The Ripper's Wife

18

I should have known better than to trust Michael. Desperate as I was, I should not have looked for even an ounce of chivalry in his cold, arrogant soul. Michael told Jim all that I had confided about the drugs I believed were transforming him into a real-life Jekyll and Hyde.

Jim came home from London and flung the front door open with such force it cracked one of the stained-glass panels and charged upstairs and beat me with his umbrella until it broke and then he threatened to put my eyes out with the finial. When I tried to crawl under the bed to escape him, he wrenched me out by my ankles, flipped me over, beat me with his fists and kicked me with his boots on, and raped me. I could not show myself in public for over a week even with paint on.

That awful autumn, while the madman that was my husband consumed my waking hours, that unknown madman, Jack the Ripper, stalked my dreams; he seemed to dog my fitfully slumbering soul’s every step. I’d see myself as a fallen woman, pathetic, dirty, haggard, and raggedy. It was so real I could even smell my filthy flesh and taste my fetid breath and rotting teeth and feel the itch of fleabites beneath the rancid rags I was wearing. I’d catch my reflection in a window and see all my beauty gone, worn away by worry and want, and feel so very tired, as though I hadn’t slept in a thousand nights or more but had spent them walking aimlessly, lost in the fog, fear stabbing my heart every time I heard a sound or turned a corner, never knowing if it would bring me face-to-face with the faceless fiend none could recognize.

That, I think, was the most frightening part. He might appear benign and grandfatherly, like a genial old doctor, a priest with the most blessedly comforting countenance, or a favorite uncle. Surely he did not go about with the mark of evil clearly upon him like a tattoo on his brow or else none would ever steal into the shadows with him beside them.

Those wretched women surely were not fools or they wouldn’t have survived on those hellish streets as long as they had. I thought so much about those women, I felt that we were, in some strange way, sisters beneath the skin, that though our lives had been very different, I would have understood them and they would have understood me. Maybe they could have told me how to break free? How to burst the shackles and chains of the comfort, luxury, and respectability that held me fast, to just let go of it all, of myself and the velvet cushion life I had always known and didn’t believe I could survive without. Perhaps they could have told me how to really not care anymore, not just to pretend not to. Every time I told myself I no longer loved or wanted Jim, that I was done with him, my conscience shouted, Liar! in a whisper that was also a scream.

I thought about the Ripper too. What manner of monster was he? Are such men born evil, or do they become so? What could turn a man into a flesh-ripping monster? I sat and pondered in the parlor and speculated as I tossed sleeplessly in my bed at night or after being rousted out of yet another foggy nightmare in which I walked the streets of Whitechapel, knowing to the very depths of my soul exactly what it felt like to have lost everything that mattered, along with all one’s hopes and dreams, always awaiting the inevitable, the knife that flashed so fast it left me no time to scream. Would I know him when I saw him, or would I only recognize him when it was too late? Would anyone hear my dying screams? Would anyone come to save me or could only I save myself? I now wonder, decades too late, was that what these dreams were truly trying to tell me?

Though I had sworn that I would never go back, I went back to Alfred Brierley’s bed. I can’t even offer a justifiable reason; even when my life hung in the balance I couldn’t explain it. It was just something I did. Maybe I was hoping it would be different this time? Maybe I was hoping that, in time, he would truly come to love me? Maybe I couldn’t let go of the dream that someday we would be together, living and loving in Paris or some other sophisticated city that took divorce in stride? Maybe I was just one more woman seeking some kind of comfort in a pair of arms that were willing to hold her while a cock nested inside her? Maybe it’s a fair price to pay for just being held? We all want some kind of love. Sometimes it’s not enough, and sometimes it is.

All I know is that one day I was there at his door, in his arms, then naked in his bed once more. He was a kind, generous, and skillful lover; it was only when he talked that he showed himself insensitive. I still ask myself, Why wasn’t that enough? Why couldn’t I be content with his sensual finesse? Why couldn’t I be happy with what we had? Why did I let it make me so very sad? Why did I run to him when I knew all too well that icy cold sadness lay beneath the burning heat of passion? There really is a unique sort of sadness that goes hand in glove with the act so often called “making love,” though love often has little or nothing to do with it. Strange how being filled can leave you so empty, I’d think every time as I wandered through Woollright’s after leaving his bed, frittering the rest of the afternoon away making frivolous purchases before I had to go “home” again.





19

THE DIARY

Double event this time! The first bitch squealed a bit. The pony and cart were almost upon us. The driver reached out his whip and poked the dead whore with it. But he didn’t see me. I had to flee before I was done with her. I knew I was invincible—the name, the powder, the power—I knew they couldn’t stop me, but for a moment . . . How I trembled and my heart raced! I could not keep up with it! It was like a drum in my ears as I fled, beating faster and faster. The scent of blood was in my nostrils, on my hands, on my lips where I had lapped it up along with my medicine. The lust was hot upon me. I was not sated; like a man interrupted in the midst of f-ucking, I had to seek another, for the full satisfaction. I would know no peace until I did! It had been three weeks since my last kill. I could endure no more, stifling, bottling up the rage, holding it back, while my wife-whore fucked Alfred Brierley behind my back! I had to kill, to purge myself; I could not go home until I was free of it!

But first . . . the first . . . The tall, “fair” Swedish liar.

“You would say anything but your prayers,” I said, and kissed her.

I have her prayer book in my pocket now. It’s in Swedish so I cannot read it, but there’s a crude woodcut of the Devil stained with the whore’s own blood. Long Liz! Tall and lank. I wanted to yank her head back and rip that lying tongue out by its roots!

Nothing but a tired old whore now, but she must have been a blond beauty in her youth, the signs were still there, but you had to squint and look hard to see them. Haunting gray eyes—like tarnished silver left out in the rain. She claimed to have the second sight, but the bitch never saw what was coming or else she would have run from me and not clung to me. I couldn’t wait to cut, Cut, CUT her! Dark yellow hair, like burned butter, hanging down in stringy, greasy hanks, hair fit for a hag, framing a face haggard and gaunt. But what fine cheekbones! A sculptor would have loved them! Good bones tell. I traced them with my fingertip. I couldn’t wait to bare them down to the bone; I wanted to see it shining white as a pearl in the moonlight. Who’s the poetic one now, Michael? She had no upper teeth; she’d lost them, she said, in the Princess Alice steamship disaster. Her husband and nine children had been amongst the seven hundred who died when a collier rammed it. As she clambered up a ladder, always just a step above the rising water that threatened to suck her back down to a watery death, the man above her slipped and his heavy work boot kicked her in the mouth and knocked her teeth out, caved the roof of her mouth in, and cleaved her upper palate clean in two.

