I had winced when putting on Mrs Wiggs’ clothes. The feel of her dress on my skin made me cringe, and her bonnet carried her smell: vinegar and cloves. Strands of her hair that had caught in the straw brushed against my face. I wobbled a little when I watched the two men lift the trunk between them and put it onto the coach. I was scared it would fall and that the lid would fly open, sending Mrs Wiggs tumbling onto the pavement. I must have looked ill, because Dr Shivershev slapped me on the back, the way a sailor would another. I stumbled forward into the road.
‘Made of sterner stuff, aren’t we? Remember we’re British,’ he said.
I nodded my agreement but wasn’t sure. I wanted to ask him about the British part because I understood him to be of Russian descent, but I didn’t have the energy.
He must have heard my question in his head because he answered it anyway. ‘I’ve always liked the way that sounds.’
Walter drove us to Dorset Street in Whitechapel, where he and Dr Shivershev took the trunk from the coach and set it down on the pavement. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it, scared to blink, petrified if I should shut my eyes that something would happen.
A skinny little boy ran up to Walter, who passed him some coins. They exchanged words, then the boy led the horse and coach away.
‘Where is he going?’ I asked.
‘We’ll walk the rest of the way,’ said Dr Shivershev.
They picked up the trunk. It was night-time, maybe ten o’clock, eleven even. Fear of the Ripper had left most streets dark and empty. They bumped and jostled Mrs Wiggs between them as I blindly followed along a cobblestoned road made smooth by gutter mud and horse muck that had dried and then been made wet again with fresh rain. My feet kept getting sucked into it. The houses were tall and shallow to the pavement, with bitter little bricks and large, broken windows boarded up with newspaper and sacking. We came to a stop. In between two wooden doors there was a small archway – I would have missed it myself. We walked under it and into the dark. We were in the heart of the Nichol. The hairs on my neck stood to attention at the familiarity of it. I had come all the way back to my beginnings, as I feared I would. My circle was closing.
We felt our way along the narrow alley and came out to a cramped and overlooked courtyard. There was the sound of damp, running water, muck underfoot and the smell of rotting rubbish. We passed dark stairs on the right and I heard the scurry of rats as we disturbed them and they reassembled behind us. A single lamp emitted a weak, quivering glow. There were seven little rooms around the perimeter. I doubted good things went on in any of them.
We entered the door of 13 Miller’s Court, the dwelling of Dr Shivershev’s friend, Mary Kelly. Her dingy little room was cramped and sparsely furnished and the door would not open all the way because it hit something on the other side. This was intentional, a little trick to alert the occupant should a stranger intrude. I remembered that my mother used to do a similar thing.
We had to wait outside while Dr Shivershev slipped through the gap like an eel and removed the blockage – a nightstand – so the trunk could be carried through. Once inside, he replaced the nightstand by the door, lit an oil lamp and set it down. There were half a dozen half-burned candles on the nightstand and I wondered if Mary had stolen them from the houses she charred in, though from what I’d seen of her in the Ten Bells, she didn’t appear the charring kind.
Dr Shivershev sat on a wooden chair in the corner and gestured for me to sit on the brass bed butted up against the wall. I lowered myself onto it. It had layers of blankets and some of them looked to be quite fine, not the sort of quilts I would expect to see in a whore’s dwelling. Maybe they were gifts from Dr Shivershev, or other men. Perhaps Mary had purchased them herself with the money she earned from luring innocents to their deaths, unwitting suppliers of harvested organs to gentlemen’s collections. What if they had lured me here for the same reason? It would be one way of getting rid of me.
Walter stood by the window with his back to the wall. Every so often he would peer through it, though it was opaque. I guessed he did this to calm his nerves. There was a small fireplace in the corner of the room. I had started to feel the November temperature in my toes and hoped that when Dr Shivershev’s Mary came, she would light the fire, though I didn’t dare ask. Even so, I removed Mrs Wiggs’ tight bonnet from my head. That whiff of vinegar and cloves again.
There were footsteps the other side of the door and we all sat up,
