The Ripper's Wife

If these wild, wicked words were true . . . Jack the Ripper was no longer a faceless fiend stalking the streets of Whitechapel and my own bad dreams. He had another name, an ordinary mundane man’s name, James Maybrick, and he was my very own husband, the father of my children.

As I lifted the diary from my lap a brass key fell from its binding. I was catapulted at once back through time to the morning I had sat as a young, naïve bride at my husband’s desk and rattled the locked drawers. My life had indeed turned out to be a fairy tale after all, only not one of the pretty, happily ever after stories, but the most sinister one of all—I was indeed Bluebeard’s bride, Jack the Ripper’s wife. And amongst the many secrets my husband was harboring was a cachet of murdered, butchered women, like the dead wives in Bluebeard’s secret chamber. When I had opened the cover of that diary I had peeked into that secret room, and now, now I held in my hand the key. . . .

God help me,
I prayed as I walked into my husband’s study.

Books by Brandy Purdy

THE BOLEYN WIFE

 

THE TUDOR THRONE

 

THE QUEEN’S PLEASURE

 

THE QUEEN’S RIVALS

 

THE BOLEYN BRIDE

 

THE RIPPER’S WIFE

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

THE
R
IPPER’S
W
IFE

BRANDY PURDY

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

This is a work of fiction inspired by the controversial document known as the Ripper Diary, and the lives of James and Florence Maybrick, Jack the Ripper, and his unfortunate victims. Creative liberties have been taken with all—certain characters and events have been altered, eliminated, embellished, or condensed.

—Jeremiah 17:9

 

—Daisy Miller
by Henry James

 

—a popular ballad of the 1890s by William B. Gray

 

 

 

O
n the outside it looks so innocent, just an old battered book, musty and dusty, nothing special at all. An ordinary diary bound in cardboard covered in rusty black cloth, corners bent and bumped like a quartet of bruised and broken noses, a tad frayed in places like curmudgeonly eyebrows grown wildly awry, chipped and fading gilt accents. Seven lucky gold bands adorn the spine. I chose it for that reason, because
he,
because
we,
believed in luck. You could walk into any stationery shop in the civilized world and find one just like it. I know: I’m the one who bought it.

When you open the cover, that’s when the horrors begin. Your skin begins to crawl and your blood begins to chill, and you discover that this battered old diary is anything but ordinary. No dreaded dentist appointments, tedious afternoon teas with a vicar avariciously fond of cucumber sandwiches and saving cannibals’ souls, quarrels with the giddy young wife about her ludicrous, exorbitantly priced bonnets—
silly
things sprouting stuffed canaries and spinach! However can she keep a straight face and wear them?—and her abominable, troublemaking mother, or taking the children to a Saturday matinée for an afternoon’s flight of fantasy to see
Peter Pan
. Oh no, nothing like that! It’s like walking into the parlor and seeing blood dripped across a cream-colored carpet in a trail leading straight to a torn and bloody corpse. A most unexpected sight when all you’re expecting is the calm and mundane, orderly ordinary. You’ve come to have tea after all, not to scream and fall fainting over a corpse.

It begins with the words I’ve quoted above, scribbled in a scrawl of ragged red, big, bold, bright jagged letters and blobs of ink like spattered blood, garish and vulgar as a gin-soaked harlot’s lip rouge, sloppily sprawling across the page like a wanton body on a rumpled bed, written as though by a drunkard in the grip of the tremors or someone with palsy who cannot quite command the pen, yet with such
force,
such
rage,
the words at times nearly cut, like a knife, right through the page. A murderer’s words, it’s easy to imagine them written in blood with the weapon that took so many lives, including, in a sense, my own.

I was the first or, perhaps, the final, victim. Maybe I was neither. Maybe I was both. Maybe the man who wrote this diary didn’t destroy me at all. Maybe
I
destroyed myself. Maybe in the end all it amounts to is one weak woman’s desperate attempts to justify all the things that went wrong in her life. You, dear reader, will have to decide. I’ve faced a judge and jury before. I’ve already experienced the worst and lost everything that matters. This time I’m not afraid. If you condemn me, there’s nothing left that I hold dear that you can take from me now, not even my life.

Those vicious red words were written by my husband. The man I spent fifteen years in prison for murdering, the man whose death exiled me permanently from my children’s lives and hearts. This is his diary, the one that I, as a blissful young bride, bought for him. It was a different century, sixty years ago, but it might have been only yesterday. I remember it so well—that bright blue sky day when I, so light of step in my pearl-buttoned boots of white kid, so sweetly ignorant and only eighteen, with a garden of silk daisies, cherry-red poppies, bluebells, and black-eyed Susans blooming on my straw hat and a rainbow of ribbons bouncing down my back to tickle the big, floppy lemon chiffon bow on my bustle, skipped into the shop and plucked it off the shelf. With a radiant smile, I announced to the clerk that it was “a gift for my husband” as I plopped it down upon the counter and told him, rather grandly, to charge it to my husband’s account and wrap it in such a way as would appeal to a gentleman of the most refined and elegant taste, in striped paper perhaps—burgundy and forest green or navy blue and cream? I tapped my chin and pondered—and there simply
must
be a bow, a very neat, tidy,
masculine
bow, not a big, flowing, feminine thing, oh no, that would
never
do for Jim!

Those with a thirst for sensation, those who avidly peruse the penny illustrated papers, following divorce dramas and murder trials like bloodhounds, the kind of ladies and gentlemen of leisure who take their opera glasses and a boxed lunch to spend the day sitting in a crowded courtroom; cotton brokers; learned doctors; lawyers; politicians; sanctimonious moralizers; and the self-important, supercilious members of what we from the American South would call “the highfalutin” Currant Jelly Set, will know his name quite well—Mr. James Maybrick of Liverpool. But the rest of the world knows him by another name, one written in blood—Jack the Ripper.

Every love has its own peculiar story tied up with disparate, desperate bows of melodrama, madness, romance, tragedy, passion, pain, and farce, sacrifice and gluttony, tenderness and grace, honor and deceit, punishment and pleasure, sanctity and sin, the bland, ho-hum ordinary and penny-dreadful thrills, where vengeance and bliss sometimes sleep side by side in the same bed. Pure or profane, every love exacts a beautiful or bitter price. It
always
takes some toll, whether it be a pittance or a fortune, like a tax upon the hearts of those who tender, reject, or receive it. Love
always
leaves a mark: a scar, a smudge, a stain. Even those who long for love but lack it cannot escape unmarked.

It’s been on my mind so much these last few days, tugging at me so urgently, shaking me, whenever I try to rest or sit idle for too long, with a cat on my lap, dreaming over faded photographs and movie magazines, making me feel like I’m waking up with the house on fire when all I want to do is sleep, to go on waltzing with the ghosts in my dreams. Dreaming of what was and what might have been . . .

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness, forgetting, and living with, and living without, monsters masquerading as mild-mannered men and the strange angels the Lord sometimes sends, even to those who seem, at first glance, the most unworthy of them, and all the strange, terrible, and beautiful creatures that lie in between the blackest black and the whitest white, and all the many shades of gray that bridge the gulf in between, tattered yellow newspapers, faded photographs of the dead, those who are gone and lost forever, and flickering images, larger than life and platinum precious, projected, like magic, on a screen.

My name is Florence Elizabeth Chandler Maybrick. My family and friends called me Florie, but, when he loved me he called me Bunny. I was Jack the Ripper’s wife, maybe even the reason, as a clever rhymester once wrote, a man who was society’s pillar became a killer. This is our own peculiar story.