She seemed to mourn the loss of her teeth more than her family. It would be a pleasure to send this selfish whore to Hell! I would take my time and savor each moment! I couldn’t wait to start cutting, to plunge my knife in and twist it around, stirring her innards like some foul witch’s brew! I would show the bitch that there are worse things than losing one’s teeth.

Second sight, my arse, you silly bitch! While I smiled and charmed her, inside I was taunting the vain fool: Why ever did you let your family go aboard the Princess Alice? Why didn’t you save them and your precious teeth? Why don’t you now? You still could, you know! And now you’re promenading like a lady in the park with the man who’s about to take your sorry whore’s life—second sight indeed!

I saved her life. She thought that meant she could trust me, that I would protect her. What fools women are! They have no sense of danger; they never see it until it’s right in front of their faces and too late to run! The knife’s already at their throat before they even think to scream and then they’re paralyzed with fright! Women are born to be the victims of men like me.

It was a rain-sodden Saturday, a cold, dark night. I first saw her through a curtain of rain. She was standing in the doorway of the Bricklayers’ Arms pub, taking shelter from the rain, trying to keep warm, huddled and crammed in with several other men and women in the same plight. There was a man with her, dark haired with a droopy mustache.

“That’s Leather Apron you’ve got cozyin’ up nexta you,” one of the men nudged and teased her, jerking his head at her companion, but she just laughed and clung tighter to his arm. She seemed to know him well . . . well enough not to be afraid.

That remark about “Leather Apron” got my attention. I followed them. In Berner Street, they rested against a wall. He leaned over and whispered something in her ear. She put her palm against his chest, shook her head, and gave him a playful little push.

“Not tonight, some other time perhaps,” she said. A whore who said no; how intriguing!

To his mind, that was clearly the wrong answer. He tried to pull her through the gate. She kicked and fought him. He shoved her down. She screamed. He grabbed her head with one hand while the other fumbled past his heavy overcoat to unbutton his trousers. She screamed again.

“Lipski! Lipski!” some fool, paused to light his pipe upon the opposite pavement, shouted, pointing at the man, who did have a distinctly Jewish appearance. It’s an insult they use in these parts; it was the name of a Jew who killed a girl a few years back. That stopped the man cold with his cock wilting and his trousers sagging.

The man with the pipe trembled and took off with the whore’s assailant in hot pursuit, running toward the railway station. I wonder what he did to him when he caught him? That would teach the fool to go around shouting, “Lipski!”

Like the Good Samaritan, I helped the fallen woman up. I straightened her bonnet, tweaking the limp black crepe ruffles as though I were the finest milliner in Paris proud of my latest creation, and retrieved the brass thimble and wad of black thread that had fallen from her pocket. She stroked the diamond horseshoe on my black tie with a covetous gleam in her gray eyes—the bitch would nip it if I did not watch her!—and told me I had brought her luck. I was her hero, her savior; she could not thank me enough!

I gave her one of Edwin’s gay silk handkerchiefs—a green-and-yellow-checkered one. I knotted it playfully about her neck, wanting to twist it tight, but not yet, not yet.... With my own handkerchief I wiped the grime from her cheek where she had grazed it against the wet pavement. I gave her a pack of pretty pink cachous from my pocket; her breath stank of gin and rot and I hoped she would take the hint and make immediate use of them, but she merely held them in her hand, awkwardly, admiring them—“such a pretty pink!”—as though she didn’t know what to do with them and was afraid to ask. I bought her a red rose, backed with maidenhair fern, and pinned it on her shabby black jacket.

I lulled her with kind words; I soothed her with sweet deeds. I wanted her to trust me; I needed it. It would make the horror when it came so much the sweeter! I wanted to see the hurt and betrayal in her eyes as she died! I wanted this to be sublime, an experience I would never forget! I wanted this whore to close her eyes in rapture, to submit to me like the most willing lover, the one she had dreamed of all her life but never found. I wanted her to expect delights, to dream of them, only to awaken to a nightmare in my arms that was all too real as I plunged my knife in and twisted it around.

I strolled her down the street; I told her even though it was raining—a light and inconstant drizzle—the sun shone for me every time I looked at her. A fruiterer’s shop was still open though it was nearing midnight, with a tempting array of white and black grapes arranged in his window. He was yawning and about to close his shutters. I bought half a pound of black grapes and shared them with her, but the ungrateful bitch merely chewed them, then spit them out into the street. She said she didn’t like how they felt going down her throat. At least she had the decency to use her own handkerchief to wipe the juice from her chin and not the fine silk one I had just given her. The cheap and vulgar tart, she had no refinement at all!

The International Working Men’s Educational Club was having a meeting, a bunch of socialist Jews and armchair anarchists who used politics as an excuse to get a night away from their wives once a week, and music was coming from the open windows of their clubhouse, so we strolled up and down Berner Street listening to it, Long Liz sometimes singing along when she knew the words. Then I drew her close and whispered, “Will you?”

Coyly twirling a grape stem, she said, “Yes.”

They always say yes to a toff like me!

Stupid bitches, they think clothes make the man, that coarse clothes and manners means a brute and that they can trust a suit and spats, a fine black overcoat trimmed with astrakhan, a mammoth gold watch chain gleaming on a man’s vest, a diamond horseshoe twinkling in his tie, and a tall silk topper or deerstalker hat. Because a man is dressed as a gentleman they think he is a gentle man. They don’t realize it, but I’m dressed to kill! I don a deerstalker only when I go hunting.

I followed her through the gate, the same one that surly chap had tried to drag her through. This time she went willingly, leading me by the hand, looking back at me with bold eyes. Oh yes, she must have been beautiful when she was young! Eyes like a gray dove’s plumage; what a pity she was so soiled.

The night was cold; so were my hands, and even colder my heart. I am a man of ice, angry ice, through and through! My hands were numb, but they would soon be warm. She turned away, fussing with the fastenings on her jacket. I drew my knife out. Just then she happened to glance back. She opened her mouth to scream. I grabbed the knot of the checkered silk handkerchief and twisted it viciously tight. I silenced the bitch with scarcely a whimper. A little worn-down stub of a knife, the blade barely a nub, fell from her lifeless fingers. How dare the bitch even think of trying to fight for her life; didn’t she know it wasn’t worth it? I stuffed the knife in my pocket—another souvenir. I took her prayer book too. She had shown it to me earlier, to prove that she knew what the Devil looked like.

