The Ripper's Wife (28 page)

I
had
to kill her. I know that now. It could never end any other way. She was the mirror and I had to break her. She was the medium who resurrected the whores I killed and brought them back to haunt me, to rattle their phantom chains and stand at the foot of my bed to rob me of peace and rest. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing them. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore in the green mirror of her eyes. The women I killed I thought were worthless, human dross no one gave a damn about, penny fuckers who would even spread their legs for a stale loaf of bread if you offered it to them, but
she
made them
real;
through her own peculiar Irish-Welsh witchcraft, her storyteller’s tongue, she made them live again. She made me see them as something more, women more worthy of pity than scorn. Some of them had fought to redeem themselves. Even if they ultimately failed,
they had tried!
The earnest attempt counted for far more than the failure! She showed me how life’s misfortunes had made them what they were when I, Jack the Ripper, mighty, invincible, with my arsenic and my nice sharp knife, made them pay for another woman’s crimes, crimes she might never have committed had I been a better husband.

She was the mirror and I had to break her. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore, mirrored in uncanny green. Jack the Ripper masquerading as a gentle man—a gentleman—reflected in the emerald mirror of her Irish eyes! I saw a condemned man every time I looked in them. I saw my jury of four, my jury of whores—Polly, Annie, Liz, and Katie—declaring me guilty, damning me to Hell, every time. Some people believe that when someone dies violently the last thing they see is imprinted upon the retinas of their eyes and a photograph will reveal it. I shudder to think what the police will see if they bring their lights and cameras to photograph Mary Jane’s magical green eyes. The coward in me wanted to gouge them out, to grind them like grapes beneath my boot heels, so that could never happen, but I hadn’t the heart; I hadn’t the right. Let her eyes condemn and damn me; they already have. Even if they don’t lead the police to my door, I’m damned. Saucy Jacky is no more!

It was better this way, I tried to console myself as I sat on the edge of that bloody bed weeping and holding her dead hand, feeling her flesh as cold as my own. Drink would have destroyed her beauty all too soon; men are brutal creatures by nature and would not spare her the boot or the fist or their syphilitic cucumbers. She would have lost her teeth and roamed about Whitechapel miserable, drunken, riddled with lice, fleas, and disease, fucking for pennies to drown her sorrows in gin until despair drove her to the river, to suicide, another haggard, ugly whore, sick and old before her time. If not my knife, some other’s knife might have killed her, a scorned lover, a pimp who thought she owed him a share of her meager earnings, an abortionist on a bloodstained table in some dark back alley, Fishmonger Joe, or another man like him, who couldn’t tolerate her “jolly frolics” with other females. My knife was really the kindest cut of all. In my own way, I loved her.

In the fireplace I burned the green stockings and the fancy bonnet I had given her. I took some old clothes her laundress-whore friend had left behind and added them to the blaze. I couldn’t risk these pretty bits of greenery being traced back to me. I still had to think of my children.

I took Mary Jane’s heart away with me. I held it in my icy, trembling hands and imagined it still beating, pulsing faintly with life, just for me. And some souvenirs: a lock of her hair, the key she was forever misplacing, and a naughty French postcard, superbly hand tinted, the only one she had left to remember her decadent days in Paris by—Mary Jane striking a risqué pose, looking every bit the elegant lady in a mint-green and turquoise satin gown, with her long ladylike white gloves, lace fan, and high-piled mound of gleaming curls garnished with red roses. A saucy, mischievous glow lit up her face as she impishly lifted her skirt high to show she hadn’t a stitch on above her red-gartered stockings.

I stood over her and stroked her hair and kissed the bare, bloody bone of her brow. She just stared at me with eyes like cold green glass. I saw accusation, understanding, and tenderness in their glassy, dead emerald depths and
knew
I was forgiven . . . by her . . . but not by me, nor God, I fear; the Devil shall yet claim me as his own. I’ve a feeling a flaming throne is reserved for me at the left hand of Satan.

I left with the dawn. I left her more naked than naked. More naked than she had ever been in life.

