People of Abandoned Character

by Clare Whitfield

  More details were released, ever so gradually so as to keep us in a perpetual state of quivering horror. Her uterus, the upper portion of her vagina, and the posterior two thirds of her bladder had been removed. As this was done so quickly, the murderer would need to have had knowledge of pathological or anatomical examinations. According to the coroner, the killer had half strangled her to the ground, rendering her voiceless, and then cut her throat. It was blood loss that caused her death.

  At the inquest, the piece of leather apron was dismissed as irrelevant – a bitter disappointment, as it had made such good theatre. It was found to have belonged to the son of a tenant.

  If there had been hysteria over the murders before, then after this one it went wild. The murders were headline news as far as New York, Montreal, and all over Europe. When they weren’t printing fantastical witness accounts, speculative theories or letters from moralists, the press dedicated column inches to savaging the police. Even the coroner joined in, complaining he had not been given a map to show where or how the last body was found. The general consensus was that the police were stupid, plodding clowns.

  At the morgue, Annie’s body had been stripped and washed down by inmates of the workhouse and her clothes dumped in the corner, ruining any evidence. The police surgeon protested that he could not work in such terrible conditions, it being an outrage that Whitechapel didn’t even have its own morgue. The police were overwhelmed and had few resources. They had to rely on word of mouth, and there were a lot of flapping mouths in the East End. A group of local tradesmen started their own organisation in frustration. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee duly issued a notice stating they would offer a substantial reward for any information that led to the arrest of the murderer. An MP put up £500. As a result, the police were bombarded with even more witnesses, letters, confessions, hoaxes and ever-helpful theorists.

  Moralists and commentators posed some difficult questions. Surely the poverty and depravity suffered by the innocents of the East End were a matter of public responsibility? If the lawless, morally corrupt and dangerous conditions there created killers such as Leather Apron, who would address them?

  On Monday the tenth of September, Leather Apron was found, hiding in a house on Mulberry Street. His real name was John Pizer. The police discovered several long blades in the house, which Pizer said were for his work as a boot finisher. He protested his innocence but was taken, along with those who had hidden him, to Leman Street Police Station.

  It came as a surprise to find myself deflated, disappointed even. Was that it? If it was Pizer, then that meant I was to be stuck with the man I had married. I think I had rather hoped the police would knock on the door one day and take him away, solving my problems. Still, I had to take comfort that it was my wild imagination making Thomas capable of such horrific acts. Of course that was absurd. It was the drops. I needed to cut down on them; they were sending my thoughts racing, making my dreams surreal. I had to accept the humiliating truth that Thomas’s hatred and anger were apparently only for me. But if he wasn’t out murdering women, what he was up to?

  Even so, I needed to know conclusively that this John Pizer was the murderer. I scoured the countless inches of cheap hearsay and unfounded opinion filling the columns of every newspaper known to womankind, but there were gaping holes all over the place. Often I became so frustrated, I almost tore the papers in pieces. I considered writing my own version of the story of Leather Apron. Putting him into the picture alongside Little Lost Polly and Dark Annie in an attempt to understand more about him, try and fathom his motives but I couldn’t find enough about him to conjure up anything worth writing down. I could not understand such a man. What struck me was that I had not felt this lack of understanding when it came to the victims, and that filled me with fear. Why was it so easy for me to imagine their lives, had I not moved far enough away from that fate, was my writing hobby a danger? A way of pulling me back to the fate I had escaped.

  The city waited with bated breath for the confession, but then all of a sudden Pizer was released without charge. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t him! Leather Apron was not the Whitechapel murderer, though everyone – the papers, the people, and myself – had assumed his guilt was a certainty. But John Pizer’s alibis stood up. He was a rogue; that was not in doubt. He was an altogether nasty person, and a quite horrible and violent bully of women. But they couldn’t imprison him for that. If they had, they’d have had to lock up half of London, and most of Westminster.

  I had resigned myself to the fact that the monster had been caught and had laughed at my ridiculous suspicions about Thomas, but now that was all possible again. I felt a twinge of satisfaction that my instincts could be correct, but it was difficult to find solace in being right when I was petrified of what I might be right about. I had not seen Thomas since the night of our argument and Annie Chapman’s murder, and that was some days ago now.

  I found myself back at the beginning, with no answers at all, no clue as to where my husband was or with whom, and dreading him walking through the door.

  22

  The days passed and I still had no idea where Thomas was hiding. If Mrs Wiggs knew any better, she kept that to herself. I fantasised that he’d killed himself, taken by a fit of guilt after beating his wife and murdering Annie Chapman and the others, or that the police had him, or that he’d tripped, knocked himself out and drowned in the Thames. I rehearsed in my mind the various conversations I would have with the police should they turn up.

  The longer Thomas stayed away, the more fearful I was of how things would be should he return. My cheek was bruised and my lip split on my left side. I studied my face in the mirror every day, sometimes every few hours, and convinced myself it was getting better. I wished I could have shown Mabel at least. We could have compared wounds, to measure who was the bigger fool, but I hadn’t heard from her, hadn’t received any letter. Cloistered in my bedroom, I broke up the hours by taking my drops with brandy, abandoning my self-imposed rule of never doing so during the daytime. I thought of Mabel often, and worried what would happen to me. By the end of the week I had taken all the clothes, feathers and frivolous things that Thomas had bought me, dumped them outside my bedroom door and told Mrs Wiggs to get rid of them.