I lowered her to the ground. I drew my knife across her throat. I felt my fingers tingle as I bathed them in her hot blood. A horse neighed nearby—too nearby! I started and glanced back over my shoulder. Hooves flailed the air. A man shouted; a whip cracked; the pony kicked the air and shied, refusing to pass through the gate. They call horses “dumb animals,” but they are so much more sensitive than we humans are. The horse knew what his driver didn’t. I scrambled back into the shadows, tensely awaiting my moment as he leaned forward and poked at her hip with his whip. I could not be trapped here in this courtyard. I groped for my silver box. I licked my medicine from my bloody palm, I tasted her blood along with its power. I felt strength surge through me. I knew everything would be all right!

The driver got down and struck a match. It was a windy night and the match immediately went out. He tried again. It must have been enough for him to see the blood. He ran into the club, jabbering in his Jew tongue. I saw my chance and seized it. I drew my overcoat tight about me and stepped swiftly past the cart, out into the street, and walked calmly but quickly away.

The bloodlust was still upon me. It drove me relentlessly onward. I couldn’t stop! As I walked, I sprinkled more of my medicine onto my palm and licked it. I moved deeper into the city, losing myself in the dark labyrinth of tangled and decaying, stinking, rubbish-strewn streets.

My hands were numb again and cold, so very cold, like my heart. I was shivering. The blood cools so quickly; I needed its warmth, that feeling of release, to be reborn in a bloody baptism. I had to kill again, I needed to rip, to hear the flesh tear, the grotesque musical gurgle of burbling blood and air escaping from a severed windpipe. They’d never sing again; I always took their voices away, and then their lives. But a slashed throat was never enough. I had to plunge my hands inside and grope and plunder. I had to feel the life go out and the hot blood turn cold. I had to know that thrill again!

I’d romanced a young whore called Rosey in Heneage Court earlier that evening. We spooned, sitting on a dustbin, but we had been interrupted, by a bumbling fool of a bobby no less. I pointed to my black bag and said I was a doctor, and the girl backed me up—bless her sweet, trusting soul!—so I spared her. I kissed her brow and called her “a sweet young thing” as I gently took my leave of her. Now I almost wished I hadn’t. . . . The next bitch I would make pay for my thwarted kill; I would do everything I intended for Long Liz and more, much more! Her own mother wouldn’t recognize the whore when I was done with her.





Katie. She was the liveliest of the lot. A trampled red cabbage rose with an untrammeled spirit, that’s how I shall always think of her. However had she kept her hopes alive in Whitechapel all these years when it seemed to suck the life out of everyone else?

She was a dainty bit o’ fun. The top of her head scarcely reached my shoulder, with bright hazel eyes and a mop of deep auburn curls, clean for a whore in this dirty city, apple cheeks, a pointed chin, and a cheery smile beaming from beneath the brim of a black straw bonnet with amber and green glass beads.

When I happened upon her, she was leaning beneath one of the sparse street lamps, having a smoke from a clay pipe, to steady her stomach, she explained. She’d been drinking all night and was just out of jail. She’d been having “a bit o’ fun” marching up and down Aldgate High Street pretending to be a fire engine, “bringin’ a bit o’ cheer” to the crowd that had gathered to watch her, when a constable came along and took her off to jail, to sleep it off.

“My man’ll give me a damn fine ’idin’ when I get ’ome,” she groused.

I just smiled. I knew what she didn’t know—she would never go home again.

She was fresh up from the country, “been ’op pickin’ with my man down in Kent I ’ave.”

Apparently the “lady” lacked luggage; she was wearing every bit of clothing she possessed. I teased her about being plump as a Christmas goose, but she said, “No, ’t’ain’t really so, gov; I’m really turrible skinny. See!”

She juggled the fulsome folds of her paisley silk shawl to better free up her arms, hiked up her grimy gray apron, and proceeded to reveal herself to me layer by layer. I was instantly reminded of the set of Russian nesting dolls I had given Gladys last Christmas. With increasing amusement, I watched as Katie lifted a dark green alpaca skirt, with an ornate pattern of golden lilies and Michaelmas daisies, a rich castoff from a stall in Petticoat Lane no doubt, another of brown linsey trimmed with black silk braid, followed by a much-soiled sky blue with three red rickrack flounces—she was so proud of those flounces!—then the petticoat her man had just given her to mark their anniversary (“been together eight years we ’ave!”), a triple-flounced pale pink chintz with a pattern of tiny bright flowers.

But she didn’t stop there. With a playful smile, she lifted a rank, ragged yellowed chemise stained with spots of reddish brown that must have been blood shed in months past, and showed me a pair of stick-skinny legs in brown ribbed stockings rising out of a pair of mismatched mud-caked men’s work boots.

She giggled and lifted her fat armful of skirts even higher and showed me her hairy cunt. The hair was deep red like that on her head, the color of freshly drying blood. I couldn’t wait to stab it!

I’ll leave this one her heart, since she’s already given it to “her man,” I charitably decided. Her liver or perhaps a kidney will do nice enough for me! “You must let me add something to your layers,” I said, caressing the bare skin above her bodice where ruffles galore framed her plump little b-reasts. “I’m afraid you will catch cold if I don’t.” She giggled as I tied another of Edwin’s gaudy silks around her neck. “There! It brings out the red in your hair and cheeks.”

She led me to Mitre Square. “It’s dark an’ quiet this time o’ night an’ we can take our time an’ be alone there.” The poor little whore was so eager to please me!

“Are you sure?” I blew playfully on the back of her neck and whispered, “It’s haunted, you know. Are you not afraid of ghosts?”

I told her the story of the mad monk, Brother Martin. Driven insane by lust, he had murdered a nun upon the altar of the church that used to overlook the square during the reign of Henry VIII.

Katie laughed. “Lord love ya, no! I ’aven’t a cowardly bone in me ’ole body! There’s not a ghostie or a beastie o’ the two- or four-legged sort that frightens me! An’ if me word’s not good enough to prove it, I’ll tell ya somethin’ more. . . .” She glanced swiftly from side to side to make sure no one was near enough to hear us, but we were quite alone; I had already made certain of that. “I’ve come back to London early, to earn the reward for capturin’ Jack the Ripper. I think I know ’im!”

“You do?” I arched my brows and leaned forward eagerly. “Truly, I am agog with curiosity! Won’t you tell me who he is?”

But she laughed and playfully jabbed me in the ribs. “Get on witcha now; I ain’t tellin’! Lose me reward, I should think not!”

