The Ripper's Wife (21 page)

True to her word, she became the gayest and most popular girl. And, more than that, she became the Madame’s favorite. “Her little pet, I slept in her bed most ev’ry night” and even traveled with her “a time or two” across the Channel to Paris, where Mary Jane worked for a time as an artists’ model and posed for a few naughty photographs. But pride got the better of her, and she began putting on airs and calling herself “Marie Jeanette.” “All the girls
hated
me,” she said, and I could well imagine her giving orders and strutting about all high-and-mighty as though she owned the place.

But drink was her bête noire: “Me black beastie what sunk his claws in me good, it was.” Gin, rum, wine, whiskey, champagne, what have you, Mary Jane couldn’t do without it and didn’t want to. And when the horrors of drink were upon her, she was herself a horror and “a right misery an’ terror to deal with,” she admitted. “Worse than the Magdalene possessed by her seven demons, I was!”

A rich man became enamored of Mary Jane and begged her to quit the brothel and be his own. He promised that as his mistress she would “lead the life of a lady” and “want for nothing.”

He also promised to use his influence to help her fulfill her ambition of going on the stage. Though, having a brother who is a star in the music halls, I think I speak with some authority when I say that this was just a pipe dream. Mary Jane was only a fair warbler at best and would
never
have made even a modest success of it. And as she did not have a modest bone in her body, a “modest success” would never have satisfied Mary Jane. She was too temperamental to get on with the stage managers and other performers, drink made her unreliable, and her brogue was too thick and herself too lazy to dedicate herself to the hard work necessary to completely transform herself in order to have even a fighting chance upon the stage.

By then a new girl, Clara, a sweet little Swedish girl, a
genuine
virgin, with blond hair almost fair as snow, newly ripening breasts like little pears, and not a hair on her cunt, was poised to replace Mary Jane as the reigning favorite and in Madame’s bed. It didn’t help when Mary Jane, drunk and sulking upstairs, dozed off and left the water in Madame’s pink marble tub running. A cascade of water suddenly crashed down through the lewdly lolling nudes painted on the ceiling and drenched the gents downstairs having a party celebrating Clara’s first blood. The cake was ruined, and Clara, who had never had a fancy cake in her life, cried for hours. Madame was
furious
and Mary Jane wisely decided it was time to move on.

She accepted the gentleman’s offer. In a high drunken temper, she vowed she wanted, and would take nothing, from this house, and clad only in a pair of black silk stockings, red satin garters, and black leather high-heeled boots, she set a black velvet hat “à la Empress Eugenie” with a curling white ostrich plume flowing back over the brim held in place by a cameo jauntily atop her ginger-gold curls, pulled on a pair of long black lace gloves and her diamond bracelet—“I couldn’t think o’ leaving
that
behind!”—and walked down the grand staircase “regal as a queen.” Out the front door she went, held open for her by a pair of astonished, gape-mouthed, white-wigged Negro footmen who thought that, after years of employment in this establishment, they had seen everything, and straight into the delighted, but mortified, gentleman’s carriage and arms.

But it didn’t last long. Her drunken antics and the loud, quarrelsome nature she exhibited when she was deep in her cups, coupled with her startling habit of walking around “starkers” even in the public rooms of the house in full view of the servants and any guests, and the women she sometimes brought home “for a little frolic” in her big bed, explaining that she sometimes needed “a holiday from the men pokin’ their pickles inta me,” soon exhausted her genteel lover’s patience, and Mary Jane found herself out on the streets.

A mannish spinster lady who preached zealously against the evils of “the demon rum” took Mary Jane in, wanting to save her, but that ended after a fortnight when she staggered in starkers to have tea with the Temperance Society, singing her favorite song, “Only a Violet I Pluck’d from My Mother’s Grave,” and brandishing a near-empty gin bottle, and plopped herself down on the reverend’s lap.

“So much for
Christian Charity,
” Mary Jane sneered. “She cast me out onto the streets, to fend for meself any way I could, said she didn’t care what happened to me, she did. An’ her servants did me out o’ a lot o’ me finery; they was supposed to pack it all up, but when I opened me bags I found they’d raided the rag bin to fill ’em, an’ the rest I had to pawn until there was nothin’ left. I remember I stood out there, weepin’ in the pourin’ rain, arms stretched out,
beggin’
her to take me back. When she opened the window, I thought she was goin’ to have pity, but she only tossed down a penny—a
penny
for all the joy I gave her, the sour old cunt!—then she cut me dead, she did, closed the curtains an’ turned her back on me. I remember, for a long time I stood there starin’ down at that penny, dirty money bein’ washed clean by the rain. I wanted
so bad
to be too proud to pick it up, I did, I wanted to make the grand gesture, but in the end . . . money is money, so I picked it up, though I’ve regretted it ever since.”

