The Ripper's Wife Read online

  She was an old whore, and whores don’t live to be old in Whitechapel if they aren’t canny. I couldn’t risk her screaming, some instinct of the gut tugging at her, shouting DANGER! I bought her gin though she was already the worse for it. To breed trust, I gave her a bonnet.

  “Wot a jolly bonnet! I’ll never lack for me doss money now, not when I’m wearin’ this!” The dowdy drab preened like a peacock as she tied the bow beneath her chin and peered blearily into the bit of broken mirror she kept in her pocket.

  Black straw with a band of beaded black velvet trimmed with a red velvet rose. I nipped it off a sleeping tart when I was changing trains. It was one of those sweet, opportune moments. It reminded me of the black hat blooming with red poppies my wife-whore had worn when I saw her in Whitechapel with that bastard Brierley. I thrust the bonnet under my overcoat as I passed. I was gone, boarding another train, before she even noticed her hat was. I was so bloody clever! A woman like that would never report the theft; her ilk usually dread the police like the pox. No one will ever know how Polly got her jolly bonnet.

  I arranged a rendezvous with Polly. I didn’t want to be seen leaving the pub with her. Someone might notice a toff in a shiny black silk topper with a diamond horseshoe in his cravat, and a long black overcoat trimmed with astrakhan, toting a black Gladstone bag, talking to this slum-vermin bawd. Later, before our tryst, I would doff my topper and don a deerstalker. My hunting clothes. I would be dressed to kill.

  “Don’t you forget now,” I warned, waggling a finger at her. She was so drunk her eyes couldn’t even focus on it.

  “Right you are, Old Cock,” she slurred, and slapped my chest, nearly felling me with gin fumes. “Don’tcha worry, sir; your Polly will be there,” she promised, and staggered off, weaving and reeling, waving her arms like a windmill.

  I worried that I had given her too much gin and that she would fall down senseless in the street somewhere and sleep right through our tryst. But mistakes are meant to be learned from, and a stolen bonnet and a few pennies’ worth of gin are not as grave mistakes as a scream that leads to capture, a whore’s spilt blood that stains my children forever, and myself swinging from the gallows. If this whore failed to show, there would always be another, I assured myself. London was full of easy pickings and they were all mine for the taking.

  I took more of my medicine. I lapped the white powder from my palm. I felt its power coursing through my blood, flooding me with power. People take less than I do and die, yet I’ve never felt more alive!

  When I have my medicine, I can do anything; no one can stop me! I’m not afraid of the police, those bumbling bobbies bungling around in their big, noisy boots. I can hear them coming a mile away, ha ha!

  She met me in Buck’s Row by the stable-yard gates. It was a quiet, dark street with only one lamp at the far end. I heard a horse neigh. Was it a mare? Was she old and gray too, just like Polly?

  I watched poor jolly Polly slowly weaving her way toward me, waving her arms, and singing:

  “ ‘Wot cheer!’ all the neighbors cried,

  ‘Who’re yer goin’ to meet, Bill?

  Have yer bought the street, Bill?’

  Laugh! I thought I should ’ave died,

  Knock’d ’em in the Old Kent Road!”

  I smiled and took her hand. “The one time you are true, it will cost you dearly, my dear.”

  “Eh, wot’s that, Bill?” she croaked as she grabbed hold of my coat to keep from falling flat on her nose. Some stitches on my shoulder popped. Clumsy, stupid slut! I should drown her in a barrel of rum, I thought, only that would be a truly heavenly exit for the likes of her!

  I seized her throat and beneath her “jolly new bonnet” her eyes bulged with fright. I ached with desire as I laid her down and flung her skirts up to her nose. I like to think she died smelling the horse manure staining her hems. I stood staring down at her as I took off my overcoat and gloves. My knife slashed. My hands were cold; then they were warm, warmer than they had ever been before.

  Eyes open wide, she was staring at me over her stinking, frayed hems. The scream she would have uttered came out in a weak, whistling gurgle—a new kind of music I almost wished I could share with Michael. Did I only imagine she tried to say, “God help me?” As if He would!

