The Ripper's Wife(66)

Katie and her Johnny lived one day at a time, renting a double bed most nights in a doss-house in Flower & Dean Street, him working as a porter in the market and her hiring out as a char and taking in washing and needlework or hawking flowers or what have you in the streets. She was a bit of a magpie, with a fine, quick eye and a knack for picking up little treasures to pawn, things the finer folk threw away or lost, like quality buttons of metal or ivory, sometimes ones set with stones, or pillboxes and cigarette or card cases. Once she even found a pair of silver spectacles set with little diamonds and flashy black stones so fine she thought “they must’ve belonged to the Queen” and was half-tempted to go to the palace to return them. Every autumn Katie and Johnny would join the mass of migrant workers heading for the country to pick hops and enjoy the sunshine and clean air and all the fresh milk and wholesome country fare they could eat. It was something they looked forward to all year; it was such a welcome change from the miserable muck and murk of foul and foggy London.

Now two ghostly whores were rattling their chains at me. I wanted to strangle Mary Jane Kelly with those phantom chains, but when I looked in her green eyes all I could say was, “Back down on your back you go,” and roll on top of her and thrust deep inside her. Why was it so hard to kill this one? She was only a whore like all the rest of them!





Back in my bolt-hole, I cut Katie’s kidney in half and fried and ate it with onions and carrots. I sprinkled my medicine in my glass of fine red wine and watched the white powder swirl and melt into its ruby-red depths. Warmth flooded my icy fingers, filling them to the very tips. It was very nice! Almost as nice as bathing them in a whore’s hot blood. The other half, bloody and raw, sopping and wine sodden, I put into a little brown cardboard box and tied it up tight with string, then sat down with my red ink to write a new letter, this one addressed to Mr. George Lusk, the Chairman of the newly formed Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, who had vowed not to rest until I was brought to justice and was offering a substantial reward for my capture. I had met the man before; he specialized in decorating music halls and was a fellow Freemason in Michael’s lodge. Lusk thought Michael was “a gem of a man” and always wanted the halls he designed to be the perfect setting for him, so it gave me great pleasure to address him in the guise of Jack the Ripper.



Mr. Lusk





Sor





I send you half the Kidne I took from one women

prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was

very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it

out if you only wate a whil longer





signed





Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk





I wrote it in strong, bold red letters, delighting in my crude misspellings, so contradictory and bizarre that it would make them wonder if I was really that ignorant or just playing games. What illiterate cockney knows that knife starts with k and writes such an elegant copperplate? But this time, as much as I wanted to, I did not sign my name, just to toy with them. They would know who it was from; Katie’s kidney would leave them in no doubt about that! I could think of no better calling card, except one with my real name engraved upon it, and that the fools will never have, ha ha!

I lay back on my bed and licked white strength from my palm. I furiously fondled my cock and thought of my wife-whore sucking Alfred Brierley’s while I stood at the foot of the bed and watched. I glanced at my watch. Tomorrow, after I mailed my parcel to Mr. Lusk, I must catch the train back to Liverpool. How I wished I could catch my wife-whore and Brierley in the act, burst in on them naked in bed. I wanted to whip out my cock and scream at them to keep f-ucking until I spent all over them!

I held my watch up over my head, swinging it by its heavy chain, like a pendulum. My Muse blessed me then with a wonderful idea. I found a pin and, after carefully prying off the back of the casing, slowly, painstakingly, inscribed dead in the center of it I am Jack the Ripper! and, below it, my signature, James Maybrick; then, like planets orbiting the sun, I surrounded it with four sets of initials: PN, AC, ES, and CE.

It served the last whore right to deny her her man’s name at the end. E for Eddowes, her maiden name, though her days of maidenhood were long past. Now the whores are always with me! As long as I have my watch, I will carry them with me wherever I go. The victims I know them so well! Let them rattle their phantom chains, God damn them!





20

I couldn’t bear it anymore, this endless back-and-forth between loving husband and the mad, rampant monster. I would have to resort to drastic measures. If I could not divorce Jim, I would have to make him divorce me. I’d managed to make a few discreet inquiries amongst solicitors, and they all advised me, for the sake of the children, to aim for reconciliation. Even Dr. Hopper, who had pretended all along with me that my injuries were the result of tumbles down stairs and other careless accidents, agreed that it was all for the best when I turned to him, hoping he would testify for me. I’d tried to write Jim a letter, asking him to set me free, a long, rambling, bumbling, surely bungled thing that I ended up shoving into the depths of my desk in frustration. It was no use! Since no one would take my side and help me, Jim would just have to divorce me; I’d have to force his hand.

I decided to do the most brazen thing I could think of. I reserved the bridal suite at Flatman’s Hotel in our own names, Mr. and Mrs. James Maybrick. I told Jim an old aunt of mine was ailing and in London to see a surgeon and was begging me to visit her, fearing it might be the last time she would ever see me on earth. Of course, Jim said I must go. He even gave me a lovely speckled fur cape lined in orchid satin as a substitute for his “warm embrace during these dreary and lonesome days we must spend apart,” explaining that his business prevented him from joining me, as I knew perfectly well it would; that was why I had chosen that week in particular.