The Ripper's Wife Read online

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I cradled the brown glass bottle against my breast and walked into the dressing room, hoping and praying that God would guide my hand.

  I found Jim’s coat and slipped my hand into the pocket. The silver box felt like ice in my hand. I sat there holding it for quite some time, staring down at Lady Hamilton as a near-nude nymph of health.

  Could I really do this for him? I looked at myself in the mirror, trying to see the noble Lady Justice blindfolded and sword wielding in her robes of flowing white, embodied in the weak and wretched, teary-eyed, disheveled blond woman in the black lace dress staring back at me, her reflection blurring and wavering through my hot tears. Instead of the scales of Justice I held Jim’s silver box in one hand and the onion-shaped brown bottle of Valentine’s Meat Juice in the other.

  “Courage, Bunny!” Somehow Jim’s weak, raspy voice reached me through the half-open door. Do it quickly; don’t think about it! I told myself. I sat the silver box down and uncorked the bottle. My hands shook so badly some of the brown juice splashed out as the cork came out with a POP! and an untidy snowfall of white powder billowed down around the neck as I quickly added two tiny pinches of arsenic. I took out my handkerchief and quickly mopped up the mess I’d made, praying every second that God would give me a sign that I was doing the right thing.

  But a moment came when I could delay no more. It was now or never. I knew my courage would fail me completely if I dallied any longer. As I headed for the door I realized I’d forgotten the cork. In turning back, I stumbled over my skirts and fell to my knees. Through my bleary, tear-blind eyes I saw that about half the bottle of meat juice was now lying pooled on the floor with little messy clumps of white powder, like sodden sugar lumps melting in the brown heart of it.

  I gazed heavenward. Was this the sign I had been asking for? I hurriedly grabbed my handkerchief and wiped the whole mess up. Then I stood, took a deep breath, trying so hard to steady myself, and replenished the bottle with water until it was full again, hoping I was diluting whatever, if any, of the poison remained inside it. In that moment a certain sense of peace came over me, like a comforting mantle of downy angel’s wings, and I knew that God had sent one of His angels to reach out a heavenly foot and trip me. It wasn’t meant for me to take justice into my own hands and end Jim’s life; I didn’t have that right and it was wrong for me to even contemplate usurping it.

  When I walked out of the dressing room I saw that Jim, thank heaven, was sleeping peacefully, so I didn’t have to look him in the eye and confess that I had failed him. I just couldn’t bear to see the hurt and disappointment in his eyes.

  The dreadful Nurse Gore was just then coming in with the dawn to relieve the night nurse, whose name escapes me, watching me with eagle eyes as I crossed the room and set the bottle on the mantel, well out of Jim’s reach. Out of sight, out of mind, I prayed, hoping slumber would bring forgetfulness and he would never ask me again. I smiled and nodded pleasantly to the two nurses in passing as I left the room and returned to my own.

  In my room I fell onto the sofa in an exhausted swoon. I hadn’t the strength to take off my clothes, wash, and put on a nightgown. I knew that if I tried to take one more step I’d fall. I promised myself I would just lie down for an hour or two. The gray sky was streaked with orange when I closed my eyes.

  I awakened some hours later to a loud bang, like a gunshot—my door had just been kicked open!—and Edwin was leaning over me, grasping my shoulders, and shaking me hard, demanding my household keys. “Your keys!” he kept shouting right into my face. “I want your keys!” Out in the hallway Michael’s voice, as commanding as a general’s on a battlefield, was telling someone that Mrs. Maybrick was no longer mistress of this house.

  Suddenly my doorway was filled with faces—doctors, servants, neighbors, nurses—all of them staring in at me as though I were some rare, exotic animal in a zoo.

  “JIM!” I sprang up screaming. “JIM!” I hurled myself through them like a cannonball, before any of the hands they reached out could stop me, and ran to his room. I knew in my heart that he was already gone. He’d slipped away while I was sleeping; their faces told me so. But I didn’t want to believe them. I had to see him one last time.

