The Ripper's Wife

28

Bicker, bicker, bicker, that’s all the doctors did, and all the time Jim just kept on getting sicker and sicker. He was sinking so fast, and no one seemed able to pull him back up. And I was caught right smack in the middle of it. I just didn’t know what to do or who to believe. They kept saying words like gastritis and nervous dyspepsia and melancholia and talking about bad sherry and gross indulgences while dining, and pumping more drugs into his poor body through every orifice. He moaned and groaned and tossed in terrible pain, and every time they gave him anything in the way of medicine or food he was sick at one end or the other, sometimes both at the same time. Finally they would let him have nothing to eat but a kind of bottled invalid food, a weak beef broth, called Valentine’s Meat Juice, since everything else seemed to disagree with him.

But Jim kept crying for champagne, lemonade, and, most of all, arsenic and strychnine, insisting that he would soon be right as rain if he could only have his “pick-me-up” tonic. But everyone acted like they were deaf and dumb, as though my poor husband were a man deranged by delirium crying out some vile obscenity that it was best to ignore for propriety’s sake.

In desperation, I sought advice in Jim’s own medical books. When I found a passage suggesting that sudden and complete deprivation could be deadly to a man accustomed to arsenic eating and brought it to the physicians’ attention they just smiled at me, patted my hand, and said I must put my trust in them and advised me to try to calm my nerves with needlework and prayer.

Michael came up from London, furious that I hadn’t called in more doctors and nurses; it was obvious Jim was in need of more specialized care than Liverpool could provide. When Edwin interjected that it was “those damn strychnine pills; he’s been killing himself with them!” Michael snapped at him to be quiet: “When you attain a medical degree I will be pleased to consider your opinion, but until then I will thank you to keep your mouth shut!” Poor Edwin just stood there blinking and baffled; he’d only been trying to help, and what he’d said made a lot more sense than any of the doctors’ prattle about inferior sherry and too vigorous a toweling at the Turkish baths.

Mrs. Briggs agreed with Michael that I was quite incompetent and flooded his ear with tales about the “slipshod fashion” in which this household was run, then proceeded to take full charge. Then I looked out a window and saw Nanny Yapp in the garden gesticulating wildly, talking urgently to Edwin. Later I came across the two of them, with Mrs. Briggs and Michael, huddled in the hallway outside Jim’s room thick as thieves. They broke apart at my approach and the looks on their faces almost froze my blood. Suddenly I found myself forbidden access to the sickroom without supervision. There would be times when I would hear Jim calling for me and I would try to go to him and find the door barred against me by a nurse whose features were as hard as her marble heart. “Can’t you hear he’s calling for me?” I would cry as the door was closed firmly in my face.

I didn’t know then, but I had made another mistake. Alfred Brierley had informed me by letter that he had made up his mind once and for all to end everything between us forever and go away to South America. Jim being so ill and me feeling so friendless, alone against Michael, Mrs. Briggs, Nanny Yapp, and the dizzying array of doctors and nurses marching in and out of the house, I just couldn’t bear the thought of parting. All I could think about was Alfred lazing away the days amidst coffee beans and brown-skinned beauties wearing little more than beads fanning him with palm leaves. The cold tone of his letter made me long suddenly for the warmth of his body and the comfort of his arms. I know better than any just how horrible that sounds, with my husband lying there sick, maybe even dying, and me weeping and wailing and walking the floors and hardly sleeping, hoping and begging and praying that he would get well, wanting, yet again, to make yet another fresh start. Heavens, but I do look a contrary, contradictory, deceptive, duplicitous female! Even I can see it. Yet the purpose of this memoir is truth, and I cannot deny what I felt, even if that truth shows me in the poorest and most unflattering light.

I had dashed off an impulsive letter to Alfred, to try to stop him from leaving, the words flying from my pen so fast I hardly knew what they said, thrust it into an envelope without giving it a second glance, and told the maid to mail it. She left it lying on the hall table, and it happened that as Nanny Yapp was passing, to take the children out for “their afternoon constitutional,” she saw it. She would later say that she gave it to Gladys to carry and that my little girl, skipping along on the way to the post office, excited about doing this favor for Mama, had dropped it in a mud puddle.

Being the kind, considerate woman that she was, that viper who had nursed at Satan’s own teat, Nanny Yapp decided to open my letter and put it in a fresh envelope and in so doing discovered my shameful adultery and decided that it was her “Christian duty” to alert Edwin and Michael, choosing that time to also tell them about the flypapers I had been soaking in my bedroom before the ball.

There had been a dreadful murder case a few years back in which a pair of sinister spinster sisters who ran a rooming house had sent some of their lodgers to the grave with arsenic they obtained by soaking flypapers, and Nanny Yapp leapt to the conclusion that I was no doubt up to the same thing, endeavoring to “hasten the poor master’s end,” and my “sinful passion for Mr. Brierley” was the reason.

