The Ripper's Wife(4)
When I dared open my eyes, a diamond horseshoe was winking at me from a gentleman’s black silk tie. He’s caught me in his arms like he has his luck in that glittering U, I thought. Slowly, I raised my eyes to see a pink mouth smiling at me from beneath a dapper mustache, so deep a brown it was deceptively black, carefully formed and waxed beneath a fine patrician nose, and then I was staring into a pair of intense dark eyes, sharp and sure as a surgeon’s knife, I vividly recall thinking. My unknown savior held me like a bride about to be carried over the threshold of her new home. My bosom heaved, but I couldn’t breathe. I felt all aflame, as though I’d just emerged from a visit to the boiler room. I felt the perspiration pool between my b-reasts and a flaming blush dye my cheeks a pepper-hot red. I couldn’t speak. My tongue felt like a clumsy knot of wet pink ribbons. I must be scarlet as a lobster and seem about as dumb as one! I thought. Where, oh where was that coy, flirtatious, smiling miss I had always been with my beaus? I needed her!
Before the gentleman and I could exchange a single word—surely I would have said something soon!—General Hazard and his wife were upon us, reaching out to me with the most tender concern. Exclaiming that they had seen the whole thing and watched in heart-stopping horror as I began to plummet but hadn’t been able to reach me in time.
The Hazards were like an uncle and aunt to me; they kept homes in New Orleans and Liverpool on account of the General’s dealings in the cotton trade, and we had often visited and traveled with them. The General and Mrs. Hazard both suffered from rheumatism and other age-related infirmities and loved to go anywhere they might enjoy the baths, luxuriating in the hot, sulfurous waters and sipping mineral-rich tonics, being pampered by nice doctors, who brought sweet dreams instead of nightmares to one’s bedside and never prescribed nasty medicines, pretty, smiling nurses in starched white caps and uniforms that rustled like angels’ wings, and sure-fingered muscular masseurs with faces fit for magazine covers but bodies that looked poised to enter the boxing ring. Mama and I had accompanied the Hazards to several fashionable spas and sampled such delights for ourselves, though neither one of us was ailing and we were both in the bright bloom of health. But it was always fun to be petted and pampered, especially by such nice, attractive people.
“Florie! Oh my dear, I’m trembling still! When I saw you start to fall my heart stopped!” Mrs. Hazard exclaimed, patting her heart through her black bombazine bodice.
“Thank heaven you were here, Jim, to save our Florie,” General Hazard was saying to my gallant savior, mopping his worried brow and frowning beneath the upside-down horseshoe of his droopy pewter mustache. “If it hadn’t been for my gout, my heels would have spouted wings and I would’ve caught you myself, my dear!”
I felt my slippers touch solid ground again. I was on my feet, and still flustered and speechless. What was wrong with me? Mrs. Hazard’s arm was around my waist, and I was leaning weakly against her, ever so grateful for her support, as I didn’t quite trust my feet, and introductions were being made.
His name was James Maybrick; he was a wealthy cotton broker with offices in Norfolk, Virginia, and England’s prosperous port city of Liverpool, where he was born and still made his home. The Hazards had known him for years. The General had often done business with him and enjoyed his hospitality at the Liverpool Cricket Club, and Mrs. Hazard had lost count of all the times he’d shared their table. They were clearly very impressed with him. “Solid as a rock, my dear! You need have no fears about James Maybrick!” Mrs. Hazard assured Mama when she took her aside and asked for his particulars.
After that, we were almost constantly together, sitting in the deck chairs, wrapped in warm tartan flannel blankets, deep in conversation over steaming cups of tea or beef broth, or just leaning back, resting and enjoying the salty sea air; strolling the promenade deck, a proud pair of seasoned travelers, smilingly reassuring those of our fellow passengers who were nervous and green; playing cards; dining and dancing; sitting beside each other, our fingers sometimes discreetly, daringly, entwining, at the ship’s concerts; or with our two heads bowed over a single hymnal during religious services. Every evening Mr. Maybrick would call for me at my stateroom and escort me in to supper and then, afterward, to the ladies saloon for coffee and conversation, while he retired to the smoking room for brandy and cigars with the other gentlemen. Then he would retrieve me for a moonlit stroll before seeing me safely back to my stateroom.
The attraction was instantaneous; we were like two moths drawn to the same flame. But no one seemed to understand; they all accounted it some great mystery, like some dime museum oddity in which some element of chicanery might be commingled with the wonderment it inspired. All were in agreement as to why Mr. Maybrick should be so smitten with a ravishing young belle like me, but when they looked at him all they could see was a portly, paunchy, pasty, middle-aged Englishman who talked a great deal about cotton and horse racing. Were they all blind and deaf? Why couldn’t they hear his enthusiasm and see how when he smiled he lit up like a jack-o’-lantern? He was like a great big overgrown boy, and my heart just wanted to reach out and hug him. I couldn’t help but love him. Their confusion was the conundrum, not my feelings!
They made so much of the fact that he was forty-two and I a mere eighteen. I didn’t understand all those frowns and behind our backs whispers that had a way of always reaching my ears, all those muffled murmurs about pretty babies being snatched from cradles. In the South where I was born and spent my early childhood, husbands were often considerably older than their wives, and in the sophisticated European society I had grown accustomed to in my teens this was also commonplace; I had met men in their seventies with wives my age.