The Ripper's Wife(117)

While the landlady was busy with her back to me, demonstrating that the window really did open—“it just sticks a bit, but you’ll soon acquire the knack for opening it . . .”—I mouthed a silent good-bye to my little angel and quietly slipped out.

“The past is dead,” I whispered as I swiftly descended the stairs. I lingered just a moment on the threshold, slowly, softly closing the front door, just saying good-bye. “The past is dead,” I whispered, and never looked back.





When I finally stood before Jim’s grave in Anfield Cemetery I was surprised at how little I felt. I thought I would feel more. I thought all the anger I had been carrying around inside me all these years would come bubbling right up and I’d push the cross from its pedestal, scream, and hurl myself onto the ground and rend and pummel the sacred earth like a madwoman. But I did nothing of the kind. I just stood there like any other ordinary mourner with a bunch of violets in my hand and let the truth sleep in its uneasy peace.

The Bible says that the truth will set you free. But would it? I’ve always wondered what would really have happened if I had revealed the diary and that candy box full of ghoulish souvenirs. Would it have really been as bad as I imagined? Would the wounds have never healed and remained raw and livid throughout all our lifetimes? Would I have been vindicated and acquitted? Or would my adultery still have cast too great a shadow? Would Judge Stephen, with his obsessive need to punish unchaste and misguided females, all those Delilahs, Salomes, and Jezebels, have still accounted my sins far greater than Jim’s? Judge Stephen hadn’t blinked an eye or cocked a brow at Jim’s Mrs. Sarah and their five bastards. Would the murder of five prostitutes in Whitechapel have stirred any horror in his heart at all? Would it have all been for nothing? A daring act doomed to failure? Would I have been convicted and lost those fifteen years and my children anyway? Would they have scoffed at the whole story and said it was all a sham I had concocted? Would Michael’s deep pockets have paid for experts to denounce the diary’s authenticity? Experts are not infallible; sometimes they see only what they want to see or what they are paid to see. Maybe the diary and those macabre remembrances would have turned and rebounded against me like a boomerang. Maybe Michael, with the family’s reputation, his career, and political ambitions to protect—he had given up the stage and become the Mayor of the Isle of Wight while I was in prison— would have found some way to twist the truth and lay those crimes on my lap too. And, in a sense, they really were mine. Those women died standing proxy, for me. Maybe my fifteen lost years truly were a just punishment.

It’s too late now. Wondering is as futile as walking a mile for exercise, then eating a pound of fudge as soon as you get home. I’ll never know. I let the chance go by. The gambler in me wasn’t brave enough to chance it and lay my cards down. I put my children first and foremost as a mother always should, and I can’t really regret that in spite of the way things turned out. If I was going to do it, I should have done it before Jim died, but I made the decision to leave Jim in God’s hands instead of surrendering him and the evidence against him to worldly justice of judge, jury, and hangman. I made the decision.

Did we both play God, each of us in our own way? Jim took lives; I kept his secret. I aided and abetted him in my own fashion. Yes, I am guilty of that. I put the powder in the meat juice, I almost did what he asked me to, but then I spilled it. Maybe that is enough to convict me of evil intentions, even though a change of heart, a change of mind, came, in the form of an accident or divine intervention at the last minute.

But the fact remains that I kept silent. I let the chance slip by when it might or might not have changed everything, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, just like the vows we make in marriage. And I still don’t know if that was right or wrong. Did I keep a vow I should have broken? I know I broke some that I should have kept.

For years I’ve borne this terrible burden all alone. I made the sacrifice. Willingly I chose to carry that weight. In the end, I can blame no one but myself for what was and wasn’t and what might have been. Maybe those do-gooders, philosophers, Bible-thumpers, and would-be saints are right—maybe everything really does happen for a reason, and that reason is often God’s alone to know. Ask and ye shall receive. When we pray for it to be revealed, sometimes it is given. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no, and sometimes it is not yet. Everything in God’s own time. Tempus Omnia Revelat; Time Reveals All. In the end, we are all the murderers of our own dreams.

I knelt and laid my poor little paltry bunch of violets upon Jim’s grave. Then I laid my head down where his shoulder would have been beneath the earth and waited for my anger to end. I closed my eyes and remembered the first time I saw him, smiling at me, mustachioed and dapper, with a diamond horseshoe twinkling in his tie. I think I knew then that we’d be together all our lives. I remembered walking with his hand in mine, dancing in his arms, the smiles and laughter and love we’d shared, the way our bodies fit hand in glove in passion, slick as silk, warm as velvet, every night ending and every morning beginning with my head on his shoulder and his arms around me, how good he’d been to me, the way he doted on and spoiled me—I was a wife and a little girl all at once, sensuous siren and naughty schoolgirl—and the way we both believed in luck, our fingers, his and mine, stroking the diamond horseshoe in his tie before each wager. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost, and the worst thing we ever lost was each other. We let too many things come between us. I remembered how in happier days he’d come and lay his head in my lap and I’d playfully count his gray hairs and tease him that it was time for another application of Indian Princess Hair Blacking. Even when he was in his most murderous rages I never truly stopped believing that he loved me. I never stopped hoping that what was lost would again be found. I was always willing to give us another chance, to try again for a fresh start. There’d been so many and never enough. And the sins, the crimes, he committed . . . all for love.... Love diverted, love perverted, love had driven him mad and turned my gentle Jim into a fiend. Oh, Jim, oh, Jim . . .