The Ripper's Wife (26 page)

Now
two
ghostly whores were rattling their chains at me. I wanted to
strangle
Mary Jane Kelly with those phantom chains, but when I looked in her green eyes all I could say was, “Back down on your back you go,” and roll on top of her and thrust deep inside her.
Why
was it
so hard
to kill this one? She was
only
a whore like all the rest of them!

 

Back in my bolt-hole, I cut Katie’s kidney in half and fried and ate it with onions and carrots. I sprinkled my medicine in my glass of fine red wine and watched the white powder swirl and melt into its ruby-red depths. Warmth flooded my icy fingers, filling them to the very tips. It was
very
nice!
Almost
as nice as bathing them in a whore’s hot blood. The other half, bloody and raw, sopping and wine sodden, I put into a little brown cardboard box and tied it up tight with string, then sat down with my red ink to write a new letter, this one addressed to Mr. George Lusk, the Chairman of the newly formed Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, who had vowed not to rest until I was brought to justice and was offering a substantial reward for my capture. I had met the man before; he specialized in decorating music halls and was a fellow Freemason in Michael’s lodge. Lusk thought Michael was “a gem of a man” and always wanted the halls he designed to be the perfect setting for him, so it gave me
great
pleasure to address him in the guise of Jack the Ripper.

I wrote it in strong, bold red letters, delighting in my crude misspellings, so contradictory and bizarre that it would make them wonder if I was
really
that ignorant or just playing games. What illiterate cockney knows that
knife
starts with
k
and writes such an elegant copperplate? But
this
time, as much as I wanted to, I did not sign my name, just to toy with them. They would
know
who it was from; Katie’s kidney would leave them in no doubt about that! I could think of no better calling card, except one with my
real
name engraved upon it, and
that
the fools will
never
have,
ha ha!

I lay back on my bed and licked white strength from my palm. I furiously fondled my cock and thought of my wife-whore sucking Alfred Brierley’s while I stood at the foot of the bed and watched. I glanced at my watch. Tomorrow, after I mailed my parcel to Mr. Lusk, I must catch the train back to Liverpool. How I wished I could catch my wife-whore and Brierley in the act, burst in on them naked in bed. I wanted to whip out my cock and scream at them to keep fucking until I spent all over them!

I held my watch up over my head, swinging it by its heavy chain, like a pendulum. My Muse blessed me then with a
wonderful
idea. I found a pin and, after carefully prying off the back of the casing, slowly, painstakingly, inscribed dead in the center of it
I am Jack the Ripper!
and, below it, my signature,
James Maybrick;
then, like planets orbiting the sun, I surrounded it with four sets of initials:
PN, AC, ES,
and
CE
.

It served the last whore right to deny her her man’s name at the end.
E
for
Eddowes,
her maiden name, though her days of maidenhood were long past. Now the whores are
always
with me! As long as I have my watch, I will carry them with me wherever I go. The victims I know them
so well!
Let them rattle their phantom chains, God damn them!

I
couldn’t bear it anymore, this endless back-and-forth between loving husband and the mad, rampant monster. I would have to resort to drastic measures. If I could not divorce Jim, I would have to make him divorce me. I’d managed to make a few discreet inquiries amongst solicitors, and they all advised me, for the sake of the children, to aim for reconciliation. Even Dr. Hopper, who had pretended all along with me that my injuries were the result of tumbles down stairs and other careless accidents, agreed that it was all for the best when I turned to him, hoping he would testify for me. I’d tried to write Jim a letter, asking him to set me free, a long, rambling, bumbling, surely bungled thing that I ended up shoving into the depths of my desk in frustration. It was no use! Since no one would take my side and help me, Jim would just have to divorce me; I’d have to force his hand.

I decided to do the most brazen thing I could think of. I reserved the bridal suite at Flatman’s Hotel in our own names, Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick. I told Jim an old aunt of mine was ailing and in London to see a surgeon and was begging me to visit her, fearing it might be the last time she would ever see me on earth. Of course, Jim said I must go. He even gave me a lovely speckled fur cape lined in orchid satin as a substitute for his “warm embrace during these dreary and lonesome days we must spend apart,” explaining that his business prevented him from joining me, as I knew perfectly well it would; that was why I had chosen that week in particular.

