The Ripper's Wife

32

I counted the stitches, stitches in time, sewn throughout the years, every instant feeling like a taffy-stretched eternity. I thought about my children growing up without me, and, in my woman’s heart, I dreamed of Alfred Brierley.

Those numerous sleepless nights were passed in foolish fantasies in which I was magically set free and he was waiting at the prison gate for me, to sweep me up in his arms and carry me away in a hot-air balloon. I imagined us swooping down and scooping my children up. Then away we’d all go to a new and happy life together. I hoped and prayed that he was thinking of me too, that he would wait for me. But a day came when Mama, during the precious half hour we got to spend together every three months, talking through a grille, with a matron standing by me, told me that he’d married.

I’m so glad it wasn’t me, a little part of my heart took me by surprise by saying. It took me a long time to realize that little voice was the voice of truth. We could never have really made each other happy. He was just a fantasy, a dream I tried to will into reality, and even when he was flesh and blood and throbbing manhood in my arms he was still just a dream. I was just too hurt and blind to see it at the time. But even when I knew that dream was also lost to me, I never did stop thinking of him lustfully; we all need someone to dream about. Why must loss, lust, and love be tangled up so?

I thought of the diary, and I thought about Jim and that whole impossibly tangled mess we’d both made of love and lust, resentment and revenge, passion and pain. So many, many times I felt Jack the Ripper’s knife twist in my heart. Jim’s confession could set me free . . . but at what cost! This sacrifice, this penance, this silence, this imprisonment for a crime I had briefly contemplated but never, thank God, committed! Would the reality for my children truly be as bad as I feared? Why was it so hard to know if I had done the right thing? Why did I keep torturing myself by traveling up and down that road? Why couldn’t I make peace with the decision I had made? Why couldn’t I be stalwart like a saint and stoically endure my fate, knowing that I had made a noble sacrifice? I was so weary of wrestling with my conscience, day after day, night after night, always wondering what was wrong and what was right. All I truly knew was that once black and white paint are mixed together they can never be pure and separate ever again, only some shade of gray.

Other books tormented me too. One day I impulsively took Mr. James’s Daisy Miller from the library cart. But that was a mistake. In its pages I found the ghost of the girl I used to be, the fun, foolish, flighty, and frivolous young madcap, and she came back to haunt me, bobbing bustle and ringlets, saucy manner, and vibrant, flirty smile, dancing through life with her head in the clouds and stars in her eyes. I also found shades of me in the prison’s illicit copy of Madame Bovary, that scandalous book stitched inside the cover of a book of sermons to be secretly savored by all of us who could read; there I was the discontented wife, racking up debts and recklessly running off to rendezvous with her lover. That story ends with poison too, only it’s the wanton wife who dies, not her ditch-water-dull doctor husband. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter I found peculiarly comforting now that I wore an ineradicable invisible A upon my breast that could never be put off, not even in death—A for Arsenic, A for Adulteress. And Lady Audley’s Secret I could not suffer to have near me. Never would I take it into my cell, not even when it remained alone in the library cart the only volume I had not read. It reminded me that I also had a secret. East Lynne I likewise shunned. It made the unrelenting ache for my children even more unbearable; Lady Isabel was my sister in sorrow.

I became slothful and indifferent. It’s hard not to when all you have to wear is one baggy brown dress and you’re all but bald beneath your cap. I also became dispassionate and, in a sense, numb. When before the sight of a mouse or some ugly creepy-crawly insect would send me shrieking up onto the nearest stool, now I sat, in the stony gloom of my living tomb, and stared at the mice and black beetles scuttling across my cell, amazed that any life would come willingly here.

The ever-present chill crept into my bones, lodged there, and would never leave, bringing with it, uninvited, the most unwelcome and tenacious houseguests—fevers, chilblains, bronchitis, catarrh, rheumatism, burning throats, and hacking coughs.

And so the years crept past. Slowly, slowly, slowly. The old year dragging into the new one like the deadweight of a corpse being dragged from a river. Every New Year’s Eve I would stand on my toes, gazing out the window, seeing nothing but the dream of what might have been. Christmases spent with my children. Being spoiled and petted, kissed and lavished with gifts. Champagne and waltzes, a new gown, sparkling jewels, diamonds and pearls, and a man who loved and desired me taking me in his arms and kissing me at the midnight hour. Some years I imagined it was Jim; others I dreamed of Alfred Brierley. What did it really matter? They were both lost to me. My bare shoulders bundled in costly furs, a ride home through snow and moonlight, then falling into a bed of love, my body opening like a flower beneath my beloved’s kiss. Sometimes, in those dark hours, when the world I used to be a part of was embracing and celebrating, bidding the old year good-bye and welcoming the new one with champagne, and my fellow prisoners slumbered, dreaming their equally hopeless dreams, I dared lift my mud-hued skirt and in my stocking feet, humming just as softly as I could, waltzed across my cell in the arms of a phantom lover.

My children grew up without me. Michael arranged for them to be adopted by one of Jim’s doctors who had testified against me at my trial, Dr. Charles Fuller, and his wife. For one hundred pounds per annum they would raise Bobo and Gladys as their own and send them to spend every summer with their chilly, arrogant, and otherwise indifferent uncle Michael at his house on the Isle of Wight. The Fullers even changed the children’s names. Bobo was now James Fuller—he’d even dropped my family name of Chandler, which he’d been given as a middle name—and my daughter became Gladys Evelyn Fuller.

Michael was determined that they should despise me. But Mrs. Fuller at least had a heart. No matter what else she might have thought of me, she knew the pain of a mother’s heart, perhaps because a string of miscarriages had dashed her hopes of having children of her own. Every Christmas without fail, she sent me a photograph of Bobo and Gladys, so I could, from this sad, disgraced distance, see the changes each year wrought.

