‘You need spectacles,’ I said. The light was clear and bright, the weather cold and brittle. The pale light leached the colour from the room and turned everything black and white, like a photograph, but it was she who was in shadow. I was a ghostly white, translucent; only my bruises gave me colour.
She looked up at me, caught me with those heavy lids. ‘You know, Susannah, I think you’re right.’
‘Whatever happened to “Mrs Lancaster”?’
She sighed. ‘It was never a name for you, my dear,’ she said, and returned to her sewing.
*
We started to exchange words, little more than two cats that hissed at each other, but it was better than silence. It was dull, routine conversation, about the weather and how cold it was getting, or how she was struggling to keep the house clean without any help. I asked if there was any news on the Whitechapel murders, but she said she wasn’t following the reports. To my surprise, later that afternoon, she came back with the day’s newspapers. I struggled to focus, my eyes danced about and I couldn’t see the words properly because of the drugs, so she read them to me. She read very well, putting energy and feeling into it as if she were reading a story. She raised her eyebrows in shock and wrinkled her nose as she became involved. She explained how a series of letters had been written by the killer himself – exciting, but I was sure it was a hoax. There had been three all in all, and now the Whitechapel man had a new name: Jack the Ripper.
‘Jack the Ripper? Much better than Leather Apron, I think. Like Spring-Heeled Jack, but it is not very… sophisticated. I wonder what the real killer thinks of it.’
‘Sophisticated? What a strange mind you have, Susannah. I cannot think how a man who goes about the business of ripping street walking women is concerned about whether or not he is deemed sophisticated. I should imagine such a monster is not capable of lucid thought at all. But it has caught on, all the papers now refer to him as “the Ripper”,’ she said.
She told me how Kate Eddowes was found to have been missing a kidney. Half a kidney had been sent to the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and the other half, the letter said, Jack had fried and ate. Mrs Wiggs didn’t like that bit.
There was still no clue as to who the murderer really was, just a lot of suspects, and theories, all of them barking mad or desperate. Not once did Mrs Wiggs intimate that she knew of the things I’d told Dr Shivershev about Thomas. Had Dr Shivershev kept those details to himself? But why would he tell Thomas about my mother and then hold back from that?
‘They will catch him eventually,’ she said.
‘I doubt that very much. He’ll have died of old age before they get round to working it out.’
‘I wouldn’t mention these theories too much where you’re going,’ she said.
‘Where am I going?’ I asked.
She put her newspaper down on her lap in a crumpled mess, gave a heavy sigh and stood up. With the key to my bedroom, which she kept tied to her wrist with a red ribbon, she unlocked the door and went out. A few minutes later she returned with a pamphlet and handed it to me. It had a drawing of a grand house in parkland, and bonneted ladies with their hands in muffs walking in pairs on the grass in front of a lake. It was called Aphra House and it was in Surrey.
‘It’s only for ladies. I had to press quite hard for Thomas to consider this place – it’s not the cheapest. You’ll be well cared for, if you behave and don’t babble on about this Jack the Ripper or silly hairbrushes. It will be just like the hospital, except this time you will be the one being cared for. Now, doesn’t that sound lovely?’
‘What did Thomas want to do with me?’ I asked, but she was looking at the leaflet, pleased with her selection.
Her eyes flicked towards me, back to the leaflet. I knew she’d heard.
‘Mrs Wiggs, what did my husband propose to do with me?’
Still she didn’t answer.
‘I’m going to leave you for a while. Here, look at the pamphlet, you might be happy there. Didn’t you marry him to be looked after? Can you not think of this as a different answer to the same question?’ She locked the door behind her.
This was how it went for days. We would talk and she would bring me food, though I barely ate. But as soon as I started with the questions, she would make her excuses and leave, locking the door behind her.
‘Why?’ I asked many times. ‘Why me? What did I do?’
I begged her to tell me, sometimes I shouted at her, but she never reacted, only pretended not to hear. One day, when she came to tie the rubber tube around my arm, instead of being docile, I knocked the tray and sent it crashing to the ground.
She glared at me, exasperated but silent, and stooped to pick up everything off the floor. ‘Don’t be like this, Susannah. I shall have to get Thomas to help me bind your hands again, and he will be less patient than me. Is that what you want?’
‘I want to know why. Thomas chased me, he begged me to marry him – three times. There were other nurses, lots of them, so why me?’
‘What does it matter?’ she said.
‘I’m begging you!’
She inhaled deeply and brushed down her skirts before sitting herself in the chair at the
