The Ripper's Wife(56)

get a chance. Good luck.





Yours truly,





But what to sign myself? Something catchy for the man they cannot catch. A name that will live forever. A name that will still inspire fear long after my bones have turned to ashes. I am a gentle, almost saintly, man when the rage is not upon me. . . . Saint James the Whore Slayer? Sir Jim, as Nanny Yapp calls me when I play knights with Bobo and my little princess Gladys? Something less formal? Something with a common touch for common people? I have it—Jack! Like Spring-Heeled Jack, with his long, icy claws and eyes glowing like fireballs, the demon who terrorized London half a century ago and still springs out to terrify audiences in stage melodramas and the penny-dreadful novels Edwin adores so. Or . . . OH YES! YES! Like Michael’s Jack, the lady-loving jolly jack-tar from one of his most popular songs—“They All Love Jack.” That’s it! Jack the Whore Killer . . . Jack the Slut Slayer . . . No, something sharper like my knife. A name that will make every woman’s quim quiver with fear of what I would do if only I could get my hands, and my knife, upon her. What wouldn’t I do to her? Ah, I have it now; thank you, my Muse, for visiting me instead of Michael. . . .





Yours truly,





Jack the Ripper





Now they’ll never forget me!

I stroked myself with my red-ink-and-bloodstained fingers and spent before I put down my pen.

I’ll put it away now, folded carefully, for this document, the first I’ve signed with my new name, is so very precious and I might want to add a postscript later, after I’ve seen the papers. Leather Apron indeed! He’s not fit to finish my boots, much less wear them.

I returned to my bed, red ink still upon my hands and Dark Annie’s blood caked beneath my nails, and touched myself again, harder and faster, jerking, as though I were furious with my own flesh. This time I thought only of my wife-whore and her lover, how much they must be enjoying themselves in my absence. Does she bring him into the house, beneath the same roof where our children sleep, and f-uck him in her own bed, or do they compound the insult and betrayal and soil mine?

I imagined myself standing outside, peeping in through a window, watching them naked, bucking and f-ucking hard upon my bed, the wife-whore with her golden hair unbound, straddling him, his hands gripping her hips so hard each fingertip will leave a bruise, marking her as his whore and himself as her master.

When I return to Battlecrease House I shall rip her skirt off and place my own fingers there. I shall show the whore who is really her master! I can see myself standing there in the darkness, bush at my back, thorns stabbing through my clothes, glass at my nose, my hard prick in my angry hand, jerking—furious pleasure, furious pain! OH GOD, HOW IT EXCITES ME SO! It shouldn’t, but it does! Oh, God help me, IT DOES!

I think I shall let her continue seeing him a while longer . . . just so I can have this pleasure, so I can lie here alone afterward and imagine . . . London is full of little whores who can pay for the Great Whore’s sins and keep my children safe from the rage I would, without their sacrifice, most assuredly turn upon their whore-mother, my wife-whore, and, God help me, in my madness, maybe even them. I cannot bear the thought! That fear is enough to keep my knife sharp! I would kill every whore in the world to save Bobo and Gladys!





In Mary Jane’s room, I savored her fear as well as her sex. I lapped it up like arsenic. But damn her green eyes, when she talks about those drabs she makes them come back to life; she resurrects the human flotsam from the cesspool where they would have drowned had it not been for me and my merciful knife and brings them back to haunt me.

I now know Annie Chapman was a guardsman’s daughter who, despite spending her life surrounded by men in military barracks, thought she was destined to die an old maid until, most unexpectedly, at the forlorn age of almost thirty, she fell in love with a coachman—John Chapman. The happy couple made their home in Windsor. They posed for a photographer once, Mr. Chapman in checkered trousers and watered-silk vest, and Annie in a lilac calico crinoline with a pattern of white stripes and little flowers, her late mother’s Bible on her lap and her long brown hair gathered back, the curls smoothed and subdued and coiled in a fat bun at the nape of her neck with a tortoiseshell comb. She’d shown Mary Jane that picture once, though the frame had long since been pawned, still so proud of that long-vanished dress and its skirt, made from yards and yards of material billowing over the then fashionable hoop. She’d sat there and pointed and told her what color everything was, painting the colors back in on what was now only a faded sepia memory.

Those were the days before it all went wrong. John Chapman was a man, fickle like any other. Time and familiarity bred boredom, and another, younger and prettier, soon caught his fancy. Annie found that the children he had given her were scant consolation and turned to the bottle. She had a son who had to be sent away to a home for cripples and a daughter who married up, moved to France, and forgot all about the folks she left behind her.

Forced to fend for herself in London, Annie had tried to earn her keep by doing crochet work and selling flowers. In desperation, she had even sold her hair to a wig maker.

When suicide seemed the only alternative—“ ’twas either that or the river”—she became a whore, “an’ hated herself every moment for it.” Annie sought oblivion in gin. She could no longer bear to face her own Bible and, not having the heart to pawn it, left it abandoned on a bench in Hyde Park, hoping someone would find it and give it a good, and more deserving, home. “She didn’t half seem to care when the doctor told her she was dyin’. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m already dead,’ she’d say to us who knew her; her sisters in sorrow, she called us.”