The Ripper's Wife

11

THE DIARY

Love makes sane men mad

and can turn a gentle man into a fiend.





Capricious cunt! Flighty American bitch! I should have known! Women like her cannot be trusted! You give them everything and they still want more! I’ve seen the way she looks at other men, my hot little Bunny! Bright shining eyes, heaving b-reasts, I swear I can feel the heat from her cunt even under all those sumptuous layers of satin and velvet I paid for! She laughs, flutters her lashes, and rests her little hand on their sleeve and leans in close. Even Edwin—my own brother! I dropped my spoon and saw their ankles entwined beneath the table, black patent leather and pink satin. The Judas-whore! I half-expected to see her hand dip down to pet his prick through his trousers or take it out and fondle it right there at the table. I’m certain she’s done it! Of course, I cannot blame Edwin; he’s always been so susceptible to seduction.

I didn’t want to believe it; I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want Michael to be right. But Michael is always right, damn his eyes, damn those silver vocal cords that have lined his pockets with gold! Command performances for the Queen, a mansion in Regent’s Park! Michael is God’s own gift to the world! Our parents always loved him best because he could sing; Mother always wept with pride because God had given him a voice. He didn’t have to do chores like I did; he didn’t have to lift a finger, only his voice to the glory of God while I wore mine to the bone taking up the slack. I was the family workhorse, the dogsbody, the slave! A poor, mediocre Liverpool lad with no special God-given talent, I spent my whole childhood dreaming of the day when I would best Michael at something.

I made myself rich; through sheer dint of will, I worked myself up to the top of the cotton trade. I swept floors in the brokers’ offices when I was nine. Now other poor little lads come in to sweep mine, but Michael is still the star. God’s chosen one, always the best and the brightest, always right, Saint Michael is, and he was right about Bunny too, damn him! I should have listened to him when he said I couldn’t possibly be in love with someone I had known only one week, that these whirlwind shipboard romances were the stuff of novels and musical comedies and not to be trusted in real life. She was no more an “American Dollar Princess” than I was! She’s heiress to two and a half million acres of fetid swamps as rank, rotten, and foul as her black whore’s heart is! She learned at the knee of the best, her own mother, Caroline the Cuckolder, Baroness von Bawd, who uses men like handkerchiefs so she can wear diamonds and wipe her arse on pound notes! In ten years’ time Bunny will be just like her. Money and whores—they’re the bane of mankind’s existence, they break hearts and destroy souls, but we cannot live with or without them! Lack, like, loathing, or loving, they’ll drive you MAD!

I could have pretended, I could have denied it, if only I had not seen it. It would have been so easy to dismiss it as more nastiness and spite from the Currant Jelly Set directed at my American-born wife, “the Dollarless Dollar Princess.” But I saw, I saw; with my own eyes I saw it!

We were in London, for some entertainment and for me to see a doctor about this vexing numbness in my cold, cold hands—cold as her heart and her cunt when I come to her bed and try to touch it! “Do let me, dear!” I implore the icy wall of her back, but silence is the only answer I ever get. There’s a distressing tremor and a feeling of needles and pins—like the lies that stab my heart! Pain gnaws like starving rats at my stomach. My bowels are like rice water, and my skin sloughs off like a snake’s. It itches abominably, burns, yet is so cold; I can never get warm enough.

Whenever I visit this great City of Whores, crawling with them like vermin, rich whores and poor whores, slim whores and stout whores, shy whores and bold whores, plain whores and pretty whores, I always return to Whitechapel, to visit my Mrs. Sarah and have my wedding present, the gold watch she gave me from her uncle’s shop, cleaned and polished bright as new.

Of course the bitch wanted money for our five brats. I suppose they are mine; there was a time when I lay with her every chance I got. I was hot and lusty, right out of school and from under my parents’ pious roof, and still believed all the preacher’s prattle about hellfire and damnation and sins of the flesh, and the words of the beautiful, uplifting hymns Michael sang every Sunday. When I rented a room above the watchmaker’s shop, Sarah set my loins on fire at the first sight of her. I saw her ankles on the stairs. I blushed and stammered and cast down my eyes until she left me alone so I could tend to the sticky mess in my trousers. A red-haired Magdalene with a bosom and bum like a juicy apple I longed to bite into. I was hard as a poker every time her skirts brushed against me in passing. And she knew it! She didn’t even have to touch me! I fell asleep with my prick in my hand every night. I played with it so much I had to see a doctor. He advised me to leave it alone, that the soreness would abate with the slackening of my attentions, but I couldn’t stop myself. Not even a regimen of cold baths could douse the fire Sarah lit inside me. Nor did the barbed ring the doctor recommended I wear to bed fitted snugly around the root of my cock deter me. There was no help for it—I had to possess her!

