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.