But it wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick who checked in at Flatman’s but Alfred Brierley and Mrs. Maybrick. Several of the cotton brokers who frequented Flatman’s recognized us. They knew at once that the man registered as James Maybrick and sleeping in bed with Mrs. Maybrick was not Jim, and that was just what I had intended.

But I didn’t count on Alfred walking out on me after the first night. He’d seemed so delighted when we’d made the arrangements, congratulating me on being so clever and saying how perfect it all was. But the fantasy didn’t quite match the reality. He was sullen and peevish instead of passionate. He accused me of trying to drag his name through the mud, of using him and wanting to see him named co-respondent in a divorce scandal. He said he didn’t love me, we’d had our fun, and he was done, he had no intention of marrying me.

“You mean nothing to me,” he said bluntly as he was putting his clothes back on and packing up his trunk, ignoring the lovely dinner I’d ordered brought upstairs for us, “no more than any other woman, just pleasure for pleasure’s sake, nothing more, and I cannot fathom how you ever thought otherwise; I certainly never said anything to give you that impression. If I like her, and the lady is willing, I’m willing to oblige her until I get tired of her. Afterward, if she doesn’t cling and cry too much and try to hold on to me, sometimes we can resume as friends, after a suitable interval, of course. That’s how I live my life, and I see no reason to change it; I’m having a thoroughly marvelous time being a bachelor, I couldn’t be happier.”

At first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“No! You don’t . . . you
can’t
mean that!” I cried.

“Oh, but I do,” he was quick to assure me, eyes and words cold as ice,
freezing
me.

In that moment I felt my heart break like a trifling little crimson glass Valentine’s Day bauble. It was only when I was losing him that I realized how much I loved him. I just couldn’t bear to let him go.

I was so upset I snatched up the crystal bowl of jewel-lovely fruit medley and poured it over his copper head and slapped his face, sending fat, glistening drops of sugary-sweet syrup and chunks of pineapple, diced peaches, grapes, and cherries flying everywhere.
“You cad!”
I shouted. “You haven’t a chivalrous bone in your body!”

I wept up a storm and went back to Liverpool on the very next train. I told the people who saw me crying that there’d been an unexpected death in my family.

Aching with loss and longing, I returned to Battlecrease House, with leaden feet, to await the inevitable; the storm was bound to break soon. No one was expecting me, and when I walked heart-sore, travel weary, and tearstained into my bedroom I was astonished to find none other than Nanny Yapp, blind as a bat with her spectacles off, dancing and twirling before my mirror wearing my candy-striped satin corset and a flurry of pink and white ruffled petticoats trimmed with red satin bows and ribbon-threaded lace that also belonged to me. She lifted and shook them like a French dancer, displaying a pair of my frilly drawers and pink silk stockings. She even had her big flat feet crammed into a pair of my little red satin French heels, her toes bulging out at the sides in a way I supposed must be quite painful, and had my bracelets, a veritable fortune in icy-glistening diamonds, stacked up to her elbows over a pair of my pink satin opera gloves. She was singing in such an awful off-key manner I was suddenly immensely grateful that Jim and Mrs. Briggs had never seen fit to entrust her with the children’s musical education.

This was simply
too much;
I just
had
to walk away. Luckily she was singing so loudly and without her spectacles she was so blind that she never noticed me standing in the doorway. I went back downstairs and told May I was feeling right poorly and would she please be so good as to draw me a hot bath; that would surely give Nanny Yapp time to get back into
her
clothes and out of
my
room.

While I was soaking in my bath, luxuriating in the rose-perfumed steam, I asked May to bring me any letters that had come for me during my absence.

Much to my surprise, amongst the many bills I found a letter from Alfred Brierley. He said he feared he’d been “far too precipitate” and “egregiously mistaken.” He’d been feeling foolish and out of sorts and worried after several men he habitually did business with had recognized him in the lobby, and one must expect a certain amount of fear and trepidation when a man sees the end of his bachelor days upon the horizon. That fear had made him unkind and he fully deserved being called a “cad” as well as having the fruit medley dumped over his head. I was “the most exciting, intoxicating woman” he’d ever known, and he couldn’t bear to go on without me. We
must
reconcile at the first possible opportunity or else he would find himself sitting with a pistol in his hand one night contemplating self-destruction, and did I
really
want a man’s blood, his heart’s blood that pulsed
only
for
me,
staining my lovely lily-white hands?