I thought the fires of Hell were burning me, that there was something supernatural, otherworldly, about my lust, that it was surely Hell instead of Heaven sent and the only way I could avert damnation was by marrying her. But I was never a fool. I knew better than to trust my prick. This was not a woman I would be proud to introduce to the world as Mrs. Maybrick, but she was jolly fun for an apprentice boy with a prick like fireworks always going off and having her would restore my peace of mind.

To stop her wheedling and whining, I had one of Michael’s theatrical friends dress up as a preacher and bless the brass ring I slipped on her finger. I lifted her veil—made from a lace tablecloth bought cheap off one of the stalls in Petticoat Lane because of a bad coffee stain—and kissed “my own dear wife,” “my Mrs. Sarah.” There’s a parchment with Certificate of Marriage in big fancy script and both our signatures—mine scrawled so illegibly not even Satan himself could read it—that she keeps framed above her bed. Proof the whore can point to that she isn’t a whore even when she’s lying underneath it letting the rat catcher from down the street diddle her cunt.

But all women are whores, in one way or another; they all have their price. They’ll sell themselves for pennies, a kind word, a crust of bread, a tot of gin, or a bright silk handkerchief, and the most costly of all demand diamonds; it’s only a matter of naming the right price. I’ve had whores I couldn’t afford to, or didn’t want to, pay for the silk handkerchief out of my pocket, and they were happy to have it. Sometimes when Edwin is out, I help myself to some of his bright, gaudy silks; the whores love those! You should see the way their eyes light up and their skirts flip up! That’s how I get my three-penny knee tremblers for free, ha ha!

I had promised my darling Bunny a treat—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum. She was supposed to be spending the day shopping while I saw the doctor and took care of some business. Of all the people I might have seen by chance, slumming gents and lady-whores with their veils down in the cesspool of Whitechapel, I had to see my own wife, with Alfred Brierley, a man I considered one of my best friends; I sponsored him at the Liverpool Cricket Club, God damn and blight him!

Her veil was down and she was wearing what I suppose was her idea of a discreet dress and hat—black with scarlet poppies blooming from head to hem—but I knew it was her. I saw the familiar, intimate way she leaned into him as they walked into the hotel, one of those low places where rooms are let by the hour. They stayed for two.

Pain burning like a fireball in my belly, I sat by the window at the pub across the street drinking rotgut gin and sprinkling arsenic on my palm, licking it up in long, languorous strokes, the way I used to lick her cunt when I thought she was all mine, God damn her, and watched until they came out again.

The sun went down, and it started to rain. Even the heavens weep for me! I thought. The hour came and went when Bunny would have been dressing for the theater. Was she alarmed by my absence? Did she make inquiries? Did she try to find me? Or did she shrug and say I must have been delayed and go with him taking my ticket, taking my place? And still I sat there, drinking gin and taking arsenic—I even sprinkled some in the rotgut.

I’d never felt such a rage. I wanted to MURDER her with my bare hands! But the children’s faces kept floating before my eyes, like large, stubborn cinders obscuring my vision. I would see my hands closing around her throat, her big violet-blue eyes bulging out, protruding like a frog’s until they popped, like bursting blueberries, and then I would see Bobo and Gladys staring out at me from the silver-framed picture on the mantel and I just couldn’t do it. I thrust the wife-whore from me and let her fall. I stood over her, listening to her pant like a dog, a bitch, lying in a whimpering, quivering heap at my feet. I kicked her, and it felt so good, I kicked her again. Half of me hated her. The other half still loved, worshiped, and adored her. I wanted to kill her . . . I wanted to kiss her . . . I think I knew then that I was losing my mind.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the children! My black-haired boy, with the rare double row of eyelashes all the ladies envy so, and my frail little girl who succumbs to every cough and fever. There is a line in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that always makes me think of Gladys—“always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered.” My little angels! Oh God, how I love them! But oh, how they make me worry! Bobo’s beauty provokes the other boys’ teasing, even after his curls have been shorn. He always feels he has to prove himself the little man and sometimes takes risks he shouldn’t, like the time he broke his finger playing ball in the park with the bigger boys whose company he was forbidden on account of their roughness. He tried to hide it and the bone began to knit crookedly and Dr. Hopper had to break it again and reset it. My brave little man, he tried so hard not to cry! And poor little Gladys sees Dr. Hopper almost as often as I do (last month I saw him eleven times). I sit her on my knee and put the pills into her rosebud mouth. Sometimes I give her a sip—just a tiny sip for a tiny girl—of my Fowler’s Solution, that lovely lavender-tinted tincture of arsenic and potassium. I pray it will make her stronger!

