The Ripper's Wife

15

THE DIARY

I’ve done it! She’s dead! I ripped her flesh like rotten old cloth! I heard it tear and give way beneath my knife! I stabbed and jabbed and then I fled, a phantom fiend, vanishing back into the night. No one saw me. I was invincible, invisible!

She was a revolting creature! Mouth full of missing and rotten teeth, her tits hung down like a pair of empty purses, flaccid and leathery; it disgusted me to touch them. She stank like the brandy warehouse that was blazing on the docks, setting the sky above Whitechapel alight with hellfire.

The whores were out en masse, drumming up trade, and the pickpockets were at their nimble best. No one noticed me. They were all too busy watching the fire. I was just another gentleman slummer.

I was so bloody clever, so brilliantly clever, this time! Everything went exactly as planned! How often can one say that in life? Everything went exactly as planned!

Her name was Polly. I met her in the Frying Pan Tavern. A short, stinking little strumpet dressed in shit-brown linsey with brass buttons the size of saucers on her raggedy old coat. She was going gray at the temples, streaks as wide as though someone had slapped her on each side of her greasy brown head with a paintbrush. The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, many long years ago!—Ha ha!

She was an old whore, and whores don’t live to be old in Whitechapel if they aren’t canny. I couldn’t risk her screaming, some instinct of the gut tugging at her, shouting DANGER! I bought her gin though she was already the worse for it. To breed trust, I gave her a bonnet.

“Wot a jolly bonnet! I’ll never lack for me doss money now, not when I’m wearin’ this!” The dowdy drab preened like a peacock as she tied the bow beneath her chin and peered blearily into the bit of broken mirror she kept in her pocket.

Black straw with a band of beaded black velvet trimmed with a red velvet rose. I nipped it off a sleeping tart when I was changing trains. It was one of those sweet, opportune moments. It reminded me of the black hat blooming with red poppies my wife-whore had worn when I saw her in Whitechapel with that bastard Brierley. I thrust the bonnet under my overcoat as I passed. I was gone, boarding another train, before she even noticed her hat was. I was so bloody clever! A woman like that would never report the theft; her ilk usually dread the police like the pox. No one will ever know how Polly got her jolly bonnet.

I arranged a rendezvous with Polly. I didn’t want to be seen leaving the pub with her. Someone might notice a toff in a shiny black silk topper with a diamond horseshoe in his cravat, and a long black overcoat trimmed with astrakhan, toting a black Gladstone bag, talking to this slum-vermin bawd. Later, before our tryst, I would doff my topper and don a deerstalker. My hunting clothes. I would be dressed to kill.

“Don’t you forget now,” I warned, waggling a finger at her. She was so drunk her eyes couldn’t even focus on it.

“Right you are, Old Cock,” she slurred, and slapped my chest, nearly felling me with gin fumes. “Don’tcha worry, sir; your Polly will be there,” she promised, and staggered off, weaving and reeling, waving her arms like a windmill.

I worried that I had given her too much gin and that she would fall down senseless in the street somewhere and sleep right through our tryst. But mistakes are meant to be learned from, and a stolen bonnet and a few pennies’ worth of gin are not as grave mistakes as a scream that leads to capture, a whore’s spilt blood that stains my children forever, and myself swinging from the gallows. If this whore failed to show, there would always be another, I assured myself. London was full of easy pickings and they were all mine for the taking.

I took more of my medicine. I lapped the white powder from my palm. I felt its power coursing through my blood, flooding me with power. People take less than I do and die, yet I’ve never felt more alive!

When I have my medicine, I can do anything; no one can stop me! I’m not afraid of the police, those bumbling bobbies bungling around in their big, noisy boots. I can hear them coming a mile away, ha ha!

She met me in Buck’s Row by the stable-yard gates. It was a quiet, dark street with only one lamp at the far end. I heard a horse neigh. Was it a mare? Was she old and gray too, just like Polly?

I watched poor jolly Polly slowly weaving her way toward me, waving her arms, and singing:



“ ‘Wot cheer!’ all the neighbors cried,

‘Who’re yer goin’ to meet, Bill?