  I blooded my knife like a knight does his sword in his first battle. I bloodied my hands, in a baptism of blood, but there were no sacred words to say, only profane ones and lust grunts. I felt the blade graze bone. The scrape sent a shiver down my spine. I spent in my trousers. Oh, the indescribable thrill! Ragged, jagged cuts and wet, red heat! When I bathed my hands in her blood I felt purified, exorcised, purged of my rage. I could go home to my darling Bunny and the children without fear that I would hurt them. I stabbed her flaccid, worn-out old whore’s cunt and let my knife stand proxy for my prick. Her dead eyes stared up at me as I pulled on my gloves, to cover my bloody hands, and resumed my overcoat’s warm embrace. I waved a hand before those blind dead eyes. Not a flicker of life. How could there be? I could see the guts like a teeming mass of snakes inside her. Not such a hot little whore now; the dead so soon grow cold. I bent and, with the tip of my bloody knife, cut one of the big vulgar brass buttons from her coat. A souvenir to take home with me. I laughed, tossed it in the air like a lucky coin, caught it, and tucked it safely inside my pocket. My new lucky charm; I shall carry it with me next time I go to the races! Ha ha!

  Back in my bolt-hole, a quiet rented room in Petticoat Lane, I saw the button was embossed with a naked lady with long flowing hair riding a horse—Lady Godiva, ha ha! I wished I could show Bunny. Maybe she’d appreciate the noble sacrifice? The first honorable thing this whore had ever done in her whole miserable life, ha ha!

  The next morning it was all anybody could talk about. “ ‘Horrible Murder in the East End!,’ ” “ ‘The Work of a Maniac!,’ ” “ ‘Ghastly Crimes of a Madman!,’ ” the newsboys were out shouting on every corner, brandishing the horrors in the face of every passerby. In the pubs those who had known the deceased were drowned in free drinks by journalists in exchange for their reminiscences.

  I returned to Buck’s Row. I stood, being jostled by the curious, and saw her blood still staining the cobbles. I gleefully paid my penny to go up to Mrs. Emma Green’s bedroom for a bird’s-eye view of those dumb, bumbling bobbies down on their knees trying to scrub away the bloodstains; they couldn’t even do that right and ignored the shouted advice of housewives. One of the bobbies, a young officer, glanced up; our eyes met; I gave him a polite nod, which he returned. Had he but known . . . the fools! They can’t even catch me when I stand right in front of them! The button from her coat was in my pocket all the time and her blood still caked beneath my nails under my gloves.

  I’ve met someone. I’m bored with my Mrs. Sarah. Her looks are gone: she’s bloated as a leech and whines all the time. It takes all the joy out of fucking. She’s a fat sow who has suckled too many piglets! “My darling piggy,” I sometimes call her. Stupid bitch, she never hears the sarcasm in my voice, only the darling. I’m done with her for good! It must have been Fate putting this tempting morsel in my path at exactly the right moment. Let that diddling rat catcher spend his hard-earned wages on those miserable brats from now on and see how he likes it! Let him decide if Sarah’s cunt is worth the price!

  Her name is Mary Jane Kelly. She’s so deliciously low! A bawdy bawd, a ribald rut! A stout little wench, shapely as an hourglass, bosom and bum lovely and fat like well-stuffed cushions fit for a man’s favorite fireside chair, but she carries it well. I love the way she swings and swishes her hips when she walks! A hearty young Irish whore by way of Wales with a wealth of ginger-gold hair, a ready smile—no missing teeth yet, at least none that show—and eyes as green as the Emerald Isles. They were wide with horror the first time I saw them when they looked up and met mine over the newspaper she was reading with an artist’s full-paged rendering on the front page of a bull’s-eye-lantern-toting bobby discovering Polly’s co
rpse.

  “What kind o’ monster could have done this evil thing?” Mary Jane Kelly asked in a fascinating musical blend of Irish brogue, Welsh lilt, and cockney crudity.

  What kind indeed? Ha ha! Sometimes monsters or angels can be standing right in front of you, staring you in the face or even speaking to you, and you don’t even know it until it’s too late. Some monsters even masquerade as gentle men—gentlemen—by day, but when the night falls out comes the knife and out goes the light of life.

  She intrigues me like no other woman ever has, this Mary Jane Kelly. She’s still young and beautiful, though probably not for much longer. She has rum every morning for breakfast. Her teeth are already starting to go; she uses the wax drippings from her candle to fill in the cavities. Oh, what a clever little whore she is!