Melodrama had leapt right off the stage and become real life! No wonder they regarded me with suspicion! But I was too overwrought; I couldn’t see it through their eyes then, so I missed the chance to take precautions to protect myself. Murder had never even tiptoed to the threshold of my mind at any time! And Jim took so much arsenic himself and was even then lying there in his sickbed bleating for it like a baby for its mother’s milk.... I thought everyone who knew him, even casually, knew about his habit; he was always whipping out that silver box, dropping a pinch into his wine, and raising his glass to wish everyone “a fine complexion, good health, and longevity!” I was too blind and weary to see it then, but I was playing right into their hands. Michael would see to it that Jim’s reputation would be safeguarded at all costs, while my own already-tarnished honor would be sacrificed, even if it meant my life must also be lost. But I didn’t know until after . . . and by then it was already too late....





Jim sent for me to sit with him. This time they allowed it. Outside in the hall, where I was left waiting, I heard him arguing with them, demanding would they deny a dying man his final wish, the consolation of what just might be his last meeting with his beloved wife. Michael and Mrs. Briggs tried to speak against me, but Jim, to his credit, would not hear them.

“She’s my wife,” he said, “and I love her, and I will see her alone—without busybodies and chaperones!”

And in the end, they let me in.

“Oh, Jim, I’m so afraid!” I cried, clutching at his hands. The skin was gray, cold, and clammy and looked waxy and dead. It was an awful thing to hold and part of me wished I didn’t have to, but another part of me never wanted to let go.

I bent forward, meaning to kiss him, and nearly vomited right onto his chest. It took all my strength to persevere and deliver the intended kiss. His breath was absolutely fetid. I’d never smelled anything so foul coming out of a human mouth.

“Oh, Jim!” I sobbed, wishing I had strength and power enough to pull him back to health and life.

“Hush, now,” he said, his voice weak and raspy, and squeezed my hand. “It’s all for the best.” He smiled gently at me, a real smile this time that was in his eyes as well as upon his mouth.

“But, Jim,” I protested, “when we married we swore for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . .” And now, when I could see the very life ebbing out of him, I knew I had failed to keep the most important promise of my life, the one I had intended never to ever break. Yet I had broken it again and again, so many times, and now it was too late to make amends. I had done the unforgivable, and even if Jim could find it in his heart to forgive me I could never forgive myself. In that moment I hated Alfred Brierley and Edwin too, but even more than them, those Devil-sent temptations I had succumbed to, I hated myself.

“Hush,” Jim said gently, raising, with a mightily trembling hand, my own to his lips and letting his cracked, fever-hot lips linger there. “It doesn’t matter now. I forgive you for everything, and I hope you can forgive me—”

“Oh, I do, I do!” I cried. “Anything! Everything!”

“Not yet . . .” he said with an adamant shake of his head, “not yet, not until you know . . . all.”

It was then that he pushed from beneath the covers a black book. After a moment I recognized it as the diary I had bought for him all those years ago as a happy young bride skipping spontaneously into a stationer’s shop to buy a gift for her husband. I’d wanted to give him something for his study, to lie on his desk and to say for me, whenever he touched or looked at it, I love you and I’m thinking of you. I hadn’t seen it since; in my silly, frivolous way, I’d forgotten all about the gift after the pleasurable moment of giving it had passed; I’d had no idea that he had even kept it.

“Before I give you this,” he said in a raspy, rough, whisper-soft voice, “you must promise me first that after you’ve read it, no matter what you think of me, you must come back and sit, talk with me again, one last time.”

“Of course I will!” I assured him, a trifle baffled as to why he would even ask such a thing. Of course I would come back; I would be with him every moment if only they would let me! How could he think anything written in that silly old book could change that, and at a time like this, when his very life was in peril? It all seemed so absurdly trivial!

Jim shook his head. “This is a promise you cannot make lightly, Bunny. If you give your word, you must be fully prepared to keep it, no matter what you find in these pages.” He tapped the book’s black cover.

“I promise,” I said, thinking no doubt that he had chronicled his adulteries, or gambling debts I had no inkling of. But given my own sins, I could surely face his. Knowing the details might hurt, I couldn’t deny that, but I could bear the punishment; maybe I even deserved it after the way I had carried on with Alfred Brierley. “I promise faithfully, no matter what you’ve written, I will come back to you after I’ve read it.”

“Even if you find a monster inside?” he persisted, his eyes boring like nails into mine.

“Even if I meet a monster inside,” I promised, “you are still my husband, and I love you, and I will always come back to you, as God is my witness. I mean it, Jim; this is one promise I will keep!”

Jim nodded, satisfied, and pushed the book across the bed to me.

“Leave me now,” he said, “go and read it, and then, come back to me, and, if you can, forgive everything.”

“I’ll come just as soon as I can.” I rose and pressed a kiss onto his brow.

As I reached the door, just as my hand was on the knob, he called out to me, forcing his weary, worn voice to carry—how it must have hurt his poor throat to make that effort! “It was all for love, Bunny; you must believe that!”

“I do!” I assured him. “I do! We’ve both hurt each other so much, my darling, but it really was all for love! People do bad things in Love’s name all the time; we’re not unique in that. I think we’ve just made a worse muddle of it than most do.” I forced myself to smile through my tears.

“Indeed we have!” With a wry, weak little chuckle, Jim nodded and lay back and shut his eyes. I had a sense, in that moment, that I had, with my words, given him a sense of peace, and I was glad that that at least was something I could give him.





