The Ripper's Wife

21

THE DIARY

My life is a house of cards. It’s threatening to fall apart. I’m afraid that soon all will come a-tumbling down. Blinding headaches, bad dreams, and bellyaches, I do believe I’m done for; I’m afraid I am damned in this world as well as the next. Even my medicine’s strength seems to be flagging. I need so much now that every time I take it I know I am taking my life into my own hands . . . one grain too many and Death’s scythe will strike me down. I feel awed and enslaved by its power, yet I would not give up one precious grain of my white powder.

The icy numbness that afflicts my hands is creeping down into my legs and feet. My fingers and toes are like nubs of ice. Sometimes I sit on the side of my bed and hold up my unfeeling hands and stare down at my bare feet. I wiggle my fingers and toes. Sometimes they tantalize me by tingling, but that’s all. It’s a queer sensation. I walk but cannot feel the floor beneath my feet. I stepped on one of Bobo’s lead soldiers; his little sword broke through the skin and drew blood. Had I not stumbled and looked down, I never would have known it.

Dead whores stalk my sleep, rattling their chains and pointing fingers of blame, alongside images of my wife-whore writhing naked on my bed with Alfred Brierley while I stand at the foot and watch, furiously jerking my cock, and our children’s woebegone faces float before my eyes, and something else—I’m haunted by the gentle man I used to be. Sweet and solicitous to my wife, kissing and caressing her, I liked to pretend she was my little girl with golden curls and no one could spoil her even half so well as me. “Kiss Papa,” I would whisper when I hung jewels around her slender white throat and pressed a kiss to the gently throbbing pulse.

“The best father in the world!” Bobo and Gladys used to call me. I always took such pride in that!

Suddenly my grand scheme, to make all the little whores pay for the Great Whore’s sins, seems so futile, so pointless! I don’t want to be Jack the Ripper anymore! My God, what was I thinking? I MUST have been mad! Why did I ever stray from the path of righteousness? I want to be the man I used to be, the one who won Bunny’s heart; I want to forget the crimes I committed when I was consumed and transfigured by rage, lust, and madness. I want absolution and to make amends.





I went to visit my parents’ graves today. It was my fiftieth birthday. I can scarcely believe I’ve lived half a century. I didn’t sleep at all last night. I dreamed I cut my darling Bunny up instead of a birthday cake and, with a devilish smile and a mad gleam in my eyes, served pieces of her—heart, cunt, kidneys, liver—to the children and guests. I woke up screaming. I flung off the covers and ran and woke Bunny up, hugging and kissing her a thousand times. I was so very glad that she was still alive and all in one piece, that I hadn’t risen from my bed in a trance and hacked her to bits. We made love, really made love, for the first time since this horrid business began. She gave freely and willingly; I didn’t just take. Warm and welcoming, she took me into her body, into her sweet arms, comforted me, and told me that she still loved me and always had. I want so much to believe her! “I never stopped loving you, Jim!” she cried as she clung to me. “It was just that I was so hurt and mad!” Hurt and mad, we both had been hurt and mad, but in my pain and madness I had become the Devil’s tool. God help me! I was a mad FOOL!

I stood for a long time gazing down at my parents’ graves, slumbering serenely in perpetual peace in the shadow of a stone cross. I prayed for tranquility and guidance, for God to shine a beacon on the path to absolution to help me find my way back. How I wished that they had loved me! Sometimes I think that’s why I love my own children so much, because I know what it is like to grow up lonely and unloved. When Mother died, her hand in mine, not Michael’s—mine, Mine, MINE!—her last words to me were a plea that I endeavor to be more like Michael. When I remembered that, I kicked the cross and trampled the violets I had brought my parents, CRUSHING them, PULVERIZING them with my heel, GRINDING them, leaving a pulpy purple, green, and brown dent in the sacred ground.





I get no rest. I toss and thrash and talk in my sleep. Fever burns my brain. Pain gnaws my belly. There are hours when my limbs are locked and useless as iron bars. Sometimes I rise and walk without waking. Damn Edwin for telling Michael! I am writing this from his house in Regent’s Park. Michael insists I see another specialist. He’s taken to locking me in at night so I don’t fall down the stairs and break my neck.

The doctors are useless, Useless, USELESS; I see that now. Were they not necessary to procure prescriptions I would be done with the lot of them altogether. I’m more down on doctors now than I am on whores, but I lack the energy to start a new regime of ripping. They use words like hypochondria, melancholia, gross indulgence, and dyspepsia and dose me with harmless tonics that might as well be sugar-water for all the good that they do me. Liver pills! Digestive lozenges! That fool Hopper actually had the gall to caution me against trebling the doses of his prescriptions, as though one spoonful of anything ever did anyone any good, and mixing them with other drugs. He said if I continued to do so I might do myself a grave injury! That’s his polite and careful physician’s way of saying I might kill myself. If I didn’t take matters into my own hands and dose myself with arsenic and strychnine I would be dead already!

