The Ripper's Wife Read online

  When I crept in to check on Jim I was greatly alarmed. His breathing seemed so labored and, in the gentle golden glow of the lamplight, there was a distinctly cadaverous appearance about his face. His head against the pillows looked like it had been carved out of wax, like something straight out of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

  Icy fingers of fear gripped my heart and I burst into tears and flung myself against my husband’s body, clinging to him desperately and taking comfort in feeling the rise and fall of his chest and hearing his heart, still beating.

  “Please, Jim, please get well! I need you! I love you!” I cried. “Think of Spain, sunshine and oranges! Our new start! Please, don’t leave me; don’t ever leave me! I’m sorry for everything!”

  Despite his pain, Jim smiled at me.

  “There, there, Bunny,” he whispered. “You mustn’t worry. I’ve never, no matter what I’ve said and done, stopped loving you for an instant. I sometimes think this pain I’m suffering now is God’s punishment for the pain I’ve caused you. But I shall soon be well, God is merciful, and I’ve been praying for His forgiveness. It’s spring you know, my favorite season. And you know what spring means—rebirth and renewal—and I hope, I pray, it may be so with us. . . .”

  “It will, it will!” I cried fervently. “It will! Everything’s going to be all right; I just know it!”

  And in that moment I believed it. I wanted it so bad I could almost taste the morsel of our future happiness melting like fine chocolate upon my tongue even as Fate hovered nearby threatening to snatch it away. I curled myself up into a little ball at Jim’s side, laid my head on his shoulder, and held him tight, trying to will him well, to send some of my strength into his body. I didn’t leave him again until morning’s first light.

  27

  THE DIARY

  I’ve taken to my bed. I shall never rise again. Doctors come; doctors go. They dose and poke, prod, and purge me. Syringes—for veins and anus. I am pumped full of drugs, except the one I crave most—they stint so on the arsenic, and I am too weak to reach my private store!

  Morphine suppositories, hydrate of potash, bromides and bicarbonates, Fowler’s Solution, nux vomica, potassium salts, soda water and milk, mustard in steaming-hot water to soak my ice-cold feet and purge my stomach, double doses of bismuth and brandy, Tincture of Jaborandi, Extract of Aloes and Chamomile Flowers, sulphur lozenges, laudanum, Du Barry’s Revalenta, chlorodyne, Valentine’s Meat Juice, Neave’s Invalid Food, prussic acid, lemonade gargles, celery nerve tonic, liver pills, antipyrine, enemas, and even leeches.

  Dear Edwin sneaks me sips of champagne on the sly and assures me I will soon be better.

  Why can’t I have my arsenic and strychnine tablets? I grow weaker and weaker without them, but the fools won’t give me any no matter how much I beg and plead. Michael says it is very ill becoming of me to behave in such a whining, petulant manner, like a tot throwing a tantrum because he is denied a toffee apple. I’m dying, Dying, DYING for want of arsenic! But all they will let me have is just a little sip, a very tiny, tiny, tiny, minuscule, occasional sip, of Fowler’s Solution that only tantalizes me.

  They hover together like a flock of blackbirds in their black coats for their consultations; they argue and contradict one another, blabbering about inferior sherry and chronic dyspepsia, indiscreet dining, a chill from when I was caught out in the rain last time I went to the races, or too vigorous a toweling at the Turkish baths. Have you ever in your entire life heard anything more absurd? Death by toweling in a Turkish bath! Each one thinks he knows better than the rest. Bunny weeps, Edwin frowns and rages, “I tell you it’s those damn strychnine pills; he’s been taking them like candy!,” and Michael glowers and summons more doctors.

  My legs are as stiff and useless as dead things. They lie there stretched out before me, rigid as steel bars.

  It’s May outside, but my windows are shut tight. “Nature,” John Calvin so rightly said, “is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.” But not revealed to me . . . only concealed. . . . The velvet curtains are drawn tight against the fresh, sweet air, blue skies, and sunlight. My children will never again grab me one by each hand and pull me out to walk in the park, to fly kites, chase hoops, and sail toy boats, feed the birds and squirrels, and buy them toffee apples and ices—lemon for Bobo, raspberry for Gladys. The next time my little girl brings me a bouquet of bright flowers it will be to lay upon my grave.

