The Ripper's Wife (13 page)

In the end, all I know is that
if
it
was
revenge, it was
not
sweet. It cost me something very dear. By succumbing that once, I forever forfeited the pleasure I had formerly found in my brother-in-law’s sweet and silly company. Edwin thought it gave him the right to possess me whenever an opportune moment arose. It ruined our friendship and I
dreaded
finding myself alone with him because I always knew where it was leading to.

Instead of sitting and chatting or going out like old dear friends the way we used to, after that fateful afternoon Edwin was more likely to chase me around the room, try to pin me down on the sofa, bend me over any convenient table or chair, or back me into a corner where my skirts would quickly come up and my drawers down. He’d paw and kiss me as I wept and implored, “Can’t we be the way we were before?,” though in my heart I already knew the answer.

But Edwin would merely bury his face in my perfumed neck and push my hand down where he wanted it to be and murmur that this way was much better, “the way it was meant to be, the way it would have been if only we’d met each other first . . . but . . . since we didn’t . . . we might as well make the best of things. . . .”

He never once looked at my face, he never saw the way I’d wince and weep, though I doubt it would have made any difference anyway. Maybe that’s why he preferred to take me from behind? It allowed him to feign blindness and pretend I enjoyed it.

I still mourn and miss the friend I lost that afternoon. It was as though the Edwin I knew and liked best had died and left behind a single-minded amorous identical twin to accost and bedevil me. And there was no one I could turn to for help. I couldn’t very well confide in Jim or Mrs. Briggs. With Edwin living right there in the house it was simply impossible to avoid him; to snub and cold-shoulder him in any noticeable fashion would only invite awkward questions. I lost so many things that day—the sanctity of my marriage, all the trust and love I had poured into it and thought I had been given in return, my children’s legitimacy, my self-respect, and my own respectability, the right to say with pride that I had always been a faithful wife. Then, as if that were not enough to lose all in one afternoon, I lost my best friend too. And the worst part is, if I had met him first, instead of Jim, I might have loved Edwin. I
had
loved him. And, by letting him have me, I had lost him forever.

Bent over the back of that chair, stifled by my tight-laced stays, blood rushing to my skirt-shrouded head, I felt as though I were sinking like a stone, drowning, like salt water was searing my nose, throat, and lungs. I felt that horrid heart-about-to-burst pounding. Then, all of a sudden, it was as though my head broke the surface, and I came up, gasping for air. I shoved Edwin away. Before I could say a word or slap his smiling face, the front door opened and I heard voices, Jim’s amongst them. I froze. Edwin turned his back and nimbly did up his trousers and slicked back his hair. I stumbled over my drawers, down around my ankles, and almost fell. I heard them rip, but I hadn’t time to fuss with hitching up all my many layers of skirts trying to pull them back up, so I snatched them off and stuffed them into the nearest vase and ran to the mirror above the mantel to put right my hair.

With all that had happened, I had quite forgotten that we were expecting guests for cards and dinner. Mr. and Mrs. Samuelson, the Carters, the Radcliffes, Dr. and Mrs. Drysdale, the Hammersmiths, the Dashmores, and, of course, Mrs. Briggs, and the poor man who had the misfortune to call himself her husband. It would be
hours
before I could talk to Jim in private.
Hours
in which I would have to smile and pretend and sit there in the parlor playing whist, stark naked under my skirts, aware every moment of the shameful wet heat between my thighs, with Edwin darting secret smiles across the table at me as though we really were lovers and what had passed between us actually meant something more than the end of our friendship.

I did it, but for the life of me I cannot tell you how. If you know the scandal that surrounds my name and are reading this hoping for a guidebook for discreet deceit within a marriage, to learn how a smart, sophisticated woman manages her secret amours, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that was never who I
really
was or ever wanted to be and I bungled it all
so badly
. Whatever you do, dear reader,
do not
pattern yourself after me! The only thing I can offer by way of instruction is my many mistakes, and you’re welcome to take what lessons you can from them.

