The Ripper's Wife (25 page)

I plunged boldly into the darkness of the narrow archway leading to her room. Number 13, lucky for some, unlucky for others. I peeked through the window, around the makeshift muslin curtain, worn thin as a bridal veil. I was in luck. I caressed the diamond horseshoe on my tie and smiled like the Devil. She was alone. Fishmonger Joe was nowhere in sight. I’d been half-afraid that he would spoil everything. I’d thought about watching them fuck through the window, the way I fantasized about my wife-whore and Alfred Brierley. The candle in the ginger beer bottle was burning bright and Mary Jane was lying there on the rumpled bed just as I had pictured her. I could hear her singing softly and slurrily about that damned, infernal violet on her mother’s grave.

Let the police go on playing hunt the Ripper, let them have their fun, while I had mine.

 

With the dawn I rose and left Mary Jane sprawled in sweet drunken slumber. On my way back to my cozy little bolt-hole in Petticoat Lane, I passed a policeman. He handed me a handbill. On it was my letter, printed in facsimile, in red ink no less, above an urgently worded request for any who recognized the writing to come forward. As I walked along I saw that they were also pasting posters on the walls. I wanted to laugh right in their stupid faces. Safely back in my bolt-hole, I took a postcard and my bottle of red ink from my travel desk and sat down to write:

That “tomorrow” would really confound them and make them wonder if I had really stopped in the midst of my bloody labors to write and mail the postcard or if instead it was the act of a prankster. Once again I addressed myself to the gentlemen of the press, at the Central News Agency; I knew they wouldn’t disappoint me.

I changed my clothes and went out to pop my postcard in the post, enjoying my walk and the cries of the newsboys, shrilling out the latest horrors to befall the harlots of Whitechapel. I watched the women cluster together, cowering close to one another and their menfolk for comfort. I
savored
the terror in their eyes.
Which one of you,
I wondered,
which one of you will be the next for Jack?

I bought every edition, every paper I could find. I stopped at a bakery for an assortment of pastries, drizzled with icing, caramel, and rich chocolate sauce and filled with spicy cinnamon, jam, or sweet cream. I am
always
good to my whores. I knew these sweets would please Mary Jane, as would the present in my pocket and inside the gay striped satin hatbox I was carrying.

She knelt naked upon the bed as I placed the emerald taffeta bonnet on her sleep-tousled ginger-gold head and tied the ribbons in a big beautiful bow beneath her pretty chin. I watched her ravenously tear into the buns, tearing into them like I tore into whores. And guzzle from the bottle of rum I’d brought her, knowing this was her favorite breakfast. White cream, tawny caramel, red jam, and dark chocolate staining her face, she sat there, shamelessly naked, legs wantonly sprawled; ravenously licking her sticky fingers when all the sweets were gone. She was an adorable greedy glutton begging for more and I would give it to her.

I watched as she leisurely rolled the green silk stockings—“as green as the Emerald Isles and as beautiful as your eyes,” I said gallantly—up her fine, shapely legs. She remarked that it had been such a “terrible long time” since she had felt silk against her skin and lifted a leg and twisted one green-clad ankle this way and that to admire it. “I’ve hooked many a man by showin’ me ankles on a rainy day!” she said as I smiled over the newspapers and read to her all about Jack the Ripper’s double event.

I watched her shudder and cross herself and reach for the rosary lying on the table beside her bed and begin idly fingering the beads instead of herself.

“Sometimes I dream,” she confided with wide, frightened eyes, “that he’s comin’ for me! Sure as the Mark o’ Cain, I’m marked as one o’ his, an’ there’s no help for it; even if I run, he’ll find me!”

Her terror fed my need and my greed, and soon I must let the papers fall to the floor and take her again, plunging my knife of hot flesh, not cold steel, into her until she
screamed
with pleasure and begged for more and for me to stop all in the same breath. Women—two-faced, two-minded, duplicitous, deceitful whores all of them!

