The Whitechapel Girl

by The Whitechapel Girl (retail) (epub)

  ‘I know that I love you, Jacob,’ she said eventually. The words surprised her.

  He leaned forward to kiss her again but she slipped away. ‘I think I’ll need a bath first,’ she said, trying to smile while she scratched frantically at herself. ‘I really am cooty. And you’ll catch them off me if you’re not careful.’

  ‘Perhaps we both need to cleanse ourselves,’ he said, and lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bathroom.

  Chapter 26

  When Celia woke, her mind was full of nightmares. No matter how hard she shook her head or blinked her eyelids, visions of death, blood and dissection crowded her thoughts. She felt so tired, so completely exhausted, even more now than before she’d crept into bed over eight hours ago. She rubbed her hands over her face and tried keeping her drooping eyes open. The maid must have tidied the room: there was no sign of the clothes she had worn last night. She swung her legs from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. She rubbed her hands over her face, tossed her thick fair hair over her shoulder and sighed deeply. Her body ached as though she had been labouring in a scullery. She was worn out, drained both physically and emotionally. And, most alarming of all, she felt as though every barrier that had ever existed to prevent her from doing wrong had simply disappeared – dissolved entirely away. There was nothing left to concern her any more. She had seen and experienced horrors throughout her short life, but now she knew about the real dreads and fears that could exist in a woman’s life.

  Celia rang for the maid and, when she had bathed and dressed, she went downstairs to speak to her father.

  She found him taking tea in the drawing room. The windows were pushed up, open to the top of their sashes, and the curtains fluttered in the warm afternoon breeze. The whole room smelt fresh and the mirrors and ornaments sparkled in the summer sunshine.

  ‘Good afternoon, Father,’ she said levelly.

  Bartholomew looked up. ‘You look rather more presentable. Are you feeling better now?’ He didn’t pause to allow her to reply. ‘I don’t expect to see you looking so dishevelled again.’ He put a small triangular sandwich in his mouth and fastidiously wiped the crumbs from his lips with a still-folded napkin.

  Celia sat in the armchair opposite him, the cake stand, teapot and assorted paraphernalia of an English high tea stood between them, one boundary which still existed.

  She was not surprised when an unfamiliar young woman stepped forward to pour her tea. Since childhood, Celia had been accustomed to unexplained changes in the younger members of the female staff.

  Celia shook her head when the maid offered her a plate and napkin. ‘I would very much like to speak to you alone, Father,’ Celia said.

  Bartholomew raised his eyebrows and drew in a noisy breath to express his boredom. ‘If you must.’ He shooed the maid from the room with a limp flick of his hand and settled back in his armchair to suck crumbs loudly from between his teeth whilst preparing himself to listen to the usual tedious prattlings of his daughter.

  But Celia did not intend to waste her breath on polite tea-time trivia. She lifted her chin and went immediately to her point. ‘Father,’ she said, with extraordinary calm. ‘I intend to work.’

  This time, Bartholomew Tressing’s eyebrows were not raised in cynical boredom but in barely suppressed anger. ‘You have the temerity to tell me that you intend to take employment?’

  ‘No,’ she said, still very calmly. ‘Not paid work, no.’ She leaned forward, perching on the edge of her chair. ‘I might as well tell you everything, I’m sure you’ll find out anyway. I have been working with the women of the slums in the East End. Just as I always intended. I am using the skills which you yourself taught me. I have been putting them to good use – offering my services as a…’ She lowered her head, considering her words. ‘… as a nurse. It’s what I want to do, you cannot stop me. I have decided. It is to be my life.’

  ‘Your life?’ he exploded. ‘Your life is here, with me.’

  Celia shrank back in her seat, but she was determined to try and hide her fear.

  Bartholomew stood up. He strode back and forth across the room. Then, quite unexpectedly he stopped and turned on his heel and loomed over her. He was far too close for her comfort, menacing in both proximity and manner. She could smell the food he had just eaten on his breath, see the little morsels of bread on his lips. She knew that, had he been aware of it, he would have hated it: he was always so scrupulous about his appearance.

