The Ripper's Wife

by Brandy Purdy

  I who had once enjoyed hot rose-scented baths in my own private tub was forced to wade quickly through a long vat of cold, dingy gray water. When I emerged, the soles of my feet feeling like they were coated in slime, a blast of white powder hit my crotch in a billowing puff to kill any lingering vermin and a matron barked at me to put my hands behind my head so she could fumigate my armpits in the same manner. The powder and my pride stung and brought tears to my eyes.

  I followed the line to a long table where I was given one rough petticoat stenciled “AYLESBURY” in bold black letters, the mud-brown linsey prison uniform, a baggy long-sleeved sack of a dress, a pair of thick, ribbed beige woolen stockings, and big brown heavy-soled boots, stout enough to last a lifetime. No drawers or stays were permitted. Nor were nightgowns allowed; we must sleep in our uniforms.

  The third thing I lost was my hair. That weighty golden glory I had once worn piled high in a gilded pompadour or cascading in curls was chopped off high at the nape of my neck. The matron in charge of my shearing gathered my hair tight in her big meaty fist, pulling so hard my scalp burned and tears pricked my eyes, and determinedly hacked away with her scissors. Every rasp of the blades broke my heart. She briskly wound a length of twine around my hair, forming what looked like a long gold horse’s tail, and handed it aside, to be put in storage with my clothes. Then, not content with leaving me shorn short as a man, she went to work with her shears again, cutting what was left of my hair as close as she could to my scalp. When she was done, she tossed a white linen cap into my lap and shouted, “Next!”

  I was led down a long, dark corridor of thick, double-bricked walls. The matron paused to unlock a door, set with an abysmal little postage-stamp window, barred as though a grown woman could ever hope to shimmy and crawl through it when that would be hard for even a baby. And even if she got her hand through somehow what could she hope to grasp except air? The matron motioned me inside and locked the door behind me.

  That was when I stopped counting what I had lost and started counting what I had. Seven normal-sized steps took me across the width of my cell, and another seven measured the length of it. One barred window, my only light, set with thick glazed glass, set up high, so that even when I strained and stood on my tiptoes I seemed to view the world through tears. A wooden plank bed covered with a thin mattress stuffed with coconut fibers, and a gray serge blanket. A bucket for one’s bodily needs sat beneath it. There was also a second bucket filled with cold water, for washing body and cell and eating utensils. A stool and a small table that I might use at my labor and my little leisure. On a shelf, set recessed into the wall, not nailed there lest some clever or deranged convict pry it loose and wield it as a weapon, sat a tin plate, bowl, cup, and spoon, a small dish of salt, and an ounce of soap, a whole week’s allotment, a comb, a slim volume to instruct me in prison etiquette, a hymnal, and a Bible.

  I would be permitted a bath, a fresh uniform, and barbering once a month as needed, essentially a repetition of the deplorable process I had just endured. After the initial to-the-scalp shearing, my hair would be allowed to grow no longer than my earlobes, but if any vermin were detected I would be shorn down to the scalp again.

  This would be my life from now on, a living death entombed by bricks piled and mortared double thick, suffered in silence, always silence. There were moments when I longed to scream just so I could remind myself what my own voice sounded like, to lose myself completely and be like the madwomen whose tormented banshee shrieks sometimes shattered the silent nights. Sometimes when one of the matrons, the warden, or the chaplain spoke to me, allowing me to speak in return, I’d stumble over the simplest words, they had grown so unfamiliar to my tongue. I must have sounded like a simpleton, dumbly groping for words that once rolled off my tongue smooth as silk. I never thought I’d live to see the hour when a sneeze, a cough, or even a fart would be welcome because it broke the omnipresent silence without inviting dire punishment.

  I had thought the days in which I stood in the dock, on trial for my life, then those, after I was condemned, when I sat in my cell waiting to die were the darkest days of my life, but I was mistaken. I think now, no matter how bad things may seem, there is always something worse.