The time I spent alone in my bedroom with that book changed my life forever.

It took me hours to read it because I kept stopping, sick with horror, dumbstruck and disbelieving, going back and reading the same lines over and over again, hoping I had misread it, that I was tired and overwrought and imagining things and that this time the barbaric mutilation of a woman of the streets would become a mundane business luncheon where the talk was as dry as the cotton the men were discussing.

I sat and stared and ran my hands, like someone blind groping gently to discern a person’s features, over that mad, erratic, furious scrawl, so different from my Jim’s genteel, gentlemanly hand. This can’t be him, I kept telling myself. It just can’t be. This is not the man I love, the man I married.... It must be the drugs; it had to be the drugs! Combined with the ghastly and lurid stories filling all the newspapers and the anger he was feeling toward me, the jealousy and betrayal, it had all combined, melded into one mad arsenic fever dream and given birth to this medley of horrors. It was no more than a ferocious, furious fiction! Oh God, please, let it be so! It just couldn’t be anything else! Because if it was the truth . . . that was just too horrible to contemplate.

The more I read, the more incredible it seemed. My blood turned to ice and the horror cut through me just like Jack the Ripper’s knife. I shivered so hard there were times I could scarcely read the words; whether I held it in my hands or laid it on my lap, the book shook so badly, and there were moments when my face went green and I had to thrust it from me and grope blindly, through my tears, for the chamber pot.

I just couldn’t believe it! I didn’t want to believe it! If this was true . . . Oh God, it couldn’t be true! I wanted to believe that my husband was mad, better a madman who sat and wrote out his crazed, drug-fueled fantasies than a murderer, because with madness there was always hope, hope of a cure, of a return to normalcy, but with murder it meant a life for a life, prison until the last breath was drawn or he perished on the gallows!

But it all seemed so terribly real! I could feel the hate burning off every page, and the rage that wielded the pen, and the knife, it was all so vividly real to me. This was not Charles Dickens drawing the reader into a story, spinning and binding a spell with words; this was too terribly, nauseatingly, horribly REAL! And the pain . . .

Oh God, those poor women! I could see their faces, I could feel their fetid breath upon my flesh, along with their heart-pounding fear the moment when they realized . . . It was as though I were standing right there, looking over his shoulder, helpless, deaf and dumb, unable to warn them, unable to shout, RUN! SAVE YOURSELF! I had no choice but to stand there and watch them die, watch him—my Jim!—kill them!

If these wild, wicked words were true . . . Jack the Ripper was no longer a faceless fiend stalking the streets of Whitechapel and my own bad dreams, he had another name, an ordinary mundane man’s name, James Maybrick, and he was my very own husband, the father of my children. If this sick fantasy was indeed fact . . . my husband was a killer and I was the cause! I was the blind White Queen who had reigned, unwittingly, beside the mad Red King over that Autumn of Terror! He had projected my sins onto those poor, unfortunate women, so, in a way, I killed them too; they had died because of me. No matter how horrified and sickened I was by what he had done, I could never forget that—that I was the cause of it all. Our damaged, distorted, and perverted love had brought death, in the most violent, frenzied form, to five innocent women.

With his words he took me back, back to where I never wanted to be again, back onto the wretched streets of Whitechapel, the site of my first illicit tryst with Alfred Brierley, and even further, Jim took me to Hell and showed me such horrors there that I knew I would be forever scarred by them. He introduced me, one by one, to his victims, so that they could never again be just names in a newspaper. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—now they were all real women to me! I had seen them through his eyes, and through his hands I felt them; I felt their blood surge and their hearts race with terror and then grow cold, still, and die. I wanted to fall on my knees and beg their forgiveness. I now knew just how true it was that one small pebble cast into a pond creates great ripples that spread far and wide and can indeed touch and change, horribly and incredibly and indelibly, many lives. My sins were no longer my own; others had suffered and died because I was vain, hurt, lonely, foolish and weak. God help me, I was in my own way, a murderer too!

Love makes sane men mad and can turn a gentle man into a fiend, my husband had written. I now knew what he had meant when he had called after me as I was leaving his room, “It was all for love, Bunny; you must believe that!” The horrible thing was that I did, I did believe it, I knew it was true. Love, like Justice, is blind, but only Love is mad and impetuous and shouldn’t ever be trusted to wield a sword; it causes only more harm, leaving hearts and lives lying broken and bleeding in Love’s debris. Do the dead and wounded, I wonder, weep for the ones left behind to pick up the pieces? Or is it a penance they are destined to pay? God alone knows the answers.

As I lifted the diary from my lap a brass key fell from its binding. I was catapulted at once back through time to the morning I had sat as a young, na?ve bride at my husband’s desk and rattled the locked drawers. My life had indeed turned out to be a fairy tale after all, only not one of the pretty, happily ever after stories but the most sinister one of all—I was indeed Bluebeard’s bride, Jack the Ripper’s wife. And amongst the many secrets my husband was harboring was a cachet of murdered, butchered women, like the dead wives in Bluebeard’s secret chamber. When I had opened the covers of that diary I had peeked into that secret room, and now, now I held in my hand the key. . . . God help me! I prayed as I walked into my husband’s study.

