The Ripper's Wife Read online

  “I’ll come just as soon as I can.” I rose and pressed a kiss onto his brow.

  As I reached the door, just as my hand was on the knob, he called out to me, forcing his weary, worn voice to carry—how it must have hurt his poor throat to make that effort! “It was all for love, Bunny; you must believe that!”

  “I do!” I assured him. “I do! We’ve both hurt each other so much, my darling, but it really was all for love! People do bad things in Love’s name all the time; we’re not unique in that. I think we’ve just made a worse muddle of it than most do.” I forced myself to smile through my tears.

  “Indeed we have!” With a wry, weak little chuckle, Jim nodded and lay back and shut his eyes. I had a sense, in that moment, that I had, with my words, given him a sense of peace, and I was glad that that at least was something I could give him.

  The time I spent alone in my bedroom with that book changed my life forever.

  It took me hours to read it because I kept stopping, sick with horror, dumbstruck and disbelieving, going back and reading the same lines over and over again, hoping I had misread it, that I was tired and overwrought and imagining things and that this time the barbaric mutilation of a woman of the streets would become a mundane business luncheon where the talk was as dry as the cotton the men were discussing.

  I sat and stared and ran my hands, like someone blind groping gently to discern a person’s features, over that mad, erratic, furious scrawl, so different from my Jim’s genteel, gentlemanly hand. This can’t be him, I kept telling myself. It just can’t be. This is not the man I love, the man I married.... It must be the drugs; it had to be the drugs! Combined with the ghastly and lurid stories filling all the newspapers and the anger he was feeling toward me, the jealousy and betrayal, it had all combined, melded into one mad arsenic fever dream and given birth to this medley of horrors. It was no more than a ferocious, furious fiction! Oh God, please, let it be so! It just couldn’t be anything else! Because if it was the truth . . . that was just too horrible to contemplate.

  The more I read, the more incredible it seemed. My blood turned to ice and the horror cut through me just like Jack the Ripper’s knife. I shivered so hard there were times I could scarcely read the words; whether I held it in my hands or laid it on my lap, the book shook so badly, and there were moments when my face went green and I had to thrust it from me and grope blindly, through my tears, for the chamber pot.

  I just couldn’t believe it! I didn’t want to believe it! If this was true . . . Oh God, it couldn’t be true! I wanted to believe that my husband was mad, better a madman who sat and wrote out his crazed, drug-fueled fantasies than a murderer, because with madness there was always hope, hope of a cure, of a return to normalcy, but with murder it meant a life for a life, prison until the last breath was drawn or he perished on the gallows!

  But it all seemed so terribly real! I could feel the hate burning off every page, and the rage that wielded the pen, and the knife, it was all so vividly real to me. This was not Charles Dickens drawing the reader into a story, spinning and binding a spell with words; this was too terribly, nauseatingly, horribly REAL! And the pain . . .

  Oh God, those poor women! I could see their faces, I could feel their fetid breath upon my flesh, along with their heart-pounding fear the moment when they realized . . . It was as though I were standing right there, looking over his shoulder, helpless, deaf and dumb, unable to warn them, unable to shout, RUN! SAVE YOURSELF! I had no choice but to stand there and watch them die, watch him—my Jim!—kill them!

  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. If this sick fantasy was indeed fact . . . my husband was a killer and I was the cause! I was the blind White Queen who had reigned, unwittingly, beside the mad Red King over that Autumn of Terror! He had projected my sins onto those poor, unfortunate women, so, in a way, I killed them too; they had died because of me. No matter how horrified and sickened I was by what he had done, I could never forget that—that I was the cause of it all. Our damaged, distorted, and perverted love had brought death, in the most violent, frenzied form, to five innocent women.