  Every morning I must rise at six o’clock. I must be waiting, standing at the door, with my bowl and cup, for weak tea and lumpy gruel with a few morsels of gristly mutton and a hunk of brown bread so hard and gritty it was murder on the teeth and jaw. By the time the bell rang for chapel I must have thoroughly scrubbed my cell, down on my knees, with cold water that caused my hands to crack and left my knuckles rough and raw, carefully portioning out my meager supply of soap. At seven o’clock we were led out, leaving our scrub buckets and brushes outside our cell doors as we went, walking a full three paces one behind the other, to the prison chapel for a thirty-minute service. Then it was back to our cells for work duty.

  Sewing shirts for soldiers, that was mine. I was required to produce at least five completed shirts each week, with no faults or sloppy stitches, as each would be minutely inspected. If I failed or disappointed in any way my rations would be cut, my weekly library book and letter and visitation privileges revoked, and a notation made in my record. Every evening when I heard the matron making her rounds to collect our sewing implements I stitched all the faster, praying for time. There were nights when I went to bed and couldn’t sleep for worrying over an unfinished shirt, fearing that I would fail to meet the requisite quota by the week’s end.

  At noon we paused in our labors for another meager meal of tough mutton, weak tea, and brick-hard bread. For the following hour, we were let out into the prison yard, walking, three paces between each body, round and round in circles, never stopping, staring straight ahead, mouths sealed lest the vigilant matron suspect us of talking. What else was there to look at except the backs of one another’s heads? Only the high stone walls, the flat gray flagstones beneath our boots, and the sky above, mocking us each moment with its expansive blue freedom and clouds that could drift wherever in the world they wished. By two o’clock we were back at our labors.

  For supper at six, we stood at our cell doors, cups and bowls humbly outstretched for the greasy meat stew, tepid tea, and hard bread. After our meal, a prisoner, who had earned the ultimate privilege of working in the library, would roll a cart down the cell-lined corridors taking back the books we had finished and letting us select new ones.

  We were allotted one hour of “leisure” before bed in which we might read, pray, or sit in quiet contemplation over a loved one’s letter or photograph. We were each allowed one small box in which to keep these precious paper treasures, subject to inspection, of course, to make sure we never came into possession of anything forbidden. All our letters were read before we ever laid eyes on them. Privacy was another one of those words my tongue could no longer form or fathom; it had lost all meaning to me.

  32

  I counted the stitches, stitches in time, sewn throughout the years, every instant feeling like a taffy-stretched eternity. I thought about my children growing up without me, and, in my woman’s heart, I dreamed of Alfred Brierley.

  Those numerous sleepless nights were passed in foolish fantasies in which I was magically set free and he was waiting at the prison gate for me, to sweep me up in his arms and carry me away in a hot-air balloon. I imagined us swooping down and scooping my children up. Then away we’d all go to a new and happy life together. I hoped and prayed that he was thinking of me too, that he would wait for me. But a day came when Mama, during the precious half hour we got to spend together every three months, talking through a grille, with a matron standing by me, told me that he’d married.

  I’m so glad it wasn’t me, a little part of my heart took me by surprise by saying. It took me a long time to realize that little voice was the voice of truth. We could never have really made each other happy. He was just a fantasy, a dream I tried to will into reality, and even when he was flesh and blood and throbbing manhood in my
arms he was still just a dream. I was just too hurt and blind to see it at the time. But even when I knew that dream was also lost to me, I never did stop thinking of him lustfully; we all need someone to dream about. Why must loss, lust, and love be tangled up so?

  I thought of the diary, and I thought about Jim and that whole impossibly tangled mess we’d both made of love and lust, resentment and revenge, passion and pain. So many, many times I felt Jack the Ripper’s knife twist in my heart. Jim’s confession could set me free . . . but at what cost! This sacrifice, this penance, this silence, this imprisonment for a crime I had briefly contemplated but never, thank God, committed! Would the reality for my children truly be as bad as I feared? Why was it so hard to know if I had done the right thing? Why did I keep torturing myself by traveling up and down that road? Why couldn’t I make peace with the decision I had made? Why couldn’t I be stalwart like a saint and stoically endure my fate, knowing that I had made a noble sacrifice? I was so weary of wrestling with my conscience, day after day, night after night, always wondering what was wrong and what was right. All I truly knew was that once black and white paint are mixed together they can never be pure and separate ever again, only some shade of gray.