 

Do all the whores in Whitechapel know one another? There are so many whores here,
thousands
of them, it seems impossible. Yet Mary Jane knew Long Liz and Katie. Like the miserable ghost of Marley rattling his chains at Ebenezer Scrooge, Mary Jane brought them back to haunt me, accusing eyes, angry mouths, and, underneath, throats gaping open like second mouths, hungry for life but filled only with death—raw, bloody death! Filthy whores, they degrade everything they touch, even their own sorry lives! I did them all a favor by killing them. I relieved them of their misery; it was the nicest thing anyone could ever have done for them. I let them sacrifice their lives for a good and noble cause—to keep two sweet, innocent children and their undeserving mother-whore safe. Why can’t they be grateful? They should go down on their knees and thank me, not haunt me and rattle those damn phantom chains!

The tall, gangly, flaxen-haired farmer’s daughter Elisabeth Gustafsdotter—Gustav’s Daughter—was born in “Torslunda or somethin’ like it.” She loved to read
anything
she could get her hands on. She dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher, but all her hopes were shattered when she was sixteen. She was working at her first job, as a maidservant in a fine house in Gothenburg, “servin’ the gentry,” when she let the charming young master, Lars Fredrik, the adored only son of the house, seduce her. She thought he loved her. In those days Liz still believed all the fairy tales about peasant girls who became princesses.

He left her pregnant and with a dose of “somethin’ heinous” that landed her in the infirmary, with the blame
all
upon her.

The young man claimed that
she
had seduced
him,
wept when he knelt down before his gray-haired old mother, and confessed that Elisabeth, the housemaid, had stolen his innocence and infected him with some shameful ailment that had left a canker on his doodle and made it burn and weep a foul discharge.

Liz’s daughter was stillborn. She was heartbroken when the doctor told her that she could never have another. Her good name and all her hopes gone, she took to drink and walking the streets.

Eventually she emigrated, hoping for a new and better life in England. She threw herself on the charity of the Swedish Church in Trinity Street. She loved to visit the reading room and pore over the papers from the old country. Sometimes she let the Swedish sailors who brought them buy her favors and drinks,
always
drinks.

Then along came John Thomas Stride, a good man believing in redemption, that everyone deserves a second chance. They married and opened a coffeehouse in Crispin Street. Liz was always kind to the poor, sick, downhearted, and downtrodden, especially the whores. “There but for the grace of God go I,” she always said as she filled the coffee cups and served thick, generous slices of the cinnamon-spice cake or another kind filled with creamy cheese and luscious tarty-sweet red raspberry jam, and special cookies rolled in white sugar, all baked from her own mother’s recipes.

Though Elisabeth was certainly a tall girl, I learned from Mary Jane that her height had nothing to do with her being called “Long Liz.” It was her habit of telling tall tales and her vast knowledge of Swedish folk and fairy tales, with which she regaled the coffeehouse customers for hours.

But of course it didn’t last. Disease raddled Mr. Stride’s fine, generous mind; he raved and turned violent. It was a
dreadful
sight to see a man so horribly transformed. “Truly, had you known him before, you would not have known him after,” Mary Jane said. “He was altogether a different man when he’d been the soul o’ sweetness before.” He had to go to the asylum, where he soon afterward died. “Liz said they sawed his skull open an’ found his brain full o’ holes like moths had been at it.”

His brother did Liz wrong, cheating her out of the coffeehouse, and, sunk deep in despair, she sought solace in drink and the arms of strangers again. “She just couldn’t resist those sailor boys from Sweden.” She had to earn her keep. She’d already seen what happened when body and soul parted ways—“when that happened to you, you were like to end up in the asylum like Mr. Stride.” She whored and begged charity and drinks, always drinks.

As I had suspected, the
Princess Alice
tale was just a figment of her imagination, bait for sympathy, originally concocted to take advantage of the charity fund established for victims of the disaster. “The closest Long Liz ever got to a ship after she docked in England was the sailors she fucked.” Mary Jane laughed. The boot of some surly drunk or a pimp Long Liz wouldn’t pay—depending on which story you chose to believe—had kicked most of her teeth out; the rest she had lost to decay.

She’d lived off and on the last few years with a dockside laborer called Michael Kidney—Kidney! I perked up, remembering the treasure sealed up tight, floating like a mysterious blob-shaped creature at the bottom of the sea, in a jar of red wine locked in darkness inside the black Gladstone bag I’d left beneath my bed in Petticoat Lane. But “she couldn’t quite stick to it. For long spells she’d be fine; then off she’d go, carousin’ with sailors, livin’ an’ fuckin’ an’ drinkin’ like there wasn’t goin’ to be a tomorrow.”