Have yer bought the street, Bill?’

Laugh! I thought I should ’ave died,

Knock’d ’em in the Old Kent Road!”





I smiled and took her hand. “The one time you are true, it will cost you dearly, my dear.”

“Eh, wot’s that, Bill?” she croaked as she grabbed hold of my coat to keep from falling flat on her nose. Some stitches on my shoulder popped. Clumsy, stupid slut! I should drown her in a barrel of rum, I thought, only that would be a truly heavenly exit for the likes of her!

I seized her throat and beneath her “jolly new bonnet” her eyes bulged with fright. I ached with desire as I laid her down and flung her skirts up to her nose. I like to think she died smelling the horse manure staining her hems. I stood staring down at her as I took off my overcoat and gloves. My knife slashed. My hands were cold; then they were warm, warmer than they had ever been before.

Eyes open wide, she was staring at me over her stinking, frayed hems. The scream she would have uttered came out in a weak, whistling gurgle—a new kind of music I almost wished I could share with Michael. Did I only imagine she tried to say, “God help me?” As if He would!

I blooded my knife like a knight does his sword in his first battle. I bloodied my hands, in a baptism of blood, but there were no sacred words to say, only profane ones and lust grunts. I felt the blade graze bone. The scrape sent a shiver down my spine. I spent in my trousers. Oh, the indescribable thrill! Ragged, jagged cuts and wet, red heat! When I bathed my hands in her blood I felt purified, exorcised, purged of my rage. I could go home to my darling Bunny and the children without fear that I would hurt them. I stabbed her flaccid, worn-out old whore’s cunt and let my knife stand proxy for my prick. Her dead eyes stared up at me as I pulled on my gloves, to cover my bloody hands, and resumed my overcoat’s warm embrace. I waved a hand before those blind dead eyes. Not a flicker of life. How could there be? I could see the guts like a teeming mass of snakes inside her. Not such a hot little whore now; the dead so soon grow cold. I bent and, with the tip of my bloody knife, cut one of the big vulgar brass buttons from her coat. A souvenir to take home with me. I laughed, tossed it in the air like a lucky coin, caught it, and tucked it safely inside my pocket. My new lucky charm; I shall carry it with me next time I go to the races! Ha ha!

Back in my bolt-hole, a quiet rented room in Petticoat Lane, I saw the button was embossed with a naked lady with long flowing hair riding a horse—Lady Godiva, ha ha! I wished I could show Bunny. Maybe she’d appreciate the noble sacrifice? The first honorable thing this whore had ever done in her whole miserable life, ha ha!





The next morning it was all anybody could talk about. “ ‘Horrible Murder in the East End!,’ ” “ ‘The Work of a Maniac!,’ ” “ ‘Ghastly Crimes of a Madman!,’ ” the newsboys were out shouting on every corner, brandishing the horrors in the face of every passerby. In the pubs those who had known the deceased were drowned in free drinks by journalists in exchange for their reminiscences.

I returned to Buck’s Row. I stood, being jostled by the curious, and saw her blood still staining the cobbles. I gleefully paid my penny to go up to Mrs. Emma Green’s bedroom for a bird’s-eye view of those dumb, bumbling bobbies down on their knees trying to scrub away the bloodstains; they couldn’t even do that right and ignored the shouted advice of housewives. One of the bobbies, a young officer, glanced up; our eyes met; I gave him a polite nod, which he returned. Had he but known . . . the fools! They can’t even catch me when I stand right in front of them! The button from her coat was in my pocket all the time and her blood still caked beneath my nails under my gloves.





I’ve met someone. I’m bored with my Mrs. Sarah. Her looks are gone: she’s bloated as a leech and whines all the time. It takes all the joy out of f-ucking. She’s a fat sow who has suckled too many piglets! “My darling piggy,” I sometimes call her. Stupid bitch, she never hears the sarcasm in my voice, only the darling. I’m done with her for good! It must have been Fate putting this tempting morsel in my path at exactly the right moment. Let that diddling rat catcher spend his hard-earned wages on those miserable brats from now on and see how he likes it! Let him decide if Sarah’s cunt is worth the price!

