The Ripper's Wife(122)

That where there is despair, I may bring hope;

That where there are shadows, I may bring light;

That where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;

To understand, than to be understood;

To love, than to be loved;

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds,

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven,

It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.”





The bloodstains vanished and all the wounds of soul and skin were healed. The knife fell from Jim’s hand and disappeared, as though it had never been. All the wrongs were made right. And all that had been lost was at long last found. Jim took me in his arms and kissed me and I knew, this time, our love would last forever. There would be no more pain, suffering, or dying, waiting, or crying. There really was a new beginning waiting for me at the end.

That feeling of peace was still with me when I woke up. I lay in the gloaming gazing at the pictures arranged upon my windowsill: Jim and me—our wedding picture; Bobo and Gladys as children in their Easter finery, posing with baby bunnies and fluffy yellow butterball chicks; Mama in a black lace gown, big hat, feather boa, and diamonds looking as though she might have given busty, bawdy Mae West her inspiration for Diamond Lil; Edwin, dark haired and dashing as a Russian count in a black fur hat; Bobby, my sweet, shy, eternally young Biograph boy; and Ty, my surrogate silver-screen son, gazing at his own reflection in a mirror-topped table, making a sly, secret joke of the legend of Narcissus, because the handsomest man in Hollywood was devoid of personal vanity. It makes me wonder if Mr. Poe was correct when he said “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”





EPILOGUE

On October 23, 1941, Florence Chandler Maybrick was found dead in her bed, surrounded by her beloved cats, old photographs, and yellowed newspaper clippings, on a mattress crawling with bedbugs. She was seventy-nine years old. A rosary was in her hand and her Bible was at her side. Tucked inside, folded away, faded, and long forgotten, was a prescription for a facial wash containing a minuscule amount of arsenic written by Dr. Greggs of New York in 1878.