  ‘Are you completely mad?’ His face, so near to hers, hovering over her, was ugly, screwed up with rage. ‘Do you have even the slightest inkling of what really goes on there? You say you are using the skills I taught you.’ His eyes bulged, his words came slowly, deliberately. ‘But you know nothing. Slicing up the stinking remains of a dead whore in the operating room is no preparation for the real thing.’

  Celia grasped the arms of the chair, desperately trying to keep her poise, trying not to allow her fear to show. ‘If you were to see the true horrors of childbirth – ill-nourished slum women dying in labour, filthy girls no more than children themselves in their third and fourth pregnancy, then you’d understand that someone has to do something about it.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Celia, whatever are you thinking of? You’ve seen the sorts of messes we deal with in dissection, when they’ve forced their pathetic potions and rusty knitting needles into one another.’ He stood upright and turned his back on her. ‘I’ll hear no more of it. We’re going away for a while, anyway.’

  ‘Going away? Why?’

  ‘That need not concern you,’ he said. His voice, even for him, sounded unnaturally agitated. ‘All you need know is that we are going away.’

  ‘But I won’t go. I don’t want to go with you.’ Celia sat very still in the armchair. ‘I meant what I said, I intend to continue my work in the slums.’

  ‘Continue your work?’

  She shrank back as he bent over her again – why hadn’t she fled when she had the chance?

  ‘Listen to yourself – “my work”.’

  His mocking tone was as harsh as any slap across her face could have been.

  ‘And now listen to me and take note of my words: females are not meant to work. This modern obsession with women working. Do you know what happens to the brain of a woman who works? Of course you don’t, you know nothing, but you think you know so much.’

  Celia flinched as he spat the words at her. He was speaking with that same repulsive, almost deranged glee which took him over when he commented during the dissections.

  ‘The female brain becomes abnormally developed and that, of course, can only happen at the expense of the uterus. That organ becomes starved and withered. It is then that the woman begins to act unnaturally. You do understand what I mean by “unnaturally”, don’t you, Celia?’ His face became inflamed. ‘Women developing deviant appetites.’ He paused, judging her reaction. ‘Women desiring their own sex.’

  As Bartholomew’s breathing grew more rapid, Celia became more frightened: she recognised all too well the signs she had learnt to fear.

  ‘This perverse fad for ambitious women,’ he continued, his voice still almost composed, but his manner growing ever more threatening. ‘It can only result in freakishness, sterility, and total degeneration. That is guaranteed for those who choose such a path.’

  Celia knew that her only chance was to break the spell he had cast over her. She summoned all her courage and looked at him as steadily and coolly as she could manage, trying to see him as no more than a man with hairs growing from his nostrils and saliva gathering in the corners of his mouth. But in her fear she became almost hypnotised by the drooling lines of spittle; she could hardly take her eyes from it. It took all her reserves of strength to keep her voice even as she spoke, her eyes still fixed on his wet mouth.

  ‘How, Father,’ she murmured, ‘please tell me, if female labour is such an aberration, do you explain the ability of the female slum-dwellers to work all hours of the ni
ght and day? To slave away non-stop, in fact.’

  It hardly seemed possible, but the menace in his voice increased. ‘You would equate yourself with those strumpets and harridans?’ Though full of fury, his words came slowly, ponderously, as he returned to his armchair and began to pick idly at a scone from the cake stand. ‘It is as well that we will be going away for a week or so. We will go to the country, to the Brownlows’ place in Gloucestershire,’ he said, almost brightly. His mood, as always, was totally unpredictable, even for his daughter. ‘The rest will give you the opportunity to restore your brain to order, and your manner to obedience.’

  ‘I am not going with you, Father.’ The words had left her lips. She waited for him to rise and his hand to strike her and the fist to knock her from the chair to the ground but she had misjudged him: he had chosen another punishment.