I smiled and laughed, flirted and chattered like my old frivolous self, but I can’t recollect a single word I said or that was spoken to me. I only know it seems like I spent the entire miserable evening trying not to look at that Blue Willow vase into which I’d thrust my drawers but feeling my eyes drawn inexorably toward it, fearing that the others would notice and someone would rise to admire it, or the flowers within, and discover my guilty secret. I felt like the lovers of the Blue Willow legend, whom the gods had taken pity on and transformed into doves, were laughing at me, mocking my misery with every flap of their happy wings. Love,
real
love, just isn’t like a fable or a fairy story; the truth intrudes and makes it ugly every time.

 

Jim, calm and regal as a king in his red velvet dressing gown, with a glass of brandy and a cigar in hand, came in while I was sitting at my dressing table, brushing my hair. I instinctively pulled the gold-crusted bodice of my amethyst velvet dressing gown together over my breasts, the way I would if any man who was not my husband suddenly walked into my room while I was in a state of dishabille. My fingers fumbled over the gold buttons and I stumbled over the voluminous velvet folds pooled around my feet as I stood up and swung round to face him. My dressing gown was cut in a faux medieval style, with slashed-open sleeves hanging down long enough to trail the floor. I was always stumbling over it, but I loved wearing it. Jim said it was “a robe fit for a queen” when I modeled it for him, so he wouldn’t complain when the bill came. I needed all its majesty now to shore me up. I needed a queen’s cast-iron petticoat strength now more than ever before. My bare arms trembled, goose pimples rising, as I stood, braced against my dressing table, staring at Jim as though he were a snake.

He came toward me with a smile and bent to kiss me.

I pulled away. “Your wife came to see me today,” I said.

“My wife is right here,” Jim said, turning me around to face the mirror. He brushed the thick golden curtain of my hair aside, baring my neck, and pressed his lips hungrily to the pulse beating there. His fingers deftly undid my buttons and, in spite of my resolve to be strong, my nipples puckered. He lifted my breast out of my lilac silk nightgown and held it, cupped tenderly in his palm, caressing the nipple with his thumb, making my knees tremble.

Somehow I found the strength and shoved him away. “Don’t touch me! I don’t know who you are anymore!”

“Bunny!”
Jim frowned and reached for me again, but I slapped his hands down.

“I’m talking about your
other
wife, your
first
wife!” I said as he stumbled back, staring at me with wide, astonished eyes. “Or have you forgotten all about Sarah Maybrick, the mother of your
five
other children? Don’t tell me falling in love with me erased
thirty years
from your mind just like that!” I snapped my fingers in his face. “And two of those babies born
after
you made your vows to me, and another on the way now by the look of things!”

“Florie!” Jim cried, and came at me again. To my astonishment, he was
laughing,
there was a smile on his lips, and his arms were open wide. “Do you mean to tell me that Mad Sarah has been
here?
To
this
house? I can’t believe it! I didn’t think she had it in her; she’s always been deathly afraid of trains.”

“This very afternoon.” I nodded.

Still laughing, Jim sank down onto the quilted velvet bench of my dressing table and pulled me onto his lap. “Don’t fight,” he admonished, playfully waggling a finger at me, when I resisted. “Sit down and
your husband
will tell you
all
about it. . . .”

I was a woman grasping at straws, wanting
desperately
to believe that there really was some rational explanation, that the shattered fragments of my world could be put back together again. So I sat there stiffly, not nestling into him the way I always used to do, and listened, my arms folded across my chest, giving him a furious, stubborn stare in the mirror.

He spun me a tale about Sarah Robertson, a buxom red-haired beauty who had roused his young lust when he was an apprentice boy, working at a London shipping office and living in a single rented room in Whitechapel above her uncle’s watchmaking shop. Jim had dallied with her as young men are wont to do.

“You’re a woman, Bunny, not a little girl anymore, so you know something now of the ways of the world. I was a young man, and my flesh was not only willing but weak, and I succumbed.”

He had toyed with the notion of marrying her, but Michael, always the soul of sense, had talked him out of it, advising Jim to ask himself seriously if this was a woman he would be pleased to present as his wife to the Currant Jelly Set. The voice of reason had, of course, prevailed. But before Jim could let her down gently, Sarah had suffered a fall down the stairs, cracked her head open wide, lost a bucket of blood, and it was only by some miracle that she survived.

Her body recovered, but her poor battered brain did not. She began to imagine that Jim was her husband, and it became dangerous to leave her unattended where any man might get at her, for the part of her brain that governed morality was fatally damaged and she would welcome any man eager to embrace her as her “husband,” Jim.

