‘I can see the resemblance,’ I said.
‘You can? You would be the first.’
‘I meant to you; you are certainly your father’s daughter.’
Her eyes narrowed and she waved one of her lawyers forward. He presented me with papers as Helen talked.
‘We understand you find yourself unexpectedly widowed. We assumed you might return to your family, but, as your solicitor has explained, you don’t have one. Therefore, as a gesture of goodwill and a token of our sympathy, we would like to offer you the sum of fifty pounds. This is in addition to the rent we have paid in advance on the property in Chelsea. I should imagine you are in need of some immediate funds—’
‘Not good enough,’ I said, and pushed the piece of paper away without looking at it.
Her gaggle of penguins coughed and balked.
Helen stared at me, her nostrils flared. She tried not to bite her bottom lip. ‘Let me be clear…’ She struggled to know what to call me. ‘There is nothing in this house that will ever belong to you. You may think you have some claim on my brother’s estate, but you do not. I’m sure you are bitterly disappointed that your marriage was, to all intents and purposes, a disaster, but perhaps if you’d known him a little better, you might have declined his impulsive offer to wed. However, I’m guessing the decision wasn’t entirely based on his charms. At your age, you should have known better, but then I suppose money brings out the worst in all of us.’
‘You haven’t addressed me directly once, Helen, not as “Susannah”, as a sister would, nor as “Mrs Lancaster”. Why is that?’
‘Because I cannot bring myself to. We are not sisters, and you have not earned the right to be called “Lancaster”, not as far as I am concerned.’
‘Tell me then, what did I do to earn this?’ I pulled down the neck of my dress to show my red scar.
All of them flinched, except Helen, who would doubtless have suffered a hot poker in a dark crevice rather than give me a reaction.
‘I would like to speak to you privately, Helen, just once, so that I may explain why you might prefer to work with me on a quiet resolution regarding our mutual issues.’
Her solicitors tried to interrupt, but Helen silenced them all with a raised hand. They stopped like a pack of well-trained gundogs. It reminded me of how Thomas would quiet Mrs Wiggs.
Once they had left, I gave her my proposal. I would accept a lump sum and they would purchase for me and make a gift to me of the house in Chelsea. On receipt of the deeds and the money, I would never bother them again.
Helen laughed, which was as expected. ‘What on earth makes you think I would agree to such… extortion?’ she asked.
‘If you don’t, I will be forced to sell my pitiful story, which will run along the following themes: your brother was a sadistic, perverted pig who abused his wife, sexually and physically. Of course, I will be obliged to reveal intimate details of the bedchamber, and I will also need to disclose that he was rather workshy and, quite frankly, not very good at his job. I will make public the embarrassing truth that he was an active and not at all clandestine homosexual who frequented mollies’ houses – a practice that has been illegal these past three years, as you will know – which will do nothing to enhance the reputation of the Lancaster family. And lastly, I will make it widely known that he was not in reality your brother at all.’
The blood visibly drained from Helen’s face. She tried to steady her rapid breathing. This woman had shared a nursery with Thomas and, deep down, as ridiculous as it seemed, there was something in her that knew this to be the truth. I was probably the first person in the world to articulate the instincts she’d kept contained since childhood.
I explained what Mrs Wiggs had told me about finding Helen’s real baby brother dead in his crib and swapping the real Lancaster boy with her own. Hadn’t she ever noticed that Mrs Wiggs was colour-blind, like her brother?
‘The thing I struggle with most, I think, even though I have no children of my own, is how your mother could fail to recognise her own child. But then Thomas said she only ever came downstairs for dinner or to go to parties. I imagine the newspapers will speculate along the same themes,’ I said.
I also told a lie. I claimed that Mrs Wiggs had revealed to me the exact spot where she’d buried the Lancaster baby. If Helen preferred to keep this scandal between us, she could agree to my terms and pay me promptly. Otherwise, in order to keep my fire burning and food in my belly, I would tell the first journalist who would listen.
‘Where is Mrs Wiggs?’ asked Helen. Her face was a picture, the smugness gone. Her mind was clearly desperate to fathom how she could dominate again. Testing her tongue on those in her employ had not been good exercise.
‘I honestly don’t know. She was seen leaving with a man and a trunk,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she is making up for lost time.’
‘You would be willing to shame yourself to extort a pension from a family who have done nothing to deserve it? You are not the only one who has endured my brother’s temper. He was a cruel child: spoiled, explosive. My mother was petrified of him, as was I.’
‘I don’t want a pension; I want a chance. What I’m asking for is nothing to you but will change my life for ever. If you think I’m going to go away quietly after putting up with your brother and being left with such a pretty necklace, you’re wrong. Give me what I want and you’ll never hear of me again.’
It was small change to the Lancasters and Helen was a sensible girl. It frustrated the hell out of her that she would never know if I was bluffing, but she had her lawyers draw up the settlement.
As I left the study, she remained seated.
‘I don’t want my mother to know about this, but tell me where my brother is, my real brother. I want to give him a proper burial – privately of course.’
‘Ask me again in ten years,’ I said. It was a trick, of course. That woman was no more interested in her brother than she was in me.
