The Ripper's Wife(29)

I began buying more and more goods on credit and borrowing money from anyone who would lend it, even one hundred pounds from Mrs. Briggs, and then borrowing more from others to settle those little debts. Then I found myself making excuses, going up to London to visit an old friend or a maiden aunt who was stopping there, and taking pieces of jewelry I rarely wore to pawnshops where no one knew me, things Jim’s sharp eye would never notice missing. But it was only a matter of time before I ran through all those, then I began consorting with professional moneylenders, ruthless men with eyes like sharks, agreeing, in desperation, to exorbitant rates of interest. I was playing for time, just trying to keep our heads above the fast-rising water.

Soon I was writing, pouring out my anguished heart, to Mama:



I am utterly worn out and in such a state of

overstrained nervousness I am hardly fit for

anything. Whenever the doorbell rings I feel ready to

faint for fear it is someone coming to have an

account paid, and when Jim comes home it is with

fear and trembling that I look into his face to see

whether anyone has been to his office about my bills.

My life is a continual state of fear. There is no way of

stemming the current.





Sometimes I wonder: Is life worth living? I would

gladly give up the house tomorrow and move

elsewhere, but Jim says it would ruin him outright.

We must keep up appearances until he has more

capital to fall back on, to meet our liabilities, since a

suspicion aroused would open the floodgates and all

claims upon us would come pouring in all at once

and Jim couldn’t possibly settle even half of it with

what he has now.





Here I have to admit one of my great faults. When it all became too much, even though I knew I was only increasing our woes, I did what I’d been doing for so long—I went shopping. A new handbag with a cameo on the clasp or a pair of yellow satin high heels with diamanté buckles was to me like one of Jim’s arsenical “pick-me-up” tonics was to him. And, after all, Jim said we must act as though nothing had changed, so that meant continuing my sprees at Woollright’s; otherwise, people would talk.

Jim was now, I knew, stopping by the druggist for one of those tonics every morning on his way to his office, then three more times throughout the day, before having the fifth and final one on his way home, and he’d increased the dosage from five to seven drops of the arsenical solution. He’d actually boasted to me about that, as though it were something to be proud of, and that in addition to the white powder in his little silver box and the strychnine tablets he was popping into his mouth like peppermints.

Every time I saw my husband I was afraid it would be the last time. Every time the doorbell rang I was afraid it was either a bill collector or someone come to tell me that Jim had dropped dead on the Cotton Exchange floor after taking one strychnine tablet or pinch of arsenic too many. I’d tried talking to Dr. Hopper about it, and he said he’d make a note that we had had some conversation about it in case my husband should die suddenly. Frankly, I didn’t find that at all comforting and begged him to talk to Jim about it. Afterward, I wished I hadn’t. Jim’s anger was like that serpent slumbering in Cleopatra’s basket of figs. It was a week before I could show my face in public again. By that time, I’d already mastered the art of powdering and rouging over the worst of the bruises. I no longer believed him afterward when he wept, cradled and kissed me, and promised “never again.”





A day finally came when the doorbell did ring and I discovered a debt I never knew about, one that had nothing to do with hats and handbags. In fact, it wasn’t mine at all. It was a debt my husband had hidden from me, a debt dating back to before I was even born.

A blowsy fat woman with hair hennaed redder than a smallpox pustule was standing there, picking with gnawed-to-the-quick fingernails at a striped satin skirt that had clearly not known a laundress’s touch in some time. She stood there, fidgeting and hiccupping, fussing with her feathered hat’s drooping brim, and smelling like a saloon, excusing herself by saying she’d been drinking to get her courage up.

She said her name was Mrs. Sarah Maybrick and she’d come to see her husband—Mr. James Maybrick—to remind him that she and the children, all five of them, had not fallen off the face of the earth, they were still alive, in Whitechapel, where they had always been, and were in dire want of money and wanting to know what had become of the allowance he was accustomed to send. “You must excuse me for comin’ to your door like this,” she said. “I would’ve written ’im a letter, only I can’t write an’ I was too ashamed to ask anyone else to do it for me.”

That was the moment my world fell apart. As darkness engulfed me and I fell I saw it all break apart in myriad flying shards that could never be glued back together again. This time, I knew, when I opened my eyes again my world would not be all right. I’d not only lost my place in the world; I’d had it snatched right out from under my feet like a prankster had pulled a rug out from under me. I’d fallen hard and had all the breath knocked out of me and I lay there gasping and shattered. If that henna-haired slattern was Jim’s rightful wife, then who and what was I? A kept woman, his mistress, his whore?