  With his words he took me back, back to where I never wanted to be again, back onto the wretched streets of Whitechapel, the site of my first illicit tryst with Alfred Brierley, and even further, Jim took me to Hell and showed me such horrors there that I knew I would be forever scarred by them. He introduced me, one by one, to his victims, so that they could never again be just names in a newspaper. Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—now they were all real women to me! I had seen them through his eyes, and through his hands I felt them; I felt their blood surge and their hearts race with terror and then grow cold, still, and die. I wanted to fall on my knees and beg their forgiveness. I now knew just how true it was that one small pebble cast into a pond creates great ripples that spread far and wide and can indeed touch and change, horribly and incredibly and indelibly, many lives. My sins were no longer my own; others had suffered and died because I was vain, hurt, lonely, foolish and weak. God help me, I was in my own way, a murderer too!

  Love makes sane men mad and can turn a gentle man into a fiend, my husband had written. I now knew what he had meant when he had called after me as I was leaving his room, “It was all for love, Bunny; you must believe that!” The horrible thing was that I did, I did believe it, I knew it was true. Love, like Justice, is blind, but only Love is mad and impetuous and shouldn’t ever be trusted to wield a sword; it causes only more harm, leaving hearts and lives lying broken and bleeding in Love’s debris. Do the dead and wounded, I wonder, weep for the ones left behind to pick up the pieces? Or is it a penance they are destined to pay? God alone knows the answers.

  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 covers 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.

  Seated behind his desk, I shuddered and stared at the snake-haired Medusa heads that stood guardian over each keyhole. My blood is already turned to ice; if she turns my body to stone that just might be a mercy, I thought as I forced myself to try the key in each one until the third lock yielded. I was as afraid as though I knew it contained a live serpent that would rear up and strike me. I sat there for quite some time, the little brass handle at first cold growing hot in my hand, rattling gently as I trembled, trying to find the courage to open that drawer.

  Finally, I could bear it no more. I took a deep breath, gave the drawer a tug, and found myself staring down at a candy box beauty with big, innocent blue eyes set in a porcelain and roses face, framed by a pompadour of golden curls and a big pink picture hat trimmed with tulle and roses. She might have been me at my best. With trembling hands, I lifted the box out and set it on the desk.

  Whoever would have thought such a beautiful box that had once contained the most heavenly, exquisite chocolates—cream centers, caramels, liqueurs, jellies, nuts, nougats, pralines, and juicy red cherries floating in sweet pink cordial—could now be the repository of such horrors? Grisly trophies, souvenirs of the foulest murder, not tenderhearted tokens of love, sweet love, letters and valentines. One by one, I laid them all out in a row, knowing that I would never look at a chocolate box in quite the same way e
ver again.

  A big brass button embossed with the figure of a naked lady with long flowing hair on horseback, it had to be Lady Godiva; two brass rings; a little prayer book in a language I now knew was Swedish, its cracked binding flopped open to reveal a crude woodcut depicting the Devil, stained reddish brown at the edges with the life’s blood of the woman who had owned it; a stubby little knife; a cheap glass brooch with a pink flower inside, like a sad valentine, the fluted ruffle of gilt metal that framed the poor, pathetic little thing turning green and black in spots like moldy, mildewed lace; a well-worn key with a long lock of braided ginger-gold hair threaded through the top and tied with a fraying green ribbon; a bottle of red ink; a cache of newspaper clippings about the Whitechapel murders; and several slim volumes bound in innocuous, unadorned cardboard covers with some rather suggestive, titillating, and thought-provoking titles: Freaks of Youthful Passion; Lady Lilywhite & the Lumberjack; A Case of Early Morning Stiffness; Three in a Coach: The Clergyman, the Countess, & the Cowpoke; The Schoolmaster & the Waif; The Schoolmarm’s Birch Rod; The Amorous Adventures of a Kentucky Farmboy in New York; The Minister & the Milliner; and The Vicar of Make-Love. Last, there was a postcard, delicately tinted, to put roses back in a now dead woman’s cheeks and recall the vibrant green of her eyes and the ginger-gold of her hair, the only parts of her left for her lover to recognize her by after the carnage.