It was all downhill after that. How hard it must have been for her when every poor, deluded fool in the East End dreamed of the West End as a place where the streets were paved with gold and the people stuffed themselves on cream-filled pastries and Christmas goose every day of the week and didn’t know what
want
and
need
meant. In their eyes, Mary Jane Kelly had had it
all
—the West End dream—and lost it through her own bad habits and caprice. She lived with a quick succession of lovers, each one a rung lower down upon the social ladder and occupying an even worse address, until she ended up in Whitechapel, a common whore pounding the pavements looking for trade and living, on her uncle’s sufferance, in a rented room in Miller’s Court with Fishmonger Joe, and them quarreling all the time because he wanted a wife, not a whore, to warm his bed at night but couldn’t earn enough at his stinky labors to support either.

 

I’m thoroughly delighted
with my spicy ginger tart! What a treat she is! So succulent, so bawdy! I’ve never enjoyed a whore more! I will visit her again when I am next in London. Next time I will bring her some candy sticks, to thank her for the pleasurable sensations she provoked in my prick when she went down on her knees and pretended it was one. It will be nice to have someone bawdy and fun, someone who knows how to forget herself in bed, not like those two
outwardly respectable
Mrs. Maybricks I’ve had the misfortune to acquire. Maybe I’ll make Mary Jane the
third
Mrs. Maybrick,
ha ha!

I left Mary Jane lying back in bed, cradling the gin bottle against her bare breasts and singing “Only a Violet I Pluck’d from My Mother’s Grave.” I wonder if she knows any of Michael’s songs? If only he could see this bold as brass little hussy hugging the gin bottle and diddling her cunny while singing one of his sweet ballads, like “True Blue” or “Your Dear Brown Eyes”—yes, that’s the
very
one!—oh, what I would give to see his face.

T
he papers were full of the most
ghastly
murder in London, in Whitechapel no less. It made me
shudder
to think of it occurring in the same spot where Alfred and I had had our first tryst. Some poor woman of the streets had been ripped open and gutted like a fish. I read every word, even though I knew I was courting bad dreams and a queasy stomach. I could not stop thinking about that poor soul. Who was she and why had she fallen so low down in life that she could never claw her way back up again?

What manner of man had done this awful thing? Did he know her and bear her some personal grievance or did she merely have the misfortune to cross paths with a madman with a lust for blood coursing through his soul? Were the horrors he inflicted upon her body truly meant for her, or was he merely acting out his anger on the first unfortunate woman who crossed his path at an opportune moment?

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know unless the monster is caught,” I said to Jim on one of those rare mornings when we found ourselves facing each other across the breakfast table, me with dark-circled eyes after another restless night and the toast turning to ashes in my mouth as I put the latest edition of the
Liverpool Daily Post
aside.

“I don’t suppose so.” Jim looked up at me and smiled as he spooned white arsenic into his tea. He raised his teacup to me as though it were a champagne toast. “Longevity and fair complexion, my dear!” he said, and drained it to the dregs. He stood up, readying to leave for his office, and bent down and kissed me. The moment he was gone I bolted from my chair and vomited into the nearest flowerpot. I just could not
bear
for him to touch me!

I
t felt
so good,
I did it again! Another drab in black and brown. The only thing scarlet about these women is their morals . . . and their blood.

The charcoal-colored morning was cold and wet—I hope I did not catch a chill! I feared I had left it too long—the hour was perilously close to daybreak—but I have always been a gambler. . . .

“Will you?” I asked.

The slurred-tongued slut said, “Yes,” and took my arm.

I let her lead
me
to
her
death.
She
chose the spot; the sacrificial slut led me to the altar where she would die. A quiet backyard of a house on Hanbury Street. The residents worked all hours, so they left the doors unlocked, she said. A long passage led from the front door to the back and out into a fenced yard, if you could call that pitted patchwork of earth and cracked and crumbled paving stones a yard.

There’s a cat’s meat shop on the ground floor that sells cubed horsemeat; a cat’s a necessity for every house in these rat-infested parts. I wanted to cut this whore into bloody cubes and leave her with a note written in blood on the table for the old woman who runs the shop to sell for her customer’s cats. But my knife wasn’t sharp and fast enough for that, and I must be on my way before sunrise. But wouldn’t I have
loved
to spend the hours! Dicing Dark Annie into cubes, cubes for cats, harlot’s flesh instead of horseflesh; wouldn’t that be a
rare
treat for the pussies?
Ha ha!

This woman was ill, I could tell. Befuddled by drink and dying of consumption, but she was no Camille. A pudding-faced hag, her features like bits of fruit floating in its cushy custardy blandness, this weary whore was short and stout, with a wobbly, waddly chin, her curly dark hair cut short as a lad’s and her front teeth knocked out. How can a whore be both fat and starving? I still haven’t figured that out; I only know I saw hunger and yearning in her big moon-blue eyes.