“Oh my dear.” I drew her close and kissed her brow. “As if I could ever deprive you . . .”

Oh, Katie . . . if you only knew what I had in store for you. . . .

I smiled and followed this ragged coquette into the darkened square.

I swiftly scanned the dark, empty windows of the warehouses that surrounded it as I maneuvered her into a corner and turned her to face the wall. I nuzzled her from behind, but she was wearing so many layers I doubted she could even feel my cock.

“Oooh . . .” she purred. “Fancy it from behind, d’ya?” With a gay little laugh she leaned forward and flipped up her flounces like a French dancer and swished her bare bottom at me.

I reached for the handkerchief around her neck and gave it a jerk and a savage twist. I pulled her back and watched her eyes bulge out as her nails clawed frantically at the red silk, trying to loosen it. “Breath and voice gone forever,” I whispered in her ear. “Who did you think he was? Surely not me? Well, it doesn’t matter now; you were wrong, and you won’t live to tell!”

She went limp and I lowered her to the ground. I eased off my overcoat and stood staring down at her as I stripped off my gloves. The life had gone out of her eyes. I closed them. Her arms lay limp and loose at her sides, palms up, like a desperate woman begging for mercy or alms. I searched the blind eyes of the windows again and then took a deep breath.... I had much to do and so little time....

I fell upon her in a frenzy. I flung her skirts up, over her head, and slashed and jabbed like mad. There were so many layers that sometimes they fell down and got in my way. I didn’t stop; I cut them too. I ripped her from breast to cunt. I cut so deep I feared I would lose myself in her. I tore and flung her innards out. My hand closed around a kidney. I severed it. Maybe it would make a nice supper? Surely it couldn’t be worse than that womb.

Breathless, I sat back on my heels and spent in my trousers. Her face bothered me. It seemed so peaceful, as though she had gone to a better place, a safer place, and was now mocking me with the tranquility of the shattered husk she had left behind her. My fist tightened around my knife and I slashed off her nose, then each of her earlobes. I meant to take them away with me, to send to the police, but I forgot. I remembered Long Liz’s fine cheekbones and laid Katie’s open to the bone. Beneath each eye I carved an inverted V. If you ignored the space between, where her nose had been, and put them together ^^ it formed the letter M—M for Maybrick. But the police are such fools they’ll never see it for what it is—a clue!

I cut a corner from her apron to wipe the blood from my knife. Before I put it away, my trusty friend, my steel prick, I kissed it.

With silent mirth I swiftly pulled on my gloves as I stood and stared down at her. There was a brooch at her breast, nearly lost amidst all the ruffles, a little pink flower under glass now stained with blood. Was this cheap trinket another gift from her precious man? I pocketed it—another souvenir for my collection.

Shaking with silent laughter, I tipped my hat to Katie, lying dead at my feet with her bent legs splayed wide so that the bobbies when they came bumbling onto the scene would see another cheap pink flower, only this one sprinkled with drops of blood instead of dew.

As I was leaving the square, I passed a young bobby on the street and nodded politely to him and wished him good night. “Same to you, sir,” he said. I do hope he was the one who discovered what I had done to Katie! Would he remember me afterward and always wonder if he had said good night to Jack the Ripper? I hope the thought will haunt him all the rest of his life.

I knew they were looking for me, the hunter had once again become the hunted, but I also knew they wouldn’t catch me. I strode confidently, swift and sure, through the dark, mean streets, every twist and turn leaving them farther behind me, lost like blind rats in a maze.

In Goulston Street I paused to catch my breath. I leaned against a wall, tore off a glove, and shakily sprinkled arsenic onto my bloody palm. As I lapped up its power, I remembered the chalk. I had put a piece in my pocket, in case a clever little rhyme and the opportunity to write it came to me. I had hoped inspiration would strike while I was standing over a whore with a convenient wall behind, but you never know when the Muse will call; she’s fickle like any other bitch.

Upon the black dado wall of a darkened tenement, I scrawled in stark, startling white against the dead black:





Take it and make of it what you will, you damned, bloody fools with all your speculation about doctors, butchers, Jews, and Yids! You’ll stop and scratch your confounded heads and beat them bloody against the wall trying to figure it out, and I’ll be on to the next whore and then the next while you’re still trying to make sense of it.

If the fools have wits enough to realize it really is a message from me, I hope it will free the Jews from suspicion. They’re hated enough as it is and I’ve nothing against them.

When I was an apprentice lad, so hot for Sarah but unable to have her, I used to notice the Jewesses walking through Whitechapel in their black wigs. Their religion decrees that they must shave their heads after marriage and let no man but their husbands see them uncovered.

There was one young, shapely wench I always admired. A young bride with a face as pretty as a cameo beneath her black wig. One day, when I was burning with pulsing, mad lust for Sarah and sure I would go mad if I did not soon possess her, the beautiful young Jewess crossed my path. Acting on a sweet, mad impulse, I snatched the wig from her head and ran up an alley. Of course, she followed me.

Weeping with shame and trying to shield her naked head with her shawl, poor thing, she begged me to give back her wig. I backed her against the wall and hoisted her skirts. Tears ran down her face and she wouldn’t even look at me as I filled her. When I tried to caress her face, she jerked her trembling little chin away, still refusing to look at me. That only excited me more! I pushed her to her knees and spent all over her sacred bald scalp.

She never let me catch her alone after that; I never saw her again except in a gaggle of Jewesses. I’ve always remembered her fondly.

“For the fair Jewess,” I saluted my scrawl. I wouldn’t want one of her relatives to be molested or hanged for my naughty deeds. My soul is still kind, after all! It’s only whores I’m down upon.

I flung the scrap of bloody-shitty apron I’d used to wipe my knife down beneath it, another calling card from Jack the Ripper.

I heard the church clock strike three. Maybe they had bloodhounds after me? I’d read some such speculation in the newspapers. But I was like a bloodhound myself, relentlessly drawn to the scent of sex. Mary Jane was near. I was so close, I fancied I could almost smell her cunt. I thought of my succulent ginger tart—my spicy, ribald Mary Jane lying in her bed with her gin bottle, a song on her lips, her stained and sweaty shift hiked up to her hips, and her fingers fiddling away like mad. It was a most amusing habit she had; some women fidget with a lock of hair, a piece of jewelry, or the trimmings on their gown, but Mary Jane plays with herself. There was a little fountain set just a few feet off the road, for the denizens of Dorset Street to wash in, and I quickly peeled off my gloves and washed my hands and made myself presentable. I remembered to take the prayer book and brooch from my pocket and lock them in my black bag where Katie’s kidney was biding its time, waiting to become my dinner.