“Oh, Alfred, Alfred, Alfred,” I sighed. “Your love is just like a noose, always keeping me dangling!”

I tried to tell myself to buck up and show some pride and not go running back the moment he beckoned. But I knew myself too well to lie to me; I knew I would soon be back in his arms and in his bed again.

The warm, fragrant water lulled me into a doze, and I awakened with a start to a sudden splash. I was no longer alone. Edwin had crept in and disrobed, in such haste to join me in my perfumed bath that he had forgotten to remove his socks. I laughed until I cried, and then I laughed some more. Edwin laughed with me, pointing and braying at his sodden green socks. It was almost like old times except we were naked in the bathtub.

When my laughter subsided, I tried to shove Edwin out, but he only laughed all the harder and pulled me onto his lap. He assured me that we were quite safe; Jim had gone up to London. My absence had put him in a fond and forgiving mood, and he had decided to surprise me by settling all my debts as the first step on the road to the new life we would be starting down together the moment he returned tomorrow evening. We were only a scant few months away from a new year, 1889, and he truly wanted this New Year to be a new start for us, devoid of all deception and lies.

“He told me to tell you,” Edwin said, “when he takes you in his arms and kisses you at the stroke of midnight, he wants to kiss you that way every day for the rest of his life. I think he means like this. . . .” Edwin proceeded to illustrate until I succeeded in stopping him by shoving a cake of pink rose soap into his mouth.

I jumped out of the tub and threw on a robe. Foolish creature that I am, the words were scarcely out of Edwin’s mouth before my heart went leaping after Jim, leaving Alfred Brierley in the dust. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped and sank like a stone. By now Jim would have already inquired for me at Flatman’s and discovered that Mrs.
and Mr
. Maybrick had already checked out. The catastrophe I’d set the stage for could not be averted. The only hope I had was to pray for a miracle and, barring God’s intervention, to somehow brazen it out. If only I could persuade Jim to hold on to that spirit of forgiveness, then maybe, just maybe, there was some hope left for us after all. I suddenly wanted that new start more desperately than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I knew then, no matter how I might try to pretend, I
still
loved Jim. I wanted to be a wife,
his
wife, not any other man’s mistress.

 

I dressed in green, the color of spring, and waited for Jim to come home. Someone had once told me that butterflies were a symbol of rebirth, so I put the lavender and mint jade butterfly comb in my hair and sank down on my knees and prayed with all my might that if God would help me disentangle myself from this foolish fix that was entirely of my own devising I would never look at another man again, that henceforth there would be no one but Jim. That’s the way it should have always been, but I’d made mistakes, out of anger and hurt pride, a spirit of revenge, and a longing for what was lacking, and now I wanted desperately to atone.

I’d kept Mrs. Humphreys slaving in the kitchen all day. I ordered her to prepare, with especial care, a replica of our first meal as man and wife. Everything must be
exactly
right—the rosemary chicken, tender green asparagus, new potatoes seasoned with herbs and butter. I’d ordered the lemon custard cake from the bakery this time, Mrs. Humphreys not being so adept at fancywork as I would like, and asked that a dove with an olive branch in its beak be drawn in icing atop the dark chocolate frosting.

I jumped up and ran downstairs the instant I heard Jim at the door. My foot hadn’t even left the final step before his fist felled me. As stars danced before my eyes blood streamed from my nose and my consciousness wavered like a dying candle. I fully expected to feel his hand in my hair dragging me upstairs, followed by the crushing power of his fingers around my throat, but he left me lying right where I fell. It was his way of telling me that he was done with me. I wanted to roll over on my stomach and
drag
myself up the stairs after him and find a way,
some way,
to win his love back, but I didn’t have the strength. I never wanted anything more until after I knew I had lost it.
Tomorrow,
I promised myself as the stars stopped dancing and everything went dark,
tomorrow
. . .