Her name is Mary Jane Kelly. She’s so deliciously low! A bawdy bawd, a ribald rut! A stout little wench, shapely as an hourglass, bosom and bum lovely and fat like well-stuffed cushions fit for a man’s favorite fireside chair, but she carries it well. I love the way she swings and swishes her hips when she walks! A hearty young Irish whore by way of Wales with a wealth of ginger-gold hair, a ready smile—no missing teeth yet, at least none that show—and eyes as green as the Emerald Isles. They were wide with horror the first time I saw them when they looked up and met mine over the newspaper she was reading with an artist’s full-paged rendering on the front page of a bull’s-eye-lantern-toting bobby discovering Polly’s corpse.

“What kind o’ monster could have done this evil thing?” Mary Jane Kelly asked in a fascinating musical blend of Irish brogue, Welsh lilt, and cockney crudity.

What kind indeed? Ha ha! Sometimes monsters or angels can be standing right in front of you, staring you in the face or even speaking to you, and you don’t even know it until it’s too late. Some monsters even masquerade as gentle men—gentlemen—by day, but when the night falls out comes the knife and out goes the light of life.

She intrigues me like no other woman ever has, this Mary Jane Kelly. She’s still young and beautiful, though probably not for much longer. She has rum every morning for breakfast. Her teeth are already starting to go; she uses the wax drippings from her candle to fill in the cavities. Oh, what a clever little whore she is!

There’s something about her that reminds me of my wife-whore. I see them as two sides of the same coin. Sometimes it’s spinning so fast they blur into one. Sometimes I like to imagine they’re twin sisters, separated at birth, neither knowing of the other’s existence, one raised in luxury, the other piss-poor. They’re both twenty-six. The long, thick hair is ginger-gold, not rich molten like a melted fortune; the eyes are emerald green, not violet-blue; the hands are rough, red, and sturdy, well accustomed to gripping men’s pricks, not delicate, dove white, and dedicated to the feminine art of embroidery; the voice is lilting with the musical strains of Wales and Ireland, not a molasses-thick, syrupy sweet Southern drawl.

She walks the streets in her only pair of boots, the black leather cracked and worn, to earn a living, instead of riding in a carriage to browse and buy trifles and gewgaws; she wouldn’t be allowed to set one foot through the door of Woollright’s Department Store. She only has one set of clothes to cover her back, not a whole wardrobe spilling over with more than a hundred dresses. She doesn’t spend her afternoons sitting in the parlor with a novel or a cat on her lap. She fucks for pay, not pleasure. And yet . . . there’s a perplexing hint of refinement about this little guttersnipe, barely a wisp, as though it were hanging on for dear life, a certain something that suggests that she used to be better than this.

I asked her if she was willing. She knew what I meant. The answer was “yes.” It’s always “yes.” I gave her my arm. She laughed, saying, “Aren’t you a gallant gent!” She said we could go to her room—13 Miller’s Court in Dorset Street. Joe, the fishmonger she lived with, would be at work, “if he’s not lost that job too!” She rolled her eyes. “I know as some would think it unlucky to live in a room numbered thirteen,” she said as we walked along, “but not me—’tis one o’ McCarthy’s Rents, it is, an’ me uncle is John McCarthy himself, so I don’t have to worry about him givin’ me the boot! ’Twould break me da’s heart if his own brother did me dirty like that! An’ I’ve too pretty an arse for any man to be kickin’ it; they’d much rather poke it instead! An’ when the rent collector comes callin’ I always make sure an’ give him a bit o’ jolly to keep him smilin’ so he don’t feel half so bad about leavin’ empty-handed!” She winked. “I’ve a way with me mouth, I have, and I don’t just mean the gift o’ the gab. . . .”