  Other books tormented me too. One day I impulsively took Mr. James’s Daisy Miller from the library cart. But that was a mistake. In its pages I found the ghost of the girl I used to be, the fun, foolish, flighty, and frivolous young madcap, and she came back to haunt me, bobbing bustle and ringlets, saucy manner, and vibrant, flirty smile, dancing through life with her head in the clouds and stars in her eyes. I also found shades of me in the prison’s illicit copy of Madame Bovary, that scandalous book stitched inside the cover of a book of sermons to be secretly savored by all of us who could read; there I was the discontented wife, racking up debts and recklessly running off to rendezvous with her lover. That story ends with poison too, only it’s the wanton wife who dies, not her ditch-water-dull doctor husband. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter I found peculiarly comforting now that I wore an ineradicable invisible A upon my breast that could never be put off, not even in death—A for Arsenic, A for Adulteress. And Lady Audley’s Secret I could not suffer to have near me. Never would I take it into my cell, not even when it remained alone in the library cart the only volume I had not read. It reminded me that I also had a secret. East Lynne I likewise shunned. It made the unrelenting ache for my children even more unbearable; Lady Isabel was my sister in sorrow.

  I became slothful and indifferent. It’s hard not to when all you have to wear is one baggy brown dress and you’re all but bald beneath your cap. I also became dispassionate and, in a sense, numb. When before the sight of a mouse or some ugly creepy-crawly insect would send me shrieking up onto the nearest stool, now I sat, in the stony gloom of my living tomb, and stared at the mice and black beetles scuttling across my cell, amazed that any life would come willingly here.

  The ever-present chill crept into my bones, lodged there, and would never leave, bringing with it, uninvited, the most unwelcome and tenacious houseguests—fevers, chilblains, bronchitis, catarrh, rheumatism, burning throats, and hacking coughs.

  And so the years crept past. Slowly, slowly, slowly. The old year dragging into the new one like the deadweight of a corpse being dragged from a river. Every New Year’s Eve I would stand on my toes, gazing out the window, seeing nothing but the dream of what might have been. Christmases spent with my children. Being spoiled and petted, kissed and lavished with gifts. Champagne and waltzes, a new gown, sparkling jewels, diamonds and pearls, and a man who loved and desired me taking me in his arms and kissing me at the midnight hour. Some years I imagined it was Jim; others I dreamed of Alfred Brierley. What did it really matter? They were both lost to me. My bare shoulders bundled in costly furs, a ride home through snow and moonlight, then falling into a bed of love, my body opening like a flower beneath my beloved’s kiss. Sometimes, in those dark hours, when the world I used to be a part of was embracing and celebrating, bidding the old year good-bye and welcoming the new one with champagne, and my fellow prisoners slumbered, dreaming their equally hopeless dreams, I dared lift my mud-hued skirt and in my stocking feet, humming just as softly as I could, waltzed across my cell in the arms of a phantom lover.

  My children grew up without me. Michael arranged for them to be adopted by one of Jim’s doctors who had testified against me at my trial, Dr. Charles Fuller, and his wife. For one hundred pounds per annum they would raise Bobo and Gladys as their own and send them to spend every summer with their chilly, arrogant, and otherwise indifferent uncle Michael at his house on the Isle of Wight. The Fullers even changed the children’s names. Bobo was now James Fuller—he’d even dropped my family name of Chandler, which he’d been given as a middle name—and my daughter became Gladys Evelyn Fuller.

  Michael was determined that they should despise me. But Mrs. Fuller at least had a heart. No matter what else she might have thought of me, she knew the pain of a mother’s heart, perhaps because a string of miscarriages had dashed her hopes of having children of her own. Every Christmas without fail, she sent me a photograph of Bobo and Gladys, so I could, from this sad, disgraced distance, see the changes each year wrought.

