Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman by kindels Page B

irreconcilable mixture of pride, envy, resentment and anger, because her husband, who could do so much for so many women, could do nothing at all for her.
    Dr John Williams’s research into the causes of infertility in women, and the search for a cure, had become a desperate, personal crusade. Any feelings that he may have felt would have been set aside for his work. Lizzie Williams would have had no such welcome diversion. But despite all his efforts at University College Hospital, he was getting nowhere, and, according to his great-great -nephew, Tony Williams, the marriage had gone sour. So what were the couple to do? The only option available to Lizzie Williams was to carry on with her life as best she could, and learn to live with her emotional nightmares. She still had what remained of her marriage, she had a fine home, she was heir to a fortune, and her father’s money was always readily available.
    But it is highly probable that Lizzie’s husband decided to look elsewhere for sexual gratification; it would not have been the first time Dr John Williams had strayed outside the marriage. London offered many temptations, especially for a professional man with money and a roving eye. If, as Tony Williams has suggested, he happened to meet a woman he had known previously, an eye-catching woman much younger than himself, even younger than Lizzie – who was rather plain, and the young woman made herself available to him, it is possible that he would have seen her as an opportunity to father his child. This would have fulfilled his desire, and his mother’s wish. Or perhaps such a woman just satisfied the doctor’s sexual appetites.
    If Lizzie had discovered about his affair, she would have been incensed. Already pushed to the edge of insanity as a consequence of her infertility, it is almost possible to imagine the scene that would have followed: the tears, the arguments, the recriminations, the insults thrown from both sides. John Williams might have displayed his customary indifference and arrogance, while his wife would have been furious, but frustrated by her sheer helplessness.
    The discovery would have been Lizzie Williams’s worst nightmare , the culmination of her secret fears. Being unable to bear her husband a child, when that was what they so desperately wanted, was bad enough; it was the one element missing from their lives that might have saved their relationship. But the thought that he might be physically involved with another woman, one who was capable of bearing his child while Lizzie could not, and who might destroy what was left of their marriage, would have been almost unbearable. So what could she do?
    Probably nothing at all.
    There was little that a sad and lonely Victorian housewife could do in such a situation. While the love might have disappeared from their marriage, it was most unlikely that her husband would leave her. Even if he did, she was not entirely dependent on him. Thanks to her wealthy father, Lizzie Williams was financially secure in her own right. There was nothing she could do about her childlessness, the stresses it brought, or her loveless marriage; she just had to bear the pain and make the best of things.
    Then the unexpected happened and it came like a bolt from the blue. Something from the past caught up with the Hughes family and brought with it terrifying consequences that turned Lizzie Williams’s world upside down, changing everything.
    In the spring of 1888, the Landore Tinplate Works, of which Lizzie’s father was now managing partner, ran into financial difficulties . The company had enjoyed a good run but was too successful an enterprise to go unchallenged indefinitely. The secret methods of production which Daniel Edwards had learnt, and taken from Richard Hughes, enabled him to set up his own company in competition with Hughes’s company. The Dyffryn Works Ltd, established in 1874, was a huge operation, with three mills driven by steam. Located in the lower