‘I still don’t understand – why me?’
‘Because you are no one, Susannah. You have no immediate family, no relatives, no benefactor, no one to cause inconvenience or ask questions. Thomas had affection for you, he spoke fondly of you, but he’s so special, you understand, his attention could never be engaged by an ordinary woman. If it could not be kept by a great beauty – the daughter of an earl, no less – it was never going to be kept by you. I knew it wouldn’t work. He bores easily. It’s a sign of great intellect, some say. I did try and tell him it wouldn’t end well, but when he gets an idea into his head, as you well know…’
She bent down to pick up the remaining contents of the tray. When she stood up again, I was staring past the wall.
‘See?’ she said. ‘This has upset you. Sometimes it’s best not to ask, in case you receive an answer.’ She gazed down at me, tethered as I was to my bed, with such pity, I felt a torrent of rage.
‘I saw you together,’ I told her. ‘I saw you on the stairs. You called him “Thomas” and stroked his face.’
The look of pity disappeared, and her face assumed its stony-faced owl expression.
‘You have a monstrous mind,’ she said. Her hands trembled and she threw the tray to the floor with a crash, scattering those things she’d already picked up. She stalked out, slammed the door and locked it shut behind her.
33
By November, Mrs Wiggs had taken off my ankle restraints. It was not an act of kindness, but to give the marks on my skin time to recover ahead of my visit from Dr Shivershev. I assumed he was needed to co-sign the lunacy order that would have me confined. I was still locked in my bedroom, but I made no attempt to escape. What would be the point? The outside world was as inhospitable as a snow-covered mountain. I had neither the money nor the resources to survive by myself. Locked in my bedroom was where I was most comfortable, and the laudanum numbed me. I was not frightened of my captors, though I should have been. It was my cowardice that kept me trapped. I could have opened a window and screamed for help; that would have brought the police. I could have climbed down, but I didn’t. What would the police have done? Most likely hand-deliver me back to my husband.
Thomas himself looked remarkably different the next time I saw him. His black whiskers were back to perfect symmetry, the silver sparkle in his eye had returned, and Mrs Wiggs was behind him, his eager shadow.
‘You don’t think she looks too thin?’ He addressed Mrs Wiggs as if I wasn’t in the room.
‘Well, what would you have me do?’
‘Pale, she looks pale.’
‘Isn’t that the point? She’s not meant to look well, is she?’
‘You don’t understand!’ he shouted suddenly, making both of us start. ‘He won’t sign if… He won’t sign if he thinks she’s being mistreated.’
He peered at me as if I were a specimen, hands clasped behind his back like a doddering old lord inspecting his rose bushes.
‘How are her arms?’ He grabbed one of my hands and pulled up the sleeve of my nightdress to see where Mrs Wiggs had been injecting me. Both arms were a riot of bruises, albeit fading ones.
‘No! What have I told you!’ he shouted.
‘I’m trying my best, Thomas,’ she said, on the brink of tears.
‘She looks as if she’s been bloody tortured!’ He dropped my hand. ‘No more injections! Tincture only. We have to let the bruising go down. Dr Shivershev wants to see her this week and when he comes, make sure she has her sleeves rolled down.’
‘Tincture? Which bottle is that?’
I had never seen them like this: fractured, bickering. They were like a pair of old seagulls snapping at each other.
As I stared at the two of them, in silhouette, free to observe them uninterrupted, I had a startling revelation. A realisation that should have been plain as day but had taken my confinement to see what was right in front of me. Thomas’s hairline had a lopsided widow’s peak. I knew that, of course. It was quite distinctive. Now that I was looking at Mrs Wiggs right alongside him, I saw immediately that her hairline followed the same shape. It was the same hairline exactly, a bizarre coincidence, or inherited… How blind must I have been to only see this now.
‘The green bottle,’ he spat.
‘What good is that to me! You know this!’ she shouted back.
‘The green bastard bottle, the one with the cork in it! For God’s sake!’ He stomped out of the room. Minutes later, the front door slammed.
Mrs Wiggs was once again left alone with me, shaking her head and muttering under her breath.
‘Very well,’ she said to herself. She picked up the green glass bottle on the dresser and set it down again next to me on my nightstand.
I waited until she’d left, then fetched my own drops from the drawer in the same nightstand. My own bottle, a brown glass one, was exactly the same as theirs, with a cork in it, only the colour was different. I knew that Thomas struggled with distinguishing between reds, greens and browns sometimes. And now I wondered whether Mrs Wiggs had the same problem.
I left the two bottles side by side and waited for her to come back. When she returned and spotted them next to each other, she stopped, her confused eyes darted from one to the other.
‘What is this?’ she asked.
‘I had my own bottle. I wanted to see how similar it was, that’s all. It’s the green one, he said. Mine is brown.’
She hesitated. As hard as she looked, she could not tell the difference. That was the proof I needed. Mrs Wiggs was colour-blind, just like Thomas. Colour-blindness, I had learned at the hospital, was an inherited condition, passed along the maternal line, as it had been in this instance too, from mother to son. I had no understanding of how, but the science spoke for itself.
