I was woken by Mrs Wiggs rattling my bedroom door. Her thin voice called out to me between huffs of frustration at the new barrier between us. The memories came flooding in, making me shiver. I threw off the bedclothes, sat up and touched the skin at the back of my head. It was pulled taut into a tender, scabby seam. Mrs Wiggs continued pestering the door handle as if it would change its mind about being locked. In a daze, I stomped over and released it. She swooped in like a buzzard circling for rabbits: all grey skirts and pointed features. I sloped back to bed and pulled the blankets over me. It was Saturday and I had decided I would not get up again that day.
‘It is gone midday, Mrs Lancaster. I was concerned that something might be wrong. Are you well?’
It appeared my fragile health was a concern for the servants now. ‘I am well, Mrs Wiggs. What could possibly be wrong with me?’ I gave her my best wide eyes, and was met with a narrowing of hers.
‘You haven’t eaten since Thursday evening. Neglect of one’s appetite can make a person… hysterical,’ she said. ‘You’ve not emerged from this room since—’
‘Since the early hours of Friday morning. When my husband dragged himself home.’ I lay down and stared at the ceiling. ‘Is he here?’
‘No, Mrs Lancaster, he went out early this morning. I shall have the mirror replaced today, and take some of these clothes to the laundry. I assume that is why they are on the floor?’
I was not a tidy mistress and left my clothes scattered about my room. Having the privilege to do so was a novelty I still enjoyed.
‘You should leave the mirror, if only to remind us to agree on who should get the bad luck, Thomas or myself. It was my head that cracked it, after all.’
‘It will do no good to make a catastrophe of a silly accident, Mrs Lancaster. We shouldn’t punish ourselves.’
‘Not when we have others to punish us,’ I replied.
My comment was met with silence as dense as any Embankment mud. Eventually she sighed and said, ‘I shall send Sarah up with breakfast.’ She walked towards the door with an armful of laundry.
‘No need for breakfast. Just send Sarah, please.’
‘What for?’
‘I have an errand for her.’
‘I can tell her.’
‘No. Thank you.’
More silence.
‘Very well.’ Then she departed, and I locked the door behind her.
Two minutes later, Sarah knocked and I gave her my instructions and sent her away. While I waited for her to return, I worried. My security depended on being sure of Thomas’s affection. My position as his novelty had been tenuous, I knew that, but it seemed my day in the sun was over already. I had not even managed a brief spell in the territory of the comfortably familiar, hadn’t had the chance to insinuate myself like a pair of worn slippers he would be hesitant to throw away. I had travelled straight to inconvenience; surely exile or death would follow. My young husband had a dreadful temper, and I feared for the person who had been on the receiving end of it the night he returned home wearing their blood. No, I couldn’t leave my room that day. I had too much to think over, too many possibilities to consider.
I remembered the shirt, leapt up and scoured the room for it, but it was gone. Of course! I had to laugh. Mrs Wiggs had only come to retrieve Thomas’s shirt from where he had thrown it.
Blood didn’t pour like that from punches; there must have been a knife, and Thomas’s bare chest hadn’t had a mark on it. What if the man he had fought with was now dead? The police might even be on their way. What would I say if they should question me?
Finally, Sarah returned.
‘Here, Mrs Lancaster,’ she said, struggling with the load. ‘Mrs Wiggs said you weren’t feeling right. She did give me a look when she saw me bringing these up – she doesn’t approve, you know, thinks it morbid. Anyway, I told her it would do you good, get the heart beating, because everyone’s in such a state over it. See, it’s on every front page. It’s what you and the rest of London’s been waiting for, missus. I don’t know how you read it – gives me the shivers.’
She heaved the bundle onto the top of the dresser and I snatched the top one: The Daily News from the first of September.
ANOTHER BRUTAL MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL
Another woman was found brutally slaughtered in Whitechapel yesterday.
Shortly before four o’clock in the morning, Police Constable Neil discovered the woman lying in her own blood in Buck’s Row. Her throat had been savagely cut from ear to ear. PC Neil raised the alarm and a doctor was summoned.
Dr Llewellyn of Whitechapel Road inspected the body and pronounced the woman dead. The corpse was swiftly removed to Bethnal Green Police Station and upon further examination the horrifying details of the crime were revealed. The poor woman’s lower half had been mutilated by deep gashes.
The body was taken to the mortuary of the parish in Old Montague Street and the police made efforts to identify the woman.
CAST OUT OF LODGING HOUSE
A petticoat worn by the woman was marked with the stamp of Lambeth Workhouse and the only personal effects found in the pockets were a comb and a piece of looking glass.
As news of the crime travelled, it was discovered that she met the description of a regular at a lodging house in Thrawl Street. Women from this particular house were summoned and recognised the deceased as ‘Polly’, who had frequently taken a bed on the usual terms of the nightly fee of 4d.
IDENTIFICATION OF THE DECEASED
An inmate from the Lambeth Workhouse later identified the deceased as Mary Ann Nichols, 42, commonly known as Polly, who had been in the aforementioned workhouse in April and May of last year.
Mary Ann Nichols left the workhouse in May to take a position as a domestic in Wandsworth Common, but this did not last and soon she was wandering the streets and staying at lodging houses or the workhouse.
Nichols was married but had lived apart from her husband and children for years.