  ‘Where? What on earth for? What are you going to wear?’ I think she had serious concerns I was about to parade naked through the streets of Chelsea.

  ‘Give them to charity for all I care.’ I found out later she stored them in an unoccupied bedroom, along with the shrunken head that had made me scream.

  From then on I wore my old dresses and hats: dour grey and brown linsey frocks and plain black bonnets. They matched my mood and I felt more comfortable that way.

  *

  Bored out of my mind, I decided to go to the one place a woman could walk freely after having suffered a beating. Somewhere no one would care or notice. Whitechapel. As I made my way out the house, with clumps of powder on my face, a dark bonnet pulled down and wearing a nondescript brown dress, Mrs Wiggs chased me down the hallway. She threw her body against the door as I opened it.

  ‘You can’t go out like that, Mrs Lancaster. What will people think?’

  ‘Please stand away from the door, Mrs Wiggs.’

  ‘If you are in need of distraction, I can send Sarah out for you. A new book or more of your newspapers, perhaps?’

  I pulled the door open and shunted her out of the way. I could feel her eyes boring holes into my back as I walked down the garden path.

  My first stop was Hanbury Street, the place Annie Chapman was found, only a couple of streets away from Itchy Park. There were still crowds there, five days later: bare-headed women holding infants, and gangs of weasel boys with patchy hair and concave chests. Throngs of ladies stood giggling in pairs, thrilled at the thuggery, coarseness and proximity of the labouring poor. It was more than a little embarrassing, but I had to acknowledge I was one of these birds. We were no more than canaries, briefly escaped f
rom our mind-numbing cages. The labouring poor knew they were being gawped at. There was tension, an atmosphere of simmering rage.

  This time there was no ten-year-old girl re-enacting the drama of the victim’s last moments and asking a fee for the spectacle. For those of us curious about Dark Annie’s demise, the tenants of the Hanbury Street property were offering the chance to stare down at the murder spot from their windows, and charging for the privilege, of course. There was a queue of tourists. It was unseemly.

  I ended up wandering into the church of St Jude’s, where Thomas and I had married. I had been so full of optimism, greedy with expectation. I had been so pleased to make such a miraculous marriage to a boy who, I thought, worshipped me. I’d imagined I was in control, but I was too inexperienced, too easily flattered, too arrogant in my ignorance to question what a man like Thomas could want with a woman like me. Though it was only five days since he’d gone missing, everything had changed for me, and in the city, in that time. It had given me the opportunity to develop a million theories, all of which confused me. One minute I thought him an immature, bad-tempered husband, the next he was the Whitechapel man. How many women in London worried about the same thing, that they were married to the man who ripped whores? Probably hundreds, and we all convinced ourselves otherwise, if only for the peace of mind it gave us.

  I stopped to drop coins into the collection box on my way out. I hadn’t noticed that the vicar had been watching me, had observed my introspective gloom and the marks on my face. When the noise echoed around the church, he glided over.

  ‘My dear, that’s a very generous sound you are making.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Father. I was praying that they’ll catch the Whitechapel man soon.’

  ‘Ahhh… Let us hope those poor women didn’t die in vain, that the world has at last woken up to the pitiful lives and horrors that exist.’ The reverend, likely not as old as his lack of hair suggested, stared at my face. ‘The sisters at Providence Row are very welcoming, my dear. I can open the box, if you think you could use the money… to find a safer place?’

  For some reason, I burst into laughter. It echoed round the church and I heard myself cackling like a witch. The reverend was nonplussed, and so was I. He had mistaken me for a poor woman, battered and helpless, one who needed saving. How pitiful. How hilarious. But it was in fact deeply humiliating, and I was ashamed. I had looked at such women in the hospital, thought them feeble and pathetic as they held their puffy faces together with swollen hands and broken fingers where their husbands had stamped on them. We had tutted and judged as they trotted back like mindless idiots for their husbands to eventually trample them to death, boots moving from hands and fingers to faces.

  ‘No, thank you, Father,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll go and get pissed.’

  I went to the Ten Bells next to Itchy Park for no honourable reason. I had to push my way past the scruffy men standing on the steps between two columns at the door. One of them barely moved, stood stiff, gave me the look up and down, his body rigid, so I had to rub against him. I rolled my eyes so he could see and shouldered past him, pleased with myself for acting bold. It was where I was meant to be, after all. By birth, I belonged to the rough and the common. Perhaps I had escaped what was meant to be my life, and all these freakish twists were fate pulling me back on course. Perhaps by marrying Thomas I had made him cruel and violent and turned him into a murderer. It was me that had ruined his life. I was the badness that had crawled into the yeast, as my grandmother used to say. Bad blood thickened like tar, turning good people into monsters by proximity.