  Outside my window, Gladys and her little chums are skipping rope. I hear God’s voice in the nonsense rhyme they are chanting and it brings me a peculiar kind of peace:

  “Jack the Ripper’s dead,

  He’s lying on his bed.

  He cut his throat

  With Sunlight Soap,

  Jack the Ripper’s dead!”

  I pray God she will never know, that a day will never come when she looks back with those heart-melting violet eyes and remembers herself as a six-year-old child, in bouncing black ringlets, big satin hair bow, button boots, and purple plaid frock, and realizes just how close she came to the truth:

  Jack the Ripper’s dead,

  He’s lying on his bed,

  He hasn’t the courage to

  cut his throat,

  But Jack the Ripper’s dead.

  Today will be the last time I confide my thoughts to this loyal diary. I’ve made up my mind, I am going to give it to Bunny to read and reveal to her in all his blood-crazed jealous madness the Jekyll and Hyde monster she married. Afterward, I will most humbly implore her forgiveness and beg her to find the courage and strength to do what I cannot and kill me.

  A public trial and execution would destroy our children; they would be forever tainted, tarred and feathered, as the accursed spawn of Jack the Ripper. But Justice must be done. I cannot suffer the beast inside me to go on living, and he will as long as I draw breath. Bunny must be brave and kill the husband she once loved; it’s the only way.

  This diary I will ask her to hide away, somewhere secret and safe, and hope someday, long after Bunny and my dear children have departed this earth, when the truth can no longer touch or hurt anyone I once loved, someone will find it and those who read it will understand that love can make sane men mad and turn a gentle man into a fiend and they will find it in their hearts to forgive me.

  God have mercy upon my sorry, tormented soul, grant my guilty heart peace and my unquiet spirit eternal rest, forsake me not, instead forgive, and remember the gentle man I was before love’s madness made me into a monster.

  Signed, for the LAST time, in red, for my heart’s blood and in memoriam of that I have spilled, from the depths of my guilty heart . . .

  28

  Bicker, bicker, bicker, that’s all the doctors did, and all the time Jim just kept on getting sicker and sicker. He was sinking so fast, and no one seemed able to pull him back up. And I was caught right smack in the middle of it. I just didn’t know what to do or who to believe. They kept saying words like gastritis and nervous dyspepsia and melancholia and talking about bad sherry and gross indulgences while dining, and pumping more drugs into his poor body through every orifice. He moaned and groaned and tossed in terrible pain, and every time they gave him anything in the way of medicine or food he was sick at one end or the other, sometimes both at the same time. Finally they would let him have nothing to eat but a kind of bottled invalid food, a weak beef broth, called Valentine’s Meat Juice, since everything else seemed to disagree with him.

  But Jim kept crying for champagne, lemonade, and, most of all, arsenic and strychnine, insisting that he would soon be right as rain if he could only have his “pick-me-up” tonic. But everyone acted like they were deaf and dumb, as though my poor husband were a man deranged by delirium crying out some vile obscenity that it was best to ignore for propriety’s sake.

  In desperation, I sought advice in Jim’s own medical books. When I found a passage suggesting that sudden and complete deprivation could be deadly to a man accustomed to
arsenic eating and brought it to the physicians’ attention they just smiled at me, patted my hand, and said I must put my trust in them and advised me to try to calm my nerves with needlework and prayer.

  Michael came up from London, furious that I hadn’t called in more doctors and nurses; it was obvious Jim was in need of more specialized care than Liverpool could provide. When Edwin interjected that it was “those damn strychnine pills; he’s been killing himself with them!” Michael snapped at him to be quiet: “When you attain a medical degree I will be pleased to consider your opinion, but until then I will thank you to keep your mouth shut!” Poor Edwin just stood there blinking and baffled; he’d only been trying to help, and what he’d said made a lot more sense than any of the doctors’ prattle about inferior sherry and too vigorous a toweling at the Turkish baths.

