The Ripper's Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  I watched as she leisurely rolled the green silk stockings—“as green as the Emerald Isles and as beautiful as your eyes,” I said gallantly—up her fine, shapely legs. She remarked that it had been such a “terrible long time” since she had felt silk against her skin and lifted a leg and twisted one green-clad ankle this way and that to admire it. “I’ve hooked many a man by showin’ me ankles on a rainy day!” she said as I smiled over the newspapers and read to her all about Jack the Ripper’s double event.

  I watched her shudder and cross herself and reach for the rosary lying on the table beside her bed and begin idly fingering the beads instead of herself.

  “Sometimes I dream,” she confided with wide, frightened eyes, “that he’s comin’ for me! Sure as the Mark o’ Cain, I’m marked as one o’ his, an’ there’s no help for it; even if I run, he’ll find me!”

  Her terror fed my need and my greed, and soon I must let the papers fall to the floor and take her again, plunging my knife of hot flesh, not cold steel, into her until she screamed with pleasure and begged for more and for me to stop all in the same breath. Women—two-faced, two-minded, duplicitous, deceitful whores all of them!

  Do all the whores in Whitechapel know one another? There are so many whores here, thousands of them, it seems impossible. Yet Mary Jane knew Long Liz and Katie. Like the miserable ghost of Marley rattling his chains at Ebenezer Scrooge, Mary Jane brought them back to haunt me, accusing eyes, angry mouths, and, underneath, throats gaping open like second mouths, hungry for life but filled only with death—raw, bloody death! Filthy whores, they degrade everything they touch, even their own sorry lives! I did them all a favor by killing them. I relieved them of their misery; it was the nicest thing anyone could ever have done for them. I let them sacrifice their lives for a good and noble cause—to keep two sweet, innocent children and their undeserving mother-whore safe. Why can’t they be grateful? They should go down on their knees and thank me, not haunt me and rattle those damn phantom chains!

  The tall, gangly, flaxen-haired farmer’s daughter Elisabeth Gustafsdotter—Gustav’s Daughter—was born in “Torslunda or somethin’ like it.” She loved to read anything she could get her hands on. She dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher, but all her hopes were shattered when she was sixteen. She was working at her first job, as a maidservant in a fine house in Gothenburg, “servin’ the gentry,” when she let the charming young master, Lars Fredrik, the adored only son of the house, seduce her. She thought he loved her. In those days Liz still believed all the fairy tales about peasant girls who became princesses.

  He left her pregnant and with a dose of “somethin’ heinous” that landed her in the infirmary, with the blame all upon her.

  The young man claimed that she had seduced him, wept when he knelt down before his gray-haired old mother, and confessed that Elisabeth, the housemaid, had stolen his innocence and infected him with some shameful ailment that had left a canker on his doodle and made it burn and weep a foul discharge.

  Liz’s daughter was stillborn. She was heartbroken when the doctor told her that she could never have another. Her good name and all her hopes gone, she took to drink and walking the streets.

  Eventually she emigrated, hoping for a new and better life in England. She threw herself on the charity of the Swedish Church in Trinity Street. She loved to visit the reading room and pore over the papers from the old country. Sometimes she let the Swedish sailors who brought them buy her favors and drinks, always drinks.

  Then along came John Thomas Stride, a good man believing in redemption, that everyone deserves a second chance. They married and opened a coffeehouse in Crispin Street. Liz was always kind to the poor, sick, downhearted, and downtrodden, especially the whores. “There but for the grace of God go I,” she always said as she filled the coffee cups and served thick, generous slices of the cinnamon-spice cake or another kind filled with creamy cheese and luscious tarty-sweet red raspberry jam, and special cookies rolled in white sugar, all baked from her own mother’s recipes.

  Though Elisabeth was certainly a tall girl, I learned from Mary Jane that her height had nothing to do with her being called “Long Liz.” It was her habit of telling tall tales and her vast knowledge of Swedish folk and fairy tales, with which she regaled the coffeehouse customers for hours.

