9
F
or my daughter’s sixth birthday I was
determined
to make a fresh start. I sat Jim down on the sofa beside me and though he didn’t—
he couldn’t!
—know
everything
I meant by it, I took both his hands in mine and said I wanted to wipe the slate clean and start
all
over again and make
everything
right between us. Jim smiled, drew me into his arms, onto his lap, and kissed me.
“My darling Bunny,” he said, “
nothing
could give me more pleasure!”
For the first time since Sarah had come calling, I let him make love to me. I spent the rest of that night floating on warm, blissful waves of love. In my ecstasy and contentment I forgot all about sponges, womb veils, and douches. I just loved my husband and let him love me.
I had not seen Alfred Brierley privately since that one weak and foolish afternoon and I did not intend to.
“I love my husband and children,” I told him discreetly from behind my fan when we met at a ball.
“Of course you do,” he said, “but your heart is
so big,
Florie, is there
really
no room for another?”
“For a friend, there is
always
room,” I said, and quickly left him. Mr. Brierley was temptation personified, and resisting him was powerfully hard. My knees were already weak and I feared my resolve would soon be too if I lingered.
I’d also been doing my earnest best to avoid being alone with Edwin without arousing suspicion. I’d told him softly under cover of Gladys’s piano lesson that I wanted us to be friends as we were before, “nothing less or more.” Before he could answer, I went to stand beside the piano, where Gladys and her teacher sat side by side on the bench, and private, indiscreet conversation was impossible even if he had dared to follow me.
After that, when he couldn’t catch or keep me alone the impetuous fool began writing me letters, pages and pages filled with amorous nonsense. He kept begging for just one hour alone with me, to prove that he could please me in
every
way, promising that if I would come back to him we would be “jolly companions again, just like before, and share additional pleasures even more stimulating and sweeter,” then went on to spend the next six pages enumerating them. But I never answered his letters. When he asked if I had received them I laughed and told him he should try his hand at writing romances; it was something he could do right there at his desk in the office to relieve his boredom.
The morning of Gladys’s birthday, July 20, 1888, I awoke, after a most passionate night in Jim’s arms, with roses in my cheeks, a song on my lips, my nightgown on the floor, and not a bruise upon my body. Jim had declared Gladys’s birthday a holiday and promised to forsake the office altogether and leave it all to Edwin, even if that meant he would spend the day pulling doves and pennies out of cotton brokers’ noses and ears or tearing up important notarized contracts he would promise but ultimately fail to magically restore to pristine condition, causing the poor clerks no end of bother.
Jim and I were having the most absurdly extravagant birthday party a six-year-old could possibly have, a costume party with over sixty Currant Jelly children invited. Our ballroom had been transformed into a magical fairyland with colored lanterns, silk flowers, and green gauze draperies, to create little bowers, and all kinds of little trinkets and treasures, coins, and brightly wrapped candies had been hidden throughout. For the children’s entertainment there would be a puppet show, a clown, a magician—
not
Edwin the Extraordinary, thank God!—a storyteller, a fire-eater, a troupe of acrobats, a dancing girl dressed as a fairy queen, and a wonderful silver-haired man who was
so good
with children, dressed in a fool’s bright motley and tinkling bells, a sort of summertime Lord of Misrule or Pied Piper, to lead the little ones in games like blindman’s buff, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Squeak, Piggy, Squeak, Hunt the Slipper, and to hand out prizes in guessing games and riddles.
I’d hired in half a dozen waitresses just for the occasion. I told that dragon-faced harridan at the employment agency, who kept raising her eyebrows so high at me I thought surely they would disappear into her hair and crawl all the way to the back of her head, to send only young and pretty ones who liked and were accustomed to being around children. I didn’t want any sour-faced meanies scowling at or scolding the kiddies and making them cry. I planned to dress them all in sparkly pastel tulle and silk frocks, with silver paper wings on their backs and stars in their hair, and have them serve trays of tiny sandwiches and jam puffs, and to fill little crystal cups shaped like flowers with punch. I’d made a point of ordering
five
different kinds; the bright colors—red, green, yellow, orange, and purple—would look so pretty in the big crystal punch bowls I’d bought at Woollright’s.