  Mrs. Briggs agreed with Michael that I was quite incompetent and flooded his ear with tales about the “slipshod fashion” in which this household was run, then proceeded to take full charge. Then I looked out a window and saw Nanny Yapp in the garden gesticulating wildly, talking urgently to Edwin. Later I came across the two of them, with Mrs. Briggs and Michael, huddled in the hallway outside Jim’s room thick as thieves. They broke apart at my approach and the looks on their faces almost froze my blood. Suddenly I found myself forbidden access to the sickroom without supervision. There would be times when I would hear Jim calling for me and I would try to go to him and find the door barred against me by a nurse whose features were as hard as her marble heart. “Can’t you hear he’s calling for me?” I would cry as the door was closed firmly in my face.

  I didn’t know then, but I had made another mistake. Alfred Brierley had informed me by letter that he had made up his mind once and for all to end everything between us forever and go away to South America. Jim being so ill and me feeling so friendless, alone against Michael, Mrs. Briggs, Nanny Yapp, and the dizzying array of doctors and nurses marching in and out of the house, I just couldn’t bear the thought of parting. All I could think about was Alfred lazing away the days amidst coffee beans and brown-skinned beauties wearing little more than beads fanning him with palm leaves. The cold tone of his letter made me long suddenly for the warmth of his body and the comfort of his arms. I know better than any just how horrible that sounds, with my husband lying there sick, maybe even dying, and me weeping and wailing and walking the floors and hardly sleeping, hoping and begging and praying that he would get well, wanting, yet again, to make yet another fresh start. Heavens, but I do look a contrary, contradictory, deceptive, duplicitous female! Even I can see it. Yet the purpose of this memoir is truth, and I cannot deny what I felt, even if that truth shows me in the poorest and most unflattering light.

  I had dashed off an impulsive letter to Alfred, to try to stop him from leaving, the words flying from my pen so fast I hardly knew what they said, thrust it into an envelope without giving it a second glance, and told the maid to mail it. She left it lying on the hall table, and it happened that as Nanny Yapp was passing, to take the children out for “their afternoon constitutional,” she saw it. She would later say that she gave it to Gladys to carry and that my little girl, skipping along on the way to the post office, excited about doing this favor for Mama, had dropped it in a mud puddle.

  Being the kind, considerate woman that she was, that viper who had nursed at Satan’s own teat, Nanny Yapp decided to open my letter and put it in a fresh envelope and in so doing discovered my shameful adultery and decided that it was her “Christian duty” to alert Edwin and Michael, choosing that time to also tell them about the flypapers I had been soaking in my bedroom before the ball.

  There had been a dreadful murder case a few years back in which a pair of sinister spinster sisters who ran a rooming house had sent some of their lodgers to the grave with arsenic they obtained by soaking flypapers, and Nanny Yapp leapt to the conclusion that I was no doubt up to the same thing, endeavoring to “hasten the poor master’s end,” and my “sinful passion for Mr. Brierley” was the reason.

  Melodrama had leapt right off the stage and become real life! No wonder they regarded me with suspicion! But I was too overwrought; I couldn’t see it through their eyes then, so I missed the chance to take precautions to protect myself. Murder had never even tiptoed to the threshold of my mind at any time! And Jim took so much arsenic himself and was even then lying there in his sickbed bleating for it like a baby for its mother’s milk.... I thought everyone who knew him, even casually, knew about his habit; he was always whipping out that silver box, dropping a pinch into his wine, and raising his glass to wish everyone “a fine complexion, good health, and longevity!” I was too blind and weary to see it then, but I was playing right into their hands. Michael would see to it that Jim’s reputation would be safeguarded at all costs, while my own already-tarnished honor would be sacrificed, even if it meant my life must also be lost. But I didn’t know until after . . . and by then it was already too late....

