The Ripper's Wife (22 page)

 

In Mary Jane’s room, I savored her fear as well as her sex. I lapped it up like arsenic. But damn her green eyes, when she talks about those drabs she makes them come back to life; she resurrects the human flotsam from the cesspool where they would have drowned had it not been for me and my merciful knife and brings them back to haunt me.

I now know Annie Chapman was a guardsman’s daughter who, despite spending her life surrounded by men in military barracks, thought she was destined to die an old maid until, most unexpectedly, at the forlorn age of almost thirty, she fell in love with a coachman—John Chapman. The happy couple made their home in Windsor. They posed for a photographer once, Mr. Chapman in checkered trousers and watered-silk vest, and Annie in a lilac calico crinoline with a pattern of white stripes and little flowers, her late mother’s Bible on her lap and her long brown hair gathered back, the curls smoothed and subdued and coiled in a fat bun at the nape of her neck with a tortoiseshell comb. She’d shown Mary Jane that picture once, though the frame had long since been pawned, still so proud of that long-vanished dress and its skirt, made from yards and yards of material billowing over the then fashionable hoop. She’d sat there and pointed and told her what color everything was, painting the colors back in on what was now only a faded sepia memory.

Those were the days before it all went wrong. John Chapman was a man, fickle like any other. Time and familiarity bred boredom, and another, younger and prettier, soon caught his fancy. Annie found that the children he had given her were scant consolation and turned to the bottle. She had a son who had to be sent away to a home for cripples and a daughter who married up, moved to France, and forgot all about the folks she left behind her.

Forced to fend for herself in London, Annie had tried to earn her keep by doing crochet work and selling flowers. In desperation, she had even sold her hair to a wig maker.

When suicide seemed the only alternative—“ ’twas either that or the river”—she became a whore, “an’ hated herself every moment for it.” Annie sought oblivion in gin. She could no longer bear to face her own Bible and, not having the heart to pawn it, left it abandoned on a bench in Hyde Park, hoping someone would find it and give it a good, and more deserving, home. “She didn’t half seem to care when the doctor told her she was dyin’. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m already dead,’ she’d say to us who knew her; her sisters in sorrow, she called us.”

 

The papers are full of my naughty deeds, but, curse them, they keep crediting them to this
Leather Apron!
How
dare
he try to fill
my
shoes! I shall have to send my letter soon and set the fools straight! I bought them all and read them aloud to Mary Jane, taking fiendish delight in her fear. I’d never seen a woman not facing my knife so afraid. I wanted to whip it out and show her, let her
feel it
cold against her throat, or maybe her cunt, but her terror excited me so much I gave her my cock instead, to comfort her, the
dear
little whore. She wanted more, and I wanted more, and we gave it to each other. We suit each other
so
well!

Some think I’m a doctor driven by some unholy madness onto the streets, to use my skill to kill, to take instead of save human lives—if you can even call a whore human. And then there’s this “Leather Apron,” a whore-hating Jew boot finisher. Already the whores cower and creep about cautioning each other to “beware of The Knife!” and “watch out for Leather Apron!” I didn’t see it, but apparently there
was
a leather apron folded under a water tap—I also missed that, or I could have washed my hands!—not two feet from where I slew Dark Annie. The street lamps in Whitechapel are so scant, it’s a wonder anyone who goes about at night can see their hand before their face, or Jack’s knife, when it comes out of the dark.

I shall have to send my letter soon and set the fools right or else this poor fellow might end up a gallows dancer.

 

I’ve fooled them
ALL
—police, press, and populace, and all the witless whores who live in terror of my knife. I’ve made the City of London the City of Fear, the City of Frightened Whores! I’ve baptized it in blood—
whores’
blood.

The gentlemen of Scotland Yard are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The blind leading the blind! Catch me if you can! I
howled
with laughter over
Punch.
There was a cartoon of a blindfolded bobby playing blindman’s buff with a group of ruffians and beneath it the caption “Turn round three times and catch whom you may!”
May
—the first three letters of my surname, right there in the paper for all to see, a clue hiding in plain sight—
May, clever, clever, so bloody clever!
They’ll
NEVER
catch me! It’s so
frightfully
funny!