What a rare treat it would be for me, juicy with blood and red, red wine. I couldn’t wait to taste it! Maybe I would share it with Mary Jane or take it home to dine with my wife-whore? Or maybe the press or police would care to partake? Wouldn’t that be jolly? Let’s all make a feast of Katie’s kidney! So many men have had her in life, why not a few more in death? My bag was equipped with a good, sturdy lock. As an added precaution, I had left the key back in my bolt-hole. You can never trust a whore, and if I fell asleep Mary Jane might riffle my pockets. I smoothed down my clothes. The best thing about black is that it doesn’t show blood, especially in the dead of night. If there was any spot of blood on my white shirt, cuffs, face, or hands I would claim a nosebleed, mention it even before the bitch had the chance to notice it.

I plunged boldly into the darkness of the narrow archway leading to her room. Number 13, lucky for some, unlucky for others. I peeked through the window, around the makeshift muslin curtain, worn thin as a bridal veil. I was in luck. I caressed the diamond horseshoe on my tie and smiled like the Devil. She was alone. Fishmonger Joe was nowhere in sight. I’d been half-afraid that he would spoil everything. I’d thought about watching them f-uck through the window, the way I fantasized about my wife-whore and Alfred Brierley. The candle in the ginger beer bottle was burning bright and Mary Jane was lying there on the rumpled bed just as I had pictured her. I could hear her singing softly and slurrily about that damned, infernal violet on her mother’s grave.

Let the police go on playing hunt the Ripper, let them have their fun, while I had mine.





With the dawn I rose and left Mary Jane sprawled in sweet drunken slumber. On my way back to my cozy little bolt-hole in Petticoat Lane, I passed a policeman. He handed me a handbill. On it was my letter, printed in facsimile, in red ink no less, above an urgently worded request for any who recognized the writing to come forward. As I walked along I saw that they were also pasting posters on the walls. I wanted to laugh right in their stupid faces. Safely back in my bolt-hole, I took a postcard and my bottle of red ink from my travel desk and sat down to write:



I wasn’t codding dear old Boss when I gave

you the tip. Youll hear about Saucy Jackys

work tomorrow double event this time

number one squealed a bit couldnt finish

straight off. Had not time to get ears for

police thanks for keeping last letter back till

I got to work again.





Jack the Ripper





That “tomorrow” would really confound them and make them wonder if I had really stopped in the midst of my bloody labors to write and mail the postcard or if instead it was the act of a prankster. Once again I addressed myself to the gentlemen of the press, at the Central News Agency; I knew they wouldn’t disappoint me.

I changed my clothes and went out to pop my postcard in the post, enjoying my walk and the cries of the newsboys, shrilling out the latest horrors to befall the harlots of Whitechapel. I watched the women cluster together, cowering close to one another and their menfolk for comfort. I savored the terror in their eyes. Which one of you, I wondered, which one of you will be the next for Jack?

I bought every edition, every paper I could find. I stopped at a bakery for an assortment of pastries, drizzled with icing, caramel, and rich chocolate sauce and filled with spicy cinnamon, jam, or sweet cream. I am always good to my whores. I knew these sweets would please Mary Jane, as would the present in my pocket and inside the gay striped satin hatbox I was carrying.

She knelt naked upon the bed as I placed the emerald taffeta bonnet on her sleep-tousled ginger-gold head and tied the ribbons in a big beautiful bow beneath her pretty chin. I watched her ravenously tear into the buns, tearing into them like I tore into whores. And guzzle from the bottle of rum I’d brought her, knowing this was her favorite breakfast. White cream, tawny caramel, red jam, and dark chocolate staining her face, she sat there, shamelessly naked, legs wantonly sprawled; ravenously licking her sticky fingers when all the sweets were gone. She was an adorable greedy glutton begging for more and I would give it to her.

I watched as she leisurely rolled the green silk stockings—“as green as the Emerald Isles and as beautiful as your eyes,” I said gallantly—up her fine, shapely legs. She remarked that it had been such a “terrible long time” since she had felt silk against her skin and lifted a leg and twisted one green-clad ankle this way and that to admire it. “I’ve hooked many a man by showin’ me ankles on a rainy day!” she said as I smiled over the newspapers and read to her all about Jack the Ripper’s double event.

I watched her shudder and cross herself and reach for the rosary lying on the table beside her bed and begin idly fingering the beads instead of herself.

“Sometimes I dream,” she confided with wide, frightened eyes, “that he’s comin’ for me! Sure as the Mark o’ Cain, I’m marked as one o’ his, an’ there’s no help for it; even if I run, he’ll find me!”

Her terror fed my need and my greed, and soon I must let the papers fall to the floor and take her again, plunging my knife of hot flesh, not cold steel, into her until she screamed with pleasure and begged for more and for me to stop all in the same breath. Women—two-faced, two-minded, duplicitous, deceitful whores all of them!





Do all the whores in Whitechapel know one another? There are so many whores here, thousands of them, it seems impossible. Yet Mary Jane knew Long Liz and Katie. Like the miserable ghost of Marley rattling his chains at Ebenezer Scrooge, Mary Jane brought them back to haunt me, accusing eyes, angry mouths, and, underneath, throats gaping open like second mouths, hungry for life but filled only with death—raw, bloody death! Filthy whores, they degrade everything they touch, even their own sorry lives! I did them all a favor by killing them. I relieved them of their misery; it was the nicest thing anyone could ever have done for them. I let them sacrifice their lives for a good and noble cause—to keep two sweet, innocent children and their undeserving mother-whore safe. Why can’t they be grateful? They should go down on their knees and thank me, not haunt me and rattle those damn phantom chains!

The tall, gangly, flaxen-haired farmer’s daughter Elisabeth Gustafsdotter—Gustav’s Daughter—was born in “Torslunda or somethin’ like it.” She loved to read anything she could get her hands on. She dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher, but all her hopes were shattered when she was sixteen. She was working at her first job, as a maidservant in a fine house in Gothenburg, “servin’ the gentry,” when she let the charming young master, Lars Fredrik, the adored only son of the house, seduce her. She thought he loved her. In those days Liz still believed all the fairy tales about peasant girls who became princesses.

He left her pregnant and with a dose of “somethin’ heinous” that landed her in the infirmary, with the blame all upon her.

