The Ripper's Wife(61)
The driver got down and struck a match. It was a windy night and the match immediately went out. He tried again. It must have been enough for him to see the blood. He ran into the club, jabbering in his Jew tongue. I saw my chance and seized it. I drew my overcoat tight about me and stepped swiftly past the cart, out into the street, and walked calmly but quickly away.
The bloodlust was still upon me. It drove me relentlessly onward. I couldn’t stop! As I walked, I sprinkled more of my medicine onto my palm and licked it. I moved deeper into the city, losing myself in the dark labyrinth of tangled and decaying, stinking, rubbish-strewn streets.
My hands were numb again and cold, so very cold, like my heart. I was shivering. The blood cools so quickly; I needed its warmth, that feeling of release, to be reborn in a bloody baptism. I had to kill again, I needed to rip, to hear the flesh tear, the grotesque musical gurgle of burbling blood and air escaping from a severed windpipe. They’d never sing again; I always took their voices away, and then their lives. But a slashed throat was never enough. I had to plunge my hands inside and grope and plunder. I had to feel the life go out and the hot blood turn cold. I had to know that thrill again!
I’d romanced a young whore called Rosey in Heneage Court earlier that evening. We spooned, sitting on a dustbin, but we had been interrupted, by a bumbling fool of a bobby no less. I pointed to my black bag and said I was a doctor, and the girl backed me up—bless her sweet, trusting soul!—so I spared her. I kissed her brow and called her “a sweet young thing” as I gently took my leave of her. Now I almost wished I hadn’t. . . . The next bitch I would make pay for my thwarted kill; I would do everything I intended for Long Liz and more, much more! Her own mother wouldn’t recognize the whore when I was done with her.
Katie. She was the liveliest of the lot. A trampled red cabbage rose with an untrammeled spirit, that’s how I shall always think of her. However had she kept her hopes alive in Whitechapel all these years when it seemed to suck the life out of everyone else?
She was a dainty bit o’ fun. The top of her head scarcely reached my shoulder, with bright hazel eyes and a mop of deep auburn curls, clean for a whore in this dirty city, apple cheeks, a pointed chin, and a cheery smile beaming from beneath the brim of a black straw bonnet with amber and green glass beads.
When I happened upon her, she was leaning beneath one of the sparse street lamps, having a smoke from a clay pipe, to steady her stomach, she explained. She’d been drinking all night and was just out of jail. She’d been having “a bit o’ fun” marching up and down Aldgate High Street pretending to be a fire engine, “bringin’ a bit o’ cheer” to the crowd that had gathered to watch her, when a constable came along and took her off to jail, to sleep it off.
“My man’ll give me a damn fine ’idin’ when I get ’ome,” she groused.
I just smiled. I knew what she didn’t know—she would never go home again.
She was fresh up from the country, “been ’op pickin’ with my man down in Kent I ’ave.”
Apparently the “lady” lacked luggage; she was wearing every bit of clothing she possessed. I teased her about being plump as a Christmas goose, but she said, “No, ’t’ain’t really so, gov; I’m really turrible skinny. See!”
She juggled the fulsome folds of her paisley silk shawl to better free up her arms, hiked up her grimy gray apron, and proceeded to reveal herself to me layer by layer. I was instantly reminded of the set of Russian nesting dolls I had given Gladys last Christmas. With increasing amusement, I watched as Katie lifted a dark green alpaca skirt, with an ornate pattern of golden lilies and Michaelmas daisies, a rich castoff from a stall in Petticoat Lane no doubt, another of brown linsey trimmed with black silk braid, followed by a much-soiled sky blue with three red rickrack flounces—she was so proud of those flounces!—then the petticoat her man had just given her to mark their anniversary (“been together eight years we ’ave!”), a triple-flounced pale pink chintz with a pattern of tiny bright flowers.
But she didn’t stop there. With a playful smile, she lifted a rank, ragged yellowed chemise stained with spots of reddish brown that must have been blood shed in months past, and showed me a pair of stick-skinny legs in brown ribbed stockings rising out of a pair of mismatched mud-caked men’s work boots.
She giggled and lifted her fat armful of skirts even higher and showed me her hairy cunt. The hair was deep red like that on her head, the color of freshly drying blood. I couldn’t wait to stab it!
I’ll leave this one her heart, since she’s already given it to “her man,” I charitably decided. Her liver or perhaps a kidney will do nice enough for me! “You must let me add something to your layers,” I said, caressing the bare skin above her bodice where ruffles galore framed her plump little b-reasts. “I’m afraid you will catch cold if I don’t.” She giggled as I tied another of Edwin’s gaudy silks around her neck. “There! It brings out the red in your hair and cheeks.”
She led me to Mitre Square. “It’s dark an’ quiet this time o’ night an’ we can take our time an’ be alone there.” The poor little whore was so eager to please me!
“Are you sure?” I blew playfully on the back of her neck and whispered, “It’s haunted, you know. Are you not afraid of ghosts?”