The Ripper's Wife Page 14

  It would be a shame to waste such a spectacular gown and those tickets and Jim had carried on so about this being a special treat for me, so why should I miss it just because he wasn’t here to escort me? Unless he was lying dead in a gutter somewhere there really was no reason why Jim couldn’t have sent a message if he was unavoidably detained. The tickets were just lying there, so why shouldn’t I go, with or without him? After all, there was another man who would be only too glad to squire me anywhere I wanted to go, and I rather relished the thought of holding tight to Mr. Brierley’s hand when the man on the stage became a monster.

  I waited as long as I dared. But Jim never came. So I draped my long train over my arm, picked up my fan of dyed-red ostrich feathers, and went to the Lyceum with Alfred Brierley. We had a grand time; the play was every bit as exciting and terrifying as everyone said it was. I loved that the frights upon the stage provided a respectable excuse for me to hold my lover’s hand. After all, there were women down in the seats below clinging to strangers or fainting into their laps, so a little hand grasping with an old family friend was nothing at all in comparison. Afterward, in the cab, Alfred and I kissed and held each other tight all the way back to the hotel. He suckled my breast and guided my hand to ease inside his trousers. We smiled and giggled like naughty children making mischief behind the teacher’s back, but I daresay the savvy old coachman up on his box was well accustomed to such shenanigans.

  The moment I walked through the door Jim was on his feet, moving toward me. The look on his face paralyzed and absolutely terrified me. He pointed at my dress, calling it “the color of whores.” He grasped the bodice and tore it down the front, then ripped the rest off me, beads, feathers, and roses flying everywhere. The long train tripped and tangled me and I fell hard at his feet. His face was almost as red as the velvet and I was sorely afraid he would at any moment be struck down by a stroke. The beads bit painfully into my palms as I tried to free myself from the tangle of velvet and wriggle away from him. Jim looked at me as though he didn’t really see me and just kept on ranting and raving about whores, blood, and the color red and ripping that dress, as though he were determined to reduce it to a pile of velvet scraps the size of postage stamps. I’d never seen him like this. Good God, he’s gone mad! I thought as I began inching slowly away on my hands and heels, backward, toward the door, not daring to turn my back on him for even an instant.

  I was almost at the door. I was just twisting around to reach for the knob when Jim grabbed my ankle and jerked me back across the floor. He dug his fingers into my hair, pulling it so hard I was afraid he would snatch me bald. He dragged me into the bedroom and threw me onto the bed and tore my petticoats and drawers off, his nails raking long bloody scratches down my thighs.

  I screamed as he pulled my breasts out of my candy-striped corset, giving each nipple a savage, twisting pinch. He clamped a hand over my mouth and warned, “Do that again, you bitch, and I’ll ram my fist down your throat! I’ll grab your heart in my hand and tear it out through your lying whore’s mouth! I’ll hold it in front of your eyes so you can see its last beat as you die!”

  Somehow I managed to fight my way free of him again and made for the door, but I was clumsy in my fright and French heels. I twisted my ankle and stumbled long enough for Jim to catch hold of me again.

  “Whore!” he roared, hurling me back onto the bed, wrestling my thighs open wide, and staring with a mixture of fury and lust at the secret pink center of me. “You would have run out just as you are! Downstairs, knowing that this hotel is full of men—men I do business with! Confess—it would give you such a thrill to show all London your cunt!”

  He forced my thighs so far apart I thought I was surely going to snap like a wishbone. He drove his fist hard between my legs, punching me, as though he were trying to ram the whole of his fist, and his arm, up inside me to reach my heart that way.

  I screamed and screamed again and begged him please, for the love of God and for any love he had ever borne me, to stop, it hurt so much! But he just kept hitting me, anywhere he could, I lost count how many times. I just wanted him to stop, I begged him to stop, but it was as though he couldn’t hear me. There was a peculiar mad gleam in his eyes, and he just kept ranting about whores, blood, and the color red. I just couldn’t understand what madness had possessed him. He’d been perfectly fine when I last saw him.

  Kneeling on the bed, he tore open his trousers, threads bursting and black buttons flying, and fell on top of me. I screamed as he thrust inside, it hurt so much. I felt sure he would tear me apart before he was done with me.

