The Ripper's Wife(58)
Soon I shall get to work again, soon.... I stroke the sharp edge of my knife and my cock, sometimes the one with the other, but gently, oh so gently, and dream of what I shall do to the next. Ribbons of blood, rivers of blood. I want to take their heads, boil the skulls down to bare bones, and use them as vases. I want to fill them with bloodred roses or candles and arrange them on the altar at St. James’s Church in Piccadilly where we were married and BURN that cathedral of lies to the ground.
Michael—damn, Damn, DAMN HIM!—is worried about me; the wife-whore has persuaded him that I’m taking “too much strong medicine” for my own good and am “always the worse for it after.” Well, I gave her worse for it after! When I found out she had betrayed me, I beat, Beat, BEAT her! I made the bitch BEG for mercy and then I didn’t give it to her. Oh, how the bitch cried, Cried, CRIED. She begged, Begged, BEGGED me not to hurt her. Like an angel of love, I caressed her bruised and bleeding face. I promised never again. But I lied, Lied, LIED.
I’ve seen two more doctors, one of them Michael’s personal physician—Dr. Fuller. He’s a FOOL! He said I was a hypochondriac—ME!—how can I be a hypochondriac when I’m sick all the time? He cannot crawl into my skin and feel what I feel, the agonizing ache in my belly that sometimes bends me double and makes me cry out as though rats with fangs of fire were gnawing me, the pains in my head, sharp as spikes being hammered, the blazing burn in my bladder, stools like rice water, the maddening twitching of my eyelids, and the awful, terrifying icy numbness in my hands. Sometimes they tingle as though they are fighting, trying with all their might, to feel again, but always, always failing. I watch them move, but it is as though they belong to a stranger. I’m going to see another doctor tomorrow, and then, then . . . Oh, I cannot wait!
18
I should have known better than to trust Michael. Desperate as I was, I should not have looked for even an ounce of chivalry in his cold, arrogant soul. Michael told Jim all that I had confided about the drugs I believed were transforming him into a real-life Jekyll and Hyde.
Jim came home from London and flung the front door open with such force it cracked one of the stained-glass panels and charged upstairs and beat me with his umbrella until it broke and then he threatened to put my eyes out with the finial. When I tried to crawl under the bed to escape him, he wrenched me out by my ankles, flipped me over, beat me with his fists and kicked me with his boots on, and raped me. I could not show myself in public for over a week even with paint on.
That awful autumn, while the madman that was my husband consumed my waking hours, that unknown madman, Jack the Ripper, stalked my dreams; he seemed to dog my fitfully slumbering soul’s every step. I’d see myself as a fallen woman, pathetic, dirty, haggard, and raggedy. It was so real I could even smell my filthy flesh and taste my fetid breath and rotting teeth and feel the itch of fleabites beneath the rancid rags I was wearing. I’d catch my reflection in a window and see all my beauty gone, worn away by worry and want, and feel so very tired, as though I hadn’t slept in a thousand nights or more but had spent them walking aimlessly, lost in the fog, fear stabbing my heart every time I heard a sound or turned a corner, never knowing if it would bring me face-to-face with the faceless fiend none could recognize.
That, I think, was the most frightening part. He might appear benign and grandfatherly, like a genial old doctor, a priest with the most blessedly comforting countenance, or a favorite uncle. Surely he did not go about with the mark of evil clearly upon him like a tattoo on his brow or else none would ever steal into the shadows with him beside them.
Those wretched women surely were not fools or they wouldn’t have survived on those hellish streets as long as they had. I thought so much about those women, I felt that we were, in some strange way, sisters beneath the skin, that though our lives had been very different, I would have understood them and they would have understood me. Maybe they could have told me how to break free? How to burst the shackles and chains of the comfort, luxury, and respectability that held me fast, to just let go of it all, of myself and the velvet cushion life I had always known and didn’t believe I could survive without. Perhaps they could have told me how to really not care anymore, not just to pretend not to. Every time I told myself I no longer loved or wanted Jim, that I was done with him, my conscience shouted, Liar! in a whisper that was also a scream.
I thought about the Ripper too. What manner of monster was he? Are such men born evil, or do they become so? What could turn a man into a flesh-ripping monster? I sat and pondered in the parlor and speculated as I tossed sleeplessly in my bed at night or after being rousted out of yet another foggy nightmare in which I walked the streets of Whitechapel, knowing to the very depths of my soul exactly what it felt like to have lost everything that mattered, along with all one’s hopes and dreams, always awaiting the inevitable, the knife that flashed so fast it left me no time to scream. Would I know him when I saw him, or would I only recognize him when it was too late? Would anyone hear my dying screams? Would anyone come to save me or could only I save myself? I now wonder, decades too late, was that what these dreams were truly trying to tell me?
Though I had sworn that I would never go back, I went back to Alfred Brierley’s bed. I can’t even offer a justifiable reason; even when my life hung in the balance I couldn’t explain it. It was just something I did. Maybe I was hoping it would be different this time? Maybe I was hoping that, in time, he would truly come to love me? Maybe I couldn’t let go of the dream that someday we would be together, living and loving in Paris or some other sophisticated city that took divorce in stride? Maybe I was just one more woman seeking some kind of comfort in a pair of arms that were willing to hold her while a cock nested inside her? Maybe it’s a fair price to pay for just being held? We all want some kind of love. Sometimes it’s not enough, and sometimes it is.