“The world is unfortunately full of many men who would take advantage of a woman, especially one as beautiful as Sarah was then, and say, ‘Aye, Wife, here’s your Jim!’ ” He shook his head and sighed over the perfidy of his gender.

She conceived three bastards that way while Jim was still in lodgings there. “None of them mine,” he insisted. “I never laid a finger on her after the accident.” That another two had come after our marriage and she might now be expecting a sixth was news to him.

Moved to pity by her plight and harboring fond memories of the family who had made him feel like one of their own when he was a lonely lad making his way alone in London, he had made a point of sending a sum of money to Sarah and her bastard brood each month, but circumstances had forced him to neglect this act of charity for the past several months.

“My own family must come first,” he said, caressing my cheek. “I cannot think of clothing and feeding her children before my own. There are charities she can turn to if the situation is indeed as dire as she claims.”

Tears pouring down my face, I wilted against his chest. I put my arms around his neck. I let him kiss me. He carried me to the bed and would have made the most tender love to me, but I wouldn’t let him. I pushed him away and buried my face in the pillows and cried. He sat for a long time beside me, stroking my sob-shaking back, assuring me that Mad Sarah and her bastard brood would trouble me no more and the best thing I could do was forget. But I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, stop weeping or roll over and face him, and, after some time, I heard the door close behind him.

I cried because, even though I pretended to—and would go on pretending for the sake of my children and my own selfish self to avoid facing disgrace and hold on to the life to which we had all become accustomed—I didn’t believe him. I wanted to, but the seed of suspicion had been sown and I just
couldn’t
uproot it. I, who had so desperately craved a rational explanation, rejected it at the very moment when my prayers were seemingly answered with a story that might have sprung straight from the pen of Charles Dickens. And I cried for another reason—I cried because
if
it were indeed, God help me, the truth Jim was telling me, then
I
was the one who had been untrue.
I
had betrayed our marriage that afternoon in the parlor with Edwin. I just couldn’t face the truth or the lies anymore, so I pushed my husband away and hid my face in the pillows and cried.

There was no use pretending. I just didn’t have the iron petticoats or steel backbone of Queen Victoria. I crumbled and fell to pieces where she and a woman more like her would have stood strong. All the pieces lay scattered around my feet and I didn’t know what to do with them, where to begin, or how to pick them all up and put them back together again. I was doomed to failure, and I knew it. Maybe that’s why I didn’t even bother to try. I just left them where they lay, a mess to rot or be swept under the carpet, and went on, running from the truth and rushing headlong into the arms of the next disaster.

I
t was the Friday afternoon the striped foulard was ruined. That day is forever fixed in my memory as the one when I not only rushed headlong into the arms of Disaster but also
stayed
there, kissed him, and surrendered to him body and soul.

I was sitting in the parlor crying, as I so often did those days. The romance novels I was accustomed to wiling away the afternoons with now seemed trite and unbelievable, full of silly unrealizable dreams, and the bonbons had lost all their flavor. Not even the sweet velvet smoothness of chocolate could soothe me now, and a caramel or strawberry cream center no longer brought a smile to my lips. I was sitting there just staring at the syrupy red stain spreading over my purple-and-white-striped skirt and the pink speckled ruin of the pretty lace.

My head was aching like an ax had split it in twain, my ribs practically screaming beneath my stays every time I drew a breath, making me wonder whether I would have to invent a story we would both only pretend to believe and send for Dr. Hopper. I sincerely hoped not. I didn’t want anyone to see me. My left eye looked like it was blooming out of a violet, the tears having washed away most of the powder I’d carefully applied that morning after spending half the night lying flat on my back with a slab of raw steak on it.

Jim and I had been fighting again. He’d banged and battered me all about the bedroom, kicked me when I was down, and pulled my hair until I cried. Then had come the familiar kisses and unbelievable promises that he would
never
hurt me again, followed by the long, tearful hours alone with cold raw meat over my eye, arguing with my proud, stubborn self, tallying up all the reasons why I couldn’t just walk out. I just could not bring myself to accept that the dream of a happy home and hearth was well and truly dead and that it might be, at least partly, my fault. And the resulting scandal that would surely cling like tar and feathers to my children; divorce was such an ugly, bitter thing and the woman was usually blamed.
Men will be men; she should have just turned a blind eye,
the reasoning generally went.