  Despite the vulgar, indecent pose the elegantly clad model was striking, brazenly lifting her skirts high to reveal her naughty, naked, lasciviously rosy-tinted lady parts, it was her face I sat and stared at. It was the face that had been carved away in the Ripper’s mad frenzy, and I knew, sitting there at my husband’s desk, that I was the very last person to look upon the now effaced and forgotten features of Mary Jane Kelly.

  Was it my imagination? I reached across the desk for the silver-framed photograph my husband always kept of me and held the postcard up alongside it, trying to will my hand to stop shaking and the tears to stop pooling long enough for me to compare them. Her hair was gingery while mine was pure spun gold, my eyes were limpid violet-blue and hers a saucy, insouciant emerald, and hers was definitely the more voluptuous figure, but we might have been sisters raised in two different worlds. The same lively hint of mischief tweaked at both our smiling mouths, mine more refined, gentle, and sedate, while hers was entirely unrestrained, but it was there just the same.

  “He might have left you be had it not been for me! God forgive me!” I laid the postcard facedown in the bottom of the candy box and piled my husband’s other souvenirs back on top of it. Last, I added the diary. It fit perfectly, as though it belonged, like a big, deep, dark chocolate heart at the center of it.

  There was no turning back and retreating to blissful ignorance. I could no longer doubt and deny it, make up excuses, grasp at straws, and pretend. These grotesque souvenirs were the last nail in the coffin; all hope was dead. I now knew, beyond all doubt, that my husband was Jack the Ripper. This night he had taken me to Hell and shown me his very soul with my own, damned alongside it, shackled perpetually to it by guilt.

  I caressed the band of gold on my left hand, which now seemed to me suddenly to have become a golden shackle. “Bound forever,” I whispered, “till death and ever after!”

  I started to lock the candy box away, back in its drawer, but at the last moment I hesitated and took it with me instead, back to my room. I had some peculiar notion, an urgent, unexplainable compulsion to keep it safe, protect and preserve it; I had become the sole guardian of a terrible secret. I knew if Michael got his hands on it, it would be in the fire before I could even blink an eye. He wouldn’t hesitate to destroy the truth to maintain the fiction of the Maybricks’ outward respectability.

  In my dressing room I kept a lovely little tapestried chest that I’d had since I was a girl in Germany; I called it “my treasure chest.” Inside were my postcard album and some odds and ends, postcards I had not yet pasted in, photographs, pretty or amusing pictures, advertisements, stories, poems, articles, recipes, and anecdotes and such that I’d clipped from various periodicals with the idea of someday creating a scrapbook, and stray buttons, ribbons, and trinkets. It had a deep tray that lifted out, made in such a way that one didn’t immediately realize it, so it had the effect of having a false, or secret, shallow bottom compartment. Into this I put the candy box, burying it under all the scraps of pretty fabric I’d been saving for years, intending to make a quilt someday.

  Satisfied that the candy box was now safe, I took a few moments to compose myself, and then I went back to Jim, just as I had promised.

  The night nurse didn’t argue and let me in; she was so wrapped up in the romance she was reading I think she would have let Satan himself in with scarcely a nod over those enthralling pages. She resumed her cozy seat by the fire and just let me and Jim be. At times I heard her murmuring what sounded like “kiss her, kiss her!” as though urging the hero on to loving action.

  When I sat down on the bed beside him, Jim opened his eyes and looked at me, searching, hopeful, and wary.

  I just sat and looked at him with tears welling in my eyes.

  He hesitated a moment, then took my hand. I think we were both surprised that I didn’t pull it away. There was a part of my mind and my heart that just couldn’t reconcile it. Jim was still Jim, yet he wasn’t. . . . But how could I reproach him? I had made him what he was. I was the potion that had brought evil Mr. Hyde out of gentle Dr. Jekyll. If I had been a better wife, a faithful wife . . . those five women would still be alive.

  “You’ve come back to me,” Jim said, his voice so coarse and faint I had to lean down to hear it.