I’d gone back to the agency a day or so later and requested two nice young men to dress up as pink bunnies to hand my daughter her presents when the time came to unwrap them and to serve the ice cream. Being served a dish of cool vanilla with chocolate or strawberry sauce ladled on by a giant pink bunny was surely a memory every child would cherish. “We’ll supply the costumes, of course,” I assured the harridan. “Just choose a couple of nice young fellows who are fond of the little ones and send round their measurements to my dressmaker, Mrs. Osborne on Paradise Street.”
Her eyebrows rising until I thought surely they would strike the ceiling, that humorless shrew frostily suggested that I petition a theatrical agency instead, that such an establishment would be better equipped to meet my requirements. Of course, I told her I would do nothing of the kind, it was waiters I wanted and her agency advertised that they supplied them, and if she didn’t supply me she’d most assuredly be hearing from my husband and perhaps his legal representative. After all, a waiter was
still
a waiter, whether he was dressed as a pink bunny or in black broadcloth and white gloves; I didn’t see what difference the costume could possibly make. I was hiring the lads to ladle out ice cream, not dance and sing!
“Mrs. Maybrick, you’re a thoroughly silly woman!” she said, and I still can’t quite believe it. Jim actually
laughed
when I told him! But I got my pink bunnies just the same.
My dressmaker had made Gladys a fairy princess costume in three shades of purple, her favorite color, with enormous puffed sleeves and silver stars and crystal beads sewn all over the big, frothy tulle crinoline skirt, and silver lace wings in back. I had given her an amethyst heart on a silver chain to wear with it, but Nanny Yapp pursed her lips, shook her head, and said Gladys was much too young for jewelry, that such ornamentation at her age would appear “vulgar and ostentatious,” and suggested that Sir Jim—“Sir Jim” was what she had taken to calling my husband; she’d given him that name when he and Bobo were playing at knights rescuing the fair Princess Gladys, grabbing a toy sword and tapping him on the shoulder and solemnly intoning, “I dub thee Sir Jim of Battlecrease House! ”—put it in his safe until she was sixteen.
“Stuff and nonsense!” I retorted. “She’ll wear it to the party, and any other suitable occasion, and I don’t want to hear another word about it!”
With her hair arranged in a mass of gleaming licorice-black ringlets framing the pale heart of her face and her violet-blue eyes drinking in all that purple, Gladys was a lovely little princess, and I just
knew
Mama had been right. Despite Gladys’s puny plainness at birth, she was well on her way to blossoming into a beautiful woman. I was thinking I should start offering both my children’s services as models to some of the more respectable artists for sentimental postcards and calendars and such, but Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp were aghast at the idea and it was their opinion that counted with Jim, though I hadn’t entirely given up on trying to talk him around.
I don’t think a child ever lived who had such a magnificent behemoth of a birthday cake. It was an
enormous
thing, six tiers high—one sweet, sumptuous chocolate layer for each year of Gladys’s life—
covered
with so many purple, lavender, and lilac icing roses you could barely see the white buttercream beneath, so that
every
child would be sure to get at least one, and there were exquisitely sculpted sugar fairies stuck on long, thin pins hovering like hummingbirds over the whole thing that would be given as prizes by the drawing of lots to twenty lucky children. I remembered being six years old myself and weeping at a friend’s birthday party because her cake only had three roses and that greedy little vixen and her two sisters got them all. Well, no child would have cause to cry over icing roses at this party if
I
could help it!
When Jim and I finally left my bedroom, we went at once to the nursery. We wanted to spend some time alone with the children before the party began. Both of them came running, flying into our arms. Nanny Yapp protested that it was
most
indecorous for the children to be running about and receiving guests, even their parents, in their underclothes and curl rags, but Jim and I were in mutual accord and elected to ignore her.
