The Ripper's Wife

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 b-reasts, 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.