  I flung open the door and thought I’d just stumbled across the threshold of Hell. The bed was stripped down to the bottom sheet, every gaslight in the room was blazing, and Jim lay there naked, blind dead eyes staring up at the crimson velvet canopy. His poor, wasted body, sagging skin white as a fish’s belly, had been cut open from breast to groin, and three men, doctors I presume, stood over him. One was busy writing; another was scooping out Jim’s innards in a big bloody heap and depositing them into the big stone jar yet another man was holding out for him. An image of Jim in a much more dark and squalid setting, alone, enacting a similar scene, standing over Mary Jane Kelly flashed before my eyes, and I fell with a scream.

  When I opened my eyes I was back in my room prostrate on the sofa again. A dull ache filled my heart as I realized it had not all been just a terrible dream. Jim was dead and he’d taken Jack the Ripper with him to the grave and everyone was treating me, his widow, abominably, and I couldn’t understand why.

  Nurse Gore was sitting by the door, speaking words I couldn’t quite comprehend and had to ask her to repeat again and again—the words just wouldn’t sink in—until I finally understood that I was forbidden, on “Mr. Michael’s orders,” to leave this room. I was now a prisoner in my own home. I saw then that my desk had been ransacked. It stood there with every drawer open, and those papers deemed meaningless and unimportant strewn carelessly across the carpet, but all my personal letters, my ledger, and my household keys were missing. Anything that might have vindicated me or reflected badly upon Jim had been destroyed. I knew even before I found the fragile fragments amongst the ashes in the fireplace that the love letters Edwin had written me had been burned, just as surely as Alfred Brierley’s had been taken into Michael’s safekeeping.

  “My children!” I bolted up with a sudden cry, racing for the door. How could I have been so thoughtless, lying here in a swoon like this, instead of rushing straight to them? Their father was dead, and they needed me. I had to explain what had happened and give them what comfort I could. I needed to reassure them that everything would be all right.

  But Nurse Gore was there, barring my way, her hands closing with an iron grip around my tender wrists, pushing me back, away from the door.

  “Sit down and be quiet!” she ordered. “It does no good to make a fuss! Your children have been taken away, on Mr. Michael’s orders, where you can’t get your hands on them!”

  “My children . . . gone? . . . Taken away? . . . Why? . . . Where?” I stared up at her uncomprehendingly. “I must go to them. I must—”

  The door opened and one of the doctors came in. There was something in his hand as he came toward me, and I shrank back into the sofa cushions, wishing there were some safe haven I could run to. The syringe glistened menacingly in the gaslight, the needle pierced my arm through the black lace of my sleeve, and my mind turned into a sopping-wet cotton ball, my limbs felt weighted with lead, and all I could do was sleep. In those days, whenever my brain bobbed blearily back to the surface, before the sharp bite of the needle sent it sinking back down, I discovered that I was more in love with Sleep than I had ever been with any man. The comfort and oblivion I found in darling Sleep’s arms kept all the terrible pain, the cruel world, and the wolves howling, clawing, and clamoring at my door at bay.

  The next I knew it was daylight again and Nurse Gore was shaking me roughly awake. “If you want to see the last of the husband you murdered you had better stand up.” She pointed to the window.

  I struggled unsteadily to my feet and stumbled and tottered my way to the window, my head swimming with every step, and clutched desperately at the windowsill to keep from falling. It was then I saw the coffin, covered with white carnations, being carried out to a glass-sid
ed hearse drawn by four black horses with puffs of ebony ostrich plumes on their heads. I swung round, my skirts tangling in my feet, the heel of my shoe catching in the black lace and tearing it with a loud RIP! as I lurched toward the door.

  “Stand back!” I screamed in Norse Gore’s cruel gorgon face. “Stand back, I say! I must go to him! I must! Jim!”

  Nurse Gore, who looked like a wrestler dressed in nurse’s garb, shoved me back hard, sending me tottering and flailing over the sofa arm with my feet flying up in the air. “You are not to leave this room,” she said, positioning herself before the door, arms folded across her breast, with an expression on her face just daring me to try to get past her.