The young man claimed that she had seduced him, wept when he knelt down before his gray-haired old mother, and confessed that Elisabeth, the housemaid, had stolen his innocence and infected him with some shameful ailment that had left a canker on his doodle and made it burn and weep a foul discharge.

Liz’s daughter was stillborn. She was heartbroken when the doctor told her that she could never have another. Her good name and all her hopes gone, she took to drink and walking the streets.

Eventually she emigrated, hoping for a new and better life in England. She threw herself on the charity of the Swedish Church in Trinity Street. She loved to visit the reading room and pore over the papers from the old country. Sometimes she let the Swedish sailors who brought them buy her favors and drinks, always drinks.

Then along came John Thomas Stride, a good man believing in redemption, that everyone deserves a second chance. They married and opened a coffeehouse in Crispin Street. Liz was always kind to the poor, sick, downhearted, and downtrodden, especially the whores. “There but for the grace of God go I,” she always said as she filled the coffee cups and served thick, generous slices of the cinnamon-spice cake or another kind filled with creamy cheese and luscious tarty-sweet red raspberry jam, and special cookies rolled in white sugar, all baked from her own mother’s recipes.

Though Elisabeth was certainly a tall girl, I learned from Mary Jane that her height had nothing to do with her being called “Long Liz.” It was her habit of telling tall tales and her vast knowledge of Swedish folk and fairy tales, with which she regaled the coffeehouse customers for hours.

But of course it didn’t last. Disease raddled Mr. Stride’s fine, generous mind; he raved and turned violent. It was a dreadful sight to see a man so horribly transformed. “Truly, had you known him before, you would not have known him after,” Mary Jane said. “He was altogether a different man when he’d been the soul o’ sweetness before.” He had to go to the asylum, where he soon afterward died. “Liz said they sawed his skull open an’ found his brain full o’ holes like moths had been at it.”

His brother did Liz wrong, cheating her out of the coffeehouse, and, sunk deep in despair, she sought solace in drink and the arms of strangers again. “She just couldn’t resist those sailor boys from Sweden.” She had to earn her keep. She’d already seen what happened when body and soul parted ways—“when that happened to you, you were like to end up in the asylum like Mr. Stride.” She whored and begged charity and drinks, always drinks.

As I had suspected, the Princess Alice tale was just a figment of her imagination, bait for sympathy, originally concocted to take advantage of the charity fund established for victims of the disaster. “The closest Long Liz ever got to a ship after she docked in England was the sailors she fucked.” Mary Jane laughed. The boot of some surly drunk or a pimp Long Liz wouldn’t pay—depending on which story you chose to believe—had kicked most of her teeth out; the rest she had lost to decay.

She’d lived off and on the last few years with a dockside laborer called Michael Kidney—Kidney! I perked up, remembering the treasure sealed up tight, floating like a mysterious blob-shaped creature at the bottom of the sea, in a jar of red wine locked in darkness inside the black Gladstone bag I’d left beneath my bed in Petticoat Lane. But “she couldn’t quite stick to it. For long spells she’d be fine; then off she’d go, carousin’ with sailors, livin’ an’ fuckin’ an’ drinkin’ like there wasn’t goin’ to be a tomorrow.”

Mike was a good fellow, but he found Liz hard to handle. He grew weary of all the arguments and gave up trying to make her stay, contenting himself with knowing that she would always come back. Until Jack’s knife flashed, I added silently as I snuggled against Mary Jane’s bare back and gave her earlobe a dainty nibble when what I really wanted to do was bite it off!

Would the police find Katie’s earlobes that I had sliced off? What would they do with them? Would they sew them back on in the mortuary? What did they do with dead whores? Did they bury them in pieces or try to sew them back together again like rag dolls, to give decency in death to those who had lived so long without it?

In my mind’s eye, I saw the ghost of Long Liz standing at the foot of the bed, blame blazing in her eyes, severed throat gaping, pointing an adamantly accusing finger. The fireball in my belly churned and burned. The rats gnawed. I gasped and gripped Mary Jane’s b-reasts so hard with my cold, numb hands that she cried out, “Play gentle now, Jim!” I heard the rattle of phantom chains and swallowed hard. My throat burned as though I had drunk acid, and pain drove spikes into my head. Damn you, Mary Jane! You should be hosting séances instead of peddling your cunt! Through you the dead live again, damn, Damn, DAMN you!

But she was done talking of the fair lying Swede. Now Mary Jane was on about Katie. Catherine Eddowes, the name she had been given at birth, or Kate Kelly as she liked to call herself, proudly taking her man’s name.

Mary Jane would know her too! Would I ever kill a whore who would elicit a shrug and a blank stare from Mary Jane instead of “oh yes, poor harlot, I knew her well!”?

Katie and her many siblings had been left to run wild after her mother died in childbed, while their father worked hard to earn their keep making tin plates. At sixteen she’d fallen hard for a smooth-talking pensioner, Thomas Conway. He’d persuaded her to have his initials tattooed in blue ink upon her arm and given her three bastard babies, “but no weddin’ ring, though their life together was like a circle unendin’. First he’d beat her, then Katie’d run out an’ try an’ soothe her hurts with gin, then he’d come after her, pick her up out o’ the gutter or some other bloke’s bed, say some sweet words that’d make the poor fool fall in love all over again, an’ home they’d go, until it all happened again, an’ there was no reckonin’ when that might be, two hours, two weeks, or two months, but it always happened again. Like livin’ on a floor covered in broken glass, it was, knowin’ that no matter how carefully you set your feet down you were bound to get cut sometime.” But then Tom Conway up and disappeared, and no more was ever heard from him.

Katie mourned, then moved on. She was lucky. She found her true love with an Irish market porter, John Kelly, who was determined to give her a good home and wean her off the gin. Though she suffered an occasional slip, it wasn’t often, and he’d made it plain to her that she was his woman and he wasn’t a man to suffer her being with another.

“She wasn’t a reg’lar whore, not like me an’ the rest,” Mary Jane said. “She was just a poor soul tryin’ to get by, one day at a time. But when the thirst was upon her, an’ the bottle had gone dry, an’ the money had run out, an’ her still cravin’ more, she’d do whatever she had to to get another nip, an’ if that meant lettin’ some gent hoist her skirts, so be it. What Johnny didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.”