Gladys settled herself on Jim’s knee, in her chemise and bloomers, both threaded with purple silk ribbon and embroidered, by my own loving hand, with a border of violets, and Bobo, still in his angelic white nightgown, claimed my lap as his throne.
In honor of Gladys’s birthday, Jim had bought them a new storybook,
The Happy Prince and Other Tales,
by Oscar Wilde, that contained five of the most beautiful stories I had ever read; I couldn’t get through half of them without weeping. The author’s words just seemed to
leap
right off the page and touch my heart every time.
Though stories were usually reserved for bedtime, “today,” Jim said, “warrants a very special story that cannot wait until bed.” He opened the green pebbled leather cover and began to read us the tale of the Happy Prince.
It was the story of the statue of an angel-beautiful boy mounted atop a tall pillar, his slim body encased in gold leaf, with sapphires for his eyes and a ruby in the hilt of his sword. When he was alive the Prince lived only for pleasure and was protected by the high palace walls from all the ugliness, meanness, and misery of the world, but in death, as a statue perched high above the city, he saw it all. So greatly did he feel the weight of the world’s sorrows that he wept. But there was nothing he could give to alleviate it except himself. A sympathetic swallow postponed flying away to the warmth of Egypt for the winter to become the Prince’s emissary; he stripped the Prince of his jewels and gold leaf to help the shivering, hungry poor. The swallow delayed his departure too long, too loyal to forsake the now blind prince, and died of the cold. At that moment the Prince’s lead heart broke. The Town Councillors, so upset at how ugly and shabby the statue had become, ordered it melted down to salvage the lead, bickering all the while about which one of them most deserved a statue of himself. Curiously, the Prince’s broken heart would not melt, so they threw it, and the poor little dead bird, upon the rubbish heap.
Tears poured down my face, and Bobo’s cheek, against my own, was just as wet, as my husband read the story’s bittersweet ending:
“ ‘Bring me the two most precious things in the city,’ said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought him the leaden heart and the dead bird.
“ ‘You have rightly chosen,’ said God, ‘for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me.’ ”
As Jim closed the book, Bobo used the sleeve of his nightgown to wipe my tears away.
“Mama’s a silly goose.” I laughed. “She always cries over that story!”
“You see, my dears”—Jim took his handkerchief and gently dried Gladys’s eyes, then passed it to me, to dry Bobo’s and mine—“you must
always
remember that no matter how beautiful you are on the outside, and you are both as beautiful as angels, it is the beauty
inside
that matters far more. Even when stripped of all his gold and jewels, the Happy Prince was still beautiful, more beautiful, in fact, in his shabbiness than he was in his splendor. Outer beauty withers and fades, but internal beauty lasts forever. You must always endeavor to be kind, thoughtful, and generous. Whenever you feel spite or selfishness encroaching, you must always stop and remember the story of the Happy Prince; it holds the key to
true
happiness. Remember how the little swallow was warmed by his good deeds and you shall
never
be cold inside.” He kissed Gladys’s brow, then reached over to caress Bobo’s cheek.
“Come, my dear.” Jim took my hand. “We will leave these young people to Nanny Yapp now. I shouldn’t have made you cry.” He traced the curve of my damp cheek. “But I thought this a very important lesson for our little princess, and prince, to learn before this ostentatious to-do we’re about to have. I want them to behave with the same nobility of spirit as the Happy Prince, not like his conceited and selfish courtiers, when the house is filled with their little guests. I should like very much to hear tomorrow what a gracious little hostess our Gladys is, that she behaved with all the nobility of a princess and none of the haughtiness.”
“You are
so good
to me!” I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him. “To all of us! Oh, Jim, I love you so!
We
love you so!” I cried as the children, echoing my sentiments, flung their arms around his legs and hugged him fiercely.
Jim had just finished fastening the delicate necklace of pink diamond flowers around my neck and admiring my new dress of lilac velvet with a sumptuous beribboned pile of pale pink silk roses on the bustle when a scream sent us scurrying back to the nursery.