She leaned close and her tongue darted out to tease my ear. “I know how to please a man; I can lick his cock like a little girl does a peppermint stick. My gents always go away smilin’ an’ they always come back for more!”

We walked on, newsboys darting in and out of our path, brandishing their papers and shouting, “ ‘Murder—’Orrible Murder!’ ”

“Poor Polly, God rest her!” Mary Jane sighed and crossed herself—A Catholic whore, well, well!

“Did you know her?” I asked idly.

“Aye, ’tis a sad, sad story, it is! Polly met her Bill in the Old Kent Road. That was why she was always a-singin’ that song; it was their song.” Mary Jane sang the familiar chorus:



“ ‘Wot cheer!’ all the neighbors cried,

‘Who’re yer goin’ to meet, Bill?

Have yer bought the street, Bill?’

Laugh? I thought I should ’ave died!

Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road!”





The whore had called me Bill last night; was he on her mind even at the last?

“He had his printin’ shop there, an’ in the room upstairs all five of their bairns was born. It was a good life! But then Bill went an’ ruined it all; he fell in love with the midwife that delivered their last—Little Liza. Polly took to tryin’ to drown her sorrows. She couldn’t bear to stay, she was just too proud to sit there an’ watch another woman take her place, an’ she left him, an’ their brood. That was the hardest part. She used to cry for them when the horrors o’ the drink were upon her, an’, when she was far gone enough, for her Bill an’ to sing their song. But she was in a terrible way, she was, not fit to take care o’ herself, much less a passel o’ bairns. She went to London an’ fell into the life. Can’t keep body an’ soul together sellin’ matchsticks, don’tcha know.

“One day she woke up an’ took a long hard look at herself an’ what she had become. Made her right sick, it did. She tried to get herself right. Some missionaries, a right pair o’ teetotalers they was, butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, a preacher an’ his missus, gave her a job in their house as a skivvy. She tried real hard, she did, but she just couldn’t stand it, all that preachin’, all that talk of repentance, hellfire, an’ damnation, an’ her with the shakes wantin’ a drink so bad she felt like she was goin’ to scream the house down, an’ she fell back into her old ways, stole all the missus’s clothes while she was in the bath, left her stark naked, she did, an’ pawned the lot o’ them an’ spent every penny on gin.

“Some time after that, she met a nice bloke, a blacksmith name o’ Drew. He got her off the streets for a time, he did. She tried hard to make a go of it doin’ needlework an’ hawkin’ matches an’ flowers, but it didn’t last; she just couldn’t give up the drink, an’ in the end Drew left her too. Said he couldn’t fight a ghost, an’ when the horrors o’ the drink was upon her all she talked about was her Bill an’ how much she missed him, an’ sang that song until you wanted to bang your head against the wall or hers, God love her! Her son, Will, gave her a few pence whenever he could, but he died a few years back, burned to death, he did, when a paraffin lamp exploded in his face, poor lad.” She crossed herself again.

“Poor Polly, God rest her!” Mary Jane wiped away a tear. “ ‘An’ God shall wipe away all the tears; an’ there shall be no more death; or pain, or sorrow, or cryin’; these former things have passed away.’ No one can hurt her now!”

I stopped and stood and stared deep into those green eyes. It almost ended there. I wanted to strangle her; my hands shook with the urge to reach out, right there on the street, and squeeze the life out of her in broad daylight.

That bedraggled, gin-soaked drab I had ripped open wide and left lying like horse apples on the cobblestones was nothing, a worthless nobody, yet this trumped-up Irish strumpet made me see her as someone real, someone who had mattered to someone once and still did, even if it were only her own downtrodden ilk.

It was as though Mary Jane Kelly sat me down on the sofa next to her and opened an album of photographs. I saw the story of a life, a woman who had once been a happy wife. She’d had a husband named Bill—she had called me Bill last night!—little children had loved her and called her “Mother.” She’d had a son who sympathized and gave her money, a son who had died horribly. She’d loved and lost and been betrayed, she’d had her pride, cried, and fought a powerful weakness, and she had a song she still sang because it reminded her of the happiest time in her life, before everything went wrong. She had even tried to catch herself and stop herself from falling further, and deeper, down into the cesspool. Through the window of Mary Jane Kelly’s words, I saw why Polly had become that dirty, stinking, gin-belching hag, and I hated Mary Jane for it!