‘Funny, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Look at us, both dressed up in mourning for a man we feel nothing but bitterness towards.’
By the end of the month, I was the legal owner of the house in Chelsea and had £2000 in the bank.
40
There I was, back in Chelsea, rattling around an empty house, when the visitor I least expected knocked on the door: one Miss Mabel Mullens.
Looking a lot plumper and apple-cheeked again, she was back to being beautiful, which, I discovered, was how I preferred her. She was smirking on the doorstep, arms akimbo. It was hard to believe we’d hated each other for no other reason than the belief that there could not be enough good fortune for the both of us. We had moved past that terrain somehow and come straight to a rather abrasive affection.
‘Come on, let’s see this scar I’ve heard so much about,’ was the first thing she said. Our relationship continued in this vein for many years after.
I pulled down my bandages and stuck my chin up, showed her my scar, still ugly, scabbed and bruised.
‘I can barely see it! What a huge fuss about nothing,’ she said.
My one solace, I told her, was that Dr Haslip hadn’t been on duty, or else I would have woken up with my hand sewn to my forehead and my neck still open. I noticed little lines around her eyes when she laughed; they hadn’t been there before, but they suited her. She wasted no time in telling me she was still ‘off’ men.
‘I haven’t the stomach for the troubles they bring. You may not believe it, but I’m ward sister at a hospital. The probationers think I’m a dragon – I take my inspiration from you.’
‘I assume you mean the Reading Union? Only a workhouse could have you as ward sister,’ I said.
She laughed again. But no, she said, she’d found a job at the East London Hospital for Children, where it had spread like a whisky fire that a nurse from the London had been nearly murdered by her surgeon husband.
When I asked why she’d not kept in touch as she’d said she would, she swore blind she’d wri
tten twice. The second because she’d not received an answer to the first, which she’d sent as soon as she reached her father’s farm. She’d assumed I didn’t want anything further to do with her and didn’t write again. I would eventually find her letters, along with Aisling’s hairbrush and the wooden box with all her things in it, under the floorboards in Mrs Wiggs’ bedroom.
We talked for hours. Mabel had come to apologise, said she’d wept for nights, realising that she’d burdened me with her problems when I’d had my own and not said a word.
‘I assumed you had struck gold, Susannah. I’m so sorry.’
I didn’t dare tell her the truth. I’d told no one, although at times I was bursting. That wasn’t strictly true: sometimes I talked to Aisling, and I believed she heard me.
Our conversation eventually drifted towards what happened after I gave her the address from Dr Shivershev. It was for Princelet Street, in Whitechapel. When Mabel went there, she saw it was a cobbler’s shop: small and dingy and full of cobblers’ clutter. A tall Jew with a dark beard and his shirt open to his chest emerged from the back and asked her what her business was. On the piece of paper it had said to introduce herself as a woman suffering from chronic headaches. She felt a fool saying the words, but the man nodded then told her to go and stand on the corner of Fashion Street.
As she waited under a lamppost, heart skipping beats, twin girls came towards her, giggling, one carrying a skipping rope and the other a scarf. They skipped around her in circles and she thought they would pick her pockets and she’d be left penniless and still pregnant.
‘Won’t you play with us?’ asked one of the girls.
They were about ten or so, she said, with big brown eyes and long dark hair, beautiful girls, identically dressed in clean blue dresses with black brocade, polished shoes, and blue ribbons in their hair that had been artfully tied by someone who cared.
‘Small versions of you, Susannah. I took that as a good omen, so, believe it or not, I let them blindfold me.’
Still giggling, they held a hand each and led her down the road and into a house. She feared she was going to be robbed or killed, but they had such soft little hands, she said, that she half didn’t care what happened. There was no going back. They steered her through a building and into a courtyard, laughed when she slipped down a step outside, then tugged her into another house, and through room after room, until finally they sat her down in an armchair. One of them jumped on the arm of the chair and kissed her on the cheek as the other untied the scarf from her eyes, still laughing. Then they ran off.
As Mabel’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw there was an old lady sitting in a chair in the corner. She nearly screamed.
‘She must have been a hundred at least! Her eyes were milky, her skin yellow; I thought she was dead.’
The room was dark and sparsely furnished, but every surface was covered with lace, ornaments and trinkets. The windows were draped with heavy muslins and fussy scalloped curtains; barely any natural light was allowed in.
‘Don’t mind my mother,’ said a woman who appeared in the doorway. ‘She can’t see you.’
She was dressed head to toe in black, with a black lace veil covering her face. Mabel said she had an accent that might have been French but could have been Russian, she wasn’t sure. I knew, of course, that it was Irina, Dr Shivershev’s housekeeper, but I didn’t say anything. Questions were not to be encouraged.
‘Could have been anything. I only saw her hands, which had no spots or marks. I could see the shine of her eyes through the lace. I had the sense she was older than us, but still attractive, even underneath that veil.’
Mabel followed Irina upstairs to a room that had been set up for a specific purpose. The windows were blocked with heavy drapes, and there were many lamps to see by, even though it was the middle of the day with the sun at its brightest. It was here that Mabel began to think she might die.
