‘Won’t you play with us?’ asked one of the girls.
They were about ten or so, she said, with big brown eyes and long dark hair, beautiful girls, identically dressed in clean blue dresses with black brocade, polished shoes, and blue ribbons in their hair that had been artfully tied by someone who cared.
‘Small versions of you, Susannah. I took that as a good omen, so, believe it or not, I let them blindfold me.’
Still giggling, they held a hand each and led her down the road and into a house. She feared she was going to be robbed or killed, but they had such soft little hands, she said, that she half didn’t care what happened. There was no going back. They steered her through a building and into a courtyard, laughed when she slipped down a step outside, then tugged her into another house, and through room after room, until finally they sat her down in an armchair. One of them jumped on the arm of the chair and kissed her on the cheek as the other untied the scarf from her eyes, still laughing. Then they ran off.
As Mabel’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw there was an old lady sitting in a chair in the corner. She nearly screamed.
‘She must have been a hundred at least! Her eyes were milky, her skin yellow; I thought she was dead.’
The room was dark and sparsely furnished, but every surface was covered with lace, ornaments and trinkets. The windows were draped with heavy muslins and fussy scalloped curtains; barely any natural light was allowed in.
‘Don’t mind my mother,’ said a woman who appeared in the doorway. ‘She can’t see you.’
She was dressed head to toe in black, with a black lace veil covering her face. Mabel said she had an accent that might have been French but could have been Russian, she wasn’t sure. I knew, of course, that it was Irina, Dr Shivershev’s housekeeper, but I didn’t say anything. Questions were not to be encouraged.
‘Could have been anything. I only saw her hands, which had no spots or marks. I could see the shine of her eyes through the lace. I had the sense she was older than us, but still attractive, even underneath that veil.’
Mabel followed Irina upstairs to a room that had been set up for a specific purpose. The windows were blocked with heavy drapes, and there were many lamps to see by, even though it was the middle of the day with the sun at its brightest. It was here that Mabel began to think she might die.
In the corner of the room there was an old birthing chair, a heavy mahogany monster tilted back, with leather arm-straps, and wooden planks for the legs to be splayed apart, and more leather straps to keep them still. The chair had half a seat, like an arch with the middle missing. A steel bucket was on the floor under the missing part.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Irina said. ‘The chair frightens everyone, but it works well. It is better for you and you will not feel much.’
Mabel stripped down to her chemise and sat in the chair. She let herself be strapped in by Irina and prayed that if she was to die it would happen quickly.
She survived. Irina told her she must go straight home and lock herself away with her chamber pot.
‘Make sure to be as discreet as you can. Say nothing to anyone,’ Irina told her. ‘There are many who need my assistance. If I am arrested, who will help them?’
For this, Mabel paid Irina two pounds. It was my own money, a sum I would not have been able to get from Thomas without questions.
‘The girls will take you to a place you can find a cab.’ Irina returned Mabel to the room with the old woman. There was a cuckoo clock on the mantelpiece that chimed on the hour. The two little girls blindfolded her again and led her to the top of Commercial Street.
‘Is the lady all better now?’ one of them asked her.
‘Yes, I think so,’ Mabel replied, still dull from the ether, and they ran off.
‘That’s the thing about London – you can walk around in a blindfold and no one bats an eyelid,’ she said. ‘No wonder this Ripper hasn’t been caught. He’s probably been running about with a knife in one hand and a kidney in the other, and people simply haven’t noticed.’
Desperate not to spend money, Mabel ignored Irina’s advice and took the omnibus. She’d planned to leave the milliner’s the next day but decided she couldn’t bear another minute, so fled in the middle of the night, preferring to wait at the station for the morning train rather than spend another hour there. The night-watchman came towards her on the platform and asked if she was all right. Thinking him another pervert, she gave him short shrift. He disappeared but came back five minutes later with a blanket, and she burst into tears. He told her she was welcome to wait in his office if she liked, it had a small fire, until the trains started in the morning.
‘I don’t mean anything improper; you needn’t worry. I’m too old for all that, but there’s a murderer on the loose, and it don’t bear thinking about,’ he said.
‘So there are decent men, but apparently they’re all old enough to be my grandad,’ said Mabel.
The experience had left its mark on her face. She may not have had a scar as crude as mine, but it was in the lines around her eyes and the new sharpness in her features. She enjoyed being back at work, she said, especially with the children, but sharing the nurses’ accommodation was a bore.
‘Have you ever thought about renting a room in Chelsea?’ I asked her.
I decided that I would fill my