  I was not frightened of the men in the pub so much. As always, they either ignored or stared at me, scoring what they saw, but the women were hostile, so desperate to hold onto the scraps of male attention they’d blind a woman with broken glass, give her a scar so she wasn’t a threat. The sawdust stuck to the floor and my feet, there was a dense fog of tobacco smoke and a sickly smell of stale beer, and the bar was sticky. I waded through a pack of ruddy, bloated faces; everywhere there were the red eyes and swollen noses of dedicated drinkers. I was glad of my bruises, my Whitechapel rouge, the mark of someone who belonged. I squeezed in between two men at the bar and the barman saw me instantly – the benefit of being tall, or the curse. He asked what I wanted and I didn’t know, so I said rum, because it had been Annie Chapman’s drink. One thing I learned about rum: it’s revolting. I nursed the vile drink, determined to not let the disgust show on my face, until the sweaty barman with forearms like trees slammed another down in front of me.

  ‘But I don’t want another,’ I told him. I didn’t understand what was going on. Did they bring drink after drink in these places until you told them not to? No wonder the poor were always plastered, and poor.

  ‘Think you’ve caught someone’s eye. Aren’t you a lucky girl.’ The dour barman gestured with a tilt of his head.

  My eyes travelled across the bar until they settled on the familiar form of an unkempt Dr Shivershev. He was sat on a stool looking straight at me from the other side. He lifted his drink and gave a nod, a funny little curl on his lips. Next to him stood a ferociously pretty woman with drowsy eyes and wideset cheekbones. She was draped over his arm like a saloon girl from the Wild West. Tendrils of fair hair curled around her face. She didn’t wear a bonnet and carried herself in a way that said she didn’t need rescuing. To the other side of Dr Shivershev stood a man with gingery whiskers, a flashy waistcoat and jacket, smoking a pipe.

  The woman leaned forward to whisper to Dr Shivershev and winked at me as she did so. Dr Shivershev said something to the man with the whiskers, and they all started laughing. I felt incredibly stupid. In a fit of temper, I grabbed the rum and downed it, slammed the empty glass on the bar and shot them all what I hoped was a filthy look, although it may have appeared – quite accurately, as it happened – more like I was about to vomit. The sweaty barman scooped up the glass and I ran out of the pub, trying to contain the panic at the fire in my chest. My eyes watered. I barged past the men who’d looked me up and down earlier and they barely moved, just swayed to the sides like blades of grass in a breeze and continued their conversation. Meanwhile, I stood on the pavement and retched.

  23

  I never touched rum again after that. I hadn’t been much of a drinker anyway, but not for want of encouragement, from Aisling, of course. Drink just didn’t agree with me, as I discovered on our trip together to Brighton.

  We had decided to catch the train to Brighton, all because Aisling wanted to go to the Pavilion. I was entirely willing, but it was she who had all the ideas and made the plans, and I was happy to follow. It was obvious to anyone who cared to notice that Aisling and I had grown close. I hadn’t realised how close, of course, I only knew I was in awe of her. I followed her around like her devoted shadow. Aisling had the courage to be all the things I was so frightened of. Bold, fearless and unashamedly herself, she carried this innate belief that everything would be all right, come what may. I even started to feel that way myself. I had never had a sister, or a best friend and so she became all things to me. We were together as much as we could be, and if we were apart, I spent my hours thinking of her. Whenever I dared to dream of the future, Aisling was most definitely in it, leading from the front, me trailing behind her, quite happily as it should happen.

  When the day came for Brighton it was bright and sunny, we couldn’t believe our luck, but the train was packed, too crowded, and it appeared everyone else in London had had the same idea. We spent the morning walking along the pier, sitting on the beach on pebbles that dug into our behinds, and throwing winkles at the seagulls to see if they would catch them. Eventually we decided not to bother going to the Pavilion after all. It was early afternoon when Aisling suggested we start making our way back, to miss the rush.

  ‘What? After coming all this way? It was you wanted to come,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ said Aisling.

  ‘Do what?’

  �
��Let me make all the plans all the time and then criticise.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you were.’

  ‘Not really. I thought you wanted to come here, that’s all.’

  ‘I did, but it’s too busy, and there’s nowhere to sit. It’s like being cattle, we have to keep shuffling forwards. Why don’t we go home?’

  ‘All right,’ I said, although I was confused by her change of heart.

  Partway through our journey back, the train pulled into a quiet little station. I was staring out of the window not paying much attention when Aisling stood up, grabbed my arm and dragged me to the door of the carriage.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out here.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  Before I knew it, we were the only people on the platform and our train had left. I didn’t know where we were. The station was positively ghostly. A tiny ticket office with a geriatric stationmaster and a half-dead lurcher were the only souls.

  ‘What’s the point of this?’ I asked, but she ignored me.

  We trudged along a country lane to nothingness, with fields on either side. It was a dry earthen track that stretched for miles and we had no idea what awaited us in either direction.

  ‘Aisling, what are we doing here?’

  ‘Stop worrying. We can catch a later train. Isn’t it a lovely day? We don’t get to feel the sun on our skin often, we should make the most of it.’

  ‘I thought we were doing that in Brighton.’

  ‘It was too busy – I couldn’t breathe. It was as bad as Whitechapel.’