People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  ‘Nothing. I’m only praying.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that.’

  He made jagged wounds in the arms. I described the shapes that I had read about in the papers and felt dizzy. I thought of my grandfather, and wondered if the dizziness was my soul leaving my body along with any goodness that was left from him or if it was just the awful stench of burning clothes as Mary fed the fire.

  Dr Shivershev was still too skilful, the work should be rougher, I said. He tutted, then severed the tissues of the neck all the way down to the bone. The blood seeped out, a leak as opposed to a flow. All the while, Mary sat facing the fire, rocking backwards and forwards. The flames jumped and spat and threatened to burn the wall above them. He removed the uterus and kidneys and left these, with one of the breasts, under the head. He threw the other breast by the right foot and placed the liver between the feet, removed the intestines and threw them down on the right side, and the spleen on the left. Mary continued to sing, her weak voice running through me.

  ‘Do you really have to keep singing that? Surely it will irritate your neighbours, as it irritates me,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ she said.

  Dr Shivershev flicked blood so it made lines up the right side of the wall, to imitate the spurt of the artery. He sat down and stared at his bloody hands and forearms, wiped his forehead with a clean patch of arm. There was blood on his shirt. He threw his knife down on the nightstand, then took the long silver one, the one he’d pointed at me in the attic. This time, he held it by the blade with the handle towards me.

  ‘It’s your turn now,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘I cannot do it. I was a nurse not a surgeon.’

  ‘Take the knife. I wish to change instruments, I need you to assist me,’ he said.

  ‘Why am I to do it? If it’s Mary who’s escaping, why not let her assist you?’

  Mary tutted, turned her face to the fire again, and whispered, ‘I told you, she will get us all killed.’

  ‘Mary is not of the profession,’ said Dr Shivershev. ‘I said I would let you go in exchange for assistance. Well, this is the assistance I need. I need to know I can trust you and for that you must be more than complicit. We must be in this together. Do not play the defenceless little maid, Susannah. I’m afraid the part doesn’t suit you. Now, take the knife,’ he said, ‘and, Mary, keep singing.’

  I looked at the knife. I thought of all the things I could do, other than take it: scream, flee, even dive through the window and run down the passageway of broken glass. It was a simple thing, was it not, to take a knife from someone’s grasp? Mrs Wiggs was not the first to die by my hand. Perhaps that was why I was able to do what I did. My grandmother was right: there was a badness in me, the vermin in the yeast, the tar in the blood.

  I stared at Dr Shivershev’s wet hands, slick with the blood and matter from the open carcass that had once been Mrs Wiggs. I took a cloth from his bag and, holding it across my open palms, let him place the knife on top, then I cleaned it of Mrs Wiggs’ blood.

  He pointed at the knife he wanted to swap it for and I passed it to him. I moved to stand beside him as he discussed what should be done next, and between us we agreed that it would be prudent to cut away Mrs Wiggs’ nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears. He sliced the lips with incisions down to the chin and I suggested he make some nicks like the ones found on Catherine Eddowes and written about in the newspapers.

  I had always thought of myself as an inherently good person, but I assumed now that this was how all monsters felt. I watched as my physician cut into the woman who had brushed my hair and fussed about my not having any calling cards, and knew I could not be good. I was a different kind. There was something innately bad inside me, because I was willing to do absolutely anything to save my own skin. Whether it was to remain silent under a bed, poison an old woman, or stab another and allow them to be mutilated after death. I did not feel the weight of this yet, and I wondered when and if the gravity of the things I had done would touch me.

  I accepted this and then we agreed that Dr Shivershev should reduce the right thigh down to the bone. He also stripped the left thigh of the skin and the muscles as far as the knee. There was an age difference of what we guessed might be some twenty years; we needed her body to be so damaged that it would be indistinguishable from that of a twenty-seven-year-old. Dr Shivershev finished by hacking and slashing indiscriminately at any uncut flesh. Together, we made a very good Ripper.

  When we had finished, he removed her heart and handed it to Mary, who, with shaking hands, wrapped it in a cloth and made a package covered in newspaper.

