Jack the Ripper Victims Series: The Double Event (15 page)

Mary folded her arms and smiled. Elizabeth gave her a smile in return.

“Well, I must say,” Mary said, “I like the change.” She stood a moment longer, staring.

While Elizabeth shrank inside and held her breath for fear that she’d be discovered, she stood tall with a level gaze for Mrs. Malcolms.

Finally, the woman walked to the desk, retrieved the coins, two shillings, and handed them to Elizabeth.

“Thank you, sister,” she said

Mary seemed speechless, her expression wavering between curiosity and consternation.

Elizabeth turned and walked out.

She returned weekly to the same workshop room for more. Each time, Mrs. Malcolms gave her two shillings. Each time, Elizabeth met Lettie afterwards at the corner of Red Lion Street and High Holborn to split the take. Although Elizabeth did not like the sweater much, she established a good, if spurious, rapport with her. She exchanged a few pleasantries with Mrs. Malcolms, answered a few questions, and left somewhat richer. Well worth her effort, the visits took but a few minutes. Over time, when questioned by the woman, Elizabeth told increasingly more of her own experiences instead of those of Lettie. She allowed Mrs. Malcolms to believe that Lettie had worked in a coffee shop in Poplar and that folks called her Long Liz. Elizabeth showed a mole on her leg and told Mrs. Malcolms that was where the adder bite had occurred. Elizabeth’s history became so mixed up with Lettie’s that no doubt Mrs. Malcolms would be unable to distinguish between the two of them.

Despite all their hard work, by 1877, Elizabeth and Jon could afford meat only once a week. As their diet suffered, so did their health. In late summer, Jon endured a prolonged case of Influenza. He couldn’t work for several months, and Elizabeth had a hard time finding employment of any sort.

She sought help at the Poplar Workhouse. A relieving officer came to the tenement to look in on Jon, to inspect the conditions of the Stride home, and to question Elizabeth about her health and ability to work. After the officer’s visit, a nurse arrived on two occasions to attend to Jon briefly, and Elizabeth received word to report to the workhouse to meet the matron.

A plump, gray-haired woman in a blue and white uniform, Mrs. Tawkwin cut an imposing figure. With reddened skin on her short neck and round cheeks, she looked angry. She spoke to Elizabeth in a matter-of-fact manner. “You will arrive at six o’clock each morning, except for Sundays, for the labour test given in return for relief. I will place you in the needle-room to sew sacks. A subsistence allowance of six shillings, eight pence, and a loaf of bread will be issued to you once a week provided you perform the required labor.”

The allowance wasn’t enough to live on, but Elizabeth would have to make do somehow. The next day, she arrived at the workhouse at the appointed time.

“Did you bring anything with you besides the clothes you wear?” the matron asked during the admissions inspection.

“Only this,” Elizabeth said, taking a metal thimble from her pocket.

“We must all use the leather thimbles that are issued to avoid the appearance that one inmate has an advantage over another,” Mrs. Tawkwin said.

“No one would have to know,” Elizabeth said.

“No secrets are kept here,” the matron said sternly. “If one of the other inmates saw you had a metal thimble, she would try to take it from you. I won’t allow disruption in the schedule over such pettiness.”

Elizabeth knew the many hours of sewing would result in the leather becoming weak and allowing the needle to poke holes in her fingers.

Seeming to anticipate her, Mrs. Tawkwin said, “Inmates are issued one leather thimble. You may take it home and repair it as much as you’d like. Once it can no longer be repaired, you are expected to provide your own, a leather one, like that which is issued.”

She held out her hand to take the metal thimble, and Elizabeth dropped it in her palm. She did so from sufficient height that it bounced and almost got away from the woman. Mrs. Tawkwin clearly saw Elizabeth’s defiance in the act. As the matron slipped the thimble into the pocket of her apron, she glared at Elizabeth. “You’ll be trouble if I’m not hard on you,” Mrs. Tawkwin said. “Instead of working in the needle-room, you’ll pick oakum.”

Dread of the notoriously grim task seized Elizabeth and she regretted her lack of discipline. The Matron led her to a work station in a high-ceilinged hall, reminded her of the prohibition against talking, and left. Elizabeth sat on a hard wooden bench with other inmates. Short partitions on the bench separated her from the women seated on either side. Nearby inmates glanced at her with little curiosity. A staff member, perhaps another inmate, dumped at Elizabeth’s feet a bundle of rope segments chopped into ten to twenty inch lengths. The densely spun brown sections were to be carefully unraveled and untangled, each fiber liberated from the others and piled together.

