by Brandy Purdy
We whiled away the afternoon with our bodies lying entwined in sheets stained with the spunk and sweat of other men, including Fishmonger Joe’s. After she’d risen and had a “hard piss”—like all harlots, she believed it would keep her from conceiving—she settled herself back in my arms, as comfortable as you please, and told me the story of her life. And what a tale it was! A picaresque saga of daring debauchery and tragic travails, decadence and depravity, that would have put Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill to shame, in which our heroine went from grime to glamour, then back to grime again so rapidly it left me wondering just how much or how little of it was fact or gin-sodden fantasy; she was, after all, born of a race renowned for breeding the best storytellers.
She was born in Limerick, the only girl in a family of seven brothers, “and they’d mash any man to a pulp who trifled with me, they would,” she said proudly. She’d had one sister, but she died, “poor bairn,” when she was but three, “fell into the fireplace, she did, when Mam’s back was turned an’ bent over the ironin’.
“Mam lost her wits an’ had to be sent away, to the dear nuns who knew how to deal with such things, an’ Da decided to up an’ move us to Wales, where he had some kin, to make a new start. ’Twas what we all needed, he said.”
Her da and the boys took work in the coal mines in Carnarvonshire while Mary Jane kept house, cooked meals, and made sure they all had a clean shirt to wear to Mass on Sunday.
When she was sixteen, Mary Jane fell in love with Jonathan Davies, the boy next door. “He used to come in an’ read me poetry, newspapers, an’ stories, he did, while I was busy cookin’ an’ cleanin’. It was he who learned me what readin’ an’ writin’ I know. The first full sentence I e’er read rightly was I love you, an’ the second was Will you marry me? The answer was Aye.” She smiled and hugged herself. “The memory still warms me, it does, makes me knees weak an’ me insides all toasty!”
But the sun set all too soon for Mary Jane and her “Jon.” He was killed in a mine explosion three years later and left her with a babe new planted in her belly. The grief nearly killed her. They feared her mind would give way like her mam’s. Her da and brothers, hoping the change would do her good, sent her to Cardiff to stay with a cousin, as her husband left “no near livin’ kin an’ a woman needs another woman at a time like that.”
Ruby Ellen—that was the name of the cousin—“was a bad sort.” Jealous and greedy, she resented that Mary Jane, two years younger than herself, was a great beauty and had already been a much-loved wife and had a baby in her belly before she was widowed while Ruby Ellen languished at home as yet unmarried, with no worthy prospects, “her bein’ the kind men flirt with but don’t marry.” She introduced Mary Jane to the drink as a route to restore good cheer and to the “gay, fast company” she ran with.
Mary Jane took to the drink “as a fish does to water, I did”—“I could stop anytime I want, sure I could, but I don’t want to”—and it was so very nice to feel a pair of strong, manly arms around her again. But she’d lost her luck as well as her love. She caught “somethin’ heinous” from one of those fine, tall sailor boys she and Ruby Ellen picked up at the pier and landed in the infirmary. Mary Jane was there for months—“tossin’ an’ burnin’ with fever, I was, until I feared me own brains would be fried like an egg”—and the babe, a boy, “God bless him, the poor mite,” was born daft and had to be sent to a special home for the nuns to take care of.
Remembering that change is always good after heartbreak, Mary Jane decided to move on, to make a new life for herself in London. “I had to leave all that sorrow behind me or perish of it. ’Twas like an anchor, it was, weighin’ me heart down, an’ I thought I was too young to drown. I wanted gaiety an’ excitement, an’ to live while I was young an’ alive, not to be tied down an’ dying o’ woe. The only thing for it was to start new.”
When she first set foot in London—“green as a shamrock, that’s how ignorant I was!”—a velvet-and-lace-gowned lady in a fine carriage driven by a Negro coachman in tight white breeches, a red tail coat, and a tall silk hat, engaged Mary Jane on the spot to be a maid in her house.
But her house was no ordinary house. It was “a gay sportin’ house in the West End, it was, one o’ the grandest where all the gents an’ swells an’ even His Highness the Prince o’ Wales went.