NO ONE HEARD ANYTHING
It is extraordinary that the noise of this brutal slaying seemingly did not arouse the sleeping tenants in the area. Buck’s Row being a street tenanted by a respectable class of people, far superior to the surrounding streets.
There was a mark found on the jaw on the right side of the face as though made by a thumb, and another bruise on the left side. There was a cut under the left ear, reaching the centre of the throat, and another from the right ear to the centre. The neck was severed down to the spine. The gashes in the abdomen must also have been inflicted with extreme savagery.
Dr Llewellyn stated that the injuries were the most severe and shocking he had ever seen in his career.
*
Just like Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols had been walking those Whitechapel streets in the early hours. The papers reported that the police thought she’d been killed by a person whose company she was keeping, a polite way of saying she was a prostitute, also just like Emma and Martha.
I kept seeing Emma Smith, the bag of broken twigs, lying there bleeding to death on the hospital bed. I thought of her birdlike legs and the little dunnock and how Emma had been put in a box but did not fly away come the morning. I began to wonder how these women must have felt. What was going through their minds when they realised what was about to happen to them? Did they fight? What does a woman feel in the moment she is murdered?
I found the newspaper reporting frustrating. I consumed newspaper after newspaper, in the hope of filling in gaps in the detail, but to no avail, most simply rehashed the same old facts, which were thin on the ground to begin with and some were more like directions as to what opinions we should form of the women. As a way of making sense of it all, and for something to do – I decided I would walk in these women’s shoes, and surmise some of this missing detail myself. I was going to try and thread their stories together, like stitching up my own Frankenstein’s monster, but instead I would create the victims, these forgotten and discarded women, and I would bring them back to life in their last moments. I understand this to be weird, macabre and a little indulgent in what some might call the perverse. God knows what Thomas and Mrs Wiggs would think of it, they would call me twisted, immoral or sick, but my own physician had advised that I might find some therapy in writing my thoughts down. I was curious to see where it would lead me. I only wanted to bring these women back and spend a little time with them, have them speak and for me to listen and understand. The moment you realise you are to be murdered and your life is to end in such a miserable way must be the loneliest of all. Someone should have the courage to accompany them in this and I found myself compelled to do so.
I scoured the million theories and opinions that filled the papers, I analysed the articles that were fleshed out from the most meagre of ideas and the ones that had been fabricated around eyewitness accounts that were nothing at all. I curated my scrapbook of snippets, and from all that text and supposition I fashioned my own account of the last moments of Little Lost Polly. And I felt better for it. Then I hid these scrawls in the dresser in the back dining room.
It became very difficult to read the information and maintain a rational thought which wasn’t excited by a most paranoid fear. Commentators variously held that it had been a case of mistaken identity, the revenge of a jealous lover, the work of a maniac, an escaped lunatic… The perpetrator had to be foreign for no Englishman could have done such a thing. It was a lunatic Jew down on whores. The murderer was left-handed. It was a gang of body-snatchers… Some newspapers said Polly lost a tooth during the attack, others said she lost five and that the murderer had kicked them loose. It turned out she was missing the top five but had lost them years ago.
The only commonality between the reports was an accepted belief that the murderer had to be the same man who’d killed Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. Detective Inspector Abberline, of the Criminal Investigation Department, and Detective Inspector Helson, of J Division, had also stated this. If the murderer had hoped to make an impact, he must have been extremely proud.
But what of Thomas? He had come home the night of Polly’s murder covered in blood. I had been reading about the murder of Martha Tabram over breakfast on the morning Thomas had appeared with scratches down his neck. Hadn’t he been missing the night before?
It seemed far-fetched, of course, a mere coincidence. Then I read that the doctor at the inquest believed the murderer must have anatomical knowledge; all the vital parts of Polly Nichols’ forty-two-year-old body had been targeted with such precision, he said, he suspected that the killer might be a doctor. I read those words and heard the whistle and screech of a train as it pulls into a station. I dropped the paper and stood up but felt so ill and giddy I had to sit back down.
Those scratches, as if from a woman’s nails in desperation. Mrs Wiggs washing his bloodstained shirts in the bath. The scurrying and hiding in the attic, the repeated disappearances. Then coming home covered in blood the very same night as the next murder. I clutched my chest.
*
Once I had calmed myself down, I dismissed my conspiracy theories as the product of a bored and lonely mind; my imagination, encouraged to run a riot, had run away with itself. I had no more of my drops, and without those to dull my senses I was close to peeling wallpaper off with my teeth. There was too much room in my head and it was full of fog. I was invested in this marriage; I had no choice but to make it a functional relationship, at the very least. There was no trail of breadcrumbs leading back to my old life.
We slipped back into routine, and no one batted an eyelid. It was as if nothing had ever happened, but things had changed between us now.
The things I had read and the mystery of those two nights were like flea bites; I could ignore them most of the time, but occasionally they drove me mad with itching. At breakfast he would smile at me, at dinner he would ask if I’d had a good day, and I would hear the clock tick or see a fly landing on an apple and be reminded of the scratches, the blood, the crack of the mirror, the dent in the bedroom wall from the candlestick, the fat veins on his chest. There were the other things he said to me within the bedroom on the nights he did come home: that I was as good as fucking a corpse, how strange I was, how old I was beginning to look, how he could have done so much better, how I should be very grateful for my luck. And when daylight came we must pretend as if we were Chelsea’s Adam and Eve.