Katie and her Johnny lived one day at a time, renting a double bed most nights in a doss-house in Flower & Dean Street, him working as a porter in the market and her hiring out as a char and taking in washing and needlework or hawking flowers or what have you in the streets. She was a bit of a magpie, with a fine, quick eye and a knack for picking up little treasures to pawn, things the finer folk threw away or lost, like quality buttons of metal or ivory, sometimes ones set with stones, or pillboxes and cigarette or card cases. Once she even found a pair of silver spectacles set with little diamonds and flashy black stones so fine she thought “they must’ve belonged to the Queen” and was half-tempted to go to the palace to return them. Every autumn Katie and Johnny would join the mass of migrant workers heading for the country to pick hops and enjoy the sunshine and clean air and all the fresh milk and wholesome country fare they could eat. It was something they looked forward to all year; it was such a welcome change from the miserable muck and murk of foul and foggy London.

Now two ghostly whores were rattling their chains at me. I wanted to strangle Mary Jane Kelly with those phantom chains, but when I looked in her green eyes all I could say was, “Back down on your back you go,” and roll on top of her and thrust deep inside her. Why was it so hard to kill this one? She was only a whore like all the rest of them!





Back in my bolt-hole, I cut Katie’s kidney in half and fried and ate it with onions and carrots. I sprinkled my medicine in my glass of fine red wine and watched the white powder swirl and melt into its ruby-red depths. Warmth flooded my icy fingers, filling them to the very tips. It was very nice! Almost as nice as bathing them in a whore’s hot blood. The other half, bloody and raw, sopping and wine sodden, I put into a little brown cardboard box and tied it up tight with string, then sat down with my red ink to write a new letter, this one addressed to Mr. George Lusk, the Chairman of the newly formed Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, who had vowed not to rest until I was brought to justice and was offering a substantial reward for my capture. I had met the man before; he specialized in decorating music halls and was a fellow Freemason in Michael’s lodge. Lusk thought Michael was “a gem of a man” and always wanted the halls he designed to be the perfect setting for him, so it gave me great pleasure to address him in the guise of Jack the Ripper.



Mr. Lusk





Sor





I send you half the Kidne I took from one women

prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was

very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it

out if you only wate a whil longer





signed





Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk





I wrote it in strong, bold red letters, delighting in my crude misspellings, so contradictory and bizarre that it would make them wonder if I was really that ignorant or just playing games. What illiterate cockney knows that knife starts with k and writes such an elegant copperplate? But this time, as much as I wanted to, I did not sign my name, just to toy with them. They would know who it was from; Katie’s kidney would leave them in no doubt about that! I could think of no better calling card, except one with my real name engraved upon it, and that the fools will never have, ha ha!

I lay back on my bed and licked white strength from my palm. I furiously fondled my cock and thought of my wife-whore sucking Alfred Brierley’s while I stood at the foot of the bed and watched. I glanced at my watch. Tomorrow, after I mailed my parcel to Mr. Lusk, I must catch the train back to Liverpool. How I wished I could catch my wife-whore and Brierley in the act, burst in on them naked in bed. I wanted to whip out my cock and scream at them to keep f-ucking until I spent all over them!

I held my watch up over my head, swinging it by its heavy chain, like a pendulum. My Muse blessed me then with a wonderful idea. I found a pin and, after carefully prying off the back of the casing, slowly, painstakingly, inscribed dead in the center of it I am Jack the Ripper! and, below it, my signature, James Maybrick; then, like planets orbiting the sun, I surrounded it with four sets of initials: PN, AC, ES, and CE.

It served the last whore right to deny her her man’s name at the end. E for Eddowes, her maiden name, though her days of maidenhood were long past. Now the whores are always with me! As long as I have my watch, I will carry them with me wherever I go. The victims I know them so well! Let them rattle their phantom chains, God damn them!





20

I couldn’t bear it anymore, this endless back-and-forth between loving husband and the mad, rampant monster. I would have to resort to drastic measures. If I could not divorce Jim, I would have to make him divorce me. I’d managed to make a few discreet inquiries amongst solicitors, and they all advised me, for the sake of the children, to aim for reconciliation. Even Dr. Hopper, who had pretended all along with me that my injuries were the result of tumbles down stairs and other careless accidents, agreed that it was all for the best when I turned to him, hoping he would testify for me. I’d tried to write Jim a letter, asking him to set me free, a long, rambling, bumbling, surely bungled thing that I ended up shoving into the depths of my desk in frustration. It was no use! Since no one would take my side and help me, Jim would just have to divorce me; I’d have to force his hand.

I decided to do the most brazen thing I could think of. I reserved the bridal suite at Flatman’s Hotel in our own names, Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick. I told Jim an old aunt of mine was ailing and in London to see a surgeon and was begging me to visit her, fearing it might be the last time she would ever see me on earth. Of course, Jim said I must go. He even gave me a lovely speckled fur cape lined in orchid satin as a substitute for his “warm embrace during these dreary and lonesome days we must spend apart,” explaining that his business prevented him from joining me, as I knew perfectly well it would; that was why I had chosen that week in particular.

But it wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick who checked in at Flatman’s but Alfred Brierley and Mrs. Maybrick. Several of the cotton brokers who frequented Flatman’s recognized us. They knew at once that the man registered as James Maybrick and sleeping in bed with Mrs. Maybrick was not Jim, and that was just what I had intended.

But I didn’t count on Alfred walking out on me after the first night. He’d seemed so delighted when we’d made the arrangements, congratulating me on being so clever and saying how perfect it all was. But the fantasy didn’t quite match the reality. He was sullen and peevish instead of passionate. He accused me of trying to drag his name through the mud, of using him and wanting to see him named co-respondent in a divorce scandal. He said he didn’t love me, we’d had our fun, and he was done, he had no intention of marrying me.

“You mean nothing to me,” he said bluntly as he was putting his clothes back on and packing up his trunk, ignoring the lovely dinner I’d ordered brought upstairs for us, “no more than any other woman, just pleasure for pleasure’s sake, nothing more, and I cannot fathom how you ever thought otherwise; I certainly never said anything to give you that impression. If I like her, and the lady is willing, I’m willing to oblige her until I get tired of her. Afterward, if she doesn’t cling and cry too much and try to hold on to me, sometimes we can resume as friends, after a suitable interval, of course. That’s how I live my life, and I see no reason to change it; I’m having a thoroughly marvelous time being a bachelor, I couldn’t be happier.”

At first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“No! You don’t . . . you can’t mean that!” I cried.

“Oh, but I do,” he was quick to assure me, eyes and words cold as ice, freezing me.

In that moment I felt my heart break like a trifling little crimson glass Valentine’s Day bauble. It was only when I was losing him that I realized how much I loved him. I just couldn’t bear to let him go.

