The Ripper's Wife

12

I returned to Liverpool under a heavy veil, the train jolting my bruised and battered body for four brutal hours. I had to fight every moment to hold back the tears and bite my already burst and bloodied lips to keep from crying out. I had never been more surprised than when I awakened that morning, crumpled and bloody in the corner of our hotel room, to find myself still alive; I had thought surely Jim had killed me. I had never seen him in such a savage rage, the eyes of a madman staring out of his head, just like a real-life Jekyll and Hyde.

Jim sat beside me, absorbed in a medicine company’s catalog, using a pencil to circle the items he wanted to order. Through the whole miserable four hours he never said one word to me. He hardly even looked at me. That was fine with me. As the wheels of the train kept turning, so was my mind, making plans, important plans to change my life. I’d stood as much as I could, more than a body should have to; I just couldn’t go on like this. I’d found a new love, and now I wanted a new life.

I would go to Alfred Brierley and take off my veil and disrobe and show him what Jim had done to me. Alfred would kiss every bruise and curse Jim for the brute he was. I would tell Alfred everything, sparing him not one single detail of the violent ravishment I had suffered at my husband’s hands.

As soon as I could safely manage it, I would see a solicitor. My mind was made up. I would take my children and leave Jim, divorce him, and never set eyes on him again. I would best all the Currant Jelly belles and marry Alfred Brierley myself. We could live in Paris, where people were much more open-minded about divorce. Hang the Currant Jelly Set! We don’t need them! We could have a perfectly wonderful life without them!





13

THE DIARY

I can hardly write, my hands are shaking so, just like this infernal train! I watch them move, I stretch and curl my fingers—hands of ice, heart of ice!—and grip the pen, but I hardly feel them; it’s like they belong to a stranger! Sometimes I feel the stab of pins and needles and think the feeling is about to come back, but it never quite does. If only they weren’t so very cold! I have to wear gloves, and that makes it harder to write. My stomach aches as though it were being gnawed from within by rats. I can hardly bear the pain or stand upright. The agony! I’ve had to take more of my medicine than ever.

I was in Manchester on business. But after the business of the day was done, I could not rest. I kept thinking about my wife-whore alone back in Liverpool. I kept seeing her lying naked on my bed, opening her legs wide to Alfred Brierley, crooking her finger and saying sultry soft in her syrupy Southern drawl, Come here, and pointing down to her golden thatch, inviting him to play with that pink pearl of flesh. Oh, Bunny, I wish I didn’t love you so! It’s torture—but what exquisite torture!—both loving and hating you!

I sat alone in my hotel room, drinking red wine mixed with my medicine, sitting there entranced, watching the white powder swirl in the heart of its ruby depths. I couldn’t stand it—the lust and the rage, the longing, the loathing, they were all tied up in a tight, Tight, TIGHT knot! I took a strychnine tablet and then another, washed down with bloodred wine. I couldn’t get the pictures out of my mind. I kept hearing their lust grunts, seeing their bare limbs entwined and her golden hair spread out across the pillows as she thrashed in the throes of passion. The knot kept getting tighter and tighter. I longed for release. But more, much more, than my hand on my prick could give me. I had to do something! Destroy or be destroyed! So I went out, looking for a whore, one hopeless, God–damned and forsaken slut to stand proxy for my wife-whore.

She was selling violets, supposedly, though what fool buys wilted flowers fit only for the rubbish heap at three o’clock in the morning God only knows. A gaunt, glaze-eyed skeleton with a hacking cough and long lank hanks of stringy black hair. She said her name was Camille, like the brown-edged withering white flower she wore on the lapel of her tattered black coat. I almost laughed in her face. The only thing this blighted blossom had in common with La Dame aux Camélias was the lung rot that was slowly killing her. She was smiling at me, showing me the black empty spaces where her teeth used to be. Perhaps she thought I had come to save her, to liberate her with my love? Ha ha! I smiled and told her my name was Armand Duval. My little literary joke flew right over her head. As I bowed over her hand I reached for my knife.

That was the moment it all went wrong. Like that hot and eager apprentice boy I used to be who spent in his trousers at the mere sight of Sarah, I was too excited for my own good. I lunged. She screamed. I dropped my knife and grabbed her throat. I squeezed and pressed until she lost consciousness. I left her lying there, dead for all I know, amidst her fallen flowers, as I fled into the night, castigating myself as a careless bungler.

My heart was racing. I imagined it leaping like a crimson frog from my burning throat and leaving the empty husk of my body to fall down dead in the street as it bounded along without me. Then they would find this diary and know what I had done or tried to do. They would shake their heads and say, Poor fellow, he must have been mad! I think that’s why I keep this chronicle, so if that ever happens they will know why. Poor fellow! they will say, and point the finger of blame squarely at Love. You, they will accuse, you did this; you made him mad!

My fist curled tight around the hilt; I could not let go of my knife. My poor, poor children! How would they ever bear the disgrace? I kept imagining I heard the heavy boots of policemen pounding after me, the shrill wail of their whistles, and saw lights, like the bouncing orbs of their bull’s-eye lanterns glowing in the distance behind me, coming closer every time I dared to look back.

I had to take my medicine! It was the only thing that could save me! I felt weak; it would make me strong! I was shaking too badly to attempt my arsenic; I knew my fumbling fingers would drop the precious box and spill it, and having to crouch down and lick it up from the filthy cobblestones was too nauseating a thought. I felt in my pockets and found two strychnine tablets and swallowed them quickly.

Safely back in my hotel room, I groped desperately for my silver box and sprinkled the precious white powder onto my trembling palm, lamenting each little grain that fell onto the carpet. I sat on the bed and, with shaking, icy hands, drank straight from my bottle of Fowler’s Solution. The gaslights shone so beautifully through the lavender-arsenic tincture as I raised it to my lips. What a lovely color and flavor it has! I began to feel better and took another strychnine tablet for good measure. But I was overzealous. I took too much. I had to resort to bone black, and that brought it all back up. I wasted my precious store and had to take more.

Next time I will not let eagerness get the better of me. I will wait, and plan, and strike only when the time is right. There will be no more mistakes! The whores will pay, NOT me! I will show them all how clever I can be! When they hear of the whores ripped up like pigs in the market, gutted like fish . . . I can see them now: Michael sits at his breakfast table and frowns at the headlines over the gilt rim of his teacup. Edwin devours each deliciously dreadful word in the latest edition of the Illustrated Police News while his fingers distractedly shred the red carnation in his lapel. Bunny shudders, causing the frills on her breakfast cap to quiver like her quim in ecstasy and laments that such evil exists in the world as she lays aside the Liverpool Daily Post, all her pleasure in her morning perusal of the paper gone.

None of them will ever suspect that a man as gentle as their Jim could ever do such a thing. They will all be wondering what manner of fiend is stalking London and picturing some murderous, uncouth brute with wild, staring eyes and hands as big as hams. All of them will agree that no Englishman—and certainly no gentleman—could ever do such a thing. Inside I will be laughing all the time. The joke’s on them! Now who’s the clever one, Michael?