She made short work of undoing her first length of rope.

The work isn’t as bad as you feared,
Bess said.

As Elizabeth performed the task repetitively over the course of many hours, reality set in. Sitting for so long on the hard seat that had no backrest drove her hips and spine to agony. In short order, the labor became an abrasive insult to the flesh of her hands.

She picked two and one half pounds of oakum each day. The task left the skin of her fingers broken and bleeding. The first day, a Monday, 12 hours passed before she’d picked the required amount of oakum.

They want you to suffer,
Liza said.
Don’t give them satisfaction by showing your misery.

Each morning when she awoke at home, she remained so weary from the day before that she had to work up her courage to go back to the workhouse. Looking at her sleeping husband, lying pale and pitiful beside her in the bed, she’d think about the need to keep him fed. That got her up and moving each time, despite Liza’s complaints that he wasn’t worth the suffering. Walking to and from the workhouse, she gently rubbed her hands deep into her hair to transfer oil from her scalp to her dry, cracked skin. Saturday of her first week, she succeeded in picking two and a half pounds of oakum in 8 hours, which left her enough time to walk to Red Lion Street to gather two shillings from Mary Malcolms.

That Sunday, she could not get out of bed. Although she had told Jon not to get up, he did so to fetch her bread and butter. When she returned home from the workhouse each day after that, she found a simple meal he’d prepared for her, usually slices of bread with a bit of fat spread on them, butter or lard. On two occasions she returned home to find that he’d boiled potatoes. He also prepared warm salt water. “If you soak your hands in it,” he said, “the salt will toughen the skin.”

She knew the difficulty he had getting out of bed. While she protested that she could provide for herself, he was insistent. As the days passed, he had an easier time of it, however. Elizabeth ceased to protest, and enjoyed the care he gave her.

In her second week, she could not contain her complaints any longer. “I understand the workhouse guardians want the work to be a hardship so only the truly needy will ask for relief,” she said to Jon, “but why must they work us until we’re miserable?”

“For fear wages will suffer,” he said, “Parliament doesn’t want relief to compete with labor.”

“Jobs are so hard to come by, wages drop anyway,” Elizabeth said. “There are so many hungry people who’ll die without relief.”

“Some workhouse Guardians have good intentions. At least once a week, though, I read in the newspaper that some crow or another in Parliament is squawking about how those who bear the harsh treatment deserve it because they lack the moral strength to do better. You know that’s the common belief.”

Indeed, he was’t telling Elizabeth anything she didn’t already understand. Working in the coffee shop for so many years, she’d heard plenty of well-dressed people push such ideas about the poor. Most were careful not to sound too heartless. Working with Lettie at laundries and kitchens, she’d noticed the same sort of message was well received and repeated by many laborers who treated the poor as scapegoats, despite the fact that the workers themselves suffered low wages, long hours, and no redress with employers who had little regard for the needs of those they employed.

Jon shook his head. “As long as people see the poor as mumpers, prigs, and sharpers, employers will do as they please.”

“I’m no thief or con artist!” Elizabeth said. “I don’t go to the workhouse because I’m not willing to do better.”

“I know,” Jon said, gently reaching to take her dry, cracked hands. “You’re a hard working woman.”

On her first day in London, she’d thought of the city as a great beast trying to digest her. At present, she saw the workhouse as the London beast’s gastric mill, a great gizzard full of hard knocks meant to grind the toughness out of those the city might have trouble digesting otherwise. She was determined not to let it beat her, but feared she would soon meet her limit.

Elizabeth had seen one women go mad while picking oakum. The poor creature had dropped her work, abruptly stood at her station, and begun screaming and flailing as if she were caught in a net. Then she’d bitten her own hands. She severed two fingers before she was stopped and hauled away, wailing her heart out.

Jon placed a hand on Elizabeth’s cheek and said, “I will be back to work soon.”

The frequency and severity of his coughing diminished during her third week of workhouse out-relief and he had more color than in recent days past. In her fourth week, Jon felt much stronger, and started looking for work.

