The Ripper's Wife

40

The story ends as it began, with me and the diary fated to be mated, like a convict and his ball and chain, to the finish.

He still reaches across time to touch me. The Jim I fell in love with caresses my heart, making me fall in love all over again, and then the murderer I never knew reveals himself and stabs it. If there’s any lesson to be learned from all this, you, dear reader, must discover or divine it. I have no more stories to tell. It ends for me now—but it does not end in failure! I did what I set out to do, what even I doubted I could accomplish. I told the story, the truth as I know and lived it, start to finish. Yes, I faltered and laid down my head and cried from time to time, but I prevailed. I feel as though the final, tenacious lock has at long last been sprung and I am truly free at last.

I’ve given the beautiful candy box and the ugly burden it has carried so long a proper burial, with prayers from my heart and a rosary and sweet flowers laid within. I hope it will never be unearthed.

I had the strangest dream. I was standing on the staircase of Battlecrease House, a fetching young bride in her ice-white satin wedding gown and long veil, glowing and filled to near bursting with love. I turned and smiled and reached down my hand to Jim. A smile lit up his eyes as he gave me his hand. I felt his love in every part of me. The diamond horseshoe twinkled in his tie. So did the knife in his other hand. I saw five women I never knew in life, only in death, as names and descriptions first in newspaper columns and then in my husband’s diary. They were standing behind him with their throats gaping wide and weeping scarlet tears, wearing bloodstained rose-pink bridesmaids’ dresses. A dark-haired young man with soulful brown eyes and a shy, sweet smile stood and gazed up at us from the foot of the stairs, beautiful as an angel, with an opalescent rosary clasped in his hands. He recited a prayer, tranquil as cool blue spring water, to purge us of all our demons and send them packing with their suitcases full of anger, hate, and evil.



“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace,

That where there is hatred, I may bring love;

That where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;

That where there is discord, I may bring harmony;

That where there is error, I may bring truth;

That where there is doubt, I may bring faith;

That where there is despair, I may bring hope;

That where there are shadows, I may bring light;

That where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;

To understand, than to be understood;

To love, than to be loved;

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds,

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven,

It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.”





The bloodstains vanished and all the wounds of soul and skin were healed. The knife fell from Jim’s hand and disappeared, as though it had never been. All the wrongs were made right. And all that had been lost was at long last found. Jim took me in his arms and kissed me and I knew, this time, our love would last forever. There would be no more pain, suffering, or dying, waiting, or crying. There really was a new beginning waiting for me at the end.

That feeling of peace was still with me when I woke up. I lay in the gloaming gazing at the pictures arranged upon my windowsill: Jim and me—our wedding picture; Bobo and Gladys as children in their Easter finery, posing with baby bunnies and fluffy yellow butterball chicks; Mama in a black lace gown, big hat, feather boa, and diamonds looking as though she might have given busty, bawdy Mae West her inspiration for Diamond Lil; Edwin, dark haired and dashing as a Russian count in a black fur hat; Bobby, my sweet, shy, eternally young Biograph boy; and Ty, my surrogate silver-screen son, gazing at his own reflection in a mirror-topped table, making a sly, secret joke of the legend of Narcissus, because the handsomest man in Hollywood was devoid of personal vanity. It makes me wonder if Mr. Poe was correct when he said “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”





EPILOGUE

On October 23, 1941, Florence Chandler Maybrick was found dead in her bed, surrounded by her beloved cats, old photographs, and yellowed newspaper clippings, on a mattress crawling with bedbugs. She was seventy-nine years old. A rosary was in her hand and her Bible was at her side. Tucked inside, folded away, faded, and long forgotten, was a prescription for a facial wash containing a minuscule amount of arsenic written by Dr. Greggs of New York in 1878.