None of them understands how sick I am! They call me a hypochondriac, ignoring the obvious fact that I am sick all the time! Dr. Humphreys even gently alluded to the tale of the boy who cried wolf as though I were a child in the nursery! Of all the impertinences and absurdities! Drysdale actually had the gall to roll his eyes when I told him our neighbor had just been diagnosed with diabetes and I was afraid to have him over for dinner and cards lest I catch it. The doctors think I just want attention, to be coddled, that I like being sick! That IDIOT Drysdale thinks my condition is due to “suicidal self-indulgence at the dinner table,” nothing more! Haven’t I just reason to be afraid? The coldness and numbness continues creeping over my limbs. I fear I will wake up one morning and find myself paralyzed and not able to move at all, not even an eyelash; it almost makes me afraid to go to sleep. The pains in my belly bend me double; the doctors think I’m just being dramatic when I say it’s like rats gnawing or a blazing fireball burning me from gullet to bladder. One quack suggested I try cold cream enemas and pills of powdered rhubarb and a healthful and replenishing tonic of celery! COLD CREAM ENEMAS! RHUBARB! CELERY!

I’m so afraid of dying! I’m afraid of going to Hell and of who will be waiting for me at the portal. I’m afraid of phantom whores rattling chains, waiting for me on the other side of Heaven to drag me down to Hell, where even I know I belong. God help me; no one else can!





I’ve been beastly to the children! I DESERVE death for scaring them! What has become of the father I used to be? So loving, so kind! When they prattle on about Christmas—more than a month away! Will I even live to see it?—and try to coax me into revealing what presents I will give them, I lose my temper and snap, “A nice sharp knife like Jack the Ripper’s!” and watch their little eyes fill with tears and terror before they run away from me, the man who used to play for hours with them on the nursery floor and buy them licorice and toffee apples. My God, how I have changed! I don’t know myself anymore! God help me, even I am afraid of me!





I keep telling myself I will be better in the spring—the season of rebirth will replenish, renew, and restore me. I will be born again in the spring. It has always been my favorite season. I will feel better when the flowers bloom and the robins sing outside my window. By the time spring comes, I will have made all the wrongs right. We will be a happy family again and lead a happy life.

The wife-whore has sent me a letter, a long and lovely letter that brought tears to my eyes. She begs my forgiveness for all her mistakes, the debts and Alfred Brierley; more than anything she wants us to make a new start. We’ve said the same things so many times before, dare we make one more attempt? That’s what I want too—a new start! New Life, New Love, Love Renewed! Oh, Bunny, my dear, precious Bunny, you’ve awakened springtime in my heart!

I will give up Mary Jane, fond of my ginger tart though I am. I hate to leave her in the lurch, but we must part. Fishmonger Joe has already walked out on her and the rent is nearly thirty shillings in arrears, and Uncle John is losing his patience.

Fishmonger Joe caught her in bed with another whore, her friend Julia, “havin’ a harmless little frolic, not hurtin’ a soul,” Mary Jane protested. They’d even offered to let him join in, moving over to make room between their naked bodies, stroking their nipples and spreading their thighs wide to entice him, but he demurred. “He’s such a prude, Joe is!” Mary Jane snorted with contempt as she related the details of their parting. He’d been so angry he’d punched his fist through one of the windowpanes to keep himself from striking her and wouldn’t even linger long enough for her to bind his wounds.

I want to do something for my spicy ginger tart. I have destroyed four whores; let me now save one. I think I shall see if I can find the money to pay her passage back to Ireland, to give her a fresh start too in a land of green that reminds me of spring. I’ve heard her more than once before warning young girls, “Whatever you do, don’t you do wrong, an’ end up like me.” She’s only twenty-six; it’s not too late for her to change her life. She’s clever enough to crawl out of the gutter and stay out!





I’M GOING TO MAKE EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT!!!

I WILL ATONE FOR ALL MY SINS!!!





I’m tired of being Jack the Ripper. I want to throw my knife in the Thames and vanish into the fog as suddenly as I appeared.

I’m tired of being James Maybrick too. I’m just tired. TIRED, TIRED, TIRED! I can’t STAND the strain or the pain anymore! God help me! IT’S KILLING ME! Lightning bolts stab my brain, the rats gnaw, and my bowels and belly churn and burn like Hell is already inside me! I feel the demons’ pitchforks stabbing; they spin my innards around like noodles upon a fork! GOD HELP ME!





I JUST WANT IT TO STOP!!!





MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?

WHAT HAVE I DONE?

OH GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?





