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.
39
Helen finally agreed to a meeting after a long-winded process of letter tennis between our solicitors. It was a manipulative attempt to see which of my resources would run out first: money or motivation. I kept at it. I had a better chance of extracting a settlement if the fear of shame was fresh. I would only have to poke a finger in the open wound and tease the pain to the surface.
My solicitor tried to explain to me, as old men who know better always do, that any grounds I felt I had for improving my financial position as Thomas’s widow would be best pursued via the proper legal process, through the courts. As Thomas had yet to inherit anything and we had been married for a mere five months, it was expected that the courts would say I was only entitled to inherit from his earned income, which everyone knew was a collection of debts. The Lancasters had gallantly settled all outstanding debts before the private inquest was held. I would have no real claim, Mr Radcliffe said, but perhaps the courts would feel sorry for me and encourage the Lancasters to help with a small pension. If I wasn’t careful, they would humiliate me and ruin me publicly. I didn’t listen.
I went to Abbingdale Hall alone. Helen would have her lawyers present. Mr Radcliffe, ever the concerned worrier for my nerves, wanted to accompany me should her team of vultures attempt to pick at my flesh.
‘I’m made of sterner stuff than that,’ I assured him, though I had my doubts. My newfound bravery was actually desperation. I now, quite literally, had nothing to lose.
Thomas had described his home as poetically grand, beautiful, but then he was given to embellishment. However, in this instance, I believe he underplayed it. The estate was vast. There were ornamental gardens, fountains in front of a dramatic Gothic mansion, and well-tended grounds surrounding it. The looming spire of the family church punctured the horizon. That one family could live in such splendid isolation, cut off from the misery and hopelessness, not to mention the stink, of Whitechapel, and be so arrogant as to think that a few months’ rent on a shabby house in London would be all that was needed to get rid of me gave me confidence. This was my only advantage. They thought me a gold-digger, I knew that, a guttersnipe come to demand crumbs from their table. It was not a conversation I looked forward to, but I had need of security. Wasn’t that how wealth worked? It was grabbed at, stolen, extorted, taken by force or any other means necessary, and protestations after the fact were dismissed and ignored. I would simply play by the same rules.
I was left waiting in a foyer
