The Ripper's Wife(44)

I had promised my darling Bunny a treat—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Lyceum. She was supposed to be spending the day shopping while I saw the doctor and took care of some business. Of all the people I might have seen by chance, slumming gents and lady-whores with their veils down in the cesspool of Whitechapel, I had to see my own wife, with Alfred Brierley, a man I considered one of my best friends; I sponsored him at the Liverpool Cricket Club, God damn and blight him!

Her veil was down and she was wearing what I suppose was her idea of a discreet dress and hat—black with scarlet poppies blooming from head to hem—but I knew it was her. I saw the familiar, intimate way she leaned into him as they walked into the hotel, one of those low places where rooms are let by the hour. They stayed for two.

Pain burning like a fireball in my belly, I sat by the window at the pub across the street drinking rotgut gin and sprinkling arsenic on my palm, licking it up in long, languorous strokes, the way I used to lick her cunt when I thought she was all mine, God damn her, and watched until they came out again.

The sun went down, and it started to rain. Even the heavens weep for me! I thought. The hour came and went when Bunny would have been dressing for the theater. Was she alarmed by my absence? Did she make inquiries? Did she try to find me? Or did she shrug and say I must have been delayed and go with him taking my ticket, taking my place? And still I sat there, drinking gin and taking arsenic—I even sprinkled some in the rotgut.

I’d never felt such a rage. I wanted to MURDER her with my bare hands! But the children’s faces kept floating before my eyes, like large, stubborn cinders obscuring my vision. I would see my hands closing around her throat, her big violet-blue eyes bulging out, protruding like a frog’s until they popped, like bursting blueberries, and then I would see Bobo and Gladys staring out at me from the silver-framed picture on the mantel and I just couldn’t do it. I thrust the wife-whore from me and let her fall. I stood over her, listening to her pant like a dog, a bitch, lying in a whimpering, quivering heap at my feet. I kicked her, and it felt so good, I kicked her again. Half of me hated her. The other half still loved, worshiped, and adored her. I wanted to kill her . . . I wanted to kiss her . . . I think I knew then that I was losing my mind.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the children! My black-haired boy, with the rare double row of eyelashes all the ladies envy so, and my frail little girl who succumbs to every cough and fever. There is a line in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that always makes me think of Gladys—“always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered.” My little angels! Oh God, how I love them! But oh, how they make me worry! Bobo’s beauty provokes the other boys’ teasing, even after his curls have been shorn. He always feels he has to prove himself the little man and sometimes takes risks he shouldn’t, like the time he broke his finger playing ball in the park with the bigger boys whose company he was forbidden on account of their roughness. He tried to hide it and the bone began to knit crookedly and Dr. Hopper had to break it again and reset it. My brave little man, he tried so hard not to cry! And poor little Gladys sees Dr. Hopper almost as often as I do (last month I saw him eleven times). I sit her on my knee and put the pills into her rosebud mouth. Sometimes I give her a sip—just a tiny sip for a tiny girl—of my Fowler’s Solution, that lovely lavender-tinted tincture of arsenic and potassium. I pray it will make her stronger!

If I killed their mother, the children’s lives would be destroyed. So many people think evil is inherent in the blood. They would scrutinize the children’s every word and deed, measuring them always against what I did. I couldn’t do that to them. But I had to do something! The rage, the furious pain, it was like being in a room lined with iron spikes and the walls were closing in on me. I had to find some sort of release, some purge for my angry soul, or it would kill me. I couldn’t keep it bottled up, letting it fester, always living with the fear that it would burst out and injure those I love best. But I couldn’t trust myself alone with the bitch, the harlot with the scarlet poppies on her hat, unless I did something to rid myself of this rage.

I thought a walk in the rain might cool my head. I was so distraught, I didn’t even care if I caught my death in the downpour. It was then that she scurried out of a dark alley and touched my sleeve. She peered up at me through the falling rain and I realized that beneath the brim of that battered old black straw hat I was staring into Bunny’s face. The rain was washing the dirt from her hair, like mud from gold nuggets, revealing waves of molten gold just like Bunny’s. Her eyes were big and blue as violets. Her lips were pink and parted, wet, and lusting to be kissed. Even in the cold, cold rain, I could feel the heat coming off her!

The rain hadn’t cooled my rage at all. My head ached abominably, the rats still gnawed, and the fireball burned. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the alley. I slammed her against the wall, hard enough to jar the breath from her lungs and bring tears to her eyes. I pulled up her skirts. As I rammed into her, I grabbed her hair, pulling it hard, forcing her head back.

“You hot-cunt slut!” I hissed. “You like this, don’t you?” I covered her mouth with mine before she could answer, biting her lips, tasting her blood, sucking at it like a leech.

I imagined her cunt crawling with fleas beneath the squashed cabbage leaves of her filthy green skirt, and the dingy gray petticoats that had once been pure white, the dirty pink skin crusted with the seed of all the men who had come before me, and I thought of Bunny’s clean, perfumed pink-ivory skin and the neat little nest of golden curls, ticklish tendrils of gilt I loved to run my fingers through and bury my face in, teasing the little pink pearl they hid with my tongue. God and Devil both damn the whoring bitch! How I wished she could have seen me at that moment!