‘He’s your son, isn’t he?’ I said. I had butterflies in my stomach and only dared to whisper it.
Mrs Wiggs’ mouth hung open at words which, I guessed, had never before been said aloud.
‘What are you gibbering about? You are a lunatic, nothing but a sick lunatic. You don’t know anything!’
‘Thomas is colour-blind too. You’re his mother, aren’t you? You are both tall, you have the same hairline, practically the same ears, you stroked his face on the stairs, and now you call him “Thomas”. When you pushed me down the stairs, it was because you didn’t want a child dragged into this mess, not now, not your own grandchild born in an asylum. Was that why? I don’t know how, but you are his mother. I know it, and so will a doctor. What will you do if someone should put this to the test?’
She glared at the bottles, unsure of how they had betrayed her. To me it made perfect sense – all her adoration and fawning, the unnatural closeness between them – but then something else struck me, something I hadn’t even considered.
‘What happened to the real Lancaster boy? What happened? You didn’t kill him, did you? You killed him! Oh my God. You murdered a child and replaced him with your own.’
‘Shut up!’ She had both balled fists up by her temples and her eyes were screwed up as if she couldn’t stand to hear anything I was saying.
‘Let me go!’ I said. ‘Let me go now, this minute, and I won’t tell a soul.’
She flew at me from across the room, her arms flailing, her voice wailing. She started to beat me about the head and face. I tried to protect myself with my arms over my head, my head down. She kept on screaming and pummelling me.
‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’ she shrieked, over and over again.
‘You are bruising me again!’ I shouted. ‘What will your son say when he sees!’
At that, she stopped, as abruptly as she’d started. Her eyes were vicious and round, her chest was rising and falling at pace, and her shaking hands were clenched by her side. I thought she was going to kill me; instead, she hastened out of the room and locked me in again.
*
If Thomas were to discover that I knew the truth, the sordid details of his own background, his fabricated family
history, I would never get out of that house alive, I was sure of it. I lay in bed and turned over the new information in my mind. All those years he’d been a cuckoo in the Lancaster house. He was no better than me – no wonder we found each other. We did fit, after all.
I needed to act. I went over to the door, hoping for inspiration, some way to make my escape. The keyhole was blocked; Mrs Wiggs had left the key inside the lock. When I put my little finger in it, I could feel the metal stump.
I had to find a way to get to Reading. I needed to talk to my solicitor, not the police, who would only speak to my husband, and it would be my word against his. My solicitor could help me to raise hellfire at the Lancaster estate; he could send a letter to Helen, telling her what I knew for certain and promising that I would share my explosive information with the world. The threat of such a scandal, along with all the other details I had learned, would surely call Thomas off. Even if nothing came of it, it might be enough to keep him away from me. I knew that even if he convinced Dr Shivershev to sign the lunacy order, the order would only last for seven days. I only had to get out of the house and hide until the order expired.
Having Dr Shivershev in my head put me in mind of his housekeeper and the trick she’d used to break into his office. Might that work for me too?
I dressed, slipped a silk scarf under the door, took a rolled-up piece of paper, poked it into the keyhole and pushed the key out. When it fell, I very carefully tugged the scarf to where the gap under the door was biggest, and retrieved the key!
I didn’t know where Mrs Wiggs was, she could have been anywhere in the house, so I opted for the fastest exit: the front door was mere feet away from the bottom of the stairs, and from there it would only take a minute to reach the end of the road.
As I ran down the stairs, I made the mistake of glancing into the front dining room. Thomas’s black medical bag was on the table. He might come home at any second, but the pragmatist in me said there could be money in his bag. I had no plan for how I would get to Reading, and no money for the train. I would rummage through his bag and give myself to the count of five; if nothing came of it, I would go.
I reached into his bag and straightaway put my hand on something damp in the bottom corner. When I withdrew my fingers, they were wet and red with blood. I delved back in, disgusted but curious, and pulled out a parcel wrapped in bleeding wet newspaper. Inside it was a white cloth, seeping blood. I unwrapped it and into the palm of my hand fell what looked like a soft muscle. It seemed to me very much like a human organ. Was there more in the bag? I felt inside it once again, and nearly sliced my thumb on the thin, sharp blade of a long knife. I laid the knife on the table alongside the bloody package and looked up towards the door. Standing there was Mrs Wiggs. I had forgotten to count to five.
She had blocked the doorway with her body, and her hands were resting on either side of the doorframe. ‘Susannah,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper. We’d been getting on so much better, but you really should be in bed.’
‘You have to let me leave,’ I said. There might have been the ticking of a clock, or it might have been inside my head; it might have been an alarm that was telling me to run and push past her now, because I knew, as she did, she would never let me go.
‘Thomas will be home shortly with your physician. Dr Shivershev wants to see you for himself, he wants to see how ill you are. You have to go back to bed. Upstairs, now!’
‘I’m not going back up there.’
‘Thomas gave clear instructions—’
‘Oh, stop it! I can’t bear it any more. I know what you are. You are a murderer, and Thomas is nothing but a fraud and a criminal. You have lied for long enough. It is you who are his mother, not Lady Lancaster. You let me go now, and I will keep your dirty little secrets. That is the deal I will make with you.’