The rage is suddenly all burned out of me. A cold and quivering husk, I stood for a long time gazing down into the black waters of the Thames. I wanted to jump, but I didn’t have the courage. There’s a poem about despairing whores taking their lives, jumping from the “Bridge of Sighs.” They had more courage than I did. My hands were cold and shaking so, I couldn’t bring myself to raise the knife and slit my throat. I emptied the contents of my silver box onto my palm, a little mountain of white snow, and swallowed it all, but I’ve become accustomed; it would take more than that to finish me. It only made the rats in my belly bite harder, sinking their teeth in deep to
gnaw, Gnaw, GNAW
. My eyelids
twitch, Twitch, TWITCH!
If I weren’t already mad, I think it would drive me so. My brain and bladder
burn, Burn, BURN! The pains of Hell have got hold of me!
Tears rolled down my face. All I could do was throw my knife in. I watched it flash silver as it fell. The dark waters were the last thing it would ever stab.

Back in my bolt-hole, I mournfully etched her initials—
MJK
—onto the back of my watch. I will never forget her. I will always regret her. In my dreams, she holds me in her arms, my head cradled lovingly against her breast, as she rocks me gently, like a child, strokes my hair, and croons her favorite song:

But she was the mirror and I had to break her. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore! Wherever she is, Mary Jane will know the truth by now, and I
know
she will understand. Who was it—some author, though I cannot recall the name or the book—who said that God sometimes sends us the strangest angels; we never know they have been to visit us until after they’re gone. Mary Jane Kelly was undoubtedly one of the
strangest
angels the Lord ever sent, an angel masquerading as a whore for a murderer masquerading as a gentle man. She ended Jack the Ripper’s bloody reign. The Autumn of Terror is over; winter is about to fall.... I killed the messenger,
God’s messenger
. . .
GOD HELP ME!
Shall I live to see springtime? I buried her heart by moonlight at the base of the flowering may, the hawthorn tree, in our garden. Sometimes I look out and fancy I see her standing there . . . watching, waiting for me . . . keeping vigil . . . my saucy ginger tart angel . . .
Why didn’t you tell me God, not the Devil, sent you?

I
n November he killed again—Jack the Ripper, the faceless fiend who slashed his knife and chased me through my dreams. She was young and fair, an Irish girl, twenty-six, the same age as me. Mary Jane Kelly, that was her name. The papers said her lover could only identify her by her hair and eyes after he was done with her. Before he cut off her face, I wonder, did she in any way resemble me? He butchered her on the very bed she took him to, thinking only of his lust and money, not blood and butchery. What risks we women take! What savage carnage wrought on one only seeking coinage! He left her lying there naked, stripped of her very skin. How he must have
hated
her, or someone, very much.

I could not keep my breakfast down after reading the papers. I vomited everything back up and ran upstairs, dots dancing before my eyes, like fireworks doing the polka, and flung myself onto the bed May had only just finished making with only seconds to spare before I swooned. I lay there for
hours,
not daring to move, the flat of my palm resting on my queasy, fluttering belly, my heart galloping as though it were determined to win the Grand National.

God had seen fit to punish me, by sending me that which I most feared. I was pregnant again and I had no idea who the father was—Jim, Edwin, or Alfred. I’d been so distracted these last few months, maybe I forgot to insert the little sponge or a womb veil, or maybe it failed me? Maybe it happened one of those times when I was taken by surprise and the seed was already planted before I could even try to uproot it with a caustic douche? If I even remembered to do that? There were days when I felt as though my head would float away like a hot-air balloon if it weren’t tethered by skin and bone to my neck! Just trying to sort it all out made my head feel like it was swimming in syrup!

I tried to undo the pregnancy, with the most powerful, stinging douche I dared. I pilfered a tiny, tiny pinch of Jim’s arsenic even though it scared me so and added that to the mixture. In the privacy of my pink and ivory bathroom, I lay huddled on my side, next to the tub, with my knees drawn up tight, holding on to them as though for dear life, the bathroom tiles cold as ice beneath my burning body, and stuffed a towel into my mouth so no one would hear my screams and cried and cried. I nearly burned my insides out. It felt as though Satan himself had struck a Lucifer Match inside my womb!

When the blood began to trickle I thought I had done it, that everything would be all right. I lay flat on my back, gasping with relief and the last lingering vestiges of the unmerciful pain that had mercifully rid my womb of its unwanted burden, softly sobbing as I shakily applied great daubs of cold cream to my stinging, raw lady parts.