Seated behind his desk, I shuddered and stared at the snake-haired Medusa heads that stood guardian over each keyhole. My blood is already turned to ice; if she turns my body to stone that just might be a mercy, I thought as I forced myself to try the key in each one until the third lock yielded. I was as afraid as though I knew it contained a live serpent that would rear up and strike me. I sat there for quite some time, the little brass handle at first cold growing hot in my hand, rattling gently as I trembled, trying to find the courage to open that drawer.

Finally, I could bear it no more. I took a deep breath, gave the drawer a tug, and found myself staring down at a candy box beauty with big, innocent blue eyes set in a porcelain and roses face, framed by a pompadour of golden curls and a big pink picture hat trimmed with tulle and roses. She might have been me at my best. With trembling hands, I lifted the box out and set it on the desk.

Whoever would have thought such a beautiful box that had once contained the most heavenly, exquisite chocolates—cream centers, caramels, liqueurs, jellies, nuts, nougats, pralines, and juicy red cherries floating in sweet pink cordial—could now be the repository of such horrors? Grisly trophies, souvenirs of the foulest murder, not tenderhearted tokens of love, sweet love, letters and valentines. One by one, I laid them all out in a row, knowing that I would never look at a chocolate box in quite the same way ever again.

A big brass button embossed with the figure of a naked lady with long flowing hair on horseback, it had to be Lady Godiva; two brass rings; a little prayer book in a language I now knew was Swedish, its cracked binding flopped open to reveal a crude woodcut depicting the Devil, stained reddish brown at the edges with the life’s blood of the woman who had owned it; a stubby little knife; a cheap glass brooch with a pink flower inside, like a sad valentine, the fluted ruffle of gilt metal that framed the poor, pathetic little thing turning green and black in spots like moldy, mildewed lace; a well-worn key with a long lock of braided ginger-gold hair threaded through the top and tied with a fraying green ribbon; a bottle of red ink; a cache of newspaper clippings about the Whitechapel murders; and several slim volumes bound in innocuous, unadorned cardboard covers with some rather suggestive, titillating, and thought-provoking titles: Freaks of Youthful Passion; Lady Lilywhite & the Lumberjack; A Case of Early Morning Stiffness; Three in a Coach: The Clergyman, the Countess, & the Cowpoke; The Schoolmaster & the Waif; The Schoolmarm’s Birch Rod; The Amorous Adventures of a Kentucky Farmboy in New York; The Minister & the Milliner; and The Vicar of Make-Love. Last, there was a postcard, delicately tinted, to put roses back in a now dead woman’s cheeks and recall the vibrant green of her eyes and the ginger-gold of her hair, the only parts of her left for her lover to recognize her by after the carnage.

Despite the vulgar, indecent pose the elegantly clad model was striking, brazenly lifting her skirts high to reveal her naughty, naked, lasciviously rosy-tinted lady parts, it was her face I sat and stared at. It was the face that had been carved away in the Ripper’s mad frenzy, and I knew, sitting there at my husband’s desk, that I was the very last person to look upon the now effaced and forgotten features of Mary Jane Kelly.

Was it my imagination? I reached across the desk for the silver-framed photograph my husband always kept of me and held the postcard up alongside it, trying to will my hand to stop shaking and the tears to stop pooling long enough for me to compare them. Her hair was gingery while mine was pure spun gold, my eyes were limpid violet-blue and hers a saucy, insouciant emerald, and hers was definitely the more voluptuous figure, but we might have been sisters raised in two different worlds. The same lively hint of mischief tweaked at both our smiling mouths, mine more refined, gentle, and sedate, while hers was entirely unrestrained, but it was there just the same.

“He might have left you be had it not been for me! God forgive me!” I laid the postcard facedown in the bottom of the candy box and piled my husband’s other souvenirs back on top of it. Last, I added the diary. It fit perfectly, as though it belonged, like a big, deep, dark chocolate heart at the center of it.

There was no turning back and retreating to blissful ignorance. I could no longer doubt and deny it, make up excuses, grasp at straws, and pretend. These grotesque souvenirs were the last nail in the coffin; all hope was dead. I now knew, beyond all doubt, that my husband was Jack the Ripper. This night he had taken me to Hell and shown me his very soul with my own, damned alongside it, shackled perpetually to it by guilt.

I caressed the band of gold on my left hand, which now seemed to me suddenly to have become a golden shackle. “Bound forever,” I whispered, “till death and ever after!”

I started to lock the candy box away, back in its drawer, but at the last moment I hesitated and took it with me instead, back to my room. I had some peculiar notion, an urgent, unexplainable compulsion to keep it safe, protect and preserve it; I had become the sole guardian of a terrible secret. I knew if Michael got his hands on it, it would be in the fire before I could even blink an eye. He wouldn’t hesitate to destroy the truth to maintain the fiction of the Maybricks’ outward respectability.

In my dressing room I kept a lovely little tapestried chest that I’d had since I was a girl in Germany; I called it “my treasure chest.” Inside were my postcard album and some odds and ends, postcards I had not yet pasted in, photographs, pretty or amusing pictures, advertisements, stories, poems, articles, recipes, and anecdotes and such that I’d clipped from various periodicals with the idea of someday creating a scrapbook, and stray buttons, ribbons, and trinkets. It had a deep tray that lifted out, made in such a way that one didn’t immediately realize it, so it had the effect of having a false, or secret, shallow bottom compartment. Into this I put the candy box, burying it under all the scraps of pretty fabric I’d been saving for years, intending to make a quilt someday.