Mike was a good fellow, but he found Liz hard to handle. He grew weary of all the arguments and gave up trying to make her stay, contenting himself with knowing that she would always come back.
Until Jack’s knife flashed,
I added silently as I snuggled against Mary Jane’s bare back and gave her earlobe a dainty nibble when what I really wanted to do was
bite it off!

Would the police find Katie’s earlobes that I had sliced off? What would they do with them? Would they sew them back on in the mortuary? What did they do with dead whores? Did they bury them in pieces or try to sew them back together again like rag dolls, to give decency in death to those who had lived so long without it?

In my mind’s eye, I saw the ghost of Long Liz standing at the foot of the bed, blame blazing in her eyes, severed throat gaping, pointing an adamantly accusing finger. The fireball in my belly churned and burned. The rats gnawed. I gasped and gripped Mary Jane’s breasts so hard with my cold, numb hands that she cried out, “Play gentle now, Jim!” I heard the rattle of phantom chains and swallowed hard. My throat burned as though I had drunk acid, and pain drove spikes into my head.
Damn you, Mary Jane! You should be hosting séances instead of peddling your cunt! Through you the dead live again, damn, Damn, DAMN you!

But she was done talking of the fair lying Swede. Now Mary Jane was on about Katie. Catherine Eddowes, the name she had been given at birth, or Kate Kelly as she liked to call herself, proudly taking her man’s name.

Mary Jane
would
know her too! Would I
ever
kill a whore who would elicit a shrug and a blank stare from Mary Jane instead of “oh yes, poor harlot, I knew her well!”?

Katie and her many siblings had been left to run wild after her mother died in childbed, while their father worked hard to earn their keep making tin plates. At sixteen she’d fallen hard for a smooth-talking pensioner, Thomas Conway. He’d persuaded her to have his initials tattooed in blue ink upon her arm and given her three bastard babies, “but no weddin’ ring, though their life together was like a circle unendin’. First he’d beat her, then Katie’d run out an’ try an’ soothe her hurts with gin, then he’d come after her, pick her up out o’ the gutter or some other bloke’s bed, say some sweet words that’d make the poor fool fall in love all over again, an’ home they’d go, until it all happened again, an’ there was no reckonin’ when that might be, two hours, two weeks, or two months, but it
always
happened again. Like livin’ on a floor covered in broken glass, it was, knowin’ that no matter how carefully you set your feet down you were bound to get cut sometime.” But then Tom Conway up and disappeared, and no more was ever heard from him.

Katie mourned, then moved on. She was lucky. She found her
true
love with an Irish market porter, John Kelly, who was
determined
to give her a good home and wean her off the gin. Though she suffered an occasional slip, it wasn’t often, and he’d made it plain to her that she was
his
woman and he wasn’t a man to suffer her being with another.

“She wasn’t a reg’lar whore, not like me an’ the rest,” Mary Jane said. “She was just a poor soul tryin’ to get by, one day at a time. But when the thirst was upon her, an’ the bottle had gone dry, an’ the money had run out, an’ her still cravin’ more, she’d do whatever she had to to get another nip, an’ if that meant lettin’ some gent hoist her skirts, so be it. What Johnny didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.”

Katie and her Johnny lived one day at a time, renting a double bed most nights in a doss-house in Flower & Dean Street, him working as a porter in the market and her hiring out as a char and taking in washing and needlework or hawking flowers or what have you in the streets. She was a bit of a magpie, with a fine, quick eye and a knack for picking up little treasures to pawn, things the finer folk threw away or lost, like quality buttons of metal or ivory, sometimes ones set with stones, or pillboxes and cigarette or card cases. Once she even found a pair of silver spectacles set with little diamonds and flashy black stones so fine she thought “they must’ve belonged to the Queen” and was half-tempted to go to the palace to return them. Every autumn Katie and Johnny would join the mass of migrant workers heading for the country to pick hops and enjoy the sunshine and clean air and all the fresh milk and wholesome country fare they could eat. It was something they looked forward to all year; it was such a welcome change from the miserable muck and murk of foul and foggy London.