When I opened my eyes, I thought I had lost my mind. I thought I was lying naked in a slaughterhouse, embracing a hunk of dead meat, a freshly slaughtered cow, but, God help me, it was Mary Jane. Blood gummed my lashes and flies buzzed in my ears. Sticky redness blinded me; I could hardly see. Blood was in my nose, in my mouth, in my hair, covering my whole body as though I had bathed in it. All was red in Mary’s Jane room. The walls ran red with gore.

I wanted to believe it was all a bad dream. A nightmare from which I would soon awaken. I wanted to forget, but it was all coming back to me . . .

Walking in the rain, wishing it would cool my fever . . .

“Come along, my dear; you will be comfortable. . . .” My spicy ginger tart leading me back to her room, undressing me, and, for me, lying down, opening her legs, all juicy and pink....

She was drunk and sleeping. She never had a chance to scream. When I plunged the knife in I saw her green eyes open wide with fright and surprise, over the edge of the sheet, just like I had first seen them staring at me over a newspaper. “Oh . . . murder . . .” she gasped, that and nothing more, as her head lolled back and the blood gushed out. She lay back unabashedly for her new lover— Death—limp with limbs a-sprawl. My ginger tart . . . she surrendered so easily to the knife . . . no fight at all.

All the Devil in me must have come out to play....

Her lovely face was gone. I—it had to be me—had cut it away in strips. Only her death-glazed green eyes, staring up blindly at the blood-spattered ceiling, and her long ginger-gold hair, sopping up the blood like a sponge, remained to show that she had once been human, not just a butchered beast. Her b-reasts, nose, and ears were on the table, beside the bloody heap of her intestines, and other piles, blobs, mounds, and strips of flesh I couldn’t and didn’t even try to identify. What did it matter? Even if I could put it all back together, like a jigsaw puzzle of flesh, it would not bring her back. Her liver lay between her feet, knees bent, thighs agape, as though she had just given birth to it and her cunt had spit it out in a bloody mass onto the sheets. Her thigh was bared to the bone, nicked by my knife, like someone carving a notch for every lover. Her left hand reached into her empty abdomen, like a greedy child groping for some hidden prize, but there was nothing left.... Blood dripped like red rain to pool on the floor beside and beneath the bed. The thin mattress was soaked through, dyed red, the harlot’s color, saturated, still wet, with it. I had even—it must have been me, though I cannot remember actually doing it—scrawled my wife’s initials, a crude FM, written in blood on the wall amidst the spatter. Will anyone even notice it amongst so much blood and carnage?



And all the Queen’s horses,

And all the Queen’s men,

Can never put this harlot together again!





I had to kill her. I know that now. It could never end any other way. She was the mirror and I had to break her. She was the medium who resurrected the whores I killed and brought them back to haunt me, to rattle their phantom chains and stand at the foot of my bed to rob me of peace and rest. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing them. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore in the green mirror of her eyes. The women I killed I thought were worthless, human dross no one gave a damn about, penny fuckers who would even spread their legs for a stale loaf of bread if you offered it to them, but she made them real; through her own peculiar Irish-Welsh witchcraft, her storyteller’s tongue, she made them live again. She made me see them as something more, women more worthy of pity than scorn. Some of them had fought to redeem themselves. Even if they ultimately failed, they had tried! The earnest attempt counted for far more than the failure! She showed me how life’s misfortunes had made them what they were when I, Jack the Ripper, mighty, invincible, with my arsenic and my nice sharp knife, made them pay for another woman’s crimes, crimes she might never have committed had I been a better husband.

She was the mirror and I had to break her. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore, mirrored in uncanny green. Jack the Ripper masquerading as a gentle man—a gentleman—reflected in the emerald mirror of her Irish eyes! I saw a condemned man every time I looked in them. I saw my jury of four, my jury of whores—Polly, Annie, Liz, and Katie—declaring me guilty, damning me to Hell, every time. Some people believe that when someone dies violently the last thing they see is imprinted upon the retinas of their eyes and a photograph will reveal it. I shudder to think what the police will see if they bring their lights and cameras to photograph Mary Jane’s magical green eyes. The coward in me wanted to gouge them out, to grind them like grapes beneath my boot heels, so that could never happen, but I hadn’t the heart; I hadn’t the right. Let her eyes condemn and damn me; they already have. Even if they don’t lead the police to my door, I’m damned. Saucy Jacky is no more!

It was better this way, I tried to console myself as I sat on the edge of that bloody bed weeping and holding her dead hand, feeling her flesh as cold as my own. Drink would have destroyed her beauty all too soon; men are brutal creatures by nature and would not spare her the boot or the fist or their syphilitic cucumbers. She would have lost her teeth and roamed about Whitechapel miserable, drunken, riddled with lice, fleas, and disease, f-ucking for pennies to drown her sorrows in gin until despair drove her to the river, to suicide, another haggard, ugly whore, sick and old before her time. If not my knife, some other’s knife might have killed her, a scorned lover, a pimp who thought she owed him a share of her meager earnings, an abortionist on a bloodstained table in some dark back alley, Fishmonger Joe, or another man like him, who couldn’t tolerate her “jolly frolics” with other females. My knife was really the kindest cut of all. In my own way, I loved her.