Satisfied that the candy box was now safe, I took a few moments to compose myself, and then I went back to Jim, just as I had promised.

The night nurse didn’t argue and let me in; she was so wrapped up in the romance she was reading I think she would have let Satan himself in with scarcely a nod over those enthralling pages. She resumed her cozy seat by the fire and just let me and Jim be. At times I heard her murmuring what sounded like “kiss her, kiss her!” as though urging the hero on to loving action.

When I sat down on the bed beside him, Jim opened his eyes and looked at me, searching, hopeful, and wary.

I just sat and looked at him with tears welling in my eyes.

He hesitated a moment, then took my hand. I think we were both surprised that I didn’t pull it away. There was a part of my mind and my heart that just couldn’t reconcile it. Jim was still Jim, yet he wasn’t. . . . But how could I reproach him? I had made him what he was. I was the potion that had brought evil Mr. Hyde out of gentle Dr. Jekyll. If I had been a better wife, a faithful wife . . . those five women would still be alive.

“You’ve come back to me,” Jim said, his voice so coarse and faint I had to lean down to hear it.

I nodded. “And forgive everything,” I added as the tears overflowed my eyes.

“I always knew you were as kind and gracious as you are beautiful,” Jim said with the ghost of his old gallantry. “I was the luckiest man in the world to have you. I’m sorry I didn’t value you as highly as I should. My own bloody temper, and my wretched stupidity, my secrets, and lies, my dalliances, led to your own—”

“I was weak and foolish too!” I sobbed.

“You were a sweet, beautiful child. I spoiled and neglected and abused you in my fashion,” Jim said, “and you had every cause to rebel. You deserved better, Bunny, much better—”

“You were everything I ever wanted; you still are!” I cried, and laid my head down on his chest until his nightshirt was soaked clean through with my tears.

“Bunny.” Jim plucked gently at my gown, trying to pull me back upright so I would sit up and look at him. “Bunny, all is forgiven that can be between man and wife, but there is one thing more I must ask of you. . . . Compose yourself, my love, and be brave, and listen. . . .”

I sat up, mopping at my eyes, though the tears welled right back up, seemingly unending.

“You know now, having read the book, what a frightful coward you married. I need you now to do what I cannot.”

I started back in shock. “Jim, you can’t mean . . . !”

He nodded with the gentlest, most understanding little smile and reached out for my hand again. “It will be so easy, my dear, and you will have nothing to reproach yourself for. Remember, you do not do murder, but Justice! You are sparing our children the shame that would forever tar them if I were to stand trial. I’m so sick already, and the doctors don’t know what to do for me. Instead of making me better, they keep making me ill, so this, what you are about to do for me—and I know you will be brave and do it, Bunny! It will be so simple; the meat juice is right here.” He indicated the nightstand. “And my coat is in the dressing room, and my silver box within the pocket. They’ve weaned me, against my will, and my body can no longer withstand the doses it once could. Just add a pinch or . . . make it two for good measure, since, as I’ve always said”—his face lit up once again with the same boyish smile that stole my heart on the decks of the Baltic—“one spoonful, or pinch, of anything never did anyone any good, and I will slip quietly away and face my Maker, and His justice, and take my guilty secret to the grave, and with it, my undying love for you—”

“Oh, Jim!” I dissolved in tears again. “I can’t!”

“You can.” Jim hugged me close as I imagined my tears soaking clean through his chest to drip on his heart. “You can and you will, because you know this is the right thing to do. If I were to go on living, he would go on living too. You’ve read . . . you know . . . I’m slipping, Bunny. I can no longer chain the beast inside me. It was just the Devil protecting his own that kept me from being caught that last time, but luck doesn’t last forever.... It’s only a matter of time, and the only way to kill him is to kill me. You must do it; there’s no one else I can trust. Think of the children, the scandal, if I should be caught, the trial, the gallows, the infamy that would live forever. I would be taking their lives too, just like I did . . . the others’. . . Be brave, for both our sakes, Bunny, and the children’s, and be my Lady Justice! My life is in your hands, and I want, I need, you to take it!”

Slowly, I stood up, half-blinded by my tears. I knew he was right. If he lived and was captured and tried it would mean the gallows for him and perpetual disgrace for all those he left behind. But he was asking me to act as judge, jury, and executioner and take another human life, and I . . . I just couldn’t believe that could be right. But my children, their future . . . Like one in a trance, I began walking slowly around the bed toward the dressing-room door.

“That’s my brave girl.” Jim smiled.

“I love you!” I sobbed as I picked up the bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice. “I never realized how much until now, but I do.... I always have.... I always will!”

“And it’s because of that great love you bear me that you will be brave enough to do this for me now,” he said, “because you know in your heart that it is right. My love”—he stretched out his hand again for mine—“you are only being the instrument of Justice and you must never think otherwise or waste one single moment reproaching yourself. Come now, just two little pinches of my white powder, and the truth will die with me; no one will ever know.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I cradled the brown glass bottle against my breast and walked into the dressing room, hoping and praying that God would guide my hand.

