The Ripper's Wife Read online

  THE RIPPER’S WIFE

  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.

  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, naïve 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 cover 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.

  Books by Brandy Purdy

  THE BOLEYN WIFE

  THE TUDOR THRONE

  THE QUEEN’S PLEASURE

  THE QUEEN’S RIVALS

  THE BOLEYN BRIDE

  THE RIPPER’S WIFE

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  THE RIPPER’S WIFE

  BRANDY PURDY

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  THE RIPPER’S WIFE

  Books by Brandy Purdy

  Title Page

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11 - THE DIARY

  12

  13 - THE DIARY

  14

  15 - THE DIARY

  16

  17 - THE DIARY

  18

  19 - THE DIARY

  20

  21 - THE DIARY

  22

  23 - THE DIARY

  24

  25 - THE DIARY

  26

  27 - THE DIARY

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  EPILOGUE

  Copyright Page

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction inspired by the controversial document known as the Ripper Diary, and the lives of James and Florence Maybrick, Jack the Ripper, and his unfortunate victims. Creative liberties have been taken with all—certain characters and events have been altered, eliminated, embellished, or condensed.

  The heart is deceitful above all things,

  and desperately wicked: who can know it?

  —Jeremiah 17:9

  She was the most beautiful young lady

  I ever saw, and the most amiable....

  And she was the most innocent.

  —Daisy Miller by Henry James

  She is more to be pitied than censured,

  She is more to be helped than despised.

  She is only a lassie who ventured

  On life’s stormy path ill-advised.

  Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter,

  Do not laugh at her shame and downfall.

  For a moment, just stop and consider

  That a man was the cause of it all.

  —a popular ballad of the 1890s by William B. Gray

  PROLOGUE

  Love makes sane men mad

  and can turn a gentle man into a fiend.

  On the outside it looks so innocent, just an old battered book, musty and dusty, nothing special at all. An ordinary diary bound in cardboard covered in rusty black cloth, corners bent and bumped like a quartet of bruised and broken noses, a tad frayed in places like curmudgeonly eyebrows grown wildly awry, chipped and fading gilt accents. Seven lucky gold bands adorn the spine. I chose it for that reason, because he, because we, believed in luck. You could walk into any stationery shop in the civilized world and find one just like it. I know: I’m the one who bought it.

  When you open the cover, that’s when the horrors begin. Your skin begins to crawl and your blood begins to chill, and you discover that this battered old diary is anything but ordinary. No dreaded dentist appointments, tedious afternoon teas with a vicar avariciously fond of cucumber sandwiches and saving cannibals’ souls, quarrels with the giddy young wife about her ludicrous, exorbitantly priced bonnets—silly things sprouting stuffed canaries and spinach! However can she keep a straight face and wear them?—and her abominable, troublemaking mother, or taking the children to a Saturday matinée for an afternoon’s flight of fantasy to see Peter Pan. Oh no, nothing like that! It’s like walking into the parlor and seeing blood dripped across a cream-colored carpet in a trail leading straight to a torn and bloody corpse. A most unexpected sight when all you’re expecting is the calm and mundane, orderly ordinary. You’ve come to have tea after all, not to scream and fall fainting over a corpse.

  It begins with the words I’ve quoted above, scribbled in a scrawl of ragged red, big, bold, bright jagged letters and blobs of ink like spattered blood, garish and vulgar as a gin-soaked harlot’s lip rouge, sloppily sprawling across the page like a wanton body on a rumpled bed, written as though by a drunkard in the grip of the tremors or someone with palsy who cannot quite command the pen, yet with such force, such rage, the words at times nearly cut, like a knife, right through the page. A murderer’s words, it’s easy to imagine them written in blood with the weapon that took so many lives, including, in a sense, my own.

  I was the first or, perhaps, the final, victim. Maybe I was neither. Maybe I was both. Maybe the man who wrote this diary didn’t destroy me at all. Maybe I destroyed myself. Maybe in the end all it amounts to is one weak woman’s desperate attempts to justify all the things that went wrong in her life. You, dear reader, will have to decide. I’ve faced a judge and jury before. I’ve already experienced the worst and lost everything that matters. This time I’m not afraid. If you condemn me, there’s nothing left that I hold dear that you can take from me now, not even my life.

  Those vicious red words were written by my husband. The man I spent fifteen years in prison for murdering, the man whose death exiled me permanently from my children’s lives and hearts. This is his diary, the one that I, as a blissful young bride, bought for him. It was a different century, sixty years ago, but it might have been only yesterday. I remember it so well—that bright blue sky day when I, so light of step in my pearl-buttoned boots of white kid, so sweetly ignorant and only eighteen, with a garden of silk daisies, cherry-red poppies, bluebells, and black-eyed Susans blooming on my straw hat and a rainbow of ribbons bouncing down my back to tickle the big, floppy lemon chiffon bow on my bustle, skipped into the shop and plucked it off the shelf. With a radiant smile, I announced to the clerk that it was “a gift for my husband” as I plopped it down upon the counter and told him, rather grandly, to charge it to my husband’s account and wrap it in such a way as would appeal to a gentleman of the most refined and elegant taste, in striped paper perhaps—burgundy and forest green or navy blue and cream? I tapped my chin and pondered—and there simply must be a bow, a very neat, tidy, masculine bow, not a big, flowing, feminine thing, oh no, that would never do for Jim!

