The Ripper's Wife

27

THE DIARY

I’ve taken to my bed. I shall never rise again. Doctors come; doctors go. They dose and poke, prod, and purge me. Syringes—for veins and anus. I am pumped full of drugs, except the one I crave most—they stint so on the arsenic, and I am too weak to reach my private store!

Morphine suppositories, hydrate of potash, bromides and bicarbonates, Fowler’s Solution, nux vomica, potassium salts, soda water and milk, mustard in steaming-hot water to soak my ice-cold feet and purge my stomach, double doses of bismuth and brandy, Tincture of Jaborandi, Extract of Aloes and Chamomile Flowers, sulphur lozenges, laudanum, Du Barry’s Revalenta, chlorodyne, Valentine’s Meat Juice, Neave’s Invalid Food, prussic acid, lemonade gargles, celery nerve tonic, liver pills, antipyrine, enemas, and even leeches.

Dear Edwin sneaks me sips of champagne on the sly and assures me I will soon be better.

Why can’t I have my arsenic and strychnine tablets? I grow weaker and weaker without them, but the fools won’t give me any no matter how much I beg and plead. Michael says it is very ill becoming of me to behave in such a whining, petulant manner, like a tot throwing a tantrum because he is denied a toffee apple. I’m dying, Dying, DYING for want of arsenic! But all they will let me have is just a little sip, a very tiny, tiny, tiny, minuscule, occasional sip, of Fowler’s Solution that only tantalizes me.

They hover together like a flock of blackbirds in their black coats for their consultations; they argue and contradict one another, blabbering about inferior sherry and chronic dyspepsia, indiscreet dining, a chill from when I was caught out in the rain last time I went to the races, or too vigorous a toweling at the Turkish baths. Have you ever in your entire life heard anything more absurd? Death by toweling in a Turkish bath! Each one thinks he knows better than the rest. Bunny weeps, Edwin frowns and rages, “I tell you it’s those damn strychnine pills; he’s been taking them like candy!,” and Michael glowers and summons more doctors.

My legs are as stiff and useless as dead things. They lie there stretched out before me, rigid as steel bars.

It’s May outside, but my windows are shut tight. “Nature,” John Calvin so rightly said, “is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.” But not revealed to me . . . only concealed. . . . The velvet curtains are drawn tight against the fresh, sweet air, blue skies, and sunlight. My children will never again grab me one by each hand and pull me out to walk in the park, to fly kites, chase hoops, and sail toy boats, feed the birds and squirrels, and buy them toffee apples and ices—lemon for Bobo, raspberry for Gladys. The next time my little girl brings me a bouquet of bright flowers it will be to lay upon my grave.

Outside my window, Gladys and her little chums are skipping rope. I hear God’s voice in the nonsense rhyme they are chanting and it brings me a peculiar kind of peace:



“Jack the Ripper’s dead,

He’s lying on his bed.

He cut his throat

With Sunlight Soap,

Jack the Ripper’s dead!”





I pray God she will never know, that a day will never come when she looks back with those heart-melting violet eyes and remembers herself as a six-year-old child, in bouncing black ringlets, big satin hair bow, button boots, and purple plaid frock, and realizes just how close she came to the truth:



Jack the Ripper’s dead,

He’s lying on his bed,

He hasn’t the courage to

cut his throat,

But Jack the Ripper’s dead.





Today will be the last time I confide my thoughts to this loyal diary. I’ve made up my mind, I am going to give it to Bunny to read and reveal to her in all his blood-crazed jealous madness the Jekyll and Hyde monster she married. Afterward, I will most humbly implore her forgiveness and beg her to find the courage and strength to do what I cannot and kill me.

A public trial and execution would destroy our children; they would be forever tainted, tarred and feathered, as the accursed spawn of Jack the Ripper. But Justice must be done. I cannot suffer the beast inside me to go on living, and he will as long as I draw breath. Bunny must be brave and kill the husband she once loved; it’s the only way.

This diary I will ask her to hide away, somewhere secret and safe, and hope someday, long after Bunny and my dear children have departed this earth, when the truth can no longer touch or hurt anyone I once loved, someone will find it and those who read it will understand that love can make sane men mad and turn a gentle man into a fiend and they will find it in their hearts to forgive me.

God have mercy upon my sorry, tormented soul, grant my guilty heart peace and my unquiet spirit eternal rest, forsake me not, instead forgive, and remember the gentle man I was before love’s madness made me into a monster.

Signed, for the LAST time, in red, for my heart’s blood and in memoriam of that I have spilled, from the depths of my guilty heart . . .