She held me in her owl stare. There was a drumming, a dull thud. I could not tell if it was my own heart I could hear beating, or hers. I looked at the organ in the bloodstained cloth on the table and picked up the silver knife lying beside it.
‘I could ask what your son is doing with human organs, and no doubt the police will have their own theories on that. I will keep this to myself as well, only let me go.’
‘Oh, you’re wrong!’ She rushed forward, and I backed away.
I held the knife up with the point towards her. She came to a stop with her hands on the back of a chair.
‘Thomas is not a criminal! He is a loving boy. You don’t know anything!’ She stepped forward again and I moved back, the knife in front of me, pointed at her chest, inches between us.
‘Let me go,’ I said.
She shook her head and I knew we were both prepared to hurt the other. Mrs Wiggs would never let me go; she could never let Thomas down.
She rushed at me and I waved the knife; she tried to block it with her hand and I slashed her with it. It was a strange thing to find myself instinctively behaving as a criminal would. A second’s action, a quick flash, a little swipe and the willingness to do anything, and I was changed for ever.
We both gasped. She stared at the blood dripping down from her palm and onto the carpet, held it with her other hand and turned to me, seemingly not in any pain.
‘You know, this behaviour of yours will only further strengthen Thomas’s plan,’ she said. ‘Dr Shivershev will be sure to agree now. You are only proving that you really are dangerous.’
‘And when I tell whoever will listen that you murdered the Lancaster boy and replaced him with your own? You can’t hide being colour-blind – what will you do if they test you both? I can’t be the only one to have had doubts, to have noticed things. What if Helen has had the same suspicions all these years? Imagine. I’m sure she’ll be keen to inherit everything.’
I was close to the door to the hallway and I had only the front door to get to.
‘If you were a mother, you would understand,’ she said, creeping towards me.
‘No, I would never hurt a baby.’
‘I have never harmed a child in my life!’ she shouted, tears filling her eyes.
‘But you must have.’
‘I never could! The little boy was ailing – they are not robust people, the Lancasters, you only have to look at them to see that money doesn’t buy strength. Helen, the little girl, was well enough, but the boy was sickly from birth. I found him in his crib one morning, blue, already dead. I was so frightened. I was twenty-two years old – a girl! I had left my own boy with the baby farmer. I couldn’t feed both of us any other way. My child’s father was in the navy, left on a ship and I never heard from him again, so what was I to do? What good could have come from telling the truth? I did what any mother would have done. I took the Lancaster boy and I buried him that night in the place they call paradise. I fetched my own baby and placed him in the nursery; he was older by four weeks, but I knew Lady Lancaster would never notice, she barely held her own children.’
She looked me full in the face now, a little smile playing on her lips. ‘So now that you know the truth, we can find a way to be in this together. Wouldn’t life be better with no secrets, Susannah? No shame. We can make our own family, can’t we? Even if it is lies that bind us, and not blood. I’ll live with it.’
‘I’m leaving.’ I was getting closer to the front door, still holding the knife in front of me.
‘Let me talk to Thomas,’ she called after me. It looked as though she would let me go. ‘Think of Abbingdale, Susannah. I know you haven’t seen it, but it’s worth waiting for, and one day it will all be his. Think of the money – isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘Your son is a monster. I want nothing to do with either of you.’
I ran to the front door and snatched at the handle. Of course it was locked, but the key was still in it. I did not have time to turn it and Mrs Wiggs was coming for me, so I carried on running. I missed her grasping hands and slipped past her down the hallway, down the pantry steps and into the kitchen. I was almost at th
e back door when she grabbed my hair and pulled me backwards.
I whipped around, bent over, tried to free my hair with one hand and with the other brandished the knife blindly. I felt it slide into her soft belly, under her stays. She made a noise as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She let go of my hair and stepped backwards. We both pulled away from each other, like boxers at the sound of the bell. I saw the handle sticking out of her abdomen. The blood spread like ink into her dress, slowly at first, and then it surged in all directions as it flooded down her skirts. What had I done? Her owl eyes were large and amber. I saw my grandmother in her face: shock, betrayal and resentment.
‘Oh no, Susannah! No, no, no! Now you will never be free,’ she said, as tears fell down her cheeks.
She dropped to the floor and lay on her back, groaning, clutching her abdomen. I sat on my knees beside her and waited as she bled to death. I heard a buzzing noise and looked about to find where it was coming from. A fly was dancing at the window, trying to find a route out. As Mrs Wiggs lay dying, I stood up and opened the window so it could go free. It seemed like the right thing to do.
34
Seeing the fly like that struck me as significant. It was a sign, I was being watched, the things I had done would not go unnoticed even if only by the divine. Back in Reading when my grandmother was still alive and I was entirely under her influence, she and I had been at church on a Sunday, as we always were. It was January and bitterly cold, and I was sitting in the pew next to her, enduring the sermon and staring up at the windows.
People of Abandoned Character Page 26