  But of course it didn’t last. Disease raddled Mr. Stride’s fine, generous mind; he raved and turned violent. It was a dreadful sight to see a man so horribly transformed. “Truly, had you known him before, you would not have known him after,” Mary Jane said. “He was altogether a different man when he’d been the soul o’ sweetness before.” He had to go to the asylum, where he soon afterward died. “Liz said they sawed his skull open an’ found his brain full o’ holes like moths had been at it.”

  His brother did Liz wrong, cheating her out of the coffeehouse, and, sunk deep in despair, she sought solace in drink and the arms of strangers again. “She just couldn’t resist those sailor boys from Sweden.” She had to earn her keep. She’d already seen what happened when body and soul parted ways—“when that happened to you, you were like to end up in the asylum like Mr. Stride.” She whored and begged charity and drinks, always drinks.

  As I had suspected, the Princess Alice tale was just a figment of her imagination, bait for sympathy, originally concocted to take advantage of the charity fund established for victims of the disaster. “The closest Long Liz ever got to a ship after she docked in England was the sailors she fucked.” Mary Jane laughed. The boot of some surly drunk or a pimp Long Liz wouldn’t pay—depending on which story you chose to believe—had kicked most of her teeth out; the rest she had lost to decay.

  She’d lived off and on the last few years with a dockside laborer called Michael Kidney—Kidney! I perked up, remembering the treasure sealed up tight, floating like a mysterious blob-shaped creature at the bottom of the sea, in a jar of red wine locked in darkness inside the black Gladstone bag I’d left beneath my bed in Petticoat Lane. But “she couldn’t quite stick to it. For long spells she’d be fine; then off she’d go, carousin’ with sailors, livin’ an’ fuckin’ an’ drinkin’ like there wasn’t goin’ to be a tomorrow.”

  Mike was a good fellow, but he found Liz hard to handle. He grew weary of all the arguments and gave up trying to make her stay, contenting himself with knowing that she would always come back. Until Jack’s knife flashed, I added silently as I snuggled against Mary Jane’s bare back and gave her earlobe a dainty nibble when what I really wanted to do was bite it off!

  Would the police find Katie’s earlobes that I had sliced off? What would they do with them? Would they sew them back on in the mortuary? What did they do with dead whores? Did they bury them in pieces or try to sew them back together again like rag dolls, to give decency in death to those who had lived so long without it?

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the ghost of Long Liz standing at the foot of the bed, blame blazing in her eyes, severed throat gaping, pointing an adamantly accusing finger. The fireball in my belly churned and burned. The rats gnawed. I gasped and gripped Mary Jane’s breasts so hard with my cold, numb hands that she cried out, “Play gentle now, Jim!” I heard the rattle of phantom chains and swallowed hard. My throat burned as though I had drunk acid, and pain drove spikes into my head. Damn you, Mary Jane! You should be hosting séances instead of peddling your cunt! Through you the dead live again, damn, Damn, DAMN you!

  But she was done talking of the fair lying Swede. Now Mary Jane was on about Katie. Catherine Eddowes, the name she had been given at birth, or Kate Kelly as she liked to call herself, proudly taking her man’s name.

  Mary Jane would know her too! Would I ever kill a whore who would elicit a shrug and a blank stare from Mary Jane instead of “oh yes, poor harlot, I knew her well!”?

  Katie and her many siblings had been left to run wild after her mother died in childbed, while their father worked hard to earn their keep making tin plates. At sixteen she’d fallen hard for a smooth-talking pensi
oner, Thomas Conway. He’d persuaded her to have his initials tattooed in blue ink upon her arm and given her three bastard babies, “but no weddin’ ring, though their life together was like a circle unendin’. First he’d beat her, then Katie’d run out an’ try an’ soothe her hurts with gin, then he’d come after her, pick her up out o’ the gutter or some other bloke’s bed, say some sweet words that’d make the poor fool fall in love all over again, an’ home they’d go, until it all happened again, an’ there was no reckonin’ when that might be, two hours, two weeks, or two months, but it always happened again. Like livin’ on a floor covered in broken glass, it was, knowin’ that no matter how carefully you set your feet down you were bound to get cut sometime.” But then Tom Conway up and disappeared, and no more was ever heard from him.