In the fireplace I burned the green stockings and the fancy bonnet I had given her. I took some old clothes her laundress-whore friend had left behind and added them to the blaze. I couldn’t risk these pretty bits of greenery being traced back to me. I still had to think of my children.

I took Mary Jane’s heart away with me. I held it in my icy, trembling hands and imagined it still beating, pulsing faintly with life, just for me. And some souvenirs: a lock of her hair, the key she was forever misplacing, and a naughty French postcard, superbly hand tinted, the only one she had left to remember her decadent days in Paris by—Mary Jane striking a risqué pose, looking every bit the elegant lady in a mint-green and turquoise satin gown, with her long ladylike white gloves, lace fan, and high-piled mound of gleaming curls garnished with red roses. A saucy, mischievous glow lit up her face as she impishly lifted her skirt high to show she hadn’t a stitch on above her red-gartered stockings.

I stood over her and stroked her hair and kissed the bare, bloody bone of her brow. She just stared at me with eyes like cold green glass. I saw accusation, understanding, and tenderness in their glassy, dead emerald depths and knew I was forgiven . . . by her . . . but not by me, nor God, I fear; the Devil shall yet claim me as his own. I’ve a feeling a flaming throne is reserved for me at the left hand of Satan.

I left with the dawn. I left her more naked than naked. More naked than she had ever been in life.

The rage is suddenly all burned out of me. A cold and quivering husk, I stood for a long time gazing down into the black waters of the Thames. I wanted to jump, but I didn’t have the courage. There’s a poem about despairing whores taking their lives, jumping from the “Bridge of Sighs.” They had more courage than I did. My hands were cold and shaking so, I couldn’t bring myself to raise the knife and slit my throat. I emptied the contents of my silver box onto my palm, a little mountain of white snow, and swallowed it all, but I’ve become accustomed; it would take more than that to finish me. It only made the rats in my belly bite harder, sinking their teeth in deep to gnaw, Gnaw, GNAW. My eyelids twitch, Twitch, TWITCH! If I weren’t already mad, I think it would drive me so. My brain and bladder burn, Burn, BURN! The pains of Hell have got hold of me! Tears rolled down my face. All I could do was throw my knife in. I watched it flash silver as it fell. The dark waters were the last thing it would ever stab.

Back in my bolt-hole, I mournfully etched her initials—MJK—onto the back of my watch. I will never forget her. I will always regret her. In my dreams, she holds me in her arms, my head cradled lovingly against her breast, as she rocks me gently, like a child, strokes my hair, and croons her favorite song:



“Scenes of my childhood arise before my gaze,

Bringing recollections of bygone happy days,

When down in the meadow in childhood I would roam;

No one’s left to cheer me now within that good old home.

Father and mother they have passed away.

Sister and brother now lay beneath the clay;

But while life does remain, to cheer me I’ll retain

This small violet I pluck’d from Mother’s grave.





“Only a violet I pluck’d when but a boy,

And oft times when I’m sad at heart, this flow’r has

given me joy,

But while life does remain, in memoriam I’ll retain

This small violet I pluck’d from Mother’s grave.





“Well I remember my dear old mother’s smile,

As she used to greet me when I returned from toil;

Always knitting in the old armchair,

Father used to sit and read for all us children there.

But now all is silent around the good old home,

They all have left me in sorrow here to roam;

While life does remain, in memoriam I’ll retain

This small violet I pluck’d from Mother’s grave.

“Only a violet I pluck’d when but a boy,

And ofttimes when I’m sad at heart, this flow’r has

given me joy,

But while life does remain, in memoriam I’ll retain

This small violet I pluck’d from Mother’s grave.”





But she was the mirror and I had to break her. I couldn’t stand to look at myself anymore! Wherever she is, Mary Jane will know the truth by now, and I know she will understand. Who was it—some author, though I cannot recall the name or the book—who said that God sometimes sends us the strangest angels; we never know they have been to visit us until after they’re gone. Mary Jane Kelly was undoubtedly one of the strangest angels the Lord ever sent, an angel masquerading as a whore for a murderer masquerading as a gentle man. She ended Jack the Ripper’s bloody reign. The Autumn of Terror is over; winter is about to fall.... I killed the messenger, God’s messenger . . . GOD HELP ME! Shall I live to see springtime? I buried her heart by moonlight at the base of the flowering may, the hawthorn tree, in our garden. Sometimes I look out and fancy I see her standing there . . . watching, waiting for me . . . keeping vigil . . . my saucy ginger tart angel . . . Why didn’t you tell me God, not the Devil, sent you?