Right on cue, at half past noon, a messenger boy from Woollright’s Department Store had brought a sable cape lined with periwinkle-blue satin to the front door with a box of imported French bonbons and a perfumed pink card signed: “With loving regards from your most repentant husband.” But at that moment the cape still lay snug in its nest of pink tissue paper, tossed carelessly onto my bed, and I’d sent the fancy French chocolates to the kitchen for the maids to gossip over; I just didn’t have the stomach for them.

I was sorely worried about my little girl, Gladys. She was the reason Jim and I had gotten into that awful fight. I lost my temper and flat out accused him of trying to turn our daughter into a drug fiend just like him. She was five years old and still distressingly susceptible to every cough and sniffle, and starting to enjoy the attention sickness brought her, like extra ice cream to ease a sore throat. I’d caught her batting her little lashes and trying to flirt with Dr. Hopper while he was taking her pulse. Once I’d even overheard her telling Mrs. Hammersmith that she wanted to be an invalid like Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she grew up and wear pretty dresses and lie around on a couch all day and have the maid bring her medicines on a silver tray. Not a famous lady-poet, mind you, or the female half of one of the world’s great love stories, but an
invalid!
I didn’t like it the least little bit, this romanticizing of sickness, and I’d told Jim so several times, but he always chuckled and said it was a phase she would grow out of soon enough. But when my daughter started tearing advertisements for medicines out of magazines and asking if she could have them, I
had
to put my foot down. “She’s becoming just like you!” I screamed at Jim. But Jim just laughed at me until he got mad enough to hit me.

That afternoon weeping in the parlor I was at my wit’s end. Gladys had been crying all day for her Cherry Pectoral. It was a popular cough syrup for children. Jim said it was the most pleasant-tasting one on the market—and he should know. It
frightened
me the way she cried for it. She used to be just like Bobo, who stoically endured every vile spoonful, and not without tears and complaint, for the sake of the toffee or licorice drop that always followed to chase the nasty taste away, but not since the advent of the Cherry Pectoral. That blasted bottle had changed everything! Now Gladys couldn’t wait for her dose. She watched the clock and would be tugging at my skirt or Nanny Yapp’s if we weren’t there with the spoon and the bottle right on the dot.

Gladys had even asked if she couldn’t have it on top of her ice cream instead of chocolate sauce last night, then started to cry and kick her chair and pound her fists when I said no, indeed she most certainly could not, and snapped at Jim to sit back down when he said he didn’t see why not and started up to get it. That was what had precipitated our quarrel, which continued later in the privacy of my bedroom.

Gladys and I had gotten into a terrible tug-of-war over the bottle while Bobo galloped around us in circles astride his dappled-gray hobbyhorse shouting, “Tallyho!” and pretending to be hot on the heels of a fox. I’d sorely underestimated the strength of an angry and determined five-year-old, and we’d ended by spilling the better half of the bottle all over my dress, and with Gladys flinging herself down on the floor to pound it with her fists and scream at the top of her lungs and bring all the servants running. Bessie, downstairs dusting in the parlor, had even dropped a vase, thinking someone must surely be being murdered upstairs. But Nanny Yapp had strode right in and snatched Gladys up and
slapped
her, stunning the poor little thing into sudden silence. Then I lost what fragile hold I still had on my own temper and almost slapped Nanny Yapp. The housekeeper and the cook had to actually get between us and escort me, with hands like steel clamps upon my arms, back downstairs to the parlor to calm myself, as though
I
were the one who was at fault when that awful woman had actually struck my child!

“You’re all against me!”
I cried, and not a soul in that house denied it.

I was still trying to compose myself an hour later when the doorbell rang. Then Bessie was showing in Mr. Alfred Brierley, a handsome young copper-haired gentleman who often did business with Jim on the Cotton Exchange. They had offices around the corner from each other and frequently met for lunch or at the Liverpool Cricket Club and Turkish baths. Apparently Jim was not in his office, he’d gone up to London on some sudden and important business, without even bothering to send a note home to tell me, and Mr. Brierley had some papers he’d rather Jim looked over this evening instead of waiting until he was in his office again on Monday morning. Therefore, Mr. Brierley had taken the liberty of bringing them around. He smelled of spices and Turkish cigarettes.