  Jim sent for me to sit with him. This time they allowed it. Outside in the hall, where I was left waiting, I heard him arguing with them, demanding would they deny a dying man his final wish, the consolation of what just might be his last meeting with his beloved wife. Michael and Mrs. Briggs tried to speak against me, but Jim, to his credit, would not hear them.

  “She’s my wife,” he said, “and I love her, and I will see her alone—without busybodies and chaperones!”

  And in the end, they let me in.

  “Oh, Jim, I’m so afraid!” I cried, clutching at his hands. The skin was gray, cold, and clammy and looked waxy and dead. It was an awful thing to hold and part of me wished I didn’t have to, but another part of me never wanted to let go.

  I bent forward, meaning to kiss him, and nearly vomited right onto his chest. It took all my strength to persevere and deliver the intended kiss. His breath was absolutely fetid. I’d never smelled anything so foul coming out of a human mouth.

  “Oh, Jim!” I sobbed, wishing I had strength and power enough to pull him back to health and life.

  “Hush, now,” he said, his voice weak and raspy, and squeezed my hand. “It’s all for the best.” He smiled gently at me, a real smile this time that was in his eyes as well as upon his mouth.

  “But, Jim,” I protested, “when we married we swore for better or worse, in sickness and in health. . . .” And now, when I could see the very life ebbing out of him, I knew I had failed to keep the most important promise of my life, the one I had intended never to ever break. Yet I had broken it again and again, so many times, and now it was too late to make amends. I had done the unforgivable, and even if Jim could find it in his heart to forgive me I could never forgive myself. In that moment I hated Alfred Brierley and Edwin too, but even more than them, those Devil-sent temptations I had succumbed to, I hated myself.

  “Hush,” Jim said gently, raising, with a mightily trembling hand, my own to his lips and letting his cracked, fever-hot lips linger there. “It doesn’t matter now. I forgive you for everything, and I hope you can forgive me—”

  “Oh, I do, I do!” I cried. “Anything! Everything!”

  “Not yet . . .” he said with an adamant shake of his head, “not yet, not until you know . . . all.”

  It was then that he pushed from beneath the covers a black book. After a moment I recognized it as the diary I had bought for him all those years ago as a happy young bride skipping spontaneously into a stationer’s shop to buy a gift for her husband. I’d wanted to give him something for his study, to lie on his desk and to say for me, whenever he touched or looked at it, I love you and I’m thinking of you. I hadn’t seen it since; in my silly, frivolous way, I’d forgotten all about the gift after the pleasurable moment of giving it had passed; I’d had no idea that he had even kept it.

  “Before I give you this,” he said in a raspy, rough, whisper-soft voice, “you must promise me first that after you’ve read it, no matter what you think of me, you must come back and sit, talk with me again, one
last time.”

  “Of course I will!” I assured him, a trifle baffled as to why he would even ask such a thing. Of course I would come back; I would be with him every moment if only they would let me! How could he think anything written in that silly old book could change that, and at a time like this, when his very life was in peril? It all seemed so absurdly trivial!

  Jim shook his head. “This is a promise you cannot make lightly, Bunny. If you give your word, you must be fully prepared to keep it, no matter what you find in these pages.” He tapped the book’s black cover.

  “I promise,” I said, thinking no doubt that he had chronicled his adulteries, or gambling debts I had no inkling of. But given my own sins, I could surely face his. Knowing the details might hurt, I couldn’t deny that, but I could bear the punishment; maybe I even deserved it after the way I had carried on with Alfred Brierley. “I promise faithfully, no matter what you’ve written, I will come back to you after I’ve read it.”

  “Even if you find a monster inside?” he persisted, his eyes boring like nails into mine.

  “Even if I meet a monster inside,” I promised, “you are still my husband, and I love you, and I will always come back to you, as God is my witness. I mean it, Jim; this is one promise I will keep!”

  Jim nodded, satisfied, and pushed the book across the bed to me.

  “Leave me now,” he said, “go and read it, and then, come back to me, and, if you can, forgive everything.”