People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  Inside the package was a small wooden box, and inside this, two envelopes, one addressed to me and the other to Detective Inspector Abberline. The box was full of sawdust, and nestled in the top was something wrapped in red velvet. It had a piece of brocade attached to it and the edges were jagged, as if it had been torn or hacked at. I ripped open the envelope addressed to me and read the letter inside:

  Dear Susannah,

  I could not be more pleased to hear that you have decided to join our illustrious ranks. I wish you all the best and think of you often.

  I’m afraid our friends in London require one more task to be completed. I ask you to take a fresh envelope and from a different spot in London post the enclosed letter to Detective Inspector Abberline of the Metropolitan Police. Do not touch it. Wear gloves, and be aware of a new science they call fingerprinting.

  Your husband frequented many places to meet likeminded individuals; one of these is to be found in Cleveland Street. Our friends and sponsors wish to assist the police and give them some gentle encouragement so that they might seek adventure in this new direction and occupy themselves with the ‘criminal’ behaviour therein. The letter is a present of information about these premises and the activities taking place there. Hopefully, it will give poor old Abberline something more fruitful to focus on. Who knows, our business might go back to running smoothly again.

  I enclose a gift. I hope you appreciate the humour with which it is intended. I did deliberate, but I am sure that even if it does not amuse you, you will find it useful in your work one day. Forgive me for the shock.

  Your trustworthy Russian,

  V

  I unwrapped the velvet and out fell a long, thin, silver knife. It was the one he had used on Mrs Wiggs in the dark of Mary Kelly’s room, and the one I had taken and cleaned for him. It was also the knife Dr Shivershev had used to cut my throat.

  I had no idea how to feel. I burst out laughing and picked it up. The light bounced off the blade and I recalled the flash of silver before I’d felt its blade being dragged across my neck.

  There was no one around to hear me. Mabel was at work and the others somewhere out of sight. Sarah, our old scullery maid, was now housekeeper. She came back when I placed an advertisement in The Times. She told me she hadn’t left of her own accord but that Mrs Wiggs had fired them all. I employed both her and Cook again. Sarah now spends her days barking at a clumsy young girl called Florence. I have three lodgers: a rather strange Russian, an aloof Indian lady and an annoyingly over-friendly woman from Edinburgh. They are students at the London School of Medicine for Women. As am I.

  You see, I enrolled to become a doctor. Someone once suggested I’d make a good one.

  About the Author

  Clare Whitfield is a UK based writer living in a suburb where the main cultural landmark is a home store /Starbucks combo. She is the wife of a tattoo artist, mother of a small benign dictator and relies on a black Labrador for emotional stability. She has been a dancer, copywriter, amateur fire breather, buyer and mediocre weightlifter. This is her first novel.

  Read on for an Ebook Exclusive Bonus Chapter…

  Paradise

  Evaline put both babies in their crib, sat down on the rocking chair and waited for them to settle. She relished these little moments of peace. Looking after babies could be as exhausting by night as it was by day. At just five months old, the twins were already very different. When she put them down in the evening, the little girl, Helen, had quickly learned that grizzling would bring Evaline to her crib again, where the child would immediately forget her deception, laugh and reach out to be picked up. Evaline would comply, but had taken to approaching the crib on her hands and knees to peer in through the bars to see if the little girl had fallen asleep, or was waiting to try her bait and trap game once more.

  The little boy however, Thomas, couldn’t have been more different. As Helen grew fatter and more mischievous by the day, her twin appeared to diminish at the same rate. Evaline had to wake him and convince him to feed, which she was sure shouldn’t be the case. She did not dare raise a concern since she had convinced her employers, Lord and Lady Lancaster, she had plentiful experience. It was true she had looked after young children in the past, but not professionally, and never twins. In fact, her fraught experience had been drawn from her own baby boy being only four weeks older than the twins. Evaline knew Thomas should be at least as big as his sister, but whatever tricks she employed Helen was fast leaving him behind.

  Evaline adored the babies, and couldn’t help but enjoy the perfect surroundings she found herself living in. When the guilt did creep in, she had to reassure herself that she was doing the best for her own child who languished at the baby farmer’s while she lived in a mansion. It seemed a peculiar cruelty, and yet what choice did she have? She had gone to great lengths to secure the position and craft this new image of herself. She would be the perfect nurse: nurturing, compliant and, most of all, invisible. She had produced a marriage certificate in the name of Mrs Evaline Wiggs, and told her employers she was a widow, her husband having been killed at sea and her own child stillborn. Two bitter blows which made her ripe pickings as a well-educated wet nurse to the Lancasters. Lady Lancaster had shown little interest in her children since birth and had never visited the nursery. The employment of wet nurses was fast becoming unfashionable but Lady Lancaster had been adamant one was required and Evaline had been promised the position of nanny if the nursing months went smoothly.

