The Ripper's Wife(49)
Back in my bolt-hole, a quiet rented room in Petticoat Lane, I saw the button was embossed with a naked lady with long flowing hair riding a horse—Lady Godiva, ha ha! I wished I could show Bunny. Maybe she’d appreciate the noble sacrifice? The first honorable thing this whore had ever done in her whole miserable life, ha ha!
The next morning it was all anybody could talk about. “ ‘Horrible Murder in the East End!,’ ” “ ‘The Work of a Maniac!,’ ” “ ‘Ghastly Crimes of a Madman!,’ ” the newsboys were out shouting on every corner, brandishing the horrors in the face of every passerby. In the pubs those who had known the deceased were drowned in free drinks by journalists in exchange for their reminiscences.
I returned to Buck’s Row. I stood, being jostled by the curious, and saw her blood still staining the cobbles. I gleefully paid my penny to go up to Mrs. Emma Green’s bedroom for a bird’s-eye view of those dumb, bumbling bobbies down on their knees trying to scrub away the bloodstains; they couldn’t even do that right and ignored the shouted advice of housewives. One of the bobbies, a young officer, glanced up; our eyes met; I gave him a polite nod, which he returned. Had he but known . . . the fools! They can’t even catch me when I stand right in front of them! The button from her coat was in my pocket all the time and her blood still caked beneath my nails under my gloves.
I’ve met someone. I’m bored with my Mrs. Sarah. Her looks are gone: she’s bloated as a leech and whines all the time. It takes all the joy out of f-ucking. She’s a fat sow who has suckled too many piglets! “My darling piggy,” I sometimes call her. Stupid bitch, she never hears the sarcasm in my voice, only the darling. I’m done with her for good! It must have been Fate putting this tempting morsel in my path at exactly the right moment. Let that diddling rat catcher spend his hard-earned wages on those miserable brats from now on and see how he likes it! Let him decide if Sarah’s cunt is worth the price!
Her name is Mary Jane Kelly. She’s so deliciously low! A bawdy bawd, a ribald rut! A stout little wench, shapely as an hourglass, bosom and bum lovely and fat like well-stuffed cushions fit for a man’s favorite fireside chair, but she carries it well. I love the way she swings and swishes her hips when she walks! A hearty young Irish whore by way of Wales with a wealth of ginger-gold hair, a ready smile—no missing teeth yet, at least none that show—and eyes as green as the Emerald Isles. They were wide with horror the first time I saw them when they looked up and met mine over the newspaper she was reading with an artist’s full-paged rendering on the front page of a bull’s-eye-lantern-toting bobby discovering Polly’s corpse.
“What kind o’ monster could have done this evil thing?” Mary Jane Kelly asked in a fascinating musical blend of Irish brogue, Welsh lilt, and cockney crudity.
What kind indeed? Ha ha! Sometimes monsters or angels can be standing right in front of you, staring you in the face or even speaking to you, and you don’t even know it until it’s too late. Some monsters even masquerade as gentle men—gentlemen—by day, but when the night falls out comes the knife and out goes the light of life.
She intrigues me like no other woman ever has, this Mary Jane Kelly. She’s still young and beautiful, though probably not for much longer. She has rum every morning for breakfast. Her teeth are already starting to go; she uses the wax drippings from her candle to fill in the cavities. Oh, what a clever little whore she is!
There’s something about her that reminds me of my wife-whore. I see them as two sides of the same coin. Sometimes it’s spinning so fast they blur into one. Sometimes I like to imagine they’re twin sisters, separated at birth, neither knowing of the other’s existence, one raised in luxury, the other piss-poor. They’re both twenty-six. The long, thick hair is ginger-gold, not rich molten like a melted fortune; the eyes are emerald green, not violet-blue; the hands are rough, red, and sturdy, well accustomed to gripping men’s pricks, not delicate, dove white, and dedicated to the feminine art of embroidery; the voice is lilting with the musical strains of Wales and Ireland, not a molasses-thick, syrupy sweet Southern drawl.
She walks the streets in her only pair of boots, the black leather cracked and worn, to earn a living, instead of riding in a carriage to browse and buy trifles and gewgaws; she wouldn’t be allowed to set one foot through the door of Woollright’s Department Store. She only has one set of clothes to cover her back, not a whole wardrobe spilling over with more than a hundred dresses. She doesn’t spend her afternoons sitting in the parlor with a novel or a cat on her lap. She f*cks for pay, not pleasure. And yet . . . there’s a perplexing hint of refinement about this little guttersnipe, barely a wisp, as though it were hanging on for dear life, a certain something that suggests that she used to be better than this.
I asked her if she was willing. She knew what I meant. The answer was “yes.” It’s always “yes.” I gave her my arm. She laughed, saying, “Aren’t you a gallant gent!” She said we could go to her room—13 Miller’s Court in Dorset Street. Joe, the fishmonger she lived with, would be at work, “if he’s not lost that job too!” She rolled her eyes. “I know as some would think it unlucky to live in a room numbered thirteen,” she said as we walked along, “but not me—’tis one o’ McCarthy’s Rents, it is, an’ me uncle is John McCarthy himself, so I don’t have to worry about him givin’ me the boot! ’Twould break me da’s heart if his own brother did me dirty like that! An’ I’ve too pretty an arse for any man to be kickin’ it; they’d much rather poke it instead! An’ when the rent collector comes callin’ I always make sure an’ give him a bit o’ jolly to keep him smilin’ so he don’t feel half so bad about leavin’ empty-handed!” She winked. “I’ve a way with me mouth, I have, and I don’t just mean the gift o’ the gab. . . .”