The Ripper's Wife (20 page)

The whore had called me Bill last night; was he on her mind even at the last?

“He had his printin’ shop there, an’ in the room upstairs all five of their bairns was born. It was a
good
life! But then Bill went an’ ruined it all; he fell in love with the midwife that delivered their last—Little Liza. Polly took to tryin’ to drown her sorrows. She couldn’t bear to stay, she was just too proud to sit there an’ watch another woman take her place, an’ she left him, an’ their brood. That was the hardest part. She used to cry for them when the horrors o’ the drink were upon her, an’, when she was far gone enough, for her Bill an’ to sing their song. But she was in a
terrible
way, she was, not fit to take care o’ herself, much less a passel o’ bairns. She went to London an’ fell into the life. Can’t keep body an’ soul together sellin’ matchsticks, don’tcha know.

“One day she woke up an’ took a long hard look at herself an’ what she had become. Made her right sick, it did. She tried to get herself right. Some missionaries, a right pair o’ teetotalers they was, butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, a preacher an’ his missus, gave her a job in their house as a skivvy. She tried
real
hard, she did, but she just couldn’t stand it, all that preachin’, all that talk of repentance, hellfire, an’ damnation, an’ her with the shakes wantin’ a drink
so bad
she felt like she was goin’ to scream the house down, an’ she fell back into her old ways, stole all the missus’s clothes while she was in the bath, left her stark naked, she did, an’ pawned the lot o’ them an’ spent every penny on gin.

“Some time after that, she met a nice bloke, a blacksmith name o’ Drew. He got her off the streets for a time, he did. She tried hard to make a go of it doin’ needlework an’ hawkin’ matches an’ flowers, but it didn’t last; she just couldn’t give up the drink, an’ in the end Drew left her too. Said he couldn’t fight a ghost, an’ when the horrors o’ the drink was upon her all she talked about was her Bill an’ how much she missed him, an’ sang that song until you wanted to bang your head against the wall or hers, God love her! Her son, Will, gave her a few pence whenever he could, but he died a few years back, burned to death, he did, when a paraffin lamp exploded in his face, poor lad.” She crossed herself again.

“Poor Polly, God rest her!” Mary Jane wiped away a tear. “ ‘An’ God shall wipe away all the tears; an’ there shall be no more death; or pain, or sorrow, or cryin’; these former things have passed away.’ No one can hurt her now!”

I stopped and stood and stared deep into those green eyes. It
almost
ended there. I wanted to
strangle
her; my hands shook with the urge to reach out, right there on the street, and
squeeze
the life out of her in broad daylight.

That bedraggled, gin-soaked drab I had ripped open wide and left lying like horse apples on the cobblestones was
nothing,
a worthless nobody, yet this trumped-up Irish strumpet made me see her as someone
real,
someone who
had
mattered to someone once and
still
did, even if it were only her own downtrodden ilk.

It was as though Mary Jane Kelly sat me down on the sofa next to her and opened an album of photographs. I saw the story of a life, a woman who had once been a happy wife. She’d had a husband named Bill—she had called me Bill last night!—little children had loved her and called her “Mother.” She’d had a son who sympathized and gave her money, a son who had died horribly. She’d loved and lost and been betrayed, she’d had her pride, cried, and fought a powerful weakness, and she had a song she still sang because it reminded her of the happiest time in her life, before everything went wrong. She had even tried to catch herself and stop herself from falling further, and deeper, down into the cesspool. Through the window of Mary Jane Kelly’s words, I saw
why
Polly had become that dirty, stinking, gin-belching hag, and I
hated
Mary Jane for it!

My trembling hands reached out for Mary Jane’s throat. At the last moment they changed course. I don’t know why. I cupped her face. I kissed her hard. I bruised her lips with mine. I tasted rum, sugar, and orange juice, not blood but Shrub, a drink the harlots fancied, a cheap, sweet indulgence they persuaded men to buy them by claiming “it makes a body right randy.” I wanted her as I had never wanted any woman before. I wanted to hike up her skirts and fuck her right there in front of the newsboys. Lust,
not
rage or bloodlust, just plain, ordinary, pulsing, powerful lust, was hot upon me. Mary Jane knew it and she knew what to do.

