Varney versus Spring-heel Jack 27: February 1886.

Twenty-Seven: February 1886.

Some months had passed since the attack. My own injuries had healed. Elizabeth’s, however, were another matter. The two jagged holes in her neck had never closed. They had, however, formed a crust around their circumference. I could observe these during daylight house, when she rested, and was weak. It was as though the skin had atrophied and hardened, forming a dark, raised welt that went all the way around each piercing. To look at, it resembled nothing less than the crusts of lava I had seen when at Pompeii. Her other wounds and injuries were long gone. The physical ones, that is: there were other scars that ran far, far deeper, and which I found myself at a loss, initially, to explain.

One thing had become apparent early on: there was no way I could send her back to her family without questions being asked. Questions that I was, frankly, at a complete loss to answer. It was not enough that I had lied to them about her supposed illness. Now, when I had hoped that she would be well enough to return t them, it became apparent that she was… changed… and in a way that was beyond my understanding. Beyond my understanding but not, perhaps, beyond my suspicions. Her changing demeanour and her equally changing appetites indicated something that I found it hard, at first, to grasp. Particularly when I had more pressing concerns.

Elizabeth’s family were not large. Nor were they close. They had their separate lives, and were far from typical in our age. It counted against them in society, but it was now to work in my favour. I was able to forge a fair facsimile of her handwriting, using letters she had written me as a template. She complained of me, and spoke of a new love. Knowing the shame such a break would bring, she was to go away. There were only hints at her destination. I found myself acting like an absurd villain in ‘The Strand’. I knew that my staff were completely trustworthy, and that my butler ran the household like the ex-military man he was. His aid was essential. A parlourmaid of the same build as Elizabeth, and wearing a veil fled from the house in full view of passers-by while I flung imprecations at her to stay. She took a carriage to Victoria, thence a train to Brighton, before taking the steamer. A return in her own clothes, and minus the veil, was effected from the other side of the channel. The poor girl was ignorant of the true purpose, believing that it was a ruse designed to throw off a rival suitor for my love. Parlourmaids, like most serving girls, are susceptible to a little romance in their drab lives.

Would that my own could be drab: it was an idyllic, unattainable state, it seemed.

Meantime, I had begun to do some research. The first glimmerings of suspicion about my beloved’s condition were awakened at the back of my mind. Her newly nocturnal habits. The change in her demeanour: from a once sweet girl to a now feral cat. The pallor that infused her skin: beyond ivory, it was now ashen. Her refusal to eat anything but the rawest, bloodiest of meats. The insistence that this was not enough. An insistence that took her to the point of mania: all that saved me from physical harm, I think, was the irony that she was too weak, from lack of sustenance, to truly do me harm.

Christmas came and went, unnoticed in my home. I was lost in the books and papers that I had become obsessed by, searching for a truth that seemed to be too terrible, and yet also too absurd, to contemplate.

It was New Year that broke my morbid spell. And with a most unexpected – and initially unwelcome – visitor…