  I kept trying to twist free, but I couldn’t; his rage seemed to only make him stronger. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I didn’t dare. I couldn’t look away from that mad red face, panting and grunting above me.

  Just as suddenly as it had started, it all stopped. He pulled out of me, thankfully without spending; I had taken the sponge out and douched for good measure when I returned from Whitechapel. I thought he was finished with me. Then his hand was in my hair again, yanking my head back, as far as it would go, so hard I feared my neck was about to snap, and I felt a warm, sticky jet as he spent violently onto my face. His fingers dug even tighter into my hair. “All women are whores! Damn all whores!” he cried.

  That was the last thing I heard. He flung me off the bed, into the corner, to spend the rest of the night lying there crumpled and unconscious like a broken doll. He might have cut my throat and I wouldn’t have even known it.

  11

  THE DIARY

  Love makes sane men mad

  and can turn a gentle man into a fiend.

  Capricious cunt! Flighty American bitch! I should have known! Women like her cannot be trusted! You give them everything and they still want more! I’ve seen the way she looks at other men, my hot little Bunny! Bright shining eyes, heaving breasts, I swear I can feel the heat from her cunt even under all those sumptuous layers of satin and velvet I paid for! She laughs, flutters her lashes, and rests her little hand on their sleeve and leans in close. Even Edwin—my own brother! I dropped my spoon and saw their ankles entwined beneath the table, black patent leather and pink satin. The Judas-whore! I half-expected to see her hand dip down to pet his prick through his trousers or take it out and fondle it right there at the table. I’m certain she’s done it! Of course, I cannot blame Edwin; he’s always been so susceptible to seduction.

  I didn’t want to believe it; I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want Michael to be right. But Michael is always right, damn his eyes, damn those silver vocal cords that have lined his pockets with gold! Command performances for the Queen, a mansion in Regent’s Park! Michael is God’s own gift to the world! Our parents always loved him best because he could sing; Mother always wept with pride because God had given him a voice. He didn’t have to do chores like I did; he didn’t have to lift a finger, only his voice to the glory of God while I wore mine to the bone taking up the slack. I was the family workhorse, the dogsbody, the slave! A poor, mediocre Liverpool lad with no special God-given talent, I spent my whole childhood dreaming of the day when I would best Michael at something.

  I made myself rich; through sheer dint of will, I worked myself up to the top of the cotton trade. I swept floors in the brokers’ offices when I was nine. Now other poor little lads come in to sweep mine, but Michael is still the star. God’s chosen one, always the best and the brightest, always right, Saint Michael is, and he was right about Bunny too, damn him! I should have listened to him when he said I couldn’t possibly be in love with someone I had known only one week, that these whirlwind shipboard romances were the stuff of novels and musical comedies and not to be trusted in real life. She was no more an “American Dollar Princess” than I was! She’s heiress to two and a half million acres of fetid swamps as rank, rotten, and foul as her black whore’s heart is! She learned at the knee of the best, her own mother, Caroline the Cuckolder, Baroness von Bawd, who uses men like handkerchiefs so she can wear diam
onds and wipe her arse on pound notes! In ten years’ time Bunny will be just like her. Money and whores—they’re the bane of mankind’s existence, they break hearts and destroy souls, but we cannot live with or without them! Lack, like, loathing, or loving, they’ll drive you MAD!

  I could have pretended, I could have denied it, if only I had not seen it. It would have been so easy to dismiss it as more nastiness and spite from the Currant Jelly Set directed at my American-born wife, “the Dollarless Dollar Princess.” But I saw, I saw; with my own eyes I saw it!

  We were in London, for some entertainment and for me to see a doctor about this vexing numbness in my cold, cold hands—cold as her heart and her cunt when I come to her bed and try to touch it! “Do let me, dear!” I implore the icy wall of her back, but silence is the only answer I ever get. There’s a distressing tremor and a feeling of needles and pins—like the lies that stab my heart! Pain gnaws like starving rats at my stomach. My bowels are like rice water, and my skin sloughs off like a snake’s. It itches abominably, burns, yet is so cold; I can never get warm enough.