She held my hand tight, stepped afore me, as the passage was too narrow for us to walk side by side, and smiled back at me as she guided me through the cramped archway. She unlocked the door to a single filthy room and took me to her bed. We fucked madly. The pine headboard banged against the wall.
Hours
must have passed. It was worth
every
penny! There was just something about Mary Jane Kelly. . . . Every time I wanted to kill her, I kissed her; every time I wanted to cut her, I caressed her. I don’t pretend to know why. Maybe it really was the fabled Luck o’ the Irish? Mary Jane believed in it. “Don’tcha know, I’m like a cat, I am; I always land on me feet,” she always said. “Never despair, me dear. ’Tis always darkest before the dawn, but tomorrow the sun will come out.” She seemed untouched by the poverty and pain that surrounded her. She was of it, as dirty and ragged as the rest of them, with the teeth slowly rotting in her pretty head, but she was still, somehow, above it; her feet never seemed to touch the ground.

In her pathetic little room, half a stub of a candle burned in a ginger beer bottle on the table by the bed next to a stale crust of bread and a half-eaten apple turning brown. A filthy, ragged muslin skirt masquerading as a curtain veiled the window. The only furnishings besides the bed were two small, mismatched tables and chairs and a lopsided washstand. The pitcher and basin were cracked and the pisspot half-shoved beneath the bed stank and was perilously close to overflowing, and empty gin and ginger beer bottles rattled against it on the bare, gritty floorboards. A dented kettle sat on the hob, and for a pathetic spot of color there was a cheap, faded print of
The Fisherman’s Widow,
a desolate woman keeping vigil in a graveyard, eyes fixed upon a wooden cross. It hung over the mantel where battered tin boxes and twists of brown paper containing her meager rations of sugar and tea sat alongside a cracked shard of mirror and a broken-toothed comb.

We whiled away the afternoon with our bodies lying entwined in sheets stained with the spunk and sweat of other men, including Fishmonger Joe’s. After she’d risen and had a “hard piss”—like all harlots, she believed it would keep her from conceiving—she settled herself back in my arms, as comfortable as you please, and told me the story of her life. And what a tale it was! A picaresque saga of daring debauchery and tragic travails, decadence and depravity, that would have put Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill to shame, in which our heroine went from grime to glamour, then back to grime again so rapidly it left me wondering just how much or how little of it was fact or gin-sodden fantasy; she was, after all, born of a race renowned for breeding the best storytellers.

She was born in Limerick, the only girl in a family of seven brothers, “and they’d mash any man to a pulp who trifled with me, they would,” she said proudly. She’d had one sister, but she died, “poor bairn,” when she was but three, “fell into the fireplace, she did, when Mam’s back was turned an’ bent over the ironin’.

“Mam lost her wits an’ had to be sent away, to the dear nuns who knew how to deal with such things, an’ Da decided to up an’ move us to Wales, where he had some kin, to make a new start. ’Twas what we all needed, he said.”

Her da and the boys took work in the coal mines in Carnarvonshire while Mary Jane kept house, cooked meals, and made sure they all had a clean shirt to wear to Mass on Sunday.

When she was sixteen, Mary Jane fell in love with Jonathan Davies, the boy next door. “He used to come in an’ read me poetry, newspapers, an’ stories, he did, while I was busy cookin’ an’ cleanin’. It was he who learned me what readin’ an’ writin’ I know. The first full sentence I e’er read rightly was
I love you,
an’ the second was
Will you marry me?
The answer was
Aye
.” She smiled and hugged herself. “The memory still warms me, it does, makes me knees weak an’ me insides all toasty!”

But the sun set all too soon for Mary Jane and her “Jon.” He was killed in a mine explosion three years later and left her with a babe new planted in her belly. The grief nearly killed her. They feared her mind would give way like her mam’s. Her da and brothers, hoping the change would do her good, sent her to Cardiff to stay with a cousin, as her husband left “no near livin’ kin an’ a woman needs another woman at a time like that.”

Ruby Ellen—that was the name of the cousin—“was a bad sort.” Jealous and greedy, she resented that Mary Jane, two years younger than herself, was a great beauty and had already been a much-loved wife and had a baby in her belly before she was widowed while Ruby Ellen languished at home as yet unmarried, with no worthy prospects, “her bein’ the kind men flirt with but don’t marry.” She introduced Mary Jane to the drink as a route to restore good cheer and to the “gay, fast company” she ran with.