I was so upset I snatched up the crystal bowl of jewel-lovely fruit medley and poured it over his copper head and slapped his face, sending fat, glistening drops of sugary-sweet syrup and chunks of pineapple, diced peaches, grapes, and cherries flying everywhere. “You cad!” I shouted. “You haven’t a chivalrous bone in your body!”

I wept up a storm and went back to Liverpool on the very next train. I told the people who saw me crying that there’d been an unexpected death in my family.

Aching with loss and longing, I returned to Battlecrease House, with leaden feet, to await the inevitable; the storm was bound to break soon. No one was expecting me, and when I walked heart-sore, travel weary, and tearstained into my bedroom I was astonished to find none other than Nanny Yapp, blind as a bat with her spectacles off, dancing and twirling before my mirror wearing my candy-striped satin corset and a flurry of pink and white ruffled petticoats trimmed with red satin bows and ribbon-threaded lace that also belonged to me. She lifted and shook them like a French dancer, displaying a pair of my frilly drawers and pink silk stockings. She even had her big flat feet crammed into a pair of my little red satin French heels, her toes bulging out at the sides in a way I supposed must be quite painful, and had my bracelets, a veritable fortune in icy-glistening diamonds, stacked up to her elbows over a pair of my pink satin opera gloves. She was singing in such an awful off-key manner I was suddenly immensely grateful that Jim and Mrs. Briggs had never seen fit to entrust her with the children’s musical education.



“While strolling through the park one day,

In the merry, merry month of May,

I was taken by surprise by a pair of roguish eyes,

In a moment my poor heart was stole away,

Da da da da da da

Da da da da da da. . . .”





This was simply too much; I just had to walk away. Luckily she was singing so loudly and without her spectacles she was so blind that she never noticed me standing in the doorway. I went back downstairs and told May I was feeling right poorly and would she please be so good as to draw me a hot bath; that would surely give Nanny Yapp time to get back into her clothes and out of my room.

While I was soaking in my bath, luxuriating in the rose-perfumed steam, I asked May to bring me any letters that had come for me during my absence.

Much to my surprise, amongst the many bills I found a letter from Alfred Brierley. He said he feared he’d been “far too precipitate” and “egregiously mistaken.” He’d been feeling foolish and out of sorts and worried after several men he habitually did business with had recognized him in the lobby, and one must expect a certain amount of fear and trepidation when a man sees the end of his bachelor days upon the horizon. That fear had made him unkind and he fully deserved being called a “cad” as well as having the fruit medley dumped over his head. I was “the most exciting, intoxicating woman” he’d ever known, and he couldn’t bear to go on without me. We must reconcile at the first possible opportunity or else he would find himself sitting with a pistol in his hand one night contemplating self-destruction, and did I really want a man’s blood, his heart’s blood that pulsed only for me, staining my lovely lily-white hands?

“Oh, Alfred, Alfred, Alfred,” I sighed. “Your love is just like a noose, always keeping me dangling!”

I tried to tell myself to buck up and show some pride and not go running back the moment he beckoned. But I knew myself too well to lie to me; I knew I would soon be back in his arms and in his bed again.

The warm, fragrant water lulled me into a doze, and I awakened with a start to a sudden splash. I was no longer alone. Edwin had crept in and disrobed, in such haste to join me in my perfumed bath that he had forgotten to remove his socks. I laughed until I cried, and then I laughed some more. Edwin laughed with me, pointing and braying at his sodden green socks. It was almost like old times except we were naked in the bathtub.

When my laughter subsided, I tried to shove Edwin out, but he only laughed all the harder and pulled me onto his lap. He assured me that we were quite safe; Jim had gone up to London. My absence had put him in a fond and forgiving mood, and he had decided to surprise me by settling all my debts as the first step on the road to the new life we would be starting down together the moment he returned tomorrow evening. We were only a scant few months away from a new year, 1889, and he truly wanted this New Year to be a new start for us, devoid of all deception and lies.

“He told me to tell you,” Edwin said, “when he takes you in his arms and kisses you at the stroke of midnight, he wants to kiss you that way every day for the rest of his life. I think he means like this. . . .” Edwin proceeded to illustrate until I succeeded in stopping him by shoving a cake of pink rose soap into his mouth.

I jumped out of the tub and threw on a robe. Foolish creature that I am, the words were scarcely out of Edwin’s mouth before my heart went leaping after Jim, leaving Alfred Brierley in the dust. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped and sank like a stone. By now Jim would have already inquired for me at Flatman’s and discovered that Mrs. and Mr. Maybrick had already checked out. The catastrophe I’d set the stage for could not be averted. The only hope I had was to pray for a miracle and, barring God’s intervention, to somehow brazen it out. If only I could persuade Jim to hold on to that spirit of forgiveness, then maybe, just maybe, there was some hope left for us after all. I suddenly wanted that new start more desperately than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I knew then, no matter how I might try to pretend, I still loved Jim. I wanted to be a wife, his wife, not any other man’s mistress.





I dressed in green, the color of spring, and waited for Jim to come home. Someone had once told me that butterflies were a symbol of rebirth, so I put the lavender and mint jade butterfly comb in my hair and sank down on my knees and prayed with all my might that if God would help me disentangle myself from this foolish fix that was entirely of my own devising I would never look at another man again, that henceforth there would be no one but Jim. That’s the way it should have always been, but I’d made mistakes, out of anger and hurt pride, a spirit of revenge, and a longing for what was lacking, and now I wanted desperately to atone.

I’d kept Mrs. Humphreys slaving in the kitchen all day. I ordered her to prepare, with especial care, a replica of our first meal as man and wife. Everything must be exactly right—the rosemary chicken, tender green asparagus, new potatoes seasoned with herbs and butter. I’d ordered the lemon custard cake from the bakery this time, Mrs. Humphreys not being so adept at fancywork as I would like, and asked that a dove with an olive branch in its beak be drawn in icing atop the dark chocolate frosting.

I jumped up and ran downstairs the instant I heard Jim at the door. My foot hadn’t even left the final step before his fist felled me. As stars danced before my eyes blood streamed from my nose and my consciousness wavered like a dying candle. I fully expected to feel his hand in my hair dragging me upstairs, followed by the crushing power of his fingers around my throat, but he left me lying right where I fell. It was his way of telling me that he was done with me. I wanted to roll over on my stomach and drag myself up the stairs after him and find a way, some way, to win his love back, but I didn’t have the strength. I never wanted anything more until after I knew I had lost it. Tomorrow, I promised myself as the stars stopped dancing and everything went dark, tomorrow . . .