  Whenever I visit this great City of Whores, crawling with them like vermin, rich whores and poor whores, slim whores and stout whores, shy whores and bold whores, plain whores and pretty whores, I always return to Whitechapel, to visit my Mrs. Sarah and have my wedding present, the gold watch she gave me from her uncle’s shop, cleaned and polished bright as new.

  Of course the bitch wanted money for our five brats. I suppose they are mine; there was a time when I lay with her every chance I got. I was hot and lusty, right out of school and from under my parents’ pious roof, and still believed all the preacher’s prattle about hellfire and damnation and sins of the flesh, and the words of the beautiful, uplifting hymns Michael sang every Sunday. When I rented a room above the watchmaker’s shop, Sarah set my loins on fire at the first sight of her. I saw her ankles on the stairs. I blushed and stammered and cast down my eyes until she left me alone so I could tend to the sticky mess in my trousers. A red-haired Magdalene with a bosom and bum like a juicy apple I longed to bite into. I was hard as a poker every time her skirts brushed against me in passing. And she knew it! She didn’t even have to touch me! I fell asleep with my prick in my hand every night. I played with it so much I had to see a doctor. He advised me to leave it alone, that the soreness would abate with the slackening of my attentions, but I couldn’t stop myself. Not even a regimen of cold baths could douse the fire Sarah lit inside me. Nor did the barbed ring the doctor recommended I wear to bed fitted snugly around the root of my cock deter me. There was no help for it—I had to possess her!

  I thought the fires of Hell were burning me, that there was something supernatural, otherworldly, about my lust, that it was surely Hell instead of Heaven sent and the only way I could avert damnation was by marrying her. But I was never a fool. I knew better than to trust my prick. This was not a woman I would be proud to introduce to the world as Mrs. Maybrick, but she was jolly fun for an apprentice boy with a prick like fireworks always going off and having her would restore my peace of mind.

  To stop her wheedling and whining, I had one of Michael’s theatrical friends dress up as a preacher and bless the brass ring I slipped on her finger. I lifted her veil—made from a lace tablecloth bought cheap off one of the stalls in Petticoat Lane because of a bad coffee stain—and kissed “my own dear wife,” “my Mrs. Sarah.” There’s a parchment with Certificate of Marriage in big fancy script and both our signatures—mine scrawled so illegibly not even Satan himself could read it—that she keeps framed above her bed. Proof the whore can point to that she isn’t a whore even when she’s lying underneath it letting the rat catcher from down the street diddle her cunt.

  But all women are whores, in one way or another; they all have their price. They’ll sell themselves for pennies, a kind word, a crust of bread, a tot of gin, or a bright silk handkerchief, and the most costly of all demand diamonds; it’s only a matter of naming the right price. I’ve had whores I couldn’t afford to, or didn’t want to, pay for the silk handkerchief out of my pocket, and they were happy to have it. Sometimes when Edwin is out, I help myself to some of his bright, gaudy silks; the whores love those! You should see the way their eyes light up and their skirts flip up! That’s how I get my three-penny knee tremblers for free, ha ha!

  I had promised my darling Bunny a treat—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum. She was supposed to be spending the day shopping while I saw the doctor and took care of some business. Of all the people I might have seen by chance, slumming gents and lady-whores with their veils down in the cesspool of Whitechapel, I had to see my own wife, with Alfred Brierley, a man I considered one of my best friends; I sponsored him at the Liverpool Cricket Club, God damn and blight him!

  Her veil was down and she was wearing what I suppose was her idea of a discreet dress and hat—black with scarlet poppies blooming from head to hem—but I knew it was her. I saw the familiar, intimate way she leaned into him as they walked into the hotel, one of those low places where rooms are let by the hour. They stayed for two.

  Pain burning like a fireball in my belly, I sat by the window at the pub across the street drinking rotgut gin and sprinkling arsenic on my palm, licking it up in long, languorous strokes, the way I used to lick her cunt when I thought she was all mine, God damn her, and watched until they came out again.