If I killed their mother, the children’s lives would be destroyed. So many people think evil is inherent in the blood. They would scrutinize the children’s every word and deed, measuring them always against what I did. I couldn’t do that to them. But I had to do something! The rage, the furious pain, it was like being in a room lined with iron spikes and the walls were closing in on me. I had to find some sort of release, some purge for my angry soul, or it would kill me. I couldn’t keep it bottled up, letting it fester, always living with the fear that it would burst out and injure those I love best. But I couldn’t trust myself alone with the bitch, the harlot with the scarlet poppies on her hat, unless I did something to rid myself of this rage.

I thought a walk in the rain might cool my head. I was so distraught, I didn’t even care if I caught my death in the downpour. It was then that she scurried out of a dark alley and touched my sleeve. She peered up at me through the falling rain and I realized that beneath the brim of that battered old black straw hat I was staring into Bunny’s face. The rain was washing the dirt from her hair, like mud from gold nuggets, revealing waves of molten gold just like Bunny’s. Her eyes were big and blue as violets. Her lips were pink and parted, wet, and lusting to be kissed. Even in the cold, cold rain, I could feel the heat coming off her!

The rain hadn’t cooled my rage at all. My head ached abominably, the rats still gnawed, and the fireball burned. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the alley. I slammed her against the wall, hard enough to jar the breath from her lungs and bring tears to her eyes. I pulled up her skirts. As I rammed into her, I grabbed her hair, pulling it hard, forcing her head back.

“You hot-cunt slut!” I hissed. “You like this, don’t you?” I covered her mouth with mine before she could answer, biting her lips, tasting her blood, sucking at it like a leech.

I imagined her cunt crawling with fleas beneath the squashed cabbage leaves of her filthy green skirt, and the dingy gray petticoats that had once been pure white, the dirty pink skin crusted with the seed of all the men who had come before me, and I thought of Bunny’s clean, perfumed pink-ivory skin and the neat little nest of golden curls, ticklish tendrils of gilt I loved to run my fingers through and bury my face in, teasing the little pink pearl they hid with my tongue. God and Devil both damn the whoring bitch! How I wished she could have seen me at that moment!

The whore whimpered and I slapped her.

“Please, guv’nor, don’t spend ’pon me clothes!” she cried, hoity-toity as a duchess in velvet instead of a cockney slut in wretched rags. But it was enough. The illusion was shattered. I wanted to cut her head off! If only I had a knife! I put my hands on either side of it and twisted, wishing I could tear it off with my bare hands; I wanted to hear her flesh rip and see her hot red blood fall down to mingle with the cold rain. I rammed even harder; I wanted to make her bleed, the way my wife-whore had made my heart bleed. I imagined her in bed with Alfred Brierley, him on top of her on that dirty doss-house mattress, thrusting into her, the two of them coupling like a pair of naked savages in the worst slum in London. For a moment, all I could see was red. BLOOD! RAGE! RED! All I could feel was lust, excitement, fury, love, and hate all tangled up together in an impossible knot. I imagined myself standing there, at the foot of the bed, watching them, my prick fast in my fist. I’d never been so excited—or so angry—in my life!

“Particular, aren’t you?” I sneered as I pulled out and slapped her dirty skirt down and spurted all over it. It gave me far greater pleasure than spewing into her filthy hole ever could!

Her lips trembled and tears rolled down her bland, boring, round as the moon face. Her eyes, I saw now, weren’t blue at all but dung brown. She was a barley blonde barely sixteen by the look of her, probably fresh up from the country; she still had too much flesh on her to have been in Whitechapel for long. I pinched the big pink udders spilling from her bodice just for spite. She was nothing like my wife, God damn her! I threw her to the ground and pissed all over her and then I kicked her and left her whimpering on the wet cobbles.

I couldn’t kill my wife-whore, but the world is full of whores, worthless little whores I could kill and make suffer. All the little whores of London no one gives a damn about will pay for the sins of the Great Whore!

Tomorrow I will go shopping . . . for a sharp and shiny knife.