  ‘Celia, I need you with me.’ His put the barely touched scone back on to his plate. His expression had changed. No longer was it inflamed with fierce anger, now it was contorted into a hellish, ugly parody of pathetic longing. ‘I am the only one who can protect you from the real world. You know that. And you know that I have to keep you here with me. I am the one who knows how to save you from other men. I am the one to teach you the true ways of love. Oh, Celia.’ His breathing became yet more laboured as his eyes moved slowly over her body, possessing her first with his gaze and then, moving ever closer, with his hands.

  ‘Get away from me. Don’t touch me.’

  She jerked away from him as he grabbed at the lace at her throat. The delicate material ripped away in his hand and he stumbled backwards against the fireplace. Celia didn’t wait to see if he was injured. She fled into the hall, knocking Smithson to one side, and dashed up the stairs to her bedroom.

  Bartholomew was a fit, strong man, and he had soon regained his footing and was chasing up the stairs after her. He was close behind, but he was too late: she had locked herself in. She crouched beside her bed, the child again who knew no protection or safety even in her own home. Her father, the man who should have cherished her, was hammering on the door with his fists, not heeding or caring who else in the household was listening to his ranting pleas for his daughter’s body.

  ‘I want you, Celia. You belong to me. You will do as I demand. You will go away with me.’

  The solid oak door shook as he continued to pummel it with his now bloody knuckles.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she sobbed. ‘Leave me alone.’

  But Bartholomew Tressing wasn’t a man who understood refusal. He always had what he wanted, whenever he chose. And he would have her again, now.

  Celia, pale with terror, stood up and walked towards the shuddering door which Bartholomew was now kicking in his demented fury. Her hands were in tight little fists by her side. She tried to speak twice before she could manage to utter a sound, then the words came tumbling out in a terrified rush.

  ‘If you won’t leave me alone,’ she gasped through her sobs. ‘I’ll tell the hospital governors about your secret expeditions to the East End.’

  The kicking stopped abruptly.

  ‘I’ll tell them everything.’ Her voice was still quavering, but she felt suddenly braver. ‘I’ll tell them about the child I saw you knock to the ground and leave to die…’

  ‘Shut up, do you hear me?’ His crazed ravings began again. ‘Shut up. Shut up now. Now. I command you.’ Then the kicking started once more.

  ‘I’ll tell them where to find you if you don’t leave me alone,’ she wailed. The police will find you and take you away.’

  ‘Don’t waste your breath,’ he sneered at her from the other side of the door. ‘I shan’t be in the country. And you, you can stay here alone. Stay here and rot in hell, damn you. Rot in hell like your damned mother.’

  * * *

  The early autumn evening was growing misty but it was still light enough for Celia to see clearly down on to the square below her bedroom window. She had been locked in the room for hours without food or drink, but she didn’t dare to risk ringing for the maid. Celia knew from experience that she could never trust any of the servants. Her tears long since over, she now felt elated – she had actually succeeded in triumphing over what she had come to believe was her father’s unassailable will. She passed the time sitting and looking at the world going by, a world where perhaps fathers didn’t hurt their daughters, where parents treated their children with love and kindness as hers once had. She watched as a man, who could have been a younger version of her father, threw the delighted, squealing child he was carrying high into the air. Celia sighed, regretting what might have been, thinking how things could have been so different had it not been for her father’s madness, which she was sure had been brought on by that terrible disease: her mother would not have taken her life and her baby brother would still be with them. If only he had not gone to find illicit pleasure with those women in the first place.

  Celia drew back quickly from the window as two footmen appeared on the front steps, staggering under their load of a large metal-banded travelling trunk. Dodging to the side of the window, she peered down from the safety of the heavy brocade drapes just in time to see her father appear and a carriage – not theirs – pull alongside him at the kerb. The servants, under the direction of Smithson, loaded the big trunk on to the holding rack and then stood back while their master stepped up into the carriage. Smithson moved forward and handed Bartholomew his medical equipment.

