The Ripper's Wife(64)
Jack the Ripper
That “tomorrow” would really confound them and make them wonder if I had really stopped in the midst of my bloody labors to write and mail the postcard or if instead it was the act of a prankster. Once again I addressed myself to the gentlemen of the press, at the Central News Agency; I knew they wouldn’t disappoint me.
I changed my clothes and went out to pop my postcard in the post, enjoying my walk and the cries of the newsboys, shrilling out the latest horrors to befall the harlots of Whitechapel. I watched the women cluster together, cowering close to one another and their menfolk for comfort. I savored the terror in their eyes. Which one of you, I wondered, which one of you will be the next for Jack?
I bought every edition, every paper I could find. I stopped at a bakery for an assortment of pastries, drizzled with icing, caramel, and rich chocolate sauce and filled with spicy cinnamon, jam, or sweet cream. I am always good to my whores. I knew these sweets would please Mary Jane, as would the present in my pocket and inside the gay striped satin hatbox I was carrying.
She knelt naked upon the bed as I placed the emerald taffeta bonnet on her sleep-tousled ginger-gold head and tied the ribbons in a big beautiful bow beneath her pretty chin. I watched her ravenously tear into the buns, tearing into them like I tore into whores. And guzzle from the bottle of rum I’d brought her, knowing this was her favorite breakfast. White cream, tawny caramel, red jam, and dark chocolate staining her face, she sat there, shamelessly naked, legs wantonly sprawled; ravenously licking her sticky fingers when all the sweets were gone. She was an adorable greedy glutton begging for more and I would give it to her.
I watched as she leisurely rolled the green silk stockings—“as green as the Emerald Isles and as beautiful as your eyes,” I said gallantly—up her fine, shapely legs. She remarked that it had been such a “terrible long time” since she had felt silk against her skin and lifted a leg and twisted one green-clad ankle this way and that to admire it. “I’ve hooked many a man by showin’ me ankles on a rainy day!” she said as I smiled over the newspapers and read to her all about Jack the Ripper’s double event.
I watched her shudder and cross herself and reach for the rosary lying on the table beside her bed and begin idly fingering the beads instead of herself.
“Sometimes I dream,” she confided with wide, frightened eyes, “that he’s comin’ for me! Sure as the Mark o’ Cain, I’m marked as one o’ his, an’ there’s no help for it; even if I run, he’ll find me!”
Her terror fed my need and my greed, and soon I must let the papers fall to the floor and take her again, plunging my knife of hot flesh, not cold steel, into her until she screamed with pleasure and begged for more and for me to stop all in the same breath. Women—two-faced, two-minded, duplicitous, deceitful whores all of them!
Do all the whores in Whitechapel know one another? There are so many whores here, thousands of them, it seems impossible. Yet Mary Jane knew Long Liz and Katie. Like the miserable ghost of Marley rattling his chains at Ebenezer Scrooge, Mary Jane brought them back to haunt me, accusing eyes, angry mouths, and, underneath, throats gaping open like second mouths, hungry for life but filled only with death—raw, bloody death! Filthy whores, they degrade everything they touch, even their own sorry lives! I did them all a favor by killing them. I relieved them of their misery; it was the nicest thing anyone could ever have done for them. I let them sacrifice their lives for a good and noble cause—to keep two sweet, innocent children and their undeserving mother-whore safe. Why can’t they be grateful? They should go down on their knees and thank me, not haunt me and rattle those damn phantom chains!
The tall, gangly, flaxen-haired farmer’s daughter Elisabeth Gustafsdotter—Gustav’s Daughter—was born in “Torslunda or somethin’ like it.” She loved to read anything she could get her hands on. She dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher, but all her hopes were shattered when she was sixteen. She was working at her first job, as a maidservant in a fine house in Gothenburg, “servin’ the gentry,” when she let the charming young master, Lars Fredrik, the adored only son of the house, seduce her. She thought he loved her. In those days Liz still believed all the fairy tales about peasant girls who became princesses.
He left her pregnant and with a dose of “somethin’ heinous” that landed her in the infirmary, with the blame all upon her.
The young man claimed that she had seduced him, wept when he knelt down before his gray-haired old mother, and confessed that Elisabeth, the housemaid, had stolen his innocence and infected him with some shameful ailment that had left a canker on his doodle and made it burn and weep a foul discharge.
Liz’s daughter was stillborn. She was heartbroken when the doctor told her that she could never have another. Her good name and all her hopes gone, she took to drink and walking the streets.
Eventually she emigrated, hoping for a new and better life in England. She threw herself on the charity of the Swedish Church in Trinity Street. She loved to visit the reading room and pore over the papers from the old country. Sometimes she let the Swedish sailors who brought them buy her favors and drinks, always drinks.
Then along came John Thomas Stride, a good man believing in redemption, that everyone deserves a second chance. They married and opened a coffeehouse in Crispin Street. Liz was always kind to the poor, sick, downhearted, and downtrodden, especially the whores. “There but for the grace of God go I,” she always said as she filled the coffee cups and served thick, generous slices of the cinnamon-spice cake or another kind filled with creamy cheese and luscious tarty-sweet red raspberry jam, and special cookies rolled in white sugar, all baked from her own mother’s recipes.