I found Jim’s coat and slipped my hand into the pocket. The silver box felt like ice in my hand. I sat there holding it for quite some time, staring down at Lady Hamilton as a near-nude nymph of health.

Could I really do this for him? I looked at myself in the mirror, trying to see the noble Lady Justice blindfolded and sword wielding in her robes of flowing white, embodied in the weak and wretched, teary-eyed, disheveled blond woman in the black lace dress staring back at me, her reflection blurring and wavering through my hot tears. Instead of the scales of Justice I held Jim’s silver box in one hand and the onion-shaped brown bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice in the other.

“Courage, Bunny!” Somehow Jim’s weak, raspy voice reached me through the half-open door. Do it quickly; don’t think about it! I told myself. I sat the silver box down and uncorked the bottle. My hands shook so badly some of the brown juice splashed out as the cork came out with a POP! and an untidy snowfall of white powder billowed down around the neck as I quickly added two tiny pinches of arsenic. I took out my handkerchief and quickly mopped up the mess I’d made, praying every second that God would give me a sign that I was doing the right thing.

But a moment came when I could delay no more. It was now or never. I knew my courage would fail me completely if I dallied any longer. As I headed for the door I realized I’d forgotten the cork. In turning back, I stumbled over my skirts and fell to my knees. Through my bleary, tear-blind eyes I saw that about half the bottle of meat juice was now lying pooled on the floor with little messy clumps of white powder, like sodden sugar lumps melting in the brown heart of it.

I gazed heavenward. Was this the sign I had been asking for? I hurriedly grabbed my handkerchief and wiped the whole mess up. Then I stood, took a deep breath, trying so hard to steady myself, and replenished the bottle with water until it was full again, hoping I was diluting whatever, if any, of the poison remained inside it. In that moment a certain sense of peace came over me, like a comforting mantle of downy angel’s wings, and I knew that God had sent one of His angels to reach out a heavenly foot and trip me. It wasn’t meant for me to take justice into my own hands and end Jim’s life; I didn’t have that right and it was wrong for me to even contemplate usurping it.

When I walked out of the dressing room I saw that Jim, thank heaven, was sleeping peacefully, so I didn’t have to look him in the eye and confess that I had failed him. I just couldn’t bear to see the hurt and disappointment in his eyes.

The dreadful Nurse Gore was just then coming in with the dawn to relieve the night nurse, whose name escapes me, watching me with eagle eyes as I crossed the room and set the bottle on the mantel, well out of Jim’s reach. Out of sight, out of mind, I prayed, hoping slumber would bring forgetfulness and he would never ask me again. I smiled and nodded pleasantly to the two nurses in passing as I left the room and returned to my own.





In my room I fell onto the sofa in an exhausted swoon. I hadn’t the strength to take off my clothes, wash, and put on a nightgown. I knew that if I tried to take one more step I’d fall. I promised myself I would just lie down for an hour or two. The gray sky was streaked with orange when I closed my eyes.

I awakened some hours later to a loud bang, like a gunshot—my door had just been kicked open!—and Edwin was leaning over me, grasping my shoulders, and shaking me hard, demanding my household keys. “Your keys!” he kept shouting right into my face. “I want your keys!” Out in the hallway Michael’s voice, as commanding as a general’s on a battlefield, was telling someone that Mrs. Maybrick was no longer mistress of this house.

Suddenly my doorway was filled with faces—doctors, servants, neighbors, nurses—all of them staring in at me as though I were some rare, exotic animal in a zoo.

“JIM!” I sprang up screaming. “JIM!” I hurled myself through them like a cannonball, before any of the hands they reached out could stop me, and ran to his room. I knew in my heart that he was already gone. He’d slipped away while I was sleeping; their faces told me so. But I didn’t want to believe them. I had to see him one last time.

I flung open the door and thought I’d just stumbled across the threshold of Hell. The bed was stripped down to the bottom sheet, every gaslight in the room was blazing, and Jim lay there naked, blind dead eyes staring up at the crimson velvet canopy. His poor, wasted body, sagging skin white as a fish’s belly, had been cut open from breast to groin, and three men, doctors I presume, stood over him. One was busy writing; another was scooping out Jim’s innards in a big bloody heap and depositing them into the big stone jar yet another man was holding out for him. An image of Jim in a much more dark and squalid setting, alone, enacting a similar scene, standing over Mary Jane Kelly flashed before my eyes, and I fell with a scream.

When I opened my eyes I was back in my room prostrate on the sofa again. A dull ache filled my heart as I realized it had not all been just a terrible dream. Jim was dead and he’d taken Jack the Ripper with him to the grave and everyone was treating me, his widow, abominably, and I couldn’t understand why.

