Annie had consumption. She grew sicker and achier and more feverish by the day, and by God she wished it would hurry and take her. In the next life she dreamed there would be no fear or loneliness and certainly no rum. John would be there, and so would all her babies, and her brothers and sisters. The urge would leave her in death too, and she would finally be free.
She knew she should have pushed harder for the bed, but, forever the soldier’s daughter, she could not bring herself to beg. Not even now when her bones ached and her limbs shivered, but at least the fever kept out the cold. She pushed on the unlocked yard door in Hanbury Street and was pleased to find her spot empty; it would be all hers for a few hours.
21
It was Sarah who woke me from my screaming by banging at my locked bedroom door.
I had been lying on the floor of a coach. I must have fallen asleep there, or maybe Thomas had hit me too hard and I’d passed out. I didn’t panic, not like I had that first time when Thomas squeezed my neck until I lost consciousness. I was fairly used to it now. I could feel that the blood had dried on my face. I brushed off the flakes with my fingers and prodded the new scab on my swollen lip.
I was looking at the ceiling of a coach; its walls were black. It was still dark outside. We rolled over a particularly bumpy stretch of road and when I put both hands up against the bottom of the seats to steady myself I realised Thomas wasn’t there any more. He had left me in the coach on my own. But where was I going?
I sat up and stared out at the navy-blue skies and black branches like crooked fingers. I was being driven out of London, but to where? I pulled myself on to my knees as the coach picked up speed over the rough ground. These were country roads, not city streets. The coach was being thrown from side to side and I struggled to stay upright. The driver was obviously a reckless fool. I had to make him take me back home to Chelsea. I reached up and thumped the ceiling with my balled fist. There was a thump back.
‘Hello!’ I shouted, but there was no answer.
Thomas’s head appeared, upside down at the open coach window, grinning at me, his face livid, his cheeks slack and his blue eyes bloodshot. His hair was long and ungroomed and he held his hat on his head. When he grinned, there was a gold tooth. I screamed. How could I not have seen that before? How could I have missed it?
I screamed myself awake, and heard Sarah hammering at my bedroom door.
‘Missus! Missus! Let me in! What’s going on? Are you hurt?’ she shouted as she rattled the handle. ‘Shall I fetch Mrs Wiggs? Oh, what shall I do?’
She sounded like Mabel. I told her to go away, but she wouldn’t. So I let her in.
‘I was having a nightmare, that’s all. I’m quite all right. What time is it anyway?’ I asked.
‘It’s gone eleven, missus.’
I hadn’t had the chance to look at my face yet, although it was tender, but to her credit Sarah didn’t give anything away. I wondered if domestics received lessons in such things: how to maintain an expressionless face when confronted by the awkward evidence of violence. They used to tell us nurses that when delivering bad news we should be truthful, brief and gone, but to leave out gruesome detail. For example, when a patient had died on the operating table, we were told not to say, ‘He died in agony, half of his leg off,’ but rather, ‘The end came mercifully quickly.’
I sent Sarah away to get the papers once I’d reassured her I wasn’t dying and there was no need for a doctor, and certainly no need for Mrs Wiggs. When she came back and gave me the Telegraph, I nearly took to my bed again.
FOURTH WHITECHAPEL WOMAN MUTILATED
Yet another brutal murder was committed in the Whitechapel area this morning. This is the fourth woman to have been stabbed and mutilated, in circumstances strikingly similar to the others. She was attacked in the same way as Polly Nichols and there is little doubt she too was of the unfortunate class.
At six o’clock this morning she was found lying on her back in the yard of 29 Hanbury Street. This is a respectable street, but it is only a short distance from Spitalfields Working Men’s Club. Number 29 is let to tenants of the working class.
DISEMBOWELLED
Dr Phillips, the Divisional Surgeon of Police, found that the woman’s throat had been cut nearly to the vertebrae and that she had been entirely disembowelled. Her intestines lay next to her. She was removed to the mortuary.
While not yet officially identified, it is thought that she was known as Sievey and that her real name may have been Annie Chapman. She was last seen drinking with a man at the Ten Bells, five minutes’ walk from the spot where her corpse was found.
She had lodged at 35 Dorset Street, Spitalfields, on and off for the past eight or nine months, but last night she was unable to pay for her lodging. Recently she
