The Ripper's Wife(35)

“My darling Bunny,” he said, “nothing could give me more pleasure!”

For the first time since Sarah had come calling, I let him make love to me. I spent the rest of that night floating on warm, blissful waves of love. In my ecstasy and contentment I forgot all about sponges, womb veils, and douches. I just loved my husband and let him love me.

I had not seen Alfred Brierley privately since that one weak and foolish afternoon and I did not intend to.

“I love my husband and children,” I told him discreetly from behind my fan when we met at a ball.

“Of course you do,” he said, “but your heart is so big, Florie, is there really no room for another?”

“For a friend, there is always room,” I said, and quickly left him. Mr. Brierley was temptation personified, and resisting him was powerfully hard. My knees were already weak and I feared my resolve would soon be too if I lingered.

I’d also been doing my earnest best to avoid being alone with Edwin without arousing suspicion. I’d told him softly under cover of Gladys’s piano lesson that I wanted us to be friends as we were before, “nothing less or more.” Before he could answer, I went to stand beside the piano, where Gladys and her teacher sat side by side on the bench, and private, indiscreet conversation was impossible even if he had dared to follow me.

After that, when he couldn’t catch or keep me alone the impetuous fool began writing me letters, pages and pages filled with amorous nonsense. He kept begging for just one hour alone with me, to prove that he could please me in every way, promising that if I would come back to him we would be “jolly companions again, just like before, and share additional pleasures even more stimulating and sweeter,” then went on to spend the next six pages enumerating them. But I never answered his letters. When he asked if I had received them I laughed and told him he should try his hand at writing romances; it was something he could do right there at his desk in the office to relieve his boredom.





The morning of Gladys’s birthday, July 20, 1888, I awoke, after a most passionate night in Jim’s arms, with roses in my cheeks, a song on my lips, my nightgown on the floor, and not a bruise upon my body. Jim had declared Gladys’s birthday a holiday and promised to forsake the office altogether and leave it all to Edwin, even if that meant he would spend the day pulling doves and pennies out of cotton brokers’ noses and ears or tearing up important notarized contracts he would promise but ultimately fail to magically restore to pristine condition, causing the poor clerks no end of bother.

Jim and I were having the most absurdly extravagant birthday party a six-year-old could possibly have, a costume party with over sixty Currant Jelly children invited. Our ballroom had been transformed into a magical fairyland with colored lanterns, silk flowers, and green gauze draperies, to create little bowers, and all kinds of little trinkets and treasures, coins, and brightly wrapped candies had been hidden throughout. For the children’s entertainment there would be a puppet show, a clown, a magician—not Edwin the Extraordinary, thank God!—a storyteller, a fire-eater, a troupe of acrobats, a dancing girl dressed as a fairy queen, and a wonderful silver-haired man who was so good with children, dressed in a fool’s bright motley and tinkling bells, a sort of summertime Lord of Misrule or Pied Piper, to lead the little ones in games like blindman’s buff, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Squeak, Piggy, Squeak, Hunt the Slipper, and to hand out prizes in guessing games and riddles.

I’d hired in half a dozen waitresses just for the occasion. I told that dragon-faced harridan at the employment agency, who kept raising her eyebrows so high at me I thought surely they would disappear into her hair and crawl all the way to the back of her head, to send only young and pretty ones who liked and were accustomed to being around children. I didn’t want any sour-faced meanies scowling at or scolding the kiddies and making them cry. I planned to dress them all in sparkly pastel tulle and silk frocks, with silver paper wings on their backs and stars in their hair, and have them serve trays of tiny sandwiches and jam puffs, and to fill little crystal cups shaped like flowers with punch. I’d made a point of ordering five different kinds; the bright colors—red, green, yellow, orange, and purple—would look so pretty in the big crystal punch bowls I’d bought at Woollright’s.

I’d gone back to the agency a day or so later and requested two nice young men to dress up as pink bunnies to hand my daughter her presents when the time came to unwrap them and to serve the ice cream. Being served a dish of cool vanilla with chocolate or strawberry sauce ladled on by a giant pink bunny was surely a memory every child would cherish. “We’ll supply the costumes, of course,” I assured the harridan. “Just choose a couple of nice young fellows who are fond of the little ones and send round their measurements to my dressmaker, Mrs. Osborne on Paradise Street.”

Her eyebrows rising until I thought surely they would strike the ceiling, that humorless shrew frostily suggested that I petition a theatrical agency instead, that such an establishment would be better equipped to meet my requirements. Of course, I told her I would do nothing of the kind, it was waiters I wanted and her agency advertised that they supplied them, and if she didn’t supply me she’d most assuredly be hearing from my husband and perhaps his legal representative. After all, a waiter was still a waiter, whether he was dressed as a pink bunny or in black broadcloth and white gloves; I didn’t see what difference the costume could possibly make. I was hiring the lads to ladle out ice cream, not dance and sing!