My cheeks began to burn. I turned away in shame; I didn’t want him to see me this way—with my soiled dress and black eye. Before I knew it, I had begun to cry again, burying my face in my hands.

He sat down on the sofa beside me, put his hand on my shoulder, and in the kindest, gentlest voice said, “Please don’t cry.”

Ever so gently, he turned me around, and suddenly my head was on his shoulder. My breasts, quaking with sobs, were crushed against his chest as he held me, stroking my back in the most comforting manner.

“Oh! What am I doing?”
Common sense pulled the reins on me and I sat up straight and tended to my own tears as best I could, noting with dismay that the last of the powder came away on my handkerchief. My eye was now naked as a blueberry. I must look a perfect horror. Crying certainly didn’t improve my appearance any; no woman wants to receive visitors with a red, runny nose and eyes bloodshot and swollen from tears as well as a husband’s angry fist.

Through my stained skirt, my thigh trembled against Mr. Brierley’s green-and-tan-checkered trousers. I pulled away, startled by the welcoming warmth of him. Something about him just made me shiver and set me on fire all at the same time. I was startled to realize that I wanted to pull him closer even though I
knew
I should push him away. I was
appalled
at myself—I wanted to
kiss
him! I wanted him to kiss me! I would have stood up, moved to a chair, where I could sit solitary without the hot press of his thigh tempting me to unladylike thoughts, but I didn’t trust my knees; I knew even without trying them that they had already turned to jelly.

I just couldn’t understand it! I had met Mr. Brierley
many
times before. Besides being a friend and business associate of Jim’s, Mr. Brierley was the bachelor all the belles in the Currant Jelly Set were casting their lines for. Bets were always being laid on who would be the lucky one to land him. He was a fixture at all the best balls, dinner parties, race meets, and first nights at the theater and opera, and I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times he’d been to dine at Battlecrease House. So
why
was he having this strange effect upon me
now?
I’d even played croquet and cards with him without feeling anything out of the ordinary, not even the tiniest twinge of excitement, much less weakness and wobbly knees.

“Mr. Brierley, I do apologize! What must you think of me?” I said, lowering my head and giving a discreet tug to the wide lace ruffles on my cap, pulling them down as far as I could, and avoiding looking him in the face.

“That such a beautiful lady should never be anything but happy,” he said, taking my hand in his, gliding his thumb over my skin in a way that made me shudder and think of more intimate caresses. Though it was just the back of my hand he was touching, the fact that it was bare skin filled my head with wanton thoughts of nakedness. Suddenly I wanted to be naked as Eve in the Garden of Eden, right there in our best parlor with Alfred Brierley.

“I’ve always said that Mrs. Maybrick has the
most
beautiful smile,” he continued, his voice like pink silk on bare skin. “And no lady with a smile like that should
ever
be given cause to even
think
of frowning.”

I looked at him then, full in the face, then, remembering my eye, wished I hadn’t and tried to turn away again, but he wouldn’t let me. He caught my chin in his hand and bent and kissed first my brow, then each of my eyes. “Your eyes are like wet violets,” he said, before his lips traveled down to the tip of my nose then found my mouth, “sweeter than sugar candy.” His red-gold mustache tickled my face, making me smile. “That’s it!” He smiled. “Just what I wanted to see—the beautiful Mrs. Maybrick smiling at me!”

“ ‘Florie,’ ” I whispered tremulously as my arms went round his neck.

“Florie,” he said, his voice a warm caress, as his lips found mine again.

I looked into his crystal-blue eyes, so cool and inviting I wanted to dive right in. It had been months since I’d let my husband make love to me. I missed his touch terribly, but every time I was tempted to give in the memory of Sarah came between us, her presence so palpable it was like she was right there in the bed with us, and I just
had
to turn away, presenting my back like a brick wall to Jim. I couldn’t bear for him to touch me. But I was not made of ice or stone. I was a woman, flesh and blood, and I missed being loved. Desire overcame Reason; Temptation kicked Common Sense right out of the parlor. I lay back on the sofa and drew Alfred Brierley down on top of me.

All I can say in my defense is that he was kind to me.