  There’s something about her that reminds me of my wife-whore. I see them as two sides of the same coin. Sometimes it’s spinning so fast they blur into one. Sometimes I like to imagine they’re twin sisters, separated at birth, neither knowing of the other’s existence, one raised in luxury, the other piss-poor. They’re both twenty-six. The long, thick hair is ginger-gold, not rich molten like a melted fortune; the eyes are emerald green, not violet-blue; the hands are rough, red, and sturdy, well accustomed to gripping men’s pricks, not delicate, dove white, and dedicated to the feminine art of embroidery; the voice is lilting with the musical strains of Wales and Ireland, not a molasses-thick, syrupy sweet Southern drawl.

  She walks the streets in her only pair of boots, the black leather cracked and worn, to earn a living, instead of riding in a carriage to browse and buy trifles and gewgaws; she wouldn’t be allowed to set one foot through the door of Woollright’s Department Store. She only has one set of clothes to cover her back, not a whole wardrobe spilling over with more than a hundred dresses. She doesn’t spend her afternoons sitting in the parlor with a novel or a cat on her lap. She fucks for pay, not pleasure. And yet . . . there’s a perplexing hint of refinement about this little guttersnipe, barely a wisp, as though it were hanging on for dear life, a certain something that suggests that she used to be better than this.

  I asked her if she was willing. She knew what I meant. The answer was “yes.” It’s always “yes.” I gave her my arm. She laughed, saying, “Aren’t you a gallant gent!” She said we could go to her room—13 Miller’s Court in Dorset Street. Joe, the fishmonger she lived with, would be at work, “if he’s not lost that job too!” She rolled her eyes. “I know as some would think it unlucky to live in a room numbered thirteen,” she said as we walked along, “but not me—’tis one o’ McCarthy’s Rents, it is, an’ me uncle is John McCarthy himself, so I don’t have to worry about him givin’ me the boot! ’Twould break me da’s heart if his own brother did me dirty like that! An’ I’ve too pretty an arse for any man to be kickin’ it; they’d much rather poke it instead! An’ when the rent collector comes callin’ I always make sure an’ give him a bit o’ jolly to keep him smilin’ so he don’t feel half so bad about leavin’ empty-handed!” She winked. “I’ve a way with me mouth, I have, and I don’t just mean the gift o’ the gab. . . .”

  She leaned close and her tongue darted out to tease my ear. “I know how to please a man; I can lick his cock like a little girl does a peppermint stick. My gents always go away smilin’ an’ they always come back for more!”

  We walked on, newsboys darting in and out of our path, brandishing their papers and shouting, “ ‘Murder—’Orrible Murder!’ ”

  “Poor Polly, God rest her!” Mary Jane sighed and crossed herself—A Catholic whore, well, well!

  “Did you know her?” I asked idly.

  “Aye, ’tis a sad, sad story, it is! Polly met her Bill in the Old Kent Road. That was why she was always a-singin’ that song; it was their song.” Mary Jane sang the familiar chorus:

  “ ‘Wot cheer!’ all the neighbors cried,

  ‘Who’re yer goin’ to meet, Bill?

  Have yer bought the street, Bill?’

  Laugh? I thought I should ’ave died!

  Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road!”

  The whore had called me Bill last night; was he on her mind even at the last?

  “He had his printin’ shop there, an’ in the room upstairs all five of their bairns was born. It was a good life! But then Bill went an’ ruined it all; he fell in love with the midwife that delivered their last—Little Liza. Polly took to tryin’ to drown her sorrows. She couldn’t bear to stay, she was just too proud to sit there an’ watch another woman take her place, an’ she left him, an’ their brood. That was the hardest part. She used to cry for them when the horrors o’ the drink were upon her, an’, when she was far gone enough, for her Bill an’ to sing their song. But she was in a terrible way, she was, not fit to take care o’ herself, much less a passel o’ bairns. She went to London an’ fell into the life. Can’t keep body an’ soul together sellin’ matchsticks, don’tcha know.

  “One day she woke up an’ took a long hard look at herself an’ what she had become. Made her right sick, it did. She tried to get herself right. Some missionaries, a right pair o’ teetotalers they was, butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, a preacher an’ his missus, gave her a job in their house as a skivvy. She tried real hard, she did, but she just couldn’t stand it, all that preachin’, all that talk of repentance, hellfire, an’ damnation, an’ her with the shakes wantin’ a drink so bad she felt like she was goin’ to scream the house down, an’ she fell back into her old ways, stole all the missus’s clothes while she was in the bath, left her stark naked, she did, an’ pawned the lot o’ them an’ spent every penny on gin.

