to be looked after? Can you not think of this as a different answer to the same question?’ She locked the door behind her.
This was how it went for days. We would talk and she would bring me food, though I barely ate. But as soon as I started with the questions, she would make her excuses and leave, locking the door behind her.
‘Why?’ I asked many times. ‘Why me? What did I do?’
I begged her
to tell me, sometimes I shouted at her, but she never reacted, only pretended not to hear. One day, when she came to tie the rubber tube around my arm, instead of being docile, I knocked the tray and sent it crashing to the ground.
She glared at me, exasperated but silent, and stooped to pick up everything off the floor. ‘Don’t be like this, Susannah. I shall have to get Thomas to help me bind your hands again, and he will be less patient than me. Is that what you want?’
‘I want to know why. Thomas chased me, he begged me to marry him – three times. There were other nurses, lots of them, so why me?’
‘What does it matter?’ she said.
‘I’m begging you!’
She inhaled deeply and brushed down her skirts before sitting herself in the chair at the foot of my bed.
‘Very well, if it means you’ll stop asking. Thomas was engaged to a very beautiful, charming, talented and well-connected young woman. It was a passionate affair – too passionate, as they were both of a fiery nature. Her father is the 1st Earl of Halsbury, a judge and a government minister, among other things. There was an understanding between the families that there would be a marriage, but Thomas didn’t want to wed. The whole affair had gone too far, however, and there was a great risk of embarrassment for both families if the union didn’t go ahead.
‘His sister Helen is a strategist, a very shrewd young woman, and politically she had to insist the marriage go ahead. Thomas begged her to help un-arrange the arrangement, so to speak. If he married that girl, he knew he would be under the command of her father, he would be reduced to a mere whipping boy in a family much wealthier than his. Thomas needs to be free – oh, Susannah, he would have been miserable as the henpecked husband in the house of an earl – but Helen wouldn’t hear of it. There was no elegant way to exit such a partnership without causing scandal and animosity, not that Thomas ever cared about the fragility of such relationships. So, you understand, he married you in a somewhat prolonged fit of temper. Helen was livid of course, and humiliated, but it was the only way to put an end to the matter. That is why you have never met Thomas’s family, and why there was never going to be a visit here or to Abbingdale Hall.’
People of Abandoned Character Page 25