How my heart lived for those pictures! I was as greedy for them as any child for toys and treats on Christmas morning. No present, not even the jewels and dresses I used to take for granted, could ever have meant as much to me as those precious pictures.

Through still images, frozen moments captured in sepia tone, I got to see my beautiful black-haired boy, dressed like a man in miniature now, in suit and tie, growing up, tall and slender, so handsome he should have been posing for artists and preparing for a career on the stage. When he posed in profile, I saw his lashes were as long and luxuriant as ever. Only he was never smiling in these photographs. It worried me so to think of that laughing, happy little boy I had known becoming such a dour, frowning sourpuss, so grave and serious, cold and arrogant. I remembered how he loved to cuddle, kiss, and hug and could not reconcile those memories with the strange cold-fish little character staring morosely back at me with blank, bored eyes. I wished I had magical powers so I could reach into those photographs and shake him and shout, No, Bobo, no, this is not who you were meant to be! He was becoming Michael in miniature, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was forbidden to write to my own children. I was like a beggar every year waiting with hands outstretched and yearning for those pictures. Michael, I knew, was determined that the children be brought up strictly. “A flawed tree grows from a flawed root,” he had told the Fullers, making that an ironclad condition of the adoption. The summer visits were his means of ensuring it was being enforced.

Gladys showed every sign of blossoming into a great beauty. A violet-eyed, black-haired, porcelain-skinned belle, she had a flat, boyish figure that was gradually rounding into the tantalizing promise of beautiful, bountiful womanhood. Mrs. Fuller sent me a lovely hand-tinted picture of Gladys wearing a lilac chiffon dress. I could see so much of myself in her, the longing almost killed me. She was at an age when a girl really needs her mother, and I could not be there for her, not even by letter. Her little bosoms were just appearing when the pictures abruptly stopped coming.

After I had been in prison six years Christmas came, but the pictures didn’t. I was so upset I couldn’t stop crying or keep down my food and had to go to the infirmary for a fortnight. When Mama came to visit me I begged her to go and see Mrs. Fuller and find out what had happened. I was terrified some awful fate had befallen my children. Or maybe Mrs. Fuller had died and no one else knew of the yearly charity she had unfailingly dispensed to me? Perhaps Dr. Fuller or Michael had found out and forbidden her to continue? Mama wept herself to see me so distraught and frantic, gnawing my nails bloody, and my eyes bloodshot and dark circled from crying through so many sleepless nights. She promised she would find out and an explanation would be in her very next letter.

Trapped behind iron bars, I had no choice but to wait . . . and hope. Maybe the pictures had been lost in the mail or misdirected, which had caused a delay in their delivery? Or maybe an illness, not a serious one, from which the children, or Mrs. Fuller herself, had quickly recovered had merely postponed the pictures’ being taken and mailed in time for Christmas?

I thought there was nothing left of my heart to break, but the truth is the human heart endlessly regenerates itself and there’s no counting the number of times it can break over the course of a lifetime. No one was dead or dying and England’s postal service was as prompt and efficient as ever. Nor had Dr. Fuller or Michael forbidden Mrs. Fuller this act of charity; it was my son.

With no one to pet and feed him lumps of sugar my little Bobo had, as the pictures had made me fear, grown hard and sour. Bobo—it was impossible for me to think of him by any other name, though I knew he now answered only to the strictly formal James—had been thoroughly persuaded of my guilt. He believed that I had deprived him and his little sister of a loving father. And the fact that I was permitted the pleasure of gazing upon Bobo’s and Gladys’s features once a year made him sick. Maybe that was why he was never smiling in those pictures? Had he been sending me a silent message all along and I had failed to see it? Now that he had attained the age of fourteen and was standing on the cusp of manhood, he had adamantly expressed the wish that no further photographs be sent to me. And everyone felt, given his age and the maturity with which he had expressed himself, that this was no childish whim and that his wishes should be respected. And Gladys . . . Gladys felt the same; she also hated me. Michael had patted them both upon the shoulder and promised, “She will forget your faces, just like you have forgotten hers.”

How could anyone be so cruel? To deny me even the one tiny consolation of seeing my children’s faces, printed on paper, once a year at Christmastime? My heart all but died that day. My chest hurt so bad, assailed by the most awful pressures and pains, like a giant’s fist was gripping my heart and squeezing it, trying to wring every last drop of blood out, while bearing down with all his might upon my shoulder with the other hand, that I had to be taken to the infirmary again.

Every year thereafter, as the years crept slowly by—1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900—a whole brand-new century, just think of it!—1901—the end of an era, Queen Victoria died—1902, 1903—I sat at my table every Christmas and lined up the pictures I had in a row and tried to imagine what my children looked like now. Where they were, what they were doing, how they were spending this Christmas? And did they ever spare a thought for me?

Bobo’s voice would have changed; he would have found the first whisker on his chin and started shaving. Did he sport a fine mustache like his father or agonize over the cultivation of a straggling, puny little one or prefer to remain clean shaven? He would have finished school and gone to work. Where? At what? What were his interests? Was his work just work or was it a passion? Did he share his beauty with the world or hide it away in a dull, dreary office?

Gladys would be a woman now; she would surely have beaus. I bet the boys just flocked to her and her dance card was never empty. A little beauty like her, she might even be engaged or actually be married for all I knew. And what of Bobo? Was there some sweet girl who set his heart afire and made his soul sing?

My mother’s heart ached to know. I would sit and stare at those photographs until tears blurred my eyes and I could no longer bear it; then I would fall weeping onto my cot.

I wondered if Queen Victoria had any idea when she commuted my sentence that sparing my life would be so much crueler than putting a quick end to it on the gallows?