The Ripper's Wife

The Ripper's Wife by Brandy Purdy


AUTHOR’S NOTE

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.





The heart is deceitful above all things,

and desperately wicked: who can know it?

—Jeremiah 17:9





She was the most beautiful young lady

I ever saw, and the most amiable....

And she was the most innocent.

—Daisy Miller by Henry James





She is more to be pitied than censured,

She is more to be helped than despised.

She is only a lassie who ventured

On life’s stormy path ill-advised.

Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter,

Do not laugh at her shame and downfall.

For a moment, just stop and consider

That a man was the cause of it all.

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





PROLOGUE

Love makes sane men mad

and can turn a gentle man into a fiend.





On 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.



Florence Maybrick

Gaylordsville, Connecticut

October 7, 1941—may this be a lucky day for beginning this endeavor. God give me the strength and courage to see it through!