The days passed and I still had no idea where Thomas was hiding. If Mrs Wiggs knew any better, she kept that to herself. I fantasised that he’d killed himself, taken by a fit of guilt after beating his wife and murdering Annie Chapman and the others, or that the police had him, or that he’d tripped, knocked himself out and drowned in the Thames. I rehearsed in my mind the various conversations I would have with the police should they turn up.
The longer Thomas stayed away, the more fearful I was of how things would be should he return. My cheek was bruised and my lip split on my left side. I studied my face in the mirror every day, sometimes every few hours, and convinced myself it was getting better. I wished I could have shown Mabel at least. We could have compared wounds, to measure who was the bigger fool, but I hadn’t heard from her, hadn’t received any letter. Cloistered in my bedroom, I broke up the hours by taking my drops with brandy, abandoning my self-imposed rule of never doing so during the daytime. I thought of Mabel often, and worried what would happen to me. By the end of the week I had taken all the clothes, feathers and frivolous things that Thomas had bought me, dumped them outside my bedroom door and told Mrs Wiggs to get rid of them.
‘Where? What on earth for? What are you going to wear?’ I think she had serious concerns I was about to parade naked through the streets of Chelsea.
‘Give them to charity for all I care.’ I found out later she stored them in an unoccupied bedroom, along with the shrunken head that had made me scream.
From then on I wore my old dresses and hats: dour grey and brown linsey frocks and plain black bonnets. They matched my mood and I felt more comfortable that way.
*
Bored out of my mind, I decided to go to the one place a woman could walk freely after having suffered a beating. Somewhere no one would care or notice. Whitechapel. As I made my way out the house, with clumps of powder on my face, a dark bonnet pulled down and wearing a nondescript brown dress, Mrs Wiggs chased me down the hallway. She threw her body against the door as I opened it.
‘You can’t go out like that, Mrs Lancaster. What will people think?’
‘Please stand away from the door, Mrs Wiggs.’
‘If you are in need of distraction, I can send Sarah out for you. A new book or more of your newspapers, perhaps?’
I pulled the door open and shunted her out of the way. I could feel her eyes boring holes into my back as I walked down the garden path.
My first stop was Hanbury Street, the place Annie Chapman was found, only a couple of streets away from Itchy Park. There were still crowds there, five days later: bare-headed women holding infants, and gangs of weasel boys with patchy hair and concave chests. Throngs of ladies stood giggling in pairs, thrilled at the thuggery, coarseness and proximity of the labouring poor. It was more than a little embarrassing, but I had to acknowledge I was one of these birds. We were no more than canaries, briefly escaped from our mind-numbing cages. The labouring poor knew they were being gawped at. There was tension, an atmosphere of simmering rage.
This time there was no ten-year-old girl re-enacting the drama of the victim’s last moments and asking a fee for the spectacle. For those of us curious about Dark Annie’s demise, the tenants of the Hanbury Street property were offering the chance to stare down at the murder spot from their windows, and charging for the privilege, of course. There was a queue of tourists. It was unseemly.
I ended up wandering into the church of St Jude’s, where Thomas and I had married. I had been so full of optimism, greedy with expectation. I had been so pleased to make such a miraculous marriage to a boy who, I thought, worshipped me. I’d imagined I was in control, but I was too inexperienced, too easily flattered, too arrogant in my ignorance to question what a man like Thomas could want with a woman like me. Though it was only five days since he’d gone missing, everything had changed for me, and in the city, in that time. It had given me the opportunity to develop a million theories, all of which confused me. One minute I thought him an immature, bad-tempered husband, the next he was the Whitechapel man. How many women in London worried about the same thing, that they were married to the man who ripped whores? Probably hundreds, and we all convinced ourselves otherwise, if only for the peace of mind it gave us.
I stopped to drop coins into the collection box on my way out. I hadn’t noticed that the vicar had been watching me, had observed my introspective gloom and the marks on my face. When the noise echoed around the church, he glided over.
‘My dear, that’s a very generous sound you are making.’
‘Good afternoon, Father. I was praying that they’ll catch the Whitechapel man soon.’