“All pink satin an’ red velvet, lace sewn with little beads that twinkled like stars, real crystal chandeliers, an’ mirrors an’ gilt everywhere they could think to put one an’ paint t’other. There was even globes o’ rose-colored glass on the gaslights. Aye, I used to lie naked as a baby in me big bed o’ pink satin an’ stare at meself in that gold-framed mirror an’ think I looked just like one o’ the ladies in those French paintin’s Madame had hangin’ everywhere.”
Though she was hired to be a servant, Mary Jane soon made up her mind to be the gayest and most popular girl in the house. “Fuckin’ beats skivvyin’ any day o’ the week, me boyo, an’ I’d sooner be paid for lyin’ flat on me back on satin than down on me knees scrubbin’ floors!” At that time the reigning favorite was a novelty, a Negress known as “The Black Venus” who did a series of increasingly lewd poses plastiques draped—“for the first few o’ ’em anyway”—in cloth-of-gold. In the grand ballroom, with the floor cleared and lit by torches held by nearly naked Negro footmen in red loincloths, she performed a wild voodoo dance with a turban on her head, gold bangles on her wrists and ankles, and a real-live snake wrapped around her shoulders and a “skimpy little scrap” of gold cloth covering her cunt, which she ripped off at the end of her dance. “All the toffs were wild for it . . . an’ her,” Mary Jane added, a tad ungraciously.
On the night of the favorite’s birthday, Mary Jane, simmering with resentment, drank more than she should have of the champagne she was supposed to be serving to the guests and decided that enough was enough. She dropped her tray, full of crystal glasses, right on the floor and in her smart uniform of black dress and ruffled white apron and cap flounced into the rose-lit dining room, flipped up her skirts, and sat her bare bum right down on “that big lovely pink an’ white birthday cake with a great lovely splat, frosting flyin’ everywhere. After that, they all fell in love with me. Lined up to lick me clean, they did!”
I could tell she was quite proud of that memory. Soon she was being carried into the dining room every night stretched out on a big silver platter with her naked body decorated with icing roses, bows, and garlands, just like a fancy cake for the gents to devour. One night, she swore “on me mother’s grave it’s true!,” they served her up to “good ol’ Bertie, the Prince o’ Pleasure, our future king, himself, Lord love an’ save him!” decorated with his royal crest in icing and a regal lion and unicorn paw to hoof in icing over her clean-shaven cunt.
Another night, upon a dare for a diamond bracelet, she took a bath in a tub filled with a crate of champagne new come from Paris, “but ne’er again! I nearly burned me insides out, I did. Luckily there was a doctor in the house; he stuffed me snatch full o’ cold sweet cream from the kitchen to cool the burn, an’ all me gents were eager to comfort an’ pet me, an’ give me presents, an’ tell me what a brave little girl I was.”
True to her word, she became the gayest and most popular girl. And, more than that, she became the Madame’s favorite. “Her little pet, I slept in her bed most ev’ry night” and even traveled with her “a time or two” across the Channel to Paris, where Mary Jane worked for a time as an artists’ model and posed for a few naughty photographs. But pride got the better of her, and she began putting on airs and calling herself “Marie Jeanette.” “All the girls hated me,” she said, and I could well imagine her giving orders and strutting about all high-and-mighty as though she owned the place.
But drink was her bête noire: “Me black beastie what sunk his claws in me good, it was.” Gin, rum, wine, whiskey, champagne, what have you, Mary Jane couldn’t do without it and didn’t want to. And when the horrors of drink were upon her,
she was herself a horror and “a right misery an’ terror to deal with,” she admitted. “Worse than the Magdalene possessed by her seven demons, I was!”
A rich man became enamored of Mary Jane and begged her to quit the brothel and be his own. He promised that as his mistress she would “lead the life of a lady” and “want for nothing.”
He also promised to use his influence to help her fulfill her ambition of going on the stage. Though, having a brother who is a star in the music halls, I think I speak with some authority when I say that this was just a pipe dream. Mary Jane was only a fair warbler at best and would never have made even a modest success of it. And as she did not have a modest bone in her body, a “modest success” would never have satisfied Mary Jane. She was too temperamental to get on with the stage managers and other performers, drink made her unreliable, and her brogue was too thick and herself too lazy to dedicate herself to the hard work necessary to completely transform herself in order to have even a fighting chance upon the stage.