At the beginning of her fifth week, because she had caused Mrs. Tawkwin no grief since handing over her thimble nearly a month earlier, Elizabeth was placed in the needle-room. As she worked, sewing sacks, holes appeared in her leather thimble. Elizabeth repositioned the device numerous times to protect her fingers. Inevitably, she poked several holes in her fingertip. True relief came at the end of the week when John told her he’d found work, helping to build scaffolding for the new law court under construction in Fleet Street.

Elizabeth rested for three days, grateful that she and Jon had both survived. Although she had hope for their future, it occurred to her that the notion of something better had become a thing of the past. On the fourth day after quitting the Poplar workhouse, she took temporary work at Scab’s laundry where Lettie worked.

~ ~ ~

In 1878, the Strides moved into an old three room house in Usher Road already shared by two other families. They occupied the smallest room toward the rear of the dwelling and had to pass through the living areas of the other families when coming and going from home. Thankfully, the Levine family, a husband, wife, and two children, and the Burkins, a mother and daughter, did not begrudge the Strides access day or night.

Having no permanent work and temporary work ever harder to find, Elizabeth spent her spare time learning to beg on the streets. She took a beat along the southern edge of Victoria Park and asked for assistance from passersby. The take was hardly worth the effort at first. She dressed in her oldest, most worn clothing, dirtied her face and hands, and allowed her hair to become a mess. In the evenings, she cleaned up so Jon wouldn’t find out about her new pursuit.

Most beggars she encountered gave each other a wide berth, perhaps out of sympathy. Some who were territorial, gave her the evil eye or vocal warnings. An immense man, wearing women’s clothing and playing a penny whistle, chased Elizabeth out of Victoria Park, across the bridge over the Hertford Union Canal, and down Gunmakers Lane. Strangely, the chase excited Elizabeth. The man was too fat to catch her, yet she found something about the incident appealing—perhaps the slight danger in the midst of trying to keep her activities a secret.

Life has enough hazards as it is,
Liza warned.
Don’t look for pleasure in risk.

Elizabeth took the warning seriously for fear that if something happened to her, Jon would be left to fend for himself.

She befriended a thin, bedraggled woman named Poppy, who seemed harmless. Each day, Poppy sat in the park beside the path that passed over Regents Canal to Approach Road. She wore clothing in such disrepair that much of her arms and legs were exposed.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Poppy said, and Elizabeth agreed with her. “First thing you need to know is to beware the lurkers. They pretend to be beggars, but they’re
family people.”

Elizabeth frowned to show her lack of understanding.

“Criminals,” Poppy explained. She described several individuals. “Some are dangerous, all cause us trouble.”

“I’ve seen some of them,” Elizabeth said.

“Just stay well away from them. What you need to get on as a mumper is a fakement. You have few choices, since you don’t want to take away from someone else.”

Again, Elizabeth showed her confusion.

“We earn coin through pity,” Poppy said impatiently. She gestured toward her threadbare clothing. “I work the shallow. Mary, with the bruises and broken fingers…” She gestured down the path toward the southeast. “…uses the scaldrums dodge.”

Poppy stood and held Elizabeth by the arms, turned her this way and that, taking a good look.

“I have a crooked leg,” Elizabeth said, pulling up her skirts to reveal her shin.

“That’s good, but I’d say you’d be a glim. I haven’t seen any use that for a while. All you need is charcoal or lamp black to help you look as though you got burned out. You rub the black into you clothes, your skin and hair, maybe pinch yourself to look scorch red.” She paused and looked Elizabeth in the eye. “Or just go on the blob. Write a hard luck story on a board and carry it around.”

You could pretend to be a survivor of the Princess Alice,
Liza suggested.

Elizabeth nodded and thanked Poppy.

At home, she rummaged for a short section of board among the scraps of wood Jon kept. She chose one she thought he wouldn’t miss. Using some of his black paint and a lettering brush, she wrote on the board in her best script a short statement that read, “Lost husband and two children to the Princess Alice. Now destitute.”

More than six-hundred people had died when the Princess Alice, a moonlight excursion vessel, collided on the Thames with the collier, Bywell Castle, in September, less than a month earlier. Most of those who perished were passengers enjoying the evening pleasure cruise. The people Elizabeth encountered on her beat who knew someone involved, or at least had heard of someone associated with the tragedy, were sympathetic.

When Poppy saw Elizabeth’s board one afternoon, she gave a knowing smile and nodded her approval.

As Elizabeth’s technique improved, so did her income. The earnings were not nearly as good as working a job for a wage.