  Katie mourned, then moved on. She was lucky. She found her true love with an Irish market porter, John Kelly, who was determined to give her a good home and wean her off the gin. Though she suffered an occasional slip, it wasn’t often, and he’d made it plain to her that she was his woman and he wasn’t a man to suffer her being with another.

  “She wasn’t a reg’lar whore, not like me an’ the rest,” Mary Jane said. “She was just a poor soul tryin’ to get by, one day at a time. But when the thirst was upon her, an’ the bottle had gone dry, an’ the money had run out, an’ her still cravin’ more, she’d do whatever she had to to get another nip, an’ if that meant lettin’ some gent hoist her skirts, so be it. What Johnny didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.”

  Katie and her Johnny lived one day at a time, renting a double bed most nights in a doss-house in Flower & Dean Street, him working as a porter in the market and her hiring out as a char and taking in washing and needlework or hawking flowers or what have you in the streets. She was a bit of a magpie, with a fine, quick eye and a knack for picking up little treasures to pawn, things the finer folk threw away or lost, like quality buttons of metal or ivory, sometimes ones set with stones, or pillboxes and cigarette or card cases. Once she even found a pair of silver spectacles set with little diamonds and flashy black stones so fine she thought “they must’ve belonged to the Queen” and was half-tempted to go to the palace to return them. Every autumn Katie and Johnny would join the mass of migrant workers heading for the country to pick hops and enjoy the sunshine and clean air and all the fresh milk and wholesome country fare they could eat. It was something they looked forward to all year; it was such a welcome change from the miserable muck and murk of foul and foggy London.

  Now two ghostly whores were rattling their chains at me. I wanted to strangle Mary Jane Kelly with those phantom chains, but when I looked in her green eyes all I could say was, “Back down on your back you go,” and roll on top of her and thrust deep inside her. Why was it so hard to kill this one? She was only a whore like all the rest of them!

  Back in my bolt-hole, I cut Katie’s kidney in half and fried and ate it with onions and carrots. I sprinkled my medicine in my glass of fine red wine and watched the white powder swirl and melt into its ruby-red depths. Warmth flooded my icy fingers, filling them to the very tips. It was very nice! Almost as nice as bathing them in a whore’s hot blood. The other half, bloody and raw, sopping and wine sodden, I put into a little brown cardboard box and tied it up tight with string, then sat down with my red ink to write a new letter, this one addressed to Mr. George Lusk, the Chairman of the newly formed Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, who had vowed not to rest until I was brought to justice and was offering a substantial reward for my capture. I had met the man before; he specialized in decorating music halls and was a fellow Freemason in Michael’s lodge. Lusk thought Michael was “a gem of a man” and always wanted the halls he designed to be the perfect setting for him, so it gave me great pleasure to address him in the guise of Jack the Ripper.

  Mr. Lusk

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one women

  prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was

  very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it

  out if you only wate a whil longer

  signed

  Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk

  I wrote it in strong, bold red letters, delighting in my crude misspellings, so contradictory and bizarre that it would make them wonder if I was really that ignorant or just playing games. What illiterate cockney knows that knife starts with k and writes such an elegant copperplate? But this time, as much as I wanted to, I did not sign my name, just to toy with them. They would know who it was from; Katie’s kidney would leave them in no doubt about that! I could think of no better calling card, except one with my real name engraved upon it, and that the fools will never have, ha ha!

  I lay back on my bed and licked white strength from my palm. I furiously fondled my cock and thought of my wife-whore sucking Alfred Brierley’s while I stood at the foot of the bed and watched. I glanced at my watch. Tomorrow, after I mailed my parcel to Mr. Lusk, I must catch the train back to Liverpool. How I wished I could catch my wife-whore and Brierley in the act, burst in on them naked in bed. I wanted to whip out my cock and scream at them to keep fucking until I spent all over them!