‘Ahhh… Let us hope those poor women didn’t die in vain, that the world has at last woken up to the pitiful lives and horrors that exist.’ The reverend, likely not as old as his lack of hair suggested, stared at my face. ‘The sisters at Providence Row are very welcoming, my dear. I can open the box, if you think you could use the money… to find a safer place?’
For some reason, I burst into laughter. It echoed round the church and I heard myself cackling like a witch. The reverend was nonplussed, and so was I. He had mistaken me for a poor woman, battered and helpless, one who needed saving. How pitiful. How hilarious. But it was in fact deeply humiliating, and I was ashamed. I had looked at such women in the hospital, thought them feeble and pathetic as they held their puffy faces together with swollen hands and broken fingers where their husbands had stamped on them. We had tutted and judged as they trotted back like mindless idiots for their husbands to eventually trample them to death, boots moving from hands and fingers to faces.
‘No, thank you, Father,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll go and get pissed.’
I went to the Ten Bells next to Itchy Park for no honourable reason. I had to push my way past the scruffy men standing on the steps between two columns at the door. One of them barely moved, stood stiff, gave me the look up and down, his body rigid, so I had to rub against him. I rolled my eyes so he could see and shouldered past him, pleased with myself for acting bold. It was where I was meant to be, after all. By birth, I belonged to the rough and the common. Perhaps I had escaped what was meant to be my life, and all these freakish twists were fate pulling me back on course. Perhaps by marrying Thomas I had made him cruel and violent and turned him into a murderer. It was me that had ruined his life. I was the badness that had crawled into the yeast, as my grandmother used to say. Bad blood thickened like tar, turning good people into monsters by proximity.
I was not frightened of the men in the pub so much. As always, they either ignored or stared at me, scoring what they saw, but the women were hostile, so desperate to hold onto the scraps of male attention they’d blind a woman with broken glass, give her a scar so she wasn’t a threat. The sawdust stuck to the floor and my feet, there was a dense fog of tobacco smoke and a sickly smell of stale beer, and the bar was sticky. I waded through a pack of ruddy, bloated faces; everywhere there were the red eyes and swollen noses of dedicated drinkers. I was glad of my bruises, my Whitechapel rouge, the mark of someone who belonged. I squeezed in between two men at the bar and the barman saw me instantly – the benefit of being tall, or the curse. He asked what I wanted and I didn’t know, so I said rum, because it had been Annie Chapman’s drink. One thing I learned about rum: it’s revolting. I nursed the vile drink, determined to not let the disgust show on my face, until the sweaty barman with forearms like trees slammed another down in front of me.
‘But I don’t want another,’ I told him. I didn’t understand what was going on. Did they bring drink after drink in these places until you told them not to? No wonder the poor were always plastered, and poor.
‘Think you’ve caught someone’s eye. Aren’t you a lucky girl.’ The dour barman gestured with a tilt of his head.
My eyes travelled across the bar until they settled on the familiar form of an unkempt Dr Shivershev. He was sat on a stool looking straight at me from the other side. He lifted his drink and gave a nod, a funny little curl on his lips. Next to him stood a ferociously pretty woman with drowsy eyes and wideset cheekbones. She was draped over his arm like a saloon girl from the Wild West. Tendrils of fair hair curled around her face. She didn’t wear a bonnet and carried herself in a way that said she didn’t need rescuing. To the other side of Dr Shivershev stood a man with gingery whiskers, a flashy waistcoat and jacket, smoking a pipe.
The woman leaned forward to whisper to Dr Shivershev and winked at me as she did so. Dr Shivershev said something to the man with the whiskers, and they all started laughing. I felt incredibly stupid. In a fit of temper, I grabbed the rum and downed it, slammed the empty glass on the bar and shot them all what I hoped was a filthy look, although it may have appeared – quite accurately, as it happened – more like I was about to vomit. The sweaty barman scooped up the glass and I ran out of the pub, trying to contain the panic at the fire in my chest. My eyes watered. I barged past the men who’d looked me up and down earlier and they barely moved, just swayed to the sides like blades of grass in a breeze and continued their conversation. Meanwhile, I stood on the pavement and retched.