  In reality, Naval Officer Wiggs was no more her husband than the twins were her own babies, though she had come to the assumption he was likely dead – or certainly would be if she ever caught up with him.

  Sometimes, with one or both babies in her arms, she would walk around the beautiful, pristine nursery, imagining how wonderful life would be if this were her house, and her little Edwin was with her. If only he could grow up with the opportunities that the Lancaster children would have fall at their feet. Their souls were no more deserving than her own son’s, and yet his life was a source of shame, while the Lancaster children were celebrated and spoiled.

  Evaline had waited for Edwin’s father to return or write, or send money, as he promised he would, but nothing had ever come. She hadn’t admitted the true desperation of her situation until she had given birth in the workhouse infirmary in Portsmouth. Only then did she accept she had been abandoned. She was, in the eyes of those who beheld her, a fallen woman. As she had made her way back towards Bristol with her son, begging along the way, she had realised that in order to keep them both alive, she would have to reinvent herself. Evaline would spend her life nurturing the offspring of the wealthy. She would watch them grow and thrive and could only hope that her own son would survive the baby farmer. He was simply another nameless bastard, and there were so many these days.

  *

  Helen woke her in the early hours. Evaline hadn’t realised she had fallen asleep in the chair; it felt as if she’d only closed her eyes for a second. The sun was rising so she decided to begin the day by feeding and dressing them both. The weather had been fine the day before and she never tired of the privilege of roaming the grounds of Abbingdale Hall. When Evaline reached the crib, the little girl was attempting to pull herself up but couldn’t quite manage, a few more days and she would be there. She felt a pang of concern at the increasing gap between the restless sister and her sleepy little brother.

  ‘Good morning, Helen, you will leave your brother too far behind for his pride to stand, we can’t have that, can we?’ Evaline whispered. She looked over at Thomas and saw he was still sleeping, but something about the tone of his skin made her stomach lurch. She put the back of her hand to the little boy’s cheek. It was cold. Evaline picked him up but he was floppy and lifeless. Helen smiled and kicked her fat little legs, oblivious to the raging panic that surged through Evaline. She held the little boy close to her chest to warm him, sure her own thumping heart might start his own. She cradled him tight and tried to
revive him then, when the tears started to come from her own eyes instead of his, she held him up and shook him, begging him to come back to life. It was no good. The sickly heir to Abbingdale Hall was dead. She looked around the room as if help would leak from the walls and then Helen started to cry.

  ‘Oh, please, please don’t.’ Evaline put the little boy’s body down in the crib, scooped up Helen and cradled the warm baby as they both sobbed. Everything was ruined. She would lose her job. She would not be able to pay the baby farmer. Edwin would have to go to an orphanage. Evaline rocked backwards and forwards, until the little girl settled. They would blame her for the baby’s death, of course. She cursed Naval Officer Wiggs, for his easy affection and empty promises. For leading her astray and landing her in this impossible situation.

  *

  Evaline pushed the perambulator down the narrow alley that rang along the back of the row of houses and banged on the door. She looked over her shoulder, this was not the sort of tenement row well-dressed nannies came with their charges. She could hear babies crying from inside but no one answered, so she balled up a fist and hammered on the door again.

  ‘Evaline! What are you doing here?’ The small, wiry woman had sounded furious at the interruption, though her tone had changed the minute she saw who it was at the door. Ada looked at the pram and then at Evaline. ‘I think you’d best come in.’ Evaline took one last look about but only saw a mangy cat and pushed the pram inside.

  ‘Wasn’t expecting to see you.’ Ada muttered as she hobbled back into the dank room she called the kitchen. There were four babies in crates lined up on the table against the wall, their naked feet wrestling with the air.

  ‘May I see my son?’ Eveline asked.

  Ada coughed into her hands and wiped them on her skirts, ‘Course you can, let me get him.’ She disappeared into the back room and Evaline tried not to take in the surroundings. The house was alive with the noise of mewling babies. The kitchen was filthy. There were bottles of infant syrup left open, a dirty spoon, bottles of gin. The place was disgusting and Ada was one of the good ones.

  ‘Here he is, see? As you left him.’ She shuffled back in with Edwin, sucking on his own fist. On seeing his mother, he wriggled and kicked in Ada’s arms and held out his own for Evaline, who put him on her hip and swayed and jiggled to keep him calm.

  ‘Something has come up, Ada, and I’m going to take him,’ said Evaline.

  ‘What?’ said Ada, ‘Are you leaving the Lancasters?’

  ‘I’ve made other arrangements. I can take Edwin to be with a friend nearer the house. He’ll be closer and… I can pay you for the rest of the month…’

  Evaline rummaged to find the money she had brought. Ada was an old bird, flown over from Austria. She seemed frail but was made of stern stuff and she had been in this business too long not to sense when a woman was hiding something. Ada stared at the pram with the hood pulled up. Evaline stood in front of it with baby Edwin on her hip as she pressed money into Ada’s hands.

