The Ripper's Wife(43)

I didn’t want to believe it; I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want Michael to be right. But Michael is always right, damn his eyes, damn those silver vocal cords that have lined his pockets with gold! Command performances for the Queen, a mansion in Regent’s Park! Michael is God’s own gift to the world! Our parents always loved him best because he could sing; Mother always wept with pride because God had given him a voice. He didn’t have to do chores like I did; he didn’t have to lift a finger, only his voice to the glory of God while I wore mine to the bone taking up the slack. I was the family workhorse, the dogsbody, the slave! A poor, mediocre Liverpool lad with no special God-given talent, I spent my whole childhood dreaming of the day when I would best Michael at something.

I made myself rich; through sheer dint of will, I worked myself up to the top of the cotton trade. I swept floors in the brokers’ offices when I was nine. Now other poor little lads come in to sweep mine, but Michael is still the star. God’s chosen one, always the best and the brightest, always right, Saint Michael is, and he was right about Bunny too, damn him! I should have listened to him when he said I couldn’t possibly be in love with someone I had known only one week, that these whirlwind shipboard romances were the stuff of novels and musical comedies and not to be trusted in real life. She was no more an “American Dollar Princess” than I was! She’s heiress to two and a half million acres of fetid swamps as rank, rotten, and foul as her black whore’s heart is! She learned at the knee of the best, her own mother, Caroline the Cuckolder, Baroness von Bawd, who uses men like handkerchiefs so she can wear diamonds and wipe her arse on pound notes! In ten years’ time Bunny will be just like her. Money and whores—they’re the bane of mankind’s existence, they break hearts and destroy souls, but we cannot live with or without them! Lack, like, loathing, or loving, they’ll drive you MAD!

I could have pretended, I could have denied it, if only I had not seen it. It would have been so easy to dismiss it as more nastiness and spite from the Currant Jelly Set directed at my American-born wife, “the Dollarless Dollar Princess.” But I saw, I saw; with my own eyes I saw it!

We were in London, for some entertainment and for me to see a doctor about this vexing numbness in my cold, cold hands—cold as her heart and her cunt when I come to her bed and try to touch it! “Do let me, dear!” I implore the icy wall of her back, but silence is the only answer I ever get. There’s a distressing tremor and a feeling of needles and pins—like the lies that stab my heart! Pain gnaws like starving rats at my stomach. My bowels are like rice water, and my skin sloughs off like a snake’s. It itches abominably, burns, yet is so cold; I can never get warm enough.

Whenever I visit this great City of Whores, crawling with them like vermin, rich whores and poor whores, slim whores and stout whores, shy whores and bold whores, plain whores and pretty whores, I always return to Whitechapel, to visit my Mrs. Sarah and have my wedding present, the gold watch she gave me from her uncle’s shop, cleaned and polished bright as new.

Of course the bitch wanted money for our five brats. I suppose they are mine; there was a time when I lay with her every chance I got. I was hot and lusty, right out of school and from under my parents’ pious roof, and still believed all the preacher’s prattle about hellfire and damnation and sins of the flesh, and the words of the beautiful, uplifting hymns Michael sang every Sunday. When I rented a room above the watchmaker’s shop, Sarah set my loins on fire at the first sight of her. I saw her ankles on the stairs. I blushed and stammered and cast down my eyes until she left me alone so I could tend to the sticky mess in my trousers. A red-haired Magdalene with a bosom and bum like a juicy apple I longed to bite into. I was hard as a poker every time her skirts brushed against me in passing. And she knew it! She didn’t even have to touch me! I fell asleep with my prick in my hand every night. I played with it so much I had to see a doctor. He advised me to leave it alone, that the soreness would abate with the slackening of my attentions, but I couldn’t stop myself. Not even a regimen of cold baths could douse the fire Sarah lit inside me. Nor did the barbed ring the doctor recommended I wear to bed fitted snugly around the root of my cock deter me. There was no help for it—I had to possess her!

I thought the fires of Hell were burning me, that there was something supernatural, otherworldly, about my lust, that it was surely Hell instead of Heaven sent and the only way I could avert damnation was by marrying her. But I was never a fool. I knew better than to trust my prick. This was not a woman I would be proud to introduce to the world as Mrs. Maybrick, but she was jolly fun for an apprentice boy with a prick like fireworks always going off and having her would restore my peace of mind.

To stop her wheedling and whining, I had one of Michael’s theatrical friends dress up as a preacher and bless the brass ring I slipped on her finger. I lifted her veil—made from a lace tablecloth bought cheap off one of the stalls in Petticoat Lane because of a bad coffee stain—and kissed “my own dear wife,” “my Mrs. Sarah.” There’s a parchment with Certificate of Marriage in big fancy script and both our signatures—mine scrawled so illegibly not even Satan himself could read it—that she keeps framed above her bed. Proof the whore can point to that she isn’t a whore even when she’s lying underneath it letting the rat catcher from down the street diddle her cunt.

But all women are whores, in one way or another; they all have their price. They’ll sell themselves for pennies, a kind word, a crust of bread, a tot of gin, or a bright silk handkerchief, and the most costly of all demand diamonds; it’s only a matter of naming the right price. I’ve had whores I couldn’t afford to, or didn’t want to, pay for the silk handkerchief out of my pocket, and they were happy to have it. Sometimes when Edwin is out, I help myself to some of his bright, gaudy silks; the whores love those! You should see the way their eyes light up and their skirts flip up! That’s how I get my three-penny knee tremblers for free, ha ha!