Across the breakfast table the wife-whore shudders and swoons over the headlines and wonders, “
Why
don’t the police
do something?
” I comfort her as best I can. I, the most hated and hunted criminal since the world began, play the loving husband and pat her shoulder or hand, kiss her cheek, and tell her that our police force here in Liverpool is one of the finest in the world and such things could
never
happen here—I’m not such a fool as to soil my own backyard! —or to women of
her
class; the whores of Whitechapel die as they live, on the knife’s edge of danger. Every time they toddle drunkenly up to a man and say, “How’s about a poke, Old Cock?” they’re taking their lives into their own drink-trembling hands. They’re asking for it every time!

How my dear little wifey frowns and worries over those damned dead whores! Bedraggled hags who are better off dead! If she only knew that it is
her own sins
I am punishing, every little no-account whore I kill is dying in
her
stead! They die so
she
can go on living, so our children’s names will never be sullied by her sins and my crimes of punishment by proxy, so I will never make the mistake of bringing my hate home with me. What would she do if she knew? Would she give me, and herself, away? Would she think of the children like I do? She’s such a selfish bitch, my wife-whore, she would act impulsively; she doesn’t have the sense to stop and think about tomorrow. She would only think of the moment, the lives lost, and the blood spilled, not that it might stain our children. The bitch is lucky to have me;
I
think of
everything.

 

I’ve mailed my letter. I’m tired of reading about Leather Apron and speculation that I’m a doctor or a mad butcher and that no Englishman could ever do such a thing. Others trying to snatch the gory glory away from me! It’s time for me to take it
ALL
back!

Before I sent it, I couldn’t resist adding a postscript:

Soon I will be more famous than the Queen herself. Now there will be no more talk about “The Knife” and “Leather Apron,” only Jack—the Ripper!

I’ll no longer be an unknown killer, a knife plunging out of the pea soup fog and darkness, slashing at whores’ throats, sagging udders and hungry bellies, and filthy flea-crawling cunts;
now
I have a name. Mothers will caution their kiddies:
Jack the Ripper’s going to get you if you don’t watch out; Jack the Ripper’s going to get you if you don’t come inside right now; Jack the Ripper’s going to get you if you don’t eat all your vegetables, mind your manners, and say your prayers.
They’ll
never
forget me; they’ll forget Michael’s jolly jack-tar, but they’ll
never
forget me! You can take all your sea chanteys, sentimental ballads, and humble hymns, Michael, and shove them up your arse along with Fred Weatherly’s prick. This name, taken with my medicine, will make me
invincible. NOTHING
can stop me now! I’m Jack, Jack the Ripper, my knife is my scepter, and
I
reign as the Red King over this Autumn of Terror. Long live King Jack; long may he hack!

Soon I shall get to work again, soon.... I stroke the sharp edge of my knife and my cock, sometimes the one with the other, but
gently, oh so gently,
and dream of what I shall do to the next. Ribbons of blood, rivers of blood. I want to take their heads, boil the skulls down to bare bones, and use them as vases. I want to fill them with bloodred roses or candles and arrange them on the altar at St. James’s Church in Piccadilly where we were married and
BURN
that cathedral of lies to the ground.

 

Michael—
damn, Damn, DAMN HIM!
—is worried about me; the wife-whore has persuaded him that I’m taking “too much strong medicine” for my own good and am “always the worse for it after.” Well, I gave
her
worse for it after! When I found out she had betrayed me, I
beat, Beat, BEAT
her! I made the bitch
BEG
for mercy and then I didn’t give it to her. Oh, how the bitch
cried, Cried, CRIED.
She
begged, Begged, BEGGED
me not to hurt her. Like an angel of love, I caressed her bruised and bleeding face. I promised never again. But I
lied, Lied, LIED
.

 

I’ve seen two more doctors, one of them Michael’s
personal physician
—Dr. Fuller. He’s a
FOOL!
He said I was a hypochondriac—
ME!
—how can I be a hypochondriac when I’m sick all the time? He cannot crawl into my skin and feel what
I
feel, the agonizing ache in my belly that sometimes bends me double and makes me cry out as though rats with fangs of fire were gnawing me, the pains in my head, sharp as spikes being hammered, the
blazing
burn in my bladder, stools like rice water, the
maddening
twitching of my eyelids, and the
awful,
terrifying icy numbness in my hands. Sometimes they tingle as though they are fighting, trying with all their might, to feel again, but always,
always
failing. I watch them move, but it is as though they belong to a stranger. I’m going to see another doctor tomorrow, and then, then . . .
Oh, I cannot wait!