  ‘Why have you brought the Lancaster babies here? Someone could have seen you? I ask you again, what is going on?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Evaline, who half laughed and then let the smile slip from her lips too quickly. Her face was damp from nerves. The pristine pram with its painted wooden frame looked ridiculous in such surroundings, something had to be wrong. Ada edged closer to the pram.

  ‘Soon they will not fit in together, surely. Let me see them,’ she cooed.

  ‘No!’ Evaline almost put her hand upon Ada’s chest. ‘They’re sleeping.’

  ‘I won’t disturb them, it’s not like I’m not used to babies.’ Ada laughed.

  ‘I said no.’ But Ada pushed her aside and looked into the pram and gasped, and started muttering something unintelligible in her own language. Ada had seen enough death to know what she was looking at.

  ‘Get out! How dare you bring a dead child in to this house!’

  ‘Shhh! Keep your voice down.’ They spoke in furious whispers. Evaline gripped onto Ada’s sleeve. The walls were thin. The houses crowded. No one knew who might be listening.

  ‘Why do you bring a dead baby to me! A Lancaster. Are you mad?’

  ‘Please Ada, I have a plan. I wasn’t going to tell you but there’s only one of me. What was I to do with the children when I came here? I must be quick. I don’t have much time.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  Ada looked at the dozing Helen and then at Edwin on his mother’s hip, still sucking his fingers. Then she shook her head. ‘No, Evaline, you can’t. You have lost your mind!’

  ‘It is best for everyone.’

  ‘What is the age difference between them?’

  ‘Four weeks, it’s really nothing.’

  ‘They’ll know. His mother…’

  ‘His mother wouldn’t notice if I swapped him with a cat. This is meant to be. This is God’s plan for Edwin and me, I know it is. I have prayed and prayed and now this. I have to do this. I must. And you will keep this secret.’

  ‘You’ve gone insane,’ Ada mumbled and turned her back, putting her hands to her temples. As she looked around her, the babies seemed to squirm in time with her nerves. The room was alive with little fists and feet, writhing helplessly like the buckets of eels they sold by the docks. By rights they should be noisier, but she had ways of keeping babies calm. She turned back to Evaline. Ada knew good business when she saw it.

  ‘You pay me, as you have. You take Edwin, I keep my mouth shut but you pay me. Think of it as charity; one less mouth to feed and I put more food in the mouths of the others. You pay me, I keep quiet.’

  ‘Half. I’ll pay you half of what I’ve been paying you. No more.’

  ‘Half? Not good enough. Not worth keeping such a secret for. You give me the same!’

  ‘Half. No more.’

  ‘Half and I tell the police.’

  ‘Half, and if you tell the police, I’ll lose my job, Edwin will be taken into the orphanage and so will all your babies. But I’ll also tell them they may want to dig up your yard, for they might find more than potatoes and the odd dead dog out there, am I right? After all, not all babies take to their medicine, do they, Ada?’

  Ada nodded. The two women had reached an agreement.

  *

  Evaline managed to convince one of the housemaids to watch the twins as she had to run an errand for a friend who needed medicine for a sick child. The girl rolled her eyes and smiled.

  ‘Sick child, eh? Don’t you worry, I’ll watch them.’ There was a plague of sick children when it came to the young female servants doing each other favours, most often in order to meet a potential suitor under the cover of darkness.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Evaline promised, ignoring the girl’s knowing looks. And she meant it. Her heart was in her throat and wouldn’t go back to her chest until this was done.

  Evaline crept out of the servant’s entrance with the body of little Thomas Lancaster inside her coat. It was an advantage he was so frail and small. She snuck into the gardener’s shed and borrowed a shovel, trying not to think about what she was about to do. Instead she thought of Edwin, and Helen. God had set her on this path for a reason. One more trial and then she and her babies would bask in His favour.

  She made her way to the place they called Paradise, where a carpet of bluebells lay under the shade of the trees. It was not so very dark under the moonlight so she easily found her way. Paradise would be a fitting place for Thomas. All children belong in Paradise, she told herself. It was harder than she thought to bury him; the ground was hard and unyielding. She was breathless, hot, and exhausted by the time it was done. It had taken much longer than she planned and she had mud all over her hands. She put the shovel back in its rightful place and hurried to the nursery. As she walked in, the housemaid was jiggling Edwin in her arms. She looked Eveline up and down and smirked.

  ‘It’s just as well she likes babies, isn’t it Master Thomas!’ she teased.

  ‘I
beg your pardon?’ said Evaline.

  The girl laughed and nodded towards Eveline’s skirts. As she looked down at her legs, she saw the patches of wet mud on her knees and gasped in embarrassment, then burst out laughing along with the housemaid. She was going to get away with this. Fate was on her side.

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