The Ripper's Wife(65)
Though Elisabeth was certainly a tall girl, I learned from Mary Jane that her height had nothing to do with her being called “Long Liz.” It was her habit of telling tall tales and her vast knowledge of Swedish folk and fairy tales, with which she regaled the coffeehouse customers for hours.
But of course it didn’t last. Disease raddled Mr. Stride’s fine, generous mind; he raved and turned violent. It was a dreadful sight to see a man so horribly transformed. “Truly, had you known him before, you would not have known him after,” Mary Jane said. “He was altogether a different man when he’d been the soul o’ sweetness before.” He had to go to the asylum, where he soon afterward died. “Liz said they sawed his skull open an’ found his brain full o’ holes like moths had been at it.”
His brother did Liz wrong, cheating her out of the coffeehouse, and, sunk deep in despair, she sought solace in drink and the arms of strangers again. “She just couldn’t resist those sailor boys from Sweden.” She had to earn her keep. She’d already seen what happened when body and soul parted ways—“when that happened to you, you were like to end up in the asylum like Mr. Stride.” She whored and begged charity and drinks, always drinks.
As I had suspected, the Princess Alice tale was just a figment of her imagination, bait for sympathy, originally concocted to take advantage of the charity fund established for victims of the disaster. “The closest Long Liz ever got to a ship after she docked in England was the sailors she f*cked.” Mary Jane laughed. The boot of some surly drunk or a pimp Long Liz wouldn’t pay—depending on which story you chose to believe—had kicked most of her teeth out; the rest she had lost to decay.
She’d lived off and on the last few years with a dockside laborer called Michael Kidney—Kidney! I perked up, remembering the treasure sealed up tight, floating like a mysterious blob-shaped creature at the bottom of the sea, in a jar of red wine locked in darkness inside the black Gladstone bag I’d left beneath my bed in Petticoat Lane. But “she couldn’t quite stick to it. For long spells she’d be fine; then off she’d go, carousin’ with sailors, livin’ an’ f*ckin’ an’ drinkin’ like there wasn’t goin’ to be a tomorrow.”
Mike was a good fellow, but he found Liz hard to handle. He grew weary of all the arguments and gave up trying to make her stay, contenting himself with knowing that she would always come back. Until Jack’s knife flashed, I added silently as I snuggled against Mary Jane’s bare back and gave her earlobe a dainty nibble when what I really wanted to do was bite it off!
Would the police find Katie’s earlobes that I had sliced off? What would they do with them? Would they sew them back on in the mortuary? What did they do with dead whores? Did they bury them in pieces or try to sew them back together again like rag dolls, to give decency in death to those who had lived so long without it?
In my mind’s eye, I saw the ghost of Long Liz standing at the foot of the bed, blame blazing in her eyes, severed throat gaping, pointing an adamantly accusing finger. The fireball in my belly churned and burned. The rats gnawed. I gasped and gripped Mary Jane’s b-reasts so hard with my cold, numb hands that she cried out, “Play gentle now, Jim!” I heard the rattle of phantom chains and swallowed hard. My throat burned as though I had drunk acid, and pain drove spikes into my head. Damn you, Mary Jane! You should be hosting séances instead of peddling your cunt! Through you the dead live again, damn, Damn, DAMN you!
But she was done talking of the fair lying Swede. Now Mary Jane was on about Katie. Catherine Eddowes, the name she had been given at birth, or Kate Kelly as she liked to call herself, proudly taking her man’s name.
Mary Jane would know her too! Would I ever kill a whore who would elicit a shrug and a blank stare from Mary Jane instead of “oh yes, poor harlot, I knew her well!”?
Katie and her many siblings had been left to run wild after her mother died in childbed, while their father worked hard to earn their keep making tin plates. At sixteen she’d fallen hard for a smooth-talking pensioner, Thomas Conway. He’d persuaded her to have his initials tattooed in blue ink upon her arm and given her three bastard babies, “but no weddin’ ring, though their life together was like a circle unendin’. First he’d beat her, then Katie’d run out an’ try an’ soothe her hurts with gin, then he’d come after her, pick her up out o’ the gutter or some other bloke’s bed, say some sweet words that’d make the poor fool fall in love all over again, an’ home they’d go, until it all happened again, an’ there was no reckonin’ when that might be, two hours, two weeks, or two months, but it always happened again. Like livin’ on a floor covered in broken glass, it was, knowin’ that no matter how carefully you set your feet down you were bound to get cut sometime.” But then Tom Conway up and disappeared, and no more was ever heard from him.
Katie mourned, then moved on. She was lucky. She found her true love with an Irish market porter, John Kelly, who was determined to give her a good home and wean her off the gin. Though she suffered an occasional slip, it wasn’t often, and he’d made it plain to her that she was his woman and he wasn’t a man to suffer her being with another.
“She wasn’t a reg’lar whore, not like me an’ the rest,” Mary Jane said. “She was just a poor soul tryin’ to get by, one day at a time. But when the thirst was upon her, an’ the bottle had gone dry, an’ the money had run out, an’ her still cravin’ more, she’d do whatever she had to to get another nip, an’ if that meant lettin’ some gent hoist her skirts, so be it. What Johnny didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.”