  Those with a thirst for sensation, those who avidly peruse the penny illustrated papers, following divorce dramas and murder t
rials like bloodhounds, the kind of ladies and gentlemen of leisure who take their opera glasses and a boxed lunch to spend the day sitting in a crowded courtroom; cotton brokers; learned doctors; lawyers; politicians; sanctimonious moralizers; and the self-important, supercilious members of what we from the American South would call “the highfalutin” Currant Jelly Set, will know his name quite well—Mr. James Maybrick of Liverpool. But the rest of the world knows him by another name, one written in blood—Jack the Ripper.

  Every love has its own peculiar story tied up with disparate, desperate bows of melodrama, madness, romance, tragedy, passion, pain, and farce, sacrifice and gluttony, tenderness and grace, honor and deceit, punishment and pleasure, sanctity and sin, the bland, ho-hum ordinary and penny-dreadful thrills, where vengeance and bliss sometimes sleep side by side in the same bed. Pure or profane, every love exacts a beautiful or bitter price. It always takes some toll, whether it be a pittance or a fortune, like a tax upon the hearts of those who tender, reject, or receive it. Love always leaves a mark: a scar, a smudge, a stain. Even those who long for love but lack it cannot escape unmarked.

  It’s been on my mind so much these last few days, tugging at me so urgently, shaking me, whenever I try to rest or sit idle for too long, with a cat on my lap, dreaming over faded photographs and movie magazines, making me feel like I’m waking up with the house on fire when all I want to do is sleep, to go on waltzing with the ghosts in my dreams. Dreaming of what was and what might have been . . .

  I’ve been thinking about forgiveness, forgetting, and living with, and living without, monsters masquerading as mild-mannered men and the strange angels the Lord sometimes sends, even to those who seem, at first glance, the most unworthy of them, and all the strange, terrible, and beautiful creatures that lie in between the blackest black and the whitest white, and all the many shades of gray that bridge the gulf in between, tattered yellow newspapers, faded photographs of the dead, those who are gone and lost forever, and flickering images, larger than life and platinum precious, projected, like magic, on a screen.

  My name is Florence Elizabeth Chandler Maybrick. My family and friends called me Florie, but, when he loved me he called me Bunny. I was Jack the Ripper’s wife, maybe even the reason, as a clever rhymester once wrote, a man who was society’s pillar became a killer. This is our own peculiar story.

  Florence Maybrick

  Gaylordsville, Connecticut

  October 7, 1941—may this be a lucky day for beginning this endeavor. God give me the strength and courage to see it through!

  1

  It began with a shipboard romance, the sort of thing you might find in any romantic novel, play, or film. From time immemorial it always seems to have been the rule that when presenting romance to the masses, the hero and heroine must meet in a memorable manner, something amusing, adorable, or antagonistic, that will spawn an entertaining anecdote they can regale their friends and relations with for years to come. But happily ever after really depends upon where you end your story.

  Did you ever sit and wonder what happens to the lovers locked in a passionate embrace after the gilt-fringed curtain goes down or the words The End appear upon the silver screen? Does Prince Charming really love and adore his Cinderella forevermore, forsaking all others as long as they both shall live, till death they do part? Or does he, sooner or later, exert his royal and manly prerogative and take a mistress, an ambitious lady-in-waiting, a buxom, bawdy laundress, or a pretty little actress perhaps? Are we really expected to believe that the noble bluebloods of the court accept a former servant girl as their queen? The young and naïve never think or worry about such things; when you’re only eighteen it’s easy to believe in love lasting “forever” and “happily ever after.”

  The setting was picture-postcard perfect—a spick-and-span new steamship, part of the prestigious White Star Line, all fresh paint, varnish, and high-gloss polish, a veritable floating palace, with a buff-colored funnel belching steam high above our heads, regally bearing us across the ocean from New York to Liverpool. The SS Baltic might have steamed right off one of those popular souvenir postcards almost everyone in those days collected. It was all that perfect—gilt-edged perfect! It was the perfect place to fall in love!

  Looking back now, in hindsight after six decades, if I were to cast the movie of my life, I might have been pert, blond, and vivacious Carole Lombard, champagne bubbly in a bustle and ringlets with an Alabama belle’s molasses accent, dense and sweet, and he might have been dignified and debonair, sedately suave William Powell, a little staid and stodgy perhaps—some might even have gone so far as to call him “pompous”—but with a ready smile, a wry sense of humor, and a twinkle in his eye. He made my heart flutter and skip like a schoolgirl! With a tall silk hat and a diamond horseshoe sparkling in his silk cravat, dapper in a dark suit straight from Savile Row, patent-leather boots, and immaculate dove-gray gloves and matching spats, he was every inch a gentleman.