Nurse Gore was sitting by the door, speaking words I couldn’t quite comprehend and had to ask her to repeat again and again—the words just wouldn’t sink in—until I finally understood that I was forbidden, on “Mr. Michael’s orders,” to leave this room. I was now a prisoner in my own home. I saw then that my desk had been ransacked. It stood there with every drawer open, and those papers deemed meaningless and unimportant strewn carelessly across the carpet, but all my personal letters, my ledger, and my household keys were missing. Anything that might have vindicated me or reflected badly upon Jim had been destroyed. I knew even before I found the fragile fragments amongst the ashes in the fireplace that the love letters Edwin had written me had been burned, just as surely as Alfred Brierley’s had been taken into Michael’s safekeeping.

“My children!” I bolted up with a sudden cry, racing for the door. How could I have been so thoughtless, lying here in a swoon like this, instead of rushing straight to them? Their father was dead, and they needed me. I had to explain what had happened and give them what comfort I could. I needed to reassure them that everything would be all right.

But Nurse Gore was there, barring my way, her hands closing with an iron grip around my tender wrists, pushing me back, away from the door.

“Sit down and be quiet!” she ordered. “It does no good to make a fuss! Your children have been taken away, on Mr. Michael’s orders, where you can’t get your hands on them!”

“My children . . . gone? . . . Taken away? . . . Why? . . . Where?” I stared up at her uncomprehendingly. “I must go to them. I must—”

The door opened and one of the doctors came in. There was something in his hand as he came toward me, and I shrank back into the sofa cushions, wishing there were some safe haven I could run to. The syringe glistened menacingly in the gaslight, the needle pierced my arm through the black lace of my sleeve, and my mind turned into a sopping-wet cotton ball, my limbs felt weighted with lead, and all I could do was sleep. In those days, whenever my brain bobbed blearily back to the surface, before the sharp bite of the needle sent it sinking back down, I discovered that I was more in love with Sleep than I had ever been with any man. The comfort and oblivion I found in darling Sleep’s arms kept all the terrible pain, the cruel world, and the wolves howling, clawing, and clamoring at my door at bay.

The next I knew it was daylight again and Nurse Gore was shaking me roughly awake. “If you want to see the last of the husband you murdered you had better stand up.” She pointed to the window.

I struggled unsteadily to my feet and stumbled and tottered my way to the window, my head swimming with every step, and clutched desperately at the windowsill to keep from falling. It was then I saw the coffin, covered with white carnations, being carried out to a glass-sided hearse drawn by four black horses with puffs of ebony ostrich plumes on their heads. I swung round, my skirts tangling in my feet, the heel of my shoe catching in the black lace and tearing it with a loud RIP! as I lurched toward the door.

“Stand back!” I screamed in Norse Gore’s cruel gorgon face. “Stand back, I say! I must go to him! I must! Jim!”

Nurse Gore, who looked like a wrestler dressed in nurse’s garb, shoved me back hard, sending me tottering and flailing over the sofa arm with my feet flying up in the air. “You are not to leave this room,” she said, positioning herself before the door, arms folded across her breast, with an expression on her face just daring me to try to get past her.

I had no choice. I was trapped. I rushed back to the window and watched as Jim’s carnation-covered coffin was loaded into the hearse and the glass doors closed upon him. Hysterically I began to hammer on the glass with my fists, shouting his name, “Jim! Jim!” as though I expected the din I was making to rouse him from his coffin and for him to push off the lid and sit up and look back to see what I was making such a god-awful ruckus about. In my desperation, I picked up a little footstool and was swinging it toward the window, meaning to shatter it, when Nurse Gore grabbed me and wrested it from my hands. “No! No!” I fought her as hard as I could. “Leave me be! I must go to him! Jim! Jim! Don’t leave me!” I fell sobbing to the floor, irrationally crying out for him not to leave me, even though I knew he already had and, what was even worse, he’d left me alone against the world in a house filled with enemies.

Then the doctor was there again with the needle and sweet oblivion opened its arms to catch me as I fell. I was dimly conscious of Nurse Gore picking me up by my shoulders and the doctor taking hold of my ankles and the two of them swinging me like a sack of potatoes onto the sofa. That’s the last thing I remember.

I kept dreaming I was a bride again in my blue linen suit waltzing through Versailles with my happy, smiling husband, so handsome, so charming, in his black Savile Row suit with the lucky diamond horseshoe sparkling in his black-and-gray-striped silk cravat. We were so in love, laughing, and smiling into each other’s eyes. We danced through every room, the vast grand ballroom, the presence chamber, and the Hall of Mirrors, and down every corridor, up every staircase, even through the kitchens. Jim even lifted me up onto a long banqueting table and we danced across its smooth, polished surface before he swung me back down onto the marble floor again. Then we were out in the garden, dancing down the pebbled paths and even on the rims of fountains.

We must have waltzed for hours! Every time I started to float back to the surface, to glimpse reality through the glassy waters, I felt even more exhausted, as though I really had been dancing all that time without ever stopping to catch my breath. I’d feel dizzy and my stays pinching, even my feet aching, and before I broke the surface I sank like a stone gratefully back down into the thick, warm mud of sleep. But in no time at all I would be back in Jim’s arms, waltzing through Versailles again.

During the days that followed—I never was sure just how many—someone must have carried me to my bed, but they didn’t care enough to undress me and put me properly to bed, so when I awakened I found myself still wearing the same black dress, now grown quite rank and smelly, and my petticoats stained by urine and a light, bloody discharge, too faint to be the onset of my monthly courses but similar to the “sanguineous discharge” I’d suffered before. They hadn’t even cared enough for my comfort to take off my shoes or to pull the pins from my hair, which now had the appearance of an oily, frizzed, and matted yellow rat’s nest.