  “Some time after that, she met a nice bloke, a blacksmith name o’ Drew. He got her off the streets for a time, he did. She tried hard to make a go of it doin’ needlework an’ hawkin’ matches an’ flowers, but it didn’t last; she just couldn’t give up the drink, an’ in the end Drew left her too. Said he couldn’t fight a ghost, an’ when the horrors o’ the drink was upon her all she talked about was her Bill an’ how much she missed him, an’ sang that song until you wanted to bang your head against the wall or hers, God love her! Her son, Will, gave her a few pence whenever he could, but he died a few years back, burned to death, he did, when a paraffin lamp exploded in his face, poor lad.” She crossed herself again.

  “Poor Polly, God rest her!” Mary Jane wiped away a tear. “ ‘An’ God shall wipe away all the tears; an’ there shall be no more death; or pain, or sorrow, or cryin’; these former things have passed away.’ No one can hurt her now!”

  I stopped and stood and stared deep into those green eyes. It almost ended there. I wanted to strangle her; my hands shook with the urge to reach out, right there on the street, and squeeze the life out of her in broad daylight.

  That bedraggled, gin-soaked drab I had ripped open wide and left lying like horse apples on the cobblestones was nothing, a worthless nobody, yet this trumped-up Irish strumpet made me see her as someone real, someone who had mattered to someone once and still did, even if it were only her own downtrodden ilk.

  It was as though Mary Jane Kelly sat me down on the sofa next to her and opened an album of photographs. I saw the story of a life, a woman who had once been a happy wife. She’d had a husband named Bill—she had called me Bill last night!—little children had loved her and called her “Mother.” She’d had a son who sympathized and gave her money, a son who had died horribly. She’d loved and lost and been betrayed, she’d had her pride, cried, and fought a powerful weakness, and she had a song she still sang because it reminded her of the happiest time in her life, before everything went wrong. She had even tried to catch herself and stop herself from falling further, and deeper, down into the cesspool. Through the window of Mary Jane Kelly’s words, I saw why Polly had become that dirty, stinking, gin-belching hag, and I hated Mary Jane for it!

  My trembling hands reached out for Mary Jane’s throat. At the last moment they changed course. I don’t know why. I cupped her face. I k
issed her hard. I bruised her lips with mine. I tasted rum, sugar, and orange juice, not blood but Shrub, a drink the harlots fancied, a cheap, sweet indulgence they persuaded men to buy them by claiming “it makes a body right randy.” I wanted her as I had never wanted any woman before. I wanted to hike up her skirts and fuck her right there in front of the newsboys. Lust, not rage or bloodlust, just plain, ordinary, pulsing, powerful lust, was hot upon me. Mary Jane knew it and she knew what to do.

  She held my hand tight, stepped afore me, as the passage was too narrow for us to walk side by side, and smiled back at me as she guided me through the cramped archway. She unlocked the door to a single filthy room and took me to her bed. We fucked madly. The pine headboard banged against the wall. Hours must have passed. It was worth every penny! There was just something about Mary Jane Kelly. . . . Every time I wanted to kill her, I kissed her; every time I wanted to cut her, I caressed her. I don’t pretend to know why. Maybe it really was the fabled Luck o’ the Irish? Mary Jane believed in it. “Don’tcha know, I’m like a cat, I am; I always land on me feet,” she always said. “Never despair, me dear. ’Tis always darkest before the dawn, but tomorrow the sun will come out.” She seemed untouched by the poverty and pain that surrounded her. She was of it, as dirty and ragged as the rest of them, with the teeth slowly rotting in her pretty head, but she was still, somehow, above it; her feet never seemed to touch the ground.

  In her pathetic little room, half a stub of a candle burned in a ginger beer bottle on the table by the bed next to a stale crust of bread and a half-eaten apple turning brown. A filthy, ragged muslin skirt masquerading as a curtain veiled the window. The only furnishings besides the bed were two small, mismatched tables and chairs and a lopsided washstand. The pitcher and basin were cracked and the pisspot half-shoved beneath the bed stank and was perilously close to overflowing, and empty gin and ginger beer bottles rattled against it on the bare, gritty floorboards. A dented kettle sat on the hob, and for a pathetic spot of color there was a cheap, faded print of The Fisherman’s Widow, a desolate woman keeping vigil in a graveyard, eyes fixed upon a wooden cross. It hung over the mantel where battered tin boxes and twists of brown paper containing her meager rations of sugar and tea sat alongside a cracked shard of mirror and a broken-toothed comb.