My trembling hands reached out for Mary Jane’s throat. At the last moment they changed course. I don’t know why. I cupped her face. I kissed her hard. I bruised her lips with mine. I tasted rum, sugar, and orange juice, not blood but Shrub, a drink the harlots fancied, a cheap, sweet indulgence they persuaded men to buy them by claiming “it makes a body right randy.” I wanted her as I had never wanted any woman before. I wanted to hike up her skirts and f-uck her right there in front of the newsboys. Lust, not rage or bloodlust, just plain, ordinary, pulsing, powerful lust, was hot upon me. Mary Jane knew it and she knew what to do.

She held my hand tight, stepped afore me, as the passage was too narrow for us to walk side by side, and smiled back at me as she guided me through the cramped archway. She unlocked the door to a single filthy room and took me to her bed. We fucked madly. The pine headboard banged against the wall. Hours must have passed. It was worth every penny! There was just something about Mary Jane Kelly. . . . Every time I wanted to kill her, I kissed her; every time I wanted to cut her, I caressed her. I don’t pretend to know why. Maybe it really was the fabled Luck o’ the Irish? Mary Jane believed in it. “Don’tcha know, I’m like a cat, I am; I always land on me feet,” she always said. “Never despair, me dear. ’Tis always darkest before the dawn, but tomorrow the sun will come out.” She seemed untouched by the poverty and pain that surrounded her. She was of it, as dirty and ragged as the rest of them, with the teeth slowly rotting in her pretty head, but she was still, somehow, above it; her feet never seemed to touch the ground.

In her pathetic little room, half a stub of a candle burned in a ginger beer bottle on the table by the bed next to a stale crust of bread and a half-eaten apple turning brown. A filthy, ragged muslin skirt masquerading as a curtain veiled the window. The only furnishings besides the bed were two small, mismatched tables and chairs and a lopsided washstand. The pitcher and basin were cracked and the pisspot half-shoved beneath the bed stank and was perilously close to overflowing, and empty gin and ginger beer bottles rattled against it on the bare, gritty floorboards. A dented kettle sat on the hob, and for a pathetic spot of color there was a cheap, faded print of The Fisherman’s Widow, a desolate woman keeping vigil in a graveyard, eyes fixed upon a wooden cross. It hung over the mantel where battered tin boxes and twists of brown paper containing her meager rations of sugar and tea sat alongside a cracked shard of mirror and a broken-toothed comb.

We whiled away the afternoon with our bodies lying entwined in sheets stained with the spunk and sweat of other men, including Fishmonger Joe’s. After she’d risen and had a “hard piss”—like all harlots, she believed it would keep her from conceiving—she settled herself back in my arms, as comfortable as you please, and told me the story of her life. And what a tale it was! A picaresque saga of daring debauchery and tragic travails, decadence and depravity, that would have put Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill to shame, in which our heroine went from grime to glamour, then back to grime again so rapidly it left me wondering just how much or how little of it was fact or gin-sodden fantasy; she was, after all, born of a race renowned for breeding the best storytellers.

She was born in Limerick, the only girl in a family of seven brothers, “and they’d mash any man to a pulp who trifled with me, they would,” she said proudly. She’d had one sister, but she died, “poor bairn,” when she was but three, “fell into the fireplace, she did, when Mam’s back was turned an’ bent over the ironin’.

“Mam lost her wits an’ had to be sent away, to the dear nuns who knew how to deal with such things, an’ Da decided to up an’ move us to Wales, where he had some kin, to make a new start. ’Twas what we all needed, he said.”

Her da and the boys took work in the coal mines in Carnarvonshire while Mary Jane kept house, cooked meals, and made sure they all had a clean shirt to wear to Mass on Sunday.