By then a new girl, Clara, a sweet little Swedish girl, a genuine virgin, with blond hair almost fair as snow, newly ripening breasts like little pears, and not a hair on her cunt, was poised to replace Mary Jane as the reigning favorite and in Madame’s bed. It didn’t help when Mary Jane, drunk and sulking upstairs, dozed off and left the water in Madame’s pink marble tub running. A cascade of water suddenly crashed down through the lewdly lolling nudes painted on the ceiling and drenched the gents downstairs having a party celebrating Clara’s first blood. The cake was ruined, and Clara, who had never had a fancy cake in her life, cried for hours. Madame was furious and Mary Jane wisely decided it was time to move on.
She accepted the gentleman’s offer. In a high drunken temper, she vowed she wanted, and would take nothing, from this house, and clad only in a pair of black silk stockings, red satin garters, and black leather high-heeled boots, she set a black velvet hat “à la Empress Eugenie” with a curling white ostrich plume flowing back over the brim held in place by a cameo jauntily atop her ginger-gold curls, pulled on a pair of long black lace gloves and her diamond bracelet—“I couldn’t think o’ leaving that behind!”—and walked down the grand staircase “regal as a queen.” Out the front door she went, held open for her by a pair of astonished, gape-mouthed, white-wigged Negro footmen who thought that, after years of employment in this establishment, they had seen everything, and straight into the delighted, but mortified, gentleman’s carriage and arms.
But it didn’t last long. Her drunken antics and the loud, quarrelsome nature she exhibited when she was deep in her cups, coupled with her startling habit of walking around “starkers” even in the public rooms of the house in full view of the servants and any guests, and the women she sometimes brought home “for a little frolic” in her big bed, explaining that she sometimes needed “a holiday from the men pokin’ their pickles inta me,” soon exhausted her genteel lover’s patience, and Mary Jane found herself out on the streets.
A mannish spinster lady who preached zealously against the evils of “the demon rum” took Mary Jane in, wanting to save her, but that ended after a fortnight when she staggered in starkers to have tea with the Temperance Society, singing her favorite song, “Only a Violet I Pluck’d from My Mother’s Grave,” and brandishing a near-empty gin bottle, and plopped herself down on the reverend’s lap.
“So much for Christian Charity,” Mary Jane sneered. “She cast me out onto the streets, to fend for meself any way I could, said she didn’t care what happened to me, she did. An’ her servants did me out o’ a lot o’ me finery; they was supposed to pack it all up, but when I opened me bags I found they’d raided the rag bin to fill ’em, an’ the rest I had to pawn until there was nothin’ left. I remember I stood out there, weepin’ in the pourin’ rain, arms stretched out, beggin’ her to take me back. When she opened the window, I thought she was goin’ to have pity, but she only tossed down a penny—a penny for all the joy I gave her, the sour old cunt!—then she cut me dead, she did, closed the curtains an’ turned her back on me. I remember, for a long time I stood there starin’ down at that penny, dirty money bein’ washed clean by the rain. I wanted so bad to be too proud to pick it up, I did, I wanted to make the grand gesture, but in the end . . . money is money, so I picked it up, though I’ve regretted it ever since.”
It was all downhill after that. How hard it must have been for her when every poor, deluded fool in the East End dreamed of the West End as a place where the streets were paved with gold and the people stuffed themselves on cream-filled pastries and Christmas goose every day of the week and didn’t know what want and need meant. In their eyes, Mary Jane Kelly had had it all—the West End dream—and lost it through her own bad habits and caprice. She lived with a quick succession of lovers, each one a rung lower down upon the social ladder and occupying an even worse address, until she ended up in Whitechapel, a common whore pounding the pavements looking for trade and living, on her uncle’s sufferance, in a rented room in Miller’s Court with Fishmonger Joe, and them quarreling all the time because he wanted a wife, not a whore, to warm his bed at night but couldn’t earn enough at his stinky labors to support either.
