Mrs Wiggs was hovering as usual and came bursting in carrying a tray of tea and devilled kidneys that neither of us would eat and that would instead rise and create a stench between us like the fog on the Thames.
‘Mrs Wiggs, do you see the scratches on Dr Lancaster’s neck?’ I asked.
I knew she would fuss. True to form, she slapped the tray down with a clatter and rushed to him. He attempted to swat her away like a fly.
‘Oh, good heavens, Dr Lancaster,’ she said.
Thomas shot me a dark look and I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling.
‘You must be vigilant or else they will become infected. Was it a patient?’
‘It was a cat. I had forgotten – it’s only now I remember,’ said Thomas.
I had to stop myself from laughing. Thomas hated cats. He hated all animals. Thought them dirty creatures. In no situation would he have allowed himself to come into such close proximity to a cat. Mrs Wiggs stood listening to his amazingly tall tale, lapping up every word. He conjured this fantastic story about a lady losing her cat as he was walking home. He took the time to mention how charming and elegant the young lady had been, while looking in my direction. The beautiful young lady’s cat had escaped and got stuck in the mud on the banks of Chelsea creek and he had climbed down to rescue it. Thomas detested dirt; the only mess he would tolerate was the blood and matter of surgery, and that purely because it paved the way to success. When he’d finished, Mrs Wiggs was full of pride, as if he were George fresh from slaying the dragon, when all he’d done was retrieve a mucky cat. An event I very much doubted happened at all.
‘Oh, Dr Lancaster, cats are wretched creatures. You should have let it drown, lady or not,’ she said.
‘One must do the right thing, Mrs Wiggs,’ he replied.
If I’d known what he was, I wouldn’t have baited him about the blasted scratches. I would have scarpered right then, leapt up and raced out the front door and far away. If I’m truly honest, I already knew something was wrong, but I refused to accept I had made a mistake. I reassured myself by feasting my eyes on my diamond engagement ring. I liked to feel its weight, how it anchored me to that house in Chelsea and warded off any fear of hunger or the English winter. I was learning what money felt like. It felt like space, room to move and breathe, to stretch out my legs in comfort without worrying about falling. Being poor was to be small and cramped, a body bent over and locked up, folded in on itself. Stifled, trapped and unable to breathe. Here, I had room. Quite literally. There were rooms in the Chelsea house that I could roll about in without hitting the furniture for a good few feet. I know, because I’d tried it one aimless day.
Thomas stood up, put on his jacket, paused to admire his reflection in the mirror over the mantel and smoothed down his impeccable black whiskers.
‘Is there anything interesting in the news, my dear?’ he said, turning his head this way and that to make sure he saw only perfect symmetry.
Thinking it prudent to avoid angering him, I looked down at the newspaper I had been wrestling with all morning. A small paragraph caught my eye.
‘Only that a woman has been murdered in Whitechapel.’
‘How unusual,’ he said. Without looking, he tossed the Evening News onto my lap. ‘Here, why don’t you turn your attention to something more cheerful. There is news of the prince’s bad foot.’
He bent down and gave me an aggressive peck on the cheek, said goodbye, spun on his heel like a German count, and left.
I was more than a little bewildered by the denial of the scratches and then the ridiculous cat story. It was as if when a man was within his own household the credibility of his stories was beyond reproach, regardless of their ridiculousness to anyone else with eyes and ears. I put this down to my not knowing anything about being married or being upper-middle class. It was all strange, practically foreign, in truth. We might use the same words, but at times they seemed to mean entirely different things. My earlier passion to carve out an influential position in the house had already dissipated, and for now I could only muster the energy to try and fit in. But at least I wasn’t emptying bedpans or nursing men with hernias the size of Wales. It was my fault. I kept putting my great clumsy feet in all the wrong places and had difficulty keeping my mouth shut. I had screamed at him like a fishwife when he’d mentioned my age. That hadn’t helped, but it would not be the last time I would fail to grasp what was expected of me.
It was in this reflective sulk that I found my eyes drawn back to the news story Thomas had dismissed so flippantly. It wasn’t very large, or by all accounts unusual, but the scant details leapt out, as they always do when there is news about one’s home town.
A WHITECHAPEL HORROR
A woman, now lying unidentified at the mortuary, Whitechapel, was viciously stabbed to death between two and four o’clock this morning, her outraged corpse found on the landing of a staircase inside George’s Buildings, Whitechapel. George’s Buildings are tenements occupied by the labouring classes.
The woman was stabbed in twenty-four places. No