I
should have known better than to trust Michael. Desperate as I was, I should not have looked for even an ounce of chivalry in his cold, arrogant soul. Michael told Jim all that I had confided about the drugs I believed were transforming him into a real-life Jekyll and Hyde.

Jim came home from London and flung the front door open with such force it cracked one of the stained-glass panels and charged upstairs and beat me with his umbrella until it broke and then he threatened to put my eyes out with the finial. When I tried to crawl under the bed to escape him, he wrenched me out by my ankles, flipped me over, beat me with his fists and kicked me with his boots on, and raped me. I could not show myself in public for over a week even with paint on.

That awful autumn, while the madman that was my husband consumed my waking hours, that unknown madman, Jack the Ripper, stalked my dreams; he seemed to dog my fitfully slumbering soul’s every step. I’d see myself as a fallen woman, pathetic, dirty, haggard, and raggedy. It was
so real
I could even smell my filthy flesh and taste my fetid breath and rotting teeth and feel the itch of fleabites beneath the rancid rags I was wearing. I’d catch my reflection in a window and see all my beauty gone, worn away by worry and want, and feel so very tired, as though I hadn’t slept in a thousand nights or more but had spent them walking aimlessly, lost in the fog, fear stabbing my heart every time I heard a sound or turned a corner, never knowing if it would bring me face-to-face with the faceless fiend none could recognize.

That, I think, was the most frightening part. He might appear benign and grandfatherly, like a genial old doctor, a priest with the most blessedly comforting countenance, or a favorite uncle. Surely he did not go about with the mark of evil clearly upon him like a tattoo on his brow or else none would ever steal into the shadows with him beside them.

Those wretched women surely were not fools or they wouldn’t have survived on those hellish streets as long as they had. I thought so much about those women, I felt that we were, in some strange way, sisters beneath the skin, that though our lives had been very different, I would have understood them and they would have understood me. Maybe they could have told me how to break free? How to burst the shackles and chains of the comfort, luxury, and respectability that held me fast, to just let go of it all, of myself and the velvet cushion life I had always known and didn’t believe I could survive without. Perhaps they could have told me how to
really
not care anymore, not just to pretend not to. Every time I told myself I no longer loved or wanted Jim, that I was done with him, my conscience shouted,
Liar!
in a whisper that was also a scream.

I thought about the Ripper too. What manner of monster was he? Are such men born evil, or do they become so? What could turn a man into a flesh-ripping monster? I sat and pondered in the parlor and speculated as I tossed sleeplessly in my bed at night or after being rousted out of yet another foggy nightmare in which I walked the streets of Whitechapel, knowing to the very depths of my soul
exactly
what it felt like to have lost everything that mattered, along with all one’s hopes and dreams, always awaiting the inevitable, the knife that flashed so fast it left me no time to scream. Would I know him when I saw him, or would I only recognize him when it was too late? Would anyone hear my dying screams? Would anyone come to save me or could only I save myself? I now wonder, decades too late, was that what these dreams were truly trying to tell me?

Though I had sworn that I would never go back, I went back to Alfred Brierley’s bed. I can’t even offer a justifiable reason; even when my life hung in the balance I couldn’t explain it. It was just something I did. Maybe I was hoping it would be different this time? Maybe I was hoping that, in time, he would truly come to love me? Maybe I couldn’t let go of the dream that someday we would be together, living and loving in Paris or some other sophisticated city that took divorce in stride? Maybe I was just one more woman seeking some kind of comfort in a pair of arms that were willing to hold her while a cock nested inside her? Maybe it’s a fair price to pay for just being held? We all want some kind of love. Sometimes it’s not enough, and sometimes it is.

All I know is that one day I was there at his door, in his arms, then naked in his bed once more. He was a kind, generous, and skillful lover; it was only when he talked that he showed himself insensitive. I still ask myself,
Why wasn’t that enough?
Why couldn’t I be content with his sensual finesse? Why couldn’t I be happy with what we had? Why did I let it make me so very sad? Why did I run to him when I knew all too well that icy cold sadness lay beneath the burning heat of passion? There really is a unique sort of sadness that goes hand in glove with the act so often called “making love,” though love often has little or nothing to do with it.
Strange how being filled can leave you so empty,
I’d think every time as I wandered through Woollright’s after leaving his bed, frittering the rest of the afternoon away making frivolous purchases before I had to go “home” again.