When she was sixteen, Mary Jane fell in love with Jonathan Davies, the boy next door. “He used to come in an’ read me poetry, newspapers, an’ stories, he did, while I was busy cookin’ an’ cleanin’. It was he who learned me what readin’ an’ writin’ I know. The first full sentence I e’er read rightly was I love you, an’ the second was Will you marry me? The answer was Aye.” She smiled and hugged herself. “The memory still warms me, it does, makes me knees weak an’ me insides all toasty!”

But the sun set all too soon for Mary Jane and her “Jon.” He was killed in a mine explosion three years later and left her with a babe new planted in her belly. The grief nearly killed her. They feared her mind would give way like her mam’s. Her da and brothers, hoping the change would do her good, sent her to Cardiff to stay with a cousin, as her husband left “no near livin’ kin an’ a woman needs another woman at a time like that.”

Ruby Ellen—that was the name of the cousin—“was a bad sort.” Jealous and greedy, she resented that Mary Jane, two years younger than herself, was a great beauty and had already been a much-loved wife and had a baby in her belly before she was widowed while Ruby Ellen languished at home as yet unmarried, with no worthy prospects, “her bein’ the kind men flirt with but don’t marry.” She introduced Mary Jane to the drink as a route to restore good cheer and to the “gay, fast company” she ran with.

Mary Jane took to the drink “as a fish does to water, I did”—“I could stop anytime I want, sure I could, but I don’t want to”—and it was so very nice to feel a pair of strong, manly arms around her again. But she’d lost her luck as well as her love. She caught “somethin’ heinous” from one of those fine, tall sailor boys she and Ruby Ellen picked up at the pier and landed in the infirmary. Mary Jane was there for months—“tossin’ an’ burnin’ with fever, I was, until I feared me own brains would be fried like an egg”—and the babe, a boy, “God bless him, the poor mite,” was born daft and had to be sent to a special home for the nuns to take care of.

Remembering that change is always good after heartbreak, Mary Jane decided to move on, to make a new life for herself in London. “I had to leave all that sorrow behind me or perish of it. ’Twas like an anchor, it was, weighin’ me heart down, an’ I thought I was too young to drown. I wanted gaiety an’ excitement, an’ to live while I was young an’ alive, not to be tied down an’ dying o’ woe. The only thing for it was to start new.”

When she first set foot in London—“green as a shamrock, that’s how ignorant I was!”—a velvet-and-lace-gowned lady in a fine carriage driven by a Negro coachman in tight white breeches, a red tail coat, and a tall silk hat, engaged Mary Jane on the spot to be a maid in her house.

But her house was no ordinary house. It was “a gay sportin’ house in the West End, it was, one o’ the grandest where all the gents an’ swells an’ even His Highness the Prince o’ Wales went.

“All pink satin an’ red velvet, lace sewn with little beads that twinkled like stars, real crystal chandeliers, an’ mirrors an’ gilt everywhere they could think to put one an’ paint t’other. There was even globes o’ rose-colored glass on the gaslights. Aye, I used to lie naked as a baby in me big bed o’ pink satin an’ stare at meself in that gold-framed mirror an’ think I looked just like one o’ the ladies in those French paintin’s Madame had hangin’ everywhere.”

Though she was hired to be a servant, Mary Jane soon made up her mind to be the gayest and most popular girl in the house. “Fuckin’ beats skivvyin’ any day o’ the week, me boyo, an’ I’d sooner be paid for lyin’ flat on me back on satin than down on me knees scrubbin’ floors!” At that time the reigning favorite was a novelty, a Negress known as “The Black Venus” who did a series of increasingly lewd poses plastiques draped—“for the first few o’ ’em anyway”—in cloth-of-gold. In the grand ballroom, with the floor cleared and lit by torches held by nearly naked Negro footmen in red loincloths, she performed a wild voodoo dance with a turban on her head, gold bangles on her wrists and ankles, and a real-live snake wrapped around her shoulders and a “skimpy little scrap” of gold cloth covering her cunt, which she ripped off at the end of her dance. “All the toffs were wild for it . . . an’ her,” Mary Jane added, a tad ungraciously.