But the blood was only the result of irritation; I’d simply scalded that most delicate skin bloody raw. My womb was not void of its terrible, unwanted burden after all. I had heard horrible stories about desperate women who resorted to the knitting needle when all else failed, but I didn’t have the courage to chance it. Bobo and Gladys needed me, and I
had
to go on living for their sake. I could only pray that after God’s punishment would come a small mercy and He would see me through the horrors of childbed one more time.

I knew I would have to tell Jim soon, before my face and belly began to exhibit the telltale roundness. I would keep my secret as long as I could, but all I could really do was hope and pray that my baby would not be born a miniature mirror image of Alfred Brierley. Thank heaven for small mercies and I didn’t have to worry about any resemblance to Edwin. That would be entirely understandable and wouldn’t cause even one single eyelash to flicker, as all the Maybrick men had brown-black hair and similar features.

I
’ve tried three times to kill myself. But I am still alive. Suicide seems the only honorable thing to do. Bunny and the children will think it was an accident. I take so many dangerous medicines, it should be quite simple. There would be no shame to blacken their names, and perhaps, someday, they will look back and remember their “poor Jim,” “poor father,” with kindness. But each time I quaked with cowardice and reached for the charcoal, the bone black, and saved myself at the last instant. I’ve journeyed to the threshold of death, only to falter and turn back.

There are moments when all I want to do is die and others when I want, with all my heart, to live. A little voice in my head says that if Jack the Ripper were brought to trial he would be executed, so my taking my life is only Justice donning a different cap; it wouldn’t
truly
be suicide and a sin but an
execution
. I think that little voice is right. I want to heed to it. It will not be quieted and needles at me so, sharper than the delicious pinch of the hypodermic. I know, in my heart, ignoring it is wrong; it is the Voice of Righteousness, the Voice of God. But I haven’t the courage to be my own executioner, so I just lie here, my guilty heart swollen sore with remorse so that each sluggish beat is a torment to me, and pray that soon it will stop.

Every night and day I pray that God will give me the courage to die. But I just
can’t
do it! It seems so simple; arsenic and strychnine have slain so many, through mishap and malice, but it’s not;
it’s not!
Oh God, it’s so damned difficult! I took their lives, callously, without regard, but I
cannot
take my own!

It fills me with horror to contemplate the knife-wielding monster, the maniac, I let myself become. Everyone believed me the kindest, the gentlest, and the most loving of men. Edwin always used to joke that I would not even suffer them to use flypapers in the kitchen to kill innocent flies. What would he say if he knew I had murdered five harlots? I fooled them all, but I can no longer laugh about it. It
sickens
me to look back on what I have written and know that monster was me and that he still lives because I lack the courage to kill—to execute—him.

 

Christmas was
dreadful!
The beast is still alive in the black heart of me. At our Christmas Ball, I saw Alfred Brierley lay his hand on Bunny’s bare shoulder and lean and whisper something in her ear as she lit the candles on the Christmas tree.

When Bunny and I had bid good night to the last of our guests, I swooped her up in my arms, carried her upstairs, tore off her gown, ripped the jewels from her neck and the pearls from her hair, and
beat, Beat, BEAT
her! I didn’t stop there; I raced into my study, flung open the safe. I marvel now that my
cold, Cold, COLD, numb, Numb, NUMB
hands and my
hot, Hot, HOT
head had the wits to unlock it. I brandished my will in her face.

“Do you know what this is?”
I taunted.

I tore it up, scattering the pieces like snowflakes in her hair. I left the bitch penniless, and then I flung her to the floor and
fucked, Fucked, FUCKED
her harder than I have
ever
fucked a whore before.

As I crouched over her, mercilessly pounding her bleeding cunt, pulling her hair,
relishing
every plea and whimper, feeling blood trickle through her hair to warm my cold, numb fingers, suddenly I chanced to look up. I saw four little white feet innocent as doves. Bobo and Gladys were standing hand in hand in the doorway in their white nightgowns.

With a cry like a dying animal I wrenched myself—
my monstrous self!
—off their mother and fled into my study. I locked myself in. I gulped brandy straight from the decanter and swallowed every potion, powder, and pill I could find. I tried to end my life again, but, at the last crucial instant, the bone black beckoned and the coward in me reached out like a drowning man to grasp it and let it pull me back to life—Sweet, Horrible, Wonderful, Wicked Life!