“Dark Annie,” she said they called her on account of her dark, brooding moods. She wanted pity. A dollop of kindness for a dying trollop. She went on about the cruelty and unkindness of men, displaying two highly polished farthings another gent had passed off on her as sovereigns.
Money is money to a whore like you, so why are you complaining?
I bit my tongue to keep from saying. She was the worse from a fight with another whore a few days past, over a sliver of soap no less, that had left Annie with a black eye. She opened her bodice and showed me the bruises on her chest where the other whore had kicked her, and her just only out of the infirmary, she said; it was most unkind.

She had two pills; she gripped them like treasures, wadded in a scrap of paper. Afterward, I took them and left her two of my own, piled with the rest of her meager possessions at her feet. Whatever will the police make of it? Shall they waste
hours
wondering why and if this gesture is one of particular, or peculiar, significance? Don’t the fools know it was only for jolly? I don’t know what the pills were, but since they have done me no ill, they must have done me good;
she
certainly did. I left the scrap of paper; there was, of all the splendid ironies, an elegant
M
written on one side. I was giving them a clue if the fools could but see it; I felt as though I were leaving behind my calling card.

“Poor thing,” I said. I peeled off my gloves and let my overcoat fall. The poor, weak bitch didn’t have the time or strength to squeal. I twisted the scarf—her own, knotted tight, to keep out the chill of the night—savagely around her neck, like a noose, and silently laughed as her eyes and tongue bulged out. She bit it in her dying throes.

Death came silently and swiftly. It was a mercy considering what I did next.

She lay dead at my feet, tongue lolling out by my boots as though she wanted to lick them. I stood over her and licked the white powder from my palm and felt such
power,
like lightning coursing through me; I felt the strength swimming in my veins; I almost fancied I could hear it humming. I cut her throat. Her hot harlot’s blood warmed my ice-cold hands. The numbness vanished; I could
feel
again!
Hallelujah!
I wanted to raise my bloody hands to Heaven and shout like one of those American fools at their tent revivals. But I
knew
better; already I was playing the ultimate game of chance—
Murder!
—risking my own life by taking another’s. If I were caught now—red-handed,
ha ha!
—
nothing
could save me from the gallows!

My knife grated against bone. I worked and worried at it, sawing back and forth for longer than I should have as the sky lightened. I wanted to take her head away with me. I wanted to boil the flesh from it and make it into a vase, a memento mori, filled with bloodred roses for my study, or maybe to adorn my wife-whore’s boudoir. At last I gave up. I just could not get through the bone, and there was so much more I wanted to do to Dark Annie; I mustn’t squander precious time.

I flung up her filthy skirts, exposing candy-striped stockings that made me smile, recalling my wife-whore’s favorite corset. I pushed up her knees and spread them wide, parting them in an obscene parody of passion or childbirth. I felt the Devil in my knife, guiding me. I slashed and ripped and tore and still I wanted
more, More, MORE!
I gutted her. I flung her innards out onto her shoulder, a fleshy—not a feather—boa for milady’s shoulders. My wife-whore tells me that particular shade of pink—“intestinal pink” I shall call it from now on in memoriam of Dark Annie,
ha ha!
—is all the rage this season! Perhaps I shall visit one of the fashionable shops tomorrow and buy her a feather boa that color—and if it has accents of bloodred and shit brown so much the better,
ha ha!
—so I can look at her, laugh, and remember the little whore who died for the sins of the Great Whore.

I took her womb away with me along with some blood in a ginger beer bottle, locked in my Gladstone bag lined with newspapers about Polly’s murder. I’ve a fancy to fry it. It’s the
only
way I can bring myself to taste her! And last, from her dead finger I snatched a pair of brass rings, a wedding and a keeper, like the cheap set I had given my Mrs. Sarah, a souvenir, something to remember Dark Annie by, though I was
quite
sure I would
never
forget her.

As I walked away, I was preoccupied with pulling on my gloves, to hide my bloody hands until I could wash them, and forgot the unevenly paved ground. I stumbled and fell and barked the heel of my palm upon the broken stones—jagged and ragged like the cuts I had made. My blood mingled with hers.
We are one—one forever,
I thought as I swiftly made my way back up the passage and out onto the street. I lost myself in the early-morning market traffic, people hurrying to set up stalls, to sell their wares, or on their way to work. No one noticed me. Why should they suspect a gentleman—a gentle man—like me? The whores, they say, are wary of a Jew boot finisher who has been harassing them, a man they call “Leather Apron.” I was just another slumming gent on his way back to his wholesome, respectable home after a night of wanton carousing, tomcatting in wicked Whitechapel. No one looked twice at me.