  ‘It is for Mary’s appointment, by request,’ Dr Shivershev said. ‘Someone wants the heart of a young virgin. I’m afraid Mrs Wiggs will have to do.’

  By the time we’d finished, what was left of Mrs Wiggs looked to have been torn through a machine. We stepped away, blood on the both of us, but since she was dead when we began cutting, the majority had pooled and collected in a congealed swamp under the bed.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, and rearranged her legs to fit with what I assumed to be a natural position for a prostitute to be found in. I splayed them wide apart at an angle befitting a whore of the lowest order. I did not mean to offend anyone or upset them, I certainly didn’t wish to slight any more of Mrs Wiggs’ dignity, I was merely posing her in what I thought would make the scene impressive, in the most dramatic sense. To make up for this slur against her remains, I arranged her arms the way my mother’s had been in death: left arm bent at an angle and lying across her body, right arm on the mattress; delicate, peaceful. Restful.

  I was told to strip down to my chemise so Mary could cut my dress into pieces and burn it in the fire. I had brought a frock of my own, as instructed. He must have known all along how this would play out, from the moment I offered him my idea in the attic. Mary chattered as I undressed. Her vocabulary was wide and varied, she was fragile, soft, and had none of the hardness the other Ripper women appeared to have, from what I’d read. She told me she had lived in Paris and spoke a little French but didn’t like the world there and had returned and struggled to find her footing.

  We washed our hands as best we could with a little water, the rest of which Dr Shivershev poured over the body. It leaked through to form a pool below. Then he took a bottle, the same kind used for my medicine, and for a reason I did not understand, filled it with the blood and put it in his coat pocket. I thought it strange, but it seemed stupid to point this out. Considering the oddity of everything that had occurred, what was a bottle of watery blood?

  Mary left to meet the man with the package containing Mrs Wiggs’ miraculously virginal heart, and Dr Shivershev looked about the room.

  ‘Make sure the stuff is burned, and put the fire out. Then we go.’

  ‘What about the trunk?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll take it with us, to Boston. We’ll dispose of it there, but for now it will come in quite useful. Now let’s get you back to Chelsea.’

  37

  Dr Shivershev was to take me back to the house and bruise me, put marks on me, he said, to make it look like Thomas had beaten me more recently than my old bruises would account for.

  Walter drove us back to Chelsea in the deep darkness of the very early hours. We stood at the end of the road to watch for the lamp of the policeman, waited for him to pass, and made our way to the house. Inside, Dr Shivershev hovered in the hallway as I lit a candle. Then I remembered how my husband’s dead body still hung in the attic. The thought of being left alone with it up there, in a dark house, affected me in a way that cutting Mrs Wiggs had not.

  ‘Take me as well! I can’t stay here – they will catch me and I’ll hang, I know I will.’ My resolve had gone. Everything that had happened in that house overwhelmed me all at once and I feared I would never survive. I started to cry.

  ‘Susannah, you will be fine. You have strong nerves. You would have made a brilliant surgeon, far superior to your husb
and. I’ve seen men faint in much less torturous conditions than you endured tonight. Keep going a little longer, remember the plan and do not give up. You are nearly there.’

  ‘I can’t! I can’t do it. I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m alone. I might forget my story – I’ll be weak. What if they question me over and over and I make mistakes?’

  He pulled me close and I buried my face in his coat to the point where I could barely breathe. It was wonderful for a brief moment to be enveloped; I had forgotten how it felt to depend on someone else, even if only for a few seconds.

  ‘Now, remember,’ he said, as his rough, unshaven chin scratched the side of my face, ‘the most important thing of all is not to panic.’

  ‘What?’ My heart raced at those words. He had said those same words to Thomas moments before he strung him up. What did that mean?

  I struggled against him, but I could not free myself.

  He let go, then shoved me with a hand on my chest against the wall of the hallway. It was enough to take my breath away. I saw a flash of silver, but my eyes travelled too slowly to do anything but anticipate the pain, which was of insane heat, a burning sensation of metal across the thin skin of my neck.

