Mary left to meet the man with the package containing Mrs Wiggs’ miraculously virginal heart, and Dr Shivershev looked about the room.
‘Make sure the stuff is burned, and put the fire out. Then we go.’
‘What about the trunk?’ I asked.
‘We’ll take it with us, to Boston. We’ll dispose of it there, but for now it will come in quite useful. Now let’s get you back to Chelsea.’
37
Dr Shivershev was to take me back to the house and bruise me, put marks on me, he said, to make it look like Thomas had beaten me more recently than my old bruises would account for.
Walter drove us back to Chelsea in the deep darkness of the very early hours. We stood at the end of the road to watch for the lamp of the policeman, waited for him to pass, and made our way to the house. Inside, Dr Shivershev hovered in the hallway as I lit a candle. Then I remembered how my husband’s dead body still hung in the attic. The thought of being left alone with it up there, in a dark house, affected me in a way that cutting Mrs Wiggs had not.
‘Take me as well! I can’t stay here – they will catch me and I’ll hang, I know I will.’ My resolve had gone. Everything that had happened in that house overwhelmed me all at once and I feared I would never survive. I started to cry.
‘Susannah, you will be fine. You have strong nerves. You would have made a brilliant surgeon, far superior to your husband. I’ve seen men faint in much less torturous conditions than you endured tonight. Keep going a little longer, remember the plan and do not give up. You are nearly there.’
‘I can’t! I can’t do it. I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m alone. I might forget my story – I’ll be weak. What if they question me over and over and I make mistakes?’
He pulled me close and I buried my face in his coat to the point where I could barely breathe. It was wonderful for a brief moment to be enveloped; I had forgotten how it felt to depend on someone else, even if only for a few seconds.
‘Now, remember,’ he said, as his rough, unshaven chin scratched the side of my face, ‘the most important thing of all is not to panic.’
‘What?’ My heart raced at those words. He had said those same words to Thomas moments before he strung him up. What did that mean?
I struggled against him, but I could not free myself.
He let go, then shoved me with a hand on my chest against the wall of the hallway. It was enough to take my breath away. I saw a flash of silver, but my eyes travelled too slowly to do anything but anticipate the pain, which was of insane heat, a burning sensation of metal across the thin skin of my neck.
My mouth hung open but silent. My hands flew to my neck. I felt the warmth of my own blood running away from me. Tears spilled. But I did not panic. He had used me, taken my idea as his own to free Mary, and now I would die.
He held me by the shoulders as my back slid down the wall until I was on the ground. It was the way I imagined the Ripper lowered his victims before he tore them apart. His hand was cradling the back of my head as he lay me on the floor.
He took his knife and wiped it clean on my skirt, then put it back in his waistband. Then he took the bottle he had filled with the watery blood and poured it around me. I lay in a puddle of that and my own blood. Then he held my cheeks in both hands and kissed me full on the lips.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and left by the front door.
38
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