I’m thoroughly delighted with my spicy ginger tart! What a treat she is! So succulent, so bawdy! I’ve never enjoyed a whore more! I will visit her again when I am next in London. Next time I will bring her some candy sticks, to thank her for the pleasurable sensations she provoked in my prick when she went down on her knees and pretended it was one. It will be nice to have someone bawdy and fun, someone who knows how to forget herself in bed, not like those two outwardly respectable Mrs. Maybricks I’ve had the misfortune to acquire. Maybe I’ll make Mary Jane the third Mrs. Maybrick, ha ha!
I left Mary Jane lying back in bed, cradling the gin bottle against her bare breasts and singing “Only a Violet I Pluck’d from My Mother’s Grave.” I wonder if she knows any of Michael’s songs? If only he could see this bold as brass little hussy hugging the gin bottle and diddling her cunny while singing one of his sweet ballads, like “True Blue” or “Your Dear Brown Eyes”—yes, that’s the very one!—oh, what I would give to see his face.
16
The papers were full of the most ghastly murder in London, in Whitechapel no less. It made me shudder to think of it occurring in the same spot where Alfred and I had had our first tryst. Some poor woman of the streets had been ripped open and gutted like a fish. I read every word, even though I knew I was courting bad dreams and a queasy stomach. I could not stop thinking about that poor soul. Who was she and why had she fallen so low down in life that she could never claw her way back up again?
What manner of man had done this awful thing? Did he know her and bear her some personal grievance or did she merely have the misfortune to cross paths with a madman with a lust for blood coursing through his soul? Were the horrors he inflicted upon her body truly meant for her, or was he merely acting out his anger on the first unfortunate woman who crossed his path at an opportune moment?
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know unless the monster is caught,” I said to Jim on one of those rare mornings when we found ourselves facing each other across the breakfast table, me with dark-circled eyes after another restless night and the toast turning to ashes in my mouth as I put the latest edition of the Liverpool Daily Post aside.
“I don’t suppose so.” Jim looked up at me and smiled as he spooned white arsenic into his tea. He raised his teacup to me as though it were a champagne toast. “Longevity and fair complexion, my dear!” he said, and drained it to the dregs. He stood up, readying to leave for his office, and bent down and kissed me. The moment he was gone I bolted from my chair and vomited into the nearest flowerpot. I just could not bear for him to touch me!
17
THE DIARY
It felt so good, I did it again! Another drab in black and brown. The only thing scarlet about these women is their morals . . . and their blood.
The charcoal-colored morning was c
old and wet—I hope I did not catch a chill! I feared I had left it too long—the hour was perilously close to daybreak—but I have always been a gambler. . . .
“Will you?” I asked.
The slurred-tongued slut said, “Yes,” and took my arm.
I let her lead me to her death. She chose the spot; the sacrificial slut led me to the altar where she would die. A quiet backyard of a house on Hanbury Street. The residents worked all hours, so they left the doors unlocked, she said. A long passage led from the front door to the back and out into a fenced yard, if you could call that pitted patchwork of earth and cracked and crumbled paving stones a yard.
There’s a cat’s meat shop on the ground floor that sells cubed horsemeat; a cat’s a necessity for every house in these rat-infested parts. I wanted to cut this whore into bloody cubes and leave her with a note written in blood on the table for the old woman who runs the shop to sell for her customer’s cats. But my knife wasn’t sharp and fast enough for that, and I must be on my way before sunrise. But wouldn’t I have loved to spend the hours! Dicing Dark Annie into cubes, cubes for cats, harlot’s flesh instead of horseflesh; wouldn’t that be a rare treat for the pussies? Ha ha!
This woman was ill, I could tell. Befuddled by drink and dying of consumption, but she was no Camille. A pudding-faced hag, her features like bits of fruit floating in its cushy custardy blandness, this weary whore was short and stout, with a wobbly, waddly chin, her curly dark hair cut short as a lad’s and her front teeth knocked out. How can a whore be both fat and starving? I still haven’t figured that out; I only know I saw hunger and yearning in her big moon-blue eyes.