  My mouth hung open but silent. My hands flew to my neck. I felt the warmth of my own blood running away from me. Tears spilled. But I did not panic. He had used me, taken my idea as his own to free Mary, and now I would die.

  He held me by the shoulders as my back slid down the wall until I was on the ground. It was the way I imagined the Ripper lowered his victims before he tore them apart. His hand was cradling the back of my head as he lay me on the floor.

  He took his knife and wiped it clean on my skirt, then put it back in his waistband. Then he took the bottle he had filled with the watery blood and poured it around me. I lay in a puddle of that and my own blood. Then he held my cheeks in both hands and kissed me full on the lips.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, and left by the front door.

  38

  I was surrounded by arms coming to bury me: my grandmother, Mabel, Mrs Wiggs, Aisling, and all of Jack’s girls, from Martha Tabram to Catherine Eddowes. In reality, the arms belonged to the nurses who were pinning me down, telling me to be calm. A swath of black fabric with a white cap entered the room. It was Matron Luckes. On seeing her, I felt as if I had earned permission to surrender and I passed out, or perhaps I was sedated.

  When I woke, it was as if everything on the inside of my body was paper thin and bone dry. When I tried to use my voice, I could not avoid coughing and it hurt like hell. Any movement or tension in my neck pulled at my stitches and irritated my tender skin. I slid my fingers underneath the bandages and felt the ugly raised lumps that ran across my throat. That in itself made me panic. Now I was also a monster, inside and out.

  What stirred me from this purgatory? I heard a woman whisper to me.

  ‘He must have loved you very much… to want to take you with him.’

  Those words hovered above me. I wasn’t entirely sure if I heard or dreamed them. Looking back, they must have been whispered by a nurse who thought she was talking to herself. I inhaled them. Each word scuttled up my nose and choked me, got stuck in my throat and made me cough, pulled at my stitches, threatening to tear my neck open again. I was enraged. How could even my own kind see this supposed act of my husband’s, his slitting of my throat, as an expression of love? How was it that the intangible phoenix of a man’s ego was prized over the mutilation of a woman’s real flesh?

  The last thing I remembered was crawling out through my front door and onto the pavement as it was getting light. The bright flash of the policeman’s torch as it found my face, and the scream of his whistle. The next time I woke, Matron Luckes was at my bedside, reading her copy of The Nursing Record.

  ‘This rag used to be quite dreadful, you know, but it has vastly improved this past year,’ she said. And then, ‘Any surgeon worth his salt would have cut much deeper, had he meant it, Susannah.’

  Even Matron was at pains to protect me from the possibility that my husband had tried to kill me out of hatred. She too was giving the dead man the benefit of the doubt. I said nothing because it didn’t matter. No one would ever learn the truth from me. The odd thing was that now Thomas was gone, I didn’t spare much of a thought for him at all; out of sight really was out of mind. Yet when I was married, I had felt hopelessly trapped. There was a void where he had once been, and it felt strange. I think it was peace.

  In hospital I mostly spent my days recovering and worrying about being interviewed by the police. I rehearsed what I would say over and over and hoped the scar on my neck would elicit pity. Then Matron came and told me that I would not be questioned at all. One of the governors had taken it upon himself to intervene on my behalf and had spoken to his friends at the Home Office. He insisted it would be a gross injustice if I were to be harassed by the police, after everything I’d been through. After all, it was quite obvious to even the dullest policeman what had happened: my abusive husband, gripped by the madness of drink and debt, had driven away the servants and in a fit of desperation tried to murder his wife, then hanged himself. May God have mercy on his soul.

  At no point was there a single question regarding Dr Shivershev. Nor did anyone seek to consult my physician. It was as if he had never existed. And Dr Shivershev had been correct about one other thing: no one gave a second thought to Mrs Wiggs. There had been sightings of a woman leaving the house with a man and a trunk. The assumption was that she, like the other servants, had abandoned an unsettled household.

