The Ripper's Wife(101)

“Mama . . .” I sat there stunned and staring. I didn’t know what to say. This scheme of hers went against everything I wanted. I didn’t want any more notoriety. “Mama . . . I don’t want to do this! Please, don’t make me! I want to be forgotten; I don’t want to be remembered or reminded! I’ve paid the price, and now I want to live quietly, and I want my children back—”

“Florie!” Mama started back as though I’d struck her. There was a wounded look in her eyes that brought tears to mine. “I’m only thinkin’ o’ what’s best for you, darlin’, an’ if you want to secure your future, an’ not spend the rest o’ your days a pauper, rely-in’ on the charity o’ others, then this is the most logical course. I’m sure I don’t know what else you can do, darlin’. Mama’s not a magician; she cain’t pull wealthy bachelors out o’ her hat, you know. You no longer have your youth an’ beauty to fall back on, darlin’. You’re going to have to make some effort, an’ use what you do have—your tragic story o’ how the world has wronged you—to rouse their chivalrous an’ protective instincts. Men like to feel like knights in shinin’ armor ridin’ to the rescue of a damsel in distress; they want to think they can wrap her up in their arms an’ keep her safe like no other can. An’ you, Florie dear, are a damsel in most distressed circumstances, an’ they’re only goin’ to get worse, darlin’, if you don’t do something, an’ quickly. An’ your children are all grown-up, darlin’. Why, Bobo must be twenty if he’s a day! There’s just no way you can have those years back; they’ve grown up an’ forgotten all about you. You’ve got to face facts, darlin’; that dream is stone-cold dead!”

When this only made me hang my head and weep, Mama said, “I’ll tell you what you do, darlin’. You write them a nice long letter layin’ your heart bare. I’ll give it to the chauffeur an’ have him take it straight to the Fullers’ door. If they want to see you, they’ll answer, an’ if not . . . you just move on, the same as those ungrateful brats have.”

So I wrote a book, or rather a very efficient bespectacled spinster secretary whose fingers flew with alacrity over the keys of a typewriting machine that Mr. Wagner sent round wrote a book while I supplied the story of my woefully unfortunate life and the Hell on earth I had endured behind prison bars and ate bonbons and waited for a letter that never came and for my hair to grow out and was fitted with a new wardrobe to start my new life in courtesy of the ever-generous Densmores. A melodramatic plea for prison reform packaged between midnight-blue covers with some choice details about my alleged crime and the travesty of my trial thrown in for good measure, the book appeared on bookstore shelves as Mrs. Maybrick’s Own Story: My Fifteen Lost Years, and Mama and I packed up, bid a fond farewell to the Densmores, and went on the lecture circuit.

I wasn’t the great success everyone envisioned—I was nervous and fraught with worry and gnawed my nails before every appearance—but Mama just whispered, “Make ’em fall in love with you, Florie; that’s all you have to do!” and shoved me out onstage, slapping my hands away when I tried to turn and cling to her in fright. The truth is I hated every moment of it. My life might read like a melodrama, but I was totally unsuited for the stage, and it wasn’t long before everyone knew it.

It’s devilish hard to be likable and engaging and stand there looking pretty as a picture while you’re talking about the death of your husband, the father of your children, the man you almost went to the gallows for murdering, and recounting all the horrors and deprivations and punishments packed into fifteen years of imprisonment. It hurt me so having to endlessly relive it and answer the audience’s prurient and often impertinent questions about it. And there’s just something downright tasteless about standing there with your now rounded and well-fed woman’s body dressed in the latest fashions and top-dollar hairpieces with a fortune in pearls draped about your throat while describing the dismal prison uniform and the humiliations of having your head shorn down to stubble and not having the use of a nightgown or toothbrush for fifteen years. Every time I’d talk about the heavy, ill-fitting prison boots I’d feel every eye in the house being drawn down to my elegant little boots or French heels and silk stockings. I felt like a fraud and just as much a hypocrite as every man and woman I’d ever met in the Currant Jelly Set.

My body might have looked well enough, but my face was haunted and haggard. I couldn’t sleep. Every night I lay there with my heart galloping, racing fast enough to win the Grand National, my mind endlessly replaying scenes from my life, trying to pinpoint what I could’ve and should’ve done differently and how I might have averted this fate. Some nights I was the strong, independent woman who threw up her hands and said, The hell with you! and walked out of Battlecrease House with her children in tow without ever looking back. Other nights Jim and I succeeded in waking dreams where we had failed in real life and found a way that was not altogether clear to me to be the happily ever after fairy-tale couple and grow blissfully old and gray together and dance at our children’s weddings and our own golden anniversary. There were nights when I, the giddy bride exploring her husband’s private sanctum, found only towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom cabinets and others when Jim, reformed and repentant, poured all his drugs down the drain, then took me in his arms and told me that I was the only drug he needed and couldn’t live without.