  I nodded. “And forgive everything,” I added as the tears overflowed my eyes.

  “I always knew you were as kind and gracious as you are beautiful,” Jim said with the ghost of his old gallantry. “I was the luckiest man in the world to have you. I’m sorry I didn’t value you as highly as I should. My own bloody temper, and my wretched stupidity, my secrets, and lies, my dalliances, led to your own—”

  “I was weak and foolish too!” I sobbed.

  “You were a sweet, beautiful child. I spoiled and neglected and abused you in my fashion,” Jim said, “and you had every cause to rebel. You deserved better, Bunny, much better—”

  “You were everything I ever wanted; you still are!” I cried, and laid my head down on his chest until his nightshirt was soaked clean through with my tears.

  “Bunny.” Jim plucked gently at my gown, trying to pull me back upright so I would sit up and look at him. “Bunny, all is forgiven that can be between man and wife, but there is one thing more I must ask of you. . . . Compose yourself, my love, and be brave, and listen. . . .”

  I sat up, mopping at my eyes, though the tears welled right back up, seemingly unending.

  “You know now, having read the book, what a frightful coward you married. I need you now to do what I cannot.”

  I started back in shock. “Jim, you can’t mean . . . !”

  He nodded with the gentlest, most understanding little smile and reached out for my hand again. “It will be so easy, my dear, and you will have nothing to reproach yourself for. Remember, you do not do murder, but Justice! You are sparing our children the shame that would forever tar them if I were to stand trial. I’m so sick already, and the doctors don’t know what to do for me. Instead of making me better, they keep making me ill, so this, what you are about to do for me—and I know you will be brave and do it, Bunny! It will be so simple; the meat juice is right here.” He indicated the nightstand. “And my coat is in the dressing room, and my silver box within the pocket. They’ve weaned me, against my will, and my body can no longer withstand the doses it once could. Just add a pinch or . . . make it two for good measure, since, as I’ve always said”—his face lit up once again with the same boyish smile that stole my heart on the decks of the Baltic—“one spoonful, or pinch, of anything never did anyone any good, and I will slip quietly awa
y and face my Maker, and His justice, and take my guilty secret to the grave, and with it, my undying love for you—”

  “Oh, Jim!” I dissolved in tears again. “I can’t!”

  “You can.” Jim hugged me close as I imagined my tears soaking clean through his chest to drip on his heart. “You can and you will, because you know this is the right thing to do. If I were to go on living, he would go on living too. You’ve read . . . you know . . . I’m slipping, Bunny. I can no longer chain the beast inside me. It was just the Devil protecting his own that kept me from being caught that last time, but luck doesn’t last forever.... It’s only a matter of time, and the only way to kill him is to kill me. You must do it; there’s no one else I can trust. Think of the children, the scandal, if I should be caught, the trial, the gallows, the infamy that would live forever. I would be taking their lives too, just like I did . . . the others’. . . Be brave, for both our sakes, Bunny, and the children’s, and be my Lady Justice! My life is in your hands, and I want, I need, you to take it!”

  Slowly, I stood up, half-blinded by my tears. I knew he was right. If he lived and was captured and tried it would mean the gallows for him and perpetual disgrace for all those he left behind. But he was asking me to act as judge, jury, and executioner and take another human life, and I . . . I just couldn’t believe that could be right. But my children, their future . . . Like one in a trance, I began walking slowly around the bed toward the dressing-room door.

  “That’s my brave girl.” Jim smiled.

  “I love you!” I sobbed as I picked up the bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice. “I never realized how much until now, but I do.... I always have.... I always will!”

  “And it’s because of that great love you bear me that you will be brave enough to do this for me now,” he said, “because you know in your heart that it is right. My love”—he stretched out his hand again for mine—“you are only being the instrument of Justice and you must never think otherwise or waste one single moment reproaching yourself. Come now, just two little pinches of my white powder, and the truth will die with me; no one will ever know.”