Mary Jane took to the drink “as a fish does to water, I did”—“I could stop anytime I want, sure I could, but I don’t want to”—and it was so very nice to feel a pair of strong, manly arms around her again. But she’d lost her luck as well as her love. She caught “somethin’ heinous” from one of those fine, tall sailor boys she and Ruby Ellen picked up at the pier and landed in the infirmary. Mary Jane was there for months—“tossin’ an’ burnin’ with fever, I was, until I feared me own brains would be fried like an egg”—and the babe, a boy, “God bless him, the poor mite,” was born daft and had to be sent to a special home for the nuns to take care of.

Remembering that change is always good after heartbreak, Mary Jane decided to move on, to make a new life for herself in London. “I had to leave all that sorrow behind me or perish of it. ’Twas like an anchor, it was, weighin’ me heart down, an’ I thought I was too young to drown. I wanted gaiety an’ excitement, an’ to live while I was young an’ alive, not to be tied down an’ dying o’ woe. The only thing for it was to start new.”

When she first set foot in London—“green as a shamrock, that’s how ignorant I was!”—a velvet-and-lace-gowned lady in a fine carriage driven by a Negro coachman in tight white breeches, a red tail coat, and a tall silk hat, engaged Mary Jane on the spot to be a maid in her house.

But her house was no ordinary house. It was “a gay sportin’ house in the West End, it was, one o’ the grandest where all the gents an’ swells an’ even His Highness the Prince o’ Wales went.

“All pink satin an’ red velvet, lace sewn with little beads that twinkled like stars, real crystal chandeliers, an’ mirrors an’ gilt everywhere they could think to put one an’ paint t’other. There was even globes o’ rose-colored glass on the gaslights. Aye, I used to lie naked as a baby in me big bed o’ pink satin an’ stare at meself in that gold-framed mirror an’ think I looked just like one o’ the ladies in those French paintin’s Madame had hangin’ everywhere.”

Though she was hired to be a servant, Mary Jane soon made up her mind to be the gayest and most popular girl in the house. “Fuckin’ beats skivvyin’ any day o’ the week, me boyo, an’ I’d sooner be paid for lyin’ flat on me back on satin than down on me knees scrubbin’ floors!” At that time the reigning favorite was a novelty, a Negress known as “The Black Venus” who did a series of increasingly lewd
poses plastiques
draped—“for the first few o’ ’em anyway”—in cloth-of-gold. In the grand ballroom, with the floor cleared and lit by torches held by nearly naked Negro footmen in red loincloths, she performed a wild voodoo dance with a turban on her head, gold bangles on her wrists and ankles, and a real-live snake wrapped around her shoulders and a “skimpy little scrap” of gold cloth covering her cunt, which she ripped off at the end of her dance. “All the toffs were
wild
for it . . . an’ her,” Mary Jane added, a tad ungraciously.

On the night of the favorite’s birthday, Mary Jane, simmering with resentment, drank more than she should have of the champagne she was supposed to be serving to the guests and decided that enough was enough. She dropped her tray, full of crystal glasses, right on the floor and in her smart uniform of black dress and ruffled white apron and cap flounced into the rose-lit dining room, flipped up her skirts, and sat her bare bum right down on “that big lovely pink an’ white birthday cake with a great lovely splat, frosting flyin’ everywhere. After that, they all fell in love with me. Lined up to lick me clean, they did!”

I could tell she was quite proud of that memory. Soon she was being carried into the dining room every night stretched out on a big silver platter with her naked body decorated with icing roses, bows, and garlands, just like a fancy cake for the gents to devour. One night, she swore “on me mother’s grave it’s true!,” they served her up to “good ol’ Bertie, the Prince o’ Pleasure, our future king, himself, Lord love an’ save him!” decorated with his royal crest in icing and a regal lion and unicorn paw to hoof in icing over her clean-shaven cunt.

Another night, upon a dare for a diamond bracelet, she took a bath in a tub filled with a crate of champagne new come from Paris, “but
ne’er again!
I nearly burned me insides out, I did. Luckily there was a doctor in the house; he stuffed me snatch full o’ cold sweet cream from the kitchen to cool the burn, an’ all me gents were eager to comfort an’ pet me, an’ give me presents, an’ tell me what a brave little girl I was.”