I also told a lie. I claimed that Mrs Wiggs had revealed to me the exact spot where she’d buried the Lancaster baby. If Helen preferred to keep this scandal between us, she could agree to my terms and pay me promptly. Otherwise, in order to keep my fire burning and food in my belly, I would tell the first journalist who would listen.
‘Where is Mrs Wiggs?’ asked Helen. Her face was a picture, the smugness gone. Her mind was clearly desperate to fathom how she could dominate again. Testing her tongue on those in her employ had not been good exercise.
‘I honestly don’t know. She was seen leaving with a man and a trunk,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she is making up for lost time.’
‘You would be willing to shame yourself to extort a pension from a family who have done nothing to deserve it? You are not the only one who has endured my brother’s temper. He was a cruel child: spoiled, explosive. My mother was petrified of him, as was I.’
‘I don’t want a pension; I want a chance. What I’m asking for is nothing to you but will change my life for ever. If you think I’m going to go away quietly after putting up with your brother and being left with such a pretty necklace, you’re wrong. Give me what I want and you’ll never hear of me again.’
It was small change to the Lancasters and Helen was a sensible girl. It frustrated the hell out of her that she would never know if I was bluffing, but she had her lawyers draw up the settlement.
As I left the study, she remained seated.
‘I don’t want my mother to know about this, but tell me where my brother is, my real brother. I want to give him a proper burial – privately of course.’
‘Ask me again in ten years,’ I said. It was a trick, of course. That woman was no more interested in her brother than she was in me.
‘Funny, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Look at us, both dressed up in mourning for a man we feel nothing but bitterness towards.’
By the end of the month, I was the legal owner of the house in Chelsea and had £2000 in the bank.
40
There I was, back in Chelsea, rattling around an empty house, when the visitor I least expected knocked on the door: one Miss Mabel Mullens.
Looking a lot plumper and apple-cheeked again, she was back to being beautiful, which, I discovered, was how I preferred her. She was smirking on the doorstep, arms akimbo. It was hard to believe we’d hated each other for no other reason than the belief that there could not be enough good fortune for the both of us. We had moved past that terrain somehow and come straight to a rather abrasive affection.
‘Come on, let’s see this scar I’ve heard so much about,’ was the first thing she said. Our relationship continued in this vein for many years after.
I pulled down my bandages and stuck my chin up, showed her my scar, still ugly, scabbed and bruised.
‘I can barely see it! What a huge fuss about nothing,’ she said.
My one solace, I told her, was that Dr Haslip hadn’t been on duty, or else I would have woken up with my hand sewn to my forehead and my neck still open. I noticed little lines around her eyes when she laughed; they hadn’t been there before, but they suited her. She wasted no time in telling me she was still ‘off’ men.
‘I haven’t the stomach for the troubles they bring. You may not believe it, but I’m ward sister at a hospital. The probationers think I’m a dragon – I take my inspiration from you.’
‘I assume you mean the Reading Union? Only a workhouse could have you as ward sister,’ I said.
She laughed again. But no, she said, she’d found a job at the East London Hospital for Children, where it had spread like a whisky fire that a nurse from the London had been nearly murdered by her surgeon husband.
When I asked why she’d not kept in touch as she’d said she would, she swore blind she’d written twice. The second because she’d not received an answer to the first, which she’d sent as soon as she reached her father’s farm. She’d assumed I didn’t want anything further to do with her and didn’t write again. I would eventually find her letters, along with Aisling’s hairbrush and the wooden box with all her things in it, under the floorboards in Mrs Wiggs’ bedroom.
We talked for hours. Mabel had come to apologise, said she’d wept for nights, realising that she’d burdened me with her problems when I’d had my own and not said a word.
‘I assumed you had struck gold, Susannah. I’m so sorry.’
I didn’t dare tell her the truth. I’d told no one, although at times I was bursting. That wasn’t strictly true: sometimes I talked to Aisling, and I believed she heard me.
Our conversation eventually drifted towards what happened after I gave her the address from Dr Shivershev. It was for Princelet Street, in Whitechapel. When Mabel went there, she saw it was a cobbler’s shop: small and dingy and full of cobblers’ clutter. A tall Jew with a dark beard and his shirt open to his chest emerged from the back and asked her what her business was. On the piece of paper it had said to introduce herself as a woman suffering from chronic headaches. She felt a fool saying the words, but the man nodded then told her to go and stand on the corner of Fashion Street.
As she waited under a lamppost, heart skipping beats, twin girls came towards her, giggling, one carrying a skipping rope and the other a scarf. They