In the corner of the room there was an old birthing chair, a heavy mahogany monster tilted back, with leather arm-straps, and wooden planks for the legs to be splayed apart, and more leather straps to keep them still. The chair had half a seat, like an arch with the middle missing. A steel bucket was on the floor under the missing part.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Irina said. ‘The chair frightens everyone, but it works well. It is better for you and you will not feel much.’
Mabel stripped down to her chemise and sat in the chair. She let herself be strapped in by Irina and prayed that if she was to die it would happen quickly.
She survived. Irina told her she must go straight home and lock herself away with her chamber pot.
‘Make sure to be as discreet as you can. Say nothing to anyone,’ Irina told her. ‘There are many who need my assistance. If I am arrested, who will help them?’
For this, Mabel paid Irina two pounds. It was my own money, a sum I would not have been able to get from Thomas without questions.
‘The girls will take you to a place you can find a cab.’ Irina returned Mabel to the room with the old woman. There was a cuckoo clock on the mantelpiece that chimed on the hour. The two little girls blindfolded her again and led her to the top of Commercial Street.
‘Is the lady all better now?’ one of them asked her.
‘Yes, I think so,’ Mabel replied, still dull from the ether, and they ran off.
‘That’s the thing about London – you can walk around in a blindfold and no one bats an eyelid,’ she said. ‘No wonder this Ripper hasn’t been caught. He’s probably been running about with a knife in one hand and a kidney in the other, and people simply haven’t noticed.’
Desperate not to spend money, Mabel ignored Irina’s advice and took the omnibus. She’d planned to leave the milliner’s the next day but decided she couldn’t bear another minute, so fled in the middle of the night, preferring to wait at the station for the morning train rather than spend another hour there. The night-watchman came towards her on the platform and asked if she was all right. Thinking him another pervert, she gave him short shrift. He disappeared but came back five minutes later with a blanket, and she burst into tears. He told her she was welcome to wait in his office if she liked, it had a small fire, until the trains started in the morning.
‘I don’t mean anything improper; you needn’t worry. I’m too old for all that, but there’s a murderer on the loose, and it don’t bear thinking about,’ he said.
‘So there are decent men, but apparently they’re all old enough to be my grandad,’ said Mabel.
The experience had left its mark on her face. She may not have had a scar as crude as mine, but it was in the lines around her eyes and the new sharpness in her features. She enjoyed being back at work, she said, especially with the children, but sharing the nurses’ accommodation was a bore.
‘Have you ever thought about renting a room in Chelsea?’ I asked her.
I decided that I would fill my house in Chelsea, and Mabel would be my first tenant. The rent was cheap of course. I was not in it to make money.
41
The murder of Mary Kelly was an opera. It was the climax of a wonderful piece of theatre and had been partly of my creation. The newspapers fed off it for months. The gruesome details flew around the world, bounced off every wall in England, and Whitechapel was forever cast as the epitome of grotesque London.
I spent a lot of time with my notebooks and clippings in the ensuing days and weeks. There was no need to squirrel them away in the back dining room now that Mrs Wiggs was no longer there to pry, and I found that it was not only interesting, and absorbing, to read through all my old accounts, but useful too. It helped me reflect on what I had done, what I had become, and why. I tried not to punish myself for my hobby too much, and to think of Dr Shivershev’s words when he’d explained why he collected those specimens. It was about understanding, and knowledge. He was correct, it was not always obvious in the beginning where our curiosity will take us, we wish to learn something but we are not sure what. I un
derstood that my curiosity was driven out of a need to understand in some small way what my mother had been through, to assuage the guilt I felt over her demise. I understood enough now, I only wanted to close the remaining chapters, to tidy up the ends. Then I would close this experience down, file it away for what it was, and move on.
First, I described the last evening of Mary Kelly – or Marie Jeanette, as I called her, although of course neither was the real identity of the mutilated corpse, it being that of Mrs Wiggs.
Next, I sent my imagination back into the past, to the day three years prior when I had finally found myself free to leave Reading and begin my career as a nurse, at the London. I wanted to look at the person I was before I met Thomas, before I met Aisling, to try and see myself through these other, distant eyes I had now. Was I already of abandoned character, like my grandmother had insisted? Had my father’s blood, and my first five years in the Nichol, tainted me?
Over time, the Nichol went the same way as Whitechapel’s other degenerate and labyrinthine slums. It was built through, built on, and rendered invisible beneath new roads and shiny new tenement blocks laid on top. Some of the old roads remained, but Dorset Street and Miller’s Court were gone.
After Mary Kelly, the Ripper murders stopped. Vulnerable women were still beaten and killed in Whitechapel, but they were back to being murdered by their menfolk, behind closed doors, dying quietly without attention. The papers said the Ripper had perhaps succumbed to syphilis, infected by the whores he sought revenge on, or maybe he’d killed himself through madness, or been imprisoned for something else. Or perhaps he’d emigrated?
*
It was in the summer of 1889 that I received a package marked from California, the United States of America. A brown box, battered and thrown about on its travels. Intrigued, I took it into the front dining room and tore it open.
People of Abandoned Character Page 31