  I had no choice. I was trapped. I rushed back to the window and watched as Jim’s carnation-covered coffin was loaded into the hearse and the glass doors closed upon him. Hysterically I began to hammer on the glass with my fists, shouting his name, “Jim! Jim!” as though I expected the din I was making to rouse him from his coffin and for him to push off the lid and sit up and look back to see what I was making such a god-awful ruckus about. In my desperation, I picked up a little footstool and was swinging it toward the window, meaning to shatter it, when Nurse Gore grabbed me and wrested it from my hands. “No! No!” I fought her as hard as I could. “Leave me be! I must go to him! Jim! Jim! Don’t leave me!” I fell sobbing to the floor, irrationally crying out for him not to leave me, even though I knew he already had and, what was even worse, he’d left me alone against the world in a house filled with enemies.

  Then the doctor was there again with the needle and sweet oblivion opened its arms to catch me as I fell. I was dimly conscious of Nurse Gore picking me up by my shoulders and the doctor taking hold of my ankles and the two of them swinging me like a sack of potatoes onto the sofa. That’s the last thing I remember.

  I kept dreaming I was a bride again in my blue linen suit waltzing through Versailles with my happy, smiling husband, so handsome, so charming, in his black Savile Row suit with the lucky diamond horseshoe sparkling in his black-and-gray-striped silk cravat. We were so in love, laughing, and smiling into each other’s eyes. We danced through every room, the vast grand ballroom, the presence chamber, and the Hall of Mirrors, and down every corridor, up every staircase, even through the kitchens. Jim even lifted me up onto a long banqueting table and we danced across its smooth, polished surface before he swung me back down onto the marble floor again. Then we were out in the garden, dancing down the pebbled paths and even on the rims of fountains.

  We must have waltzed for hours! Every time I started to float back to the surface, to glimpse reality through the glassy waters, I felt even more exhausted, as though I really had been dancing all that time without ever stopping to catch my breath. I’d feel dizzy and my stays pinching, even my feet aching, and before I broke the surface I sank like a stone gratefully back down into the thick, warm mud of sleep. But in no time at all I would be back in Jim’s arms, waltzing through Versailles again.

  During the days that followed—I never was sure just how many—someone must have carried me to my bed, but they didn’t care enough to undress me and put me properly to bed, so when I awakened I found myself still wearing the same black dress, now grown quite rank and smelly, and my petticoats stained by urine and a light, bloody discharge, too faint to be the onset of my monthly courses but similar to the “sanguineous discharge” I’d suffered before. They hadn’t even cared enough for my comfort to take off my shoes or to pull the pins from my hair, which now had the appearance of an oily, frizzed, and matted yellow rat’s nest.

  I sat up, blinking and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, to find a policeman standing at the foot of my bed. That horrible nurse, Michael, Edwin, Mrs. Briggs, and Nanny Yapp all crowded behind him, staring at me. Then the doctor was feeling my pulse, nodding, and declaring me fit.

  “Mrs. Maybrick,” the officer began, “Mrs. Maybrick, you are in custody on suspicion of causing the death of your late husband, Mr. James Maybrick. If you choose to reply, be very careful, because whatever you say may be used as evidence against you.”

  “Please!” I managed to blurt out before I lost consciousness again. “Somebody send for my mother!”

  Apparently Edwin, who would never forgive me for Alfred Brierley, found it in his heart to do me one last kindness. He sent a cable to Mama in Paris that I was in trouble and needed her desperately.

  She came at once as I knew she would. “The indomitable Caroline,” Baroness von Roques, barging right in, as fearless as an angel entering a burning building, coming to my rescue, not a knight in shining armor but a voluptuous white-blond matron clad head to toe in lavender chiffon trimmed with silk periwinkles and the most enormous hat I’d ever seen. Pearls and diamonds clacking, she shoved past Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp, sending the maids scattering and Edwin running for cover, swinging her handbag and parasol left and right, like a medieval warrior’s mace, warning them to get out of her way or she would knock them all down like bowling pins.