On the night of the favorite’s birthday, Mary Jane, simmering with resentment, drank more than she should have of the champagne she was supposed to be serving to the guests and decided that enough was enough. She dropped her tray, full of crystal glasses, right on the floor and in her smart uniform of black dress and ruffled white apron and cap flounced into the rose-lit dining room, flipped up her skirts, and sat her bare bum right down on “that big lovely pink an’ white birthday cake with a great lovely splat, frosting flyin’ everywhere. After that, they all fell in love with me. Lined up to lick me clean, they did!”

I could tell she was quite proud of that memory. Soon she was being carried into the dining room every night stretched out on a big silver platter with her naked body decorated with icing roses, bows, and garlands, just like a fancy cake for the gents to devour. One night, she swore “on me mother’s grave it’s true!,” they served her up to “good ol’ Bertie, the Prince o’ Pleasure, our future king, himself, Lord love an’ save him!” decorated with his royal crest in icing and a regal lion and unicorn paw to hoof in icing over her clean-shaven cunt.

Another night, upon a dare for a diamond bracelet, she took a bath in a tub filled with a crate of champagne new come from Paris, “but ne’er again! I nearly burned me insides out, I did. Luckily there was a doctor in the house; he stuffed me snatch full o’ cold sweet cream from the kitchen to cool the burn, an’ all me gents were eager to comfort an’ pet me, an’ give me presents, an’ tell me what a brave little girl I was.”

True to her word, she became the gayest and most popular girl. And, more than that, she became the Madame’s favorite. “Her little pet, I slept in her bed most ev’ry night” and even traveled with her “a time or two” across the Channel to Paris, where Mary Jane worked for a time as an artists’ model and posed for a few naughty photographs. But pride got the better of her, and she began putting on airs and calling herself “Marie Jeanette.” “All the girls hated me,” she said, and I could well imagine her giving orders and strutting about all high-and-mighty as though she owned the place.

But drink was her bête noire: “Me black beastie what sunk his claws in me good, it was.” Gin, rum, wine, whiskey, champagne, what have you, Mary Jane couldn’t do without it and didn’t want to. And when the horrors of drink were upon her, she was herself a horror and “a right misery an’ terror to deal with,” she admitted. “Worse than the Magdalene possessed by her seven demons, I was!”

A rich man became enamored of Mary Jane and begged her to quit the brothel and be his own. He promised that as his mistress she would “lead the life of a lady” and “want for nothing.”

He also promised to use his influence to help her fulfill her ambition of going on the stage. Though, having a brother who is a star in the music halls, I think I speak with some authority when I say that this was just a pipe dream. Mary Jane was only a fair warbler at best and would never have made even a modest success of it. And as she did not have a modest bone in her body, a “modest success” would never have satisfied Mary Jane. She was too temperamental to get on with the stage managers and other performers, drink made her unreliable, and her brogue was too thick and herself too lazy to dedicate herself to the hard work necessary to completely transform herself in order to have even a fighting chance upon the stage.

By then a new girl, Clara, a sweet little Swedish girl, a genuine virgin, with blond hair almost fair as snow, newly ripening b-reasts like little pears, and not a hair on her cunt, was poised to replace Mary Jane as the reigning favorite and in Madame’s bed. It didn’t help when Mary Jane, drunk and sulking upstairs, dozed off and left the water in Madame’s pink marble tub running. A cascade of water suddenly crashed down through the lewdly lolling nudes painted on the ceiling and drenched the gents downstairs having a party celebrating Clara’s first blood. The cake was ruined, and Clara, who had never had a fancy cake in her life, cried for hours. Madame was furious and Mary Jane wisely decided it was time to move on.