  How my heart lived for those pictures! I was as greedy for them as any child for toys and treats on Christmas morning. No present, not even the jewels and dresses I used to take for granted, could ever have meant as much to me as those precious pictures.

  Through still images, frozen moments captured in sepia tone, I got to see my beautiful black-haired boy, dressed like a man in miniature now, in suit and tie, growing up, tall and slender, so handsome he should have been posing for artists and preparing for a career on the stage. When he posed in profile, I saw his lashes were as long and luxuriant as ever. Only he was never smiling in these photographs. It worried me so to think of that laughing, happy little boy I had known becoming such a dour, frowning sourpuss, so grave and serious, cold and arrogant. I remembered how he loved to cuddle, kiss, and hug and could not reconcile those memories with the strange cold-fish little character staring morosely back at me with blank, bored eyes. I wished I had magical powers so I could reach into those photographs and shake him and shout, No, Bobo, no, this is not who you were meant to be! He was becoming Michael in miniature, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was forbidden to write to my own children. I was like a beggar every year waiting with hands outstretched and yearning for those pictures. Michael, I knew, was determined that the children be brought up strictly. “A flawed tree grows from a flawed root,” he had told the Fullers, making that an ironclad condition of the adoption. The summer visits were his means of ensuring it was being enforced.

  Gladys showed every sign of blossoming into a great beauty. A violet-eyed, black-haired, porcelain-skinned belle, she had a flat, boyish figure that was gradually rounding into the tantalizing promise of beautiful, bountiful womanhood. Mrs. Fuller sent me a lovely hand-tinted picture of Gladys wearing a lilac chiffon dress. I could see so much of myself in her, the longing almost killed me. She was at an age when a girl really needs her mother, and I could not be there for her, not even by letter. Her little bosoms were just appearing when the pictures abruptly stopped coming.

  After I had been in prison six years Christmas came, but the pictures didn’t. I was so upset I couldn’t stop crying or keep down my food and had to go to the infirmary for a fortnight. When Mama came to visit me I begged her to go and see Mrs. Fuller and find out what had happened. I was terrified some awful fate had befallen my children. Or maybe Mrs. Fuller had died and no one else knew of the yearly charity she had unfailingly dispensed to me? Perhaps Dr. Fuller or Michael had found out and forbidden her to continue? Mama wept herself to see me so distraught and frantic, gnawing my nails bloody, and my eyes bloodshot and dark circled from crying through so many sleepless nights. She promised she would find out and an explanation would be in her very next letter.

  Trapped behind iron bars, I had no choice
but to wait . . . and hope. Maybe the pictures had been lost in the mail or misdirected, which had caused a delay in their delivery? Or maybe an illness, not a serious one, from which the children, or Mrs. Fuller herself, had quickly recovered had merely postponed the pictures’ being taken and mailed in time for Christmas?

  I thought there was nothing left of my heart to break, but the truth is the human heart endlessly regenerates itself and there’s no counting the number of times it can break over the course of a lifetime. No one was dead or dying and England’s postal service was as prompt and efficient as ever. Nor had Dr. Fuller or Michael forbidden Mrs. Fuller this act of charity; it was my son.

  With no one to pet and feed him lumps of sugar my little Bobo had, as the pictures had made me fear, grown hard and sour. Bobo—it was impossible for me to think of him by any other name, though I knew he now answered only to the strictly formal James—had been thoroughly persuaded of my guilt. He believed that I had deprived him and his little sister of a loving father. And the fact that I was permitted the pleasure of gazing upon Bobo’s and Gladys’s features once a year made him sick. Maybe that was why he was never smiling in those pictures? Had he been sending me a silent message all along and I had failed to see it? Now that he had attained the age of fourteen and was standing on the cusp of manhood, he had adamantly expressed the wish that no further photographs be sent to me. And everyone felt, given his age and the maturity with which he had expressed himself, that this was no childish whim and that his wishes should be respected. And Gladys . . . Gladys felt the same; she also hated me. Michael had patted them both upon the shoulder and promised, “She will forget your faces, just like you have forgotten hers.”