  I held my watch up over my head, swinging it by its heavy chain, like a pendulum. My Muse blessed me then with a wonderful idea. I found a pin and, after carefully prying off the back of the casing, slowly, painstakingly, inscribed dead in the center of it I am Jack the Ripper! and, below it, my signature, James Maybrick; then, like planets orbiting the sun, I surrounded it with four sets of initials: PN, AC, ES, and CE.

  It served the last whore right to deny her her man’s name at the end. E for Eddowes, her maiden name, though her days of maidenhood were long past. Now the whores are always with me! As long as I have my watch, I will carry them with me wherever I go. The victims I know them so well! Let them rattle their phantom chains, God damn them!

  20

  I couldn’t bear it anymore, this endless back-and-forth between loving husband and the mad, rampant monster. I would have to resort to drastic measures. If I could not divorce Jim, I would have to make him divorce me. I’d managed to make a few discreet inquiries amongst solicitors, and they all advised me, for the sake of the children, to aim for reconciliation. Even Dr. Hopper, who had pretended all along with me that my injuries were the result of tumbles down stairs and other careless accidents, agreed that it was all for the best when I turned to him, hoping he would testify for me. I’d tried to write Jim a letter, asking him to set me free, a long, rambling, bumbling, surely bungled thing that I ended up shoving into the depths of my desk in frustration. It was no use! Since no one would take my side and help me, Jim would just have to divorce me; I’d have to force his hand.

  I decided to do the most brazen thing I could think of. I reserved the bridal suite at Flatman’s Hotel in our own names, Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick. I told Jim an old aunt of mine was ailing and in London to see a surgeon and was begging me to visit her, fearing it might be the last time she would ever see me on earth. Of course, Jim said I must go. He even gave me a lovely speckled fur cape lined in orchid satin as a substitute for his “warm embrace during these dreary and lonesome days we must spend apart,” explaining that his business prevented him from joining me, as I knew perfectly well it would; that was why I had chosen that week in particular.

  But it wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick who checked in at Flatman’s but Alfred Brierley and Mrs. Maybrick. Several of the cotton brokers who frequented Flatman’s recognized us. They knew at once that the man registered as James Maybrick and sleeping in bed with Mrs. Maybrick was not Jim, and that was just what I had intended.

  But I didn’t count on Alfred walking out on me after the first night. He’d seemed so delighted when we’d made the arrangements, congratulating me on being so clever and saying how perfect it all was. But the fantasy didn’t quite match the reality. He was sullen and peevish instead of passionate. He accused me of trying to drag his name through the mud, of using h
im and wanting to see him named co-respondent in a divorce scandal. He said he didn’t love me, we’d had our fun, and he was done, he had no intention of marrying me.

  “You mean nothing to me,” he said bluntly as he was putting his clothes back on and packing up his trunk, ignoring the lovely dinner I’d ordered brought upstairs for us, “no more than any other woman, just pleasure for pleasure’s sake, nothing more, and I cannot fathom how you ever thought otherwise; I certainly never said anything to give you that impression. If I like her, and the lady is willing, I’m willing to oblige her until I get tired of her. Afterward, if she doesn’t cling and cry too much and try to hold on to me, sometimes we can resume as friends, after a suitable interval, of course. That’s how I live my life, and I see no reason to change it; I’m having a thoroughly marvelous time being a bachelor, I couldn’t be happier.”

  At first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “No! You don’t . . . you can’t mean that!” I cried.

  “Oh, but I do,” he was quick to assure me, eyes and words cold as ice, freezing me.

  In that moment I felt my heart break like a trifling little crimson glass Valentine’s Day bauble. It was only when I was losing him that I realized how much I loved him. I just couldn’t bear to let him go.

  I was so upset I snatched up the crystal bowl of jewel-lovely fruit medley and poured it over his copper head and slapped his face, sending fat, glistening drops of sugary-sweet syrup and chunks of pineapple, diced peaches, grapes, and cherries flying everywhere. “You cad!” I shouted. “You haven’t a chivalrous bone in your body!”