The Ripper's Wife(5)

I only ever worried about Mr. Maybrick’s age upon those occasions when I noticed that his pallor seemed much more pronounced and his eyes appeared bloodshot, like the dark pupils were snared in a scarlet spiderweb, and I detected a slight tremor and cold clamminess in his hands. Sometimes they appeared so pasty white and limp that I actually shrank from touching them. There were times when he would rub them vigorously, complaining of numbness.

Many times he would take from his pocket a beautiful wrought-silver box with a rather charmingly risqué bas-relief design on the lid of Nelson’s notorious mistress, Lady Hamilton, as a scantily draped “nymph of health,” more bare than bedecked, and put a pinch of the white powder it contained into his tea, soup, or wine. But I was too well-bred to ask what it was.

I was sorely afraid some illness might swoop down and carry my Mr. Maybrick away from me on the Wings of Death. But whenever I tentatively expressed my concern he would smile, call me his dear “Bunny,” and say, “I’m afraid I’m not as good a traveler as I like to pretend,” and, with a sweet shamefacedness, blame it all on a slight touch of mal de mer.

I believed him because I wanted to believe him. And why should I have doubted him? In those days, it was “the demon rum” the do-gooders crusaded against, not the contents of the medicine cabinet.

Gullible and innocent, I had no way of knowing that some gentlemen, especially those of middle or advancing age and those of weak constitution or insecure nature, routinely took “virility powders” or a “pick-me-up” tonic containing such dangerous, potentially deadly, ingredients as arsenic and strychnine to stimulate their masculine powers. Certainly no gentleman of my acquaintance would ever have been so boldly indelicate as to discuss impotency and aphrodisiacs with a well-bred virgin like me. Not even my doctor brother would have dared broach the subject. And if Mama, who was the wisest and most worldly woman I had ever met, knew about this peculiar manly indulgence she never saw fit to enlighten me.

Why could all those naysayers and frowning faces not see all the wonderful things Mr. Maybrick and I saw in each other? We both loved travel, good food, and books, keeping au courant with the fashions, and the heart-pounding excitement of the green table and turf; we were both spellbound by the roulette wheel and avidly courted Lady Luck.

He was no callow youth bent only on getting my bloomers off. I could talk to him and learn from him. He even made speculating on cotton seem exciting as a game of chance when he told me all about “bear sales” wherein cotton one doesn’t actually possess is sold in the hope of being able to cover the obligation by buying at a lower price later and thus making a profit of thousands of dollars. I was utterly fascinated. He was the first man who had ever made me feel like I was more than a living doll.

Why couldn’t they understand? How could I not love him? And what he could give me—a solid, steady, and respectable English home, real roots, a foundation, the chance to build a life and, God willing, grow a family. Though none would ever have guessed it to see the giddy girl caught up in the social whirl I was then, I was bone weary of wandering, of living out of a trunk, in luxurious hotels or the chateaux of the aristocrats and millionaires Mama sometimes intimately befriended. I didn’t want to stop dancing or for the excitement to ever end, but I wanted to settle down, to go home after the dancing was done to a place that really was home, to my own fireside, familiar and dear, not just another house or hotel in which I was merely a guest.

But they didn’t understand. Whenever Jim and I strolled past on the promenade deck, people would whisper and shake their heads. Dour old dowagers and iron-gray spinsters, who had long since given up all hope of marrying, would turn and stare or glare after us, branding our backs, determined to make their disapproval felt. They whispered about indiscretions, making our courtship sound so sordid, speaking in hushed, appalled tones about how late I stayed out, “after dark, my dear, and without a chaperone!,” and our lingering on the deck, watching the moon and the stars mirrored in the glass-smooth sea with his arms about me, his breath warming my skin, and my soul, as he called me his darling “Bunny,” and how when he brought me back to my stateroom he tarried overlong in the sitting room saying good night to me.

Mama thought Jim would make a grand husband for me. So what if he was older? He was respectable and rich, “solid and dependable as the Bank of England.” I imagined his face as an engraving surrounded by dictionary entries for words like Strength, Stability, and Security. Mama and I were from the South, where cotton was king, and knew enough cotton brokers to know that Jim’s boast that “trade is enthroned in Liverpool with cotton as prime minister” was absolute truth.

Jim was equally impressed with my pedigree. I feared Mama would drive him mad with all her chatter about the important men nesting like fat partridges in our family tree, friends and relations of royalty and founding fathers, like Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, high-ranking clergymen, Harvard graduates, bankers, founders of schools and railways, real estate barons, the first Episcopal bishop of Illinois, a Secretary of the Treasury, and a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. My grandfather had founded the town of Cairo, Illinois, and been caricatured by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, and my father had sat on the Supreme Court and served as Assistant Secretary of State for the Confederacy. And, of course, there were our cousins the Vanderbilts.

Though I wished she wouldn’t, Mama made me sound like some kind of heiress, one of those wealthy American girls the newspapers had dubbed “Dollar Princesses,” girls who traveled to Europe on fishing expeditions to catch a title to put the crowning touch on their millions. My stomach was all queasy and I felt like a fraud, a sham heiress, when she dropped hints about the two and a half million acres of land in Virginia and Kentucky that I might one day inherit, conveniently neglecting to mention that it was all swampland and there was some complicated legal tangle about just who in our family actually owned it. It was all a great muddle that would have cost too much to unravel, the lawyers would have gotten richer and us only poorer, and the land would have just sat there stagnating without a buyer, so we just left it be; no one really thought it was worth all the bother.