  I suppose I must sound awfully silly, but every time he looked at me it was like receiving a valentine. Pictures of hearts, Cupids, cooing doves, clasping hands, and bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolates tied up with red and pink satin bows filled my head like a bewildering array of pretty cards on display in a stationer’s shop, and I just didn’t know which one to choose, and in truth I didn’t want to. I wanted them all. I wanted him! He was everything I had ever dreamed of. Or perhaps the sadder and wiser and much older me of today should correct the gauche green girl of yesteryear and say that he represented everything I had ever wanted. In those days, it was all about appearances. In society, style trumped substance every time.

  It was March 11, 1880. Like the date inside a wedding ring, it is engraved upon my memory and heart. How could I ever forget? It was the day my life changed forever.

  I was eighteen, bubbling over with high castle in the clouds, hopes and champagne dreams—intoxicating, sensuous, thrilling, and sweet. A living doll—I think at almost eighty I’m old enough to say that now without seeming vain—who always saw the world through rose-colored glasses. I was a dainty little thing, with a curvaceous corseted hourglass figure, tiny waist bracketed by generous bosom and hips, dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, with gleaming golden ringlets, violet-blue eyes that provoked my many beaus to say that they would make forget-me-nots droop and weep with envy, sugar-pink rosebud lips just longing to be kissed, the white magnolia blossom skin we women of the South prized so, and ankles and wrists so tiny and trim. I was a delicious little dish!

  It seemed as though I had spent my entire life hiding under shady hats and veils to keep the sun from singeing me with its hot, crisp, baking kiss, and being scrubbed down vigorously with buttermilk and lemon juice in a never-ending crusade against freckles. And for the blemishes that seemed to erupt whenever I was overly excited or anxious Dr. Greggs prescribed a face wash of elderflower water, tincture of benzoin, and just a little arsenic. Not enough to hurt, he assured me in his kind, grandfatherly way when I shrank back and fearfully demurred when he handed me the prescription, remembering a play I had seen about an evil, scheming woman who had put arsenic in her boring old fuddy-duddy husband’s soup so she would be free to abscond with her lover, a worthless but excruciatingly handsome lounge lizard with hair like black patent leather who danced like a dream and never threw away the love letters foolish women sent him lest he have to do something so menial and mundane as work for a living. I relished every thrilling, wicked moment of it and had sat through it five times, in wide-eyed wonderment, leaning forward in my seat, even though it made my stays pinch, anxiously nibbling my nails and a bag of toffee.

  Despite being a seasoned traveler, a habitué of sophisticated Parisian salons and worldly European circles, and a rather sporadic attendance at a deluxe Swiss school for affluent young ladies in Vevey where I did little more than sit in the garden, eat chocolates, dabble in watercolors, devour romance novels, and gaze at the breathtaking vista of blue lakes and snowcapped mountains and drea
m until I graduated at sixteen, I was never blasé or jaded. In those days, I exuded a bewitching, bewildering blend of innocence and confidence, shyness and sophistication. I wore them like a halo that protected me like Saint Michael’s shield. I glided through life endowed with the sweet certainty that nothing bad could possibly ever happen to me. I believed in the innate goodness of people; I trusted in the kindness of strangers and was eager to like everyone and wanted them to like me. I gladly proffered my trust until I was given reason to withdraw it. But even then I never stopped believing that most people truly are good at heart, though they might sometimes behave badly because they were hurting inside or driven by some dark or desperate compulsion or circumstances I was not privy to. I wished them well and accepted their failings and flaws as endearing little foibles and went on believing that good would eventually triumph over whatever darkness assailed their poor souls. I didn’t believe in evil then; to me the Devil was just another storybook villain; I never thought I’d end up dancing, or sleeping, with him.

  I was traveling with Mama, the bountiful-hearted and -bosomed, white-blond, violet-blue-eyed Baroness Caroline von Roques, a worldly-wise Alabama-born beauty whose numerous admirers always poetically declared that her hair was like a field of our Southern cotton silvered under a full moon, and my brother, the handsome gilt-haired “Alabama Adonis,” Dr. Holbrook St. John Chandler.

  We had just left New York, where we had been spending time with dear old friends and making new ones, adding to our collection of admirers, the candy boxes, bouquets, and books of sonnets they sent us with declarations of undying devotion piling up high in our hotel sitting room, and just having a grand giddy ol’ time. It had been a whirlwind visit filled with lavish luncheons, society teas, and dinner parties, fancy dress balls, the theater and opera, daily shopping excursions, tailors and dressmakers appointments, brisk canters in the park on proud, high-stepping steeds that would have delighted my cavalry officer stepfather if he had been with us, and thrilling race meets where we all wagered recklessly on the ponies and gave our handkerchiefs and little charms for good luck to the handsomest of the jockeys. All Mama had to do was smile and mention our cousins the Vanderbilts and all doors instantly opened for us and credit was graciously and generously extended at all the best stores.