 

The womb was
awful, just AWFUL!
So spongy and springy I exhausted my jaw trying to eat it. Tough as an old whore! I spit it out—
damn the rotten and repulsive cunt!

I lay back on my bed, smoked a cigar, sipped some brandy, licked my medicine from my palm,
slowly, savoring
each dainty white grain, and stroked my prick and thought of Mary Jane Kelly and my wife-whore, watching them blur together in my mind, face merging with face, two sides of a spinning coin, until I could no longer tell one from the other; they were one, sister sluts, wife, whore, wife-whore. Tomorrow, I promised myself, tomorrow I shall see Mary Jane. . . .

I found I could not sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw that pathetic drab before me, begging for pity, so I rose and did what I had been
longing
to do—I wrote a letter. At first I thought to address it to the police. Then I thought better of that; it would make a far greater impression on the gentlemen of the press. The police would only file it away in annoyance, but the newspapers would be sure to publish it. But I would not mail it just yet. First, I wanted to have the pleasure of walking around with it in my pocket, knowing it was there, savoring the thrill, the thrill of the kill, and the risk of having such a damning document upon me. What if I should forget and leave it in when I gave my coat to be laundered? Oh, what a
thrill
it is, being both hunter
and
hunted!

The blood I had taken away with me was no use; it had gone dark and thick, caked inside the ginger beer bottle. Even when I tried diluting it with water, still it was no use. Fortunately, I had had the foresight to purchase a bottle of red ink.
I am so bloody clever!

I began to write in a hand elegant enough to grace the finest wedding invitation, but scattered with a smattering of misspellings and grammatical errors no educated gentleman would ever make to further confound the fools:

But what to sign myself? Something catchy for the man they cannot catch. A name that will live forever. A name that will still inspire fear long after my bones have turned to ashes. I am a gentle, almost saintly, man when the rage is not upon me. . . . Saint James the Whore Slayer? Sir Jim, as Nanny Yapp calls me when I play knights with Bobo and my little princess Gladys? Something less formal? Something with a common touch for common people? I have it—
Jack!
Like Spring-Heeled Jack, with his long, icy claws and eyes glowing like fireballs, the demon who terrorized London half a century ago and still springs out to terrify audiences in stage melodramas and the penny-dreadful novels Edwin adores so. Or . . .
OH YES! YES!
Like
Michael’s
Jack, the lady-loving jolly jack-tar from one of his most popular songs—“They All Love Jack.”
That’s it!
Jack the Whore Killer . . . Jack the Slut Slayer . . . No, something sharper like my knife. A name that will make every woman’s quim quiver with fear of what I would do if only I could get my hands, and my knife, upon her. What wouldn’t I do to her? Ah, I have it now; thank you, my Muse, for visiting
me
instead of
Michael. . . .

 

 

 

Now they’ll
never
forget me!

I stroked myself with my red-ink-and-bloodstained fingers and spent before I put down my pen.

I’ll put it away now, folded carefully, for this document, the first I’ve signed with my new name, is
so very precious
and I might want to add a postscript later, after I’ve seen the papers.
Leather Apron indeed!
He’s not fit to finish my boots, much less wear them.

I returned to my bed, red ink still upon my hands and Dark Annie’s blood caked beneath my nails, and touched myself again, harder and faster, jerking, as though I were furious with my own flesh. This time I thought only of my wife-whore and her lover, how much they must be enjoying themselves in my absence. Does she bring him into the house, beneath the same roof where our children sleep, and fuck him in her own bed, or do they compound the insult and betrayal and soil mine?

I imagined myself standing outside, peeping in through a window, watching them naked, bucking and fucking hard upon
my
bed, the wife-whore with her golden hair unbound, straddling him, his hands gripping her hips so hard each fingertip will leave a bruise, marking her as
his
whore and himself as her master.

When I return to Battlecrease House I shall rip her skirt off and place my own fingers there. I shall show the whore who is
really
her master! I can see myself standing there in the darkness, bush at my back, thorns stabbing through my clothes, glass at my nose, my hard prick in my angry hand, jerking—
furious
pleasure,
furious
pain!
OH GOD, HOW IT EXCITES ME SO!
It shouldn’t, but
it does!
Oh, God help me,
IT DOES!

I think I shall let her continue seeing him a while longer . . . just so I can have this pleasure, so I can lie here alone afterward and imagine . . . London is full of little whores who can pay for the Great Whore’s sins and keep my children safe from the rage I would, without their sacrifice, most assuredly turn upon their whore-mother, my wife-whore, and, God help me, in my madness, maybe even them. I cannot bear the thought! That fear is enough to keep my knife sharp! I would kill every whore in the world to save Bobo and Gladys!