  I had barely any visitors in the hospital. A few nurses stopped by – mainly, I think, to see the spectacle for themselves. My solicitor from Reading, Mr Radcliffe, also came. He was full of dread, burdened with his news that my generous sister-in-law, Helen, had written to express her sympathy and had agreed to pay six months’ rent on the house in Chelsea, to give me time to make other arrangements. I laughed when he read out her letter. I think he thought me disturbed, especially when I told him that once I had spoken to my sister-in-law in person, I was quite sure she would change her mind.

  39

  Helen finally agreed to a meeting after a long-winded process of letter tennis between our solicitors. It was a manipulative attempt to see which of my resources would run out first: money or motivation. I kept at it. I had a better chance of extracting a settlement if the fear of shame was fresh. I would only have to poke a finger in the open wound and tease the pain to the surface.

  My solicitor tried to explain to me, as old men who know better always do, that any grounds I felt I had for improving my financial position as Thomas’s widow would be best pursued via the proper legal process, through the courts. As Thomas had yet to inherit anything and we had been married for a mere five months, it was expected that the courts would say I was only entitled to inherit from his earned income, which everyone knew was a collection of debts. The Lancasters had gallantly settled all outstanding debts before the private inquest was held. I would have no real claim, Mr Radcliffe said, but perhaps the courts would feel sorry for me and encourage the Lancasters to help with a small pension. If I wasn’t careful, they would humiliate me and ruin me publicly. I didn’t listen.

  I went to Abbingdale Hall alone. Helen would have her lawyers present. Mr Radcliffe, ever the concerned worrier for my nerves, wanted to accompany me should her team of vultures attempt to pick at my flesh.

  ‘I’m made of sterner stuff than that,’ I assured him, though I had my doubts. My newfound bravery was actually desperation. I now, quite literally, had nothing to lose.

  Thomas had described his home as poetically grand, beautiful, but then he was given to embellishment. However, in this instance, I believe he underplayed it. The estate was vast. There were ornamental gardens, fountains in front of a dramatic Gothic mansion, and well-tended grounds surrounding it. The looming spire of the family church punctured the horizon. That one family could live in such splendid isolation, cut
off from the misery and hopelessness, not to mention the stink, of Whitechapel, and be so arrogant as to think that a few months’ rent on a shabby house in London would be all that was needed to get rid of me gave me confidence. This was my only advantage. They thought me a gold-digger, I knew that, a guttersnipe come to demand crumbs from their table. It was not a conversation I looked forward to, but I had need of security. Wasn’t that how wealth worked? It was grabbed at, stolen, extorted, taken by force or any other means necessary, and protestations after the fact were dismissed and ignored. I would simply play by the same rules.

  I was left waiting in a foyer so large, our voices and footsteps echoed around it. As I stood there, I spotted the vase, the one with three Greek girls carrying water. There was a tall girl at the back with a dour face; he had told the truth about that. I felt a pang of pity for the small boy that Thomas once was. It must have been a lonely existence for him, knowing himself to be the cuckoo, petrified he would be discovered at any moment.

  I was led into a large, dark study with carved mahogany furniture and red walls. Helen was positioned like the matriarch behind a vast desk, which only exaggerated her diminutive frame. A chorus-line of white-haired and spectacled lawyers was ranged behind her, ready to bend and scrape and give outraged looks on command.

  Thomas’s twin sister was nothing like I’d expected; she was squat and plump. How had anybody ever thought those two were twins? I understood what Mrs Wiggs had meant when she said the Lancasters were not strong. Helen was a piggish girl in a silk lilac dress; she had a weak chin, eyes set too close together and dark rings beneath them. She was used to conversing with intelligent people, but all in her employ.

  ‘You are not as I imagined,’ said Helen as I sat down.

  ‘Neither are you,’ I replied. ‘Did Thomas resemble your father?’

  ‘See for yourself – his portrait is up there.’ She gestured towards a large oil painting over the grand mantel. It was of a round, short-waisted man with the same pug face and small eyes, a set of bristling whiskers and a severe lack of hair.