‘You were naughty not to tell me, Susannah.’
He winked at me. I could have ripped the skin from his cheeks with my nails. It was the self-assured gloating of a winner, of a man who would always win. I spat in his face, a token act well worth whatever consequence it prompted; anything to dislodge his smug expression. He stood up, disgusted, and wiped my saliva from his jaw.
‘We will try our best, to manage your… aggression.’
Mrs Wiggs came towards me carrying the tray from the dresser. On it was a large metal syringe and a rubber tube. They were going to inject me.
‘Thomas, for God’s sake, you can’t really intend to let her use that on me?’ I kicked up the bedclothes and struggled, but Thomas pinned me down. I screamed and called for Sarah.
‘All the servants are gone, Susannah. Remember how you frightened them? Please calm down…’ His face hung down over me – saggy-skinned, like a bloodhound, just as it had been that night in the coach, the night of Annie Chapman’s murder, just like the man with the gold tooth. I tried to recall all the details, all the dates: the nights he’d gone missing; each murder. I would need to recount all the facts when I found someone who would listen.
The rubber was pulled tight against the skin of my arm. Thomas barked instructions at Mrs Wiggs as he sat on me and held me down while the fluid forced its way into my blood. When it hit me, a pressure at the back of my skull, I thought my eyeballs would burst. A rush swirled about my head, and a smothering darkness like a wet sackcloth was draped across my face. All the lines and edges softened, and everything fell together into one soft cloud.
‘It’s the best way of getting it into you, Susannah. Relax and enjoy it.’
Their faces went lumpy and misshapen. Their outlines leaked into the air around them, liquefying. I fell, backwards, deeper, into the bed and into the floor. My limbs became heavy, melted.
My last memory was of Mrs Wiggs as she said to Thomas, ‘Is this really necessary?’
*
Mrs Wiggs drugged me several times a day after that and was terrible at it. Her hands shook, and she was both brutal and hesitant at the same time. I was bruised up and down both arms. I kept offering fresh pieces of flesh for her to mutilate. She didn’t trust me at first, was suspicious that with my nursing background I was trying to fool her in some way. But after a few days she realised I was genuinely trying to save myself the pain and her the bother. The process was painful for her to administer as well as for me on the receiving end.
When I offered to do it myself, under her supervision, she hesitated for a moment, then untied my restraints and observed me as I injected the muscle in my thigh. After that, she didn’t restrain my wrists at all, just left the ankle binds in place. I was still very much tied to the bed, couldn’t reach far or escape. I had to kneel on the edge of the bed to use the chamber pot on the floor. Mrs Wiggs struggled with the indignity of that more than I did. I’d been treated little better than an animal in that bedroom many times before, so why would taking a shit over a pot bother me?
The laudanum delivered under the muscle had an intense, stupefying effect at first, but quickly faded. My secret little habit had rewarded me with tolerance. I looked forward to my injections; they broke up the boredom and the tyranny of my own punishing thoughts. I was docile, quiet and obedient, which I’m sure Mrs Wiggs attributed to the drugs, but after the first few days I was a lot more coherent and lucid than she realised. It was the only advantage I had. I did think about throwing a shit at Thomas, should he come through the door, but knew that it wouldn’t do me any good in the long run.
I was saving my energy for when I’d be put in front of someone who wasn’t under his influence. I would need to choose my words very carefully, so that anything I said could not be used in the argument against me. There could be no mention of my husband being the Whitechapel murderer, or talk of Mabel and her baby being cut out and put into glass jars, or accounts of fighting with Mrs Wiggs over a bloody hairbrush. I had an interest in the murders, but, I would say to the doctor who interviewed me, did not his own wife read the newspapers? Had not his own daughters been to visit the murder spots? If they were to lock me away for having a macabre interest in the slaughter of prostitutes, they would have to put half of the ladies of London away too. Thomas did have connections, though; he was a physician at the hospital, after all. And Mrs Wiggs had been with the Lancasters for years. Who was I? Who knew anything of me?
I didn’t see Thomas for many days after that first morning, until one day much later he came and spoke to Mrs Wiggs through a gap in the door. He told her she would need to reduce the dosage, as I was to be awake when Dr Shivershev came to assess me.
‘He won’t sign if he thinks we’re drugging her,’ I heard him say. ‘He’s being difficult, argumentative. He is one of God’s chosen people, after all; he can be a pious little bastard. I can manage him, just make sure she’s awake.’
As the dosage got lower and lower, the syrup sludge in my brain cleared. I was kept company at all times by Mrs Wiggs, who sat on
