The Ripper's Wife(51)
She held my hand tight, stepped afore me, as the passage was too narrow for us to walk side by side, and smiled back at me as she guided me through the cramped archway. She unlocked the door to a single filthy room and took me to her bed. We f*cked madly. The pine headboard banged against the wall. Hours must have passed. It was worth every penny! There was just something about Mary Jane Kelly. . . . Every time I wanted to kill her, I kissed her; every time I wanted to cut her, I caressed her. I don’t pretend to know why. Maybe it really was the fabled Luck o’ the Irish? Mary Jane believed in it. “Don’tcha know, I’m like a cat, I am; I always land on me feet,” she always said. “Never despair, me dear. ’Tis always darkest before the dawn, but tomorrow the sun will come out.” She seemed untouched by the poverty and pain that surrounded her. She was of it, as dirty and ragged as the rest of them, with the teeth slowly rotting in her pretty head, but she was still, somehow, above it; her feet never seemed to touch the ground.
In her pathetic little room, half a stub of a candle burned in a ginger beer bottle on the table by the bed next to a stale crust of bread and a half-eaten apple turning brown. A filthy, ragged muslin skirt masquerading as a curtain veiled the window. The only furnishings besides the bed were two small, mismatched tables and chairs and a lopsided washstand. The pitcher and basin were cracked and the pisspot half-shoved beneath the bed stank and was perilously close to overflowing, and empty gin and ginger beer bottles rattled against it on the bare, gritty floorboards. A dented kettle sat on the hob, and for a pathetic spot of color there was a cheap, faded print of The Fisherman’s Widow, a desolate woman keeping vigil in a graveyard, eyes fixed upon a wooden cross. It hung over the mantel where battered tin boxes and twists of brown paper containing her meager rations of sugar and tea sat alongside a cracked shard of mirror and a broken-toothed comb.
We whiled away the afternoon with our bodies lying entwined in sheets stained with the spunk and sweat of other men, including Fishmonger Joe’s. After she’d risen and had a “hard piss”—like all harlots, she believed it would keep her from conceiving—she settled herself back in my arms, as comfortable as you please, and told me the story of her life. And what a tale it was! A picaresque saga of daring debauchery and tragic travails, decadence and depravity, that would have put Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill to shame, in which our heroine went from grime to glamour, then back to grime again so rapidly it left me wondering just how much or how little of it was fact or gin-sodden fantasy; she was, after all, born of a race renowned for breeding the best storytellers.
She was born in Limerick, the only girl in a family of seven brothers, “and they’d mash any man to a pulp who trifled with me, they would,” she said proudly. She’d had one sister, but she died, “poor bairn,” when she was but three, “fell into the fireplace, she did, when Mam’s back was turned an’ bent over the ironin’.
“Mam lost her wits an’ had to be sent away, to the dear nuns who knew how to deal with such things, an’ Da decided to up an’ move us to Wales, where he had some kin, to make a new start. ’Twas what we all needed, he said.”
Her da and the boys took work in the coal mines in Carnarvonshire while Mary Jane kept house, cooked meals, and made sure they all had a clean shirt to wear to Mass on Sunday.
When she was sixteen, Mary Jane fell in love with Jonathan Davies, the boy next door. “He used to come in an’ read me poetry, newspapers, an’ stories, he did, while I was busy cookin’ an’ cleanin’. It was he who learned me what readin’ an’ writin’ I know. The first full sentence I e’er read rightly was I love you, an’ the second was Will you marry me? The answer was Aye.” She smiled and hugged herself. “The memory still warms me, it does, makes me knees weak an’ me insides all toasty!”
But the sun set all too soon for Mary Jane and her “Jon.” He was killed in a mine explosion three years later and left her with a babe new planted in her belly. The grief nearly killed her. They feared her mind would give way like her mam’s. Her da and brothers, hoping the change would do her good, sent her to Cardiff to stay with a cousin, as her husband left “no near livin’ kin an’ a woman needs another woman at a time like that.”
Ruby Ellen—that was the name of the cousin—“was a bad sort.” Jealous and greedy, she resented that Mary Jane, two years younger than herself, was a great beauty and had already been a much-loved wife and had a baby in her belly before she was widowed while Ruby Ellen languished at home as yet unmarried, with no worthy prospects, “her bein’ the kind men flirt with but don’t marry.” She introduced Mary Jane to the drink as a route to restore good cheer and to the “gay, fast company” she ran with.
Mary Jane took to the drink “as a fish does to water, I did”—“I could stop anytime I want, sure I could, but I don’t want to”—and it was so very nice to feel a pair of strong, manly arms around her again. But she’d lost her luck as well as her love. She caught “somethin’ heinous” from one of those fine, tall sailor boys she and Ruby Ellen picked up at the pier and landed in the infirmary. Mary Jane was there for months—“tossin’ an’ burnin’ with fever, I was, until I feared me own brains would be fried like an egg”—and the babe, a boy, “God bless him, the poor mite,” was born daft and had to be sent to a special home for the nuns to take care of.