I sat up, blinking and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, to find a policeman standing at the foot of my bed. That horrible nurse, Michael, Edwin, Mrs. Briggs, and Nanny Yapp all crowded behind him, staring at me. Then the doctor was feeling my pulse, nodding, and declaring me fit.

“Mrs. Maybrick,” the officer began, “Mrs. Maybrick, you are in custody on suspicion of causing the death of your late husband, Mr. James Maybrick. If you choose to reply, be very careful, because whatever you say may be used as evidence against you.”

“Please!” I managed to blurt out before I lost consciousness again. “Somebody send for my mother!”

Apparently Edwin, who would never forgive me for Alfred Brierley, found it in his heart to do me one last kindness. He sent a cable to Mama in Paris that I was in trouble and needed her desperately.

She came at once as I knew she would. “The indomitable Caroline,” Baroness von Roques, barging right in, as fearless as an angel entering a burning building, coming to my rescue, not a knight in shining armor but a voluptuous white-blond matron clad head to toe in lavender chiffon trimmed with silk periwinkles and the most enormous hat I’d ever seen. Pearls and diamonds clacking, she shoved past Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp, sending the maids scattering and Edwin running for cover, swinging her handbag and parasol left and right, like a medieval warrior’s mace, warning them to get out of her way or she would knock them all down like bowling pins.

When a policeman caught up with her on the stairs, telling her I was under arrest on suspicion of murdering my husband by administering an irritant poison, she poked him aside with her parasol and said, “Don’t be absurd. If anyone poisoned James Maybrick it was James Maybrick; that man was a drugstore walkin’ on two legs. I’m surprised he lasted this long! Now unhand me, sir. I’ll have you know that my second husband was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin an’ the illegitimate son of Napoleon III! An’ another of our illustrious ancestors stood right beside Christopher Columbus on the deck o’ the Mayflower holdin’ the map that he steered by!”

Then she was there, in my room, gathering me in her arms, and I, just like a terrified little girl, was clinging to her and crying, begging my mama to help me, saying that I didn’t understand what was happening and why they were treating me like this.

Apparently they’d searched the house and found packets of arsenic I’d never seen before marked “POISON!” hidden amidst my underlinens or rather planted there; it certainly wasn’t mine. And they’d collected a vast array of medicines; I believe the tally ran to 147 different pills, potions, and powders. But those were all Jim’s. I had nothing to do with them! And Nanny Yapp wouldn’t shut up about those damned infernal flypapers, which I’d only used to replicate Dr. Greggs’s prescription to get rid of my blemishes in time for the ball. Then there were those two sacks labeled Industrial Arsenic that Jim had been bragging about his “stupendous luck” in acquiring from a business associate. On the whole, the policemen said, there was enough arsenic in Battlecrease House to do away with the entire British Army and take a good bite out of the Navy too.

I told Mama the truth, except the bit about my husband being Jack the Ripper, of course, and that all I’d done was sprinkle a little white powder into the Valentine’s Meat Juice bottle at Jim’s bidding, because he was suffering so and swearing he needed it. But, before I could give it to him, and I was already thinking twice about it, I tripped and spilled it. I had refilled the bottle with water. Most of the white powder had been left on the floor in undissolved clumps. I had mopped it up myself. And what, if any, was left in the bottle was surely not enough to have killed him. Yet apparently Michael had sent the bottle out for testing and found a trace amount of arsenic in it. My handkerchiefs had also been examined and one of them was found to have arsenic on it. But that must have been either from wiping my face, after using the facial wash, or from when I mopped up the mess I made when I spilled the bottle of meat juice; it had to be one or the other.

“Surely I am guilty of no crime?” I looked up at Mama uncertainly. “Jim has been taking that arsenic for years, and there was only a teeny-tiny amount found in the meat juice bottle, not enough to kill anybody. I heard the doctors saying so! They said the attempt was clearly ‘inept’ and ‘the work of a bungler’!”

“Listen to me, Florie.” Mama braced her hands on my shoulders. “You are not to blame for this. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Jim had been poisonin’ himself for years, an’ there’s no telling what all those doctors have been givin’ him. In tryin’ to cure him they may actually have killed him. But he wouldn’t have been in this state anyway if he’d treated his body like a temple an’ kept it pure o’ all that poison! Arsenic an’ strychnine!” She rolled her eyes. “An’ now he’s died and left you in a devil of a fix! I shall have a lawyer for you by this afternoon,” she promised, “an’ we’ll clean this mess up so you can bury the past with Jim an’ come back to Paris with me and put all this behind you!”

That was my mama, “the indomitable Caroline.”

While she was in the guest room changing her dress, someone locked her in. That was when they took me away to jail. I was so weak I couldn’t walk. They had to carry me out in a chair. Mrs. Briggs yanked a silk cord from the window curtains and tied me to it to keep me from falling out as I slumped there, swooning. Two constables carried me out the door, with Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp following, graciously thanking them for taking the trash out.