  The sun went down, and it started to rain. Even the heavens weep for me! I thought. The hour came and went when Bunny would have been dressing for the theater. Was she alarmed by my absence? Did she make inquiries? Did she try to find me? Or did she shrug and say I must have been delayed and go with him taking my ticket, taking my place? And still I sat there, drinking gin and taking arsenic—I even sprinkled some in the rotgut.

  I’d never felt such a rage. I wanted to MURDER her with my bare hands! But the children’s faces kept floating before my eyes, like large, stubborn cinders obscuring my vision. I would see my hands closing around her throat, her big violet-blue eyes bulging out, protruding like a frog’s until they popped, like bursting blueberries, and then I would see Bobo and Gladys staring out at me from the silver-framed picture on the mantel and I just couldn’t do it. I thrust the wife-whore from me and let her fall. I stood over her, listening to her pant like a dog, a bitch, lying in a whimpering, quivering heap at my feet. I kicked her, and it felt so good, I kicked her again. Half of me hated her. The other half still loved, worshiped, and adored her. I wanted to kill her . . . I wanted to kiss her . . . I think I knew then that I was losing my mind.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the children! My black-haired boy, with the rare double row of eyelashes all the ladies envy so, and my frail little girl who succumbs to every cough and fever. There is a line in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that always makes me think of Gladys—“always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered.” My little angels! Oh God, how I love them! But oh, how they make me worry! Bobo’s beauty provokes the other boys’ teasing, even after his curls have been shorn. He always feels he has to prove himself the little man and sometimes takes risks he shouldn’t, like the time he broke his finger playing ball in the park with the bigger boys whose company he was forbidden on account of their roughness. He tried to hide it and the bone began to knit crookedly and Dr. Hopper had to break it again and reset it. My brave little man, he tried so hard not to cry! And poor little Gladys sees Dr. Hopper almost as often as I do (last month I saw him eleven times). I sit her on my knee and put the pills into her rosebud mouth. Sometimes I give her a sip—just a tiny sip for a tiny girl—of my Fowler’s Solution, that lovely lavender-tinted tincture of arsenic and potassium. I pray it will make her stronger!

  If I killed their mother, the children’s lives would be destroyed. So many people think evil is inherent in the blood. They would scrutinize the children’s every word and deed, measuring them always against what I did. I couldn’t do that to them. But I had to do something! The rage, the furious pain, it was like bein
g in a room lined with iron spikes and the walls were closing in on me. I had to find some sort of release, some purge for my angry soul, or it would kill me. I couldn’t keep it bottled up, letting it fester, always living with the fear that it would burst out and injure those I love best. But I couldn’t trust myself alone with the bitch, the harlot with the scarlet poppies on her hat, unless I did something to rid myself of this rage.

  I thought a walk in the rain might cool my head. I was so distraught, I didn’t even care if I caught my death in the downpour. It was then that she scurried out of a dark alley and touched my sleeve. She peered up at me through the falling rain and I realized that beneath the brim of that battered old black straw hat I was staring into Bunny’s face. The rain was washing the dirt from her hair, like mud from gold nuggets, revealing waves of molten gold just like Bunny’s. Her eyes were big and blue as violets. Her lips were pink and parted, wet, and lusting to be kissed. Even in the cold, cold rain, I could feel the heat coming off her!

  The rain hadn’t cooled my rage at all. My head ached abominably, the rats still gnawed, and the fireball burned. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the alley. I slammed her against the wall, hard enough to jar the breath from her lungs and bring tears to her eyes. I pulled up her skirts. As I rammed into her, I grabbed her hair, pulling it hard, forcing her head back.

  “You hot-cunt slut!” I hissed. “You like this, don’t you?” I covered her mouth with mine before she could answer, biting her lips, tasting her blood, sucking at it like a leech.

  I imagined her cunt crawling with fleas beneath the squashed cabbage leaves of her filthy green skirt, and the dingy gray petticoats that had once been pure white, the dirty pink skin crusted with the seed of all the men who had come before me, and I thought of Bunny’s clean, perfumed pink-ivory skin and the neat little nest of golden curls, ticklish tendrils of gilt I loved to run my fingers through and bury my face in, teasing the little pink pearl they hid with my tongue. God and Devil both damn the whoring bitch! How I wished she could have seen me at that moment!