  When a policeman caught up with her on the stairs, telling her I was under arrest on suspicion of murdering my husband by administering an irritant poison, she poked him aside with her parasol and said, “Don’t be absurd. If anyone poisoned James Maybrick it was James Maybrick; that man was a drugstore walkin’ on two legs. I’m surprised he lasted this long! Now unhand me, sir. I’ll have you know that my second husband was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin an’ the illegitimate son of Napoleon III! An’ another of our illustrious ancestors stood right beside Christopher Columbus on the deck o’ the Mayflower holdin’ the map that he steered by!”

  Then she was there, in my room, gathering me in her arms, and I, just like a terrified little girl, was clinging to her and crying, begging my mama to help me, saying that I didn’t understand what was happening and why they were treating me like this.

  Apparently they’d searched the house and found packets of arsenic I’d never seen before marked “POISON!” hidden amidst my underlinens or rather planted there; it certainly wasn’t mine. And they’d collected a vast array of medicines; I believe the tally ran to 147 different pills, potions, and powders. But those were all Jim’s. I had nothing to do with them! And Nanny Yapp wouldn’t shut up about those damned infernal flypapers, which I’d only used to replicate Dr. Greggs’s prescription to get rid of my blemishes in time for the ball. Then there were those two sacks labeled Industrial Arsenic that Jim had been bragging about his “stupendous luck” in acquiring from a business associate. On the whole, the policemen said, there was enough arsenic in Battlecrease House to do away with the entire British Army and take a good bite out of the Navy too.

  I told Mama the truth, except the bit about my husband being Jack the Ripper, of course, and that all I’d done was sprinkle a little white powder into the Valentine’s Meat Juice bottle at Jim’s bidding, because he was suffering so and swearing he needed it. But, before I could give it to him, and I was already thinking twice about it, I tripped and spilled it. I had refilled the bottle with water. Most of the white powder had been left on the floor in undissolved clumps. I had mopped it up myself. And what, if any, was left in the bottle was surely not enough to have killed him. Yet apparently Michael had sent the bottle out for testing and found a trace amount of arsenic in it. My handkerchiefs had also been examined and one of them was found to have arsenic on it. But that must have been either from wiping my face, after using the facial wash, or from when I mopped up the mess I made when I spilled the bottle of meat juice; it had to be one or the other.

  “Surely I am guilty of no crime?” I looked up at Mama uncertainly. “Jim has been taking that arsenic for years, and there was only a teeny-tiny amount found in the meat juice bottle, not enough to kill anybody. I heard the doctors saying so! They said the attempt was clearly ‘inept’ and ‘the work of a bungler’!”

  “Listen to me, Florie.” Mama braced her hands on my shoulders. “You are not to blame for this. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Jim
had been poisonin’ himself for years, an’ there’s no telling what all those doctors have been givin’ him. In tryin’ to cure him they may actually have killed him. But he wouldn’t have been in this state anyway if he’d treated his body like a temple an’ kept it pure o’ all that poison! Arsenic an’ strychnine!” She rolled her eyes. “An’ now he’s died and left you in a devil of a fix! I shall have a lawyer for you by this afternoon,” she promised, “an’ we’ll clean this mess up so you can bury the past with Jim an’ come back to Paris with me and put all this behind you!”

  That was my mama, “the indomitable Caroline.”

  While she was in the guest room changing her dress, someone locked her in. That was when they took me away to jail. I was so weak I couldn’t walk. They had to carry me out in a chair. Mrs. Briggs yanked a silk cord from the window curtains and tied me to it to keep me from falling out as I slumped there, swooning. Two constables carried me out the door, with Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp following, graciously thanking them for taking the trash out.

  29

  My trial began on August 1, 1889, in the worst heat of summer; it was one full week of unrelenting torment. I sweltered in my black crepe widow’s weeds, shrouded in thick veils, in the crowded courtroom at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool and shivered in my tiny jail cell that was like a living tomb carved out of Arctic ice.

  You’ll forgive my indignation I hope, but I simply cannot think back to that time without getting my temper up.

  They tell me as many as seven thousand people observed my trial. That includes those who just stuck their head in for a peek at the accused murderess, “hiding her guilty face from the world behind her impenetrable black veils.”