  She couldn’t quite be sure of the words, but Smithson seemed to say, ‘See you next week, Mr Tressing, sir.’

  With a brief nod to the butler, but without even a glance towards his daughter’s bedroom window, Tressing leaned out and tapped the side of the carriage door with his cane, instructing the coachman to move on.

  Celia’s heart sank. He was travelling alone – Smithson would still be in the house to torment her. But, she thought to herself, if she could deal with her father, then surely she could deal with the likes of Smithson.

  She did not stir until the sound of the departing carriage had completely disappeared, then she moved quietly across the room and went to sit at her looking-glass. She did her best to tidy her hair and make herself reasonably presentable. Her face was still a little puffed mid blotchy from crying, but there was nothing she could do to change that – she would have to do. She unlocked her door and stepped outside. Smithson was standing there in the corridor. Celia didn’t look directly at him – she couldn’t bring herself to – but she guessed correctly from experience that he was leering lecherously at her. Neither did she speak. She walked straight past him, directly down the stairs to the library. She waited a few moments to gather her thoughts, then rang for the butler.

  Smithson weaselled his way into the once comforting book-lined room.

  ‘My father,’ she said, her voice steady. ‘He’s away for seven days?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Smithson responded sullenly. ‘Why?’

  She didn’t answer him. ‘I want all the servants. All of them, in here. Now.’ Her voice never wavered.

  Smithson opened his mouth to question her, but she held up her hand to still him.

  ‘Now, Smithson.’

  ‘It is unfortunate that you all find the situation so amusing.’

  Celia addressed the assembled staff from the far end of the library. They stood in a contemptuously straggling row, their backs to the book-lined wall.

  ‘I understand from Smithson that my father will be away for one week.’

  Smithson didn’t confirm her words, instead he retained his bored and contemptuous expression. He didn’t show it, but he was angry with himself that she’d tricked him into giving her that information.

  ‘As I will not be needing your services, I am instructing you, the whole lot of you, to get out.’ She didn’t flinch as they shouted their objections.

  ‘But say we ain’t got nowhere to go, miss?’ complained one of the maids.

  ‘It ain’t right. This is our home,’ protested one
of the footmen.

  ‘You must make your own arrangements,’ said Celia coolly.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ said Smithson, his voice far more calm than the others.

  ‘Can’t I?’ replied Celia in an equally collected tone. ‘You knew, all of you, what was going on. How I was suffering. But not one of you helped me. You showed not a flicker of compassion, so now I’m repaying the favour. Get out, now, every one of you, and don’t let me see you anywhere near this house again.’

  ‘What good do you think it’ll do getting rid of us?’ sneered Smithson.

  ‘Revenge,’ she said simply.

  ‘He’ll go barmy when he finds out,’ he snapped, with far less certainty.

  ‘In my present mood, I really couldn’t care less,’ she answered, with a steady gaze directed only at Smithson. ‘But I think that is for me to deal with, don’t you? Now, if you don’t leave immediately, I shall summon the constabulary. And I will feel myself compelled, as part of my Christian duty, to tell them all about your stealing. Particularly about your little enterprises Smithson: about the cases of wines you have been selling off from the cellars, and the little services you do for my father: getting his “raw materials”, as I believe you call them.’

  She walked past the now silent but open-mouthed servants, making her way towards the double doors. When she reached them she took hold of the handles, threw the doors open wide, and then turned to add a few final thoughts.

  ‘I’m sure that the police would be only too happy to help a poor young lady left at the mercy of nasty brutish servants – they are such snobs.’ She lifted her hand at the emergence of a sound like a whimper from one of the footmen. ‘Oh no, please don’t object, it’s so tedious. And, by the way, I shall be telling my father that Smithson accepted an offer from another employer: a rich industrialist, I think he should be. Or a merchant. From the north of England. Yes. That should upset him. And I’ll say that Smithson took you all with him, lured away by the prospect of easy riches.’ She smiled and held out her hand, directing them out of the room. ‘Don’t expect to spend another night under this roof. Good evening.’