The Ripper's Wife(10)
On our last day in Paris Jim woke me with a kiss, then hurried me into the frothy white muslin frock with the pearl buttons and straw hat he had laid out for me. He took me back to Versailles, to picnic at the Petit Trianon. We fed the swans and golden carp bits of bread and cake and lay back in each other’s arms, filled with contentment, lazy as two cats who had supped their fill on cream, and kissed and dreamed. Life could not have been more perfect or exquisite!
Then came Florence, Rome, and Venice. The Grand Canal, like a picture on a postcard: a starless black night lit by torches. A golden-haired girl in a golden gown and a shawl of beaded black lace. Black plumes in the rich gleaming coils of her high-piled hair. A mask twirled idly on a long gilded stem, playing a coy game of peekaboo with her face. She reclined languidly in a gondola, leaning back against her husband’s chest, watching in breath-stealing wonder as the golden sparks of fireworks showered down into the glassy black waters that mirrored them. The gondolier sang in a velvety tenor voice, magical as the night itself. They kissed as they glided beneath the graceful arch of the Rialto Bridge. Joy everywhere, love everywhere—crowding the landing stages, filling the surrounding squares, leaning from balconies and windows, skipping and frolicking over the bridge. Everyone in love, with each other, the night, or just in love with love.
Cream linen suits and sensible straw hats, museums, coffee in quaint cafés, feeding pigeons in the square, masterpieces of Renaissance art, classical statuary, and Baedeker by day. Churches whose gilded spires soared up so high they seemed to puncture Heaven. Kisses stolen in fields of scarlet poppies and golden wheat. Roman ruins and romance by moonlight. Sipping sparkling wine and dancing beneath the starry brilliance. Cool silk gowns of white, ice blue, or mint green, ardent hands, and red-hot kisses. Cold, unyielding white marble statues staring with blind eyes at soft, pliant, living pink skin.
Our last night in Rome, we waltzed in the moonlit arena of the Colosseum, humming our own music, beneath the shadow of the cross where Christian martyrs had been thrown to the lions.
More beautiful picture postcards to paste in the album of my memory, to remind me that it wasn’t all just a dream, that, for a time at least, my life really was picture-postcard perfect.
3
When we returned to Liverpool and drove past a high ivy-clad stone wall along Riverdale Road, turning in at No. 7—our lucky number!—and I saw Battlecrease House for the first time I nearly died of rapture. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. I was falling in love again, this time not with a man but with a house—the house that would be our home. I would be the living, beating heart of these twenty rooms, the one who made sure it really was a home, not just a stately three-story pile of pale-champagne gold bricks held together by mortar.
Silly as it sounds, I wanted to lie down on the lawn, to roll, wallow, and sprawl on the grass as though it were a green velvet bedspread. I wanted to cup each flower in the garden gently in my hand and caress its petals as I bent to breathe in its sweet fragrance. I wanted to sit in blissful idleness on each stone bench, feed the fish in the pond, pet and feed carrots to the horses in the stable, bones to the hunting hounds kept in the adjoining kennel, hug the statuary and dance round the trees like an adoring pagan acolyte, and tame the proud pair of peafowl that roamed the palatial gardens to eat from my hands. There was even a wishing well I wanted to throw my whole purse into just to say, Thank you! I wanted to invite the whole world to a croquet party straightaway and say warmly to each and every person, Welcome to our home! as I served them tea and tiny sandwiches and dainty cakes with blue and pink frosting. It was all I could do not to dash across the street to the Liverpool Cricket Club and invite the men in spotless white flannel playing on the green beneath the blinding blaze of the sun and the ladies lazily watching them from beneath their shady hat brims and drooping parasols to come over right away. Like the Pied Piper, I wanted to lead them all back, skipping and prancing, singing and dancing, to our home, Battlecrease House, No. 7—lucky number seven!—Riverdale Road. Home! My home! my heart kept singing. Home sweet home!
Chuckling with delight, Jim swept me up into his arms, playfully comparing my ice-lemon silk gown, so creamy and cool, over crisp layers of ruffled white organdy, to a beautiful lemon meringue confection, and carried me up the front steps to a door set with the Maybrick coat of arms, the haughty hawk, perched on a gold brick with a sprig of flowering may in his beak, over the boldly written banner TEMPUS OMNIA REVELAT—TIME REVEALS ALL.
The white tulle atop my hat was tickling Jim’s chin and he tilted his head, angling to avoid it, but it was just too much.
“Although that hat frames a face as pretty as a picture, would you mind taking it off, my dear? The tulle is rather ticklish,” he said.
I laughed in sheer delight and instantly complied.
“Daisies.” Jim smiled at the silk flowers tumbling haphazardly over the brim. “You remind me of Mr. James’s Daisy Miller. ‘She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable.... She was also the most innocent.’ ”
I smiled and sighed, “Oh, Jim!” as though it were the first time I had received this pretty compliment when in truth it must have been the thousandth; my beaus were always comparing me to the impetuous and innocent madcap Miss Miller, the free, frank, and unfettered American girl traipsing across Europe with her mother and brother in tow.