She accepted the gentleman’s offer. In a high drunken temper, she vowed she wanted, and would take nothing, from this house, and clad only in a pair of black silk stockings, red satin garters, and black leather high-heeled boots, she set a black velvet hat “à la Empress Eugenie” with a curling white ostrich plume flowing back over the brim held in place by a cameo jauntily atop her ginger-gold curls, pulled on a pair of long black lace gloves and her diamond bracelet—“I couldn’t think o’ leaving that behind!”—and walked down the grand staircase “regal as a queen.” Out the front door she went, held open for her by a pair of astonished, gape-mouthed, white-wigged Negro footmen who thought that, after years of employment in this establishment, they had seen everything, and straight into the delighted, but mortified, gentleman’s carriage and arms.

But it didn’t last long. Her drunken antics and the loud, quarrelsome nature she exhibited when she was deep in her cups, coupled with her startling habit of walking around “starkers” even in the public rooms of the house in full view of the servants and any guests, and the women she sometimes brought home “for a little frolic” in her big bed, explaining that she sometimes needed “a holiday from the men pokin’ their pickles inta me,” soon exhausted her genteel lover’s patience, and Mary Jane found herself out on the streets.

A mannish spinster lady who preached zealously against the evils of “the demon rum” took Mary Jane in, wanting to save her, but that ended after a fortnight when she staggered in starkers to have tea with the Temperance Society, singing her favorite song, “Only a Violet I Pluck’d from My Mother’s Grave,” and brandishing a near-empty gin bottle, and plopped herself down on the reverend’s lap.

“So much for Christian Charity,” Mary Jane sneered. “She cast me out onto the streets, to fend for meself any way I could, said she didn’t care what happened to me, she did. An’ her servants did me out o’ a lot o’ me finery; they was supposed to pack it all up, but when I opened me bags I found they’d raided the rag bin to fill ’em, an’ the rest I had to pawn until there was nothin’ left. I remember I stood out there, weepin’ in the pourin’ rain, arms stretched out, beggin’ her to take me back. When she opened the window, I thought she was goin’ to have pity, but she only tossed down a penny—a penny for all the joy I gave her, the sour old cunt!—then she cut me dead, she did, closed the curtains an’ turned her back on me. I remember, for a long time I stood there starin’ down at that penny, dirty money bein’ washed clean by the rain. I wanted so bad to be too proud to pick it up, I did, I wanted to make the grand gesture, but in the end . . . money is money, so I picked it up, though I’ve regretted it ever since.”

It was all downhill after that. How hard it must have been for her when every poor, deluded fool in the East End dreamed of the West End as a place where the streets were paved with gold and the people stuffed themselves on cream-filled pastries and Christmas goose every day of the week and didn’t know what want and need meant. In their eyes, Mary Jane Kelly had had it all—the West End dream—and lost it through her own bad habits and caprice. She lived with a quick succession of lovers, each one a rung lower down upon the social ladder and occupying an even worse address, until she ended up in Whitechapel, a common whore pounding the pavements looking for trade and living, on her uncle’s sufferance, in a rented room in Miller’s Court with Fishmonger Joe, and them quarreling all the time because he wanted a wife, not a whore, to warm his bed at night but couldn’t earn enough at his stinky labors to support either.





I’m thoroughly delighted with my spicy ginger tart! What a treat she is! So succulent, so bawdy! I’ve never enjoyed a whore more! I will visit her again when I am next in London. Next time I will bring her some candy sticks, to thank her for the pleasurable sensations she provoked in my prick when she went down on her knees and pretended it was one. It will be nice to have someone bawdy and fun, someone who knows how to forget herself in bed, not like those two outwardly respectable Mrs. Maybricks I’ve had the misfortune to acquire. Maybe I’ll make Mary Jane the third Mrs. Maybrick, ha ha!

I left Mary Jane lying back in bed, cradling the gin bottle against her bare b-reasts and singing “Only a Violet I Pluck’d from My Mother’s Grave.” I wonder if she knows any of Michael’s songs? If only he could see this bold as brass little hussy hugging the gin bottle and diddling her cunny while singing one of his sweet ballads, like “True Blue” or “Your Dear Brown Eyes”—yes, that’s the very one!—oh, what I would give to see his face.